The following is a conversation with Michael Malis, his second time on the podcast.

He's an anarchist, political thinker, podcaster, and author. He wrote Dear Reader, which is a book

on North Korea, and The New Right, a book on the various ideological movements at the fringe

of American politics. He hosts the podcast called You're Welcome, spelled Y O U R, and in general,

there's a lot of live shows on YouTube that are at times profoundly absurd, and at other times

absurdly profound, and always full of humor and wisdom. He has the Joker to my Batman,

and the Caviar to my vodka. His masterful dance between dark humor and difficult, even

dangerous ideas challenges me to think deeply about this world. And when that fails, at least smile

and have a good laugh at the absurdity of it all. This episode has much of that. His outfit, for

example, the exact inverse of mine with a white suit and a black shirt is just one example of that,

of the humor, trolling, and brilliance that is Michael Malis. Quick mention of our sponsors,

NetSuite, Business Management Software, Athletic Greens, All In One Nutrition Drink,

Sun Basket, Meal Delivery Service, and Cash App. So the choice is success, health, food, or money.

Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to

support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Michael is, in many ways, a man of radical

ideas, but also a man with kindness in his heart. Those two things are great ingredients for a

fascinating conversation. I hope to have several such people on this podcast this upcoming year

who also have radical ideas about politics, science, technology, and life. At times,

often, perhaps, I might fail at asking the challenging questions that should be asked,

but I will try my best to do so and hope to keep improving every time. Mostly,

I come to these conversations with an open mind and with love. Unfortunately, that kind of approach

can be taken advantage of in many ways. It can be used by reporters or just people online later

to highlight how or why I'm ignorant or worse. I'm generally not a good human being. In the context

of this, I have two options. I could either be cautious and afraid, or second, be kind, thoughtful,

and fearless. I choose the latter, hopefully while still being open, fragile, and empathetic.

Again, I strive to be like the main character of The Idiot by Dostoyevsky. That's my New

Year's resolution. Be kind and do difficult things, difficult conversations, difficult

research projects, and difficult entrepreneurial adventures. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe

on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon,

I'll connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman. And now, here's my conversation with Michael

Malis. Knock, knock. You're stealing my bed? I'll kill your family.

That's not how a knock, knock joke works. Knock, knock, Michael. You don't do knock,

knock jokes with Russians because then we have to knock at the door. Turn down the TV.

You got to sit quiet. I hope they go away. You don't do that back in the Netherlands.

You know this. It's triggering. Who's there? I can't even do it now. Knock, knock. Who's there?

Leon. Leon who? Leon me when you're not strong, Michael. Well, that will never happen.

I stole elegantly, eloquently that joke from you. The lie detector term, that was a lie.

Elegantly and eloquently. Yeah, you crossed it on a sheet of paper. That means it's real.

The reason I bring it up is because you had the guts, the brilliance to do a knock, knock joke,

not once, but three times with Alex Jones. I think it was like six. I had a runner.

Okay. Maybe I just, they started to sort of melt together in this beautiful art form that you've

created, which is like these kind, loving knock, knock jokes with Alex Jones. So you got a chance

to meet him and talk with him twice with a tempul in a long form conversation. What was it like

talking to Alex Jones, both on the deep philosophical intellectual level and staring the man

in his eyes and doing a knock, knock joke about Olive, knock, knock. Who's there? Olive. I love

you, Alex. I love you. Well, there's a lot to explain. Where do you start? I've been on his show

Info Wars a few times when I was researching my book, then you write. So I had had conversations

with him before. One of the things that I appreciate about Alex is he is a lot more

self aware than people think and has a good sense of humor. And I also like a good twist ending.

So if you set people up and all these jokes are these kind of vapid, all of you jokes,

and the last ones about building seven, they're not going to see that one coming,

nor will he see that one coming. I even had another one about Sandy Hook,

which I didn't do on the air because he was being like a good sport, but that was the dagger,

that was kind of behind my back if necessary. But it was a good mechanism toward, I like

it when things work on several levels. It was also a good mechanism to keep kind of the conversation

guarded and this every so often this is kind of hitting the control, delete and bring it down

to a certain point of calmness. What about the love thing? I mean, you're saying that that was

a build up to the dagger, but it was also somehow really refreshing to get that little jolt like

that pause. You don't get that in conversations often. Like I'm a huge fan of Rogan and he'll

have a three hour conversation, but at some point just pause and be like, I love you, man.

Like it's in the cheesiest way possible because that seems to be, it somehow hits the hardest then.

I don't know. I don't know you didn't intend it that way, but with Alex Jones to sit there

and to say, I love you, that was like, I just haven't never heard that before. And so it struck

me as like, not just funny for what you're doing, but just like, whoa, we just took, because

conversations are all about like this ranting, especially with Alex Jones, just like ranting

about this or that, this part of the world, like, can you believe this shit, that kind of thing,

but like to pause and be like, this is awesome. I don't know if you felt that way, but...

Oh, I definitely felt that way. So it was actually very fun. I'll give you the backstory of how that

happened. It was silly because Tim calls me up and there's this expression in marketing,

don't go past the sale, right? So if you're trying to sell someone a car and you're like,

it's got this feature, this feature, and that feature, and they're like, you know what? I'm

going to buy the car. If you keep talking, you can only make them lose the sale. You just get

them to sign it and get out of dodge. So Tim calls me up and he goes, okay, here's what we're thinking.

This is top secret. Alex is going to be on the show. We want you on as well. And I've never

said yes to anything as quickly in my life. And then he keeps talking and I'm like, Tim,

this, you don't have to sell it. I interrupted him. I go, you don't have to sell it.

Why are you, by the way?

I think because I am kind of an agent of chaos. And Alex is, in his own way, an agent of chaos.

And what provides an opportunity in this kind of new media space that you and I travel in,

it's the kind of things where none of us three, as we said on the show,

knew what it would be like. You know, within certain parameters, what Megan Kelly or Wolf

Blitzer or any of these corporate figures are going to be like in a conversation to some extent,

none of us had any idea. Now, I knew they didn't know I was bringing enough jokes.

So that was kind of what was so, I said at one point, I'm kind of envious of the audience

because there's so many exciting things that are happening and that the internet

and podcasting provides people an opportunity to do that. It was great.

Yeah. That was the greatest pairing with Alex Jones that I've ever seen by far.

Wow. Okay. Thank you.

So I immediately knew, no, this isn't a knock on Tim, but I don't even know if Tim was prepared.

Tim was not prepared for this.

How could he be prepared?

Well, so I mean, I don't know if Tim is used to that. I think Joe Rogan is more equipped,

prepared for the chaos, just the years he's been in it. I immediately thought,

this is the right pairing for Joe Rogan. Because Alex Jones has been on Joe Rogan

a few times, three times. My favorite so far was with Tim Dillon.

Right. But Tim was clearly, Tim Dillon was also kind of a genius in his own right,

but he was kind of a fan and he was stepping away. He was almost like in awe of Alex Jones,

where you were both, you were in awe of the experience that's being created and at the

same time, fearlessly just trolling the situation. I mean, to do a knock knock joke,

to stop me, that just shows that you're in control of the experience. No, you're like

riding the experience. That immediately was like, this needs to be on Rogan. So I hope that

that happens as well. You're on your own, of course, on Rogan, but just you, that's an experience.

That's the, whatever, this gotta be a good name for it. Like Jimi Hendrix experience,

there's no microphone else. Because that was a ban. It's taken. Well, I don't know how many years

you can restart the experience. Because I feel, sorry to interrupt you, I feel a very big

responsibility, especially in 2020, to provide fun and something cool and something unique

that hasn't been done before for the audience. I think this has been a very rough year on our

audiences psychologically and in other aspects of their lives. So I feel if I'm going to be there,

I'm going to put on a show. And it's also going to be great because it also alienates the people

you don't want, right? So there's a lot of people who sit there and be like, oh, he's telling not,

people who are too cool for school, where they're like, oh, he's telling knock knock jokes. This

is stupid. I'm like, good. If you have an issue with having eaten cotton candy or doing a puzzle

with a kid or without it, you know, by yourself, that's on you. And it's something very, something

I think is the enemy of cynicism and this idea that like, oh, this is too silly and amethyst.

Like we need that kind of childlike aspect in our lives. I think it's something we could use more

of. It's very much an aspect of our media culture that to kind of have a condemnatory about that

or to do it in a certain very corporate, fake way. So it is something I encourage a lot,

something I enjoy doing. And again, like with the first time I was on Tim, I had a propeller

beanie on, you know, with the motorized and a lot of people were like, I can't take anyone seriously

who dresses like this. I go, good. If you judge someone's ideas by how they appear instead of

the ideas themselves, you're not someone I want on my team. Are we going to address

the outfit you're wearing? We can address it, sure. You know, for those who are colorblind,

Michael's wearing the, or just listening to this, Michael's wearing the exact opposite,

the inverse from, from another dimension outfit, which is a white suit and black shirt.

It's so genius. Okay. So you just see the next two looks I've planned.

Oh no. Yeah, they're great. Well, obviously this relationship is going to end today.

It's over. I'll put them on Instagram.

Okay. Is there some deep philosophy to the humor? Is, let's go through our trolling discussion.

And is there some, is there like chapters to this genius, or is this just what makes you

smile in the morning? Well, I mean, I think you're honestly, in this case, you think we're genius

a little loosely. I don't think this is particularly genius. But I do think it is fun. It is exuberant.

It is joyous. I think the bigger my audience has gotten, and the more I actually communicate with,

you know, fans, I do feel it kind of kicks in these paternal maternal instincts. It's,

which is very, very odd. I did not expect to have them. What do you mean? Who's the dad?

I'm the dad and the mom. I remember, and it may have been similar for you. I'm curious to hear it.

For young, smart, like ambitious men, like 24 to 27, for me was a very rough period,

because that's the window where a lot of people get married and they kind of check out.

And if you're very much kind of finding your own road, you don't know what's happening,

no one's in a position to really guide you or help you. And it's tough. It's a very tough window.

And what I'm finding now is having these kids who are in that position, but now instead of them

stumbling along, for some of them, I'm the one who could be like, no, no, no, no, it's not you,

it's everybody else. And to be able to give them that semblance of feeling seen, to use a cliched

expression, to feel normal and that, no, no, you're the heroes here. They're the background noise.

It's just really very flattering and humbling to be in that position.

You have many minds, right? There's the thoughtful kind. Michael, there's like, I'm going to burn

down the powerful Michael. And then there's like, I'm going to have this just lighthearted trolling

of the world. Which of those are most important to the 24th and to the 27th demographic?

I think it is the combination. It's like if you're making a meal, chicken kia,

you need the chicken, you need the ham, you need the butter sauce. Because I think people,

when you're young, you need to see someone who's fought the fight for you and who's won.

So it's very easy to be defeatist. So this is what winning looks like?

No, this is not. This is most assuredly what winning does not look like. But in my normal

clothes, a little bit more. This is a good time to mention that clothes wise, you're wearing

sheath underwear and people should buy sheath underwear, use code malis20.

If you go to sheathunderwear.com, use promo code malis20. What I love about that, why I'm glad to

promote the product and wear it. It's the most comfortable underwear I've ever worn. And you

have a separate pouch for both parts of your genitals. That's what I thought there was a punch

line coming. No, it's a very nice aspect of the product. Yeah. But I think what here's something

else just as it goes back to what we're just talking about, there are so many, and this is

going to segue into this, there are so many small companies who have been devastated this year.

We have not seen a sustained attack on mom and pop shops, like we've seen in 2020,

who are innovators and making something happen. And when you're just like one dude who's

producing a product, they're a sponsor of mine. I'm happy. First of all, it's funny that I'm

pitching underwear, but I'm pitching, but it's also something I enjoy. And also you said small

business. Yeah. It's microscopic, like a thimble. So this isn't a sponsor of mine, but this is a

good segue. So this is Russians we celebrate New Year's. It's Novom Glodom. We have Died

Modoz. He comes down, puts a present under your pillow. So this is a company called JL Lawson.

He's a fan of yours. He's a metalworker. And he said, can I give you something to give to Lex?

I have one of his worry coins. I'll tell you what it is. He's not a sponsor. This is not,

I'm not getting paid for this. So what a worry coin is, I carry it around in my butt. If you

have raw denim, it's great because it brings you fades. So you carry it around with you all the time.

It says worrying is like paying a debt you don't owe, right? And I carry this around and

for the longest time, like a year. Next time you're worrying, and this is a good advice

if you don't have a worry coin, go think about 10 years ago and what you were worried about then.

And then think about, did any of those things pan out? And some of them did, but you were able

to handle it. And that's a good way to maintain perspective. So JL Lawson is the company. He

sent me this present. I said, let me give it to Lex on the air. So enjoy.

Sorry, I was so open on that. JL Lawson and Co. Two Lex from Anthony.

Yeah. And I said, make something mathematical for Lex. I don't even know what's in there.

You don't know what's in there? No. And it got through his TSA.

Could be a bomb. It could be. Just like this episode.

Make sure you unwrap it close to the mic because it drives you for crazy. That's really the best part.

Or is this what an unboxing video looks like?

This conversation is going to be a big hit on the internet.

With the unboxing community.

I need to have an excited look on my face to make sure that the reaction video is being

unboxing and a reaction video. Lex Freeman reacts. It's another box. It's just a series of boxes.

Lex, big fan since hearing you on Rogan months ago. Most of your guests are over my head,

but still enjoyable. Aw. Like this episode. Michael was kind enough to want to share my work

with you. Keep doing what you do. Anthony Lawson. Thanks, Anthony. There's a lot in there.

What is in there? Give me some. I'll open some. Okay. All right. Bye, bye, bye, bye.

Show it to the camera and then make sure you look excited or not or disappointed. No,

this is cool. This is a worry coin like I was showing you. Oh, nice. So you hold it in your

hand and when you can do this with your thumb, people have anxiety or whatever.

Aw, there's a lot of cool stuff in here. Fibonacci coin. Oh, so yeah, that's the math stuff.

That's really awesome. This is really cool. Wait, you got a big one lying there too.

That's what she said. I'm telling you, last time you offended me saying I don't have humor.

The spin tray micro brass and copper bronze. By the way, the packaging is epic.

I think that's his top. He makes tops. Cool. Yeah, you spin it in there.

And it's a two different bronze and copper.

I think he's the only one who makes these machined tops.

And then they sit in here, I guess. Yeah, but you could spin them in that section.

Got it. Cool. Where's the where's the worry thing? Here's the worry coin.

All right. Anyway, I wasn't listening. What were you worried about 10 years ago?

10 years ago, 2010. What would I have been worried about then?

The government? No, that's not a worry.

What was the North Korea book? That came out in 2014. I went there in 2012.

Came out in January 2014. It still pays my rent with the royalties.

The North Korea book. Yeah. This is why it's so much better.

I got to talk to you about self publishing because you brought that up.

I'm doing the next books also going to be self published.

Can we talk about self publishing? What's the whole idea of publishing,

like having a publisher and an agent? There's a bunch of people have been reaching out to me

trying to give me to write a book, which is ridiculous.

Why? There's people who are brilliant folks like you, like Jordan Peterson,

that I think have a lot of knowledge to share with the world.

Okay. I think what I feel I can contribute to the world in terms of impact is to build something.

Okay. Meaning like engineering stuff.

Okay. A book has to be engineered and I'm not using it loosely.

You have to engineer a book.

No, for sure. What I mean is literally a product with programming and artificial

intelligence. I want to build a company I want to, because I have a few ideas that I feel I'm

equipped and it has to do with your intuition about the way you can build a better world.

You individually, like what can you add to the world? That's a positive thing.

And for me, I feel like the maximal thing I can add to the world is at least to attempt

to build products that would add more love in the world.

And like, so I want to focus on that. The danger of the book for me,

or any kind of writing, and even this podcast is a little bit dangerous for me, is like,

it's fun. That's for sure.

It's fun. It takes you into this place where you start thinking about the world.

You start enjoying and playing with ideas. You start, just your book on a dear reader,

but also the new write. Clearly, you and I probably think similarly in the sense that

that you did a lot of work. Yes. This next book is killing me.

Yeah. As you mentioned often, it's clear, like on your YouTube channel, which I'm a fan of,

you often, it just comes out like you mentioned all of these books that you're reading,

it just comes through you that you're suffering through this and it changes you.

And it's clear that you're thinking deeply about the world because of this book.

And I feel like if you do that, that's like, when I first came to this country,

I read the book The Giver, I need to read it again. It's like, the red pill thing is it changes you

in where you can never be the same person again. And I feel about a book in that same way.

The moment you write a book, of course, it depends on the book.

I could also just write, in my field, a very technical book.

No, that's a terrible idea.

Yes. But that's okay. That doesn't really change you. That's just like sharing information.

But like something where you're like, how do I think about this world?

Can you just leave that behind you?

I get it. Dude, it's being pregnant. It never escapes your brain. I'm telling you.

Yeah. You're absolutely right.

Yeah. I don't know. It does seem to change you. But the reason I bring that up is because there's

this whole industry of people that seem to not really contribute much to the publication process.

But they make themselves seem necessary for like, if you want to be in the New York Times,

bestseller list kind of thing, but also just being like reputable, which I'm allergic to

that whole concept. But do you think it's possible to be on the New York Times bestseller list

and be a reputable author and still be self published?

Not what you would want to do. Like people like Marxist, and I think it's his name,

he wrote like the primal blueprint. So like, if I'm getting the names correct,

he's the first paleo guy, right? So he self published it. It's those gangbusters.

But that would be on their health chart, I believe. And it's a little bit of a different

situation. You would be reaching much more for the mainstream. You'd be giving up a lot

if you go through a publisher, especially financially. But yeah, you are not going to

have the cred because the publishing is a cartel. The New York Times is part of this cartel.

And if you don't publish within this cartel, they will do what they can, as any cartel has to,

by necessity of being cartel, to pretend you don't exist. So I was, I think, the first one

to have an hour on BookTV for Dear Reader because that was a Kickstarter book. But this is something

that people... Dear Reader was a Kickstarter book. Yeah. This is something people would

have to be aware of. So you would be giving up a lot, but you'd also be giving a lot to work

with a publisher because you're losing like a year and a half of your life because they're

glacial and they don't care. Well, that's my main problem. It's not the money. I mean, the money is

whatever percent they take, 10, 20, 30, 50%. They're taking a huge chunk. So if I sell a book

through St. Martin's, it's a dollar. If I sell a book through Amazon, which is Dear Reader,

that's six dollars. So that's what, 87%, it's something crazy. But for me, what bothers me

isn't the money that, for me personally, for me, what bothers me is incompetence. Like whenever

I go to the DMV or something like that. Can I interrupt you? Yeah. Let's talk incompetence.

Yeah. New Right comes out last year. Yes. I get on Rogan, get on Ruben. I call them and I said,

I got in these shows, is there money in the budget for travel? And they say, we don't have that

budget? Fine. By the way, you got on those shows with no help from them. Oh yeah, that's not even

a question. The reason they would want you to do a book is because they know you could get,

the only reason people get book deals nowadays, literally, is because they know that person

can market their own book. That's the only way. And I got on Ruben, I got on Rogan,

and they would have the money for the budget for travel, which is fair. They can do Skype.

They told me this in writing. And I'm like, okay. And they can financially cover Skype.

No, but it's like, hey, Joe, yeah, we don't have the budget, but you're going to do Skype. Hello?

Hello? So there is another friend of mine was on a show on CNBC with Naseem Taleb.

And they said Naseem wants a copy of the book. And they're like, oh yeah, it's like four o clock

on Friday, so we're closed. And he's like, he went there, picked it up and walked it the two blocks.

So there is, it's almost cartoonish. Oh yeah. And it's not incompetence. It's

past that. It's something almost, you can't really believe that. I've had two friends who have been

literally rendered suicidal because this was such a huge opportunity for them. And it was like watching

their kid get beaten in front of them. And I had to talk them off the ledge. So it's,

it's people do not appreciate how bad. Here's another example. The apathy of bureaucracy,

something like that. I did this book, Concierge Confidential. There's a typo in the first

chapter. It ends with I'm about to, TOO. They didn't fix it for the paperback.

Okay. It's just like, wow, okay. Yeah. Great book, by the way. It got NPR gave it one of the books

of the year. So that was good. So why participate in this? Because otherwise, New York Times is

going to pretend you don't exist. Getting booked on some shows might be more difficult, although I

think that's collapsing in real time. You're not going to get reviewed necessarily on places like PW

or some others. So the new book you're working on, do you have a title yet? The White Pill.

Are you self publishing that? Oh yeah, for sure. And what's the thinking behind that?

Just because you already have a huge following and a big platform and

it's six times the cash. If I finished the book in December, I could have it out in February.

If I finished the book in December with the publisher, it's going to be out in

December at the earliest 2021. Why am I giving up 10 months of my life?

Well, this is the big one. Do you have any leverage? Do authors have leverage to say

FU? Can you just say... What do you mean? Meaning I want to release this book in two months.

Oh, no, no. I mean, you'll have a contract and then your agent can fight it, but they don't have

the capacity to rush things through. Yeah, I guess if the... Because I've heard big authors,

I don't know, Sam Harris, all those folks talk about... They've accepted it actually.

They've accepted it. They're like, yeah, it takes a long time to... I'm not accepting it.

But you're kind of implying that a human being like me should. I'm saying these are your options.

All right. I just hate it. I hate the waiting because it's incompetence. It's not necessarily

the weight. If it was the kind of people that are up at 2 a.m. at night on a Friday and they

love what you're doing and they're helping create something special, that's the sense I get with

some of the Netflix folks, for example, that work with people. I don't know anything about this world,

but you get like Netflix folks who help with shows. You could tell that they're obsessed

with those shows. Yeah, you're not going to get that publishing. I handed the book in,

I think it was July. I didn't hear anything from my editor until December.

Well, can we actually talk about the suffering, the darkest parts of writing a book? Let's go to

the full Michael Malis Stephen King mode of what are the darkest moments of writing this book and

what is it? Maybe start the white pill. What's the idea? What's the hope and what are your darkest

moments around writing this book? So people are familiar with the red pill and the blue pill,

therefore the matrix, the red pill is the idea that what is presented as fact by the corporate

press entertainment industry is in fact a carefully constructed narrative designed to

keep some very unpleasant people in power and everyone else under control. One of my expressions

is you take one red pill, not the whole bottle because at a certain point you think everything's

a lie and then you're kind of no capacity for distinguishing truths. You're full of good

one liners. Well, thank you. I'm full of something, that's for sure. And what I saw in this space

is a lot of these red pilled people got very disheartened and cynical. And one of my big heroes

is Albert Camus and he said the worst thing is citizen. And that's something called the black

pill, which is the idea that we're waiting for the end. It's hopeless. And I don't see it that way

at all. And I'm like, all right, I have to address this. And not just with some kind of cheerleading,

everything's gonna be great, guys. Here is why I am positive. And not that I'm positive the good

guys are gonna win, but I'm positive the good guys can win. And that's all you need because if your

God forbid kid is kidnapped and there's a 10% chance that you can save them, you're not gonna be

like, well, I don't like those odds. This is your country. This is your values. This is your family.

I don't think it's much more than 10%. And even if you lose, you will take pride in that you did

everything in your power to win. So is there a good definition of good guys in the sense that

the ones who wear white? There's layers to this. You're like modern day Shakespeare.

Is there a danger in thinking Adolf Hitler was probably pretty confident that he led a group

of good guys? Listen, if Hitler did anything wrong, why isn't he in jail? My check friend thought of

that joke. Actually, he says in his accent, it goes, if Hitler's so bad, why isn't he in the jail?

That's a good point. He's probably still alive, right? And look, yeah, hopefully.

Oh boy, two of the three people listening to this are very upset right now.

What were you even talking about? How do you know what is good?

There's lots of standards of good. But for me, to be a good guy is, if you want to leave the

world a little bit better than you found it, that to me is the definition of a good guy.

And I think there are many people that there's not their motivation at all.

It's about your motivation.

Well, it's also about if your motivation is at all correlated to reality.

No one thinks we're the bad guys. That's correct. But are you taking steps to check your motivations

and also take a certain amount of humility? Because if you're going to start interfering

with people's lives, you really better be sure you know what you're talking about.

The control of others, if you do have centralized control or then you become a leader of a group,

you better do so humbly and cautiously.

And also have steam valves, right? So if in case things go wrong, let's have,

I'm sure this is a lot happening with AI, whatever work with computers.

Like, okay, if something goes wrong here, how do we have a workaround to make sure it

doesn't cause everything to collapse?

Yeah, the going wrong thing. I mean, the whole, the feedback mechanism.

Yeah.

Like, I wonder if people in Congress think that things are really wrong.

It's working for them.

Are you sure?

No, I'm not sure.

Because I'd like to believe that the people that at least when they got into politics

actually wanted, some of it is ego, but some of it is like wanting to be the kind of person

that builds a better world.

Sure. I'd also think it's a diverse, some of we're going to have different motivations than others.

But like, once you're in the system and trying to build a better world,

how do you know that it's not working?

Like, how do you take the basic feedback mechanisms and like,

and actually productively change?

I mean, that's what it means to be a good guy.

It's like, hmm, something is wrong here.

And this, that's why I like the Elon Musk, like, think from first principles.

Like, wait, wait, wait, okay.

Let's ask the big question.

Like, can this be, one, is this working at all?

Like, the way we're solving this particular problem of government, is this working at all?

And then like, stepping away and saying like, as opposed to modifying this bill or that bill,

or like this little strategy, like increase the tax by this much or decrease the tax by this much,

like, why do we have a democracy at all?

Or why do we have any kind of representative democracy?

Shouldn't it be a pure democracy?

Or why do we have states, like representation states and federal government and so on?

Why do we have this kind of separation of powers?

Is this different?

Why don't we have term limits or not?

Like, big things.

Like, how do you actually make that happen?

And is that what it means to be a good guy?

It's like taking big revolutionary steps as opposed to incremental steps.

Well, I don't know that you could be a politician to be a good guy, to be an analyst.

And let me give you a counter example.

Someone who you could tell is not being a good guy.

Joe Biden said he was, he regards the Iraq war as a mistake, okay?

You and I have made mistakes in our lives, I'm sure.

None of our mistakes have caused tens of thousands of people to die.

If, let's suppose I'm big for yourself.

That's fair.

Okay, I'll take that.

I don't build the killbots.

If I were a chef, let's take it out of politics.

And in my restaurant somehow, accidentally, someone ate something and they died.

A, I would feel horrible.

But more importantly, I would be like, we need to look through this system

and figure out how it got to the point where someone lost their life.

Because that can never happen again.

And we need to figure out step by step.

It's, there's, I'm not a gun person, but there's like this checklist of like,

if you're holding a gun, there's five things to do.

And even if you get too wrong, you're going to be sitting, it's like,

assume every gun is loaded, only pointed at something that you want to kill.

And there's like three other things.

And it's like to make sure that nothing goes wrong.

So if I made a, if I'm that chef, and I would have to not only feel guilt,

but take preventative action to make sure this has no possibility of happening again.

If you look at the staff he's putting in, it's the same war mongers

that would have advised him to get into the Iraq war on the first time.

That is to me, is not a good guy.

That to me is someone who does not feel remorse for their responsibility

in killing not only many Americans, but some of us think that,

you know, dead Iraqis isn't necessarily ideal either.

Okay, let's talk a bit about war.

Maybe you can also correct me on something.

The first time I found myself into Barack Obama was,

I don't know how many years ago this was, but when I maybe heard a speech of his

about him speaking out against the war.

Yeah.

And him, I think it's on record saying he was against the war before he was happening.

Now, he wasn't in Senate at the time, so it was very easy for him to say this.

But see, like people say that, people say that.

People say like it was easy and it was, some people say it's like strategically

the wise thing to do given some kind of calculus, whatever.

But I to this day give him, that's the reason I've always given him props in my mind.

Like this is a man of character.

Like he makes, I also personally really value great speeches.

I think speeches are really important for leaders because they inspire the world.

That's like one of the most best things you can contribute to the world is great.

Like through intellect, mold ideas in a way that's communicable to like a huge number of people.

Yeah, it's better to persuade than to force in every instance.

That's where I disagree with Chomsky said, like if you're,

Chomsky's whole idea was that like if you're really eloquent speaker,

that means your ideas aren't that good.

That's nonsense.

Yeah, so I think that's a way for him to describe like I speak in a very boring way.

Maybe that's a pitch for this podcast.

I speak boring so that the ideas are the things you value.

And it's also useful to go to sleep.

But that's why I really liked Obama throughout his life and still do.

But when I first like saw this is for some reason, you can disagree.

I thought he's a man of character is to when most politicians,

most people who are trying to calculate and rise in power,

I think were for the war or too afraid to be against the war.

Yeah, that's why I liked Bernie Sanders and that's why I liked like in the early days,

Obama for speaking out against the war and not like in this weird activist way,

not weird, but not not saying I'm an activist.

This is but like just saying the common sense thing and being brave enough to say the common sense thing

without like having a big sign and saying I'm going to be the anti war candidate or something like that.

But just saying this is not a good idea.

Yeah, and I think it's for those of us who are old enough to remember,

it's pretty despicable what happened with Tulsi in 2020.

She was the biggest anti war candidate and she was marginalized within her own party,

which I guess you can make sense.

She's just a congresswoman from Hawaii.

But the corporate press did everything in their power to diminish her and pretend she didn't existed.

And for those of us who remember where 12 years prior,

you know, when George W. Bush had the Republican National Convention New York

and it was like the biggest protest in history and the Iraq war led to democratic

landslides in 2006 and 2008 to have that completely not part of the Democratic Party

in 2020 is both shocking and reprehensible.

Hey, Michael.

You don't have to say, hey, Michael.

You just say knock knock.

No, it's not a knock knock joke.

Oh, okay.

What did the volcano say to his true love?

What?

What? I love you.

These jokes work better when you know how to speak English.

It was actually in Russian.

I did a Google translate.

Okay. Back to your book and the suffering.

You somehow turned it positive and as one who's wearing,

who's the representative of the black pill in this conversation,

what are some of the darker moments?

What are some of the hardest challenges of putting together this book, the white pill?

Content, content, content.

So if I'm having a page about Reagan taking on Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential primaries,

I'm going to have to read like 20.

So it's the thing like if there'll be sometimes I'll remember some quotes somewhere

and then I have to spend an hour trying to find it because I want it to be as dense with

information as possible.

How do you structure the main philosophical ideas you want to convey?

Is that already planned out?

No, the book changed entirely from its conception.

So my buddy Ryan Holiday had a series of books,

so does where he takes the ideas of the Stoics

and he applies them to contemporary terms.

He has this whole cottage industry that he's doing very well with.

And I'd asked him years ago if I could do that with Camus,

he's like, sure, go for it.

And I was going to rework Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.

And I read it recently, I reread it, and this wasn't the book I remembered at all.

And I'm like, okay, I'm going to write the book that I remembered.

But the more I was writing it, one of the things I always yell at conservatives about,

and there's a long list, is they don't talk about the great victory of conservatism,

which was the winning of the Cold War without firing a shot.

And I said, you can't expect The New York Times to tell this story

because the blood is on their hands.

And I'm like, well, Michael, instead of complaining about it, why don't you do it?

Why don't you talk?

That is a great example of the good guys winning over the bad guys.

And that's become, A, the victory is beautiful,

but also pointing out to people, when people are like,

oh, things are worse than they've ever been,

they don't appreciate how bad things were in the 30s,

what Stalin was doing overseas, and how people in the West were advocating to bring that here.

So that's kind of pointing out how bad things were, and how good they became,

and you don't have to be a Republican or conservative to be delighted

at the collapse of totalitarianism and the peaceful liberation of half the world.

So that's a picture of the good guys winning.

Oh, yeah.

Well, how does that connect to Sisyphus?

And maybe to speak deeper to life and whatever the hell this thing is,

which is what I remember the myth of Sisyphus being about.

So where does the thread of Camus lie in the work that you're doing?

So the myth of Sisyphus, which I had remembered incorrectly,

is actually just a five to seven page coda to the whole book at the very end.

Like, you only need to read that little essay called The Myth of Sisyphus.

The broader work is about Camus's concept of the absurd,

and the absurd man within literature, and it's just like,

I don't really care about this character in Dostoevsky and all this other stuff

that you're talking about, it's of no relevance.

But the myth of Sisyphus, the myth itself, not the book or the essay of his,

is this Greek character, and Sisyphus is forced in hell to roll a rock up a hill.

For eternity at the very last moment, the rock falls away.

And Camus take away from the stories that we must imagine Sisyphus happy.

And there's several interpretations of this, but one is,

once you accept that you are living an absurdist existence, once you own your reality,

it loses its bite. And you can start with that as your kind of baseline.

And bite is suffering.

And hopelessness. So I think when people look at how much ridiculousness is happening in America

and it's escalating, you can either think, oh, all is lost, or you can, and I think you and I

have lived our lives like this, you can live life more like a surfer, whereas you're never

going to control the ocean. But you can sure enjoy that ride and stop.

If you're trying to control the waves, yeah, you're done. But if you're like, all right,

I've got my board, I'm going to see where this takes me, surfing from what I understand is a

pretty fun activity. And also sometimes dangerous, but you don't have to ask Tulsi about that.

So we were offline talking about Stalin and the evils of the Soviet regime.

Yeah. One of the things I mentioned, I watched the movie Mr. Jones, but it's about the 1930s

called the more the, what would you say, the torture of the Ukrainian people by Stalin.

One interesting thing to me that I'd love to hear your opinion about is the role of journalism and

all of this. And also about 1930s Germany. So what's the role of journalists and intellectuals

in a time when trouble is brewing, but it requires a really sort of brave and deep thinking to

understand that trouble is brewing. Like if you were a journalist or if you were just like an

intellectual, a thinker, but also a voice of in the space of public discourse, what would you do

in 1930s about Stalin, about how the more, and what would you do about Nazi Germany in 1937,

1938. So that's really funny that you asked that because currently how the book is structured,

it's like, you know, books often follow three X structure, right? So act three is the eighties,

act one is the thirties and act two is going to be like, all right, let's suppose you were

in the thirties, are you just going to give up? Like, are you just going to be like, well,

we're screwed. And you'd be right to say things are going to be very bad for a long time.

Or are you going to be one of those few who are like, we're going to do something about this and,

you know, we're going to go down swinging. There are two books I can recommend, which are just

masterpieces that are written by women that just historians that are just super. There's a book

called Beyond Belief by Deborah Lipstadt. She talks about the rise of Nazi Germany as seen

through the press. And what was amazing, and she does a great job empathizing with the press and

understand their perspective, is we remember, and Chamberlain gets a bad rap, Neville Chamberlain

for kind of appeasing Hitler, because not that long ago, they had the Great War. They had World War

I. And they had the carnage that the earth had never seen before. And when you had people made

out of meat, meat industrial machines, and plastic surgery was invented as a consequence of this,

they're coming back mangled and disfigured. And for what? And this was a world where the Kaiser

was the most evil person ever lived. And we all had the Western propaganda about the Han,

and all the rapes, and all this barbarism, and blah, blah, blah. So not that long later,

when you're hearing all this propaganda, which was factual about Hitler, it's like, we heard this.

We heard this 20 years ago. This was all lies. Give us a break. And she has all the quotes

from the different agencies and how they addressed it. Plus, they had very limited information.

It's not like Nazi Germany was an open society where reporters can walk around and they were

under a lot of pressure as well, you know, in those areas. And Hitler himself was pretty good at

that. He let some stuff slip, but usually he made it seem like he wants peace. He wants world peace.

This was amazing. They were making the argument that because all these Jews were being beaten

up on the street, this proved, this was the hot take of the day, that Hitler was weak.

Because since Hitler's a statesman and he can't control these hooligans,

that shows his control on power is tenuous. And this is all going to go away.

By the way, Hitler thought that too. He was kind of afraid of the bronchers,

whatever. He was afraid of these hooligans a little bit. They were useful to him,

but at a certain point, yeah, they can get in the way. That's why he wanted to get control of

the military, the army, the regiment. If you want to take over the world, you can't do it with

hooligans. You have to do it with an actual army. And then you had Kristallnacht, which was a

nationwide pogrom. And then all the news agencies universally were like, oh, crap, we got this wrong.

And the condemnation was universal. So that book traces the West's reaction to what's going on there.

And including the reaction to the incipient Holocaust as people being, you know, what they

knew, when did they know. There was not ambiguity about it. People, I think there's this myth

that she dispels, that they didn't know the Holocaust was happening or they didn't care.

They were aware, but they were already at war with Nazi Germany. Like, literally, what else could

they do at that point to rescue all these Jews? So that's the superbook. And Ann Applebaum,

I think the book is called Red Famine, came out fairly recently. And she brings the receipts.

And she's a, you know, this is something I really hate with the binary thinkers, where people think,

oh, you know, if you're a Democrat, you're basically a communist, they call Joe Biden a Marxist.

It's just like, you know, she's a hard lefty. She's, you know, has TDS. But this book just

systemically lays out what Stalin did. By the way, I'm triggered by the binary thinkers. And for

those who don't know, TDS 0011 is Trump to Rangeman Syndrome. Yes. So they, you know,

forced the starvation in this entire population. And they, it's not only that, it's like they knew

if you weren't starving by looking at you, that you were hiding food. So they'd come back to your

house at night and break your fingers in the door or take, burn down your house. And now you're on

the street without food because you lied, because this is the people's food. You're a kulak. You're

a landowner. And very quickly, a kulak, which meant like peasant landowner became anyone who had

a piece of bread. And this was systemic and ongoing. And many people in the press did not

believe it. There was a British journalist, I believe, who got out of the train, Ukraine,

like one town earlier and walked, and he described all this. And he was mocked and derided. And this

is just anti Russian propaganda. Because at the time in the 30s, this was socialism and

come through fruition. This was a noble experiment. I'd seen the future and it works. I think that

Sidney Webb was the guy who said that. And the premise was, let's see what happens. We've never

tried something like that. And they were perfectly happy to have this experiment happen overseas

at the price of the Russian people because it's like, you know what, maybe this will be paradise

on earth. And there's a, I dressed this in my book as well. There's superb essay, I think,

by Eugene Genevies. And he talks about the question, the question being, what did you know,

and when did you know it? What did you know about the concentration camps? What did you know about

the starvation? What did you know about children being taught at school to turn in their parents

for, you know, having some extra bread? And his conclusion is we all knew, and we all knew from

the beginning, every bit of it, and we didn't care because we were more interested in promoting

this ideology. So when people are kind of thinking the worst thing on earth is like Robert E. Lee

statue being taken down to Washington D.C., we were being told on a, and especially a much more

limited news information world where now you have literally anyone can have a Twitter,

but how many outlets were there that this is, we're backwards, they're the future, they're

scientific, we have the vagaries of the market, which led to the Great Depression. And when you

see what was being put over on the American public at the time, anyone who thinks things are as bad

now as they've ever been is simply delusional or ignorant.

Yeah, I would say just as a small aside, that's why reading, as I'm almost done with

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, is it refreshes, resets the palette of your understanding

of what is good and evil in the world that I think is really useful now? Like, you know,

what helps me be really positive and almost naive on Twitter and in the world is by just

studying history and comparing it to how amazing things are today. But in that time, what would

you do? What does a brave mind do? And not just acts of bravery, but how do you be effective in that?

That's something I often think about. It's sometimes easy to be an activist

in terms of just saying stuff. It's hard to be effective at your activism.

One of the big questions historians have constantly is how did this happen? A,

to make sure it doesn't happen again, but this is Germany. This is not some kind of weirdo

cult nation. They're very advanced, very in the land of poets and philosophers. How did it get

to that point that they're just shooting children and everyone's cheering for this?

Specifically on the anti Semitism and the Holocaust?

No, the whole Tartarianism, the cult of Hitler and just this whole kind of thing.

But this is starting to drop, but there's two sides. I don't know if you want to separate them.

One is the totalitarianism and the entirety of the Nazi regime. And then there's the Holocaust,

which is going, I would say, very specifically, as I think you're about to describe, is targeting

Jews very much. I don't know if you see those as two separate things.

I think they're very interconnected. But I think if you look at it,

everyone thinks that they'd be the ones putting up Anne Frank. But if you look at the numbers,

they'd be the ones calling the Stasi on her or the people who were at the time, and not the Stasi,

obviously, and patting themselves in the back for it.

So sorry to pause on that. That's a really important thing. If you're listening to this,

that and you were in Germany at the time, you would have likely been willing to commit

or at least keep a blind eye to the violence against Jews. You have to really sit with that

idea that you would have been somebody who just sees this and is not bothered by it,

and also very likely kind of understand this as a necessary evil or even a necessary good.

Yeah. And I think people think they would be the abolitionists are marching on Selma.

The numbers don't add up to that at all. And I think the question would be, my friend was on

Tinder, my friend Matt, he's a great dude. And the question was, what's the most controversial

opinion you have? This is New York, and the girl wrote, I hate Trump. And what people perceive

themselves as being courageous in saying and doing, and what is the actual social costs of

you saying or doing this are two very disconnected things. And we're also trained by corporate

media to have completely vapid, uninteresting, banal ideas and yet regard ourselves as revolutionaries.

There are people who still in New York will take pride because they have a gay friend.

And it's like, first of all, who cares? But second of all, you are not a hero.

And that person is not your prop, by the way, that's another big problem.

Which is why I'd like to give Richard Wolfe a shout out for being an intellectual who talks

about communism. I think it takes kind of a heroic intellectual right now to speak about

communism seriously. There's difficult waters to tread, is that the expression? There's difficult

paths to walk. I love watching a robot try to use idiom in a language he doesn't even know.

001. I'm quite deeply heard by the binary comment.

Are you? Your feeling has gone from one to zero.

Yeah, my buffers have overflown. I feel like communism is universally seen as a bad thing

currently in intellectual circles. Or actually, maybe some people disagree with that. People

say far left, people are trying to, there's some people who argue the BLM movement is some kind

of arm of a Marxist. I mean, I don't really follow the deep logic in that, whatever.

Well, they said they were formed by Marxism, the founder, go founder.

But stating that is different than... There's Marx, the totalitarian, there's also Marx,

the revolutionary. And I think they're talking more like, we're revolutionaries,

we're going to overthrow the status quo. Yeah, right. But we can have that

further discussion, but I just don't think they speak deeply about political systems and saying

communism is going to be the righteous system. There's not a deep intellectual discourse,

what I mean. But if you were to try to be on stage with the Jordan Peterson,

like to me, the brave thing now, it would be to argue for communism. It'd be interesting to see.

Not many people do it. I certainly wouldn't be willing to do it. I don't have enough...

I don't, first of all, don't believe it. But second of all, it's a very difficult argument to make

because you get so much fire, which is why, like Richard Wolff, he's one of the people who is

quite rigorously showing that there's some good ideas within the system of communism,

specifically saying that attacking more the negative sides of capitalism. So saying that

capitalism potentially is more dangerous than communism. I mean, I disagree with that, but

I think it's a... I love how something is like, we've got a body count of 60 million,

but everything is put to... And potentially, water can drown everyone on earth. So this

is incoherent. Well, I think nuclear weapons are bad, but nuclear energy is good.

Sure. Well, nuclear weapons also can be good. You can easily make the argument,

which I don't know that I subscribe to, that nuclear weapons prevented,

boot something around war. And it causes me much more contained.

And they're also quite effective at changing the direction of an asteroid that's about to hit

earth, as I've learned from a movie. And they're actually useful as Musk has claimed for

application, prior to colonizing Mars, making it more habitable.

Oh, okay.

So it changed.

That looks something.

But yes, but I guess what I'm saying is there's place for nuance, and there's some topics so

hot like communism, where nuance is very difficult to have. And I feel like with Nazi Germany,

it was a similar thing at the time.

You want to talk about Jeanette Rankin, who was one of my favorite people?

So Jeanette Rankin was the first woman elected to Congress. She was elected before

women's suffrage was messed, the constitutional amendment from Montana.

She was elected in 1916. She was one of a handful of people to vote against the U.S.

going into the Great War, which was the right call at the time. She was a pacifist Republican

as well, coincidentally. She lost her seat, ran again in, was it 1940, got the seat again,

and was the only person to vote against getting into World War II. It was not a unanimous choice.

Jeanette Rankin was the one person, and she said, you can no more win a war than you can win a

hurricane. So she's one of these interesting, and talk about bravery. You're the one vote

after Pearl Harbor to say, we're not doing this. And I mean, the pressure she must have been under

at the time is, and of course, many people are not interested in hearing her perspective. She's

crazy. She's evil, blah, blah. It's also funny. Someone on my Twitter, when I talked about her,

goes, maybe she had Hitler's sympathies. Like, yeah, Ms. Rankin was a big fan of Hitler.

That's why you figured it out, guys.

Do you think there's an argument to be made that United States should not have gotten involved

in World War II? Oh, easy, an easy argument. The argument, there's a, I talk about this in the

New Right. So on internet circles, there's something called Godwin's Law, which means the

longer an internet conversation goes on, the probability someone gets compared to Hitler

becomes one. In certain New Right circles, the longer the conversation goes on, the more likelihood

that the argument will become we shouldn't have ended World War II also becomes one.

And the argument is, at the very least, stay back, let Hitler and Stalin kill each other off,

and then go in and knock off the weaker one, and you're going to be saving, destroying two

nightmare systems. And I think that's an easy argument to make. Now, it's hard to pull off

after Pearl Harbor, but in terms of strategy, I don't think that's a tough sell.

What about after Pearl Harbor?

I mean, that's what I was saying. After Pearl Harbor, how are you going to sell that to the

people? The argument is, blah, blah, the Holocaust, the Holocaust, there's no scenario where that

doesn't happen, really, unless you're going in way earlier. But even so, Hitler had said,

if the Jews launch another war, we're going to wipe them from the face of the earth.

So the Jews are being held hostage by Hitler as an argument for this.

Another thing he did, which was diabolical, is in order to make it that people could not

accept Jews as refugees, if they were going to leave Germany, they had to be penniless.

So now it's not like they're coming over with money and they can take care of themselves.

No, no, they're going to be completely destitute. It makes it harder to accept them, yeah.

Millions of destitute people who don't speak the language. It's a tough sell.

So speaking of Good Ones Law, what do you make of this condition,

Trump derangement syndrome, and the idea of comparing Trump to Hitler?

I think it's despicable. And I'll give you something parallel that I think more people

should be regarded as despicable. Earlier in 2020, we were all told that unless we were in Syria

immediately, the Kurds were going to be exterminated. They invoked the Holocaust. This is going to be

another genocide. And if you're not for this, you're basically forcing another Holocaust.

None of the people who used this argument, we didn't go to Syria, the Kurds were not exterminated,

they just vanished from the news, had any consequences for using this kind of comparison.

So I think it's really kind of fatuous. And I think it's amazing that people think Hitler's the only

tyrant who ever lived. Like everyone who's bad is specifically Hitler. You know how you know he's

not Hitler? Because you can tweet at him and no one comes to your house to kill your family.

Like that's kind of a big difference. Also there between Trump and many of his critics

is that his grandchildren will be raised as Jews. So that's also kind of a, and Deborah

Lipschuk talks about this a lot. The New York Times at the time, there's another book called

Buried by the Times, which talks about the New York Times in the World War II,

because the idea that Jews weren't white was a Hitler idea. The New York Times at the time,

Salzberger, wanted to be against this idea. So they specifically downplayed the antisemitism

as opposed to the Nazis are being oppressive. So the argument that you can separate Nazism

from antisemitism is a historical debate people have. And my perspective is, I think it's,

I do not find it convincing that you can separate those two. I think antisemitism was

essential to Nazism. I think Nazism and Mussolini's fascism have very big differences.

Do you think antisemitism is fundamental to who Hitler was?

So this is the interesting thing is like, was it a tool that he saw as being effective?

No, he believed it.

So why do you see those as intricately connected? Could Hitler have accomplished

the same amount or more without the Holocaust?

Yeah, because think about how many resources you had to divert at a time where you have

Operation Barbarossa with Stalin.

So why are they connected? Why are they so connected? Is it because

Hitler was insane? Or was he a bad strategist?

He was obviously a bad strategist. He took, he had no need to open a second front.

His general, my understanding, told him, this is crazy. It didn't work out for him at all.

I mean, to draw Russia and her resources into that war, it makes absolutely no sense in retrospect.

There's a book about, I forgot what it's called. We talked about him at that point was just high

all the time on amphetamines and that could have affected his thinking.

Yeah, there's a really good book on drugs. I figure what it's called, but yeah, it's a really good one.

But it was, I mean, scapegoating is a big part and parcel of the Nazi mythology.

And this kind of one universal figure to explain this kind of, you know, skeleton key.

But it could have been the communists. I mean, that could have been the source of the hatred.

But the communists didn't get Germany into World War I, like he said the Jews did.

It seems to me that the atrocity of the Holocaust is the reason we see Hitler as evil.

No, the reason we see Hitler as evil is because of World War II propaganda still.

Because we don't see Stalin as evil.

Right, that's my main point. We don't see Mao as evil to that extent.

I think that... Why? Like, why would you say that?

You know what? Because I think a lot of the problem for certain type of mentality

is Hitler didn't mass murder equally. So as long as you're killing just one group,

it's a problem. But if you're murdering everyone equally, all of a sudden it's like,

hey, what are you going to do? So the fact like you were saying the Hall of the More is not common

knowledge, the fact that Mao's 50 million dead are not common knowledge and Richard Nixon

can be raising a glass to him in China. These are things that I think the West has not done

a good job reconciling. Knock knock. Who's there? Frank. Frank who? Frank you for being my friend,

Michael. And the heart attacks will say, Frank you for being my friend.

You got to do like this. All right. Yeah. Okay.

I'll back to Hitler. Do you think Hitler could have been stopped? We kind of talked about it a

little bit in terms of how to, what is the brave thing to do in the time of Nazi Germany? But

do you think, I mean, I'm not even going to ask about Stalin in terms of could Stalin have been

stopped? Because probably the answer is there's no. But on the Hitler side, could Hitler have been

stopped? I think a lot of these things, a lot of luck has to play with it. He was almost assassinated.

If you mean by like the West, it's very hard. I mean, yeah. By the German people too. I mean,

could like if we're politically speaking, there was a rise to power through the 30s through the

20s really. I mean, like can whoever, it's not about Hitler, it's about that kind of way of thinking

that totalitarian control that always leads to trouble. And sometimes the mass scale,

could that have been stopped in Germany or maybe in the Soviet Union?

I think this is one of the best arguments against radicalization in the States, which is,

how do you engage when you have like 30% of the population who are members of a party,

which is dedicated to systemically overthrowing the existing democracy?

Stalin gave orders that the communists who had a pretty sizable population, the Reichstag,

that their target shouldn't be the Nazis, but the liberals and the social democrats,

and they invented the term social fascist for them. So instead of, they're just like jihadis,

instead of taking their sights on Nazism, they set their sights on the moderates,

because they wanted, they figured the choice between Hitler and us, we're going to win.

And this was a huge gamble, and they were all killed or had to flee, and ones who fled were

killed also by Stalin to my understanding. So this is an easy way where he could have been

certainly heavily mitigated. What about France and England, that it was obvious that Hitler was

lying, and they wanted peace so bad that they were willing to put up with it, even after Czechoslovakia?

Like, this is the anti pacifist argument, which is like, they should have threatened military

force more. But then the other anti anti pacifist argument is, if you're going to remember Barack

Obama had that red line, if you cross this red line in Syria, we're going to go in and Assad,

whatever, was like, yeah, cool. And he's like, Oh, okay, well, sorry. So if you're a threatening

force, there's a great song lyric, don't show your guns unless you intend to fight, right?

So if it's very clear with free countries through what's in the press, whether the

institutional will is there to follow through on these threats. So I think we have been very hard

for Chamberlain to rally the British people to take on Hitler just after the great, I mean,

the suffering that Britain's took the Great War, they still, you know, obviously,

it means so much more to them than us does to us in the West.

What about what do you make of Churchill then? Like, why was Churchill able to rally the British

people? Why was he like, do you give much credit to Churchill for being one of the

great forces in stopping Hitler in World War II?

I don't think that's really in dispute. I think he was very much regarded as this kind of the

right man at the right time. And I think Chamberlain took a gamble. He, the expression peace in our

time was Neville Chamberlain, when he signed the piece with Hitler, and he goes, we now have

peace in our time now go home and get a good night's sleep. That's what he said, because he's

like, all right, you know, he's going to stop here. And it's not impossible that if you just gave,

like if you gave Saddam Hussein Kuwait, it's not impossible that he's not going to, you know,

invade Saudi Arabia next something like that. Let's see. Okay. But everything I've read,

it's like, of course, there's, there's, it's not impossible. But when you're in the room with Hitler,

you should be able to see like man to man. Like, like to me, a great leader should be able to see

past the facade and see like, like, yes, everything in life is a risk. But it seems like

the right risk to take with Hitler. Like, it's surprising to me, I know there's charisma,

but it's surprising to me, people did not see through this facade. I really hate the idea of

hindsight and everything being 2020. And I think it's a very good idea generally,

seeking generally, not in this specific instance, to give our ancestors more credit than they,

than, than we tend to give them. Because people often, here's a great example from another context,

which is lightning rods. People always talk about religious people being stupid and superstitious.

And they weren't, they often were very well reasoned. And an example of this is lightning rods,

which is every year, whatever town, the church was the tallest building. And that's the one that

always got hit by lightning and got caught on fire. Now, what it's a coincidence that it's

always the church, like that makes logical sense. Now, they didn't realize, well, it's because the

tallest and therefore that attracts electricity. And in fact, when they invented lighting rods,

this is a controversy, because it's like, well, how is God going to show his displeasure if now

it's striking this lightning rod not burning down the church? So a lot of times things are a lot

more coherent than we give them credit for. And again, Chamberlain, he's the head of a

parliamentary party. So he does not have the, the freedom in a sense that a Hitler would

to be like, all right, we're doing this again, boys. We don't know what it's like in a room

with Hitler. Come on, that's, that's, we really have no idea. But I think you have to think about

that, right? Yeah, but you can, I can very easily see him in the room being very calm and charming.

And then you think, okay, the guy with the speeches is the act. And he's putting on a

show for his people. And this is the real one. Okay. So let's, let's take somebody as an example.

Let's take our mutual friend, Vladimir Putin. Yes. Okay. I don't know why saying his name

makes my voice crack. Because you're scared he could hear you like Beetlejuice. Volodya.

So there's a lot of people that's either one who built you.

No, that was, that was a collaboration.

What's, it's a double blind engineering effort,

where I was not told of who my maker was. There's a backstory, but there's a talking cricket.

Pinocchio.

You'll be a real boy someday.

I talk about him quite a bit because I find him fascinating. Now there's a really important

line that people say, like, why does Lex admire Putin? I do not admire Putin. I find the man

fascinating. I find Hitler fascinating. I find a lot of figures in history fascinating, both good

and bad. And the figures, just as you said, that are with us today, like Vladimir Putin,

like Donald Trump, like Barack Obama, is difficult to place him on the spectrum of good and evil.

Because that's only really applies to, like, when you see the consequences of their action in a

historical context. So there's some people who say that Vladimir Putin is evil. And

based on our discussion about Hitler, that's something I think about a lot, which is

in the room with Putin. And there's also a lot of historical descriptions of what it's like to be

in the room with Hitler in the 1930s. There's a lot of charisma. In the same way, I find Putin to be

very charismatic in his own way. The humor, the wit, the brilliance, there's a simplicity of the way

he thinks that really, if taken at face value, looks like a very intelligent, honest man

thinking practically about how to build a better Russia constantly, almost like an executive.

Like, he loves, he looks like a man who loves his job in a way that Trump, for example, doesn't.

Right. Meaning like, he loves laws and rules and how to...

He has no adversarial press. So that's going to help.

Yes.

And he's popular with his people. That's also going to help enormously.

I'm talking about strictly the man, directly the words coming out of his mouth, like all the videos

and interviews I've watched. I'm based on that, not the press, not the reporting. You can just

see that here's a man who's able to display a charisma that's not... Like, I can see that's

why I love Joe Rogan, is like, you could tell the guy is genuine and is a good person. And like,

you could tell immediately that like, once you meet Joe, that he's going to be offline,

also a good person. You could tell there's like signals that we send that are like difficult to

kind of describe. In the same way, you can tell Putin is like, he genuinely loves his job and wants

to build a better Russia. There's the argument that he is actually an evil man behind that charisma

or is able to, you know, assassinate people, you know, limit free press, all those kinds of things.

Like that's... What do we do with that? So what do human beings like journalists or what do other

leaders when they're in the room with Putin do with those kinds of notions in deciding how to act

in this world and deciding what policy to enact, all those kinds of things. Just like with Hitler,

when Chairman was in the room with Hitler, how does he decide how to act?

Well, let's go back to like my wheelhouse, which is North Korea, right? So when your entire world

is based on being against Trump and everything Trump does is buffoonery or kind of productive,

the conclusion of your reporting is going to be pretty much given. I was very hopeful

that there would be some positive outlooks or outcomes rather of Trump's meeting with Kim Jong

Un. It looked like there was a space for things to go a bit better. I talked about it a lot at the

time and Trump was under no illusions about who he was dealing with. People pretend that, oh,

he was kind of naive. He had one of the refugees at the State of the Union, you know, lifting up

his crutch. The first thing he sat down and talked to Xi Jinping about in Mara Lago right after he

became inaugurated was North Korea. Barack Obama said that when he sat down, Trump and the White

House during the transfer of power, he said North Korea is the biggest issue. So I think a good

leader, whether or not you consider Trump a good leader, has to be aware of, all right,

I'm going to have to have relationships of some kind, even if it's adversarial,

with some really evil, evil, horrible people, which Kim Jong Un clearly is.

Well, I don't think there's anybody that has a perspective that North North Korean Kim Jong

Un or Il are not evil, right? Correct. But in 1930s Germany, isn't it a little bit more nuanced?

Yeah, because Hitler hasn't done anything yet and he's just to blow hard and he's

in anti semite, sure, but he's... What about like before the war breaks out? Like what about the

basic actionable anti semitism when you're like just attacking, hurting...

We're talking about Kristallnacht or talking about the Night of Long Knives?

Kristallnacht, so Night of the Broken Glass. Yeah, yeah, Long Knives is when he assassinated

a bunch of his people. That was something different. Yeah, so like when you're actually

attacking your own citizenry? Yeah, that was universally condemned, Kristallnacht,

and that was very shocking. It's level of barbarism to the West. Because I think we

still want to believe, understandably, that things aren't as bad as they seem. We would rather...

This is why the North Korea book I did, Dear Reader, is used in a humorous framework because

if you have to look... It's like looking to the sun. If you stare at it straight on,

it's very hard to do. So you have to kind of look at it obliquely and then you're kind of realizing

the enormity of the depravity. And again, pogroms in Russia had been a thing for a very long time

and there's a difference between, okay, we're going to sack these villages and persecute people

and we're going to systematically exterminate them. There's still levels of evil and depravity.

So you did write the book Dear Reader on Kim Jong Il, Dear Reader, the unauthorized

autobiography of Kim Jong Il. Yeah. So that's the previous leader of North Korea. Correct.

Current one is the Un... Jong Un. No creativity on the naming. Well, no, this is intentional

because it's a throwback to the dad. So there's been only three leaders in North Korea.

So we've talked about the history of Hitler and Stalin, men like these. I think it's important

to understand that the history of those kinds of humans, there's... The history of North Korea

is not well written about or understood, which is why your book is exceptionally powerful and

important. So maybe in a big broad way, can you say who is Kim Jong Il as a man, as a leader,

as a historical figure that we should understand and why should we understand them?

So I wrote Dear Reader by going to North Korea and getting all their propaganda,

which is translated into several languages because the conceit is everyone on earth is

interested in them and wants to mirror their ideology.

And he died in 2011. 2011. And you wrote the book in 2012.

I went there in 2012. I wrote the book, came out in 2014. So Kim Jong Il is, though not an

intellect, North Korea's version of Forrest Gump, in that when they write their history,

whenever something appears, happens, he's there. And by telling his life story, it's in the first

person, he's telling the history of North Korea. So I wanted to write the kind of book where,

in one book, and it's the kind of reading you could do in the beach or the bathroom,

you're going to get the entire history and know everything you need to know about North Korea

in one accessible outlet. And it's what people don't appreciate about North Korea,

the several things, how bad it is. And this didn't happen overnight. This was very systemic,

that what this family did to that country, where piece by piece, they did everything in their power

to hermetically seal it from the rest of the world, ramp up the oppression, keep any information

from coming in. And they're very creative and innovative in their style of manipulation and

control. So there is a farcical element. Let me give you an example. So people in the West kind

of get it wrong. They talk about, oh, they talk about when Kim Jong Il played golf for the first

time, he gets 17 holes in one. There's this one story about Kim Jong Il shrinking time.

And this is a story how it sounds supernatural, but it's not. So Kim Jong Il is at a conference,

the dear leader, and someone is giving a talk. And while that person's giving a talk, Kim Jong

Il is taking notes and working on his work. And he has an aide who keeps interrupting him with

questions. And the speaker keeps stopping. And Kim Jong Il says, while you're stopping,

goes, I see you're doing these other things. And it goes, no, no, I can do all these things at once.

Everyone's shocked. And they said, this is why Kim Jong Il looks at time, not like a plane,

but like a cube. And he can shrink time. And my friend goes, do they mean multitasking? And yes,

Kim Jong Il is the only person in North Korea who's capable of multitasking. So in order to

elevate him, they basically make everyone else in North Korea completely incompetent. And that has

a purpose because should the leader go away, this country's going to collapse overnight.

So they laugh in the West about all these newspapers show him at the factory and he's at

the fish hatchery at the paper plant. They say the difference in North Korea is that the leader goes

among the people and does what he calls field guidance. So he will go in that farm and be

like, this is what you need to do. And he'll go here and he's so smart. He's good at everything.

And thanks to him for sharing his wisdom with us. And he's not removed from the people like in every

other country. Why does that seem to go wrong with humans? Do you think that this kind of

the structure where there's this one figure, this authoritarian, this totalitarian

structure where there's one figure that's a source of comfort and knowledge.

Kim Jong Il is not good at farming. Kim Jong Il is not good at the machinery. It's all a complete lie.

Or the things he'll point out will be things that are completely obvious. So here's another

example that they use. In North Korea, they have something called the Tower of the Juche Idea,

which is an obelisk, which looks like the Washington Monument, but it's completely different

because it's got this like plastic torch at the top. And they talk about in their propaganda how

all the architects got together and they said, oh, we should make this the second tallest

stone obelisk in the world. And Kim Jong Il says, no, let's make it the tallest. They're like,

we never thought of this before. And the way it's presented as it, and like he's the first person

thing of this, like these architects are having a brainstorming session of the Tower of the Juche

Idea. They're like, all right, we got to do something innovative to put North Korea on the map.

What can we do? How about second biggest? He's going to go for this. And then he's like, oh,

we never thought of this. It's so, because I present it at face value, people sometimes say

the books a satire. It's not a satire. I downplayed all this stuff. It's a farce. Here's another

example. North Korea is very big, and I think Russia is to some extent too, on amusement parks,

fun fairs, they call them in the British style, because this is the chance for the people to

all together. And there was this amusement park. It's almost like South Park, the Cartman, where

there's all these rides. And Kim Jong Il is like, I'm not going to let any elderly or children take

these rides until I put myself in danger and ride them myself. And they go, but dear leader,

it's drizzling. And he goes, no, I have to make sure these rides are going to be safe for everyone,

even during the light rain. They go, well, can we go on these rides with you? No, no, no,

I have to be the courageous one. And he's riding all the rides and they're standing there crying at

his courage. But that's what's, and you ask all the things in one power, it's like, listen, I'm

quite confident that those fun fair engineers are in a position to ride modest mouse, whatever

it's called by themselves and be like, yeah, okay, this is good for the kids. Although to be fair,

some of those amusement parks are not are pretty rusty and dangerous.

That kind of propaganda, I guess what I'm playing a devil's advocate is like, it's comforting and

it's useful. But it does seem that that naturally leads to an abuse of power.

But how can it be used correctly? No one person has the intellect or the mind to understand

the entirety of an economy, let alone every individual field of interest.

Well, for example, you can have an artificial intelligence system that understands the

entirety of it. Your effect just completely changed. The mask slipped. I guess you could have an

artificial intelligence system. But like, the question is, can that mean like the human version

of that is like, you can hire a lot of experts, right? You can be an extremely good manager.

Since everything's dynamic, it's not gonna, they're not gonna have the data to kind of manage it well.

It seems that there's like what George Washington allegedly did. It seems like most humans are

not able to fire themselves. You're not able to like, yeah, you're right, ultimately be a check

on your own power. But that's not if I was like, if I was creating a human is like, that's not an

obvious bug of the system that we would not be able to fire ourselves to know when we have,

I mean, it seems like that's something you have to know always. Like that's something I often

wonder is like, am I wrong about this? Well, this is what we talked about earlier. What are the safety

valves? Yeah. To make sure that, okay, if I am incorrect or my knowledge is finite, Plato's cave

kind of thing, what mechanisms are in place that my mistake or limited information isn't going to

have the deleterious consequences. And North Korea does not really have that. And as a result,

they had polio in the 90s. So there is a, you, you write about it straight, but there's a humor to

it because it's an absurdly evil place, I suppose. Yeah. A bunch of people, I asked, I asked, I said

that I'm talking to you and a bunch of fast questions. Oh, I gotta hear from the plebs.

You asked me before we started recording, I specifically said no, it was in my contract.

Yeah. And you gave, I gave you all the pink skittles or whatever. But they,

So pink skittles. You don't think. I'm trolling, Michael. Let me explain to you how that works.

If people should go to malice.locals.com and sign up and pay, I think the membership fee is

several thousand dollars. It's very, it's not. It's not for the layman. Yeah. But the service is

excellent. You get a coat with it. But yeah, I went there, posted a lot of really brilliant

people there. People should join that community. If you find Michael interesting, or if you just

want to go and say why he's wrong, it's a great place to have that. I show you. Yeah. A lot of

really kind people. So anyway, there's a bunch of people asked that we should talk about humor.

Okay. So pretend hypothetically speaking that I'm a robot,

asking you to explain humor to me. What? So dear reader, I mean, there's a humor,

you're so wonderfully danced between serious dark topics and then seriously dark humor.

Can you try to, if you were to write like a, I don't know, a Wikipedia article, maybe a book

about your philosophy of humor. What do you think is the role of humor in all of this?

A joke is like a baby. You can't dissect it and then put it back together and expect it to work.

Trust me on this one. Despite, no matter how you carve that thing up, it's not going to be

working the next day. And you need it to sew those little sneakers with those hands.

I don't know that humor is something that is very explainable. People, there's something called

claptor where this is like the worst kind of humor where people applaud because they agree

with what you're saying. That's supposed to lapped her. That's the poetry reading.

Yeah. And the drag queens do that too. I think because they have the nails.

You laugh, it's a visceral reaction. When someone on Twitter is insisting, you know,

that's not funny, you're not in a position to make that claim. And let's go back to North Korea.

I had a refugee I knew and he went to high school here and he was talking to his buddies

and they said, hey, remember when we were kids, we had Pokemon and he goes, oh yeah,

except instead of Pokemon, I watched my dad start to death, which is the truth. Now,

who are any of us to tell him not to make that joke? I don't know what it's like watching anyone,

including my dad, start to death and my dad's fatty, so he's not going hungry anytime soon.

So it's very bizarre to me when people feel comfortable precluding others

from making jokes, especially, and I think this is a very Jewish thing,

like this kind of gallows humor, especially when it's some laughing about a personal

loss or experience that they've had. Humor is a great way to mitigate pain and suffering,

but it's also, I think this, why it's a Jewish thing, it's a black thing,

when you are a marginalized community or poorer, it's free. Telling stories, telling jokes or

songs, you don't have to have money, but you can have joy and happiness. And I think that's why

you find it so much more in kind of lower status communities than you find in like wasps who are

notoriously humorless. Which is strange because people pay you a lot of money for the jokes you

do, so it's not really free. Yeah, well, nope, they don't have to pay me. It's appreciated,

but not expected. I find my voice cracking every time I try to make a joke, like I fail miserably

at this. Some people... You're still in beta, that's a lie. Alpha. Sure. Being an alpha is

like being a lady. If you have to help people, you are, you aren't. No, I meant alpha version.

Oh, okay. I don't know if you're a robot govily cook. I'm not going there, okay.

Who are you talking to? In my own head. I'm talking to myself in my own head. Okay,

speaking of North Korea, some people say that, you know, I've read that comedy is about timing.

Well, first of all, do you agree? Yes. And second of all...

No, I'm serious. No, just that you're saying yes at that time. Yeah, it's funny. Okay.

Isn't it comedy's tragedy plus timing? Isn't that the full reference?

What is it? The interrupting cow knock knock joke? I'm not going to do it, but...

That's not a timing thing. It's more of a repetition and then the twist ending.

No, the moo. Oh, the moo. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Interrupting cow. You think it's the banana one. Anyway, I'm not going there.

Yet, you're... Who are you talking to? In my own head.

In my own head.

Are you small, wonder? Do you stand sleeping in a wardrobe?

Yeah, that's so British. But yet, you're very...

I don't want to say in a closet because that has connotations.

Let's both come out of the closet for a second and let's talk about...

I love you, Lex. I wasn't saying I love you, Alex. I was saying I love you, Lex.

Oh, you were talking to me. Yes, through the screen.

So you think about me when you're with another man.

I watch it when you're sleeping.

Okay, so you're on... Like a bangle song.

You're really active on Twitter. Yeah.

And somebody else asked on your overly expensive membership site...

Like grift site.

How do you find humor different in writing on Twitter versus spoken humor?

Oh, that's a great question.

If humor is about timing, how do you capture the timing and the brilliance

of the whatever is underlying humor in the context of Twitter?

Like another way to say it is how do you be funny and yet thoughtful on Twitter?

So with Twitter, you have to be the first one to the punchline.

So when Ron Paul had his stroke, I was immediately being like,

he's still the most articulate libertarian.

He's doing a great job by an impression right now.

All the libertarians got ass mad.

People like too soon or like when someone dies, you're making the jokes about them.

It's like, when do you want to make the jokes about someone just died a week later?

It doesn't make any sense.

Now, you might... Too soon is perfect timing.

Or you could say it's not appropriate ever,

but too soon does not make sense in this context.

So that is something that I enjoy doing.

It's also fun ruffling people's feathers, something I enjoy doing.

I think spoken versus writing is very different because when you are having

good banter with someone, for me as the audience, knowing that it is on the spot,

really adds an element of humor because then it's like, wow, this is fun.

It's like a ping pong match or something.

Whereas in writing, you're losing the tone.

You're losing the relationship of a dynamic conversation.

And a lot of times the joke is just going to be a different type of joke.

Well, it's funny, but Twitter, there's a sense, especially your Twitter,

that you just thought of that and you just wrote it.

Yes.

There's a feeling like it's literally you talking as opposed to what I imagine is

there's some editing or it doesn't look like it.

Whoever your editor is should be fired.

There's an interesting effect actually.

If I want to say something, I don't know, about something that's bothering me

about the presidential election or something like that.

Like, what is the actual central idea that I'm trying to convey to myself?

Like, if, say, I was having a hypothetically conversation with myself.

What?

No, not going there.

Why am I putting my pants back on?

I'm more comfortable this way.

Promo code malis20, sheathunderwear.com.

Okay.

That's sheath, what is it, what's the website?

sheathunderwear.com.

Sheathunderwear.com, promo code malis20.

And I forgot, why is that underwear really nice?

Because it has a dual pouch technology to keep your man parts separate.

They've also got woman stuff, but I don't know how that works.

If there's a thing worth going somewhere.

And the material is really refreshing.

I mean, it's really a good case.

And it makes your ass look good.

That's promo code malis20.

And it's made by a former vet because he was in Iraq.

So that's why I like promoting it.

Yeah.

But what I'm writing the tweet, it forces me to think deeply about the core of the message.

But what I found this really interesting effect, I don't really do much editing on the tweet.

I'll just think and then I'll write it.

And then when I post it, submit, I immediately see the tweet very differently than it was in my mind.

Huh? I often delete, I don't know, some percentage of tweets about like two, five seconds after.

Wow.

I don't know.

It's something, once you send it, it's why the Gmail send features,

undo send features really nice.

It's like, it just changes the way I see the thing.

It's very interesting.

It's, but I really love it that you can delete it because when I say stuff out in the wild,

like the other humans, like spoken, spoken word is like, you can't delete what you just said.

And I often regret the things I say, like in, in on the spot.

Like I shouldn't have said that.

Really?

Yeah.

I don't have that.

Well, again, whoever your editor is, what is it?

Edith Piaf.

Genère, I cut your hand.

Wow, your French is as bad as your English.

Um, I don't have any tweets I regret because if I sent a tweet that I regretted, I would

make amends.

I would make it a point if I was a needlessly offensive to somebody or hurtful or accidentally,

I would make sure to fix it and, and go out of my way to make sure that person feels vindicated

and validated by accepting my apology.

That has never happened.

Had to happen, thankfully.

I'm also someone who is not big on taking the bait.

Uh, you know, some recently, some people have come after me pretty hard.

And my perspective is that it's not really about me.

It's either I represent something to them.

I'm just some jackass with a Twitter.

So if you're getting this riled up over me, it's not really about me.

Maybe I'm delusional.

That's how I look at it.

So if they are trying to provoke me into this kind of heated exchange, I will never

do it, uh, because that's not, I'm not interested in it.

And it's, I don't think there's going to be any, it's like Janet Rankin.

You, you can't win.

It's just going to be like trying to win a hurricane.

And there's, there's no hero here.

Well, let me ask you about this.

Cause somebody also asked that on your overly expensive membership site,

that like they were saying that they're an academic.

They wonder, cause I'm an, I'm not an academic, but I do still have an affiliation

with MIT. I, the word academic is dirty.

It's like, which is a problem that needs to change.

It's just like the word nerd is dirty.

No, academic needs is going to be the next front to open.

And they're going to be very vilified.

We're coming for them.

And it's going to be very, very ugly.

And I cannot wait.

No, but there needs to be a place, a different term for people who love

research and knowledge.

Oh, that's true.

That's very fair.

Like you have to.

No, you're right.

100%.

You're right.

So like there, you have to, you have to clarify what you mean by academic.

And right now the word academic means a very, in the intellectual public discourse,

it means the enemy.

And there's a lot of people that perhaps deserve that targeted vilification,

but like a lot that don't.

They're just curious people.

You're absolutely right.

Building, building robots that will one day destroy you.

Voice cracks every time I make a joke.

You're not consistent.

I can't do this.

Because you're not making a joke because you're telling truth.

I'm editing.

Can I delete that joke?

Okay.

That's not even a joke.

Robots, building robots that will one day kill us.

Oh, God willing.

You God willing.

Humans are the joke.

That's why I'm cracking.

My voice is cracking.

What were even, what was I even fucking saying?

Academics.

Academics.

But why?

My locals, someone had a question.

They're in academic.

Right.

They're in academic.

They're saying, like, are you worried that, you know, in academia, associating yourself

with a sort of somebody who has, who can be misconstrued to have radical ideas,

like the two examples they gave is Michael Malice and Joe Rogan.

Is Joe have any radical?

I wouldn't consider him radical at all.

Well, we can talk about it.

But Joe is, I think, a bad example.

He's quite centrist to me.

Well, he could have, for example, like, what has Joe been attacked on?

It's, for example, on the topic of, like, transgender, like athletes and sports.

There's, what else?

I mean, he's been pro Bernie Sanders.

And that's how pro Trump or, like, giving Trump a pass.

Yeah, anti Trump.

Not anti Trump.

Yeah, oh, what else?

Just, but none of these are radical.

Meat, meat stuff being pro meat versus anti vegan.

Yeah, you know, all those kinds of things.

But you could be misconstrued and, and saying, there's, I think, a highlight.

My mom actually wrote to me about this, which is hilarious.

Thank you.

I like how you got it down.

It's when it's important.

Well, I see your mom wrote to you.

That's, that's a sign.

My voice cracks a sign when, when Michael Malus makes a funny joke.

So when you jot something down.

He writes it.

And then the next time he crosses it out.

It's like Joe Biden and the debates.

Okay.

It did also just crap my pants.

So, it's like a mud slide down here.

There is a, I mean, he's a comedian.

And you have a comedian side to you, right?

I mean, you're, you've talked about humorous side.

Yeah.

Humorist is.

So you can misconstru like Joe as being somehow a radical

thinker and then the same one could be done with you.

And his question was how are you worried about

associating yourself with folks like that?

Am I or you?

I'm me, me.

Yeah, that's a good question.

And is that something, do you see yourself as somebody

who's dangerous that I shouldn't be talking to?

And in the same way, do you, do you ever think about guests on

your podcast or people you talk to publicly,

associate yourself with publicly and think that there

is somebody that crosses that line that you shouldn't talk to?

So I interviewed in the new ride.

I interviewed like up to full blown Nazis in the last

chapters about Chris Cantwell.

But that was in the context of that book, right?

So there's lots of people who people want me to have on my show.

And the way I look at it is like you have a table and tablecloth,

right?

And let's suppose the table is three feet wide.

The tablecloth is two feet wide.

So if I move the tablecloth to the right, I'm going to lose

people on the left.

I can only cover so much space.

And the further you go in the fringe in one direction,

the more mainstream you're going to lose in the other direction.

So I'm very much making a conscious choice not to talk to,

being people will say I'm cowardly.

And that's absolutely true.

I'm being fearful here.

I would prefer not to talk to some of those who would alienate

some of the more mainstream people.

And here's a perfect example of why.

On my birthday last year, I woke up seven o clock in the morning

to go pee.

And I checked Twitter, whatever.

And Jeb Bush had followed me.

Jeb.

And I did seven AM.

You're not really awake.

You're like, wait, what?

And then I thought maybe it was a fake account,

but it's in the verified tab.

Oh, you don't have this because you're not verified on Twitter.

That's a shame.

So people who matter on Twitter.

Twitter does not respect robots.

They ban bots.

You're lucky I'm in there.

Zero, one.

Zero, zero.

It's zero, zero, zero.

Those are my pronouns.

So it was Jeb, Jeb Governor Bush.

And I corresponded with him and I asked him on the show

and he decided not to for various reasons.

Very politely.

He's like, just politics is so bad right now.

I don't want to talk about it.

And I respect that for him.

If I am in a space, if I'm creating my show,

where he's going to get heat and get canceled.

Oh, you can't be on the show.

He has these other guests.

I don't want to lose that opportunity because,

as we were talking about earlier,

me and Alex shows in Tim Pool,

I think a lot of people would be very excited

to see me sit down with Jeb Bush.

And I told him in writing and I meant this.

I wouldn't be clowning him.

I wouldn't be disrespectful.

It would be a lot of fun.

There's a goofball side to him that comes out sometimes

and I would do my best to bring that out

and talk about what it's like being a blue blood.

To be born into his grandfather,

Prescott Bush was a senator from Connecticut.

Marrying a woman didn't speak English.

How does that work when your family's royalty

and things like that?

So, I had a lot of fun questions for him

and you're going to have to choose one or the other.

Well, you do a really good job of that.

Like Ben Shapiro does a good job of that too,

which is you can have a trolley side, a humor side,

where you tear down the power structures and so on.

But you can also have a serious side

and it's a safe space for people

from all walks of life to walk in.

And you're not adversarial.

Never.

I take the word guest seriously.

If they're going to be on my show,

I'm not going to have them have negative consequences

as a result of being on my show.

That said, I mean, maybe in my case,

I'll be honest and say that I find Alex Jones

outside of the conspiracy stuff.

For some reason, maybe you can explain,

maybe you can psychoanalyze me,

but I find him hilarious to listen to.

He's a performer.

He's very performative.

But there's a lot of people that don't see the humor of it

and they see the serious consequences

of spreading conspiracy theories of different kinds.

And they see the danger of it.

And I personally, I'm often tempted to talk to Alex

in a podcast format,

but I think I'm trying to convince myself that I never will.

Well, for me, I feel unsafe talking to Alex

because I can't truly be myself, which is like...

Yeah, you'd have to be on.

Naive and honest.

Yeah.

And like, and actually, I generally,

when I talk to humans, I want to see the best in them.

And I think that's, like, I often think about

if I talk to Hitler in 1935, 1938.

You got to list the names to give him.

Well, yeah, I mean, that's how you get the interview.

Come on, let's be honest.

Who are we kidding?

I would...

You have to give away one of your...

I would probably give away one of my brothers.

So...

How many brothers do you have?

We'll just one.

Okay.

Too many.

I want to be an only child.

He's the older brother.

He used to pick on me.

Payback.

You know, it's only...

He had a good life.

You should think of it more Stalin.

I'm sorry to interrupt you

because Hitler, you're Jewish.

So you're already going to have a very adversarial.

It's not going to be a normal...

He's not going to perceive you as a human in a sense, right?

Right.

So it's...

Stalin, you're right.

Yeah, that would be much easier.

Or Kim Jong Un or something like that.

Okay, do you think...

Like, how...

Okay, this is a good question.

Is it?

And that's...

Why don't you jot something down?

If you...

Wolfs, gloves, Hitler.

All right, we'll cross it out in a second.

Prove.

I think this is a really good example

of a difficult figure that's controversial

that people bring up to me a lot

and you've interviewed twice,

which is Curtis Jarvan.

Yeah, Manchester Möhlberg.

Manchester Möhlberg, aka Manchester Möhlberg,

which is his pseudonym that he goes by in his blog.

Can you tell me about who he is?

Sure.

Why is he interesting?

What are his ideas are interesting?

Well, briefly, he invented the concept, the red pill.

So, Curtis, Manchester Möhlberg had a blog

called Unqualified Reservations.

You can still find it online.

It's very verbose.

He writes at length, very, very bright.

His perspective is very heretical.

So, a lot of things that we take for granted

in our liberal democracy, he regards as

not only incorrect, which is downright absurd,

and does not...

He does not take what many people view

as the basis of American political discourse

as the basis for his thought.

So, when you're starting with someone

who is basically repudiating kind of the Western worldview,

or not the Western worldview, like the American milieu,

a lot of people are going to, of course,

regard him as dangerous or someone who is verboten.

He's a very bright person.

Why is he such a toxic figure?

Because if you are blue pilled, if you are the guardians

of what is acceptable discourse,

then you have to make sure your forts are secured,

and that any figure outside of this acceptable discourse

has to be marginalized and regarded as radioactive as possible.

You don't want to let in these kind of ideas

that would be destructive to your hegemony.

Well, so let's dig into it.

So, I've read a few things by him,

but then I hear that in a bunch of places,

him being called a racist, a white supremacist,

neo fascist, so on.

I go to his Wikipedia.

There's a view on race section.

Let me read it.

Yavin's opinions have been described as racist,

with his writings interpreted as supportive of slavery,

including the belief that whites have higher IQs

than blacks for genetic reasons.

Yavin himself maintains that he's not a racist

because while he doubts that, quote,

all races are equally smart,

the notion, quote,

that people who score higher on IQ tests

than some sense superior human beings is, quote, creepy.

He also disputes being an outspoken advocate for slavery,

though he has argued that some races are more suited

for slavery than others, quote,

it should be obvious that although I'm not a white nationalist,

I am not exactly allergic to the stuff.

Yavin wrote in a post that linked approvingly of,

I don't know, these people, Steve Saylor.

Steve Saylor, yeah, he's from.

Jared Taylor and other racialists.

Yeah, so.

Okay, so like, one of my questions is.

Let me just say one sentence.

In the same way that you had,

you were mentioned that guy earlier,

who was defending some aspects of communism,

and that is in some contexts acceptable.

When you think about it, it's like,

this should be radioactive.

The fact that he is engaging with these ideas

in anything other than this has to be repudiated at all costs

is what renders him to a large extent a racist.

That's really interesting.

So there are some topics you can be nuanced and some not.

And communism is still a topic that you can be nuanced about.

It's difficult, but you can be.

Race, and this, like talking about slavery

and IQ differences based on race is a topic

that I guess is radioactive to a degree

where you can't even say anything,

even if it's nuanced or not even making a point.

It's like touching it as you make another point.

And understandably, you can understand that.

I'm going to steel man their point

because you can understand the point.

It's like, you're just talking about Hitler.

Once this foot gets in the door,

that some people are inherently slaves,

or some people are inherently better than others,

it really quickly collapses.

So that would be their perspective.

But that's what, like, if I were to give criticism of his...

But let me just say one more thing.

Racist is also used to describe Alex Jones.

Alex doesn't talk about race.

Racist is a shorthand.

Racist is a shorthand for a certain percentage

of the population to let you know,

do not bother investing in this person any further.

They're off limits.

Definitely. Racism and sexism is a thing

that's now used to shut down conversation

that's quite absurd by a small percent of the population.

But Jared Taylor and Steve Saylor,

Jared Taylor interviewed him from my book,

he would be regarded in any sense as a racist.

What's the difference in racist and racialists?

So racialists, I mean, this is splitting hairs,

and now I'm going to be already active.

Jared Taylor runs something called Amron.

And this is, I mean, his perspective

is that there are inherent differences to the races,

and you cannot live side by side, well,

whites and blacks should not be living side by side.

And by the way, for people who don't know,

this is out of context that you have written a great book

that includes some of these concepts called The New Right,

which does not include these concepts,

but talks about, well, it's more about the growth

of the community around the alt rate

and all those kinds of the world.

Right. So, and his point about IQ,

it's like if you had a population, the Dutch, right?

I think they're the tallest people on earth.

And if you said, well, the Dutch are the best people on earth,

why? Because they're the tallest,

it's like you're a crazy person.

So if someone is scoring low, an individual on an IQ test,

that means there's somehow a lower quality person.

Well, maybe in one very specific aspect,

but I mean, if they're a good human being,

I've got friends who are low IQ,

all my friends are low IQ, frankly, compared to me.

Sound like Trump there for a second.

That's how you choose friends.

Well, I don't have any other choices.

No one's going to be at my level.

Well, you're the smartest person since Abraham Lincoln

that I've ever seen.

Unlike him, I actually am honest.

So, he is someone who very much swims in heretical ideas.

Here's another thing, like if you bring up

that Aristotle said that some people are born to be slaves.

He wasn't speaking about race.

He just meant people's souls.

H. L. Menken, who is a great heretic and early 20th century figure,

one of his quotes that I say all the time,

which people have seen a lot in this past year,

that the average man does not want to be free.

He merely wants to be safe.

That, I think, I don't know.

I am not familiar with what Muldbug is saying about slavery

because his writing is ponderous,

but that certainly is something I think that is undeniable,

that I think more people are realizing

there's a large percent of the population

that is actively disinterested in freedom

and the moral responsibilities it entails.

Well, I mean, really just the word slavery,