back to indexMichael Malice: Totalitarianism and Anarchy | Lex Fridman Podcast #200
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The following is a conversation between me and Michael Malus.
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Michael is an author, anarchist, and simpleton, and I'm proud to call him my friend.
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He makes me smile, he makes me think, and he makes me wonder why I sound so sleepy all
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And now, enjoy this conversation with Michael Malus in the Tupagalovi language that I'm
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increasingly certain I'll never quite able to get the hang of.
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So Animal Farm by George Orwell is one of my favorite books.
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It's an allegory about, at least I think, about the Soviet Union and the Russian Revolution
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So for people who haven't read it, it's animals overthrow the humans and then slowly become
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as bad or worse than the humans.
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So comrade, if we lived on this farm, in the book Animal Farm, which animal would you most
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Would it be the pigs, the horses, the donkey Benjamin, the raven Moses, the humans, Mr.
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and Mrs. Jones, the dogs, or the sheep?
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I'm gonna go with the Milton answer, which is it's better to rule in hell than serve
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It's better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.
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Yeah, so I would have to go with the pigs.
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So I guess I'd be a cop.
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So the leader, the main pig, Napoleon versus like the others.
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I would say it's not, it's sure it's an allegory about the Russian Revolution, but I think
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Orwell's point was this is broader towards most totalitarian dictatorships.
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I mean, it could very easily be read as an indictment of Mussolini or Hitler, or many
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I'm a huge George Orwell fan.
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One of the things that I think people on the right need to appreciate is the courage of
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many of these undisputably left wing voices who were the strongest ones to take on totalitarian
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And the three I could think of top of my head who are all in my top 10 heroes of all time
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are Emma Goldman, Albert Camus, and Orwell being the third.
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Something that leftists like to throw in the face of people on the right who constantly
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invoke Orwell is that Orwell said, and I don't have the exact quote off the top of my head,
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but something to the effect of every word I have written should be taken as a defense
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of democratic socialism against totalitarianism.
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So people like Truman was obviously very hardcore, in many ways anti communist.
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We like to parse things out, you're going to laugh, into binary fashions that left good,
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right bad, or right good, left bad.
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But historically speaking, it would just not fall away into these camps as easily as people
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And I think it is important for those of us, it takes a lot more courage to fight the right
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from the right or to fight the left from the left, because in a sense, a lot of your countrymen
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or your fellow travelers are going to regard you as a traitor to the cause.
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So every chance I get, I will sing the praises of these three figures, among others, who
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not all even if they hadn't done what they had done, just lived just amazing lives that
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all of us can learn from and admire and regard as somewhat a role model.
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what was the nature of their opposition to totalitarianism?
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Is it basically freedom, the value of freedom?
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Let's go through the three of them.
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So Emma Goldman, she was an early anarchist figure, you know, we'll talk about her later,
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I'm sure she got deported from the United States with her partner in crime, Alexander
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Birkman, literal crime, he tried to assassinate Frick, who was Andrew Carnegie's main man
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in the Pittsburgh steel mill strike.
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She got deported to the Soviet Union.
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And they're like, oh, you want socialism?
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Because at the time, the anarchists were regarded as socialist, you know, go choke on it.
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And she was watching in great horror what was going on.
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And she actually went to Lenin's office and she goes, this isn't what we're about.
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The revolution is about the individual and free speech and everyone working together
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to further society.
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And he told her that, you know, you know, free speech is a bourgeois contrivance.
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And regardless, you can't have these circumstances in the midst of a revolution.
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And when she left the Soviet Union, and you know, she went to Britain.
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And at the time, before the 1917, there was a lot of discussion among socialist circles
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about what would the revolution look like, right?
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Would there be the Bakunin anarchist model?
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Would there be the Marxist model?
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Obviously, the Bolsheviks ended up winning.
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But even then, it wasn't obvious because there was the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.
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And what people, you know, you and I know what those words mean.
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But Bolsheviks were kind of funny because Bolsheviks means bigger and Mensheviks means
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The Mensheviks had the numbers.
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It was sarcastic that they were called Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks were called Bolsheviks.
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And Lenin, you know, destroyed all his foes in a very merciless way, obviously.
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Beforehand, you know, there was the idea like, okay, with all these cockamamie ideas, we
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have to work together.
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You know, we don't know what's going to look like for the cause.
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Then as soon as he sees power, he's like, yeah, yeah, we're not doing that kind of pluralism
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This is going to be the right approach.
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So she left the Soviet Union, as did Berkman.
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She wrote a book that they titled, My Disillusion with Russia.
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And I remember this one anecdote, which I'm going to discuss in the forthcoming book,
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where she goes to Britain and the British were very red at the time, they really had
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something called the Fabian Society, which was the predecessor to the British Labour
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Party, which were like, all right, we're going to get rid of liberalism and have a socialist
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And she gave talks, and there was this one time where she gave a talk and she started,
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and there was a standing ovation, by the time she was done, you could hear a pin drop, because
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she dared to look at these people in the face, something they'd been fighting for all their
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lives and saying, you know, we've been to the future and it works.
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And she's like, guys, this is worse than the czar.
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You know, people are under house arrest, you're not allowed to have, you know, newspapers
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are being shut down if they have heretical views, so on and so forth.
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And you know, she was just even more of a pariah than she had been previously.
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So she is, you know, deserves huge accolades in that regard.
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I brought her up and we were talking about with our conversation with Yaron Orwell, I
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think you don't need me to explain what he has done and continues to do to use fiction
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to demonstrate the horrors of a totalitarian state.
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And Camus, who might be my all time great lighthouse, so to speak, in terms of being
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a man of conscience, you know, he joined the Communist Party and for a lot of people in
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the States, you hear, oh, you joined the Communist Party, so I need to hear, it's all you need
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to, he was a communist, all you need to know.
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He joined the Communist Party because they were the main ones fighting the fascists in
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France and other locations.
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And he took Nazism, as did many others, of course, very, very, very seriously.
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He wasn't some committed communist, but this was just his mechanism to take on, you know,
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be part of the underground in Vichy France, and so on and so forth.
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So he had the quote, which is ascribed to him, which is kind of a misquote, Howard Zinn
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is the one who actually said it, that it is a job of thinking people not to be on the
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side of the executioners.
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And he very much felt, if you read his speech when he won the Nobel Prize, I forget, in
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the 50s, where he goes, it's basically the job of writers to keep civilization from destroying
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I don't think I'm ever going to be a man on the level of Camus and what he's accomplished,
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but I think that vision of it is the job of writers to be the conscience and to point
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out, you know, this is the leftism at its best when, you know, giving voice to the voiceless,
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when you have the machine of the state crushing and marginalizing people, and they might not
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be educated, literate, or have any power at all.
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He's the guy who's like, you are ruining humans, these humans matter, and I'm not going to
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let you look the other way and act like you don't know what you're doing.
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So in this time, whether we look at the time of fascism, or we look at the fictional Animal
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Farm, what's the heroic action then?
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So Camus joined the Communist Party, there's a bunch of different heroic actions, some
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more heroic than others, not just for the, you know, hero is the wrong word, in terms
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of like effectiveness, what's the effective action, I guess is what I want to ask.
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As a writer, as a thinker, as somebody with a mind, what's the heroic action?
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That's a tricky question, because a lot of times in the West, heroism is regardless intertwined
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with martyrdom, right?
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So it's kind of this idea of like, you have to speak to, you know, Camus always talked
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about justice, let justice be done though the heavens fall.
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This is a common kind of motto among people with conscience, and that you have to do the
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right thing, even the consequences might not be what you like.
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And I think that is a good loose definition of heroism.
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So if you meet, I'll give you one example of heroism.
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This was on Twitter, and I really feel bad that I don't remember the guy's name.
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This was the line to Auschwitz, I believe it was, and you know, there's the Nazi guards
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keeping everyone along.
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And if you were certain, I think if you were under 12, they killed you or something, there
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was some age limit where some kids were killed or some were not, there was some circumstances.
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And he asked the mom how old this kid was, and she's like, he's 14, and she's like,
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And she's like, no, he's 14.
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She goes, he's 12.
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And she realized what this Nazi was telling her even in that circumstance, and it ended
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up saving the kid's life.
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So I think heroism in this context is defiance and standing true to values of liberalism,
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humanism and venerating the sanctity of human life.
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I think that, and I think it's also important to pick your battles.
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I don't think if, you know, he got, that Nazi over there got in a bullhorn and said, hey,
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this is the rules, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that's not going to help anyone do anything.
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So I do think, you know, people a lot of times attack me for my anarchist views, like, oh,
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you know, would you call the police?
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Would you use the roads?
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Would you pay your income taxes?
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You know, I got in an argument with Tim Pool, because there was that couple, I think it
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was at Missouri or Illinois when they had their guns and they were being arrested and
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they basically took a plea deal and he said, you should have fought.
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I go, it's a lot easier to say you should fight, but we don't know what circumstance
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And what these totalitarian regimes did very, very well, as you know, is if you were a target
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and they can't get through to you, that's fine, you have a family.
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So you can sit there, Lex, and gird your jaw and you can stand up to all the torture, cool,
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what are we going to do about your wife?
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What about your mom?
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One thing Stalin did, he made it a law that kids up to 14 and up could get the death penalty
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for certain crimes.
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So after that, the rule was from the NKVD, if you were interrogating someone, they would
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have death warrants for the kid's child on the desk visible.
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So I'm interrogating you asking you to commit to, I'm sorry, to admit to some crime that
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you're not committed.
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And those piece of paper, it's Svitlana, she's got a death warrant.
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You're going to admit to any crime you want.
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So this is something Americans, this is even the case right now in North Korea, which I
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know you had Yonmi Park on, it's something I talk about a lot.
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Let's talk about it instead of the hypothetical, but this is happening right now on earth.
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You can look at the map on Google.
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The great leader, Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea said, class enemies must be
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exterminated three generations.
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So North, when people talk about individualism versus collectivism, Rick Santorum from Ascender
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says the family is the basic unit of society, unit.
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North Korea takes that seriously.
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The family is punished as a unit.
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So if someone does something wrong, three generations have to pay the price and you
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often don't know who it is that got you all in trouble.
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There's not a trial.
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This to Western minds is something almost incomprehensible.
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It's a lot easier to be brave when it's just your skin.
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It's something when it's your child, your loved ones, every man becomes a coward.
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But also what bravery is there for me to write an essay for The Guardian to say, I don't
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There's no consequences to me.
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There's no possibility of consequences to me.
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This is the wonderful thing about living in a free country.
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It would take a lot of courage to be in the Soviet Union and say, I'm not going to vote.
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And what would that courage accomplish?
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Heroism in the sense of kind of the suicidal stuff and taking a stance with no consequences
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is a bit overrated.
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There is some aspect, like the way I think about heroism is something like you said about
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the Nazi soldier, which is quietly privately in your own life, live the virtues that you
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want the rest of the world to live by.
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So like without writing about it is not as heroic as living it quietly.
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I'll give you a great example of this.
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I sometimes give talks on networking and I tell the kids, if you know someone's in town
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and it's their birthday with nothing to do, take them out.
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And I say, I do this for selfish reasons and everyone laughs and I go, think about it this
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The guy who takes people out for their birthday is awesome.
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That could be you.
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Like you have that capacity to be that person and you're making that day feel special.
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They're going to remember for a long time.
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30 bucks, 25 bucks.
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So it's very disturbing to me how often people have opportunities to slightly move the needle
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and make things a bit better at almost no cost.
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And they just literally don't think in those terms.
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And one of the things Camus talked about, he's often described as an existentialist,
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which he did not like that term.
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He regarded himself as an absurdist, is the idea that we're basically blank canvases.
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And this isn't something that is dangerous.
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This is an enormous opportunity.
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And you have the ability to become the kind of man or woman that you admire and want to
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You don't have to be, I don't know, George Washington or one of these great heroes of
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But everyone out there has the capacity to be, excuse me, to be a hero to their kids
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or to be a hero to maybe some, there's nursing homes and there's old people who are lonely.
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I think that you take in a dog that's on its last legs.
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These are little things, Terry Shepherd does that a lot, I regarded him as a hero.
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These are not Terry Shepherd, I'm blanking his name.
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These are things that people do that aren't heroic in the sense of Superman, but that
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I find admirable extremely and I think are very underrated because these people aren't
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Is this some kind of weird, passive, aggressive and direct way for you to tell me that I should
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take you off for your birthday on Monday?
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Is that why you gave that whole speech?
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That wasn't it at all.
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That was a joke, Michael.
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No, it was a failed joke.
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There was no punchline.
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Without failure, we would not have triumph.
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Can we stick on the Camus absurdism versus existentialism?
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What do you think is the difference?
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In your ideas about anarchism too, it seems like those are somehow intricately connected
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because existentialism is connected to freedom and freedom is connected to anarchism.
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But I mean, Sartre was a defender of the Soviet Union.
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He said explicitly about things like gulags, like even if it's true, we shouldn't talk
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What people don't appreciate is how human beings can have contradictory ideas in their
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minds at the same time.
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One would think, okay, someone's a Democrat, they think ABC, therefore they think DEF.
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People would have all sorts of contradictions and it's not at all clear and they'll have
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a clean conscience because the human mind is very sophisticated and is capable of doing
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So Sartre, you would think he's this radical individualist, this sense of ultimate freedom,
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but he's defending the Soviet Union.
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Camus, on the other hand, would probably be, was very much like a social Democrat.
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He didn't really talk about what politics should be so much as it shouldn't be.
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His essay, Reflections on the Guillotine, is one of the great masterpieces of all time,
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an attack on the death penalty, not in terms of no one's evil or it's wrong to kill murderers,
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but in terms of what does it do for a society?
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If you have someone who takes a person and locks them in a room and says, in two years,
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I'm going to murder you and you lock them for that.
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This is not someone we regard as moral, we regard this as someone who's a complete monster,
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but that's what the state does with the death penalty.
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And he challenges us to think, is this the kind of people we want to be?
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And again, he's saying, I'm not saying killing a murderer is wrong.
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I'm not saying evil is wrong.
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His entire career was dedicated to fighting the concept of evil.
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But are we the kind of people who want to be doing these things that in any other context
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we regard as torture or depraved?
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So I'm much more of a Camus person than a Sartre person.
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So he was probably against war in that same way.
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So I don't, I have to admit, I don't know much about the political side of Camus.
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Well, and I don't think his political side is that interesting or relevant.
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What I find, sorry to interrupt you, what I find fascinating about Camus and what I
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think about on a daily basis from him is his insistence that you have to live a life based
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on conscience, that you have to be accountable to yourself when you put your head on the
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pelt at the end of the day and ask yourself, did I live a righteous life with integrity
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true to my values?
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Did I not needlessly cause harm to innocent people?
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That kind of mindset, did I, if someone is weak, am I using that as an opportunity to
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exploit them or to harm them?
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Or do I feel a bit of sympathy or empathy for this person because maybe they didn't
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have circumstances that were as beneficial as other people had.
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Well, how does that fit absurdism where everything is absurd, nothing has meaning, it really
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borders on nihilism.
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So he regards, his philosophy explicitly said is a response to nihilism and a attack on
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He regards cynicism as the worst value people can have.
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And I agree with him 100%.
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A lot of times people call me cynical online and I push back very, very hard because to
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be a, you know, I had this quote in the new write where I said, I'd rather be naive than
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a cynic because a cynic is a hopeless man who projects his hopelessness to the world
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Camus, this is the metaphor I use and I find it very inspirational.
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I thought it was in his work, but I guess I thought if it described it to him.
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There's two types of people, you imagine you go to a mountainside and you see a blank canvas
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on an easel standing in front of this mountainside.
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One people be like, why is this blank canvas here, you know, what was this, what's going
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And just be confused.
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Whereas the other type of person will be like, there's a blank canvas here in this beautiful
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countryside, what a great opportunity.
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I can paint this river, I could paint that bird, I could paint my friends or myself in
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the background, infinite choices.
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And this is a gift that I have been given.
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And I think that also ties very heavily into what I was, I went to yeshiva as a kid, which
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What we were taught incessantly how to look at life is this beautiful gift that God has
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given you and that God wants you to be happy.
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He wants you to live to the fullest in a moral way.
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I remember the first time I went into a church and they were asking questions about the Jewish
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concept, the afterlife.
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They weren't familiar with Jewish thought.
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And it took me a second because I didn't really have answers.
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And then I remembered what we were taught, which is, let's suppose you're at this banquet,
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the best chef on earth, and the table is so heavy because you've got steaks and you've
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got chicken and you've got sushi and the wine's flowing and you've got your Dr. Pepper and
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Mr. Pibb and the store brand, everything you want.
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And you're looking around at this amazing bounty, right?
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And then you turn to this best chef on earth and you're like, oh, so what's for dessert?
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I mean, the offensiveness of that is just so insane.
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You have this, eat the meal.
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I promise you, if I could deliver this meal, the dessert's going to be okay.
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So this focus on the afterlife when we've been given this amazing gift on this earth
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is a very kind of different mindset from both the Jewish tradition as I'd been taught and
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the Camus mindset.
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Obviously, Camus was an atheist, didn't believe in an afterlife.
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This concept that life is meaningless, but that means you have that opportunity to find
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value, to seek for truth, to seek for happiness.
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And Camus has this quote, it's ascribed to him, it's like a meme.
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I've never found the source, so maybe he doesn't really say it, but he says, maybe it's not
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about happy endings, maybe it's about the journey.
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And I think when you have that mindset, and as you and I, I think you and I both found
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this because neither of us, when we were kids, thought we'd be doing this, right?
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But now that we are really fortunate.
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And definitely that.
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But now that we're fortunate enough to do this, and that we're blessed enough that there's
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people who find this of value and interest, and we could pay the rent doing this, there's
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not a day that goes by where I don't think you and I think, this is pretty absurd, but
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it's also pretty wonderful.
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And as a consequence of us thriving, it also shows other people that happiness is possible
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And I think cynicism is the lie.
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It's not just the worldview, it's a lie that happiness is not possible on this earth.
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Or it's only possible if you sell your soul and you're a bad person, you screw other people
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I reject that in every aspect.
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As you said, my birthday is coming up.
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I've been feeling just a lot of really great things have been happening very, very recently.
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So it affects me very heavily emotionally, especially when I see the response it gives
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So it's one thing to say, this is what I'm for.
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But when you can provide proof of concept that what you've been advocating does result
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in positive responses.
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I got a message from this kid who had tried to kill himself a year ago.
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And then he was like, look, I found your work, I found some other stuff.
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And now I realized I'm going to make something of myself.
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I was born in a meth house, you know, whatever, 19, 20 years old, I should be in the garbage.
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But I'm going to try to be a stand up because I have opportunity on this earth.
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Even if he fails as a stand up, you know, he's still such whatever he does, washing
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dishes, there's no shame in that.
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Is it so bad to have a crappy job and a girlfriend who you don't really like?
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But as compared to the alternative of like, I'm going to kill myself.
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Well, I think there's beauty to be discovered in all of it and all of those experiences.
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So, but at the same time, so I often think about I just recently reread The Idiot by
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I often feel like the idiot.
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That's why when I say I'm an idiot, I often think about Prince Mishkin, that kind of idiot,
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which the world sees you as naive.
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I don't think he's naive.
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I don't think I'm naive, but I tend to see the good in people and the good in every moment.
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And the world often is cynical.
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And in fact, especially in what we do, often the intellectual is supposed to be cynical.
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This is very much an urban, elite, educated mindset, where if you write a book about someone
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who's, let's suppose, a drug addict or a prostitute, that has heft and that's valid.
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But if you're writing a book about like a love story, you know, two people fall in love
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and they're in roller coasters or carousels, that's less legitimate.
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I hate that so much because the message it gives to people is you have to choose between
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thriving and happiness and silliness and seriousness and depravity.
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And I'm not saying a drug addict or prostitute is depraved, but they're basically their worldviews.
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Unless it's dark and twisted, it doesn't really count as art.
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And I despise that mindset, that subtext.
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So the internet and people around me often will call me naive.
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Because I don't know.
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I think the word they want is innocent.
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It's a better word.
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But it's not that innocent.
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No, but innocent in that you genuinely in your heart, I know you fairly well at this
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point, believe that goodness is possible and that people can, if not be good, at least
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be better than they were yesterday.
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See, even the word naive or the word innocent presumes that there's not wisdom in that.
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Presumes that somehow that's, oh, isn't that beautiful to live that life of a child who
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sees the world with these bright eyes and is hopeful about the future, but just wait
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until they grow up and realize that reality is much harsher than they think.
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But that child might be wiser than all of the adults in the room.
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And don't you want to be, if the world is like that, don't you want to be the guy who
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takes it on and changes it for the better?
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So it's like saying, well, you know, cancer is everywhere.
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Well, don't you want to be the one who says, not anymore.
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I'm here and I'm going to make that change and I can see it being better than it is now.
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So I think you and I have the same analysis of your worldview and I don't think that there
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is a good word for it.
link |
So I guess it's this idea of inherent benevolence might be wordy, but I think that's more accurate
link |
because, you know, you and I did not have such easy lives growing up, to put it mildly.
link |
You constantly talk about just horrific aspects of life.
link |
So to claim that you kind of don't know that they exist or you sleep under the rug is completely
link |
not accurate to your work and your mindset.
link |
Can we talk about World War II and the Soviet Union?
link |
So on Sunday, June 22nd, 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, which was the surprise
link |
invasion of the Soviet Union.
link |
If I could read to you a few lyrics from a song that for some reason is stuck throughout
link |
It was a famous song during that time.
link |
Двадцать второго июня ровно в четыре часа Киев бомбили, нам объявили, что
link |
началась война, война началась на рассвете, чтобы больше народу убить, спали родители,
link |
спали их дети, когда стали Киев бомбить.
link |
The song talks about Kiev, like that moment as part of that operation that Kiev was first
link |
bombed and it was announced on June 22nd.
link |
The song says at exactly four o clock that the war has begun.
link |
For some reason this song haunts me because the exactness of that time and this realization
link |
that at any moment you can have this thing happen to you in your own personal life.
link |
Maybe we had something like 9 11 happen where everything changes and it's just like haunting
link |
because it makes me think that at any moment something like that could happen that changes
link |
everything and I just think about like normal life going on in Kiev at the time and then
link |
all of a sudden the bombs are dropping and they announce that the war has begun and you
link |
thought you were going to stay out of the war.
link |
This is something that is very intensely emotional for me because you and I are both Russian
link |
Jewish so to know that my grandparents and my great grandma were told that the Nazis
link |
are coming and this wasn't a dress rehearsal and that if they get here, which they do,
link |
they did, Lvov is very western Ukraine, that 100% you and all your relatives are going
link |
There's a monument now in Lvov where I'm from about this but I don't think either of us
link |
can imagine what it's like to think that we're about minutes or whatever hours or there's
link |
just the Russian army standing between us and everyone we are related to are going to
link |
be murdered for no reason and what's the closure here?
link |
They evacuated a lot of people but they didn't evacuate enough and to know that there is
link |
this force coming to 100% murder you, this isn't some kind of the TV news being hyperbolic,
link |
they're coming to kill you and if they get you, they will kill you.
link |
We all think about war like, oh, we hope America wins in Iraq, but if America got their ass
link |
get kind of in Vietnam, it's not really going to affect America in the sense that you're
link |
going to have the body bags and all the kids being killed and that's something that I'm
link |
not super in the rug, but no one in America thought the Vietnamese are going to come here
link |
and kill them, right?
link |
They were secure in their person.
link |
So to have that sense of we really need to win because if we don't win, we are 100% if
link |
we, they, the Russian army doesn't win, we are 100% all going to be slaughtered and often
link |
in not just a bullet to the head and in sadistic ways is something that to know that people
link |
who share my blood saw and went through is very hard for me to kind of wrap my head around.
link |
And there's no possibility to delude yourself.
link |
Because I mean, they, they would, as the song also talks about, but that they would burn
link |
So it's basically saying we're in the war now.
link |
This is like, this is your life.
link |
Like this is our life now.
link |
You know how you, yesterday you worried about like, oh, I misplaced my pen.
link |
Like, it's like, yeah, this was paradise.
link |
Most of us are going to just, our life now is that most of us are going to die.
link |
And if we want to prevent all of us from dying, we, we have to fight.
link |
And we also can't sit down in some kind of weird, like, desert island or, you know, plane
link |
crash situation and be like, let's decide between us who's going to be the first to
link |
Maybe the like Titanic, the Titanic, right?
link |
They sat down and there were like women and children in the lifeboats.
link |
You know, they had this rational agreement.
link |
You don't have those choices in a war.
link |
So it's, it's something that I, it's, it's just very chilling and it's something I don't
link |
really have the emotional space to understand or grapple with.
link |
Even, you know, obviously I've been to North Korea, you can see it and so on and so forth.
link |
You and I can't, or anyone listening to this, except for maybe on me and people like that,
link |
you can't imagine what that's like to live it.
link |
We can't, I, we can't imagine what it's like to live in those situations where it's not
link |
like before Hitler came, everyone's, you know, dancing around and having a great time.
link |
I mean, imagine how, what that life is like where your preference to Hitler is starving
link |
and waiting on line for hours for bread and to have the secret police and your friend's
link |
attorney went and your phones are all tapped and you're a prisoner.
link |
But to you, this is infinitely better than the alternative.
link |
Like these are the choices that, you know, our family had to deal with.
link |
It's something that no matter how much you, it's like a, let me put it in terms of people
link |
can understand, you know what I mean?
link |
It's like your first bad breakup, right?
link |
Like that's a much simpler thing to wrap your head around because it's like, if you've never
link |
had it, you can't really, but when you feel it, it's just so intense, but you can't tell
link |
someone what's like, we could sit down for days and hours and have people tell us, but
link |
until it's the totality of your environment and your life and your mindset, I remember
link |
my grandma, she would talk about it like, when you're that hungry, all you're thinking
link |
about is bread because your brain won't like, you know, human beings, you know, we're evolved,
link |
we have instincts, whatever, and the mind is telling you food, food, food, food, food,
link |
and that there's kids thinking this and that they're not going to get the food.
link |
And imagine being a parent and you're watching your kids without food and knowing they're
link |
not going to get the food.
link |
And the fact that this happened in North Korea in the nineties, I met a refugee and he had
link |
to watch his dad starve to death.
link |
And we have no concept of what it's like.
link |
I mean, we kind of, you know, it's just like last night here in Austin, all the places
link |
were closed and I couldn't get my protein powder.
link |
And this is the extent of my suffering when it comes to food, you know, or if I couldn't,
link |
there was a restaurant that I went to in Brooklyn where for some faqaqta reason, they weren't
link |
serving sashimi, they only had sushi, so I had to have the rice and the carbs.
link |
To live a life where that is the extent of your food problems as opposed to the choice
link |
is either Hitler killing you or being hungry 24 seven.
link |
You know, my grandma told this story of how they had a close call, it was her and her
link |
brother and her mom, my great grandma who passed, and I think there was like either
link |
helicopter overhead or something, and my great grandma jumped on top of my grandma's brother
link |
and not my grandma.
link |
So she basically did a Sophie's Choice, my grandma's name is Sophia, and chose the brother.
link |
And this is something that she felt, you know, all her life that her mom had chosen her brother
link |
But these little things that happen, these little kind of decisions we have to make in
link |
Or there's a book I read called Five Chimneys, I think, this woman who was an Auschwitz survivor.
link |
And what she talked about what people don't appreciate, it's not necessarily the slaughter
link |
and the torture, it's that there's no rhyme or reason to it.
link |
Like she talked about how they had a camp just for people from Czechoslovakia, and they
link |
were treated better than the Jews, and then one day they just killed them all, right?
link |
And she's like, I still don't understand why they're giving them food and treating them
link |
well, and then the next day they're all killed, and we will never get answers, you know.
link |
And things like she talks about how they decided to kill all the kids, and they didn't really
link |
either for some reason they didn't have the courage to or they wanted to be cruel, so
link |
instead of shooting them, they just kept walking them in the snow until they all died.
link |
So it's things like this, that the fact that you and I dodged these bullets, and that we
link |
can be here and be doing this and, you know, running our mouths for a living, I think about
link |
it all the time, and it's just very disturbing to know, and I know you know this as well,
link |
that there's lots of places on earth where if people had a choice, they would kill us
link |
on sight and be proud of themselves for it.
link |
Yeah, there, I don't know what to make of the contrast, you were talking about the fact
link |
that you've been truly happy the last few weeks and months, there's been a lot of moments
link |
of happiness and joy, and that joy is built on a history of human suffering.
link |
Like in your roots, in your blood, is a lot of people that were tortured that suffered,
link |
so that you could have this joy, and you have both the, you have the responsibility to truly
link |
be grateful for that joy.
link |
But it also shows that there's the happy ending, that it does end, and a good note that it
link |
does get infinitely, infinitely better.
link |
And that I think there's a, I don't like using the word responsibility, but there is an opportunity
link |
for those of us who did dodge that bullet, to give testimony to these people.
link |
And more importantly, to give testimony to the people who are going through this now.
link |
So one of the reasons I talk about North Korea so much, why I wrote Dear Reader, is because
link |
it's very easy, and this is human nature, I'm not condemning people, I think that's
link |
just how people are wired.
link |
When you see an Asian country with Asian people, and things are bad over there, I think in
link |
the West it's like, oh, Asia, they're all crazy, they're wacky, they eat dogs or so
link |
on and so forth, some weird stereotype, and they think of them as kind of Martians.
link |
So it's important for people who aren't of that kind of ancestry to kind of speak on
link |
behalf of these people, because it's very different how just people just naturally react
link |
when you have a Westerner talking about this.
link |
Instead of it becoming them over there, it becomes, you know, this could have been us
link |
I have a friend, Peter Vahansky, great dude, and I was showing him photos when I was in
link |
Pyongyang, and he goes, this looks like a Russian city with Asian people.
link |
It completely disturbed him.
link |
So that was one of the reasons I did go to North Korea, because that was as close as
link |
I would get to see what your family went through, to see what my family went through, and they're
link |
still living under this regime.
link |
And one of the things I fought very hard to do with Dear Reader, which I was successful
link |
in amazingly, and I said, I could die now.
link |
I feel like if you just move the needle a little bit, then you've kind of paid your
link |
due for your time here on this earth, to have it change from being a laughing stock.
link |
And I think Team America did a good job.
link |
They made Kim Jong Il into a clown and they made a joke of it, but you're going from nothing
link |
So at least now people are aware of it that it exists, right?
link |
And then I and many others took it from a joke to like, guys, this is really, really,
link |
really bad, and none of us can even appreciate how bad it is.
link |
And I think now there is an understanding, other than a few people who are just looking
link |
at it through a Trump lens and wanting Trump to fail because Trump's an asshole and that's
link |
fine, to be like these poor people.
link |
And it's really unfortunate because there's a segment of Western culture who thinks that
link |
correctly, often when you're complaining about or discussing the plight of another country,
link |
that's just your prelude to war and an excuse to invade.
link |
Like the Kurds in Syria, you know, we're talked about, if we don't in Syria tomorrow, it's
link |
going to be another genocide, blah, blah.
link |
I'm not saying let's invade North Korea and things like that.
link |
All I'm saying is, you know, thank God that this isn't your life.
link |
I bring this up all the time.
link |
The woman who was my guide when I was there, I'm aware of what she's up to now.
link |
She's extremely rich by North Korean standards, but she'll never be in a position to buy medicine.
link |
She'll never be in a position to go on a vacation.
link |
Things that you and I just, you know, whatever, she can't go on the internet.
link |
She can't get an encyclopedia.
link |
She can't better herself as a person other than through what the state allows and meaning
link |
better yourself as a person in service to the state.
link |
So I mean, it's also frustrating because there's only so much that I can do as an individual.
link |
What's your takeaway about human nature from looking at North Korea and looking at how
link |
the rest of the world is looking at North Korea?
link |
This is a great question.
link |
I think about it fairly often.
link |
I always say human beings are animals, right?
link |
When you say someone's an animal, it's like a slur, like he's like a beast.
link |
Animals are capable of enormous kindness, empathy, sympathy.
link |
You know, they look out for one another, groom one another.
link |
There's a thing with apes where they groom each other for parasites and even if there
link |
are no parasites, they pretend there's parasites just to have that kind of bonding.
link |
You see infinite photos online of like cats raising puppies because the puppies, mom died,
link |
That's part of being an animal.
link |
Part of being an animal is also just the most monstrous cruelty.
link |
Killer whales, you know, there's this big PC move to not call them killer whales and
link |
just call them orcas.
link |
They will murder blue whale pups, calves, excuse me, and play with them and not even
link |
So they just murder for the sake of fun.
link |
Even cats, you know, kill birds all the time, things like this.
link |
So it runs the whole gamut.
link |
And I think it's, you know, when Yaron and I were on your show, I don't think Lord of
link |
the Flies is accurate.
link |
I don't think Hobbs is how reality works when you're in that kind of state.
link |
But I think we've seen countless examples of human beings, especially when human beings
link |
have power over someone who's powerless, of allowing themselves to engage in not just
link |
harm, but cruelty.
link |
And that is something as Soviets, you and I are very painfully aware of.
link |
It's not just about the oppression, which as bad enough as it is, it's that mediocre
link |
person with that little bit of power.
link |
And now they're standing between you and your daughter having medicine, and they love it
link |
to make you dance, to be like, oh, you need me to get this medicine?
link |
Make you go through hoops?
link |
Because now they feel like for the first time in their life, they're in a position of strength
link |
I think that is, in many ways, the more common nature of evil that what Hannah Arendt talks
link |
about the banality of evil, then someone who's like an SS guard, you're shooting someone
link |
Like that, I think we could all wrap our heads around to some extent, like, okay, I'm a military.
link |
I have to execute people pulling a trigger, you could kind of have this mental disconnect
link |
between the finger and the victim.
link |
But like that little day to day stuff, like, are you doing the right thing on a day to
link |
day basis that I think is far more common, and far more disturbing aspect in certain
link |
senses of the human psyche.
link |
Yeah, there's something especially disturbing about a weak man, given power, and just abusing
link |
There's something about not just weak, but like, mediocre at everything it does, or less
link |
A great example of this, which I'm also talking about in the next book is Ceausescu, who was
link |
the dictator of Romania.
link |
So you know, the Cold War is still somewhat poorly understood in, you know, popular culture.
link |
But the different countries in the second world, the Soviet bloc, some are more liberal
link |
than others, some are more sane than others.
link |
And Ceausescu, at first was one of the, you know, more Western friendly, more the free
link |
Then he met the great leader Kim Il Sung from North Korea, and he had the idea to impose
link |
a personality cult on Romania, and it's the kind of things like forcing people to breed
link |
because he wanted to make people taller.
link |
I think he made like the biggest building in all of Europe, the People's Palace, but
link |
it was just for him, while there's no electricity, you know, elsewhere.
link |
But you look at this guy, you know, Stalin's a badass, right?
link |
He was a bank robber.
link |
If you look at photos of him as a kid, he was a hunk.
link |
Lenin was clearly intellectual.
link |
These were powerful Trotsky, these were powerful men with huge egos, huge force of personality.
link |
But you look at this Ceausescu guy, and you could, like for example, on my driver's license,
link |
instead of my address, I'm not giving my real address, being like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5th Avenue,
link |
by mistake it says 1, 2, 3, 4, 5th Street, right?
link |
So you can imagine him being in the post office and me giving him my ID to get my package
link |
and him being baffled because this says street, this says Avenue instead of understanding.
link |
And this, the look on his face, this dullard, that you can see how, you know how sometimes
link |
I'm going to, can I curse?
link |
So if you know, like how if you're in the airport and you see someone and you look at
link |
them and an adult and you think, okay, this person was born fucked up, just like on sight,
link |
like something's wrong with them.
link |
How are they traveling alone?
link |
You look at Ceausescu, you look at him, you're like, something's not right with this guy.
link |
Not in the sense of like evil, but in the sense of he's a simpleton, right?
link |
And now he's in charge of this whole country and everyone's taught to regard him as one
link |
of the great geniuses of all time.
link |
And it's this, the idea, this mediocre nobody, this guy would have in any other culture been
link |
accomplished nothing or would have had an honest job where he's like, okay, he works
link |
at the mail service and he's bad at it, okay, fine, he's not hurting anyone.
link |
And now as a result of this, he's responsible for mass death, secret police, and incarceration.
link |
And you know, one of the greatest things I've ever seen, which I'm sure many people see
link |
as well, if you go on YouTube, it's his speech, and it's the first time the crowd turns and
link |
his head kind of like, because they start booing him, which was unheard of.
link |
And he was shot with his dog faced wife not that long after, it was just a great moment.
link |
But it's things like this, I agree with you, that mediocre, weak person is now in a position
link |
of power over somebody else.
link |
And that sense of vindictiveness, like I'm going to feel strong for once in my life,
link |
but it's going to be at your expense.
link |
That I think is, you know, human nature, it's most primal.
link |
And every time I meet a person in this world, you're the first person to get me to cry on
link |
a fucking podcast.
link |
Fucking the robot gets me to cry.
link |
What the fuck is going on?
link |
Every time I meet a weird person, somebody, to me, heroism is also taking a risk to rebel
link |
against mediocrity.
link |
Like in the most simplest of ways, like the license address, like taking a risk to break
link |
the little bit of rule that nobody will know about, to take that little bit of a leap of
link |
like that little protest against the bureaucracy.
link |
Like that Nazi guard where he just spoke out, he's like, hey lady.
link |
Oh, that's a big, sure.
link |
I mean, like literally at the line at Starbucks or something like that.
link |
Like even in the tiniest of ways, when I see people just like, it's almost like that little
link |
like glimmer in their eye, a wink, like we're in this together, there's all this conformity
link |
That's at a different time could have been Nazi Germany, could have been a Stalinist
link |
We're in this together.
link |
We're going to rebel against that conformity by just taking the risk, that little bit of
link |
risk against mediocrity.
link |
And then once again, I see this in companies too.
link |
When I see the mediocrity, I see this, I used to work at Google, I see it in Google and
link |
when the companies grow, that mediocrity is overwhelming.
link |
The Peter principle, right?
link |
The Peter principle.
link |
My hope is that all of us have the possibility for that glimmer, that risk taking, the leap
link |
of faith, whatever the heck that is, the leap out of the ordinary, out of the conformity,
link |
out of the mediocrity.
link |
So this is where you and I disagree.
link |
I think most, a lot of people are not capable of that.
link |
They're accustomed to it.
link |
I don't know if they're not capable.
link |
I understand your position.
link |
I'm disagreeing with it.
link |
I'm saying I do not think they're capable.
link |
I think a lot of people effectively don't have souls.
link |
They do not have a conscience in this sense where they're going to look at an issue, bring
link |
their critical thinking and say, all right, I am going to do the right thing, although
link |
I'm taking a risk.
link |
Do you think thinking is involved or is it just taking that leap?
link |
There's something about that basic human spirit.
link |
Forget the thinking part.
link |
It's just saying, I'll take that risk, taking that adventure, the same thing that got people
link |
to explore the seas throughout human civilization, explore land, explore the oceans, that exploration.
link |
We've done stuff this way all this time.
link |
I'm going to take a leap and that comes out of nowhere seemingly.
link |
But those people are the heroes, but I don't think that's universal.
link |
I'm going to use a very gauche example.
link |
There was a show called Scare Tactics, which was basically a candid camera, but they would
link |
They'd have vampires, whatever, a hidden camera and people's reactions.
link |
Sometimes the prank didn't work out like they expected.
link |
There was one where they were hiring the people who were the marks, the contestants so to speak,
link |
was hired to be a security guard.
link |
You have to watch this factory overnight and you get paid.
link |
But the setup was some people were breaking out of the factory in the middle of the night
link |
like in rags and they were saying they were keeping us prisoner here, blah, blah, and
link |
just watch the person reaction to this.
link |
There was one security guard where he basically forced them back into the building and they're
link |
working us 24 seven, we're getting beaten.
link |
He's like, I'm here to do a job, get back in there.
link |
You watch this and it never even enters his head to be like, something's wrong here.
link |
He was given his orders, he's following his orders and to me, that is not uncommon and
link |
that person, although they look like you and I, there's something essentially human missing
link |
Now, very quickly, the reaction is, well, it's one step from there to Nazism.
link |
I don't think it's something that, I'm not saying this person should be killed, but I'm
link |
just saying to expect that every human being has the capacity to have that defiance, especially
link |
at a cost to their own life, that I think is not realistic.
link |
But at the same time, I feel like an octopus on the eighth hand, it is those few of us,
link |
or if you want to include me in this, who do make these tiny little protests, who look
link |
the other way when someone is hungry, who's stealing food from the supermarket, right?
link |
It's like, all right, I'm going to pretend I didn't see anything.
link |
Those little elements of heroism are what move humanity forward and demonstrate the
link |
validity of the human experience, whereas everyone else is kind of like scenery.
link |
I think almost everybody in the world can derive deep meaning and pleasure from having
link |
done those courageous acts, and I also think they have the capacity to do them, to discover
link |
that meaning and happiness.
link |
So you're the cynic, then why aren't they doing it?
link |
They haven't gotten a chance to, like I've never tried LSD or DMT, you haven't gotten
link |
the chance to try this amazing journey, which is taking the risk.
link |
That's nonsense, because as you just said two minutes ago, everyone has that chance
link |
every day to do the right thing.
link |
We have the chance to do a lot of things and we don't realize.
link |
There's a lot of stuff right in front of our nose that we don't realize, because you have
link |
to kind of wake up to it.
link |
Sometimes you need the catalyst, there needs to be some kind of thing that happens that
link |
The fact that most people don't take the small acts of rebellion doesn't mean they don't
link |
have the capacity to both do so and to derive a lot of meaning from it.
link |
Then it's a discussion about how to create societies that get more and more people to
link |
be free actors and free thinkers.
link |
That's the question.
link |
That probably leads us into a discussion of anarchism and so on, but I just think we are
link |
very young as a species.
link |
We're trying to figure out how to get ourselves to first be collaborative, but at the same
link |
time be free spirits.
link |
I think both of those are within human nature for most of us.
link |
I think another big concern is that there's enormous disincentives, and this is Michael
link |
Malus speaking, for human beings to be kind and for tenderness.
link |
I think, especially when you're young, you know what I mean, when you're immature, a
link |
lot of times someone will reach out to you with kindness or vulnerability and you think
link |
it's funny to kind of dunk their head in the water in a pool or something like that.
link |
When you get older, there's this one example of this.
link |
This was in the 90s, and there was a woman.
link |
She became a stripper or something like that or whatever it was, but she had this amazing
link |
She was just gorgeous.
link |
The show was, she was talking about how when she was in high school, she was bullied a
link |
lot and that there was this football player.
link |
He messed with her every single day.
link |
One day, she even threw pickles in her hair and her hair smelled like pickles and it was
link |
This really screwed her up, I mean, up to that show.
link |
They took her backstage and they brought out the football player, and now he's a dad and
link |
He's like, do you know why you're here, and he's like, no, and they're like, oh, what
link |
were you like in high school?
link |
He's like, I was kind of a jock, bully, whatever.
link |
They brought her out, and he didn't even remember her really, and she just starts crying about
link |
the pickles and whatever, and this is something that affected her for 20 years, and I've never
link |
seen a clearer example of someone who wanted to kill themselves than this guy.
link |
The guilt on his face, and he's looking at her, and he's desperate to be like, what can
link |
I do to take your pain away, to make it better?
link |
He was just crippled by it because he knew there's nothing he could do.
link |
He knew he 100% did the wrong thing.
link |
He knew he did the wrong thing unthinkingly.
link |
You can imagine, I got to screw over this lady to feed my family, that's fine.
link |
At the time, it meant nothing to him, so of course he didn't remember, and he was just
link |
paralyzed by this sense of crippling guilt.
link |
One of the reasons I always try to do the right thing isn't because I'm an inherently
link |
good person, which I do not think I am, I don't think anyone is inherently good, but
link |
because I will feel guilty about it for a very, very long time because if you do the
link |
wrong thing, this is a very Camus idea, if you do the wrong thing to a good person, that's
link |
really, really bad because what kind of person are you?
link |
In the same way that everyone can be that guy who takes someone out for their birthday,
link |
everyone has that ability for someone who did the wrong thing to someone who's a normal
link |
person and do you want to be that guy as well?
link |
My friend, Bittstein, he's a big Bitcoin person, my biography ego in hubris is like $500 now
link |
on eBay, it's hard to find, came out in 2006.
link |
He had told me that you can get it on torrent, it's downloadable, and I'm like, oh, I thought
link |
if you're my friend, you'd want to buy it.
link |
At the time, it was not $500, I assure you, and he goes, I did buy it, I'm just telling
link |
you that you could also get it for free, this information that you might want to use.
link |
And I snapped at this kid who was doing right by me and I felt, it just stuck in my head,
link |
I'm like, you're an ass.
link |
And then years later, I apologize, he had no memory of this at all and I'm glad to be
link |
able to reiterate the apology again.
link |
But a lot of times I'm extremely aggressive on Twitter and in other venues, I always try
link |
to and maybe I fail and that's my moral failing, always do it as a counter attack.
link |
If you're going to start going personal, if you're going to start being aggressive against
link |
an individual, I'm not going to necessarily hold back when I reciprocate.
link |
And it's something that is very common on social media, but I don't think it is normal.
link |
Just because a lot of this, you're talking about the quiet little rebellion, just because
link |
everyone else around you thinks it's okay to just go up to people and attack them in
link |
the most personal ways, impromptu because of their views, really just take a step back
link |
and realize what you're engaging with.
link |
Now, if that's the fight they want, then my Soviet cruelty could come out and that's kind
link |
of why I don't drink because I do enjoy it, but at the same time, be aware of what you're
link |
And again, this goes back to Camus's sense that conscience really is what makes us human
link |
That's the thing I was saying, I don't think most people think in terms of conscience.
link |
They don't think it, we are taught, this is that creeping cynicism that, oh, grow up.
link |
When you're an adult, you have to make sacrifices, blah, blah, blah.
link |
And even if I buy that for a second, which I don't, but if I have to make sacrifices
link |
sometimes, that doesn't mean it's okay for me to make a sacrifice of my values in this
link |
If I have to maybe be at work and my boss is a jerk to me and calls me names, I have
link |
to be humiliated, but I got to put food on the plate.
link |
That doesn't mean it's okay later if I'm at a party and I'm just extremely offensive to
link |
someone for no reason.
link |
My own flavor of a little bit of rebellion.
link |
Sometimes I use the number two.
link |
You know, you're very witty on Twitter and Twitter likes mockery and wit and a counter
link |
attack is, Twitter loves that, somebody who's skilled at it.
link |
My own flavor of a bit of rebellion is to say things very simply, bordering on cliche
link |
with authenticity and like genuinely meaning the words I say, but knowing that those words
link |
would be, are easy to attack.
link |
And that sometimes those attacks can hurt because people would just mock me.
link |
People don't like earnestness because they've been taught to be too cool for school.
link |
So there's this pressure for me to be sound way more sophisticated.
link |
Use bigger words, sometimes throw in a criticism of institutions or something like that, almost
link |
as if I have a deep wisdom about the way the world is broken.
link |
But when you speak very simply about beautiful things in life, it's very easy to sound like
link |
you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
link |
And I kind of, I stick by that.
link |
I don't know where that's going to end up, but it's like the idiot from Dostoevsky.
link |
It feels like that's the right thing, even if it hurts when I'm attacked for it.
link |
I do something similar sometimes, which is I'll have some innocuous comment about like
link |
I mean, just it's not to be in political.
link |
And a lot of times people will respond to this paragraph of just invective about like
link |
blah, blah, blah, and then this, and you say this, and you're an ass, and just really trying
link |
And in those situations, there are very specific circumstances, I will respond and I mean it
link |
every single time.
link |
I will say, I wish your parents had been kinder to you or your mom or your dad.
link |
Because even if I'm some idiot on Twitter, who's just talking about bubblegum, and this
link |
is your, I'm not talking about politics where I can see how people get emotional, COVID,
link |
my grandma died, now you're talking about her.
link |
And I realize this isn't about me.
link |
Like I'm someone you've never met making some inane point about nothing, and you're getting
link |
agitated about this.
link |
It's clearly something else that's going on here.
link |
And someone taught you, someone had to teach you that this is how to respond in this kind
link |
of very kind of harsh way.
link |
And a lot of times they won't say anything or get deleted.
link |
And I hope every single time, there's no asterisk here, that they take a second, and they realize
link |
that the way that they were talked to growing up was not acceptable, that they don't have
link |
to carry this forward.
link |
And that they don't have to be kind to me, I'm nobody to them.
link |
But take a second and ask if this is the kind of mindset you want to be your norm, as opposed
link |
to a weapon you pull out of your pocket sometimes where it's warranted or even when it's not
link |
I think there's a lot of those people out there, and we forget how hard it is for a
link |
lot of people to grow up, how they're trained from their parents or the single parent, that
link |
the only way they're going to get attention is by acting out, that when they do good things,
link |
it doesn't get comment.
link |
But if they do bad things, they get a smack upside their head.
link |
That I think is far more common than we realize.
link |
And it's not hitting the kid that's going to last, the pain is going to give five seconds.
link |
But when you're training this child, helpless child, is something that's really, really
link |
I don't know if it always can be mapped to that.
link |
I always wonder about them, what their motivations are.
link |
And I just kind of, whenever I think about them, I think only positively.
link |
And I don't even think about the childhood thing.
link |
I think, I don't know.
link |
I kind of imagine that all of us can go through that stage where we enjoy the derision of
link |
We go through stages of being...
link |
I enjoy the derision of others, but it has to be, you know, Billy Eide had that quote,
link |
like, I like it when people are mean to me, I stop pretending to be nice.
link |
But like, what's the worst thing someone can say about you?
link |
You're not, what harm are you doing?
link |
Maybe your podcast is garbage and the people are, the conversations suck and the people
link |
No, the main thing I would say is I'm way more popular than I deserve to be.
link |
What does deserve mean?
link |
The reality is there's people out there that just enjoy hating on others and I don't fault
link |
Like, I don't even think of them as haters.
link |
I think of them as just people that in this particular part of their life are enjoying
link |
this activity of deriding others on the internet.
link |
I'm not sure what to do with that.
link |
I just don't want to, I don't want to allow myself to think badly of them, I guess is
link |
I'm the one saying don't think badly of them.
link |
I'm saying that I don't think they're inherently bad people.
link |
I think that their thinking is screwed and that I'm steel mounting them.
link |
I'm saying, let's assume everything you're saying about Lex is true.
link |
This is an opportunity for you to outdo Lex.
link |
No, but are you saying they should stop hating because I'm saying like, maybe they shouldn't
link |
I don't believe in should, right?
link |
I'm an anarchist, but I'm saying if this is your belief about Lex, you know what it is?
link |
I made this comment in my book, The New Right, when people make fun of Andy Warhol and they're
link |
like, oh my God, he painted a soup can and now he became a millionaire.
link |
Well, why don't you?
link |
So basically if I go up to you with a check and I say, I will give you a million dollars,
link |
you could see the check, you got to paint a soup can, what am I waiting for?
link |
So clearly there's a disconnect in their thinking between what they're perceiving and the reality.
link |
Because if it was as simple or as, maybe not simple, but as possible for them as they perceive
link |
it to be, why are they leaving comments instead of outdoing you?
link |
How great would it be for them to have your bigger audience and drive you into the ground?
link |
I don't know how that would work because it's not the NBA, but...
link |
No, but you want to point out, you do this too on Twitter.
link |
You want to point out the hypocrisy, the fraudulence of others, right?
link |
Sure, but what are you, you're not claiming anything other than this is, the following
link |
is the conversation between me and Machique, whatever his name is, right?
link |
I got the voice down, dude.
link |
I've been walking around my house doing my Lex impression.
link |
I've been leaking motor oil everywhere.
link |
Yeah, but yeah, I don't know.
link |
I don't know what to make of it because I think there's a more general statement to
link |
Like I see Twitter this way too.
link |
When I read a tweet, I try to read it with like the best possible interpretation, meaning
link |
like what is the wisdom in this tweet, right?
link |
As opposed to what I think a large number of people, not a large number, but some fraction
link |
try to see what is the worst possible interpretation of this tweet.
link |
And they want to, they want to destroy you for that worst interpretation.
link |
Like they want to, there's people, I'm already aware of this with me and certainly with a
link |
lot of people, they're waiting for me to fail.
link |
They want me to be like, this guy talks about love all the time.
link |
They want me to be some dark, like a Bill Cosby type character.
link |
They want you to be in pain.
link |
They want you to be in pain because they don't.
link |
I'll tell you exactly why.
link |
Because this is why I'm so for being white pilled and being for hope.
link |
Because if you are black pilled, meaning if you think it's pointless, we're all done.
link |
You're just wasting your breath.
link |
If you have any counter examples to this thesis, if there's even a little bit of hope, your
link |
entire hypothesis falls through, right?
link |
So it's kind of how like you have all these stories of people who are like painting swastikas
link |
who aren't Nazis, but just to show that, oh, there's all this Nazism.
link |
So I'm going to kind of force the conclusion.
link |
So for them, when they see you thriving, you are as a mediocre person with a crappy show,
link |
but you're demonstrating that people can succeed.
link |
This bothers them.
link |
Anyone can succeed.
link |
That bothers them.
link |
So because that, why haven't they?
link |
So now you're a counter to their worldview and that is going to cause anxiety when you
link |
have data that contradicts other data in your, in your worldview.
link |
This is the, in your mindset, this is a big issue for them.
link |
So to anyone listening to this, they're annoyed by the look of my face.
link |
Remember that you could probably do way better than me and you should.
link |
But also what would you failing look like?
link |
Like let's suppose this podcast went from whatever views you had to 100 views an episode.
link |
That's still success.
link |
You are talking to people you like, having conversations about important issues.
link |
You're having a good time.
link |
They're having a good time.
link |
How is that a failure?
link |
If I have dinner with a friend of mine, there's zero viewers and we enjoy that time.
link |
That is the height of human success.
link |
When you are sharing happiness, joy, joy over love.
link |
So what's the difference between joy and love, Michael Malus?
link |
Uh, I think joy is easier to attain.
link |
You could share it with everyone.
link |
Give me an example of joy.
link |
Like what was the moment of joy for you recently?
link |
I could give you a great example of joy and this is part in the absurdist mindset.
link |
I love having a bad meal at a restaurant and I'll give you, you can see why.
link |
You go with your friend.
link |
It takes you 45 minutes to get seated.
link |
Waiter's not paying attention to you.
link |
They bring your water.
link |
It's got a hair in it.
link |
They get the food wrong.
link |
It comes out again.
link |
It's ripe, but it's cold.
link |
At a certain point you're like, okay, I'm hungry.
link |
I'm living an anecdote.
link |
This is something that you, if you were at dinner, we could talk about this for years
link |
because how great is it that the worst thing that's happening to me is I got to wait an
link |
hour for this meal that's going to be cooked wrong, right?
link |
That to me is joy is a holding on to that idea that happiness and thriving are possible
link |
even when in the moment it's, uh, everything's going the wrong way.
link |
Doesn't every moment have the capacity to, uh, fill you with joy then?
link |
So it's both the shitty moments and the good moments.
link |
But that, see, that's the way I usually talk about love is like, I love life.
link |
And in that, because life can generate every, everything, the pain, the loss, but also just
link |
like simple or complicated bliss, all of that, I just love all of that.
link |
And that, because it fills me with a kind of, I guess, joy, but joy has a connotation
link |
that it's supposed to be somehow positive, like you're supposed to be smiling.
link |
To me, you know, man's search for meaning with Viktor Frankl, you know, just it's, you're
link |
in the Holocaust, you're in a concentration camp, just having a little bit of food that
link |
you didn't expect you will have.
link |
Or even just thinking about food.
link |
Or what about there's a kid there, you tell them a funny story and you crack them up.
link |
Like you take away this child's pain for like five minutes.
link |
That is the height of joy.
link |
So to me, like all of like life is like infinitely full of possibility for joy.
link |
And that's what I mean by love, because oftentimes like romantic love is what people think about
link |
when they think love.
link |
But to me, it's all like part of the same thing.
link |
And it's almost like love, romantic love, or love with a friend, friendship is like
link |
you both notice each other.
link |
It's like dogs, they look at each other and then they look at the thing they're interested
link |
You both notice each other and that moment of joy.
link |
You share that moment of joy together.
link |
Like the restaurant.
link |
If you're both almost without conspiring, notice the absurdity of how shitty this meal
link |
And like that, again, that little glimmer of realization, that's what makes life beautiful.
link |
You mentioned your grandmother in Lvov.
link |
You were thinking of returning there.
link |
The plans got a little bit delayed, but what are you hoping from that trip of going back
link |
to Russia, going back to Ukraine?
link |
What do you hope to get out of it, but what do you think you will feel?
link |
First of all, I'm going with my buddy, Chris Williamson.
link |
He hosts the Modern Wisdom Podcast.
link |
He is one of my closest friends.
link |
He's trying to get his ass over here to Austin.
link |
He's filling out his form right now.
link |
He's too good looking.
link |
I call him Apollo and I'm Loki.
link |
So right away you have a buddy comedy because we're going to film it, right?
link |
You have these two guys who on paper are very dissimilar, but we're very, very close.
link |
In which way are you similar and close?
link |
I think we're both very intense people, very strong emotionally.
link |
We're both very ambitious in the sense that, not in terms of career, but we want to grab
link |
life by the short hairs kind of thing.
link |
We are just both good experiences.
link |
Did he bench more than you or like in the gym?
link |
Because he's so good looking.
link |
I think he'd be one of those guys who's mostly biceps.
link |
If you go to his Instagram, Chris Will X is the handle.
link |
It's just sculpted.
link |
So he's perfect in every way.
link |
What flaws does he have?
link |
He has bad taste in friends and his accent is all crazy.
link |
He pronounces it...
link |
He's an underwear muddle, so now I spell it M U D L.
link |
Just us two, British and American, and just two different dudes, it's going to be a lot
link |
Although, to be fair, as you know, I'm an underwear model now as well, so...
link |
We're going to talk that in a second, maybe, but yeah, sheathunderwear.com.
link |
Yeah, this episode is brought to you by Sheath Underwear.
link |
Are we going to get some pictures eventually?
link |
Yes, I have them on my phone.
link |
We could share them right...
link |
You could slice it in right here.
link |
So to be able to go with someone who is a very close...
link |
I mean, we meet and talk like every day, right?
link |
So to someone who generally cares about you, who's...
link |
He's very, very grounded, right?
link |
So like a lot of times I'll have like some concern and he's really good, and if you listen
link |
to his show, at slicing through the noise and being like, hold on a second, I can't
link |
do the accent yet.
link |
Have you considered A, B, and C because, you know, whenever I had this situation, this
link |
He was really good with that.
link |
First of all, just like two buddies on a trip is really a lot of fun.
link |
Second of all, I know that it's going to be very intense.
link |
So for you, you left Russia much later than I did.
link |
So you remember it, I'm sure, very, very well.
link |
I left when I was one and a half too.
link |
I don't remember it all.
link |
To go to the streets where, you know, my family had to go through this stuff to see the...
link |
They came to Lviv, they slaughtered all the Jews.
link |
I mean, to have that little memorial there that's there now, and to just look around
link |
and know, yesterday, basically, they came here, they rounded everyone up.
link |
And also, from the other side, you had the Stalinists coming in and starving all the
link |
It's just to know that so much horror and death.
link |
There's this quote I saw once about a woman who went to Auschwitz and she just made the
link |
comment like, grass grows here.
link |
Because we think, you know, that when it comes to the nature of evil, that you're going to
link |
go there, there's going to be this pits of hell or whatever.
link |
There's birds, you know, there's, you know, robins hopping around looking for the worms
link |
They think it's perfectly nice and you stand there to understand that so much suffering
link |
happened here or there is going to be very jarring.
link |
I know that it's going to be an issue because I speak Russian and not Ukrainian.
link |
And to speak Russian to Ukrainians is like a big deal.
link |
So that's going to be a concern.
link |
I'm also worried about going to Russia because every Russian has this idea that even though
link |
they've just met you, they feel that they're in a position to tell you what you're doing
link |
wrong with your life, what you should be doing, if they're a cab driver, I have no tolerance
link |
for unsolicited advice on it based at all.
link |
That's going to be horrible.
link |
They're going to be telling me I need to speak Russian better because ты говоришь по
link |
русски как даунчик.
link |
I'm not hearing it.
link |
I'm not interested in hearing it.
link |
So that I think, and also, you know, given my upcoming book, The White Pill and covering
link |
what happened back in the day under Stalinism and later to see this was the Ljubljanka,
link |
this was the basement where they would, you know, this is something that people might
link |
There's a superb film, The Death of Stalin, which is kind of, that's what I do with North
link |
Korea, you know, puts a humorous spin on it.
link |
Then when you take a step back and you realize what they're actually saying, it's just like
link |
it's very, very disturbing how when Stalin was dying, he had a stroke, he's laying there
link |
in a pile of his own piss, he's unconscious.
link |
Right before he died, he thought the doctors were all plotting against him.
link |
So they were being tortured to confess that they were trying to murder him.
link |
They had to get the doctors out of the torture chambers to attend to him and they did it.
link |
So this kind of thing to like go there, like Red Square and see this is where it happened,
link |
to see Lenin's body, like this is the guy who Emma Goldman yelled at.
link |
It's going to be really, because I've worked so much in this space, jarring and intense
link |
And as intense as it is for me sitting here talking to you about it, to see it and to
link |
see the faces and to see Cyrillic everywhere, you know, other than Brighton Beach in Brooklyn,
link |
it's going to, I'm sure it's going to do a huge number on me because as Western and as
link |
a Tupoi Mirikanyets as the Russians will say I am, this is still where I came from.
link |
So no matter, to see it face to face, I don't know how I'm going to react, but I don't think
link |
it's going to be like, meh.
link |
You've assembled a number of essays from anarchist thinkers in a new book called The Anarchist
link |
You mentioned Emma Goldman.
link |
What interesting things do these thinkers agree on and what do they disagree on?
link |
The Anarchist Handbook.com is the website.
link |
It covers from the 1790s to, I think my essay is the last one from 2014, which a friend
link |
of mine who's kind of a mediocre scientist is going to be reading for the audio book.
link |
I never had, but it's not a podcast anyone would have heard of.
link |
It's like Tom Woods but even worse.
link |
So what they all agreed on was the illegitimacy of government and also the malevolence of
link |
state actors and the consequences of governments.
link |
So they range in terms that most people would easily regard as either left or right wing.
link |
But it tackles the nature of government and also creates positive non state alternatives
link |
from really many different angles.
link |
The slogan I have is the black flag, which is the traditional flag of anarchism.
link |
The black flag comes in many colors.
link |
So they were really all over the map in terms of what they're for, but their disagreement
link |
is about the nature of state and the nature of power.
link |
And it's very edifying because this is an ideology that's been in many ways swept under
link |
I want to seriously grow up that I can allow people to sit down and read these essays and
link |
see for themselves just how beautiful this tapestry over the decades and centuries has
link |
been woven about people who genuinely believed in freedom as the most important and how to
link |
maximize that for society.
link |
So maybe it's useful to talk about a few contrasting thinkers in there.
link |
So one is Leo Tolstoy.
link |
Who I think not many people know is an anarchist.
link |
A Christian anarchist.
link |
So he came to despise government for his deceit and his violence.
link |
But to him, the Christian principles of nonviolence, I think are important.
link |
And it's kind of pacifist kind of mindset of, you know, it's better to someone to punch
link |
you than to punch them back.
link |
So he's in that way, at least I've read he influenced MLK and Gandhi.
link |
What do you think about this flavor, color of the anarchist flag of nonviolence, nonviolent
link |
I will put the caveat that it bothers me when people bring up MLK because he's become so
link |
corporate and everyone just brings him up without knowing about him.
link |
One of the things that Martin Luther King did so very well was that he forced people
link |
to face the consequences of what they were putting forward.
link |
You want to be racist.
link |
You want to be for Jim Crow.
link |
You want to be for segregation.
link |
It's easy for you to do that from your living room.
link |
Now turn on your news and you see men and women in suits being attacked by dogs, being
link |
attacked by fire hoses and beaten by cops just so they could sit on the front of the
link |
And now for a lot of people who were still racist, who were still had animus toward black
link |
people are watching this and it's going to be a lot harder to be like, I'm okay with
link |
I'm okay with human beings, even ones I regard as somehow bad or inferior to be beaten and
link |
attacked by trained dogs and they're not doing anything in response.
link |
That strikes to, I think, a very basic nature of, especially American, like, okay, whatever
link |
you're for, I'm not for people getting beaten and attacked when they're not really doing
link |
I think pacifism is something that's very easy to make fun of, but people don't underestimate
link |
how powerful it is for someone to say, you can do what you want to me.
link |
I'm not going to fight you back.
link |
I just want to live peacefully and have the same rights as you.
link |
And to say, screw you, you should get beaten.
link |
That's a hard pill for a lot of people to swallow.
link |
So I think he was really, and Gandhi, of course, as well, were excellent in that regard.
link |
There's a little bit of Machiavellianism to it.
link |
They've both been beatified in regard to saints, but their strategy worked very, very well
link |
for their purposes.
link |
So I think just all of us, when you see someone in this kind of Christian, I know you're wrong,
link |
obviously, it's nothing very highly Christianity, but if he's someone who's willing to take
link |
a punch and to say, you could do whatever you want to me, I'm not going to hurt somebody
link |
else instinctively, and maybe this is kind of a hack.
link |
Most people want to side with that guy, step in between and be like, oh, okay, let's take
link |
a step back, because whatever led to this is not tenable.
link |
We need to go back to the drawing board if the consequence is people are having these
link |
as a result of my decisions and actions.
link |
So I think that aspect of anarchism is very, very, in certain contexts, healthy, and much
link |
smarter and more sophisticated than people give it credit for.
link |
And let's also point out that Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, and he wrote Anna Karenina.
link |
So this was not some naive or innocent, whatever word you want to use.
link |
He knew the nature of evil.
link |
He knew how bad things get.
link |
So he wasn't saying at all that human beings are inherently nice and kind.
link |
He was saying it's much more effective to not fight back and to force them to face that.
link |
I'll give you another example.
link |
I was on the show Trigonometry, and I was talking to the host, and one of them talked
link |
about how someone he knew had been the Gulag, or his mom was born the Gulag grandma.
link |
And after Stalin died and the Soviet Union liberalized and lots of the people in the
link |
Gulags were freed by Khrushchev and so on and so forth, I didn't know this, many of
link |
the, or some, let's say some, of the guards of the Gulags killed themselves because they
link |
had genuinely believed that everyone in these camps was there for a reason.
link |
And when they found out that these people were completely innocent, didn't even have
link |
trials, and that they were the ones forcing them to work themselves to death and starve,
link |
they couldn't deal with that guilt.
link |
So when you are a pacifist or non retaliatory and you're forcing someone who's using force,
link |
like look what you're doing, look what you've become.
link |
For some people, some people don't care, like the guy in Scare Tactics, like I mentioned
link |
earlier, where for a lot of others, they're going to be like, okay, is this who I wanted
link |
They will have that little flame of conscience that you and I talked about earlier.
link |
They will be like, how did I get to the point where there's this lady who wants to ride
link |
the bus and she's lovely dressed, put together, and I have a, sending a dog on her?
link |
What kind of person am I?
link |
For some of those people, they're going to be like, okay, I can't be a part of this.
link |
I don't even understand the politics.
link |
I still am racist, but I'm not going to take part in this atrocity.
link |
Well, that was for him from the individual perspective, perhaps he calls that Christian,
link |
but listening to that voice of conscience, like whatever that is in you.
link |
So for Tolstoy, it seems like anarchism from the individual perspective is silencing the
link |
rest of the world and listening to the, for him, probably God given voice of conscience.
link |
And so that's what it means to live, embody anarchism for him.
link |
And to embody Christianity, I would think he would say.
link |
But he would see those as basic.
link |
So in terms of forms of government, the Christian government is one that's no government.
link |
What do you think about that as advice for an individual?
link |
Turn the other cheek.
link |
Do you think, I tend to believe that that's a really good way to live.
link |
I think it's very underrated.
link |
And this is me talking.
link |
I think a lot of times when someone, let's suppose you're having an argument and, but
link |
you have to pick your battles, right?
link |
Let's suppose you're having a heated argument and someone says something very cruel to you,
link |
where you have attempted to double down and hit back twice as hard.
link |
But if it's someone who at all cares about you, where they're just in the moment and
link |
you just stop and you just say, did you hear what you just said to me?
link |
For some cases, that person will take a step back and be like, just like when I snapped
link |
at Michael at Bitstein years ago, I'd be like, wow, okay, this is bad.
link |
And they kind of, it's kind of like they have to get to 10 before they control delete to
link |
use your language.
link |
I appreciate that.
link |
And for some, they're going to, they're going to just twist the knife.
link |
But I think this is a very useful technique.
link |
And also you can also sleep well at night cause you could be like as much as this person
link |
tried to hurt me, I still didn't reciprocate.
link |
And yeah, I, I took that punch and it sucks, but at least I never said anything that I
link |
could feel guilty about.
link |
Do you think that's ultimately a good way to implement anarchy in your personal life?
link |
Anarchy, implementing anarchy in your personal life just means respecting people's boundaries.
link |
It means not forcing people to do things they otherwise wouldn't want to do.
link |
I think you then have to take a case by case, like there's so many human interactions that
link |
are required for life and there's tension and all those kinds of things.
link |
You're being so naive.
link |
Did you put the hat on?
link |
The hat's on the other head now.
link |
Well, I had to take off the hat cause it's like Frodo with the ring.
link |
I was starting to feel like powerful.
link |
I wanted to give you orders and I'm like, no, I just, I think there's a ways of dealing
link |
with the tensions that are natural to human interactions that can't be simply, you know,
link |
it's not as simple as saying you want to respect the freedom of others and the boundaries of
link |
It's like you both have to agree on stuff and work something out.
link |
And the mechanisms of that agreement, the game theory of that agreement requires different
link |
hacks and strategies.
link |
And the question is for an anarchist collective that's well functioning, what kind of hacks,
link |
what kind of ways of behavior are more likely to be productive and not, you know, that that's
link |
almost like the question, do you want to turn the other cheek or do you want to stand your
link |
ground really firmly?
link |
When somebody is an asshole to you, you walk away.
link |
Or when somebody is an asshole to you, you turn the other cheek and give them a chance
link |
to rise to the best version of themselves and then find a common ground kind of thing.
link |
It's an open question of how to form those collectives when there's people with difficult
link |
childhoods and all that kind of stuff.
link |
Well, this also comes down to what is your relationship with this person?
link |
Is this out of character?
link |
If you and I got into a disagreement, all of a sudden, you started getting very personal.
link |
First of all, I'd be very hurt.
link |
But then I'd be like, this is out of character for Lex.
link |
I'm sure I could be like, whoa, let's take a pause here.
link |
Like you're getting heated.
link |
I'm trying to work this out.
link |
What's going on here?
link |
And you get a kind of a meta conversation.
link |
But again, you and I have a relationship of mutual respect.
link |
So as opposed to if it was a stranger who just wants a piece of you, it's just like
link |
you are coming at me not correct.
link |
I don't have to reciprocate in kind.
link |
I'm not going to shoot you, but I'm not going to pretend that you deserve respect when you're
link |
treating me with such contempt.
link |
I do defer, especially with people I know, because this is smart long term game theory
link |
as well as the right thing to do.
link |
I do try to give them the benefit of the doubt at first, right?
link |
Because if you're going to go aggro, you can't go back.
link |
You could always go from like, let me hear them out and then then I could go aggro.
link |
So there's a big asymmetry there.
link |
And that's, I mean, I don't think anyone has the answer to this question is, is that the
link |
To me, game theoretically, it seems the right strategy is to...
link |
With reciprocity is what game theory says is the right strategy.
link |
They did the prisoner's dilemma and they found tit for tat is the one that's the most advantageous.
link |
So that's for when it's perfectly rational actors.
link |
But when you have, I mean, there's noise that there's a, I think, benefit to just, even
link |
if they keep being shitty to you, still being nice to them.
link |
Well then there's the inverse where girls are turned off.
link |
Some people are like, if you're in a relationship and not just girls, but like some people,
link |
when you're kind to them, they find you less attractive, right?
link |
That is kind of this weird, what am I supposed to do?
link |
Like you're only into me if I'm mean to you.
link |
I don't want to be mean, but then I'm getting punished for doing the right thing.
link |
That's another tricky one.
link |
And I mean, this is nothing that necessarily do with anarchism so much as like, you know,
link |
human beings are infinitely complex.
link |
We don't often know the backstory.
link |
Like for example, just yesterday, Jay, who's here is one of my closest friends.
link |
I had a dinner with a bunch of people.
link |
I couldn't bring a plus four, so he wasn't invited.
link |
He didn't know the circumstances.
link |
He just thought we were having dinner without him.
link |
Once I spelled it out, he completely understood and I felt horrible because for me to have
link |
any of my friends feel left out is just a very, very cruel thing.
link |
And I felt bad and I'm glad to apologize again publicly that that's ended up being the circumstances.
link |
But yeah, a lot of times we're also in Plato's cave.
link |
When you're dealing with somebody else, you have very, very limited information about
link |
their background and circumstances.
link |
And that's why I will always, if it's someone I even have a little bit of a relationship
link |
with, try to give them the benefit of the doubt because I found, especially this comes
link |
from being a coauthor, when you coauthor books and you're walking in other people's shoes,
link |
you don't know a lot of the information.
link |
So a lot of times it's just a misunderstanding.
link |
But isn't that a fundamentally anarchist question of how we figure out this puzzle
link |
of human complexities in order to form voluntary collectives?
link |
Like when you have to figure that out, how to make people feel good, how to make people...
link |
I think not only anarchists have to think about this as my point, of course.
link |
But we have to think about it more than others do.
link |
I feel like I should try to argue against anarchism at some point, out of love, out
link |
And so because people...
link |
People enjoy seeing me, what is it, when like Ben Shapiro argues against like a 20 year
link |
Ben Shapiro destroys high school students with facts and legends.
link |
This is this video of Michael Miles destroys a Marxist, Russian, communist pig.
link |
So anarchism is opposed to hierarchies.
link |
Well that's left anarchism, anarcho communism, yeah.
link |
But there are many hierarchies that are not the state.
link |
We have a hierarchy here.
link |
This is your show.
link |
I'm differential to you.
link |
Rigid hierarchies.
link |
Forced hierarchies is the...
link |
Forced hierarchies.
link |
Forced hierarchies.
link |
So humans, when left on their own accord, they form hierarchies naturally.
link |
Yes, inevitably in my opinion.
link |
Which is why I disagree with the left anarchists.
link |
I think it's not a coherent thing to argue for nonhierarchical relationships, even in
link |
It doesn't make sense to me.
link |
And I know the old school anarchists will call me stupid or uninformed, but I've never
link |
been able to even wrap my head around this claim that you could have relationships without
link |
So this is a certain sense in which we're living in an anarchism now.
link |
And I don't mean just like, because the nations, as you've said, are in anarchism relative
link |
to each other, but isn't the United States just a collective that was formed in anarchy?
link |
And this is just the collective that we're operating under, this hierarchy that was naturally
link |
Well, the United States was not naturally formed.
link |
It was formed by force and by fiat.
link |
But to your point, I stress this throughout the book.
link |
I always say this anarchism is not a location, it's a relationship.
link |
So yeah, you and I do have a hierarchy and this is your show, but neither of us really
link |
has an authority over the other.
link |
Like I'm here voluntarily.
link |
You can kick me out if you want.
link |
I can leave it anyone.
link |
Neither of us has the power to force the other to be in this relationship we've chosen.
link |
My lawyer, I defer to his judgment.
link |
He's not forcing me to do it.
link |
He gives me his advice and I could take it or leave it.
link |
Same with the doctor.
link |
So there is a clearly like who's in charge and who's not in charge, but they're not in
link |
a position to impose their will on everybody else.
link |
And you could very easily see John is Stephanie's lawyer and Stephanie is John's doctor.
link |
And in each of those contexts, one has this position of ostensible authority over the
link |
So anarchism is in fact not some utopian crazy thing.
link |
It is the norm of human relationships where you meet people.
link |
You're not necessarily equal.
link |
Someone's going to be taller, someone's going to be stronger, someone's smarter, wealthier
link |
So you're not at all thinking I am here and I could tell you what to do and you are legally
link |
or morally obligated to follow my wishes.
link |
That is the basis of anarchism.
link |
So in what way is the United States imposing by force something on you, do you think?
link |
If you leave your house, you will go to jail.
link |
My money being taken from me via taxation.
link |
But don't you have the freedom to not operate under that?
link |
No, but that's like, yeah, like technically if someone comes up to you and mugs you and
link |
says your money or your life, you are making a choice.
link |
But what the anarchist argument is, they're not in a position to force you to make that
link |
That is not morally binding, even though they have practically the power to force you into
link |
But you have the freedom to live under the United States or not.
link |
Yeah, the argument is if you don't like it, leave, right?
link |
Not necessarily leave like geographically, but there's ways to live outside the force
link |
of the United States.
link |
There's ways, it's just very difficult to operate that way.
link |
But that's like saying you could outrun the mugger, which is true, but the issue is does
link |
that mugger have the right to tell you at gunpoint, you're either giving me your money
link |
or I'm going to shoot you or secret plan C, you get to run away.
link |
Is that person a moral actor?
link |
And the anarchist answer is never.
link |
And just one more thing, the anarchist view is the difference between that mugger and
link |
the government is only an air of legitimacy.
link |
Literally they're morally identical.
link |
So is it possible that every hierarchy that gets big enough and successful enough such
link |
that it can monopolize a bunch of services it provides, isn't it always going to be amoral
link |
in your sense, the way the United States government is amoral?
link |
I don't want to say just like the United States government is amoral because that implies
link |
the United States government is uniquely or especially amoral.
link |
Governments, I apologize.
link |
I just want to clarify that because I know you didn't mean that and I don't want that
link |
to be the implication.
link |
Can you repeat the question?
link |
So like won't every Okay, so that's right.
link |
So that's progressive economics.
link |
So the argument is in any market at a certain point, things tend to centralize and then
link |
that organization de facto can dictate price, can dictate so on and so forth.
link |
That is completely historical.
link |
If you look at any market, the trend is always towards decentralization, the music industry,
link |
When we were kids, there were four or five record labels.
link |
They were the ones who made all the songs that you're going to see in the Billboard
link |
Top 100 with a few exceptions.
link |
Now anyone can go to direct to market.
link |
If you look at TV stations, right, it went from CBS, NBC, ABC, then you got Fox, then
link |
you had cable, which is 100.
link |
Now you have satellite, which have sounds around the world and you have YouTube, which
link |
is literally infinite.
link |
So as technology improves and as wealth increases, which is a function of free enterprise, you
link |
are going to always have more and more choice, even within a monopoly, Coca Cola, right?
link |
This is an example I used, I think in the new right, when we were kids, every terrible
link |
comedian would be like, oh, now that I've got diet caffeine free Coke, what's next?
link |
It's like, yeah, that's good.
link |
You want to have, what was his name, Cayman, the guy who invented the Segway.
link |
If you go, Dean Cayman, if you go into some restaurants right now, you will have those
link |
You have like 80 kinds of Cokes and then you could have whatever flavor you want to add
link |
Grape, cherry, lemon, lime, so on and so forth.
link |
So in any field, you're going to have more and more competition.
link |
You're going to have less competition and less choices when the state gets involved
link |
because the state wants control.
link |
The state wants one big neck with one leash around it and that way it could just pull
link |
that dog in one direction or another.
link |
And you saw this last year with the lockdowns, Carol Roth wrote this amazing book called
link |
The War on Small Business and she talked about, we have seen for the first time in history
link |
a massive wealth transfer from small and medium business towards organizations like Target
link |
and Amazon who made trillions of dollars last year.
link |
Whereas mom and pop, which to me at least is like the acme of American achievement.
link |
You come to America, you have a fruit stand, a laundromat, you make socks, whatever it
link |
is, you're that unique artisan creating something special.
link |
They're the ones who didn't last whereas Target and Amazon did.
link |
So when you have the state involvement, it will always be in favor of Jeff Bezos and
link |
for the simple reason that it's going to be a lot easier for Jeff Bezos to get Nancy Pelosi
link |
and Mitch McConnell on the phone than it is for me making socks on Etsy.
link |
Your sense is that there'll be less and less over time Jeff Bezos is like whatever industry
link |
we look at, there's be less, there's a trend towards decentralization across all industries.
link |
And when I say decentralization, I just mean choice, right?
link |
So if you look at again, networks, you're going to, if you were in the 80s and you had
link |
a network just for LGBT issues, first of all, it's going to be complete heretical.
link |
That's not going to happen and there's not going to be enough necessarily people identifies
link |
that to have an audience.
link |
Then there was something called logo.
link |
They have that and there's lots of other shows like that in this way.
link |
So more specific, look at websites.
link |
I am positive that you and I, if we wanted to look up breeding guinea pigs, would find
link |
thousands of websites about different breeds and all this other stuff 20 years ago, 30
link |
years ago, like you're going to have two books and they're not going to be dynamic as these
link |
new breeds are developed.
link |
So at the same time it does, following on your argument, it does seem easier to move
link |
and immigrate from state to state within the United States and to other countries.
link |
Do you think that's a form of freedom that embodies anarchism where you can resist the
link |
force of state by choosing where you live?
link |
To some extent, but the line of people, some of these boomers will go at me on Twitter
link |
if I'm going after the police or something and be like, if you don't like America, get
link |
And I tell them freedom means I do what I want, not what you want.
link |
Freedom means I don't have to move.
link |
You don't have to move.
link |
Free speech is a good example.
link |
It doesn't mean I have to be on Twitter, right?
link |
Twitter has the right to ban me.
link |
But what I'm saying is I'm saying something and you don't like it, too bad.
link |
You're the one who has to accommodate me because I have a right to do what I want with my person
link |
as long as I'm being peaceful.
link |
So I guess I'm trying to get to the difference between the state and what you would naturally
link |
want in anarchy, which is like a security company, all of those things.
link |
They will, as they become successful, start looking more and more like the state.
link |
Because you get to elect, you give them money, they have leaders.
link |
What's the difference between a government and a very successful service provider in
link |
Well, this gets a little confused in America as big companies necessarily are hand in hand
link |
with the government ended up in bed with them.
link |
The answer to this question is a long, complicated one.
link |
And thankfully, it's all in the Anarchist Handbook.
link |
There was an essay by Murray Rothbard who Dave Smith, this is the essay that converted
link |
So maybe it's not as good as it could have been otherwise called Anatomy of the State.
link |
And Murray Rothbard points out that state is the only agency in a country which gets
link |
its goods through force.
link |
The state is the only agency that is not a producer, but inherently a parasite because
link |
it does not get its money voluntarily, but through taxation and by imposing its values
link |
That is what makes a state uniquely different from, let's suppose, an Amazon or a Barnes
link |
and Noble or a Target.
link |
Jeff Bezos does not have the authority or the moral legitimacy to get an army and go
link |
into somebody's house, whereas Andrew Cuomo or Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump and Barack Obama
link |
But is it possible that to reframe, so Jeff Bezos does if he hires a security force, also
link |
is it possible to reframe taxation as a form of payment?
link |
If it was done much better, if you could pay this collective that we call government in
link |
ways where you could pay for things that you care for, your money would be much more directly
link |
contributing to the things you care for.
link |
If you care for a service like healthcare, you'll be able to buy essentially insurance
link |
from the government.
link |
Why am I buying insurance from the government as opposed to insurance from an insurance
link |
What do you perceive as the difference between a tax and a price?
link |
Do you see the difference?
link |
Yes, I know on the surface level, I'm trying to get deeply to say there's a lot of similarities.
link |
But what I'm saying is there's one essential difference, which is taxes are imposed on
link |
you and you have no choice.
link |
Here's an example.
link |
My book, Ego and Hubris, my biography, it goes for $500 on eBay.
link |
Someone paid for it.
link |
Some crazy person.
link |
People were showing me that it's on Amazon for $3,000, something like that.
link |
You could put a million for it.
link |
You could charge whatever price you want.
link |
The question is, is someone paying that $3,000 for it?
link |
Is someone paying that million for it?
link |
It's actually the buyer who establishes the price because the seller can put any price
link |
that he wants, $80 trillion.
link |
But unless someone's paying that amount and clearing the market, that price has literally
link |
It's not an indicator of value or worth or market price.
link |
Taxation, on the other hand, is by fiat.
link |
I can decide it's fair that you, Lex, have to pay 40% and Joe has to pay 45%.
link |
Joe and Lex are in no position to be like, this price is too high.
link |
Not only is that money set just completely out of their hands, for people who are employees,
link |
it's taken out of their paychecks before they even see it.
link |
So they don't even have the choice to be like, you know what?
link |
I agree that the government has the right to pay taxation.
link |
Here's my check for 40%.
link |
It's a completely different paradigm than you are when you're paying for price.
link |
The government provides a lot of services in the current system.
link |
But there's no service the government provides that would not be provided better, more efficiently,
link |
and with more choices in a market.
link |
That's a hypothesis.
link |
No, that's very likely.
link |
Well, that's not a...
link |
I can demonstrate this to you very easily.
link |
I love it when you get flustered.
link |
This is what people like.
link |
Don't make me put on the hat again.
link |
The robot has a fire.
link |
There's smoke coming out of his ears.
link |
I think of the government as a kind of subscription service.
link |
That's the anarchist view.
link |
The anarchist view of private security would be a subscription service.
link |
So that's exactly correct.
link |
But everyone hates when you sign up to a gym, and then you realize in the contract, it's
link |
very difficult to cancel that membership, and then they up the price.
link |
There's a lot of unpleasant things with a subscription service that then you can elect
link |
to go to another subscription service.
link |
Or you could go and Yelp and complain, and if there's enough people to do that, the gym
link |
will be receptive.
link |
Look at the power of Yelp versus the power of the vote.
link |
Well, we could talk about that too.
link |
So you're saying Yelp is more effective than voting.
link |
The thing is, I agree with you, but you take a further step.
link |
You say that Yelp is ethical and moral, and voting is amoral.
link |
Or like not voting, but government is amoral.
link |
So like it's not only is one more efficient than the other, you're saying like, because
link |
I would say government sucks at doing what it does, and it's gotten a lot better at it,
link |
and I believe it can keep getting better as it gets smaller and it leverages companies
link |
But you're saying, no, no, no, government is fundamentally as an idea gets in the way
link |
of companies that should be doing those things anyway.
link |
I just think that companies, when you take away government, will start looking like government.
link |
Just because something looks like something does not mean it's the same.
link |
If someone puts out a yarmulke and tefillin and they go to shul, they're not Jewish.
link |
The basic objection you have with government, because you can leave, like I apologize that
link |
this is that stupid Twitter cliche statement.
link |
But your opposition to this idea of leaving the United States is that it's just, it's
link |
It's too much friction.
link |
That's not the option.
link |
The opposition is in the introduction to the book, I say anarchism can be summed up in
link |
You do not speak for me.
link |
Everything else is application.
link |
So the claim that somebody I've never met or who I voted against, let's say, I hate
link |
Donald Trump, I despise him, I want Hillary Clinton to be president.
link |
Too bad Trump's your president, that's not what I want.
link |
The idea that this person can come on me and make any claims onto one second of my time,
link |
as opposed to try to persuade me, that is something that I, an anarchist, regard as
link |
inherently evil and nonsensical.
link |
But to operate large organizations, like you see this with cryptocurrency, there's governance,
link |
you have to make difficult decisions.
link |
It's a block size wars for Bitcoin.
link |
So you will, there is a voting mechanism often with membership when you're a subscription
link |
But see, the thing is, you're using these words and you're switching definitions.
link |
Because like, if I go to a store, I can technically say I'm voting for Tropicana orange juice
link |
as opposed to another one.
link |
But to kind of say, oh, well, you're making a choice there for every choice is a vote.
link |
I don't, I think that that's something that the Venn diagram is not.
link |
No, I literally mean vote in this case, not money.
link |
There's some decisions, like, should Bitcoin have increases block size?
link |
There's a bunch of different, they're called soft forks or hard forks.
link |
Oh, I'm not saying you should never vote, like stockholders have to vote, right?
link |
But there's no pretense.
link |
Here's, let's look at this.
link |
If you want to build robots, right?
link |
You would sit down with the company, you would, you guys would be like, we should do this
link |
kind of robot, we should do this kind of robot.
link |
The stockholders would have a vote or the board in proportion to their investment in
link |
Me, who knows nothing about robots, the idea that I'm in a position to walk in and be like,
link |
this is what you should do is crazy and bizarre and wrong because I'm not in a foreign position.
link |
So what democracy does is it forces people who run businesses well to run businesses
link |
poorly by people who don't know how to run businesses at all.
link |
That's the, that's one of the many concerns.
link |
But you're saying that's the fundamental property of the state.
link |
I have a sense that the state could become as effective as what we think of as companies.
link |
This is why they can't, because the state does not have access to data the way that
link |
And this is one of Ludwig von Mises's great points, what he called the calculation problem.
link |
If I'm looking at comic books, right, and I have Detective Comics, if Detective Comics
link |
26 is a thousand and Detective Comics 28 is a thousand and Detective Comics 27 is 50,000,
link |
that is telling me that even if I don't know anything about comics, that Detective Comics
link |
27 is either very, very scarce for some reason or very, very desirable.
link |
It's the first appearance of Batman, whatever, but you don't need to know that to just look
link |
at this data and be like, okay, this is the market, tell me something.
link |
If prices are set by the government, which the government is a monopoly, I have no way
link |
of picking those winners or losers.
link |
I don't have that data of supply and demand of an entire nation or a world of people making
link |
individual decisions and having price be dynamic and informing me as the organization where
link |
I should allocate my resources.
link |
So the price is a really strong signal that allows you to operate a voluntary collective
link |
where people get what they want and don't get what they don't want.
link |
And it tells me what to produce, what not to produce.
link |
And it also is great because if I see this podcasting industry, which didn't exist five
link |
years ago, and now these people are making bank, that tells me as someone who is an investor,
link |
they're making 50%, whatever, 10% profit on their capital.
link |
In the plant industry, it's 2%.
link |
If I'm going to further my capital to this 10%, and that's going to lower the profit
link |
rate as that builds up.
link |
And that is how markets are regulated, voluntarily.
link |
But the word government, I just think it's possible to have collectives of human beings
link |
that represent others based on their voluntary...
link |
Yes, of course, you have private governance.
link |
Any company, you can have a CEO, you can have a board of directors.
link |
But then you, I just, it starts to look very similar to me, a successful private governance
link |
mechanism at a scale of the United States starts looking a whole lot like the current
link |
government of the United States.
link |
Even Amazon, I don't think is anything close to the federal budget, size wise or budget
link |
wise or power wise.
link |
So you're saying you just, it's not even state, it's almost like anything at that size.
link |
You want to keep things smaller.
link |
And I don't, markets are not going to combine to that level of the state because Jeff Bezos
link |
will never be in a position to tell everyone in America, I'm going to take 40% of your
link |
money before you even see it.
link |
That to me is actually unclear.
link |
We don't know that to be true, where that Google or Amazon can't grow to the size.
link |
If you take away the US government, I'm not so sure that Amazon can't grow to the size
link |
of the US government.
link |
Okay, so worst case scenario is we're back where we started, right?
link |
That's not worst case scenario.
link |
But the concern is that Google is going to be the federal government?
link |
That's not the concern.
link |
I'm saying like, this is what it looks like when Google is the federal government.
link |
It's not, it's like, to me, the US government is our best attempt so far to have large scale
link |
representation of people's interest.
link |
It really sucks, but it's our best attempt so far and the question is how to improve
link |
Like if you take away all, if you take away the US government, I'm trying to see how do
link |
we improve on that level, that scale of representation of people's interest.
link |
Let me give you one example that people could wrap their hands around very easily.
link |
I'm against government police monopoly, I'm for private security, right?
link |
You don't have to be an anarchist to understand this.
link |
Can everyone agree, or at least as a hypothesis, everyone can wrap their heads around, here's
link |
a big concern, 911, right?
link |
I've heard this 911 call, it's very chilling.
link |
There's a kid in a closet, his family's being murdered outside, right?
link |
He has to call 911, he's whispering.
link |
It's horrifying to hear.
link |
There's no reason why the number I call for my family's being murdered is the same number
link |
I call for the fire department is the same number I call for an ambulance.
link |
What if instead it operated like Uber?
link |
You have buttons on your phone, if there's a real emergency, like someone's gun flyers,
link |
someone's being killed, you press this and it sends instead of the one police district,
link |
whatever company is nearby, you have a bunch of them and they're the ones who are going
link |
to come to your house to save you.
link |
People can wrap their heads around that very easily.
link |
That is one very clear way to go from having a government security monopoly towards having
link |
a more free enterprise system.
link |
So when you apply that to pretty much anything, it doesn't become that complicated of an alternative.
link |
So what I would, you're going to criticize this, but I believe the government, it's like
link |
the parenting thing we've talked about earlier, I think it creates a safe space for gov, for
link |
I'm for safe spaces, so I'm not going to laugh at you about that.
link |
I want people to be safe.
link |
But for a safe space for entrepreneurship.
link |
So I believe that good government, hold on a sec, give me a sec, give me a sec.
link |
I think government gives a opportunity for companies to out compete it.
link |
UPS, FedEx, 100%, not a question.
link |
So I believe you need to have private schools, government to give a chance for UPS, FedEx,
link |
for SpaceX, oh there's an X in there, to pop up and then government will naturally back
link |
off from that place.
link |
So like you, but you need the innovators to step in and build the thing.
link |
Like you can't just.
link |
When has government ever backed off though?
link |
That never happens.
link |
I back, well, from FedEx and UPS, from SpaceX, from Amazon.
link |
Wait, wait, hold on.
link |
The US Postal Service still competes with FedEx and UPS.
link |
So here's the other thing.
link |
Not well, but they still exist.
link |
But UPS and FedEx are taxed.
link |
So not only are they paying for their own company, they're paying for this competitor.
link |
This is the essential difference.
link |
Imagine if you didn't have UPS, excuse me, the federal government and no post office.
link |
So you had FedEx, you have DHL, you have US Postal Service and many others.
link |
How about in this scenario, UPS has the capacity to take 20% of FedEx's DHL and couriers money
link |
and put in their own pocket and they never have to do anything in return.
link |
This is going to be an enormous advantage of UPS.
link |
And then when you add the addition that UPS is not necessarily going to be more efficient
link |
than the others, this is going to be a huge distortion in the market.
link |
Can you imagine if your podcast, you just automatically got 20% of the views of everybody
link |
I mean, would there be any incentive for you to be great?
link |
Or you could just sit in your laurels and do whatever you want even more than now.
link |
It's hard to imagine more than now.
link |
That's because you're a robot and lack imagination.
link |
I think there just has to be, of course you can do it completely without government, but
link |
That's all I need to hear.
link |
That's all I need to hear.
link |
What else you can do without government at the end?
link |
The question is that safety net that's needed for entrepreneurship, that's needed for, I'm
link |
sorry to say, but I have a sense that there needs to be a bit of a safety net for freedom.
link |
I'm much more comfortable with saying you need a safety net for freedom than you need
link |
one for entrepreneurs.
link |
The beauty of markets is with your startup, if you have a startup and it completely fails,
link |
the only person who's screwed is you and your investors.
link |
If I'm a government and I make a startup, the entire society fails, like the Iraq war.
link |
If I have this cockamamie plan, everyone else doesn't have a choice.
link |
They are both funding it and sometimes even drafted or forced into it.
link |
The safety net, the antlers, getting back to the early anarchists, one of the things
link |
that I admire about them, the inaugural communists, the old school left anarchists, is people
link |
don't remember what context they were in.
link |
They were in context without a welfare state, they're immigrating in huge numbers from
link |
Eastern Europe, you go to the Tenement Museum in New York, people like 12 to a room, kids
link |
are working in factories, they're either working in factories or they have to starve.
link |
It's not that their parents didn't love them, it's that the parents didn't have birth control,
link |
which was a felony, and they also were in a position to put food on the table for their
link |
kids because they're uneducated and the jobs are paying nothing.
link |
You could understand why Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Proudhon, and all these other figures
link |
were like, this is untenable, we see Carnegie with 80,000 mansions, whereas this lady whose
link |
husband died at age 30, who's never been to high school or even junior high school, has
link |
10 kids, how's she going to put food on the table, it's not going to happen.
link |
You could understand why they would be like, all right, we need to seize this money and
link |
distribute it around the people, that makes a lot of sense.
link |
In a contemporary context, where food is much cheaper, where shelter to some extent is more
link |
available, when medical care, we're so oblivious to how bad things were that we see things
link |
are bad now, so we assume that they were better than in some contexts.
link |
They were much, much worse there in many contexts.
link |
So if you're going to make an argument for government, for me, the strongest argument
link |
is like food stamps or like free lunches for children, because I agree that would be very
link |
inefficient and it's going to probably make them obese because you're going to have Nabisco
link |
lobbying to make sure that if you're going to have this protein, you're not going to
link |
give the kids an Oreo, aren't you?
link |
These kids are poor, you want them to have some pleasure and that's going to have deleterious
link |
But if the choice is an inefficient government program and mass starvation, that is one where
link |
as an anarchist, I could easily see making the argument for that one.
link |
Even though I think very clearly private charity would be more efficient and distribute it
link |
But at that point, I don't really care about efficiency.
link |
If you're throwing out food to make sure these kids get fed, I don't care.
link |
So would engagement in military conflict be one of the biggest negative things about the
link |
War is the state at its worst.
link |
So if we take away war or make it defensive instead of aggressive, yeah.
link |
I mean, wouldn't that be a huge step forward if war instead of regarded, we're always,
link |
this is what drives me crazy.
link |
We're taught as kids in school that war is a last resort.
link |
And I agree with that.
link |
And yet when you look at the corporate press, war is always the first response.
link |
And these people do not talk about what war means.
link |
They'll show examples during the Bush years of soldiers coming home in caskets, which
link |
already is an unacceptable price in many cases for me.
link |
But they don't even pretend to care about the people overseas whose countries we've
link |
ransacked and lives we've ruined.
link |
And it's just like, well, what are you going to do?
link |
Not ransack those countries?
link |
So that war to me is the state at its worst.
link |
See, I think that there is value from small government that doesn't engage in wars.
link |
I do think that the kind of collectives that you imagine functioning well would look like
link |
the best version of government that I imagine.
link |
So I see them as the same.
link |
I think a lot of it is just terminology.
link |
I have no problem saying that I'm using the word anarchism incorrectly and to go for what
link |
I have no problem with that or anything, really.
link |
Because like I said, life is beautiful.
link |
But nevertheless, you wrote the essay, why I'm not going to vote this time or ever.
link |
Why I won't vote this year or any other year or any year.
link |
And the basic idea.
link |
I hope you do a better job reading it than you just read that title.
link |
I guess you'll take as many takes as necessary.
link |
I'll read it in Russian and then pay somebody to translate it.
link |
This isn't even Russian at all.
link |
He's just making up words.
link |
Where'd you find this guy?
link |
You get what you pay for.
link |
This is what you wanted.
link |
Like your basic summary is, let me see, if pressed, the simplest explanation I have for
link |
refusing to vote is this, I don't vote for the same exact reasons that I don't take communion.
link |
No matter how admirable he is or how much I agree with him, the Pope isn't the steward
link |
over my soul, nor is any president the leader of my life.
link |
This does not make me ignorant or evil any more than not being a Christian makes me ignorant
link |
If I need representation, I will hire the most qualified person to do so.
link |
Isn't voting our current best developed way of hiring the most qualified person to represent
link |
you on some things?
link |
No, because if I have a lawyer and the lawyer screws up, I can fire him.
link |
If I vote for someone, I don't get who I want.
link |
I get for who my neighbors want.
link |
So that makes no sense.
link |
Representation means I want you to speak for me.
link |
Whereas voting is like, I kind of want you, but I'll take what I can get and I'm going
link |
to take what I could get regardless.
link |
So what's the point?
link |
In governments, again, that's what Bitcoin is.
link |
You want to be represented in deciding what to do, but once...
link |
Wait, Bitcoin isn't picking a person.
link |
They're not picking a president of Bitcoin.
link |
They're picking an idea.
link |
It's more like a referendum.
link |
And to me, a referendum is much more coherent and defensible than it is voting for a representative
link |
because if I'm voting for Joe Biden, I'm saying this person speaks for me for abortion, taxation,
link |
environmental policy, immigration, war, right?
link |
The odds that unless you're a complete NPC, that this one person will speak for you for
link |
everything and will deliver what he promised and has the power to deliver what he promises
link |
Whereas if I have Brexit, if I say I want Britain to remain part of the European Union
link |
to say yes or no question, that makes a lot more sense to me.
link |
But even that is not pure democracy because going back to the idea of the circulation
link |
of elites, which James Burnham talked about, Pareto and Moscow and all them, you're still
link |
going to have someone telling you what you can and can't vote for and how these questions
link |
So in contradiction to what the left anarchist said, some element of hierarchy is always
link |
going to be inevitable.
link |
So listen, I agree with this aspect very much so that we should be voting for ideas and
link |
issues not voting for leaders, for leaders to represent us across the full spectrum of
link |
It seems to make no sense.
link |
Yeah, this is great.
link |
But I do think there should be a leader, I do believe in voting for representatives to
link |
debate, to be communicators of ideas to us.
link |
But let me start to interrupt you, but you could have those two things.
link |
For example, wouldn't this be an improvement if they have that now, you have a referendum,
link |
you want tax rates to be 30 or 40, whatever percent, you have the guy leading the campaign
link |
for 50, fight for 50, then you have the lady leading the campaign for 40, fight for 40,
link |
they'll go out there, they can have debates, they can talk about the issue, but you're
link |
still not voting for one of them, you're voting for the issue.
link |
That makes much more sense to me than I'm going to vote for him and hope that he puts
link |
forward 50 and that depends on 99 other senators.
link |
But also, I mean, I do like the idea of voting for certain people to debate certain ideas.
link |
Yes, I think that's a major improvement.
link |
But the final vote should be based on the idea.
link |
So okay, so we agree.
link |
That would be nice to have, plus no wars, and then you'll stop tweeting so aggressively.
link |
And to decriminalize things that don't hurt people.
link |
Drugs especially, prostitution is a big one.
link |
And this is me talking, all cops are criminals.
link |
There's no one, or maybe other than abused children, who needs access to the police other
link |
They're the ones who are the most likely to really put themselves in danger situation,
link |
so they need to be able to call security, because that's why they have pimps.
link |
Because you're a woman dealing with some strange dudes who are a lot of the time going to have
link |
weird kinks, you want to be able to be sure, even if you don't approve of prostitution,
link |
think it's horrible, that she's not going to be raped and murdered and have no consequences.
link |
And if you're going to say, oh, well, she's a prostitute, she can't be raped.
link |
Just think for a second, if you're agreeing to sleep with somebody, and then he starts
link |
choking you and beating the crap out of you and saying it's now it's a dom situation,
link |
that is clearly beyond the pale of salt.
link |
And the same thing with drugs, heroin, cocaine, crack.
link |
The people that need help the most are the ones who are addicted to those drugs and putting
link |
Let's suppose you think drug dealers should be in jail, right?
link |
It is very hard for me to say that someone who sells cocaine should be treated or in
link |
the same building as someone who rapes children, or as a murderer.
link |
These are not similar types of evil, even if you believe that that drug dealer is an
link |
I mean, there's an essay in there called by Alexander Berkman, who was Emma Goldman's
link |
partner on prisons and crime.
link |
And this is leftism at its best, forgetting the person is forgotten.
link |
And the fact that we have the world's largest prison population, the fact that so many people
link |
are just like, oh, you commit a crime, just put them in jail, throw away the key.
link |
At the very least, if you want to be totally immoral about it, it's expensive.
link |
And second of all, the concept that all criminals should be locked in a room together in these
link |
kind of largely inhuman conditions, and that's going to help people.
link |
I don't think that that's the ideal mechanism.
link |
Yeah, I tend to believe, I usually don't speak so negatively about politicians, but I do think
link |
that politicians have done more evil in the war on drugs than did the people that are
link |
supposed to be the criminals in this picture.
link |
And I'll give you another example of how this is the anarchist critique of power.
link |
Hunter Biden, and I'm not making fun of him, I'm not taking shots at him.
link |
He had an article in the New Yorker, where he talks about when he was in LA, he was buying
link |
crack and there was a misunderstanding or like he left the crack pipe in the Hertz car
link |
and then blah, blah, blah, there's an issue.
link |
He's admitting to a felony in writing to a reporter.
link |
And I'm sure this was within the statute of limitations.
link |
There was no possibility he was going to have consequences.
link |
Kamala Harris, who was a cop, talked about when she was in college, she was smoking weed.
link |
And it's like, I don't begrudge you guys smoking your crack or smoking your weed, but for other
link |
people who are poor or maybe just had the short end of the stick, this is years of their
link |
life being destroyed.
link |
At the very least, even an arrest is a traumatic situation.
link |
If you have a weed or cocaine or crack, you're arrested, that's really going to screw up,
link |
it's going to do a number on you being locked up.
link |
So to have that double standard to me is completely unacceptable.
link |
And that has nothing to do with Republican or Democrat.
link |
George W. Bush was a coke head back in the day.
link |
He talks about overcoming his addiction, and I'm glad that he did, more power to him.
link |
But just to have this kind of, you know, it's just really kind of disturbing to me, and
link |
this is my anarchist brain, like how prevalent drug use is in college.
link |
I think there's a joke on South Park, like, there's a time and a place to try drugs, and
link |
that's called college where people experiment.
link |
But all those college kids, which are going to become next generation's elite, don't really
link |
have that worry that if they get caught, then anything's going to happen to them.
link |
But that kid in the street who did not have that good upbringing, even if he's a piece
link |
of crap, like he's not going to have a different punishment, I think that's just really at
link |
his base on American.
link |
So in contrast to Tolstoy, let me ask you about Emma Goldman.
link |
You wrote that if anarchism believed in rulers, then Emma Goldman would be the undisputed
link |
What ideas defined her flavor of anarchism, would you say?
link |
Emma was really an old school radical.
link |
She was a radical among radicals.
link |
I don't know what ideas, I mean, what would define her was anarchism, obviously.
link |
There's the violence.
link |
I mean, she was more open to the idea of violent opposition versus somebody like Tolstoy.
link |
Oh, sure, for sure.
link |
So basically, Emma and Alexander Berkman, their mentor was someone named Johann Most.
link |
And Johann Most was a very early free speech, not very early, but he was a free speech concern
link |
because he published a pamphlet in Europe that was translated in the States about how
link |
to build dynamite.
link |
Because his idea was, all right, you have this oppressive government, this oppressive
link |
police force that use batons and bolts against us.
link |
The only way for us as the working class to level the playing field is through dynamite
link |
and here's how you build it.
link |
So the question is, all right, is this something that could be allowed to be legal now that
link |
you're allowing the layman to, in his own house, build bombs?
link |
So Johann Most, basically, they had a big parting of ways because when Alexander Berkman
link |
tried to assassinate Frick, Johann said, no, no, no, this is not something I'm for.
link |
And in fact, they thought with this assassination, this failed assassination, this would be the
link |
thing that's fired off the revolution because you had the strike, the Pinkertons involved,
link |
Pinkertons getting killed, strikers are getting killed.
link |
This is what Marx predicted, they're gonna light the spark and everything's gonna come
link |
He ends up going to jail for 13 years instead, Alexander Berkman does.
link |
And then Goldman and Berkman had a big issue because when Leon Salgas killed McKinley
link |
in 1901, it was really, it's kind of humorous in retrospect.
link |
He gets arrested and they're like, why'd you kill the president?
link |
He goes, I was radicalized by Emma Goldman and she's like, oh, damn it, she's on the
link |
I don't even know this guy.
link |
And she made the point about like, why is it worse than the president being killed and
link |
And you would think if you're against capitalism, against the ruling class, this would be your
link |
But Berkman, who went to jail, who tried to assassinate someone, he had said, McKinley,
link |
this is your villain?
link |
He's just a party hack.
link |
He's like a symptom of the times, this is foolish.
link |
And Goldman disagreed with him.
link |
He thought it wasn't necessarily justified, but it may have done something that was defensible.
link |
So the three of them, you know, had their differences on the use of violence.
link |
And in fact, when she came back from Russia and was denouncing it in her book, My Disillusionment
link |
in Russia, My First Disillusionment in Russia, the last chapter she goes, look, I'm not saying
link |
I'm against violence.
link |
When there's the revolution comes, we're going to have to use force.
link |
She goes, but it's not the force of the state against the working class, against the masses.
link |
This is exactly what we're opposed to.
link |
This is a complete obscenity to our principles.
link |
So that was interesting.
link |
The fact that she was a, her periodical Mother Earth was a clearinghouse for many prominent,
link |
you know, ideas of the day that weren't anarchist, but were certainly radical.
link |
So she was a bit, and also she was like tiny, she was like 5.1.
link |
So to have this little woman who was so feisty and...
link |
Talk back to Lenin.
link |
Talk back to Lenin.
link |
She took on Lenin, Woodrow Wilson, J. Edgar Hoover was the one who deported her.
link |
Someone who just...
link |
And the thing is, you have to be careful because I think just like war, it's very easy to glamorize
link |
violence and to regard it as something admirable or heroic, like you're fighting for the cause.
link |
But if you take it out of the romanticism, you're like, you're killing someone who had
link |
You are, you know, killing someone with a family.
link |
You're making your, if you're going to shoot someone, they're probably going to retaliate
link |
Violence sings its own song and this is a very dangerous road you're going down.
link |
So you really need to be careful about what you're preaching here.
link |
And you know, she kind of had this mixed feelings about it, but that is certainly not Emma Goldman
link |
Emma Goldman her best was about the ultimate freedom of the individual, of caring about
link |
people who are desperately poor, who despised the corporate idea that we all had to be made
link |
into cookie cutters and be interchangeable and all have to start work at the same time.
link |
And basically our entire lives slave for corporation that have nothing to show for it while they
link |
get wealthy and you have no opportunity for either productive work or creative work.
link |
So that I think the valorization of kind of the lowest of the low is something I find
link |
There's a quote of hers, which I think even for those of us who are, you know, for property
link |
rights is left anarchism at its best, but she goes, go and ask for work.
link |
If they don't give you work, ask for bread.
link |
If they don't give you bread, take bread.
link |
So the idea that like, if you're that poor and you're honestly trying to work and work
link |
isn't available and you steal food to keep alive, that you shouldn't feel guilt about
link |
I don't know that I would disagree with that.
link |
I think that there's something to be said at that point where it's just like, you know,
link |
if property rights come between that and mass starvation, it's going to be very hard for
link |
anyone to make the case for property rights.
link |
Now, my argument is when you have free enterprise, food becomes so plentiful that now obesity
link |
But at the time she did not have, of course, have that data to access.
link |
Is there somebody you left out from the book that you thought about leaving in like some
link |
interesting figures?
link |
Yeah, there's a couple.
link |
So Chomsky would have been one, of course, because he's probably one of the biggest anarchist
link |
thinkers in contemporary times.
link |
I was on the fence about Herbert Spencer because he's not an anarchist.
link |
Chris Williamson's reading the chapter for the book.
link |
He coined the term Survival of the Fittest and the chapter is called The Right to Ignore
link |
the State from his book, Social Statics.
link |
It was deleted from later editions, but people found it and reprinted it.
link |
And Randolph Bourne, he was an early progressive.
link |
He was the only one or one of the very few fighting against entering the Great War.
link |
And he had an essay called War is the Health of the State, which is basically about how
link |
states love war because it gives them an excuse to increase their power.
link |
And it's very hard to argue against increasing state power in a time of war.
link |
But since he was not himself an anarchist and there was plenty antiwar in there already,
link |
I didn't include him, but those would be the ones.
link |
Is there some people that you think the public would be surprised to learn that they are
link |
at least in part anarchists?
link |
Like I saw that Howard Zinn is supposedly an anarchist.
link |
I mean, is there, like, just like Tolstoy is an anarchist.
link |
Is there some people like that that you think in our modern life that would be surprised
link |
to learn they're anarchists?
link |
I can't think of any off the top of my head.
link |
I mean, you could say Carl Hess, who was like Barry Goldwater's speechwriter from the 1964
link |
campaign, but he's hardly a household name.
link |
I mean, I think a lot of people would not ascribe to that term, but are certainly informed
link |
with this complete distrust of all authority.
link |
Murray Rothbard had an essay, if I didn't include anatomy of the state, I was going
link |
to include this one.
link |
It's much, much shorter.
link |
And his question was, who are our allies and who are our enemies?
link |
And the point he made is there's lots of people who would call themselves anarchists who are
link |
of little use, whereas someone who is still like a minarchist or for government, but genuinely
link |
hates the question Rothbard had is if there's a button and you could press that you would
link |
end the state, would you press it so fast your finger would get a blister?
link |
Those are allies, even if they're, you know, somewhat of a minarchist.
link |
So I think that is kind of a better lens of looking at it.
link |
And I don't think anyone needs to really ascribe to anarchism as a whole ideology in so far
link |
as you're seeing right now, many people in certain fringe elements are just essentially
link |
or are decreasingly fringe and increasing mainstream elements are realizing that this
link |
idea that whatever the state does is somehow morally binding or legitimate is something
link |
that at least bears strong questioning.
link |
And I mean, I guess there's a lot of groups like the libertarians, for example, have some
link |
I mean, I think that's the beginning of the ways of government.
link |
And also, I think what I love, I mean, if there's one issue where I would want people
link |
to have this kind of analysis, it is war.
link |
And it is like, okay, are you really sure?
link |
Because this is 100% going to result in a lot of people being killed, a lot of people
link |
being traumatized, a lot of people who are never going to recover, children, innocent
link |
Are you really sure this is the right thing to do?
link |
And I think a lot of times if the answer is, well, it's the profitable thing to do.
link |
And that is, I think, again, government at its absolute most venal and worst.
link |
You Michael Malice in many ways are a New Yorker.
link |
I'll give you one example.
link |
I don't know where Austin is on the map.
link |
But does it even matter?
link |
It doesn't matter.
link |
But nevertheless, you've decided to move to Austin.
link |
Why do you think you're moving to Austin, or why do you moving both to Austin and away
link |
This was one of the both, I hate it when people talk like this, but I'm gonna do it anyway.
link |
This was one of the hardest and easiest decisions of my life.
link |
It was hard because I've lived in New York since I was two, other than college.
link |
It's the only home I've known.
link |
I know it intimately.
link |
I know all the cool spots.
link |
I love it with every fiber of my being or I did.
link |
It was very much, you know, ingrained in my personality, my outlook about what cities
link |
can be and can't be and should be and shouldn't be.
link |
Deciding to move was not done.
link |
But when you see your crew, your chosen family, one by one whittling away, it's not easy.
link |
There's just a couple of us left in New York.
link |
And I don't see any mechanism by which New York is going to improve.
link |
Things are getting much worse all the time.
link |
It's just completely outrageous.
link |
Here I would have a huge crew.
link |
I didn't realize how much cheaper real estate is than in New York.
link |
This is another way.
link |
So New Yorkers are the most provincial people on earth who are completely oblivious to the
link |
rest of the country.
link |
So for a long time, the argument was New York versus LA, right, for certain types of people.
link |
And they would say LA is cheaper in terms of rent.
link |
So in New York, let's suppose the rent is a thousand, LA was 700, but you have to get
link |
I'm like, this is kind of a wash.
link |
So I assumed Austin would be like 80% of New York prices.
link |
And I'm looking at these houses and for like 700,000, you could get a house here that would
link |
cost like 3.5 million in New York.
link |
And you could have a gun.
link |
And it's just like, I could have a yard and I could have a dog and I could have a three
link |
bedroom and I could have, you know, aquariums and my weird plants.
link |
So to have all that, and it's just to have, I am very, very lucky that I have such a supportive
link |
And they were also very smart because they sat me down and they said, whatever excuse
link |
you have not to move here, we are going to make sure that doesn't count.
link |
So my buddy Matt said, because I have a huge library, he goes, I will go to your house
link |
and I will pack every single book you own myself so you can get that as an excuse the
link |
I don't know how to drive and you do this, she's like, we're going to take driving lessons
link |
There goes that excuse.
link |
How do I find an apartment?
link |
They're like, we'll go to with the realtor and we'll take pictures for you.
link |
We'll report back.
link |
You can trust our judgment.
link |
And I'm like, that's great.
link |
That sounds like fun shopping for houses that have to buy them.
link |
Then Matt just yesterday had the idea goes, come here, rent a furnished apartment for
link |
You don't have the pressure of buying.
link |
And it's just, it's going to be an easy transition.
link |
The rent's not going to be anything compared to New York.
link |
I'm like, these are all very valid things.
link |
Lots of other people.
link |
Yeah, that's what this is.
link |
I made sure that's renting month to month.
link |
Oh, this is rental.
link |
Oh, you didn't realize this.
link |
I thought you bought this.
link |
I thought you bought it.
link |
Well, I really value freedom.
link |
Who are you talking to?
link |
I've heard of this thing, freedom, it's really great.
link |
But not everybody in the implementation of freedom is different for everybody.
link |
I don't want to make a statement about others.
link |
I'll just speak for myself.
link |
I think when you buy a house, that is not just a wise financial decision or all those
link |
kinds of reasons that people have, investment, all those kinds of things.
link |
I think it's also a hit on your freedom because the positive way to frame that is you make
link |
You have a deep connection to it.
link |
But the negative way to frame it is you're now a little bit stuck there.
link |
And you may stay there way longer than you should when much better opportunities for
link |
There's stages in life when you're not sure exactly what the future will hold.
link |
I would argue that's very often the case, basically at every stage in life.
link |
I just want to make sure I maximize the freedom to embrace the most ambitious, the craziest,
link |
the wildest, the most beautiful opportunities that come by.
link |
You've actually brought this up too, because I said I really enjoyed the conversation with
link |
you and Yaron, talking to you and somebody else, and I think you make a really significant
link |
You've said this before, but it really is true and it stands in contrast to other folks
link |
who are also good conversation.
link |
You really make an effort for that person to meet the person.
link |
You made me realize it's kind of an art form, but it's also just, it's a thing worth doing
link |
of putting in that effort and that leap of humanity to reach the, whether you're talking
link |
to Dave Rubin or Alex Jones or Joe or me, just those are different human beings and
link |
they're taking that leap.
link |
I mean, do you have, how do you think about that?
link |
I'm a huge introvert as you are, I think.
link |
I feel very, very, very lucky that I get to get on a mic and run my mouth and for some
link |
people, for some reason, people like this.
link |
So I know what it's like to have a good convo and I know what it's like to have a bad convo.
link |
So before I'll do a show, I will have like some things I would want to talk about.
link |
And then I'll think about how to say them in an engaging way.
link |
So I do my homework in that regard.
link |
I'm also very good at, or I pride myself at taking people who are cerebral or intellectual
link |
and making them a little bit silly, but also making them feel safe to be silly because
link |
I'm not going to be making a buffoon of them that we're having fun as opposed to disrespecting
link |
I think we all saw that with Yaron, who's very cerebral, very serious, but we were all
link |
cracking jokes and he was having a good time and he knew even if I'm making fun of him
link |
to his face, it is coming from a place of kindness and he's in on the joke and we're
link |
That is something I try to do as much as possible.
link |
I had an episode of my show a couple of weeks ago and someone who's been a friend of mine
link |
for a long time and someone I admire a lot, Elizabeth Spires, she was the founding member
link |
of, founding editor of Gawker, she's worked for the Observer for Jared Kushner, her resume
link |
second to none and she was on my show and she was talking, her politics are pretty straightforward
link |
like corporate journalist, blue pilled politics and my audience was very upset that I wasn't
link |
pushing back or whatever.
link |
I'm like, my job, if someone is coming to a place where the audience is at least going
link |
to be somewhat hostile, is not to make her have negative consequences for doing something
link |
that she didn't need to do.
link |
My job is to make sure that the experience is a positive one for her as the host.
link |
So when I'm the guest, I always feel that my job is to make the host look good and make
link |
the host not feel like it's work and the audience really likes that because instead of it being
link |
an interview or intense, it is a conversation, nine of us know what's going to happen and
link |
so this is something I think about a fair amount and I try to apply and insofar as it's
link |
successful, I'm delighted and there's times when it's not successful and that's a shame
link |
but all we could do is do our best.
link |
Yeah, I really enjoyed that conversation with her.
link |
I was surprised by the dislikes and all that kind of stuff.
link |
Well, one of the things I always talk about is I don't care what my friends politics are.
link |
I care about if I'm having a bad day, can I call them up and ask for advice and Elizabeth
link |
has been there for me in the past and then when I do it on a camera in front of mics,
link |
people freaking out.
link |
I'm like, I'm practicing what I preach.
link |
My, the relationships are more important than someone's political views and it's not hypocrisy
link |
at all to demonstrate that and not to push back.
link |
And there was great humor there.
link |
You're both a bit of trolls in very different ways but nevertheless, that connection, the
link |
humor and the mutual respect and love that was all there, yeah, it's just fascinating.
link |
You've talked to Alex Jones a couple days ago.
link |
I haven't seen him many times before but you've had him on your podcast.
link |
I was kind of surprised that he mentioned that human animal hybrids was like the number,
link |
the main conspiracy that people should look into to open their eyes to the, you know,
link |
to all this, to the globalists, to all the conspiracies that are out there.
link |
Was that surprising to you?
link |
No, because I came in there with questions and I was very focused on corralling him and
link |
having it be like kind of a coherent intellectual conversation.
link |
That was a really, really good, it was only an hour but it was a very good conversation.
link |
I, the response was overwhelmingly positive and I'm like, all right, I'm in a unique position
link |
because Alex, I met Alex, well, that's not true, but I was on Alex, with Alex on Tim
link |
Pool a couple of times.
link |
It was mayhem, it was anarchy and I'm like, all right, let me get.
link |
But the thing is what people enjoyed is I was the one who was basically able to translate
link |
He's obviously very performative and a lot of times Alex will say things that are not
link |
really particularly controversial, but he'll say them in such a way that it sounds crazier
link |
You know, I think Joe's made this observation as well.
link |
So what I wanted to have him on my show is, all right, let's go through all these conspiracies
link |
which have validity, which don't.
link |
And I knew if I asked him, because he's got a lot of historical knowledge, even if you
link |
think of a lot of it's nonsensical, let's sort out the wheat from the chaff, you know,
link |
because everyone has someone crazy in them.
link |
I have this expression, you take one red pill, not the whole bottle, you take the whole bottle
link |
of red pills, you assume literally everything in the media is a lie, that's just not a coherent
link |
Is the weather a lie when they tell you that temperature is going to be wrong tomorrow?
link |
So that was fun to watch him go through that.
link |
And he felt bad because he felt incorrectly, in my opinion, that he was needlessly aggressive
link |
and disrespectful toward me on Tim.
link |
I didn't feel disrespected at all.
link |
It got heated, but I didn't take it personally.
link |
People have heated debates all the time.
link |
So I think he promised me he wouldn't interrupt and would be deferential, but that because
link |
he promised to be on his best behavior, that gave me an opportunity to address him seriously
link |
and not to bring the clown aspect out of him, which is easy to caricature him.
link |
My friend Ethan Suppley, who I'm sure people know, played basically a character based on
link |
him in The Hunt, because Alex is kind of this cartoon archetype.
link |
So it was really fun to get another side of him.
link |
And also, it's just fun being on his show, just him being bombastic and just trying to
link |
be the calm voice of reason.
link |
And for once, the trickster was Apollo.
link |
Well, I like this thing he said before.
link |
And that's what makes me the most interested in Alex is the Nietzsche quote about gazing
link |
I think he said on your show that he has become the abyss or something like that.
link |
I think that makes him fascinating that when you really take conspiracy theories seriously,
link |
the kind of effect it has on your mind.
link |
That to me is fascinating.
link |
Well, can I say one thing, that term conspiracy theory?
link |
If you ask any layman, look, it's like this, you say, do you like puppies?
link |
Do you like baby dogs?
link |
Oh, they're the best, right?
link |
People, the human mind is capable of doing this.
link |
So if you ask people, do you think extremely powerful people often get together and manipulate
link |
data or rules in order to further their power and control and maintain it?
link |
I think 90 plus percent of people would be like, of course.
link |
Then you say, oh, so you believe in conspiracy theories.
link |
Oh no, that's for crazy people.
link |
Those concepts are identical.
link |
Now that term is used for people who are like, all right, there's conspiracies in government
link |
to experiment on people like Tuskegee.
link |
This is not in dispute.
link |
The CIA has unsealed things, Operation Mockingbird, so on and so forth.
link |
And at the same time, conspiracy theory applies to people who say 9 11 never happened and
link |
those are holograms.
link |
Now it's the same word for both, but these are not at all equal truth claims and they
link |
do not at all have equal evidence to them.
link |
But it's very useful for powerful people to have that term in the zeitgeist because then
link |
I don't have to explain or defend.
link |
It's like, only lunatics are going to look further on this.
link |
Do you really want to be a lunatic kid?
link |
And that takes care of the issue.
link |
Unfortunately the same problem applies, language applies to a lot of other areas.
link |
100%, that's the nature of language, yeah.
link |
It's used not just to communicate, but to obfuscate.
link |
Obviously that could be fixed by coming up with different words to label conspiracy theories
link |
that are much more likely to be true.
link |
Yeah, like power elite analysis is another, is basically conspiracy theory.
link |
This is the black pill versus white pill question with the abyss.
link |
Do you think thinking about these things can destroy the mind, can make you deeply cynical
link |
Yeah, because if you are thinking that you are not aware of, or no one is aware of who's
link |
controlling things and that the level of their control, it gives you the sense of powerlessness
link |
And my counter is the people in charge, one of the reasons I'm an anarchist, are nowhere
link |
near as smart and crafty as you think they are.
link |
And certainly maybe the ones complete in the shadow maybe are, but the ones who are in
link |
the public face most certainly are not, as social media has demonstrated, when you look
link |
at how senators and Harvard professors tweet, these are not, you know, intellects that you're
link |
in awe of, to put it mildly.
link |
So I think that kind of takes the bloom off the rose to a great extent.
link |
You mentioned that you've been doing a lot of amazing things, been truly joyful recently.
link |
But I don't know if you have a bucket list.
link |
Is there items on the bucket list you haven't done yet?
link |
Are you pretty much satisfied and happy, and if you die today, if I murder you, you'll
link |
I could die today.
link |
Is there an item on the bucket list you want to get done?
link |
Deep Sea submersible.
link |
That would be number one on the bucket list.
link |
Because that's where all the most interesting zoology is.
link |
And to be in a place where like virtually no human being has been, and to see these
link |
gods mistakes and their natural environment.
link |
My friend coined that term gods mistakes.
link |
If you look at deep sea creatures, you can imagine god making some animal being like,
link |
oh god, this is hideous, I'll just throw them on the ocean, no one's gonna see this.
link |
So that would be my number one bucket list thing.
link |
I would say go to the White House as a guest would be a bucket list thing.
link |
Russia, go to Russia would be a bucket list thing.
link |
I want to go, these are secondary, like go to Eritrea would be a bucket list thing.
link |
I've got a long list of books I need to write.
link |
That's that's, I don't know if that's really a bucket list per se.
link |
There's not that much, what I'm at a point in my life is once you cross up certain things,
link |
you basically, instead of driving the car, start surfing.
link |
And just amazing thing, I talked to you about this medical thing, you know, before we started.
link |
At a certain point, and I'm sure this happens to you, because your platform is a lot bigger
link |
than mine, all sorts of things start coming your way that you never would have thought
link |
And you're like, this is pretty darn cool.
link |
So to be, and that's happening at an escalating rate.
link |
Like I'm at a point now where I get stopped every day by people.
link |
So that's going to be a weird thing for me to get adjusted to.
link |
Like without exception, everyone who has ever stopped me on the street has been cool.
link |
And it's been a pleasant experience.
link |
There was one exception at an event where someone was genuinely on the spectrum and
link |
they didn't understand like distance and you don't touch people and that, but that's as
link |
So that is something that's going to be weird for me to have to deal with over the next
link |
But you know, it's the price you pay and it's hardly a small price when people come up to
link |
you and say you've made my life better.
link |
But it's just weird when you go and like, like I was at the gym and then someone tweets
link |
like, did I see you at the gym just now?
link |
It's kind of weird.
link |
And I'm sure it's the same for you when you're walking around and you don't think about it,
link |
but people know who you are and you don't know who they are that you're being watched.
link |
Even though it's not malevolent, it's still just, you don't get prepared for that.
link |
Michael, there were, there will be two really big names that wanted to do this podcast.
link |
We'll do this podcast that I considered to do episode 200 with.
link |
But then I realized why the hell talk to somebody famous when I could talk to somebody I love
link |
that nobody knows or cares for.
link |
You just hit a random number generator.
link |
Just, I listed all the Russians I know and who is the easiest to get.
link |
Yeah, who's the most desperate for camera stuff.
link |
He's got a shitty book out, we can talk about that for five minutes.
link |
This garbage cut and paste that he did.
link |
Uh, it turned out okay, I think slightly above average.
link |
Michael, I love you.
link |
You're an incredible human being.
link |
It's an honor that you would talk to me and you'll be my friend.
link |
Thanks so much for doing this.
link |
Uh, the respect that I got, uh, when you asked me to be the guest for the anniversary episode
link |
was similar to the respect when my two friends, Josh and Zoe, they were going to get married
link |
at city hall and they said, we want someone to witness at the Basque.
link |
So it's one thing when people tell you they like you and respect you, which I had growing
link |
It's another thing when they show it.
link |
And this is something that I do not take lightly and I hope no one takes lightly.
link |
And if someone does right by you and shows you respect, going back to kind of taking
link |
out for dinner, thank them, buy them a candy bar, buy them a soda, do something to show
link |
that you don't take it for granted.
link |
Because I think what you and I both want to do is increase human kindness as much as possible.
link |
And I'm going to look at the camera, be kind to yourself, because a lot of you deserve
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael Malice and thank you to Gala
link |
Games, Indeed, BetterHelp and Masterclass.
link |
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
link |
And now let me leave you with some words from Jack Kerouac that perhaps begins to explain
link |
the nature of and the reasons for my friendship with Mr. Michael Malice.
link |
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad
link |
to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say
link |
commonplace thing but burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders
link |
across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes
link |
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.