The following is a conversation between me and Michael Malis.

Michael is an author, anarchist, and simpleton, and I'm proud to call him my friend.

He makes me smile, he makes me think, and he makes me wonder why I sound so sleepy all

the time.

And now, enjoy this conversation with Michael Malis in the Dupagalovic language that I'm

increasingly certain I'll never quite able to get the hang of.

Hello, Comrade.

So, Animal Farm by George Orwell is one of my favorite books.

It's an allegory about, at least I think, about the Soviet Union and the Russian Revolution

of 1917.

So for people who haven't read it, it's animals overthrow the humans and then slowly become

as bad or worse than the humans.

So Comrade, if we lived on this farm, in the book Animal Farm, which animal would you most

rather be?

Would it be the pigs, the horses, the donkey Benjamin, the raven Moses, the humans, Mr.

Mrs. Jones, the dogs, or the sheep?

I'm going to go with the Milton answer, which is better to rule in hell than serve in heaven,

right?

It's better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.

Yeah.

So I would have to go with the pigs.

So I guess I'd be a cop.

At the very top.

So the leader, the main pig, Napoleon, versus like the...

The wallet of the others.

Yeah.

I would say it's not...

It's sure it's an allegory about the Russian Revolution, but I think Orwell's point was

this is broader towards most totalitarian dictatorships.

I mean, it could very easily be reticent indictment of Mussolini or Hitler or many of these others.

I'm a huge George Orwell fan.

One of the things that I think people on the right need to appreciate is the courage of

many of these indisputably left wing voices who were the strongest ones to take on totalitarianism,

totalitarian communism.

And the three I could think off top of my head who are all in my top 10 heroes of all

time are Emma Goldman, Albert Camus, and Orwell being the third.

Something that leftists like to throw in the face of people on the right who constantly

invoke Orwell is that Orwell said, and I don't have the exact quote off top of my head, but

something to the effect of every word I have written should be taken as a defense of democratic

socialism against totalitarianism.

So people like Truman was obviously very hardcore in many ways, anti communist.

We like to parse things out, you're going to laugh into binary fashions that left good,

right bad, or right good, left bad.

But historically speaking, it was just not fall away into these camps as easily as people

would like.

And I think it is important for those of us, it takes a lot more courage to fight the right

from the right or to fight the left from the left, because in a sense, a lot of your countrymen

or your fellow travelers are going to regard you as a traitor to the cause.

So every chance I get, I will sing the praises of these three figures among others who not

all, even if they hadn't done what they had done, just lived just amazing lives that all

of us can learn from and admire and regard as somewhat a role model.

So what was the nature of their opposition to totalitarianism?

Is it basically freedom, the value of freedom?

Let's go through the three of them.

So Emma Goldman, she was an early anarchist figure, we'll talk about her later, I'm sure.

She got deported from the United States with her partner in crime, Alexander Berkman,

literal crime, he tried to assassinate Frick, who was Andrew Carnegie's main man in the

Pittsburgh Steel Mill Strike.

She got deported to the Soviet Union, and they're like, oh, you want socialism because

at the time the anarchists were regarded as socialists, go choke on it.

And she's there, and she was watching in great horror what was going on.

And she actually went to Lenin's office, and she goes, this isn't what we're about.

The revolution is about the individual and free speech, and everyone working together

to further society.

And he told her that free speech is a bourgeois contrivance, and regardless, you can't have

these circumstances in the midst of a revolution.

And when she left the Soviet Union, and she went to Britain, and at the time, before the

1917, there was a lot of discussion among socialist circles about what would the revolution

look like, right?

Would there be the Bakunin anarchist model?

Would there be the Marxist model?

Obviously the Bolsheviks ended up winning, but even then it wasn't obvious because there

was the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.

And what people, you and I know what those words mean, but Bolsheviks were kind of funny

because Bolsheviks means bigger and Mensheviks means smaller.

The Mensheviks had the numbers.

It was sarcastic that they were called Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks were called Bolsheviks.

And Lenin destroyed all his foes in a very merciless way, obviously.

Beforehand, there was the idea that with all these kakamimi ideas, we have to work together.

We don't know what's going to look like for the cause.

Then as soon as he sees power, he's like, yeah, yeah, we're not doing that kind of pluralism

anymore.

This is going to be the right approach.

So she left the Soviet Union, as did Berkman, she wrote a book that they titled My Disillusion

with Russia.

And I remember there's one anecdote, which I'm going to discuss in a forthcoming book,

where she goes to Britain and the British were very red at the time.

They really had something called the Fabian Society, which was the predecessor to the

British Labor Party, which were like, all right, we're going to get rid of liberalism

and have a socialist kind of nation.

And she gave talks and there was this one time where she gave a talk and she started

and there was a standing ovation by the time she was done, you could hear a pin drop because

she dared to look at these people in the face, something they've been fighting for all their

lives and saying, we've been to the future and it works.

And she's like, guys, this is worse than the czar.

People are under house arrest, you're not allowed to have newspapers being shut down

if they have heretical views, so on and so forth.

And she was just even more of a pariah than she had been previously.

So she deserves huge accolades in that regard.

I brought her up and we were talking about with our conversation with Yaron Orwell.

I think you don't need me to explain what he has done and continues to do to use fiction

to demonstrate the horrors of a totalitarian state.

And Camus, who might be my all time, great lighthouse, so to speak, in terms of being

a man of conscience, he joined the Communist Party and for a lot of people in the States,

you hear, oh, you joined the Communist Party, so I need to hear.

So he was the Communist, all you need to know.

He joined the Communist Party because they were the main ones fighting the fascists in

France and other locations.

And he took Nazism, as did many others, of course, very, very, very seriously.

He wasn't some committed communist, but this was just his mechanism to take on, you know,

be part of the underground and Vichy France and so on and so forth.

So he had the quote, which is ascribed to him, which is kind of a misquote.

Howard Zinn is the one who actually said it, that it is a job of thinking people not to

be on the side of the executioners.

And he very much felt, if you read his speech when he won the Nobel Prize, I forget, in

the 50s, where he goes, it's basically the job of writers to keep civilization from destroying

himself.

I don't think I'm ever going to be a man on the level of Camus and what he's accomplished,

but I think that vision of it is the job of writers to be the conscience and to point out,

you know, this is the leftism at its best when, you know, giving voice to the voiceless,

when you have the machine of the state crushing and marginalizing people and they might not

be educated, literate or have any power at all, he's the guy who's like, you are ruining

humans, these humans matter and I'm not going to let you look the other way and act like

you don't know what you're doing.

So in this time, whether we look at the time of fascism or we look at the fictional animal

farm, what's the heroic action then?

So Camus joined the Communist Party, there's a bunch of different heroic actions, some

more heroic than others, not just for the, you know, heroes the wrong word in terms

of like effectiveness.

Sure.

What's the effective action, I guess is what I want to ask.

As a writer, as a thinker, as somebody with a mind, what's the heroic action?

That's a tricky question because a lot of times in the West, heroism is regardless intertwined

with martyrdom, right?

So it's kind of this idea of like you have to speak to, you know, Camus always talked

about let justice be done, though the heavens fall.

This is a common kind of motto among people with conscience and that you have to do the

right thing, even the consequences might not be what you like.

And I think that is a good loose definition of heroism.

So if you meet, I'll give you one example of heroism.

This was on Twitter and I really feel bad that I don't remember the guy's name.

This was the line to Auschwitz, I believe it was, and you know, there's the Nazi guards

keeping everyone along.

And if you were a certain, I think if you were under 12, they killed you or some, there

was some age limit where some kids were killed or some were not, there was some circumstances.

And he asked the mom how old this kid was and she's like, he's 14 and she's like, no,

he's 12.

And she's like, no, he's nice 14.

She goes, he's 12.

And she realized what this Nazi was telling her, even in that circumstance, and it ended

up saving the kid's life.

So I think heroism in this context is defiance and standing true to values of liberalism,

humanism and venerating the sanctity of human life.

I think that, and I think it's also important to pick your battles.

I don't think if, you know, he got that Nazi over there, gotten a bullhorn and said, hey,

this is the rules, blah, blah, blah, blah.

That's not going to help anyone do anything.

So I do think, you know, people a lot of times attack me for my anarchist views.

It's like, oh, you know, would you call the police?

Would you use the roads?

Would you pay your income taxes?

You know, I got an argument with Tim Poole because there was that couple, I think, in

what was that Missouri or Illinois when they had their guns and they were being arrested

and they basically took a plea deal and he said, you should have fought.

I go, it's a lot easier to say you should fight, but we don't know what circumstance

someone is under.

And what these totalitarian regimes did very, very well, as you know, is if you were a target

and they can't get through to you, that's fine, you have a family.

So you can sit there, Lex, and gird your jaw and you can stand up to all the torture.

Cool.

What are we going to do about your wife?

What about your mom?

One thing Stalin did, he made it a law that kids up to 14 and up could get the death penalty

for certain crimes.

So after that, the rule was from the NKVD, if you were interrogating someone, they would

have death warrants for the kid's child on the desk visible.

So I'm interrogating you, asking you to commit to, I'm sorry, to admit to some crime that

you're not committed.

And those piece of paper, it's, you know, Svetlana, she's got a death warrant.

You're going to admit to any crime you want.

So this is something Americans, this is even the case right now in North Korea, which I

know you had Yanmi Park on is something I talk about a lot.

Let's talk about instead of the hypothetical, but this is happening right now on earth.

You can look at the map on Google.

The great leader Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea said class enemies must be

exterminated three generations.

So North, when people talk about individualism versus collectivism, Rick Santorum from Ascender

says the family is the basic unit of society, unit.

North Korea takes that seriously.

The family is punished as a unit.

So if someone does something wrong, three generations have to pay the price and you

often don't know who it is that got you all in trouble.

There's not a trial.

This to Western minds is something almost incomprehensible.

It's a lot easier to be brave when it's just your skin.

There's something when it's, yeah, when it's your child, your loved ones, every man becomes

a coward.

But also what bravery is there for me to write an essay for The Guardian to say I don't vote?

There's no consequences to me, there's no possibility of consequences to me.

This is the wonderful thing about living, excuse me, in a free country.

It would take a lot of courage to be in the Soviet Union and say, I'm not going to vote.

And what would that courage accomplish very little?

So I think heroism in the sense of kind of the suicidal stuff and taking a stance with

no consequence that is a bit overrated.

There is some aspect like the way I think about heroism is something like you said about

the Nazi soldier, which is quietly, privately in your own life, lived the virtues that you

want the rest of the world to live by.

Yes.

So like without writing about it is not as heroic as living it quietly.

I'll give you a great example of this.

I sometimes give talks on networking and I tell the kids, if you know someone's in town

and it's their birthday with nothing to do, take them out.

And I say, I do this for selfish reasons and everyone laughs.

And I go, think about it this way.

The guy who takes people out for their birthday is awesome.

That could be you, like you have that capacity to be that person and you're making that day

feel special.

They're going to remember for a long time what's the cost, dinner, 30 bucks, 25 bucks.

So it's very disturbing to me how often people have opportunities to slightly move the needle

and make things a bit better at almost no cost.

And they just literally don't think in those terms.

And one of the things Camus talked about, he's often described as an existentialist,

which he did not like that term, he regarded himself as an absurdist, is the idea that

we're basically blank canvases.

And this isn't something that is dangerous.

This is enormous opportunity.

And you have the ability to become the kind of man or woman that you admire and want

to be.

You don't have to be, I don't know, George Washington or one of these great heroes of

all time, but everyone out there has the capacity to be a hero to their kids or to be a hero

to maybe some, there's nursing homes and there's old people who are lonely.

I think that you take in a dog that's on its last legs.

These are little things, Terry Shepherd does that a lot on Abraham as a hero.

These are not Terry Shepherd, I'm blanking his name.

These are things that people do that aren't heroic in the sense of Superman, but that

I find admirable extremely and I think are very underrated because these people aren't

championed.

Is this some kind of weird passive aggressive and direct way for you to tell me that I should

take you off for your birthday on Monday?

Is that why you gave that whole speech?

That wasn't it at all.

That was a joke, Michael.

No, it was a failed joke.

Nevertheless.

There was no punchline.

No failure.

We would not have triumph.

Can we stick on the Camus absurdism versus existentialism?

Sure.

What do you think is the difference in your ideas about anarchism too?

It seems like those are somehow intricately connected because existentialism is connected

to freedom and freedom is connected to anarchism.

Sure.

I mean, Sartre was a defender of the Soviet Union.

He said explicitly about things like gulags, like even if it's true, we shouldn't talk

about it.

What people don't appreciate is how human beings can have contradictory ideas in their

minds at the same time.

One would think, okay, someone's a Democrat, they think ABC, therefore they can think DEF.

People that have all sorts of contradictions and it's not at all clear and they'll have

a clean conscience because the human mind is very sophisticated and is capable of doing

this.

Sartre was, you would think, he's this radical individualist, this sense of ultimate freedom,

but he's defending the Soviet Union.

Camus, on the other hand, would probably be, was very much like a social Democrat.

He didn't really talk about what politics should be so much as it shouldn't be.

His essay, Reflections on the Guillotine, is one of the great masterpieces of all time

and attack on the death penalty, not in terms of no one's evil or it's wrong to kill murderers,

but in terms of what does it do for a society?

If you'd have someone who takes a person and locks them in a room and says, in two years,

I'm going to murder you and you lock them for that, this is not someone we'd regard as

moral, we regard this as someone who's a complete monster, but that's what the state does with

the death penalty and he challenges us to think, is this the kind of people we want

to be?

And again, he's saying, I'm not saying killing a murder is wrong.

I'm not saying evil is wrong.

His entire career was dedicated to fighting the concept of evil, but are we the kind of

people who want to be doing these things that in any other context, we regard as torture

or depraved?

So I'm much more of a Camus person than a Sartre person.

Because he was probably against war in that same way.

So I don't have to admit, I don't know much about the political side of Camus.

Well, and I don't think his political side is that interesting or relevant.

What I find, sorry to interrupt you, what I find fascinating about Camus and what I

think about on a daily basis from him is his insistence that you have to live a life based

on conscience, that you have to be accountable to yourself when you put your head on the

belt at the end of the day and ask yourself, did I live a righteous life with integrity

true to my values?

Did I not needlessly cause harm to innocent people?

That kind of mindset, did I, if someone is weak, am I using that as an opportunity to

exploit them or to harm them?

Or do I feel a bit of sympathy or empathy for this person?

Because maybe they didn't have circumstances that were as beneficial as other people had.

Well, how does that fit absurdism where everything is absurd, nothing has meaning, it really

borders on nihilism.

So his philosophy explicitly said is a response to nihilism and a attack on nihilism.

He regrets cynicism as the worst value people can have and I agree with him 100%.

A lot of times people call me cynical online and I push back very, very hard because to

be a, you know, I had this quote in the New Right where I said, I'd rather be naive than

a cynic because a cynic is a hopeless man who projects his hopelessness to the world

at large.

Camus, this is the metaphor I use and I find it very inspirational.

I thought it was in his work, but I guess I thought if it described it to him.

There's two types of people, you imagine you go to a mountainside and you see a blank canvas

on an easel standing in front of this mountainside.

One people be like, why is this blank canvas here, you know, what was this, what's going

on here?

And just be confused, whereas the other type of person will be like, there's a blank canvas

here in this beautiful countryside, what a great opportunity.

I can paint this river, I could paint that bird, I could paint my friends or myself in

the background, infinite choices and this is a gift that I have been given.

And I think that also ties very heavily into what I was, I went to Yeshiva as a kid, which

is Jewish school.

What we were taught incessantly how to look at life is this beautiful gift that God has

given you and that God wants you to be happy.

He wants you to live to the fullest in a moral way.

I remember the first time I went into a church and they were asking questions about the Jewish

concept, the afterlife, they weren't familiar with Jewish thought.

And it took me a second because I didn't really have answers.

And then I remembered what we were taught, which is, let's suppose you're at this banquet,

the best chef on earth and the table's so heavy because you've got steaks and you've

got chicken and you've got sushi and the wine's flowing and you've got your Dr. Pepper and

Mr. Pib and the store brand, everything you want.

And you're looking around at this amazing bounty, right?

And then you turn to this best chef on earth and you're like, oh, so what's for dessert?

I mean, the offensiveness of that is just so insane.

You have this, eat the meal.

I promise you, if I could deliver this meal, the dessert's going to be okay.

So this focus on the afterlife when we've been given this amazing gift on this earth

is a very different mindset from both the Jewish tradition as I've been taught and the

Camus mindset.

And obviously Camus was an atheist, didn't believe in an afterlife, but this concept

that life is meaningless, but that means you have that opportunity to find value, to seek

for truth, to seek for happiness.

And Camus has this quote, it's ascribed to him, it's like a meme.

I've never found the source, so maybe he doesn't really say it, but he says, maybe it's not

about happy endings, maybe it's about the journey.

And I think when you have that mindset, and as you and I, I think you and I have both

found this because neither of us, when we were kids, thought we'd be doing this, right?

But now that we are really fortunate.

Definitely this.

Yeah.

And definitely that.

Yeah.

But now that we're fortunate enough to do this and that we're blessed enough that there's

people who find this of value and interest and we could pay the rent doing this, there's

not a day that goes by where I don't think you and I think this is pretty absurd.

But it's also pretty wonderful and as a consequence of us thriving, it also shows other people

that happiness is possible on this earth.

And I think cynicism is the lie.

It's not just a world view, it's a lie that happiness is not possible on this earth.

Or it's only possible if you sell your soul and you're like a bad person, you screw other

people over.

I reject that in every aspect.

You know, as you said, my birth is coming up.

I've been feeling just a lot of really great things have been happening very, very recently.

So it affects me very heavily emotionally, especially when I see the response it gives

to the kids.

So it's one thing to say, this is what I'm for, but when you can provide proof of concept

that what you've been advocating does result in positive responses, I got a message from

this kid who had tried to kill himself a year ago.

And then he was like, look, I found your work.

I found some other stuff.

And now I realize I'm going to make something of myself.

I was born in a meth house, you know, whatever, 19, 20 years old, I should be in the garbage,

but I'm going to try to be a standup because I have opportunity on this earth.

Even if he fails as a standup, you know, he's still such whatever he does, washing dishes,

there's no shame in that.

Is it so bad to have a crappy job and a girlfriend who you don't really like?

But as compared to the alternative of like, I'm going to kill myself.

This is heaven.

Well, I think there's beauty to be discovered in all of it, in all of those experiences.

Yes.

So, but at the same time, so I often think about, I just recently reread the idiot by

Dostoyevsky.

I often feel like the idiot.

That's why when I say I'm an idiot, I often think about Prince Mishkin, that kind of idiot,

which the world sees you as naive.

I don't think he's naive.

I don't think I'm naive, but I tend to see the good in people and the good in every

moment and the world often is cynical and in fact, especially in what we do, often the

intellectual is supposed to be cynical.

This is very much an urban elite educated mindset where if you write a book about someone

who's let's suppose a drug addict or a prostitute, that has heft and that's valid.

But if you're writing a book about like a love story, you know, two people fall in love

and they're on roller coasters or carousels, that's less legitimate.

I hate that.

I hate that.

I hate that so much because the message it gives to people is you have to choose between

thriving and happiness and silliness and seriousness and depravity.

And I'm not saying a drug addict or a prostitute is depraved, but they're basically their worldviews.

If it's unless it's dark and twisted, it doesn't really count as art.

And I despise that mindset, that subtext.

So the internet and people around me often will call me naive because I don't know.

But the word they want is innocent, don't you think?

It's a better word.

But it's not that innocent.

No, but innocent in that you genuinely in your heart, I know you fairly well at this

point, believe that goodness is possible and that people can, if not be good, at least

be better than they were yesterday.

See, even the word naive or the word innocent presumes that there's not wisdom in that.

Presumes that somehow that's, oh, isn't that beautiful to live that life of a child who

sees the world with these bright eyes and is hopeful about the future, but just wait

until they go up and realize that reality is much harsher than they think.

But that child might be wiser than all of the adults in the room.

And don't you, don't you want to be, if the world is like that, don't you want to be the

guy who takes it on and changes it for the better, right?

So it's like saying, well, you know, cancer is everywhere.

It's inevitable.

Well, don't you want to be the one who says not anymore?

I'm here and I'm going to make that change and I can see it being better than it is now.

So I think you and I have the same analysis of your worldview and I don't think that there

is a good word for it.

So I guess it's this idea of, you know, inherent benevolence might be, you know, maybe wordy,

but I think that's more accurate because, you know, you and I did not have such easy

lives growing up to put it mildly.

You constantly talk about just horrific aspects of life.

So to claim that you kind of don't know that they exist or you sweep on the rug is completely

not accurate to your work and your mindset.

Can we talk about World War II and the Soviet Union?

Sure.

So on Sunday, June 22nd, 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, which was the surprising

invasion of the Soviet Union.

If I could read to you a few lyrics from a song that, for some reason, has stuck throughout

my childhood.

It was a famous song during that time.

On June 22nd, exactly four o clock, Kiev was bombed, we were announced that the war

began.

The song talks about that moment as part of that operation that Kiev was first bombed

and it was announced on June 22nd.

The song says at exactly four o clock that the war has begun.

For some reason, this song haunts me because the exactness of that time and this realization

that at any moment you can have this thing happen to you in your own personal life, maybe

we'll have something like 9 11 happen where everything changes and it's just like haunting

because it makes me think that at any moment something like that could happen that changes

everything and I just think about like normal life going on in Kiev at the time and then

all of a sudden the bombs are dropping and they announced that the war has begun and

you thought you were going to stay out of the war.

This is something that is very intensely emotional for me because you and I are both Russian

Jewish so to know that my grandparents and my great grandma were told that the Nazis

are coming and this was an address rehearsal and that if they get here, which they do,

they did live up is very Western Ukraine that 100% you and all your relatives are going

to be murdered and there's a monument now in Lviv where I'm from about this but I don't

think either of us can imagine what it's like to know, to think that we're about minutes

or whatever hours or there's just the Russian army standing between us and everyone we are

related to are going to be murdered for no reason and what's the closure here, right?

They evacuated a lot of people but they didn't evacuate enough and to know that there is this

force coming to 100% murder you.

This isn't some kind of the TV news being hyperbolic.

They're coming to kill you and if they get you, they will kill you and we all think about

war like, oh, we hope America wins in Iraq but if America got their ass kicked in Vietnam,

it's not really going to affect America in the sense that you're going to have the body

bags and all the kids being killed and that's something I'm not sleeping in the rug but

no one in America thought the Vietnamese are going to come here and kill them, right?

They were secure in their person.

To have that sense of we really need to win because if we don't win, we are 100% if they,

the Russian army doesn't win, we are 100% all going to be slaughtered and often not just

a bullet to the head in insidistic ways is something that to know that people who share

my blood saw and went through is very hard for me to kind of wrap my head around.

And there's no possibility to delude yourself because, I mean, they would, as the song also

talks about, but they would burn the factories.

So it's basically saying, we're in the war now.

This is like, this is your life.

This is our life now.

You know how yesterday you were worried about, like, oh, I misplaced my pen, where is it?

It's like, yeah, this was paradise.

Most of us are going to, our life now is that most of us are going to die and if we want

to prevent all of us from dying, we have to fight.

And we also can't sit down in some kind of weird desert island or plain crash situation

and be like, let's decide between us who's going to be the first to die.

Maybe the Titanic, that's Titanic, right?

They sat down and they're like women and children in the lifeboats.

They had this rational agreement.

You don't have those choices in a war.

So it's something that I, it's just very chilling.

And it's something I don't really have the emotional space to understand or grapple with.

You know, obviously I've been to North Korea, you can see it and so on and so forth.

You and I can't, or anyone listening to this, except for maybe on me and people like that,

you can't imagine what that's like to live it.

We can't, we can't imagine what it's like to live in those situations where it's not

like before Hitler came, everyone's, you know, dancing around and having a great time.

I mean, imagine how what that life is like where your preference to Hitler is starving

and waiting online for hours for bread and to have the secret police and your friend's

attorney you went and your phones are all tapped and your prisoner.

But to you, this is infinitely better than the alternative.

Like these are the choices that, you know, our family had to deal with.

It's something that no matter how much you, it's like a, let me put it in terms of people

to understand, you know what I mean?

It's like your first bad breakup, right?

Like that's a much simpler thing to wrap your head around because it's like, if you've

never had it, you can't really, but when you feel that it's just so intense, but you can't

tell someone what's like, we could sit down for days and hours and have people tell us.

But until it's the totality of your environment and your life and your mindset, I remember

my grandma, she would talk about it like, when you're that hungry, all you're thinking

about is bread.

Because your brain won't let, you know, human beings, you know, we're evolved, we have instincts,

whatever, and the mind is telling you food, food, food, food, food, food.

And that there's kids thinking this and that they're not going to get the food.

And imagine being a parent and your kids watching your kids without food and knowing they're

not going to get the food.

And the fact that this happened in North Korea in the 90s, I met a refugee and he had to

watch his dad starve to death.

And thank you.

And we have no concept of what it's like.

I mean, we kind of, you know, it's just like last night here in Austin, all the places

were closed and I couldn't get my protein powder.

And this is the extent of my suffering when it comes to food, you know.

Or if I couldn't, there was a restaurant that I went to in Brooklyn where for some

of the cocktails reason, they weren't serving sashimi, they only had sushi.

So I had to have the rice and the carbs to live a life where that is the extent of your

food problems as opposed to the choices either Hitler killing you or being hungry 24 seven.

You know, my grandma told this story of how they had a close call.

It was her and her brother and her mom, my great grandma who passed.

And I think there was like either a helicopter overhead or something.

And my great grandma jumped on top of my grandma's brother and not my grandma.

So she basically did a Sophie's choice, my grandma's name is Sophia and chose the brother.

And this is something that she felt, you know, all her life that her mom had chosen her brother

over her.

But these little things that happen, these little kind of a decisions we have to make

in war, there's a book I read called Five Chimneys, I think this woman who was an Auschwitz

survivor.

And what she talked about what people don't appreciate, it's not necessarily the slaughter

and the torture.

It's that there's no rhyme or reason to it.

She talked about how they had a camp just for people from Czechoslovakia and they were

treated better than the Jews.

And then one day they just killed them all, right?

And she's like, I still don't understand why they're giving them food and treating them

well.

And then the next day they're all killed and we will never get answers, you know.

And she's, and things like she talks about how they decided to kill all the kids and

they didn't really, either for some reason, they didn't have the courage to or they wanted

to be cruel.

So instead of shooting them, they just kept walking them in the snow until they all died.

So it's things like this, that the fact that you and I dodged these bullets and that we

can be here and be doing this and, you know, running our mouths for a living, I think about

it all the time.

And it's just very disturbing to know, and I know you know this as well, that there's

lots of places on earth where if people had a choice, they would kill us on site and be

proud of themselves for it.

Yeah.

I don't know what to make of the contrast.

You were talking about the fact that you've been truly happy the last few weeks and months.

Yes.

You know, a lot of moments of happiness and joy, and that joy is built on a history of

human suffering, like in your roots, in your blood, is a lot of people that were tortured

that suffered so that you could have this joy.

And you have both the, you have the responsibility to truly be grateful for that joy.

But it also shows that there's the happy ending, that it does end in a good note, that it does

get infinitely, infinitely better.

And that I think there's a, I don't like you saying there were responsibility, but there

is an opportunity for those of us who did dodge that bullet to give testimony to these

people, and more importantly, to give testimony to the people who are going through this now.

So one of the reasons I talk about North Korea so much, why I wrote Dear Reader, is because

it's very easy, and this is human nature, I'm not condemning people.

I think that's just how people are wired.

When you see an Asian country with Asian people, and things are bad over there, I think in

the West, it's like, oh, Asia, they're all crazy, they're wacky, they eat dogs or so

on and so forth, some weird stereotype, and they think of them as kind of Martians.

So it's important for people who aren't of that kind of ancestry to kind of speak on

behalf of these people, because it's very different how just people just naturally act

when you have a Westerner talking about this, instead of becoming them over there, it becomes,

this could have been us very easily.

I have a friend, Peter, they hand ski great dude, and I was showing him photos when I was

in Pyongyang, and he goes, this looks like a Russian city with Asian people.

It completely disturbed him.

So that was one of the reasons I did go to North Korea, because that was as close as

I would get to see what your family went through, to see what my family went through, and they're

still living under this regime.

And one of the things I fought very hard to do with Dear Reader, which I was successful

in amazingly, and it just, I said, I could die now.

I feel like if you just move the needle a little bit, then you've kind of paid your

due for your time here on this earth to have it change from being a laughing stock.

And I think Team America did a good job.

They made Kim Jong Il into a clown, and they made a joke of it, but you're going from nothing

to jokes.

At least now people are aware of it, that it exists, right?

And then I, and many others, took it from a joke to like, guys, this is really, really,

really bad, and none of us can even appreciate how bad it is.

And I think now there is an understanding, other than a few people who are just looking

at it through a Trump lens and wanting Trump to fail, because Trump's an asshole, and that's

fine, to be like these poor people.

And it's really unfortunate because there's a segment of a Western culture who thinks

that, correctly, often when you're complaining about, or discussing the plight of another

country, that's just your prelude to war and an excuse to invade.

Like the Kurds in Syria, you know, we talked about, if we don't in Syria tomorrow, it's

going to be another genocide, blah, blah.

I'm not saying let's invade North Korea and things like that.

All I'm saying is, you know, thank God that this isn't your life.

I bring this up all the time.

The woman who was my guide when I was there, I'm aware of what she's up to now.

She's still, she's extremely rich by North Korean standards, but she'll never be in a

position to buy medicine.

She'll never be in a position to go on a vacation.

Things that you and I just, you know, whatever, she can't go on the internet.

She can't get an encyclopedia.

She can't better herself as a person other than through what the state allows and meaning

better yourself as a person in service to the state.

So I mean, there's, it's also frustrating because there's only so much that I can do

as an individual.

What's your takeaway about human nature from looking at North Korea and looking at how

the rest of the world is looking at North Korea?

I always, this is a great question.

I think about it fairly often and I always say human beings are animals, right?

When you say someone's an animal, it's like a slur, like he's like a beast.

Animals are capable of enormous kindness, empathy, sympathy, you know, they look out

for one another, groom one another.

There's a thing with apes where they groom each other for parasites and you're, even

if there are no parasites, they pretend there's parasites just to have that kind of bonding.

You see infinite photos online of like cats raising puppies because the puppies mom died,

things like this.

That's part of being an animal.

Part of being an animal is also just the most monstrous cruelty.

Killer whales, you know, there's this big PC move to not call them killer whales and

just call them orcas.

They will murder blue whale pups, calves, excuse me, and play with them and not even

eat them.

So they just murder for the sake of fun.

So there's, and cats, you know, kill birds all the time, things like this.

So it runs the whole gamut.

And I think it's, you know, when you're on and I were on your show, I don't think Lord

the Flies is accurate.

I don't think Hobbes is how reality works when you're in that kind of state.

But I think we've seen countless examples of human beings, especially when human beings

have power over someone who's powerless of allowing themselves to engage in not just

harm, but cruelty, and that is something as Soviet, you and I are very painfully aware

of it.

It's not just about the oppression, which as bad enough as it is, it's that mediocre

person with that little bit of power.

And now they're standing between you and your daughter having medicine and they love it

to make you dance to be like, oh, you need me to get this medicine, make you go through

hoops, because now they feel like for the first time in their life, they're in a position

of strength and power.

I think that is in many ways the more common nature of evil that what Hannah Arendt talks

about the banality of evil, then someone who's like an SS guard, you're shooting someone

in the head.

Like that, I think we could all wrap our heads around to some extent, like, okay, I'm a military.

It's not easy.

I have to execute people pulling a trigger.

You could kind of have this mental disconnect between the finger and the victim.

But like that little day to day stuff, like, are you doing the right thing on a day to

day basis that I think is far more common and far more disturbing aspect in certain senses

of the human psyche?

Yeah, there's something especially disturbing about a weak man given power and just abusing

that power.

There's something about not just weak, but like mediocre at everything it does or less

than mediocre.

A great example of this, which I'm also talking about in the next book is Ceausescu, who was

the dictator of Romania.

The Cold War is still somewhat poorly understood in popular culture, but the different countries

in the second world, the Soviet bloc, some are more liberal than others, some are more

sane than others.

Ceausescu at first was one of the more Western friendly, more of the free ones.

Then he met the great leader Kim Il Sung from North Korea, and he had the idea to impose

a personality cult on Romania, and it's the kind of things like forcing people to breed

because he wanted to make people taller.

I think he made like the biggest building in all of Europe, the people's palace, but

it was just for him, bothers no electricity elsewhere.

But you look at this guy, Stalin's a badass, right?

He was a bank robber.

If you look at photos of him as a kid, he was a hunk, Lenin was clearly intellectual.

These were powerful men with huge egos, huge force of personality.

So you look at this Ceausescu guy, and you could, like for example, on my driver's license,

instead of my address, I'm like in my real address, being like 12345th Avenue, by mistake

it says 12345th Street, right?

So you can imagine him being in the post office and me giving him my ID to get my package

and him being baffled because this says Street, this says Avenue instead of Understand, and

the look on his face, this dullard that you can see how, you know how sometimes I'm going

to connect hers?

Fuck yes.

Yeah.

So if you know like how if you're in the airport and you see someone and you look at them an

adult and you think, okay, this person was born fucked up, just like on site, like something's

wrong with them, how are they traveling alone?

You look at Ceausescu, you look at him, you're like something's not right with this guy.

Not in the sense of like evil, but in the sense that he's a simpleton, right?

And now he's in charge of this whole country and everyone's taught to regard him as one

of the great geniuses of all time.

And it's this, the idea of this mediocre nobody, this guy would have in any other culture

been accomplished nothing or would have had an honest job where he's like, okay, he works

at the mail service and he's bad at it, okay, fine, he's not hurting anyone.

And now as a result of this, he's responsible for mass death, secret police and incarceration.

And you know, one of the greatest things that I've ever seen, which I'm sure many people

have seen as well.

If you go on YouTube, it's his speech and it's the first time the crowd turns and his

head kind of like, because they start booing him, which was unheard of.

And you know, he was shot with his dog faced wife not that long after, it was just a great

moment.

But it's things like this.

I agree with you that mediocre, weak person is now in a position of power over somebody

else and that sense of vindictiveness, like I'm going to feel strong for once in my life,

but it's going to be at your expense.

That I think is, you know, human nature, it's most primal.

And every time I meet a person in this world, you're the first person to get me to cry on

a fucking podcast, fucking the robot gets me to cry.

What the fuck is going on?

Every time I meet a weird person, somebody, to me, heroism is also taking a risk to rebel

against mediocrity, like in the most simplest of ways, like the license address, like taking

a risk to break the little bit of rule that nobody will know about, to take that little

bit of a leap of like that little protest against the bureaucracy.

Like that Nazi guard where he just spoke out, he's like, Hey lady, that's a big one.

Oh, that's a brochure.

I mean, like literally at the line at Starbucks or something like that, like even in the tiniest

of ways, when I see people just like, it's almost like that little like glimmer in their

eye of wink, like we're in this together, this, there's, there's all this conformity

all around us that's at a different time could have been Nazi Germany could have been Stalin

and the Soviet Union, we're in this together, we're going to rebel against that conformity.

But I just, just taking the risk, that little bit of risk against mediocrity.

I don't know.

And that, and then once again, I see this in companies too.

When I see the mediocrity, I see this, I used to work at Google, I see it in Google.

When the companies grow, that mediocrity is overwhelming.

The Peter principle, right?

The Peter principle.

Yeah.

And that is that all of us have the possibility for that glimmer, that risk taking, the leap

of faith or whatever the heck that is, the leap out of the ordinary, out of the conformity,

out of the mediocrity.

So this is where you and I disagree.

I think most, a lot of people are not capable of that.

They're accustomed to it.

I don't know if they're not capable.

No, I understand your position.

I'm disagreeing with it.

I'm saying I do not think they're capable.

I think a lot of people effectively don't have souls.

They do not have a conscience in this sense where they're going to look at an issue, bring

their critical thinking and say, all right, I am going to do the right thing, although

I'm taking a risk.

I don't think thinking is involved or is it just taking that leap?

There's something about that basic human spirit.

Forget the thinking part.

It's just saying like, I'll take that risk, taking that adventure, the same thing that

got people to explore the seas, you know, throughout human civilization, explore land,

explore the oceans, like that exploration, like we've done stuff this way all this time.

I'm going to take a leap.

And that comes out of nowhere, seemingly.

But those people are the heroes, but I don't think that's universal.

I'm going to use a very gauche example.

There was a show called Scare Tactics, which was basically a candid camera, but they would

scare people.

They'd have vampires, whatever, a hidden camera in people's reactions.

But sometimes the prank didn't work out like they expected.

So there was one where they were hiring the people who were the marks, you know, the contestants,

so to speak, who hired to be a security guard.

And you have to watch this factory overnight and you get paid.

And what the setup was, some people were breaking out of the factory in the middle of the night,

like in rags, and they were saying they were keeping us prisoner here, blah, blah, blah,

and just watched the person reaction to this.

And there was one security guard where he basically forced them back into the building,

and they're like, they're working us 24 seven, we're getting beaten.

He's like, I'm here to do a job, get back in there.

And you watch this, and it never even enters his head to be like, something's wrong here.

He was given his orders, he's following his orders.

And to me, that is not uncommon.

And that person, although they look like you and I, there's something essentially human

missing with them.

Now, very quickly, the reaction is, well, it's one step from there to Nazism.

I don't think it's something that, I'm not saying this person should be killed, but I'm

just saying to expect that every human being has the capacity to have that defiance, especially

at a cost of their own life, that I think is not realistic.

And I, but at the same time, I feel like an octopus on the eighth hand, it is those few

of us, or if you want to include me in this, who do make these tiny little protests, who

look the other way when someone is hungry, who's stealing food from the supermarket, right?

It's like, all right, I'm going to pretend I didn't see anything.

That, those little elements of heroism are what move humanity forward and demonstrate

the validity of the human experience, whereas everyone else is kind of like scenery.

I think almost everybody in the world can derive deep meaning and pleasure from having

done those courageous acts.

And I also think they have the capacity to do them, to discover that meaning and happiness.

So you're the cynic, then why aren't they doing it?

They haven't gotten a chance to, like I've never tried LSD or DMT, you haven't gotten

a chance to try this amazing journey, which is taking the risk and rebellience.

Because as you just said, two minutes ago, everyone has that chance every day to do the

right thing.

We have the chance to do a lot of things and we don't realize, there's a lot of stuff

right in front of our nose that we don't realize, because you have to kind of wake up to it.

Sometimes you need the catalyst.

There needs to be some kind of thing that happens that wakes you up.

The fact that most people don't take the small acts of rebellion doesn't mean they don't

have the capacity to both do so and to derive a lot of meaning from it.

Then it's a discussion about how to create societies that get more and more people to

be free actors and free thinkers.

That's the question.

That probably leads us into a discussion of anarchism and so on.

But I just think we are very young as a species.

We're trying to figure out how to get ourselves to first be collaborative, but at the same

time be free spirits.

I think both of those are within human nature for most of us.

I think another big concern is that there's enormous disincentives, and this is Michael

Malis speaking, for human beings to be kind and for tenderness.

I think especially when you're young, when you're immature, a lot of times someone will

reach out to you with kindness or vulnerability, and you think it's funny to dunk the head

on the water in a pool or something like that.

When you get older, there's this one example of this.

This was in the 90s, and there was a woman, she became a stripper or something like that

or whatever it was, but she had this amazing body.

She was just gorgeous.

The show was, she was talking about how when she was in high school, she was bullied a lot,

and that there was this football player, he messed with her every single day, and at one

day she even threw pickles in her hair, and her hair smelled like pickles, and it was

laughing at her.

This really screwed her up, up to that show, and they took her backstage, and they brought

out the football player.

Now, he's a dad and a regular dude, and he's like, do you know why you're here?

He's like, no.

They're like, oh, what were you like in high school?

I was kind of a jock bully, whatever.

They brought her out, and he didn't even remember her really, and she just starts crying about

the pickles and whatever, and there's something that affected her for 20 years, and I've never

seen a clear example of someone who wanted to kill themselves in this guy.

The guilt on his face, and he's looking at her, and he's desperate to be like, what can

I do to take your pain away, to make it better?

He was just crippled by it, because he knew there's nothing he could do.

He knew he 100% did the wrong thing.

He knew he did the wrong thing unthinkingly.

You can imagine, I got to screw over this lady to feed my family, that's fine.

At the time, it meant nothing to him, so of course, he didn't remember, and he was just

paralyzed by this sense of crippling guilt.

One of the reasons I always tried to do the right thing isn't because I'm an inherently

good person, which I do not think I am.

I don't think anyone is inherently good, but because I will feel guilty about it for a

very, very long time, because if you do the wrong thing, this is a very Camus idea, if

you do the wrong thing to a good person, that's really, really bad, because what kind of person

are you?

In the same way that everyone can be that guy who takes someone out for their birthday,

everyone has that ability for someone who did the wrong thing to someone who is a normal

person, and do you want to be that guy as well?

My friend, Bitstein, he's a Bitcoin person.

My biography, Ego and Hubris, is $500 now in eBay, it's hard to find, came out in 2006.

He had told me that you can get it on Torrent, it's downloadable, and I'm like, oh, I thought

if you were my friend, you'd want to buy it, at the time, it was not $500, I assure you.

He goes, I did buy it, I'm just telling you that you could also get it for free, this

information that you might want to use.

I'm like, I snapped at this kid who was doing right by me, and I felt, it just stuck in

my head, I'm like, you're an ass.

And then years later, I apologize, he didn't have no memory of this at all, and I'm glad

to be able to reiterate the apology again.

But a lot of times I'm extremely aggressive on Twitter and in other venues, I always try

to, and maybe I fail, and that's my moral failing, always do it as a counterattack.

If you're going to start going personal, if you're going to start being aggressive against

an individual, I'm not going to necessarily hold back when I reciprocate.

And it's something that is very common on social media, but I don't think it is normal.

Just because a lot of, this is what you were talking about, the quiet little rebellion,

just because everyone else around you thinks it's okay to just go up to people and attack

them in the most personal ways, impromptu, because of their views, really just take a

step back and realize what you're engaging with.

Now, if that's the fight they want, then my Soviet cruelty can come out, and that's kind

of why I don't drink, because I do enjoy it.

But at the same time, be aware of what you're doing.

And again, this goes back to Camus's sense that the conscience really is what makes us

human beings.

But that's the thing we're saying, I don't think most people think in terms of conscience.

They don't think it, we are taught, this is that creeping cynicism, that, oh, grow up

when you're an adult, you have to make sacrifices, blah, blah, blah.

And even if I buy that for a second, which I don't.

But if I have to make sacrifices sometimes, that doesn't mean it's okay for me to make

a sacrifice of my values in this moment.

If I have to maybe be at work and my boss is a jerk to me and calls me names, I have

to be humiliated, but I got to put food on the plate, that doesn't mean it's okay later

if I'm at a party and I'm just extremely offensive to someone for no reason.

My own flavor of a little bit of rebellion, sometimes I use the number two, is you're

very witty on Twitter.

And Twitter likes mockery and wit.

And on the counter attack is Twitter loves that, somebody who's skilled at it.

My own flavor of a bit of rebellion is to say things very simply, bordering on cliche

with authenticity and like genuinely meaning the words I say, but knowing that those words

would be are easy to attack.

And that sometimes those attacks can hurt because people would just mock me.

People don't like earnestness because they've been taught to be too cool for school.

So there's this pressure for me to be sound way more sophisticated.

Use bigger words, sometimes throw in a criticism of institutions or something like that, like

almost as if I have a deep wisdom about the way the world is broken.

But when you speak very simply about beautiful things in life, it's very easy to sound like

you don't know what the hell you're talking about.

And I kind of, I stick by that, I don't know where that's going to end up, but it's like

the idiot from the stadesky.

It feels like that's the right, that's the right thing, even if it hurts when I'm attacked

for it.

And I do something similar sometimes, which is I'll have some innocuous comment about

like bubble gum.

I mean, just it's not to be in political.

And a lot of times people will respond to this paragraph of just invective about like

blah, blah, blah, and then this and you say this and you're an ass and just really trying

to get at me.

And what I, in those situations, they're very specific circumstances.

I will respond and I mean it every single time.

I will say I wish your parents had been kinder to you or your mom or your dad, because if

someone is some, even if I'm some idiot on Twitter, right, if we just talk about bubble

gum and this is your, I'm not talking about politics where I can see how people get emotional,

COVID, my grandma died, now you're talking about her.

And you, I realize this isn't about me.

Like I'm someone you've never met, making some inane point about nothing and you're getting

agitated about this.

It's clearly something else that's going on here and someone taught you, someone had to

teach you that this is how to respond in this kind of very kind of harsh way.

And a lot of times they'll, you know, they won't say anything or get deleted.

And I hope every single time there's no asterisk here that they take a second and they realize

that the way that they were talked to growing up was not acceptable, that they don't have

to carry this forward and that they don't have to be kind to me, I'm nobody of them.

But take a second and ask if this is the kind of mindset you want to be your norm as opposed

to a weapon you pull out of your pocket sometimes where it's warranted or even when it's not

warranted.

I think there's a lot of those people out there, you know, and we forget how, you know,

how hard it is for a lot of people to grow up, how they're trained from their parents

or the single parent, that the only way they're going to get attention is by acting out, that

when they do good things, it doesn't get comment.

But if they do bad things, they got to smack upside their head.

That I think is far more common than we realize.

And that's such a, it's not even, it's not hitting the kid that's going to last.

The pain is going to give five seconds.

But when you're training this child, helpless child is something that's really, really bad.

I don't know if it always can be mapped to that.

I always wonder about them, like what their motivations are.

And I just kind of, like, whenever I think about them, I think only positively.

And I don't even think about the childhood thing.

I think, I don't know, I kind of imagine that all of us can go through that stage where

we enjoy the derision of others.

We go through stages of being.

I enjoy the derision of others, but it has to be, you know, Billy, I'd have that quote

of like, I like it when people are mean to me because it's not pretending to be nice.

But like, what's the worst thing something to say to about you?

You're not, what harm are you doing?

Maybe your podcast is garbage and the people are, the conversations suck and the people

are losers.

Okay.

No, the main thing I would say is I'm way more popular than I deserve to be.

What does deserve mean?

The reality is there's people out there that just enjoy hating on others.

And I don't, I don't fault them for it.

Like I don't even think of them as haters.

I think of them as just people that in this particular part of their life are enjoying

this activity of deriding others on the internet.

I'm not sure what to do with that.

I just don't want to, I don't want to allow myself to think badly of them, I guess is the

thing.

I'm the one saying don't think badly of them.

I'm saying that, I don't think they're inherently bad people.

I think that their thinking is screwed and that I'm, I'm, I'm steelmanning them.

I'm saying, let's assume everything you're saying about Lex is true.

This is an opportunity for you to outdo Lex.

Like it's,

No, but are you saying they should stop hating because I'm saying like, maybe they shouldn't

just keep

I don't believe in should, right?

I'm an anarchist, but I'm saying is like, if this is your belief about Lex, you know

what it is?

I made this comment in my book, the new right when people make fun of Andy Warhol and they're

like, Oh my God, he painted a soup can and now he became a millionaire.

I could do this.

Well, why don't you?

So basically, if I go up to you with a check and I say, I will give you a million dollars,

you could see the check, you got to paint a soup can, what am I waiting for?

So clearly there's a disconnect in their thinking between what they're perceiving and the reality

because if it was as simple or as maybe not simple, but as, as, as possible for them as

they perceive it to be, why are they leaving comments instead of outdoing you?

How great would it be for them to have your bigger audience and drive you into the ground?

I don't know how that would work because it's not the NBA, but

No, but you want to point out, you do this too on Twitter.

You want to point out the hypocrisy, the fraudulence of others, right?

Sure.

But what are you, you're not claiming anything other than this is the following is the conversation

between me and, and, and Michiki or whatever his name is, right?

I got the voice down, dude.

I got it down.

I've been walking out of my house doing my Lex impression.

I've been leaking motor oil everywhere.

Yeah, but yeah, I don't know.

I, I don't know.

I don't know what to make of it because I think there's, there's a more general statement

to be made.

Like I see Twitter this way too.

When I read a tweet, I try to read it with like the best possible interpretation, meaning

like what is the wisdom in this tweet?

Sure.

It goes to what I think a large number of people, not a large number, but some fraction

tried to see what is the worst possible interpretation of this tweet.

And they want to, they, they want to destroy you for that worst interpretation.

Like they want to, um, there's people, I'm already aware of this with me and certainly

with a lot of people, they're waiting for me to fail.

They want me to be like this guy talks about love all the time.

They want me to be some dark, like, uh, they want you to be in pain, yeah.

They want you to be in pain because they don't, I'll tell you exactly why.

Because this is why I'm so for being white pilled and being for hope.

Because if you are black pilled, meaning if you think it's pointless, we're all done.

You're just wasting your breath.

If you have any counter examples to this thesis, if there's even a little bit of hope, your

entire hypothesis falls through, right?

So if it's, it's kind of how like you have all these stories of people who are like painting

swastikas who aren't Nazis, but just to show that, oh, there's all this Nazism.

So I'm going to, you know, kind of, uh, force the conclusion.

So for them, when they see you thriving, you are as a mediocre person with a crappy show,

but you're demonstrating that people can succeed.

This bothers them.

So you are, anyone can succeed.

That bothers them.

Yeah.

Cause that, why haven't they, so now you're a counter to their worldview and that is going

to cause anxiety when you have data that contradicts other data in your, in your worldview.

This is the, in your mindset, this is a big issue for them.

Yeah.

So anyone listening to this, they're annoyed by the look of my face.

Remember that you could probably do a better than me and you should.

But also what would you failing look like?

Like let's suppose this podcast went from whatever views you had to 100 views in episode.

That's still success.

You are talking to people you like, having conversations about important issues, you're

having good time, they're giving good time.

How is that a failure?

If I have dinner with a friend of mine, there's zero viewers and we enjoy that time.

That is the height of human success.

When you are sharing happiness, joy, joy over love.

So what's the difference between joy and love, Michael Malus?

Uh, I think joy is easier to attain.

It's more common.

You could share it with everyone.

Give me an example of joy.

Like what was the moment of joy for you recently?

I could give you a great example of joy and this is part in the absurdist mindset.

Okay.

I love having a bad meal at a restaurant and I'll give you, you can see why.

You go with your friend.

It takes you 45 minutes to get seated.

Okay.

I'm starving.

Waiters not at paying attention to you.

They bring your water.

It's got a hair in it.

They get the food wrong.

They comes out again.

It's ripe, but it's cold.

At a certain point you're like, okay, I'm hungry.

I'm living an anecdote.

This is something that you, if you were at dinner, we could talk about this for years

because how great is it that the worst thing that's happening to me is I got to wait an

hour for this meal that's going to be cooked wrong, right?

That to me is joy is holding on to that idea that happiness and thriving are possible even

when in the moment it's, everything's going the wrong way.

Doesn't every moment have the capacity to fill you with joy then?

Yes.

So it's both the shitty moments and the good moments.

Yes.

See, that's the way I usually talk about love is like, I love life and because life can

generate everything, the pain, the loss, but also just like simple or complicated bliss.

All of that.

I just love all of that and that because it fills me with a kind of, I guess, joy, but

joy has a connotation that it's supposed to be somehow positive, like you're supposed

to be smiling.

To me, man search for meaning with Victor Frankel, you're in the Holocaust, you're in

a concentration camp, just having a little bit of food that you didn't expect you will

have or even just thinking about food.

What about there's a kid there, you tell him a funny story and you crack him up.

Like you take away this child's pain for like five minutes, that is the height of joy.

So to me, all of life is infinitely full of possibility for joy.

And that's what I mean by love because oftentimes romantic love is what people think about when

they think love, but to me, it's all part of the same thing.

It's almost like love, romantic love or love with a friend, friendship is like, you both

notice each other.

It's like dogs, they look at each other and then they look at the thing they're interested

in.

You both notice each other and that moment of joy.

You share that moment of joy together.

Yeah, like the restaurant.

The restaurant.

Yeah.

If you're both almost without conspiring, notice the absurdity of how shitty this meal

is.

And again, that little glimmer of realization, that's what makes life beautiful.

You mentioned your grandmother in Levov, you were thinking of returning there.

The plans got a little bit delayed, but what are you hoping from that trip of going back

to Russia, going back to Ukraine?

What do you hope to get out of it, but what do you think you will feel?

A lot of things.

First of all, I'm going with my buddy Chris Williamson.

He hosts the Modern Wisdom Podcast.

He is one of my closest friends.

We've never met.

Oh, really?

We've never met.

He's in Britain.

He's trying to get his ass over here to Austin.

He's filling out his form right now.

He's too good looking.

It's a crime.

I call him Apollo and I'm Loki.

So right away, you have a buddy comedy because we're going to film it, right?

You have these two guys who on paper, you're very dissimilar, but we're very, very close.

In which way are you similar?

I think we're both very intense people, very strong emotionally.

We're both very ambitious in the sense that not in terms of career, but like we want to

grab life by the short hairs kind of thing.

We're just both like good experiences.

He benched more than you or?

Oh yeah.

Of course.

I mean, the guy's jacked.

Because you know, he's so good looking, he could be one of those guys who is mostly biceps.

Oh no, no, no.

If you look at, go to his Instagram, chriswillx is the handle, it's like head to toe, it's

just sculpted.

So he's perfect in every way.

That's great.

What flaws does he have?

Because I need.

He's bad taster friends.

At his accent, it's all crazy.

He pronounces it, he's an under a model.

So now I spell it MUDL, so just us two, British and American and just two different dudes.

It's going to be a lot of fun.

Although to be fair, as you know, I'm an underwear model now as well.

So we're going to talk that in a second, maybe, but yeah, sheathunderwear.com.

Yeah, this episode is brought to you by Sheath Underwear.

We're going to get some pictures eventually.

I think we might be, yes, I have them on my phone, we're going to, we'll have them because

shouldn't write, you could slice it in right here.

So to be able to go with someone who is a very close, I mean, we meet and talk like

every day, right?

So to someone who generally cares about you, who, who's, he's very, very grounded, right?

So like a lot of times I'll have like some concern and he's really good and if you listen

to show at slicing through the noise and being like, hold on a second, I can't do the accent

yet.

Have you considered A, B and C?

Because you know, whenever I had the situation, this is what I did.

So he's really good with that.

So to have a, first of all, just like two buddies on a trip is a really a lot of fun.

Second of all, I know that if it's going to be very intense.

So for you, you left Russia much later than I did.

How old were you?

13.

13, right.

So you remember it, I'm sure very, very well.

I left when I was one and a half to, I don't remember at all, to go to the streets where,

you know, my family had to go through this stuff to see the, you know, they, they came

to live up, they slaughtered all the Jews.

I mean, to have that little memorial there that's there now and to just look around and

know yesterday, basically, they came here, they rounded everyone up.

And also from the other side, you had the Stalinists coming in and starting all the

people.

It's just to know that so much horror and death, there's this quote I saw once about

a woman who went to Auschwitz and she just made the comment like, grass grows here.

Because we think, you know, that when you come to the nature of evil that you're going

to go there, there's going to be this pits of hell or whatever.

There's birds.

You know, there's, you know, Robbins hopping around looking for the worms or whatever.

They think it's perfectly nice and you, you, you stand there to understand that so much

suffering happened here or there is going to be very jarring.

I know that it's going to be an issue because I speak Russian and not Ukrainian and to speak

Russian to Ukrainians is like a big deal.

So that's going to be a concern.

I'm also worried about going to Russia because every Russian has this idea that even though

they've just met you, they feel, they feel they're in a position to tell you what you're

doing wrong with your life, what you should be doing if they're a cab driver.

I have no tolerance for unsolicited advice and it based at all.

That's going to be horrible.

They're going to be telling me I need to speak Russian better because I'm not hearing it.

I'm not interested in hearing it.

So that I think, and also, you know, given my upcoming book, The White Pill and covering

what happened back in the day under Stalinism and later to see this was the Ljublanka.

This was the basement where they would, you know, once this is something that people might

not realize, there's a superb film, The Death of Stalin, which is kind of does what I do

with North Korea, you know, puts a humorous spin on it.

Then when you take a step back and you realize what they're actually saying, it's just like

it's very, very disturbing how when Stalin was dying, he had a stroke.

He's laying there in a pile of his own past.

He's unconscious.

He'd be right before he died, he thought the doctors were all plotting against him.

So they were being tortured to confess that they were trying to murder him.

They had to get the doctors out of the torture chambers to attend to him and they did it.

So this kind of thing to like go there like Red Square and see this is where it happened

to see Lenin's body like this is the guy who Emma Goldman yelled at.

It's going to be really, because I've worked so much in this space, jarring and intense

and emotional.

And as intense as it is for me sitting here talking to you about it, to see it and to

see the faces and to see Cyrillic everywhere, you know, other than Brighton Beach in Brooklyn,

it's going to, I'm sure it's going to do a huge number on me because as Western and

as the DuPoi Medikanyets, as the Russians will say I am, this is still where I came

from.

So no matter to see it face to face, I don't know how I'm going to react, but I don't think

it's going to be like meh.

You've assembled a number of essays from anarchist thinkers in a new book called The Anarchist

Handbook.

You mentioned Emma Goldman.

What interesting things do these thinkers agree on and what do they disagree on?

The anarchisthandbook.com is the website.

It covers from the 1790s to I think my essays, the last one from 2014, which a friend of

mine who's kind of a mediocre scientist is going to be reading for the audiobook.

Also podcast.

Also podcast.

I never, but it's not a podcast anyone would have heard of.

It's like Tom Woods, but even worse.

So what they all agreed on was the illegitimacy of government and also the malevolence of

state actors and the consequences of governments.

So they range in terms that most people would easily regard as either left or right wing,

but it tackles the nature of government and also creates positive non state alternatives

from really many different angles.

The slogan I have is the black flag, which is the traditional flag of anarchism.

The black flag comes in many colors.

So they were really all over the map in terms of what they're for, but their disagreement

is about the nature of state and the nature of power.

And it's very edifying because this is an ideology that's been in many ways swept under

the rug.

No one takes this seriously, grow up.

That I can allow people to sit down and read these essays and see for themselves just how

beautiful this tapestry over the decades and centuries has been woven about people who

genuinely believed in freedom as the most important and how to maximize that for society.

So maybe it's useful to talk about a few contrasting thinkers in there.

So one is Leo Tolstoy, who I think not many people know is an anarchist, a Christian anarchist.

So he came to despise government for his deceit and its violence.

But to him, the Christian principles of nonviolence, I think, are important.

Oh, yeah.

And it's kind of pacifist kind of mindset of, you know, it's better to someone to punch

you than to punch them back.

So he's in that way, at least I read he influenced MLK and Gandhi.

What do you think about this flavor, color of the anarchist flag of nonviolence, nonviolent

opposition?

I will put the caveat that it bothers me when people bring up MLK because he's become so

corporate and everyone just brings him up without knowing about him.

One of the things that Martin Luther King did so very well was that he forced people

to face the consequences of what they were putting forward.

You want to be racist, you want to be for Jim Crow, you want to be for segregation.

Okay, it's easy for you to do that from your living room.

Now turn on your news and you see men and women in suits being attacked by dogs, being

attacked by firehoses and beaten by cops just so they could sit on the front of the bus.

And now for a lot of people who were still racist, who were still had animus toward black

people are watching this.

And it's going to be a lot harder to be like, I'm okay with this.

I'm okay with human beings, even ones I regard as somehow bad or inferior to be beaten and

attacked by trained dogs and they're not doing anything in response.

That strikes to, I think, a very basic nature of, especially American, like, okay, whatever

you're for, I'm not for people getting beaten and attacked when they're not really doing

anything.

So I think pacifism is something that's very easy to make fun of, but people don't underestimate

how powerful it is for someone to say, you can do what you want to me, I'm not going

to fight you back, I just want to live peacefully and have the same rights as you.

And to say, screw you, you should get beaten.

That's a hard pill for a lot of people to swallow.

So I think he was really, and Gandhi, of course, as well, were excellent in that regard.

There's a little bit of Machiavellianism to it.

They've both been beatified regard as saints, but their strategy worked very, very well

for their purposes.

So I think just all of us, when you see someone, you know, in this kind of Christian, you know,

I know you're Ron, obviously, it's nothing very highly Christianity, but if he's someone

who's willing to, you know, take a punch and just say, you could do whatever you want to

me, I'm not going to hurt somebody else instinctively, and maybe this is kind of a hack, most people

want to side with that guy, step in between and be like, oh, okay, let's take a step back

because whatever led to this is not tenable, we need to go back to drawing board if the

consequence is people are having these as a result of my decisions and actions.

So I think that aspect of anarchism is very, very in certain contexts, healthy and much

smarter and more sophisticated than people give it credit for.

And let's also point out that Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, and he wrote Anna Karenina.

So this was not some naive or innocent, whatever word you want to use.

He knew the nature of evil.

He knew how bad things get.

So he wasn't saying at all that human beings are inherently nice and kind.

He was saying it's much more effective to not fight back and to force them to face that.

I'll give you another example.

I was talking to, I was on the show Trigonometry, and I was talking to the hosts and one of

them talked about how someone he knew had been in the gulag, or his mom was born in

the gulag grandma.

And after Stalin died and the Serbian liberalized and lots of the people in the gulags were

freed by Khrushchev and so on and so forth, I didn't know this.

Many of the, or some, let's say some, of the guards of the gulags killed themselves because

they had genuinely believed that everyone in these camps was there for a reason.

And when they found out that these people were completely innocent, didn't even have

trials and that they were the ones forced them to work themselves to death and starve,

they couldn't deal with that guilt.

So when you are a pacifist or a non retaliatory and you're forcing someone who's using force,

look what you're doing.

Look what you've become.

For some people, some people don't care.

The guide and scare tactics, like I mentioned earlier, where for a lot of others, they're

going to be like, okay, is this who I wanted to grow up to be?

They will have that little flame of conscious that you and I talked about earlier.

There will be like, how did I get to the point where there's this lady who wants to ride

the bus and she's, you know, lovely dressed, put together, and I have a, sending a dog

on her?

What kind of person am I?

For some of those people, they're going to be like, okay, I can't be a part of this.

I don't even understand the politics.

I still am racist, but I'm not going to take part in this atrocity.

Well, that was for him, from the individual perspective, perhaps he calls that Christian,

but listening to that voice of conscience, like whatever that is in you.

So for Tolstoy, it seems like anarchism from the individual perspective is silencing the

rest of the world and listening to the, for him, probably God given voice of conscience.

And so that, that's what it means to live in body anarchism for him.

And it's in body Christianity, I would think he would say, but he would see those as basically

Yes.

Correct.

Yeah.

So in terms of forms of government, the Christian government is one that's no government.

Yeah.

Correct.

What do you think about that as advice for an individual, turn the other cheek?

Do you think, I tend to believe that that's a really good way to live?

I think it's very underrated and this is me talking.

I think a lot of times when someone, let's suppose you're having an argument and, but

you have to, you have to pick your battles, right?

Let's suppose you're having a heated argument and someone says something very cruel to you.

We have attempted to double down and hit back twice as hard, but if it's someone who had

all cares about you, what they're just in the moment and you just stop and you just

say, did you hear what you just said to me?

For some cases, that person will take a step back and be like, just like we, when I snapped

at Michael, uh, at bitstein years ago, I'd be like, wow, okay, this, this is bad.

This is bad.

I'm sorry.

And they kind of, you know, it's kind of like they have to get to 10 before they read control

of the lead to use your language.

Thank you.

Yeah.

But for overflow, I'd appreciate that.

But for some, they're going to, they're going to just twist the knife, but I think this

is a very useful technique.

And also you can also sleep well at night because you could be like as much as this person tried

to hurt me, I still didn't reciprocate.

And yeah, I took that punch and it sucks, but at least I never said anything that I

could feel guilty about.

Exactly.

Do you think that's ultimately a good way to implement anarchy in your personal life?

Anarchy, I don't, implementing anarchy in your personal life just means, uh, respecting

people's boundaries.

It means, um, uh, not forcing people to do things that otherwise wouldn't want to do.

I think you then have to take, uh, case by case, like there's so many human interactions

that are required for life.

And there's tension and all those kinds of things.

It's not always...

You're not being naive or innocent.

You're being, you're being so naive.

No, it's...

Put the hat on.

The hat's on the other head now.

Well, I had to take off the hat because it's like photo with the ring.

I was starting to feel like powerful.

I wanted to give you orders and I went, no, I, I just, I think there's, uh, ways of dealing

with the tensions that are natural to human interactions that can't be simply, um, you

know, it's not as simple as saying you want to respect the freedom of others and, um,

the boundaries of others.

It's like, you both have to agree on stuff and work something out and the mechanisms

of that agreement, the game theory of that agreement, requires different hacks and strategies.

And the, the question is for an anarchist collective that's well functioning, what kind

of hacks, uh, what kind of ways of behavior are more likely to be productive and not?

You know, that, that's almost like the question.

Do you want to turn the other cheek or do you want to stand your ground really firmly?

When somebody's an asshole to you, you walk away.

Or when somebody's an asshole to you, you turn the other cheek and give them a chance

to rise to the best version of themselves and then find a common ground kind of thing.

It's an open question of how to form those collectives when there's people with, with

difficult childhoods and the, the, all that kind of stuff.

Well, this also comes down to what is your relationship for this person?

Is this out of character?

If you and I got into a disagreement, all of a sudden you started getting very personal.

The first thought would be very hurt, but then I'd be like, this is out of character

for legs.

I'm sure I could be like, well, let's take a pause here.

Like you're getting heated.

I'm trying to work this out.

What's going on here?

And you get it kind of a meta conversation.

But again, you and I have a relationship of mutual respect, so as opposed to if it was

a stranger, you know, who's, yeah, just wants a piece of you.

It's just like, I don't, you are coming at me.

Not correct.

I don't have to reciprocate in kind.

I'm not going to shoot you, but I'm not going to pretend that you deserve respect when

you're treating me with such contempt.

I would, I do defer, especially with people I know, because it's just, this is smart

longterm game theory as well as the right thing to do.

I do try to give them the benefit of data first, right?

Because if you're going to go aggro, you can't go back, but you could always go from like,

let me hear them out and then, then I could go aggro.

So there's a big asymmetry there.

Yeah.

And that's, I mean, I don't think anyone has the answer to this question is, is that the

right strategy?

To me, game theoretically, it seems the right strategy is to, well, reciprocity is what

game theory says is the right strategy.

They did the prisoner's dilemma and they found tit for tat is the one that's the most advantageous.

So that's for when it's perfectly rational actors, but when you have, I mean, there's

noise that there's a, I think benefit to just, even if they keep being shitty to you, still

being nice to them.

Well, then there's the inverse where girls are turned off.

Some people are like, if you're in a relationship and not just girls, but girl, like some people,

when you're kind to them, they find you less attractive, right?

Yeah.

Like that is kind of this weird, what am I supposed to do?

Like you're only into me.

If I mean to you, I don't want to be mean, but then I'm getting punished for doing the

right thing.

That's another tricky one.

And I mean, this is nothing that necessarily do with anarchism so much as like, you know,

human beings are infinitely complex.

We don't often know the backstory.

Like for example, just yesterday, Jay, who's here is one of my closest friends.

I had a dinner with a bunch of people.

I couldn't bring a plus four.

So I didn't, he wasn't invited.

He didn't know the circumstances.

He just thought we were having dinner without him.

He was hurt.

Once I spelled it out, he completely understood it.

And I felt horrible because for me to have any of my friends feel left out is just a very,

very cruel thing.

And I was, I felt bad and I'm glad to apologize again publicly that that's ended up being

the circumstances.

But yeah, it's, it's, it's a lot of times we're also in Plato's cave.

When you're dealing with somebody else, you have very, very limited information about

their background and circumstances.

And that's why I will always, if it's someone I have even have a little bit of a relationship

with, try to give them the benefit of the doubt because I found, especially this comes

from being a co author when you co author books and you're walking other people's shoes.

You don't know what's a lot of the information.

So it's a lot of times it's just a misunderstanding.

But isn't that a fundamentally anarchist question of how we figure out this puzzle of human

complexities in order to form voluntary collectives?

Like, when you have to figure that out, how to make people feel good, how to make people

like.

I agree.

That's fair.

And that I think, I think not only anarchists have to think about this as my point, of

course.

But we have to think about it more than others do.

Right.

I feel like I should try to argue against anarchism at some point, out of love, out of love.

And so because people, people enjoy seeing me, what is it, when like Ben Shapiro argues

against like a 20 year old feminist, destroys high school students, this is this video of

Michael Malz destroys a Marxist Russian communist pig.

So anarchism is opposed to hierarchies.

Well, that's left anarchism, anarcho communism.

Yeah.

The state.

But there are many hierarchies that are not the state.

We have a hierarchy here.

This is your show.

I'm differential to you.

Right.

But they're rigid hierarchies.

Forced hierarchies.

Forced hierarchies.

Yes.

Forced hierarchies.

Okay.

So do you think it's possible that humans, when left on their own court, they form hierarchies

naturally?

Yes.

Inevitably in my opinion.

Inevitably.

Which is why I disagree with the left anarchist.

It's not a coherent thing to argue for non hierarchical relationships.

Even in theory, it doesn't make sense to me.

And I know the old school anarchists will call me stupid or uninformed, but I've never

been able to even wrap my head around this claim that you could have relationships without

hierarchy.

Right.

So I guess there's a certain sense in which we're living in anarchism now.

And I don't mean just like because the nations as you've said are in anarchism relative to

each other, but isn't the United States just a collective that was formed in anarchy?

And this is just the collective that we're operating under, this hierarchy that was naturally

formed.

Well, the United States was not naturally formed.

It was formed by force and by fiat.

But to your point, I stress this throughout the book.

I always say this anarchism is not a location, it's a relationship.

So yeah, you and I do have a hierarchy in that this is your show, but neither of us really

has an authority over the other.

Like I'm here voluntarily.

You can kick me out if you want.

I can leave it if you want.

Neither of us has the power to force the other to be in this relationship we've chosen.

My lawyer, I defer to his judgment.

He's not forcing me to do it.

He gives me his advice and I can take it or leave it.

Same with the doctor.

So there is a clearly like who's in charge and who's not in charge, but they're not in

a position to impose their will on everybody else.

And you could very easily see John is Stephanie's lawyer and Stephanie is John's doctor.

And in each of those contexts, one has a position of ostensible authority over the other.

So anarchism is in fact not some utopian crazy thing.

It is the norm of human relationships where you meet people, you're not necessarily equal.

Someone's going to be taller, someone's going to be stronger, someone's smarter, wealthier

with others, but you're not at all thinking, I am here and I could tell you what to do

and you are legally or morally obligated to follow my wishes.

That is the basis of anarchism.

So in what way is the United States imposing by force something on you, do you think?

If you leave your house, you will go to jail.

My money being taken from you via taxation.

But don't you have the freedom to not operate under that?

No, but that's like, yeah, like technically if someone comes up to you and mugs you and

says your money or your life, you are making a choice, but what the anarchist argument

is they're not in a position to force you to make that choice.

That is not morally binding, even though they have practically the power to force you into

that dilemma.

But you have the freedom to live under the United States or not.

So even, yeah, the argument is if you don't like it, leave, right?

Not necessarily leave like geographically, but there's ways to live outside the force

of the United States.

There's ways it's just very difficult to operate that way.

But that's like saying you could outrun the mugger, which is true, but the issue is does

that mugger have the right to tell you at gunpoint, you're either giving me your money

or I'm going to shoot you or secret plan C, you get to run away.

Is that person a moral actor?

And the anarchist answer is never.

And the difference, just one more thing, the anarchist view is the difference between

that mugger and the government is only an air of legitimacy.

Literally they're morally identical.

So is it possible that every hierarchy that gets big enough and successful enough such

that it can monopolize a bunch of services it provides, isn't it always going to be

a moral in your sense, the way the United States government is a moral?

Well, I don't want to say just like the United States government is a moral because that

implies the United States government is uniquely or especially a moral, which I just want to

clarify that because I know you didn't mean that and I want that to be the implication.

Can you repeat the question?

So like won't every okay, so that's right.

So that's progressive economics.

So the argument is in any market at a certain point, things tend to centralize and then

that organization de facto can dictate price can dictate so on and so forth.

That is completely a historical.

If you look at any market, the trend is always towards decentralization, the music industry,

right?

When we were kids, there were four or five record labels.

They were the ones who made all the songs that you're going to see in the Billboard

Top 100 with a few exceptions.

Now anyone can go to direct to market.

If you look at TV stations, right?

It went from CBS, NBC, ABC, then you got Fox, then you had cable, which is 100.

Now you have satellite, which have sounds around the world and you have YouTube, which

is literally infinite.

So as technology improves and as wealth increases, which is a function of free enterprise, you

are going to always have more and more choice even within a monopoly, Coca Cola, right?

This is an example I used, I think, in the New Right, when we were kids, every terrible

comedian would be like, oh, now that I've got diet caffeine free Coke, what's next?

It's like, yeah, that's good.

You want to have, what was his name, Cayman, the guy who invented the Segway.

If you go, Dean Cayman, if you go into some restaurants right now, you will have those

machines.

You have like 80 kinds of Cokes and then you could have whatever flavor you want to add

to a grape, cherry, lemon lime, so on and so forth.

So in any field, you're going to have more and more competition.

You're going to have less competition and less choices when the state gets involved

because the state wants control.

The state wants one big neck with one leash around it and that way it could just pull that

dog in one direction or another.

And you saw this last year with the lockdowns, Carol Roth wrote this amazing book called

the war on small business and she talked about, we have seen for the first time in history

a massive wealth transfer from small and medium business towards organizations like Target

and Amazon who made trillions of dollars last year, whereas mom and pop, which to me at

least is like the acme of American achievement.

You come to America, you have a fruit stand, a laundromat, you make, you socks, whatever

it is, you're that unique artisan creating something special.

They're the ones who didn't last, whereas Target and Amazon did.

So when you have the state involvement, it will always be in favor of Jeff Bezos.

And for the simple reason that it's going to be a lot easier for Jeff Bezos to get Nancy

Pelosi and Mitch McConnell on the phone than it is for me making socks and Etsy.

But your sense is that there'll be less and less over time, Jeff Bezos is like whatever

the industry will look at, there's a trend towards decentralization across all industries.

And when I say decentralization, I just mean choice, right?

So if you look at, again, networks, you're going to, if you were in the 80s and you had

a network just for LGBT issues, first of all, it's going to be completely heretical.

That's not going to happen.

And there's not going to be enough necessarily people identify as that to have an audience.

Then there was something called logo.

They have that.

And there's lots of other shows like that in this way.

So more specifically, look at websites.

I am positive that you and I, if we wanted to look up breeding guinea pigs, would find

thousands of websites about different breeds and all this other stuff 20 years ago, 30

years ago, like you're going to have two books and they're not going to be dynamic as these

new breeds are developed.

So at the same time, it does following on your argument, it does seem easier to move

and immigrate from state to state within the United States and to other countries.

Do you think that's a form of freedom that embodies anarchism where you can resist the

force of state by choosing where you live?

To some extent, but the line of people, some of these boomers will go on me on Twitter

if I'm going up to police or something and be like, if you don't like America, get out

of here.

And I tell them freedom means I do what I want.

Not what you want.

Freedom means I don't have to move.

You don't have to move.

Free speech is a good example.

It doesn't mean I have to be on Twitter, right?

Twitter has the right to ban me, but what I'm saying is I'm saying something and you

don't like it too bad.

You're the one who has to accommodate me because I have a right to do what I want with my person

as long as I'm being peaceful.

So I guess I'm trying to get to the difference between the state and what you would naturally

want in anarchy, which is like a security company, all of those things, they will as

they become successful start looking more and more like the state because you get to

elect, you give them money, they have leaders.

What's the difference between a government and a very successful service provider in

anarchism?

This gets a little confused in America as big companies necessarily are hand in hand

with the government, ended up in bed with them.

The answer to this question is a long, complicated one and thankfully it's all in the anarchist

handbook.

There's an essay by Murray Rothbard, this is the essay that converted Dave Smith.

So maybe it's not as good as it could have been otherwise called Anatomy of the State.

And Murray Rothbard points out that state is the only agency in a country which gets

its goods through force.