The following is a conversation with Michael Mallis, his second time on the podcast. He's an anarchist political thinker podcast or an author. He wrote Dear Reader, which is a book on North Korea and the new write, a book on the various ideological movements at the fringe of American politics. He hosts the podcast called Your Welcome spelled y o u r. And in general, there's a lot of live shows on YouTube that are at times profoundly absurd and other times absurdly profound and always full of humor and wisdom.

He is the joker to my Batman and the Caviare to my vodka. His masterful dance between dark humor and difficult, even dangerous ideas challenges me to think deeply about this world. And when that fails, at least smile and have a good laugh at the absurdity of it all. This episode has much of that. His outfit, for example, the exact inverse of mine with a white suit and a black shirt is just one example of that, of the humor, trolling and brilliance that is Michael Malice.

Quick mention of our sponsors, NetSuite, business management software, athletic greens, all in one nutrition, drink, sun basket meal delivery service and Kashyap. So the choice is success, health, food or money, choose wisely, my friends, and if you wish, click the sponsored links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Michael is in many ways a man of radical ideas, but also a man with kindness in his heart.

Those two things are great ingredients for a fascinating conversation. I hope to have several such people on this podcast this upcoming year who also have radical ideas about politics, science, technology and life at times. Often, perhaps, I might fail at asking the challenging questions that should be asked, but I will try my best to do so and hope to keep improving every time. Mostly I come to these conversations with an open mind and with love.

Unfortunately, that kind of approach can be taken advantage of in many ways. It can be used by reporters or just people online later to highlight how or why. Ignore it or worse, I'm generally not a good human being. In the context of this. I have two options. I could either be cautious and afraid or second, be kind, thoughtful and fearless. I choose the latter, hopefully, while still being open, fragile and empathetic again. I strive to be like the main character of the idiot, but just the Yassky.

That's my New Year's resolution behind and do difficult things, difficult conversations, difficult research projects and difficult entrepreneurial adventures. Enjoy this thing. Subscribe on YouTube, review and Apple podcast. Follow on Spotify, support on, feature on or connect with me on Twitter. Àlex Friedemann, as usual. I do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I tried to make this interesting, but I give you time stamps. So if you skip please to check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description.

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They'll probably change it to Leks from strategy soon. But for now, its strategy. Schedule your free product tour right now. And NetSuite accounts for a strategy NetSuite dotcom slash strategy that is the cheesiest and the worst code word they could have used strategy. But I did read a bunch of reviews of NetSuite and people really do love it. All right. Onto the next one. This show is also sponsored by Athleta Greens, the only one daily drink to support better health and peak performance.

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It's delicious. Finally, the show presented by Kashyap, the number one finance app in the App Store, when you get it, you called podcast, catch up with you, send money to friends, buy Bitcoin and invest in the stock market with as little as one dollar. I'm thinking of doing conversations with folks who work in and around the cryptocurrency space. Similar to I. There are a lot of charlatans in the space, but there are also a lot of free thinkers and technical geniuses.

From my perspective, it's actually sometimes difficult to figure out the difference between the charlatans and the geniuses, but I do my best anyway. If I do make mistakes in selecting the guests I speak with or just the details of various things I say in their conversations, as I'm sure I often do, I will keep trying to improve. I promise you this correct things where I can afterwards and also keep following my curiosity wherever it takes me. Please be patient.

I'm doing my best here. So again, if you get Kasher from the App Store or Google Play and use the Kolchak's podcast, you get ten bucks in cash. I will also donate and ask the first an organization that is helping to advance robotics and stem education for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with Michael Balas. Knock, knock. You're stealing like that. I'll kill your family. Knock, knock, joke works. Knock, knock.

Michael, you don't do a knock knock joke with the Russians. Knock at the door Turned out the TV. You got to sit quiet. They go away. You know that back. You know it's trigger there. I can't even do it now. Knock, knock. Who's there?

Leon. Leon who? Leon me. When you're not strong, Michael.

Well, that will never happen. I stole elegantly, eloquently that joke from you. The lie detector test.

That was a lie elegantly and eloquently. No, no. Yeah. You crossed it on a sheet of paper. That means it's real. The reason I bring it up is because you had the guts, the brilliance to to do a knock knock joke not once, but three times with Alex Jones. I think it was like six. I had a runner. OK, maybe I just they started to sort of melt together in this beautiful art form that you've created, which is like these kind, loving knock knock jokes with Alex Jones.

So you got the chance to meet them and talk to them twice with temper. Yeah, in long form conversation.

What was it like talking to Alex Jones both on the deep philosophical intellectual level and staring the man in his eyes and doing a knock knock joke about Olive?

Knock, knock, who's there? Olive? I love you, Alex. Yeah, well, there's a lot to explain.

Where do you start?

I've been on his show Infowars a few times when I was researching my book, The New Right. So I had had conversations with him before. One of the things that I appreciate about Alex is he is a lot more self-aware than people think and has a good sense of humor. And I also like a good twist ending. So if you set people up and all these jokes, are these kind of vapid, you know, all of you jokes and the last one is about building seven, they're not going to see that one coming, nor will he see that one coming.

I even had another one about Sandy Hook, which I didn't do on the air because he was being like a good sport. But that was the dagger that was kind of behind my back, if necessary. But it was a good mechanism toward I like it when things work on several levels. It was also a good mechanism to keep kind of the conversation guarded. And this every so often this is kind of hitting the control delete and bring it down to a certain point of calmness.

What about the love thing? I mean, you're saying that that was a build up to the dagger, but it was also somehow really refreshing to get that little jolt like that pause. You don't get that in conversations often. Like I'm a huge fan of Rogen and you have a three hour conversation, but at some point just pause and be like. I love you, man. I think it's in the cheesiest way possible, because there seems to be it's somehow hits the hardest then.

I don't know. I don't know. You didn't intend it that way. But with Alex Jones, sit there and to say I love you. That was like that, I just have never heard that before, and so it struck me as like not just funny for what you're doing, but just like, whoa, we just took because conversations are all about like this ranting, especially with Alex Jones, just like ranting about this or that. This part of the world, like, can you believe this shit, that kind of thing, but like to pause and be like, this is awesome.

I don't know if you felt that way, but.

Oh, I definitely felt that way. So it's actually very fun. I'll give you the back story of how that happened. It was it was it was silly because Tim calls me up and there's this expression in marketing, don't go past the sale. Right? So if you're trying to sell someone a car and you're like it's got this feature, this feature in that picture and they're like, you know what? I'm going to buy the car. If you keep talking, you can only make them lose the sale.

You just get them to sign and get get out of Dodge. So Tim calls me up and he goes, OK, here's what we're thinking. This is top secret. Alex is going to be on the show. We want you on as well. And I've never said yes to anything as quickly in my life. And then he keeps talking and I'm like this. You don't have to sell it. I interrupted him. I go, you don't have to sell it.

Why you, by the way? I think because I am kind of an agent of chaos and Alex is in his own way, an agent of chaos. And what is provides an opportunity in this kind of new media space that you and I travel in. It's the kind of things where none of us three, you know, as we said on the show, knew what it would be like if you you know, to certain within certain parameters what you know, Megan Kelly or Wolf Blitzer or any of these corporate figures are going to be like in a conversation to some extent.

None of us had any idea. I knew they didn't know I was bringing knock knock jokes. Yeah. So that was kind of what was so so I said at one point, I'm kind of envious of the audience because this is there's so many exciting things that are happening and that the Internet and podcasting provides people an opportunity to do that. It was great. Yeah, that was the greatest pairing with Alex Jones that I've ever seen by far. So, like, OK, so I immediately knew.

Now this isn't a knock on Tim, but I don't even know if Tim was prepared.

Tim was not prepared for this. Could he be prepared? Well, so I mean, I don't know if Tim is used to that. I think Joe Rogan is more equipped, prepared for the chaos, just the years he's been in it. Like I immediately thought this is the right pairing for Joe Rogan because Alex Jones has been on Joe Rogan a few times. Yeah, three times. My favorite so far was with Tim doing right. Yeah. But Tim was clearly Tim Gunn was also kind of a genius in his own right, but he was kind of a fan and he was back and he was stepping away.

He was almost like in awe of Alex Jones, where you were both you were in all of the experience that's being created and at the same time fearlessly just trolling the situation. I mean, to do a knock knock joke to stop. I mean, it just shows that you're in control of the experience and you're like riding the experience that immediately was like this needs to be on Rogen. So I hope that happens as well. You're on your own, of course, on Rogen, but just you.

That's an experience. That's the whatever discovery. A good name for it. Like Jimi Hendrix Experience.

There's nothing like going out because I was a band. It's taken that well. I don't know how many years you can you can restart the experience because I feel sorry for you.

I feel a very big responsibility, especially in 2020, to provide fun and something cool and something unique that hasn't been done before for the audience. I think this has been a very rough year on our audiences psychologically and in other aspects of their lives. So I feel if I'm going to be there, I'm going to put on a show and it's also going to be great because it also alienates the people you don't want.

Right. So there's a lot of people who sit there and be like, oh, he's telling people who are too cool for school. We're like, oh, he's telling knock knock jokes. This is stupid. I'm like, good. If you have an issue with having eaten cotton candy or doing a puzzle with the kid or that, you know, by yourself that's on you. And it's something very I something I think is the enemy is cynicism. And this idea that like, oh, this is too silly and it's like we need that kind of childlike aspect in our lives.

I think it's something we could use more of. It's very much an aspect of our media culture that to kind of be condemnatory about that or to do it in a certain very corporate fake way. So it is something I encourage a lot, something I enjoy doing. And again, like the first time I was on Tim, I had a propeller bignone, you know, with the motorized and a lot of people were like, I can't take anyone seriously who dresses like this.

I go, good. If you judge someone's ideas by how they appear instead of the ideas themselves, you're not someone I want on my team.

Are we going to address the outfit you're wearing? We got dresses. Sure.

You know, for those who are colorblind, what Michael's wearing the or just listening to this, Michael is wearing the exact opposite universe from from another dimension outfit, which is a white suit. Black shirt. So genius.

OK, so you just see the next two looks like bland. Oh no. Yeah, they're great. Well, obviously, this is going to play out over the audience there. OK, is there some deep philosophy to the humor?

Is this goes to a trolling discussion? Is there some. Is there like chapters to this genius or is this just what makes you smile in the morning?

Well, I mean, I think you're honestly, in this case, use the word genius a little loosely. This is particularly genius. But I do think it is fun. It is exuberant. It is joyous. I think the bigger my audience has gotten and the more I actually communicate with the fans, I do feel it kind of kicks in these paternal maternal instincts, which is very, very odd. I did not expect to have the women. Who's the dad?

I'm the dad and the mom. I remember.

And it may have been similar for you. I'm curious to hear it for young, smart, like ambitious men like twenty four to twenty seven for me was a very rough period because that's the window where a lot of people get married and they kind of check out. And if you're very much kind of finding your own road, you don't know what's happening. No one's in a position to really guide you or help you. And it's it's it's tough. It's a very tough window.

And what I'm finding now is having these kids who are in that position. But now, instead of them stumbling along for some of them, I'm the one who could be like, no, no, no, no, it's not you. It's everybody else. And to be able to give them that semblance of feeling, seen to use a cliched expression to feel normal and that no, no, you're you're you're the heroes here. They're the background noise.

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

You have many minds, right? There's the thoughtful kind, Michael. There's like I'm going to burn down the powerful. Yeah. My God. They like. Yeah.

And then there's like, I'm going to have this just light hearted trolling of the world. Yeah. Which and which of those are most important to the twenty four. To the twenty seven demographic.

I think it is the combination. You know, it's like if you're making a meal, you know, chicken Kiev, you need the chicken, you need the ham, you need the butter sauce. Because I think people when you're young you need to see someone who's fought the fight for you and who's won. So it's very easy to be defeatist.

So this is what winning looks like. This is not this is most assuredly what winning does not look like, but in my normal clothes. Yeah, I love it more.

This is a good time to mention the clothes wise. You're wearing shoes, underwear and people should buy shoes, underwear, use code Mallee's twenty.

If you go to see Thunder Road. I come from a good man. I was twenty. What I love about why I'm glad to promote the product and wear it. It's the most comfortable underwear I've ever worn and you have a separate pouch for both parts of your genitals. That's that's what I thought. There was like a punch line coming. No, it's a very nice aspect of the product. Yeah, but I think what here's something else just goes back to we're just talking about there are so many and this is going to segway into this.

There are so many small companies who have been devastated this year. We have not seen a sustained attack on mom and pop shops like we've seen in twenty twenty who are innovators and making something happen. And when you're just like one dude who's producing a product, they're sponsored by and I'm happy to first of all, it's funny that I'm pitching underwear, but I'm pitching. But it's also something I enjoy says small business.

Yeah, yeah. It's microscopic, like a thimble. So this isn't a sponsor of mine, but this is a good Segway. So this is the Russians. We celebrate New Year's. It's nothing them we have Jetmir, as he comes down, puts a present under your pillow. So this is a company called Jail Austin. He's a fan of yours. He's a metal worker. And he said, can I give you something to give to Lex? I have one of his worry coins.

I'll tell you what it is. He's not a sponsor. This is not I'm not getting paid for this. So what a worry coin is. I carry around in my butt. If you have raw denim, it's great because it brings you face. So you carry it around with you all the time.

It says worrying is like paying a debt you don't owe. Right, and I carry this around and it's been like a year. Next time you're worrying and this is good advice, if you don't have a word coined, go think about 10 years ago. Yes. And what you were worried about then and then think about did any of those things pan out? And some of them did, but you were able to handle it. And that's a good way to maintain perspective.

So JLR, since the company he sent me this present, I said, let me give it to Leks on the air. So enjoy. So I open it up. Yeah.

J.L Lawson and Co two legs from Anthony. Yeah. And I said make something mathematical for Lex. I don't even know what's in there. You don't know what's in it. And it got through a TSA could be a bomb, it could be just like this episode. Make sure you unwrap it close to Micah's address for crazy. That's really the best part. Yeah.

Or is this what unboxing video looks like, this conversation going to be a big hit on the Internet boxing community? I need to have an excited look on my face to make sure that the reaction video is being unboxing and a reaction video like streaming.

We have another box. It's a box.

It big fan. Since hearing you on Rogel months ago, most of your guests are over my head, but still enjoyable.

Oh, like this episode, Michael was kind enough to want to share my work with you. Keep doing what you do, Anthony Lawson. Thanks, Anthony. There's a lot in there. What is it to give you some idea if it's OK? Right. I should show it to the camera and then make sure you look excited or not or disappoint. Oh, this is cool.

This is a word coined like I was showing you. Oh, so you hold it in your hand. And when you can do this with your thumbs, if people are have anxiety or whatever, there's a lot of cool stuff in your Fibonacci coin.

Now, see, that's the math stuff. That's really awesome. This is really cool where you've got a big one in there, too.

That's what she said. I'm telling you, last time you found me saying, I don't have humor, so I. The spin tray, micro glass and copper, bronze, by the way, the packagings epic.

I think that his thought he makes top's cool. You spent in there and two different bronze and copper. I think he's the only one who makes these machine stops and he's sitting here, I guess. Yeah, but you could spin him in that section, got a call.

Was the was the worry thing you used the word. Anyway, I wasn't listening. What were you worried about 10 years ago, 10 years ago, 2010? What would I have been worried about the government? No, I'm not. That's not a worry.

I was in North Korea, a book that came out in 2000 and 14. I went there in 2012, came out January 2014. It's still paying my rent with the royalties.

So to North Korea.

But, yeah, this is this is why it's so much better to go to talk to you about self publishing, because you brought that up. And I'm doing the next book is also going to be self published.

Can we talk about self publishing? What was that was the whole idea of publishing like having a publisher and an agent? This is a bunch of people have been reaching out to me, trying to get me to write a book, which is ridiculous.

Why there's people who are brilliant, folks like you, like Jordan Peterson that I think have a lot of knowledge to share with the world. OK, I think what I feel I can contribute to the world in terms of impact is to build something. OK, meaning like engineering stuff, OK, like a book to be engineered, and I'm not using it loosely yet, the engineer book, it would not for sure.

What I mean is like literally a product with programming and artificial intelligence that's I want to build the company. I want to because I have a few ideas that I feel I'm equipped.

And it has to do with your, like, intuition about the way you can build a better world.

You individually like what can you add to the world? That's a positive thing. And for me, I feel like the maximal thing I can add to the world is at least to attempt to build products that would add more love in the world. And so I want to focus on that.

The danger of the book for me or any kind of writing and even this podcast is a little bit dangerous for me, is like it's fine for sure.

It's it's fun. It's like it takes you to this place where you start thinking about the world. You start enjoying and playing with ideas.

You start it like just your book on a dear reader, but also then you write like clearly you and I probably think similarly in the sense that you did a lot of work.

Yes. This next book is Killing Me.

Yeah.

As you mentioned, often it's clear like in your YouTube channel, which I'm a fan of, you often it just comes out like you mention, all of these books that you're reading, it just comes through you that you're suffering through this and it changes you.

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

And I feel like if you do that, that's like when I was when I first came to this country, I read the book to give, had to read it again.

It's like it the red pill thing is it changes you in where you can never be the same person again. Sure. I feel I feel about a book in that same way. The moment you write a book, the way of course it depends on the book. I could also just write, like in my field, a very technical book.

No, that's a terrible idea. Yes, but that that's OK.

That doesn't really change you. That's just like sharing information, but like something where you're like, how do I think about this world? Can you just leave that behind you? I get it.

It's it's being pregnant. It never escapes your brain. I'm telling you, you're absolutely right.

Yeah. I don't know. It it does seem to change. But the reason I bring that up is because there's this whole industry. Of people that seem to not really contribute much to the publication process, but they they make themselves seem necessary for like if you want to be in The New York Times bestseller list kind of thing, but also just being, like, reputable.

Yeah. Which I'm allergic to the whole concept, but it does. Do you think it's possible to be on the New York Times bestseller list and be a reputable author and still be self published? Not what you would want to do, like people like Marxists.

And I think it's his name he wrote, like the primal blueprints, the like if I'm getting the names correct. He's the first paleo guy. Right. So he published it. It's not gangbusters. But that would be OK on their health chart, I believe. And it's a little bit of a different situation.

You would be reaching much more for the mainstream.

You'd be giving up a lot if you go through a publisher, especially financially. But yeah, you are not going to have the cred because they're publishing is a cartel. The New York Times is part of this cartel. And if you don't publish within this cartel, they will do what they can, as any cartel has to do by necessity of being cartel to pretend you don't exist. So they will. I was, I think, the first one to have an hour on book TV for Dear Reader because I was a kick start a book.

But this is something that people do. It was a Kickstarter book. Yeah. This is something people would have to be aware of. So you would be giving up a lot, but you'd also be giving a lot to work with a publisher because you're losing like a year and a half of your life because they're glacial and they don't care.

Well, that's my problem. It's not the money. I mean, the money is whatever percent they take, 10, 20, 30, 50 percent, they're taking a huge chunk.

So if I sell a book through St. Martin's, it's a dollar. If I sell a book through Amazon, which is Dear Reader, that's six dollars. So that's what. Eighty seven percent. It's something crazy.

But for me, what bothers me is the money that that for me personally, for me, what bothers me is incompetents like whenever I go to the DMV or something like that and I can interrupt you.

Yeah.

Let's talk in confidence. New right comes out last year. Yes, I get on Rogan. Get on Reuben. I call them and I said I got in these shows, is there money in the budget for travel? And they say we don't have the budget fine, by the way, you got on those shows with no help from them. That's not even a question.

The reason they would want you to do a book is because they know you could get the only reason people get book deals nowadays, literally. It's because they know that person can market their own book. That's the only way. And I got to Reuben, I got a Rogan and they don't have the money for travel, which is fair. They can do Skype. They told me this in writing, and I'm like, OK, and they can financially cover Skype, but it's like, Hey Joe, yeah, we're on the budget but you're going to Skype.

So there is another friend of mine was on a show on CNBC with Nassim Taleb. And they said Nessim wants a copy of the book and they're like, oh yeah, it's like four o'clock on Friday, so we're close so that he's like he went there, picked it up and walked it the two blocks.

So there is it's almost cartoonish. Yeah. And it's not incompetence. It's. It's past that it's something almost you can't really believe that I've had two friends who have been literally rendered suicidal because this is such a huge opportunity for them and they were like watching their kid get beaten in front of them. And I had to talk to them off the ledge. So it's people do not appreciate how bad.

Here's another example. The apathy of bureaucracy, something like that. I did this book, Concierge Confidential. There's a typo in the first chapter ends with I'm about to tell. Well, they didn't fix it for the paperback. It's just like, wow, OK. Yeah, great book, by the way. Got it, got it, one of the books there, so that was good. So why participate in this? Because otherwise New York Times is going to pretend you don't exist.

Getting book and booked on some shows might be more difficult, although I think that's collapsing in real time. You're not going to get reviewed necessarily in places like P.W. or some others, so the new book you're working on, your title, your pill, The Apple. Are you saw publishing that? Oh, yeah, for sure. And what's the thinking behind that? Just because you already have a huge following and a big platform and it's six times the cash.

If I finish the book in December, I could have it out in February. If I finish the book in December with the publisher, it's going to be out in December at the earliest 2021. Why am I giving up 10 months of my life? Well, this is a big one. Do you have any leverage like do do authors have leverage to say, if you like, can you just say, what do you mean? Just look meaning like I want to release this book in two months.

Oh no, no.

I mean, you'll have a contract and then you you can fight it, but they don't have the they don't have the capacity to rush things through. Yeah, I guess if the because I've heard, like the big authors, I don't know Sam Harris, all those folks talk about like they've accepted it actually they've accepted. They're like, yeah, it takes a long time to. I'm not accepting it. But but you're kind of implying that a human being like me should, like I'm saying, these are your options, right?

So I just I just hate it. I hate waiting because it's incompetence. It's not that it's not necessarily the way if I knew it wasn't, you know, if it was the kind of people that are up at 2:00 a.m. at night on a Friday and they love what you're doing in there, helping create something special.

That's the sense I get with some of the Netflix folks, for example, that work with people. I just I don't know anything about this world. But you get like Netflix folks who who help with shows, you could tell that they're obsessed with those shows. Yeah. Yeah.

You're not gonna get a publishing if you hand like I hand in the book in I think it was July. I didn't hear anything from my editor until December. Well, can we actually talk about.

The suffering, sure, the darkest parts of writing a book, so the scores go to the phone, Michael Moore, Stephen King mode of what are the darkest moments of writing this book and what is it? Maybe start the white pill. What's the idea? What's the hope? And what are your darkest moments around writing this book?

So people are familiar with the red pill and the blue pill. Therefore, the matrix, the red pill is the idea that what is presented as fact by the corporate press entertainment industry is in fact a carefully constructed narrative designed to keep some very unpleasant people in power and everyone else under control. And one of my expressions is you take one red pill, not the whole bottle. Yes, because at a certain point you think everything's a lie and that you kind of no capacity for distinguishing truth.

You're full of good one liners. Well, thank you. Yeah, I'm full of something, that's for sure. And what I saw in this space is a lot of these red pill people got very disheartened and cynical. And one of my big heroes is Albert Camu. And he said the worst thing is cynicism. And that's something called the black pill, which is the idea that, you know, it's all it's it's it's just we're waiting for the end.

It's hopeless. And I don't see it that way at all. And I'm like, all right, I have to address this. And not just with some kind of cheerleading. Everything is you make great guys. Here is why I am positive. And not that I'm positive the good guys are going to win, but I'm positive the good guys can win and that's all you need, because if you're, God forbid, kid is kidnapped and there's a 10 percent chance that you can save them, you're not going to be like, wow, I don't like those odds.

This is your country. This is your values. This is your family. And I don't think it's much more than 10 percent. And even if you lose, you will take pride in that. You did everything in your power to win.

So is there a good definition of good guys in the sense the ones who were white, there's layers to this.

You're like modern day Shakespeare.

Is there a danger in thinking? Adolf Hitler was probably pretty confident that he led a group of good guys. Listen, if Hitler did anything wrong, why isn't he in jail?

I check for thought of that, he actually said that his accent goes so bad, why isn't he in jail?

That's a good point.

He's probably still alive. Right. And look. Yeah, hopefully.

Oh, boy.

Two of the three people listening to this are very upset right now.

Uh, what were you even talk about or how do you how do you know the what is good?

There's lots of standards of good. But if you're for me to be a good guy is if you want to leave the world a little bit better than you found it. That, to me is the definition of a good guy. And I think there are many people that that that's not their motivation at all.

It's about your motivation.

Well, it's also about if your motivation is at all correlated to reality. You know, one thinks we're the bad guys. That's correct. But are you taking steps to check your motivations? And also, it takes a certain amount of humility, because if you're going to start interfering in other people's lives, you really better be sure you know what you're talking about, the control of others if you do have centralized control or any kind of.

You become a leader of a group, you better know, you better do so humbly and cautiously and also have steam valves, right.

So if in case things go wrong, let's have I'm sure this is a lot happening with I would ever work with computers, like, OK, if something goes wrong here, how do we have a workaround to make sure it doesn't cause everything to collapse? Yeah.

The going wrong thing. I mean the whole the feedback mechanism. Yeah. Like, I wonder if people in Congress think that things are really wrong. It's working for them. I, I sure because I'm not sure because I, I'd like to believe that the people that at least when they got into politics actually wanted some of it is ego, but some of it is like wanting to be the kind of person that builds a better world. Sure. I also think it's a diverse some who are going to have different motivations than others.

But like once you're in the system and trying to build a better world, how do you know that it's not working? Like how do you take the basic feedback mechanisms and like and actually productively change? I mean, that's what it means to be a good guy is like something is wrong here. And that's why I like the Elon Musk. I think from first principles like, OK, let's ask the big question, like, can this be one? Is this working at all?

Like the way we're solving this particular problem of government? Is this working at all? And then like stepping away and saying like as opposed to modifying this bill or that bill or like this little strategy, like increase the tax by this march or decrease the tax by this, much like why do we have a democracy at all or why do we have any kind of representative democracy? Shouldn't it be a pure democracy or why do we have states like representation, states and federal government, so on?

Why do we have this kind of separation of powers? Is this different? Why why don't we have term limits or not like big things? Like how do you actually make that happen? And is that what it means to be a good guy? It's like. Taking big revolutionary steps as opposed to incremental steps. Well, I don't know that you can be a politician to be a good guy, to be honest. And let me give you a counterexample.

Someone who you could tell is not being a good guy. Joe Biden said he was he regards the Iraq war as a mistake. You and I have made mistakes in our lives. I'm sure none of our mistakes have caused tens of thousands of people to die. If let's suppose I speak for yourself.

That's fair. OK, I'll take that. I don't build the kill.

But if I were a chef, let's take it out of politics. And in my restaurant, somehow, accidentally, someone ate something. They died a I would feel horrible. But more importantly, I would be like, we need to look through the system and figure out how it got to the point where someone lost their life, because that can never happen again. And we need to figure out step by step there's I'm not a gun person, but there's like this checklist of like if you're holding a gun, there's five things to do.

And if you if you get you wrong, you're going to be it's like assume every gun is loaded, only pointed at something that you want to kill. And there's like three other things, and it's like to make sure that nothing goes wrong. So if I made it, if I'm not chef and I would have to not only feel guilt, but take preventative action to make sure this has no possibility of happening again. If you look at the staff is putting in, it's the same warmongers that would have advised him to get into the Iraq war on the first time.

That is to me is not a good guy. That to me is someone who does not feel remorse for their responsibility in killing not only many Americans, but some of us think that dead Iraqis is necessarily ideal either.

OK, let's talk a bit about war. Maybe you can also correct me on something. The first time I found myself into Barack Obama was I don't know how many years ago this was, but when I maybe heard a speech of his about him speaking out against the war. Yeah. And him, I think it's on record saying he was against the war before it was happening.

Now, he wasn't insane at the time. So it's very easy for him to say this, because I see like people say that people say that. People say like it was easy and it was some people say it's like strategically the wise thing to do given some kind of calculus, whatever.

But I to this day, give him that's the reason I've always given him props in my mind, like, OK, this is a man of character he makes. I also personally really value great speeches. I think speeches are really important for leaders because they inspire the world. I think that's one of the most best things you can contribute to. The world is great, like through intellect, mould, ideas in a way that's communicable to like a huge number of people.

It's better to persuade them to force in every instance. That's where I disagree with Chomsky said. Like, if you're a just this whole idea was that like if you're really eloquent speaker, that means your ideas aren't that good. It's nonsense. Yeah. So I think that's a way for him to describe. Like, I speak in a very boring way. That's the pitch for this podcast. I speak boring so that the ideas are the things you value.

And it's also useful to go the but the that's that's why I really liked Obama throughout his life. I still do. But when I first like saw this is for some reason you can disagree. I thought he's a man of character is the one most politicians, most people who are trying to calculate and rise in power I think were for the war or too afraid to be against the war. Yeah, that's why I liked Bernie Sanders. And that's why I liked, like in the early days of Obama for speaking out against the war and not like in this weird activist way.

Not weird, but not not saying I'm an activist. This is but like just saying the common sense thing and being brave enough to say the common sense thing without like having a big sign and saying, I'm going to be the anti-war candidate, something like that. But just saying this is not a good idea. Yeah.

And I think it's it's for those of us who are old enough to remember, it's pretty despicable what happened with Tulsi in twenty twenty. She was the biggest anti-war candidate and she was marginalized within her own party, which I guess you can make sense. She's just a congresswoman from Hawaii. But the corporate press did everything in their power to diminish her and pretend she didn't existed. And for those of us who remember were twelve years prior, you know, when George W.

Bush had the Republican National Convention in New York. And it was like the biggest protest in history. And the Iraq war led to Democratic landslides in twin. Six in 2008, to have that completely not part of the Democratic Party in 2020 is both shocking and reprehensible. And Michael, how is it that you don't have to say, Michael, you just say knock, knock? No, it's not like that. OK, what did the volcano say to his true love?

What? I love you. I just a veteran, you know how to speak English. I was actually in Russian, I did a Google Translate. OK, back to your book.

In The Suffering, you you somehow turn it positive. And as as one who's wearing who's the representative of the black people in this conversation, what are some of the darker moments?

What are the some of the hardest challenges of putting together this book to wipe out content, content, content? So if I'm having a page. In about Reagan taking on Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential primaries, I'm going to have to read like 20. So and it's the thing like if there'll be sometimes I'll remember some quotes somewhere and then I have to spend an hour trying to find it because I want it to be as dense with information as possible.

How do you structure the the main philosophical ideas you want to convey? Is that already planned out?

No, the book changed entirely from its conception. So my buddy Ryan Holladay had a series of books. So does where he takes the ideas of the Stoics and he applies them to contemporary terms. He has a whole cottage industry that he's doing very well with. And I'd asked him years ago if I could do that with Camu. And he's like, sure, go for it. And I was going to rework Camus The Myth of Sisyphus. And I read it recently.

I reread it and this was in the book. I remember it at all. And I'm like, OK, I'm going to write the book that I remembered.

But the more I was writing it, I one of the things I always yell at conservatives about there's a long list is they don't talk about the great victory of conservatism, which was the winning of the Cold War without firing a shot. And I said, you can't expect The New York Times to tell the story because the blood is on their hands. And I'm like, well, Michael, instead of complaining about it, why don't you do it? Why don't you talk?

That is a great example of the good guys winning over the bad guys. And that's become a it's the victory is beautiful. But also pointing out when people are like, oh, things are worse than they've ever been. They don't appreciate how bad things were in the 30s, what Stalin was doing overseas and how people in the West were advocating to bring that here. So that's kind of pointing out how bad things were and how good they became. And you don't have to be Republican or conservative to be delighted at the collapse of totalitarianism and the peaceful liberation of the world.

So that's a picture of the good guys winning. Oh, how does that connect to surface and maybe dig deeper to life and whatever the hell this thing is, which is what I remember the Mathias's office being about. So where does the threat of Comeaux sort of lie in the work that you're doing? So the myth of Sisyphus, which I had remembered incorrectly, is actually just a five like seven five to seven page like coda to the whole book at the very end.

Like, you only need to read that little essay called The Myth of this is the broader work is about Camus concept of the absurd and the absurd man within literature. And he goes and it's just like, I don't really care about the character Dostoyevsky and also the stuff that you're talking about. It's of no relevance. But what he the myth of Sisyphus, the myth itself, not the book or the or the essay of his, is this Greek character.

And Sisyphus is forced in hell to roll a rock up a hill for eternity.

At the very last moment, the rock falls away. And Camus take away from the story is that we have to we must imagine Sisyphus happy. And there are several interpretations of this. But one is once you accept. That you are living and absurdist existence, once you own your reality, it loses its bite and you can start with that as your kind of baseline and bite is suffering and hopelessness.

So I think when people look at how much ridiculousness is happening in America and it's escalating, you can either think, oh, all is lost or you can. And I think you and I have lived our lives like this. You can live life more like a surfer, whereas you're never going to control the ocean. But you can sure enjoy that ride and stop if you're trying to control the waves. Yeah, you're done. But if you're like, all right, I've got my board.

I'm going to see where this takes me. Surfing from what I understand is a pretty fun activity and also sometimes dangerous. But you have to ask Chelsea about that.

So we were offline talking about Stalin and the evils of the Soviet regime. Yeah, one of the things I mentioned, I watched the movie Mr. Jones, but it's about the 1930s Holodomor. The what would you say, the torture of the Ukrainian people. Yeah, by Stalin.

One interesting thing to me that I'd love to hear your opinion about the role of journalism in all of this and also about 1930s Germany.

So what's the role of journalists and intellectuals in a time when trouble is brewing? But it requires a really sort of brave and deep thinking to understand that trouble is brewing, like if you were a journalist or if you were just like an intellectual, a thinker, but also a voice of in the space of public discourse. What would you do in the 1930s about Stalin, about how the more and what would you do about Nazi Germany in nineteen thirty seven, thirty eight.

So that's really funny that you ask that, because currently how the book is structured, it's like, you know, books often follow three act structure. Right. So Act three is the 80s, Act one is the thirties and Act two is going to be like, all right, let's suppose you were in the thirties. Are you just going to give up? Like, are you just going to be like, well, we're screwed. And you'd be right to say things are going to be very bad for a long time?

Or are you going to be one of those few who are like, we're going to do something about this and, you know, we're going to go down swinging? There are two books I can recommend which are just. Masterpieces that that are written by women, that just historians that are superb. There's a book called Beyond Belief by Deborah Lipstadt. She talks about the rise of Nazi Germany as seen through the press and what was amazing. And she does a great job empathizing with the press and understand that perspective is we remember and Chamberlain gets a bad rap, Neville Chamberlain, for kind of appeasing Hitler, because not that long ago they had the Great War, they had World War One, and they had the carnage that the Earth had never seen before.

And when you had people made out of meat meeting industrial machines and plastic surgery was invented as a consequence of this, they're coming back mangled and disfigured. And for what? And this was a world where the Kaiser was the most evil person who ever lived. And we all had the Western propaganda about the huhn and all the rapes and all this barbarism and blah, blah, blah. So not that long later, when you hear all this propaganda, which was factual about Hitler, it's like we heard this we heard this 20 years ago.

This was all lies. Give us give us a break. And she has all the quotes from the different agencies in how they addressed it. Plus they had very limited information. It's not like Nazi Germany was an open society where reporters can walk around and they were under a lot of pressure as well, you know, in those areas.

And Hitler himself was pretty good at he let some stuff slip, but usually he made it seem like he wants peace. He wants world peace.

This was amazing. They were making the argument that because all these Jews were being beaten up on the street, this proved this was the hot take of the day, that Hitler was weak, because since Hitler is a statesman and he can't control these hooligans, that shows his control and power is tenuous. And this is all going to go away, by the way. I mean, Hitler thought that, too. He was kind of afraid of the branches, whatever, like he was afraid of these hooligans a little bit like they were useful to him.

But like at a certain point, like, yeah, they can get in the way. Yeah. That's why he wanted to get control of the military. The army, like the regiment. Like if you want to take over the world, you can't do it with hooligans. Right. You have to do it with an actual army.

And then you had Kristallnacht, which was a nationwide pogrom, and then all the news agencies universally were like, oh, crap, we we got this wrong. And the condemnation was universal. So that book traces the West's reaction to what's going on there and including the reaction to the incipient Holocaust as people were being, you know, what they knew? When did they know there was not ambiguity about it? People I think there's this myth that she dispels that that they didn't know the Holocaust was happening or they didn't care.

They were aware, but they were already at war with Nazi Germany. Like, literally, what else could they do at that point, you know, to to rescue all these Jews? So that's the Superbook and Anne Applebaum, I think the book is called Red Famine came out fairly recently.

And she brings the receipts and she's a you know, this is something I really hate with binary thinkers where people think, oh, you know, if you're a Democrat, you're basically a communist. They call Joe Biden a Marxist. It's just like, you know, she's a hard lefty. She's, you know, has TDRS. But this book just systemically lays out what Stalin did.

By the way, I'm triggered by the binary thinkers. And for those who don't know, TDRS zero zero one one is Trump derangement syndrome. Yes.

So they, you know, force the starvation and the entire population. And they it's not only that. It's like they knew if you weren't starving by looking at you, that you were hiding food so they'd come back to your house at night and break your fingers in the door or take burn down your house and now you're on the street without food because you lied, because this is the people's food, your Kulluk, your landlord. And very quickly, Coolac, which meant like peasant landowner, became anyone who had a piece of bread.

And it was systemic and ongoing. And many people in the press did not believe it. There was a a British journalist, I believe, who got out of the train, Ukraine, like one town earlier and walked. And he described all this and he was mocked and derided. And this is just anti Russian propaganda, because at the time in the 30s, this was socialism come to fruition. This was a noble experiment. I'd seen the future and it works is I think that's Sydney Webb was the guy who said that.

And the premise was. Let's see what happens, we've never tried something like that, and they were perfectly happy to have this experiment happen overseas at the price of the Russian people, because it's like, you know what? Maybe this will be paradise on Earth. And there's addressed this in my book as well. There's a superb essay, I think, by Eugene Genovese.

And he talks about the question, the question being, what did you know and when did you know it? What did you know about the concentration camps? What did you know about the starvation, what you know about children being taught at school to turn in? Their parents were, you know, having some extra bread. And his conclusion is we all knew and we all knew from the beginning, every bit of it. And we didn't care because we were more interested in promoting this ideology.

So when people are kind of thinking the worst thing on Earth is like Robert E. Lee statue being taken down to Washington, D.C., we were being told on an especially a much more limited news information world where now you have literally anyone have a Twitter. But how many outlets were there that this is we're backwards. They're the future. They're scientific. We have the vagaries of the market which led to the Great Depression. And when you see what was being put over on the American public at the time, anyone who thinks things are as bad now as they have ever been is simply delusional or ignorant.

Yeah, I would say, just as a small aside, that's why I'm reading as I'm almost done with the rise and fall of the Third Reich.

Oh, yeah. Is it's refreshers the resets, the palate of your understanding what is good and evil in the world that I think is it really useful. Now, like, you know what helps me be really positive and almost naive on Twitter and in the world is by just studying history. Yeah. And and comparing it to how amazing things are today. But in that time, what. Would you do what does the brave mind do and not just acts of bravery, but how do you be effective in that?

That's something I often think about sometimes easy to be an activist in terms of just saying stuff. It's hard to be effective.

Your activism, one of the big questions historians have constantly is how did this happen to make sure it doesn't happen again? But this is Germany. This is not some kind of weirdo cult nation. They're very advanced, very land of poets and philosophers. How did it get to that point that they're just shooting children and everyone's cheering for this?

And specifically on the anti-Semitism in the Holocaust is not totalitarianism, the cult of Hitler and just this whole kind of thing and the something to draw. But there's two sides. I don't know if you want to separate that. One is the totalitarianism and the entire the entirety of the Nazi regime. And then there's the Holocaust, which is like, you know, going I would say. Like, very specifically, as I think you're about to describe, it's like, you know, targeting Jews very much so I don't know if you see those as two separate things.

I think they're very interconnected. But I think if you look at it, everyone thinks that they'd be the ones putting up and Frank. But if you look at the numbers, they'd be the ones calling the Stasi on her or whoever the people were at the time and not the Stasi, obviously, and patting themselves on the back for it. So sort of porzel.

That's a really important thing if you're listening to this. That and you were not you were in Germany at the time, you would have likely been willing to commit or at least keep a blind eye to the violence against Jews. Like you have to really sit with that idea that you would have been somebody who just sees this and is not bothered by it and also very likely kind of understand this as a necessary evil or even unnecessary good.

Yeah, and I think people think that would be the abolitionists are marching on Selma. The numbers don't add that up to that at all. And I think the question would be like, what? My friend was on tender. My friend Matt is a great dude. And the question was, what's the most controversial opinion you have? This is New York. And the girl wrote, I hate Trump and what people perceive themselves as being courageous in saying and doing.

And what is the actual social costs of you saying or doing? This are two very disconnected things. And we're also trained by corporate media to have completely vapid, uninteresting, banal ideas and yet regard ourselves as revolutionaries. You know, there are people who still in New York will take pride because they have a gay friend. And it's like, first of all, who cares? But second of all, you are not a hero. And that person is not your prop, by the way, that's another big problem, which is why I'd like to give Richard Wolf a shout out for being an intellectual who talks about communism.

I think it takes kind of a heroic intellectual right now to speak about communism. Seriously, there's difficult waters to tread that the expression there's difficult path to walk. I love watching a robot try to use it, even a language.

Zero zero one one. I'm quite deeply hurt by the binary comment.

Are you your feeling has got one to zero. Yeah. What is my buffer's overflown though. But there's difficult.

I feel like communism is like universally seen as a bad thing currently in intellectual circles. Yes, actually maybe some people disagree with that. People say like far, far left people are trying to you know, some people argue the the BLM movement is some kind of Marxist. I mean, I don't I don't really follow the deep logic in that whatever.

But, you know, it's just. Well, they said they before by Marxism, the founder goes on, you know, but stating that it's different than there's Marx, that the totalitarian there's also marks the revolutionary.

And I think they're talking about more like we're revolutionaries. They're going to overthrow the status quo. Yeah, right. But they we can have that further discussion. But I just don't think they speak deeply about political systems and saying communism is is going to be the righteous system. You know, there's not a deep intellectual discourse that I mean, but if you were to try to be on stage with the Jordan Peterson. Like, to me, the brave thing now, like it would be to argue for communism.

It'd be interesting to see not many people do it. I certainly would be willing to do it. I don't have enough. I don't. First of all, I don't believe it. But second of all, it's a very difficult argument to make because you get so much fire, which is why I like Richard Wolf. He's one of the people who is quite rigorously showing that there's some good ideas within the system of communism, specifically saying that attacking more the the negative sides of capitalism.

So saying that there is that capitalism potentially is more dangerous than communism. I mean, it's I disagree with that. But I think it's a I love how something it's like we've got a body count of 60 million. But this everything is put to potentially, you know, like water can drown everyone on Earth. So this is incoherent.

Well, I think nuclear weapons are bad, but nuclear energy is good. Sure. Nuclear weapons are also can be good. You can easily make the argument, which I don't know that I subscribe to, that nuclear weapons prevented boots on the ground war at all costs and to be much more contained. And they're also quite effective at changing the direction of an asteroid that's about to hit Earth, as I've learned from our target.

And they're actually useful, as Elon Musk has claimed, for for applications for prior to colonizing Mars, making it more habitable. Oh, OK.

So it's something else. But yes. But I guess what I'm saying is there's the place for nuance and there's some topics so hot, like communism, where nuance is very difficult to have. And that I feel like with Nazi Germany, it was a similar thing at the time.

Tell you want to talk about Jeannette Rankin, who one of my favorite people. So Jeannette Rankin was the first woman elected to Congress. She was elected before women's suffrage was a constitutional amendment for Montana. She was elected in 1916. She was one of a handful of people to vote against the US going into the Great War, which was the right call at the time. She's a pacifist Republican as well.

Coincidentally, she lost her seat. Ran again in was in 1940, got the seat again and was the only person to vote against getting into World War Two. It was not a unanimous choice. Jeannette Rankin was the one person and she said, you can no more win a war than you can win a hurricane. So she's one of these interesting talk about bravery. You're the one vote after Pearl Harbor to say we're not doing this. And I mean, the pressure she must have been under at the time is and of course, many people aren't interested in hearing her perspective.

She's crazy. She's evil. It's also funny, someone on my Twitter when I talked about her goes maybe she had Hitler's sympathies, like, yeah, Miss Rankin was a big fan of Hitler. That's you figured it out.

Guys, do you think there's an argument to be made that the United States should not have gotten involved in World War two?

Oh, easy. An easy argument. The argument there's a I talk about this in the new right. So on Internet circles, there's something called Godwin's Law, which means the longer the Internet conversation goes on, the probability someone gets compared to Hitler becomes one in certain new right circles. The longer the conversation goes on, the more likelihood that the argument will come.

We should have ended. World War Two also becomes one. And the argument is at the very least, stay back, let Hitler and Stalin kill each other off and then go in and knock off the weaker one. And you're going to be saving, destroying two nightmare systems. And I think that's an easy argument to make. Now, it's hard to pull off after Pearl Harbor, but in terms of strategy, I don't think that's a that's a tough sell.

What about after Pearl Harbor?

I mean, that's not saying after Pearl Harbor, how are you going to sell it to the people? The argument is bubble of the Holocaust, the Holocaust. There's no scenario where that doesn't happen, really, if you're unless you're going in way earlier. But even so, Hitler had said if the Jews launch another war, you know, we're going to wipe them from the face of the earth. So the Jews are being held hostage by Hitler as an argument for this.

Another thing he did, which was, you know, diabolical, is in order to make it that people could not accept Jews as refugees if they were going to leave Germany, they had to be penniless. So now you have it's not like they're coming over with money and they could take care of themselves. No, no. They're going to be completely destitute. Makes it harder to accept them. Yeah. Millions of destitute people who don't speak the language.

It's it's a tough sell.

So speaking of good ones law, what do you make of this condition, Trump Derangement Syndrome. Yeah. And the idea of comparing Trump to Hitler, I think it's despicable. And I'll give you an example, something parallel that I think more people should be regarded regarding as despicable.

Earlier in twenty twenty, we were all told that unless we were in Syria immediately, the Kurds were going to be exterminated. They invoke the Holocaust. This is going to be another genocide. And if you are not for this, you should you're basically forcing another Holocaust. None of the people who use this argument, we didn't go to Syria. The Kurds were exterminated. They just vanished. The news had any consequences for using this kind of a comparison.

So I think it's it's really kind of fatuous. And I think it's amazing that people think Hitler is the only tyrant who ever lived like everyone who's bad is specifically Hitler. You know how you know he's not Hitler because you can tweet at him and no one comes to your house to kill your family. Like, that's kind of a big difference. Also between Trump and many of his critics is that his grandchildren will be raised as Jews. So that's also kind of.

And then and Deborah Lipstadt talks about this a lot. The New York Times at the time, there's another book called Buried by The Times, which talks with The New York Times and the World War Two, because the idea that Jews weren't white was the Hitler idea.

The New York Times at the time, Sulzberger wanted to be against this idea. So they specifically downplayed the anti-Semitism as opposed to the Nazis are being oppressive. So the argument that you can separate Nazism from anti-Semitism is a historical debate people have. And my perspective is I think it's I do not find it convincing that you can separate those two. I think anti-Semitism was essential to Nazism. I think Nazism and Mussolini's fascism have very big differences.

And do you think do you think anti-Semitism is fundamental to who Hitler was or was it just that? So this is the interesting thing is like it was a tool that he saw as being effective. He believed it. So why do you see those as intricately connected? Could Hitler have accomplished the same amount or more without the Holocaust?

Yeah, because think about how many resources you had to divert at a time where you have operation. Barbarossa with Stalin. So why are they connect, why are they so connected? Is it because Hitler was insane or is he a bad strategist or was obviously the best strategist he took? He had no need to open a second front. His generals, my understanding, told him, this is crazy. It didn't work out for him at all. I mean, to draw Russia and her resources into that war, it makes absolutely no sense in retrospect.

There's a book about I forget what it's called or talked about him at that point was just high all the time on amphetamines. And that could have affected his thinking.

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

But it was I mean, scapegoating is a big part and parcel of the Nazi mythology and this kind of one universal figure to explain this kind of, you know, skeleton key.

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

So the communists didn't get Germany into World War One like he said the Jews did.

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

No reason we see Hitler is evil is because of World War Two propaganda. Still, because we don't see Stalin as evil right now, as evil to that extent. I think that why like why would you say, you know, because of their propaganda?

Because I think a lot of the problem for a certain type of mentality is Hitler didn't mass murder equally.

So as long as you're killing just one group, it's a problem. But if you're murdering everyone equally, all of a sudden it's like, what are you going to do? So the fact like you were saying, the whole damn war is not common knowledge. The fact that Mao's 50 million dead and not common knowledge and Richard Nixon can be raising a glass to him in China, these are things that I think the West has not done a good job reconciling.

Knock, knock, who's there, Frank? Frank.

Frank, you for being my friend, my coat and the heart of to say Frank you for being my friend, you got to do like that.

Yeah, OK. Now back to Hitler. Do you think Hitler could have been stopped? We kind of talked about it a little bit in terms of how to what is the brave thing to do in the time of Nazi Germany. But do you think I mean, I'm not even going to ask about Stalin in terms of Stalin or been stopped because the probably the answer is there's no but on the Hitler side, because Hitler had been stopped. I think a lot of these things, a lot of luck has to play with it.

He was almost assassinated. If you mean by like the West, it's very hard. I mean, yeah.

Where the German people to I mean, could like if politically speaking, there was a rise to power through the 30s, through the 20s, really. I mean, like, can whoever it's not about Hitler. It's about that kind of way of thinking that totalitarian control that always leads to trouble and sometimes a mass scale. Could that have been stopped in Germany or maybe in the Soviet Union?

I think this is one of the best arguments against radicalization in the states, which is how do you engage when you have like 30 percent of the population who are members of a party which is dedicated to systemically overthrowing the existing democracy? Stalin gave orders that the communists, who had a pretty sizable population in the Reichstag, that their target shouldn't be the Nazis, but the liberals and the Social Democrats.

And they invented the term social fascist for them. So instead of they're just like like jihadis, instead of setting their sights on Naziism, they set their sights on the moderates because they wanted they figured the choice between Hitler and us, we're going to win.

And this was a huge gamble. And they were all killed or had to flee. And the ones who fled were killed also by Stalin. So that's my understanding. So this is the easy way where he could have been certainly heavily mitigated.

What about France and England? That it was obvious that Hitler was lying and they wanted peace so bad that they were willing to put up with it even after Czechoslovakia? Like like this is the anti pacifist argument, which is like they should have. Threaten military force more, but then the other a. a. a. pacifist argument is, if you're going to remember Barack Obama had that the red line, if you crossed this red line in Syria, we're going to go in and Assad like, cool.

And he's like, oh, OK. Well, sorry. So if you were threatening force, there's the great song lyric. Don't show your guns unless you intend to fight. Right. So it's very clear with free countries through what's in the press, whether the institutional will is there to follow through on these threats. So I think we have been very hard for Chamberlain to rally the British people to take on Hitler just after the great I mean, the suffering that Britons took, the Great War, they still, you know, obviously, I mean, so much more of them than it does to us in the West.

What about what do you make of Churchill then? Like why was Churchill able to rally the British people? Why was he like do give much credit to Churchill for being one of the.

Great forces in stopping Hitler in World War Two, I don't think that's really in dispute. I think he was very much regarded as this kind of the right man at the right time. And I think Chamberlain took a gamble. He the expression peace in our time was Neville Chamberlain when he signed the appeasement with Hitler. And he goes, we now have peace in our time. Now go home and get a good night's sleep. That's what he said, because he's like, all right, you know, he's going to stop here.

And it's not impossible that if you just like if you gave Saddam Hussein Kuwait, it's not impossible that he's not going to invade Saudi Arabia next, something like that.

See, OK, but everything I've read. It's like. Of course, there's there's it's not impossible. But when you're in the room with Hitler. You should be able to see, like, man to man. They like to me, a great leader should be able to see past the facade and see like like, yes, everything in life is a risk, but it seems like the right risk to take with Hitler. Like it is surprising to me.

I know there's charisma, but surprising to me people did not see through this facade.

I really hate the idea of hindsight and everything being 20/20. And I think it's a very good idea, generally speaking, generally, not this specific instance, to give our ancestors more credit than they then then we tend to give them. Because people often here's a great example from another context, which is lightning rods. People always talk about religious people being stupid and superstitious, and they weren't they often were very well reasoned. And an example of this is lightning rods, which is every year, whatever town, the church was the tallest building.

And that's the one that always got hit by lightning and got caught on fire. Now, it's a coincidence that it's always the church like that makes logical sense that they didn't realize, well, it's because it's the tallest and therefore that attracts the electricity. And in fact, when they invented lightning rods, this is a controversy because it's like, well, how is God going to show his displeasure if now it's striking this lightning rod not burning down the church?

So a lot of times things are a lot more coherent than we give them credit for. And again, Chamberlain didn't. He's the head of a parliamentary party. So he does not have the freedom in a sense that Hitler would to be like, all right, we're doing this again, boys. We don't know what it's like in a room with Hitler. Come on. That's that's we really have no idea.

But I think you have to think about that, right?

Yeah, I can very easily see him in the room being very calm and charming. And then you think, OK, the guy with the speeches is the act and he's putting on a show for his people. And this is the real one.

OK, so let's take somebody as an example. Let's take our mutual friend, Vladimir Putin. Yes. OK, I don't know why he's saying his name makes my voice crack, gets you scared or you think Beetlejuice. Yeah. So there is a lot of people.

Let's do the one who built you know, that was that was a collaboration.

But it's a double blind engineering effort where I was not told of who my maker was.

There's a back story, but there's a talking cricket. Pinocchio, hmm, the real boy, I talk about him quite a bit because I find him fascinating. Now, there's there's a really important line that people say, like, why does Lex admire Putin? I do not admire Putin. I find the man fascinating. I find Hitler fascinating. I find a lot of figures in history fascinating, both good and bad. And the figures, just as you said.

That are with us today, like Vladimir Putin, like Donald Trump, like Barack Obama, is difficult to place him on the spectrum of good and evil, because that's only really applies to like when you see the consequences of their actions in historical context. So there's some people who say that Vladimir Putin is evil. And. Based on our discussion about Hitler, that's something I think about a lot, which is in the room with Putin and there's also a lot of historical descriptions of what it's like to be in the room with Hitler in the 1930s.

There is a lot of charisma in the same way.

I find Putin to be very charismatic in his own way. The humor, the with the brilliance, the there's. There's a simplicity of the way he thinks that really, if taken at face value, looks like a very intelligent, honest man.

Thinking practically about how to build a better Russia constantly, almost like like an executive, like he loves you, he looks like a man who loves his job in a way that Trump, for example, doesn't write, meaning like he loves laws and rules and how to no adversarial press.

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

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

But all the videos, interviews are watched based on that. Not the press, not the reporting. You can just see that here's a man who's able to display a charisma that's not like I can see. That's why I love Joe Rogan. That is like you could tell the guy is genuine and is a good person. And you could tell immediately that, like, once you meet Joe that he's going to be offline. Also, good person. You could tell there's like signals that we send that are like difficult to kind of describe.

In the same way, you can tell Putin is like he genuinely loves his job and wants to build a better Russia.

There's the argument that he is an evil man behind that charisma or is able to, you know, assassinate people of, you know, limit free press, all those kinds of things. Like, that's. What do we do with that? So what do human beings like journalists or what do other leaders, when they're in the room with Putin, do with those kinds of notions? In deciding how to act in this world, in deciding what policy to enact all those kinds of things, just like with Hitler, when chairman was in the room with Hitler, how does he decide how to act?

Let's go back to my wheelhouse, which is North Korea. Right. So when your entire world is based on being against Trump and everything Trump does is buffoonery or counterproductive, the conclusion of your reporting is going to be pretty much given. I was very hopeful that there would be some positive outlooks or outcomes, rather, of Trump's meeting with Kim Jong un. It looked like there was a space for things to go a bit better. I talked about a lot at the time and.

A Trump was under no illusions about who he was dealing with, people pretend that he was kind of naive. He had one of the refugees that a State of the Union, you know, lifting up his crotch. The first thing he sat down and talked to jumping about in Mar a Lago right after he became inaugurated was North Korea. Barack Obama said that when he sat down Trump in the White House during transfer of power, he said North Korea is the biggest issue.

So I think a good leader, whether or not you consider Trump a good leader, has to be aware of. All right. I'm going to have to have relationships of some kind, even if it's adversarial with some really evil, evil, horrible people, which Kim Jong un clearly is.

Well, but I don't think there's anybody that has a perspective that no North Korean Kim Jong un or ill are not evil. Right? Correct. But with in 1930s Germany, isn't it a little bit more nuanced?

Yeah, because Hitler hasn't done anything yet and he's just a blowhard and he's an anti-Semite. Sure. But he's.

What about like before the war breaks out? What about the basic actionable anti-Semitism when you're like just attacking, hurting, which is Kristallnacht, the night of long knives, Kristallnacht, the night of the broken glass wall.

The long knives is when he assassinated a bunch of his people. That was something different. Yeah.

So like when you're actually attacking your own citizenry. Yeah. That was universally condemned Kristallnacht. And that was very shocking. Its level of barbarism to the West, because I think I think we still want to believe understandably that things aren't as bad as they seem. We would rather this is why, you know, the North Korea book I did, Dear Reader, is used in a humorous framework, because if you have to look, it's like looking to the sun.

If you stare at it straight on, it's very hard to do. So you have to kind of look at it obliquely and then you're kind of realizing the enormity of the depravity. And again, pogroms in Russia had been a thing for a very long time. And there is a difference between, OK, you know, we're going to sack these villages and persecute people and we're going to systematically exterminate them. That's there's still levels of evil and depravity.

So you did write the book, Dear Reader, on Kim Jong Il. Yeah. Dear Reader, the unauthorized autobiography of Kim Jong Il. Yeah. So that's the previous leader of North Korea, correct? Current one is the UN Jungleland. No, no creativity on the naming. Well, no, this is intentional because it's a throwback to the dead.

So there's been only three leaders in North Korea. So we've talked about the history of Hitler and Stalin. Then like these. I think it's important to understand that the history of those kinds of humans, there's the history of North Korea is not well written about or understood, which is why your book is exceptionally powerful and important. So maybe in a big broad.

Where can you say who was who is Kim Jong Il? And as a as a man, as a leader, as a historical figure, that we should understand and why should we understand them?

So I wrote, Dear Reader, by going to North Korea and getting all their propaganda, which is translated into several languages, because the conceit is everyone on Earth is interested in them and wants to share their ideology.

And he died in 2011, 2011. And you wrote the book in 2012? I went there in 2012. I wrote the book came out in 2014. So Kim Jong Il is not an intellect, North Korea's version of Forrest Gump in that when they write their history, whenever something appeared happens, he's there. And by telling his life story, it's in the first person he's telling the history of North Korea. So I wanted to write the kind of book where in one book and it's the kind of reading you could do in the beach or the bathroom, you're going to get the entire history and know everything you need to know about North Korea in one accessible outlet.

And it's it's what people don't appreciate about North Korea, the several things, how bad it is. And this didn't happen overnight. This was very systemic that what this family did to that country where piece by piece they did everything in their power to hermetically seal it from the rest of the world, ramp up the oppression, keep any information from coming in. And, you know, they're very creative and innovative in their style of manipulation and control.

So there is a farcical element.

Let me give you an example. So people in the West kind of get it wrong. They talk about how they talk about when Kim Jong Il played golf for the first time, he gets 17 holes in one.

There is this one story about Kim Jong Il shrinking time. And this is a story and it sounds supernatural, but it's not. So Kim Jong Il is at a conference, the Dear Leader, and someone is giving a talk. And while that person is giving a talk, Kim Jong Il is taking notes and working on his work. And he has an aide who keeps interrupting him with questions. And the speaker keeps stopping. And Kim Jong Il says, why are you stopping?

Because I see you're doing other things. And it goes, no, no, he can I can do all these things at once. Everyone's shocked. And they said, this is why Kim Jong Il looks at time not like a plane, but like a cube. And he can shrink time. And my friend goes, do they mean multitasking? And yes, Kim Jong Il is the only person in North Korea who's capable of multitasking. So in order to elevate him, they basically make everyone else in North Korea completely, you know, incompetent.

And that has a purpose because should the leader go away, this country is going to collapse overnight. So this with a laugh in the West about all these newspapers. Show him, you know, at the factory and he's at the fish hatchery at the paper plant. They say the difference in North Korea is that the leader goes among the people and does what he called field guidance. So he will go in that farm and be like, this is what you need to do.

And he'll go here. And he's so smart. He's good at everything. And thanks to him for sharing his wisdom with us. And he's not removed from the people like in every other country.

Why does that seem to go wrong with humans, do you think? This kind of the structure where there's this one figure, this authoritarian, it's a totalitarian. Structure where there's one figure that's a source of comfort, knowledge. Kim Jong Il is not good at farming. Kim Jong Il is not good at the machinery. It's all a complete lie or the things he'll point out, only things that are completely obvious. So here's another example that they use in North Korea.

They have something called the Tao of the Jewish idea, which is that obelisk, which looks like the Washington Monument. But it's completely different because it's got this like plastic torch at the top. And they talk about in the propaganda how all the architects got together and they said, oh, we should make this the second tallest stone obelisk in the world. And Kim Jong Il says, no, let's make it the tallest. They're like, oh, we never thought of this before.

And the way it's presented as it. And like he's the first person to think of this. Like these architects are having a brainstorming session at the time. That idea, they're like, all right, we got to do something innovative to put North Korea on the map. What can we do?

How about second biggest? He's going to go for this and then he's like, oh, we never thought of this. It's it's so because I presented at face value, people sometimes say the book's a satire. It's not a satire. I downplayed all this stuff. It's a farce. He's another example. North Korea is very big. And I think Russia is to some extent to an amusement parks funfair, as they call them, the British style, because this is a chance for the people to get together.

And there was this amusement park.

It's almost like South Park Cartman, where there's all these rides and Kim Jong Il is like, I'm not going to let any elderly or children take these rides until I put myself in danger and ride them myself. And they go, But dear leader, it's drizzling. And he goes, no, I have to make sure these rides are going to be safe for everyone. Even during the light rain, they go, well, can we go on these rides with you?

No, no, no. I mean, the courageous one. And he's riding all the rides and they're standing there crying at his courage. Yeah, but that's what's and you ask all the things when power it's like, listen, I'm quite confident that those fun fair engineers are in a position to ride Modest Mouse River. It's called by themselves and be like, yeah, OK, this is good for the kids.

Although to be fair, some of those amusement parks are not are pretty rusty and dangerous that that that kind of propaganda. I guess what I'm playing a devil's advocate is like it's comforting and it's useful, but it does seem that that naturally leads to an abuse of power.

It's not how can it be used correctly? No one person has the intellect or the mind to understand the entirety of an economy, let alone every individual field of interest.

Well, for example, you can have an artificial intelligence system that understands the entire universe, just completely let the mask slip. You could have an artificial intelligence.

But like the question is, can that mean, like, the human version of that is like you can hire a lot of experts, right? You can be an extremely good manager.

And since everything is dynamic, it's not going to they're not going to have the data to kind of manage it.

Well, it seems that there's a lot like what George Washington allegedly did. It seems like most humans are not able to fire themselves. You're not able to like, yeah, you're right, I'll be checking your power.

But that's not if I was like if I was creating a human is that's not an obvious bug of the system that we would not be able to fire ourselves to to know when we have. I mean, it seems like that's something you have to know always like there's something I often wonder is like, am I wrong about this? But this is all we talked about earlier. What are the safety valves to make sure that, OK, if I am incorrect or my knowledge is finite, Plato's cave kind of thing, what mechanisms are in place that my mistake or limited information is going to have the deleterious consequences if North Korea does not really have that?

And as a result, they had polio in the 90s.

So there is your you write about it straight, but there's a humor to it because it's an absurdly evil place, I suppose. Yeah. A bunch of people. I asked I asked, I said that I'm talking to you and a bunch of questions we got here from the plebs, you asked me before we start recording, I specifically said, no, it was in my contract.

Yeah. And you gave I gave you all the pink Skittles or whatever, but they still think, you know, think I'm trolling.

Michael, let me explain to you how that works.

If people should go Malus, that local Starcom and sign up and pay, I think the membership fee, several thousand dollars. It's very it's it's not it's not for the layman. Yeah. But the service is there, so you get a coat with it. But yeah, I went there, posted a lot of really brilliant people that appeals to during that community. If you find Michael interesting or if you just want to go and say why he's wrong, it's a great place to have that.

For that, I show you a lot of really kind people.

So anyway, the there's a bunch of people asked that we should talk about humor.

OK, so pretend, hypothetically speaking, that I'm a robot asking you to explain humor to me. What so dear reader, I mean, there's a humor. There's just so.

A wonderfully dance between serious dark topics and then. Seriously, dark humor, can you try to if you were to write like a, I don't know, Wikipedia article, maybe a book about your philosophy of humor? What do you think is the role of humor in all of this?

A joke is like a baby. You can't dissect it and then put it back together and expect it to work. Trust me on this one, this fight, no matter how you carve that thing up, it's not going to be working the next day. And you needed to saw those little sneakers with those hands. Oh, I don't know. That humor is something that is a very explainable people. There's something called Klapper where this is like the worst kind of humor, where people applaud because they agree with what you're saying as opposed to laughter.

That's that's that's the kind of support you're reading. Yeah. And the drag queens do that, too.

I think because of the nails you laugh. It's a visceral reaction when someone on Twitter is insisting, you know, that's not funny. You're not in a position to make that claim. And let's let's let's go back to North Korea. I had a refugee I knew and he went to high school here and he was talking to his buddies and they said, hey, remember when we were kids, we had Pokemon.

And he goes, Oh, yeah, except instead of Pokemon, I watched my dad starve to death, which is the truth now. Who are who are any of us to tell him not to make that joke? I don't know what it's like watching anyone, including my dad, starve to death at my dad's fatty. So he's not going hungry anytime soon. So it's very bizarre to me when people feel comfortable precluding others from making jokes, especially. And I think this is a very Jewish thing, like this kind of gallows humor, especially when it's laughing about a personal loss or experience that they've had.

Humor is a great way to mitigate pain and suffering.

But it's also I think this is why it's a Jewish thing. It's it's a black thing.

When you are marginalized community or poorer, it's free telling stories, telling jokes or songs. You don't have to have money, but you can have joy and happiness. And I think that's why you find it so much more in kind of lower status communities than you would find it like wasps who are notoriously humorless, which is strange because people pay a lot of money for the jokes you do.

So it's not really free.

Yeah, well, no, they don't have to pay me. It's appreciated, but not expected.

I find my voice cracking every time I try to make a joke like I failed miserably at this.

So some people are still in beta alpha think enough was like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.

No, I meant alpha version. Oh, OK. I don't I don't know your robot gobbledygook. I'm not going to. OK, it's OK. It's in my own head.

I'm talking to myself in my own head. OK, speaking of North Korea, some people say that, you know, I've read that comedy is about timing. First of all, do you agree? And second of all, no, I'm serious.

It's just that you saying, yes, the timing is funny, isn't it?

Comedy is tragedy. Plus, timing is not that is not the full reference. What is it interrupting. Oh, knock, knock joke. I'm not going to do it.

But that's not a timing thing. That's more of a repetition. And then the twist ending the movie. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

INTERRUPTING How are you thinking of the banana one anyway. Uh I'm not, I'm not going there yet. You're fucking right. Look, I just wondered, is Dad sleeping in a wardrobe. Yeah.

So British. But yet you're very I want to stay in a closet because that has connotations.

Let's let's both come out of the closet for a second. I love you. Let's talk about you.

Like I wasn't saying I love you, Alex. I would say I love you. Lex.

Oh, you're talking to me. Yes. There's a screen.

So when you see you think about me when you're over with another man, I watch you when you're sleeping. OK, you're Danielsson really active on Twitter.

Yeah. And somebody else asked on your overly expensive membership.

Say what? Like grifts.

How do you find humor different in writing on Twitter versus spoken humor? So it is a great question. If humor is about timing, how do you capture the timing and the brilliance of the whatever is underlying humor in the context of Twitter, like, in other words, say it is, or how do you be funny and yet thoughtful on Twitter?

So. With Twitter, you have to be the first one to the punch line. So when Ron Paul had a stroke, I was immediately being like, he's still the most articulate libertarian. He's doing a great Joe Biden impression right now. All the libertarians got mad and people like too soon or like when someone dies, you're making the jokes about them. It's like, when do you want to make the jokes about someone just died a week later. It doesn't make any sense now.

You might soon perfect timing. Or you could say it's not appropriate ever. But too soon does not make sense in this context. So that is something that I enjoy doing. It's also fun ruffling people's feathers, something I enjoy doing. I think spoken versus writing is very different because when you are having good banter with someone for me as the audience, knowing that it is on the spot, really adds an element of humor because then it's like, wow, this is fun.

It's like a ping pong match or something. Whereas in writing it's you're losing the tone, you're losing the relationship of a dynamic conversation. And a lot of times the joke is just kind of a different type of joke. Well, it's funny, but Twitter, there's a sense, especially your Twitter, that.

You're you just thought of that and you just wrote it. Yes, like there's is a there's a feeling like it's literally you talking as opposed to what I imagine is there are some editing, but it doesn't look like it.

Where were you editors should be fired into?

There's an interesting effect, actually, if I want to say something I don't know about. About the something that's bothering me about the presidential election or something like that, like what are what is the actual central idea that I'm trying to convey to myself, like sales, having a hypothetical conversation with myself, like, why am I putting my pants back on this way? Provoke not malice to sheath the word dotcom. OK, that's she's what is what's the website she Thunderer dot com.

She's on the dotcom promo code, MALLIS 20 and I forgot. Why is that underwear really nice?

Because it has a dual pouched technology to keep your MANPAD separate. They've also got woman stuff, but I don't know how that works. Is the thing worth going somewhere? And the material is really refreshing. I mean, it's really a guy. It makes your ass look good.

That's promo code MALS 20 and it's made by it's made by a former vet because he was in Iraq. So that's why I like promoting it.

Yeah, but what I'm writing the the, the tweet I like to it forces me to think deeply about the core of the message. OK, but what I found this really interesting effect, like I don't really do much editing and the tweet, like I just like think and then I'll write it and then when I post it, like submit like I immediately see the two very differently than it was in my mind.

I often delete like I delete some percentage of tweets about like two, five seconds after. Wow. I don't know something.

Well you once you send it it's why the Gmail send features I which is really nice. It's like, it just changes the way I see the thing. So it's very interesting. It's but I really love it that you can delete it because. When I say stuff out in the wild, like to other humans, like others, spoken, spoken word is like you can't delete what you just said. And I often regret the things I say, like in in on the spot.

Like, I shouldn't have said that. Really?

Yeah, I don't have that.

Well, again, whoever your editor is, what is it at this? Know, I could you're your fantasies about as your English.

Um, I don't have any tweets I regret because if I sent a tweet that I regretted, I would make amends. I would make it a point if I was a needlessly offensive to somebody or hurtful or accidentally, I would make sure to fix it and go out of my way to make sure that person feels vindicated and validated by accepting my apology. That has never happened, had to happen.

Thankfully, I'm also someone who is not big on taking the bait us some recently some people have come after me pretty hard. And my perspective is that it's not really about me. It's either I represent something to them. I'm just a jackass with a Twitter. So if you're getting this riled up over me, it's not really about me. Maybe I'm delusional. That's how I look at it. So if they are trying to provoke me into this kind of heated exchange, I will never do it, because that's not I'm not interested in it.

And it's I don't think there's going to be. And it's like Jeannette Rankin, you can't win. It's just going to be like trying to win a hurricane. There's no hero here.

Well, let me ask you about this, because some of you also asked that on your overly expensive membership's like that, like they were saying that they're an academic. They wonder because I'm an academic, I'm not an academic, but I do still have an affiliation with MIT.

I the word academic is dirty. It's I guess, which is the problem that needs to change. Just like the word nerd is dirty.

No academic needs is going to be the next front to open and they're going to be very vilified. We're coming for them and it's going to be very, very ugly. And I cannot wait.

No, but there needs to be a place and a different term for people who love research and knowledge and input. Like you have to be right 100 percent. You're right. So there you have to you have to clarify what you mean by academic. And right now, the word academic means a verse in the intellectual public discourse. It means the enemy. And there's a lot of people that perhaps deserve that targeted vilification. But like a lot that don't they're just curious people.

They're just you're absolutely right.

Building building robots will one day destroy voice cracks.

Every time I make a joke, you know, I can't do this. It's OK. It's like I'm editing and I can't delete that joke.

OK, that's not even a joke. Robots building robots will one day kill us.

Oh, God willing humans are the joke.

That's why I'm cracking my voice cracking.

And what were even what was even fucking saying academics. But why I local someone had a question.

They're not academic, they're academic.

They're saying like, are you worried that, you know, in academia associating yourself with a sort of somebody who has who can be misconstrued to have radical ideas like the two examples they gave is Michael Mouse and Joe Rogan is you'll have any radical.

I wouldn't consider him radical at all. Well, we can talk about it. Oh, I think a bad example is why quite centrist to me.

Well, he could have, for example, like, what has Joe been attacked on is, for example, on the topic of like transgender, like athletes, athletes in sports.

There's what else? I mean, he's been pro Bernie Sanders and that's pro Trump or like giving Trump a pass not by Trump, not anti Trump.

Oh, what else? Just but of these are red meat, meat stuff being pro meat versus anti vegan. Yeah. Of know all those kinds of things.

But it could be misconstrued and and saying there's I think a highlight in my mom actually wrote to me about this, which is hilarious.

Thank you. At like he jotted down its words. That important. Well that's say your mom wrote to you. Just think that's that's a sign.

My voice cracks are silent when Michael Malice makes the funny jokes, when he does something that and then he writes it and then the next time he crosses it out, just put. Yeah, it's like. Joe Biden at the debates. OK? It also just crapped my pants so much. There is a I mean, he's a comedian.

You have a comedian side to you, right? I mean, you're you've talked about the humor side. Humorous is so you can misconstrue, like Joe as being somehow a radical thinker. And the same could be done with you.

And his question was, how are you worried about associating yourself with folks like that?

Am I or you? I mean me. Yeah. And is that something do you see yourself as somebody? Who's dangerous that I shouldn't be talking to and in the same way you do, you do you ever think about guests on your podcast or people you talk to publicly associate yourself with publicly and think that there is somebody that crosses that line that you shouldn't?

So I interviewed in the new right, I interviewed up to full blown Nazis. The last chapter is about Chris Kentwell. But that was in the context of that book. Right. So there's lots of people who people want me to have on my show. And the way I look at it is like you have a table and tablecloth. Right. And let's suppose the table is of three feet wide. The tablecloth is two feet wide. So if I move the tablecloth to the right, I'm going to lose people on the left.

I can only cover so much space. And the further you go on the fringe in one direction, the more mainstream you're going to lose and the other direction. So I'm very much making a conscious choice not to talk to being. People will say I'm cowardly and that's absolutely true. I'm being fearful here. I would prefer not to talk to some of those who would alienate some of the more mainstream people. And here's a perfect example of why. On my birthday last year, I woke up seven o'clock in the morning to go pee and I checked Twitter, whatever, and Jeb Bush had followed me.

Jeb and I did seven a.m.. You're not really awake. You're like, wait, what? And then I thought maybe it's a fake account, but it's in the verified tab. You don't have this because you're not verified on Twitter. That's a shame. So people who are matter on Twitter, Twitter does not respect robots.

They then bots. You're lucky, zero one zero zero zero zero zero.

Those are my pronouns.

So it was Jeb, Jeb, Governor Bush and I corresponded with him and I asked him on the show and he decided not to, for various reasons, very politely, like just politics is still bad right now. I want to talk about it and I respect that for him.

If I am in a spirit, if I'm creating my show where he's going to get heat for who I get canceled. Oh, you can't be on the show. He has his other guests. I don't want to lose that opportunity because as we were talking about earlier, I mean, Alex Jones and Tim Pool, I think a lot of people would be very excited to see me sit down with Jeb Bush. And I told him in writing and I meant this, I wouldn't be clowning him.

I wouldn't be disrespectful. It would be a lot of fun. There's a goofball side to him that comes out sometimes. And I would do my best to bring that out and talk about what it's like being a blueblood to be born into. His grandfather, Prescott Bush was a senator from Connecticut. Marrying a woman, didn't speak English. How does that work when your family's royalty and things like that? So I had a lot of fun questions for him.

And that's kind of you going to have to choose one or the other.

Well, you do a really good job of that. Like Ben Shapiro does a good job of that, too, which is you can have multiple you can have a trolly side humor side where you tear down the power structures and so on. But you can also have a serious side and it's a safe space for people from all walks of life to walk in. And yes, not you're not adversarial. Never. Abdirahim, I take the word guest seriously.

If they're going to be on my show, I'm not going to have them have negative consequences as a result of being on my show.

That said, I mean, maybe in my case, I'll be honest and say that I find Alex Jones outside of the conspiracy stuff for some reason. Maybe you can explain, maybe you can psychoanalyze me, but I find him hilarious. Yeah.

Listen to me. He's a performer. He's very performative. But there's a lot of people that don't see the humor of it and they see the serious consequences of spreading conspiracy theories of different kinds. And, yeah, they see the danger of it, you know, and I personally. I'm often tempted to to talk to Alex in a podcast format, but I think I'm trying to convince myself that I never will. For me, I feel unsafe talking to Alex because.

I can't truly be myself, which is like that, you'd have to be on naive and honest. Yeah, and like and actually I generally when I talk to humans, I want to see the best in them. And I think that's like I often think about if I talk to Hitler in 1935, 1938, you got to list the names to give him.

Well, yeah, I mean, that's how you get the interview. Come on, let's be honest. Who who are we kidding? I would you have to give away one of your.

I would probably get along with my brother.

So how many brothers there was one too many. What I want to know is the older brother used to pick on me. Payback. You know, it's only he a good life. You should think of it more. Stalin, I interrupt you because Hitler, you're Jewish, so you're already getting to have very adversarial. It's not going to be normal. He's not going to perceive you as a as a human in a sense. Right. Right. So it's all in you, right?

Yeah. That would be much easier work. Kim Jong un or something like that. I guess you think, OK, this is a good question is in that and that's.

But why don't you judge something if you are. All right, we'll cross it out in a second. I think this is a really good example of a difficult figure that's controversial that people bring up to me a lot. And you interviewed twice, which is courtesy of an apartment just like Mencius Mall, a.k.a. Mensches Small Bug, which is his pseudonym, that he goes by his book. Can you tell me about who he is? Sure. Why is the interesting one of his ideas very interesting?

Well, he briefly he invented the concept, the red pill. So Curtis Mencius milblog had a blog called Unqualified Reservations. You can still find it online. It's very verbose. He writes at length, very, very bright. His perspective is very heretical. So a lot of things that we take for granted in our liberal democracy, he regards as not only incorrect, which is downright absurd and does not he does not take what many people view as the basis of American public discourse, as the basis for his thought so.

When you're starting with someone who is basically repudiating kind of the Western world view, we're not the Western world, you like the American media, a lot of people are going to, of course, regard him as dangerous or someone who is verboten. He's a very bright person.

Why is this such a toxic figure? Because if you are blue pills, if you are the guardians of what is acceptable discourse, then you have to make sure your thoughts are secured and that any figure outside of this acceptable discourse has to be marginalized and regarded as radioactive as possible. You don't want to let in these kind of ideas that would be destructive to your hegemony.

Well, so let's dig into it. So the key I've read a few things by him, but then I hear that in a bunch of places, him being called the racist, a white supremacist, neo fascist.

So on I go to Wikipedia. Yeah, there's a view on race section. Let me read it, OK? Javins opinions have been described as racist, with his writings interpreted as support of slavery, including the belief that whites have higher IQ than blacks for genetic reasons. Javin himself maintains that he's not a racist because while he doubts that, quote, all races are equally smart. The notion, quote, that people who score higher on IQ tests are in some sense superior human beings is, quote, creepy.

He also disputes being an outspoken advocate for slavery, though he has argued that some races are more suited for slavery than others. Quote, It should be obvious that although I'm not always a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff you even wrote in a post that linked approvingly of, I don't know, these people. Steve Sailer, this area from Jared Gaoler and other racialists. Yeah.

So, OK, so one of my questions is let me just say one sentence in the same way that you had.

You mentioned that guy earlier who was defending some aspects of communism and that is in some contexts acceptable. When you think about it's like this should be radioactive. Right. The fact that he is engaging with these ideas in anything other than this has to be refuted at all costs is what renders him, to a large extent, racist. That's really interesting. So there are some topics you can be nuanced, nuanced and some not. And communism is still a topic that you can be nuanced about.

It's difficult, but you can be raised in this like talk about slavery and IQ differences based on race is a topic that I guess is radioactive to a degree where you can't even say anything, even if it's like nuanced or not, even like making a point. It's like touching it as you make another point.

And understandably, you can understand that I'm going to steal their point because you can understand the point like you're just talking about Hitler once this foot gets in the door that some people are inherently slaves or some people are inherently better than others, it really quickly collapses.

So that would be their perspective. But that's what I like if I were to give criticism of his. But let me just say one more thing. Racist is also used to describe Alex Jones. Alex doesn't talk about race. Racist is a shorthand for a certain percentage of the population to let you know, do not bother investigating this person any further. They're off limits are definitely racism.

And sexism is a thing that's now used to shut down conversation. That's quite absurd. But by a small percentage of the point, Jared Taylor and Steve Sailer, Jared Taylor interviewed him for my book. He would be regarded in any sense as a racist.

What's the difference in racist and racialists? So, racialists, I mean, this is splitting hairs and now I'm going to be all radioactive. Jared Taylor runs something called Amron. And this is I mean, his perspective is that there are inherent differences for the races and you cannot live side by side. Well, whites and blacks should not be living.

And by the way, for people who don't know, this is out of context. You have written a great book that includes some of these concepts called The New Right, which does not include these concepts, but talks about. Yeah, well, it's more about the growth of the the community around that. That's the right. And all those kinds of the world. Right.

So and his point about IQ, it's like if you had a population, the Dutch I think they're the tallest people on Earth. And if you said, well, the Dutch are the best people on earth. Why? Because they're the tallest. It's like you're a crazy person. So if someone is scoring low, an individual on an IQ test, that means there's somehow a lower quality person.

Well, maybe one very specific aspect, but I mean, if they're a good human being, I've got friends who are low IQ. All my friends are low IQ, frankly, compared to me. Sound like Trump.

They're for how you choose. Well, I don't have any other choices. No one can be at my level. You're the you're the smartest person since Abraham Lincoln that I've that I've ever seen.

Unlike him, I actually am honest.

So. So he is someone who very much swims in heretical ideas. Aristotle. Here's another thing. Like if you bring up that Aristotle said that some people are born to be slaves. He wasn't speaking about race. You just meant people's souls. H.L. Mencken, who was a great heretic and early 20th century figure of his quotes that I say all the time, which people have seen a lot in this past year, that the average man does not want to be free, he merely wants to be safe.

That, I think, is I don't know.

I am not familiar with what Mahlberg saying about slavery because his writing is ponderous. But that certainly is something I think that it's undeniable that I think more people are realizing there's a large percent of the population that is actively disinterested in freedom and the more responsibilities that entails.

Well, I mean, really just the word slavery. If you want to make some kind of point or even think about the topic. Outside the context of this is a horrible thing that happened in the United States history and other countries history, us. Let's be clear, this is very important in their slavery going on today.

And there are a lot of people argue that sex trafficking and all those kinds of things, I mean, there's atrocities going on today that, you know, talking about it in a way that's not immediately saying this is the most horrible thing that happened ever. You know, it's something I think about a lot is like if I want to say something controversial. I should do so with skill, with care, and only about things I care about.

Well, here's where I would disagree. I'm not when I say things, I often say things that are controversial or I will say uncontroversial things in a controversial way because it's a useful mechanism to alienate people you don't want around you, because if there are people who are going to be shocked by certain topics, like we shouldn't have entered World War Two, like even as a hypothesis, they just clutch their payrolls. They're like, oh, you want the Holocaust to happen?

I can't discuss most things with you because you're not interested in having a conversation, interested in your emotional response. I think I see things differently. Maybe this is a bit of a devil's advocate, but what in at least the modern discourse of like Twitter and social media and so on, I find that if you do that, you're not actually. Removing the people that are not thoughtful and kind and so on, you're actually attracting loud people like a small number of them, they come over and start yelling at you, start yelling.

They're basically ruining the party by showing up and just screaming. And so all the thoughtful people leave.

Well, that's why you have to be a very heavy blogger. You have to block people on Twitter because you have to cultivate your audience and have them. Like a lot of times people come at me, I don't care. Then they'll start attacking members of my audience and then I'm like, dang, I got to block them because they've won this one because I can't have that.

Yeah, I don't know.

On necessarily provoking people feels. It's it's it's this is beta testing, you try to break the system and see what works, you put as much pressure as possible. This is very much computer stuff that you should be able to appreciate. The point being, when you have a program, you're trying to intentionally sit there and do as many mistakes go wrong. Right. Is that not common? Yeah. Yeah.

So you're saying that's that's a way to see communication with the world, as you say, something uncontroversial in a controversial way and that blocks people that or does it trigger them?

Do they roll their eyes? You know what? It's going to be the emotional response or they start yelling.

The problem is the reason I can't think like this or I can't because I'm not sure about the points I'm trying to make always like I'm not always 100 percent sure that I'm right about things like so I'm being thoughtful. I'm afraid that I'll turn off with an inelegantly phrased or even incorrect statement. I will do damage that can't be undone in terms of. Having a good conversation about a topic so I want to be very careful about, like, I'm nothing afraid.

Fear is not what I'm talking about. I think fear is is like not saying something out of fear is at the core of many of the problems of the world today. But I'm just saying be safe stuff with care. If I'm going to touch race a topic, it feels like you really should be deeply first have a point to make, like you really care about a point you want to make. And second, think deeply about how to see that point in a way that communicates the best and and touching.

I would say, listen, I've I've on your show, which is which is great. I mean, I'd like to say thank you for having Mencius Mobile. You are welcome. That's the that's the name of the show.

Thank you for having a couple of times. It's great to sort of get him to in this loose way to talk about different kinds of stuff.

I don't think we talk about race at all, so. No, no, no. I'm just bringing it back to what you were asking, which is if you read the Wikipedia, the perspective is going to be this guy talks about slavery constantly where it's completely disproportionate to his work. But even on your show, you can tell even outside of the very stuff that he's not ultra careful about. He's not. Nuanced. Yeah, he's not afraid to say something, just like I would say, let me just criticize him.

If it does not use me carelessly, say something controversial, right? Like I'm not saying he doesn't go. You know, that makes him it's a very different thing than somebody who on purpose says something controversial, stuff like Milo Anapolis. Sorry, I forgot Milo, whatever his name is. Yeah. Which is really nice to see that he's a genuine person who's thoughtful. He doesn't mean shit, but he just cares carelessly. Seems to say things that I feel like damage the rest of his body of work.

I can't really speak for him. But I would guess his point is once you're swimming in this kind of worldview, you're going to be anathema already. So there's no pleasing these people. So why bother trying?

Yeah, I think that's a deeply that's a that's a black pill way of seeing the world. It's not Blackfield at all because it's a cynical way that these people. So it's it's saying that you're it's a very kind of way of thinking. Like, I'll say whatever I want, whoever comes along with me.

No, you just earlier said yourself that race, racism has been weaponized as a way to shut down conversation. So I think his perspective would be I am so outside the mainstream in my worldview that I know I'm going to be called racism racist. So there's no point in trying to be nuanced because I'm already going to get the Scarlet Letter. Yeah, I just disagree with that because, for example, I'm one I am one person that he turned off by his carelessness.

And I think I should be a good target. I should be somebody that's fair. And I'm just like he it's very convenient to think that there's ridiculous people out there which there are who call every racist and sexist currently, and then you can't please them. So I'm not even going to try. No, but there is like this gray area of people that I don't listen to the outrage culture, whatever. I don't this Wikipedia article means nothing to me.

Like, I'm not going to write what I'm more I'm just seeing this careless person. And if he's going to be careless about, like, race like this, I feel like if I walk along with him long enough, I'm going to catch the carelessness.

I'm going to lose. Like, I'll defend your perspective better than you can.

Yeah. This is this is good. I'm taking notes.

I talked to Eric Weinstein after you guys talked about me on your show last Wednesday. We had a good conversation. He invited me on his show. There'll be an amazing conversation.

And we got on the phone and his concern fairly.

He goes, I don't want you to come on my show for the purposes of clowning me. And I would never do that. It would never happen. He might not be aware of.

That's why he wants to feel me out. He's like, you know, when he hears trouble, it can mean a lot of different things. And I we had a very conversation and very much was very clear that that's not where the conversation will go. But I think when you are going to be on someone's show, there is a responsibility that they're not going to have to pay a cost for having you as their guests. So if you're if you were put off by how he was in that live stream or two, I did like I understand where you're coming from.

I think he's very, very bright. But you have a very you have a different audience than I do when you're going for something different than I am.

No, no. Like in my in just the sense of you wouldn't feel safe with him. Yeah, I wouldn't feel safe with them. But he's he's borderline life for me. I think I would like to actually talk to him one day. Alex Jones is cross the other line for me as well.

You could do it with me. Tape the episode.

They never release it. Now, it's one of those things will be when there's finally the Atomic History Channel documentary about you and I and how it all went wrong, like the cult that we started in that everybody killed themselves. And there's a will release that then because it'll be like unseen footage.

This is how it started. It'll be black and white in a basement somewhere in New York. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, this explains so much. OK, so I spoke to Yaron Brooke about Objectivism and I and Rand.

He he kind of argued he highlighted the difference between capitalism and anarchism as around the topic of violence and the idea that having government. Be the sort of the the the negative way to say it is like having a monopoly on violence, but basically being the arbiter of or the the people that are making sure that violence doesn't get out of hand, that, you know, any studies show that the government is great at that.

Well, what would be OK without this system with a straight face making that argument good right there on.

All right.

Well, can you with a straight face argue for the idea that in anarchism, violence would not get out of hand? Sure.

For one thing, if your worst argument against that, one of my little quotes is what are presented as the strongest arguments against anarchism are inevitably descriptions of the status quo. So the argument is under anarchism, you know, you'd have warlords, you know, killing people and then you'd have, you know, whoever's strongest gets to just take over a neighborhood.

Well, we have that now. We saw that the police are perfectly comfortable disarming the population and then when they try to protect themselves, are punished. They were happy to stand down. You can't you can only have that happen if you have a monopoly. If they're like, let's suppose you had television stations, right? And CBS said, you know what, we're not going to broadcast cool. You don't broadcast. We're going to watch any of these other channels.

So the problem with having a monopoly is everyone has to be dependent on this issue.

What's amazing about anarchism, which Objectivists are, is they will argue that government is really, really bad at everything it does and it touches. Therefore, it has to be in charge of the most important stuff.

But it's not. Therefore, but but there is a thing that's fundamentally different than all the other things.

Yaron Brook also said that no government has this is on your show has ever worked in the way he's proposing now, objectivism. Ayn Rand's philosophy is based on objective reality. And what she posited is you look and study the facts of nature. So that's the reality and deduce things accordingly. And she very much regards herself as part of the Aristotelian tradition, as opposed to the Platonist tradition, where the idea precedes reality and the idea is more real than what we see around us.

So what he's saying is all the data, according to him, contradicts his argument. But still, he's going to make this imaginary government that has never existed and there's no evidence that it can exist. Let's talk about objective law to have access to the legal system, which is something we want even justice from selling disputes. When you have a government nappily, it's going to be more expensive, more difficult for poor people. The cost of hiring a lawyer is more expensive than hiring a surgeon.

You can't say with a straight face this is the only way or the best way. OK, so and the other thing is the argument for objectivism they have to do against anarchism, they have this stupid claim. It's like, what if, you know, you're a member of one security company and I'm a member of another and we have a dispute and one shows up the door, what happens now as if this is some insuperable argument? Well, we have that on Earth.

Every country is in a state of anarchism regarding every other country, but don't have a world government.

So what happens if a Canadian kills an American in Mexico? I have no idea. I bet you don't have an idea. What I'm sure of is that system has been worked out ahead of time between the three countries and it's been worked out in such a way that you and I don't have to reinvent the wheel. Same thing with cell phone companies. If I'm on Sprint and MetroPCS and I call you, who pays the sprint pay you? Do they split the difference?

First of all, there's no objective way that one has to work. But the thing is, companies who have auto accidents, they have arbitrage all the time. Like if I run into you, they work it out and it never reaches our desk. So the only thing that cops are good at is keeping at any government monopoly is forcing people to be their customers by keeping them unsafe.

OK, there's a few things I'd like to say there that just explore some of these ideas. So one is in terms of Canadian and Mexican, so on, that it does something has been worked out.

Perhaps not. Perhaps don't don't say perhaps you know for sure that there's a point I'm trying to make.

So let's say for sure it's been worked out. There is a there was a point in history where it wasn't worked out, like, to to to work to come to a place of stability.

There has to be some instability.

So when you first like for every kind of situation in there, like dispute over space, like who gets to own Mars, that kind of thing, there's a first for it. And then then these different competing institutions will have to figure it out. And so there's the concern with anarchism, I think, or with any kind of interaction. What you said the brilliantly that there's an anarchism relative to the there's no one world government. Right. Alex Jones enters the chat.

But the there's the fear is that there's going to be an instability that that that doesn't converge towards some stable place.

That is not the fear. That is the goal. Under Ayn Rand's philosophy, markets have something that they always talk about is being creatively destructive, which means you look at something that's been happening for a very long time. Every generation, every innovator starts chipping away at it. He finds better ways, marginal improvement or marginal and or doesn't work, and he goes broke. When government tries to implement improvement, we all have to suffer the consequences.

When an innovator does, it's a huge asymmetry. If it hurts, it only hurts him. If it succeeds, he becomes rich and we all profit as a consequence.

But the fear of anarchism, I think, is that. It will be noncreative destruction, it'll be just destruction. Right. It's not like the instability. Let's give you there's no stability is one of these words that sounds objective but has no real meaning. What field has stability? If you let's suppose you want stability relationships. Yeah. Let's talk about medicine. Stability means we're not going to invent new diseases or new treatments. Right. If you mean stability in terms of a baseline of security, we have that already.

Very few relationships turn violent under an anarchist system. Look at it right now where if you look at a bar full of drunken young males full of testosterone, if you look at a hotel where everyone is not native to the area, those are both far safer than the places that the government has taken upon itself to protect you. The parks, the alleyways, the streets, the subways we have right now a comparison of which is better at keeping people safe.

And it's very obvious that when it's something, it's private and under someone's control and there would be layers of there'd be more police, but there wouldn't be a government monopoly. The store would have someone on the street would have someone and you'd have your own personal security that would be attached to your phone.

Having security is a function of geography as opposed to a function of you as an individual is a landline technology cell phone world. So you think it's possible to have, psychologically speaking, as an individual among the masses, to have a sense of security, even there's even though there's not a centralized thing at the bottom of the whole thing. So, like, there's not a set of laws that are enforced based on geography, like we have nations now.

You can have a set of laws that are enforced in some kind of emergent agreed upon way.

So basically, I want to go to a hotel and trust that I'll be able to get a room and nobody's going to break down the door and.

I don't know, but you have to call my vidler. Let's let's take a different way. If you were worried about a hotel having bedbugs. Not a sign that governments involved in what mechanist. And that's not an unrealistic concern. Are there mechanisms right now that you can undertake to make sure that's not the case? Yes. So it would be the same thing with I want to make sure I go to a hotel that has security. It be exactly the same thing.

And here's another example. Kosher food. People who keep kosher, Jews who keep kosher, their food has to be repaired in a certain way. It has to meet higher rabbinical standards. Right. If you look at food, it will have that certification, the K and there's even competition there. There's the K and there's a stricter you letter. People don't notice because they're looking for it. You would have companies certifying different locales for their level of security and it would take an hour to have an app that just like when you have toll roads, right.

That would tell you you're approaching an unsafe area, you're not going to be covered by us or and you could have it color coded very easily. We could do this today.

But the thing is, you're exactly correct. But there's an assumption of you're already in a you can give me a different word and stability, but you're already in a place where the forces of the market or whatever can operate the worries. Like initially you might not have enough the ability to where you can choose one place over the other based on the security that they provide.

We already have different types of security here because we have federal government, we have state governments and we have local governments. So and these often contradict each other.

So the idea of the implausibility of having different security companies and having it be unstable or impossible, we already have a very rough example of it happening in real life.

But all of it started. It's like the idea of special Yaroun is like it all started with government monopoly of violence, saying, like, now kids don't let violence get out of hand.

So like civil war where half the country was slaughtered, that's the display of the government not having a monopoly on the violence.

Right.

It's like it had it had such a monopoly in the violence in the north that it could draft people to fight others that they didn't even cover.

There's a south. So it's a it's a it's the government splitting. OK, so because this is a giant iceberg, like splitting is it's the argument is that you would have something like a civil war much more often under anarchism.

But that's that's that's first of all, if you had a civil war much more often, we don't have that with car companies. Right. There's no car company that says I refuse to pay or whatever. It's not violent.

Sorry to interrupt, but like and I'm playing it is that it is violence because if I'm a company and I'm saying that my cars can run over yours with no consequences, this is a rough analogue. That's why has that not happened now in terms of having security system, if I am free, just like switching cell phone to go from one provider to another and this one company is part of its payment, doesn't want fifty dollars a month. A hundred dollars a month.

Once my son, I'm not going to be a member of the security company unless in that case we're dealing with something like a Pearl Harbor or foreign invasion where it's like all hands on deck.

Let's go by evidence, how many places do have evidence of that? There you can have it a large scale. Was that a large scale, because it feels like once you don't know the person, what about eBay?

eBay is an example of anarchism in practice. I am selling something to someone whose name I don't even know in a country that is nowhere proximate to me and eBay acts as the arbiter. Sometimes I don't get the money after I get screwed over. But that's far less than the taxation that I have to give to the federal government. That's a great point, but it's a nice piece of finance. If I could if on eBay you could also commit violence, theft is violence.

No, if yeah.

If you give me 10 grand for a car and I don't deliver anything, you've stolen 10 grand from me.

Yes, but there's something uniquely problematic to being stabbed or shot.

The recent stabbed or shot is because the government, despite its contract, is refusing to allow Second Amendment rights to be implemented among the citizenry. And the people who are making that the case are the cops. They are the ones who are the traitors of the Constitution and should be regarded as such, whereas private companies are far more amenable to market pressures than the state is.

It's a strong argument. But let's actually just briefly mention the scale thing. Why why don't you think we should talk about scale?

Like because if you had anarchism just in Vermont or just in Brooklyn, well, find the people, make the argument you need anarchism, China's going to invade. But that's like saying what? Like do these little countries don't exist? San Salvador not exist? Some of them are violent. Some of them are not. But the point is they're not all at a moment's notice about to be invaded. Kuwait is an example of this. Kuwait was invaded by Iraq.

And very quickly, all the big countries were interested in having your stability safe space, got involved and kicked him out of Kuwait. If you had this company that was waging war on the population, it seems quite likely that the other organization would get together, put a stop to this, because they're not in a position to provide the service security to their customers. OK, this is brilliant.

But didn't you just say that we are actually in a state of anarchism relative to other countries? Yes. So isn't this what emerges? This is this is what aren't we actually living in a state of anarchism where we all have agreed? I haven't agreed to anything. So like the basic criticism you have is like you're born on a land, geographical land area, geographical area, and you're forced to have signed a bunch of stuff just by being born. Right.

Good place. So. So really, you could if you could, just much easier to choose, right, which space of ideas you associate with. Right. That would be actually a state of anarchism.

Yes. And you could have like a military you sign up with, sure. And you're certainly not putting people in prison to get raped because they're selling drugs. Yeah. And you're certainly not allowing everyone else on the street who wants to be there, can we say something nice about Ayn Rand?

I can talk about nice things about her all day. I own a copy of The Fountainhead. Yet what to you is Ayn Rand's best idea, one that you find impactful, insightful, useful for us in modern society that you think about that your life has meaning and productive work is your highest value and that you shouldn't apologize. And this something I despise. You shouldn't apologize for saying I want to be happy and I'm going to work toward that and that a few others that you owe nobody else some random stranger a second of your time.

You see this a lot on Twitter and social media. People like demanding a debate or demanding you act a certain way and engage with them. You don't owe them anything. So I think those are some of her. Best ideas actually teach you how to think Ayn Rand does not have all the answers, but she has all the questions, do you think what do you think about the whole selfishness thing? I mean, do you are you triggered by the word selfish?

So it's really unfortunate what she does, because you were just talking about earlier about Mooroolbark being carelessly she this is indefensible, in my opinion. So she talks about the virtue of selfishness and she claims that when people talk about selfishness, think they mean concerned primarily with the self, they don't. When people talk about selfishness, they mean in a sociopathic way concern exclusively with one's self. Right. They mean like, oh, if someone is dying on the street, I'm not going to, you know, even waste the second saving them because I'm selfish.

So she sets up this complete caricature of the term. What she when she's attacking selflessness in her best sense is when there are people who have no sense of self, they have no values of their own, they have no goals of their own. Everything that's in their mind, it's gotten second hand from the culture at large. And there's nothing unique or special from their perspective worth fighting for. So when she attacks, which she advocates for the self, she basically means self development, self improvement and achievement.

So I think that word choice is really it false and needlessly off-putting.

Yeah, controversial, perhaps for the purpose of being controversial enough.

But it's just it's not accurate. That's not what people mean by selfishness.

Yeah, I would say it's one of the one of the reasons probably her philosophy is not as much adopted. Your thought about is like it's funny. Like the use of words means something exactly as you said. That's my criticism. It's Jazzmobile, which could be incorrect criticism, by the way. So I'm not exactly sure. Can we talk about. Some modern day chaos and politics. Yes, please. US speaking of your hatred for chaos, let's talk about secession.

Oh, yeah, I was the first one on this trip. Yeah, you were. Well, the Civil War beat you to it, but sure. In contemporary times.

In contemporary times, you are you're on this. Can you talk about what is the idea of secession? What are the odds that it might happen? What does it mean for the United States in some way for different states to secede? Sure. America has been one country with several cultures since the beginning. There's absolutely no reason for someone. This goes back to the anarchist idea. If you despise Donald Trump, which is your prerogative, if you think Joe Biden is a clown, which is your prerogative, there's absolutely no reason for you to be governed by someone you disapprove of.

This is an incoherent, nonsensical concept. The only reason we even take it as a hypothesis is that we're trained to the contrary since kindergarten, a secession, I don't know. Along what lines. But increasingly it's becoming harder and harder for people to have conversations. I think social media and this is something people despise social media for.

I think this is something that social media has done well, which I'm advocating for is it tends to kind of run through ideas through like an evolutionary process and drive them to the logical conclusion. So it's very hard to be a modern online because it's going to be people, you know, pushing through your ideas through several cycles and then you're going to end up at some kind of more pure or if you want to dislike it, extreme perspective, having these different pockets.

It's not really governable because people fundamentally have different worldviews. So I don't know what secession would look like. I think the number is really increasing at exponential rate. I do not a number of support and supporters. I think the claim that this can only be accomplished to violence is false. It's a lie. Just like any divorce doesn't have to involve beating your ex-husband or ex-wife.

So and I'm very much looking forward to this becoming a reality far quicker than I ever expected. Well, do you think there's a value of.

Competing world views being forced to be in the same yes space in a context, so we can agree if Group One thinks A, B and C are the fundamental aspects of their worldview and argue within that. And World Group two thinks DNF and argues in that. So you're going to have a lot of argument within the space. But if there's fundamental differences in Worldview, there's no reason to be, especially when each views the other is completely coherent and reasonable.

Do you think there's a line of fundamentally different world views that. Along with secession will happen in the United States. Is there something that emerges to you as a set of ideas that are like.

Would you call that like you can't come to you can't come to an agreement over? I yeah, I think it's already happening like with the masks. I think there's just two fundamental perspective. And each one thinks the other is insane and also deadly and destructive. And I don't see how there's any discourse on this topic. So on the left, I wouldn't say it's left versus right. I think it's people who are pro risk versus people who are risk averse.

Yes, so risk averse and then there's like a hope for the comfort of the sort of centralized science giving the truth, and then everybody must follow the truth of the proper way to behave. And then there's on the other side a distrust of any kind of centralized institutions of anybody who might use, like control to try to gain greater and greater power and masks a symbol of that. And even if masks are not a effective way of of stopping the virus, which is really unfortunate to me as a from a perspective, I happen to be in a survey paper about masks, like people don't seem to care about the data or so on this.

This has become just a nice point on which to then highlight the difference between the two the two sides. Yeah, it's really I mean, I it's it sounds kind of on the face kind of ridiculous that this obsession would occur over it. But I'm saying it's an example of something where there's a clean break. Yes. And risk averse versus, you know, someone who's risk seeking. These are just two fundamentally different perspectives. Do you want to have an NHS or do you have a one of a market based health care system?

You can make very valid arguments for both. There's no reason for everyone to be under one. But you think that's not something that's that you think that's irreconcilable? If that's the word. Yeah. That that's not in the space of ideas that you can have in the same room together and they fight each other and ultimately make progress like that. Secession is the more effective way to proceed forward. Yes.

What do you see? A possible world knows the answer.

Meaning I know you say yes because you kind of lean on the side of freedom and anarchism. Yes. Like you make you want to make. Let me make an argument in terms of divorce, which is in your world view or your intuition is you want to make succession as frictionless as possible, of course, along all not just states or whatever, just like you want to choose. You want to be free. Yeah, and peaceful.

Let me make my authoritarian Russian style argument in terms of relationships like when she goes wrong in a relationship, it's not your language.

OK, there's only one place for one star at this table.

OK, ok, I'll get you let him know you get to be like Merkel as our previous discussion with Putin.

OK, don't let me unleash the hounds.

You know, you want to work through some of the troubles before you get a divorce.

Like you want to do the work and relationships, like it goes up and down. It's been two hundred plus years. It's it's done.

But in the listen, OK, so it's not a one night stand. But, you know, look at Trump this I don't see the middle ground.

He's either a complete calamity buffoon or he's been the first great president we've had in like many, many years. So you think that there's something different now than it was 20 years ago? Yes. Social media and access to information. And the division will only increase, do you think? Oh, yes, so Trump is not an accident of history. So they thought Trump was the river, but he was the dam.

Trump was the dam, they thought he was the river, so not analogy. Trump being gone makes things worse. Yes, for that perspective, because now things are really going to hit the fan. So what are the odds of secession? I don't know. And my desperate hope is that it's peaceful. But I think the number of people who are becoming very comfortable with the violence is making me very unsettled. Well, I see words as violence in your Twitter.

It's like Hiroshima, a million.

Sometimes I curl up in the corner crying after I check your Twitter feed, so.

But, you know, in all seriousness, do you think it's possible to do nonviolent secession?

It's a good Czechoslovakia. Look at Brexit. Brexit was the secession. Right, right, so you can have civil war did not need to be fought, that would have been a non-violent secession. And if even worried about slavery, you could have bought off all the slaves and brought them to the north. It still would have been cheaper and less loss of life and probably better for race relations.

Yeah, I don't know enough history to wonder about, like how the civil war could have been avoided, but that's how is well, conversation. So like, no, no.

If they want to secede, say, look, here's what we're going to do, we're going to let you secede, but you have to end up you have to end slavery. They seceded because of slavery. Here's the other thing. This is like this. Some circles of conservatism have this myth that wasn't about slavery, about states rights. Well, if you go back every state when they seceded, release the press release and they said explicitly, we're doing this because slavery.

So that is an abomination that needs to be taken care of. But the way other countries have, you know, ended slavery peacefully, one of the ways to do it is pay them back. And we end up doing this after the war. I think the South people got reparations. The slave owners, it was just insane.

Bring the North want to go to Cannes or whatever. And you agree. And that's our peace treaty. Because the people who died weren't the slave owners, it was white trash and it was always and I hate that that's the term, I can't think of a better one, but that's who always ends up fighting these wars, often disproportionately. It's poor people and uneducated people. And I don't I don't I do not regard them as cannon fodder. I think it's horrible.

So what would it look like? There would be two founding documents. Yeah, they had they had their constitution. I don't know the history of the they had a constitution, but it was much more decentralized. If secession doesn't happen, yeah. You said that Donald Trump was the dam, not the river. Yeah. That sounds like Walt Whitman or something, isn't it, poetry? OK, and you flirting with me, I don't you know, we don't we don't flirt.

We just go to the club and drag you into the hammock.

We have friends that go and you don't want to know about the good cop, bad cop, bad cop.

Worse. Yeah.

What do you think twenty, twenty four looks like in terms of the candidates and it's going to be Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate. I'm really looking forward to Ted Cruz versus Mike Pence because they're both very good at debate. That would be interesting to see how they differentiate themselves. But honestly, I don't I mean, things are going to get really ugly really soon.

What about Donald Trump coming back? He's not going to do it.

So things in my opinion, I think things are going to be really, really crazy in twenty, twenty one. And talk about the dad being gone like I'm only twenty one.

So this year coming up. Oh yeah. It's going to be complete. It's going to be complete mayhem.

What do you think of like prediction wise and this is empirical. What do you think Donald Trump's Twitter feed looks like in twenty twenty one at the end of twenty, twenty one, we'll look back and see like what was the, you know, Obama gay exclamation points or we one, he is going to be, for the first time in history, holding the Republican Party accountable to the the base.

We've never had that happen before. I I think he's going to be holding their feet to the fire, radicalizing them. And given that they have the Senate where it's going to be 50 50, the Democrats have a three seat majority in the House. This is not a governing coalition for either. It's going to be a complete mayhem.

What does that actually look like? So what are the key values, do you think, that he's he's going to try to push?

I think it's just going to be very contrarian. It's he's going to be holding them accountable in terms of budgeting, even though he never did that as president. I think in terms of some kind of nominations, here's the thing. This is the first time since Nixon 50 years and things weren't as politicized then where an incoming president doesn't have control of the Senate. The Senate has the vote over Cabinet positions. I do not see a possibility of them not trying to pick a fight on one or two of these nominations.

And that's going to and especially as revenge for Cavener. This is going to get a very bloody very quickly. And I think Mitch McConnell, there's a sadistic side to him. He revels in being the brakes on the car. And I think the base, it's just going to be throwing just they're going to want somebody. And it's like, oh, yeah, we eliminated this one person. So that's going to get really ugly really quickly.

You see it being quite diverse, like division increasing, not stabilizing or decreasing.

And I'll be doing my part. I know you'll be doing my part, but I'm trying to do my part. And they try to be like to me, the division is shouting over people like Elon Musk, people who are actually building stuff and like accomplishing things in this world. In terms of, like Elon said, he took the red pill.

Now you're talking about the I'm talking about forget Elon, SpaceX and Tesla and actually the good size of, like, some of the things that Google is doing, it's like actually building things, like making the world's information searchable, all that kind of stuff. I call the stuff the making actually the world a better place. There's a bunch of technologies that are increasing our quality of life, almost all that kind of stuff. I feel like they get like not much credit or in our public discourse because of the division divisions, just like like it's clouding our ability to concentrate on what's awesome about this world.

Well, you know what would eliminate the division, right?

Secession. Yeah, see, I don't. I know it's hard for me to disagree. It's hard for me to disagree because but at the same time, secession. I'm a romantic at heart, you want a divorce breaks my heart cool, but you want to live in a country. Yeah. What do you want to live in a country where Joe Rogan is regarded as an example of someone who is spreading white supremacy? I don't.

Well, but see, I feel like that's not the country we live in. That's just The New York Times did it. The cathedral does it on a regular basis. Well, the cathedral is OK. The cathedral, I guess you can maybe define the cathedral, but it's like the centralized institutions that have like a story that they're trying to sell. So this is my box concept. But, yeah, they basically are set the limits of permissible discourse and create a narrative for the population to follow.

But to me, that's a minority of people, minorities, always controlling everything in any country.

The vast majority, the masses have no thought. But minorities can be overthrown and assure the circulation of elites the way the land. And that's what the progress looks like is ridiculous. People take power. Yes. And then they get annoying and new ridiculous people that are a little bit better overthrow the previous.

No, I think progress happens despite the people who are in power, not because of them. Right.

And so why is secession? So is it always about overthrowing the powerful? Is that how progress happens? No, I think progress happens despite the powerful, the powerful are going to do what's in their power to maintain their power. And they're going to fight innovation because it's a threat to their control.

There's always going to be The New York Times of the world. There's always going to be those the let them have their own country.

So it's two countries, one has Georgia and the other one is The New York Times. That's basically what's happening right now. It's just geographically this map out very well. But culturally, yes. But that's just cultural stuff, like there's a layer of public discourse. OK, I don't mean like that's what we're operating under now, but there's actually progress being made, like roads being built, hospitals being run, all those kinds of things, like the different innovations.

That seems like secession is counter productive to that.

Right. Because one country would have all the roads and the other would have all the hospitals. That's a great point.

No, that's not that's not the point I'm trying to make, because just like it just feels like the division that we're experiencing in the space of ideas could be constructive and productive for for building better roads and better hospitals as opposed to like using that division to separate the countries. They're all going to have to solve the same problems.

It feels like they're sure, but they can solve them differently and compete that way. Market sample. Yeah, we're seeing that right now. Different countries have different mass mandates and things like this.

And the competition within the same structure, within the same founding documents and same institutions is not a fact that you think is as effective as separate and it is effective.

But there is a certain point which I think we have long past, where there is not a consensus, a governing consensus, ideologically or culturally. Let me ask you a fine question, OK? Knock, knock.

Who's there? Mars.

God of war, the other one. The planet. Yeah, so there is a kind of captivating notion that we might I'm excited by the human beings stepping foot on Mars. That to me is like one of those things that feels. Like, it's why do we want to engage in space exploration, but I'm a little bit with Elon Musk on this, which is. It's obvious that eventually, if human species is to survive, it's going to have to innovate in ways that includes the space, OK, like there is a lot of things we're not able to predict yet that if we push ourselves to the limits of space, like new ideas will come, they'll be obvious 100 years from now.

And we're not even imagining and colonizing Mars. That idea that seems ridiculous, exceptionally difficult, impossibly expensive is something that is actually going to be seen as obvious in retrospect and that we should engage in. OK, that's just to contextualize things. The fun idea and experiment from a philosophical political science is what kind of government how do you orchestrate a government when you go to Mars? Like we don't get too many chances like this, but how do you build new systems not in place of old ones, but in a place with no system previous have existed?

I think organically. I hate that word, but that's the correct word you would have to figure out. I mean, that's how America was built. You had that was a Jamestown colony and they tried to communism here and it completely failed. And they went to a more free market system with the second wave of colonists. My understanding from Mars, I mean, it depends on the population, who the population was, the number of people I don't know.

These are all kind of hypotheticals that I don't really have any good insight in whatsoever. I'm not a space person. I hate astronomy like I hate it.

So a lot of people look up to the stars and they're filled with on wonder about the mystery of the universe. And you you look up to the stars and you feel, what?

I'm not looking up. I'm looking at the earth. If you if you look at what's I'd much rather given a choice between Mars and the deep sea, I'd much rather spend a week at the deep sea and all the life forms that are down there because there are literal aliens. It's like things that are not literal, but they're unimaginable to us. Some of the things down there.

Yeah, it's true to me. It's an interesting thought experiment to see when you have ten people and you have one hundred people. Right.

How do you build an effective you know, this is actually really useful for a company, right? Like horrible. In fact, a company that does things. It's not an obvious despite everybody being really certain about everything that's in this modern world. To me, it's not obvious. Like how do you run successfully as a group of people?

I, i that's what I'm saying. It all organic means you have to look at who the people are and tailor the organization to them as opposed to try to impose something. But you get to also select people. Right, because it's not going to open borders on Mars. All right, I was going to say, when you have one country, it's all open borders. Yeah, you're right. Them from from outer space, right.

Some say they're aliens already there, so you're going to have to negotiate that or we're aliens, so we're aliens to somebody with illegal aliens. Do you think there's alien civilizations out there? Yes, of course. What do you think is their system of government anarchism? Because they're advanced? Do you honestly think there's intelligent life forms out there? Of course, is the math that it's impossible? There isn't. So what do you make of all the all the stories of UFO sightings, all that kind of stuff?

Do you think that visited Earth?

Yes, my grandfather was an air traffic controller in the Soviet Union and he said they would often see these things that were not operating the way we new vehicles operate. So that's good enough for me.

So, I mean, do you think government is in possession of some like what do you think government is doing with this kind of information? Do you think somebody has any understanding of. UFO sightings or any kind of information about extraterrestrial life forms that are not known to the public?

Yes, that's indisputably true. I think the fact that so many of these sightings are from aerodynamic professionals like pilots and things of that nature, there are people who've seen it all who are reputable, if they are on record saying, I've seen things that don't make sense. And both the Russians and the Americans thought it was the other one that says something.

Shouldn't that be a bigger problem? Shouldn't that be bigger news? And a bigger problem of government is, in fact, hiding it, I guess.

But what are they going to do with that information? It's a good question, like if a UFO, if extraterrestrial spacecraft, which most likely would be like a crappy space, like it wouldn't be the actual aliens, it would be like some drone probes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So if that looked like, what would you do with that information as somebody that's in charge of, you know, like you see how badly the WHL fumbled the discussion of masks.

Masks. Yeah. Masks is one of them. But everything really in terms of communicating with the public honestly about what they know, what they don't know. And that's a trivial one.

Right.

I don't I don't I don't know, they're certainly feel incompetent and being able to communicate effectively with the public about something much more difficult, much more fodder for mystery, like a of a thing, a piece of material that's out of the earth.

Forget like. Organic material. I don't I don't know to me so from a scientific perspective, would be beautiful.

It would be inspiring to reveal this to the world. Here's a mystery and make it completely public. Share it with China. Share it with everybody.

I think there is a domino effect where the concern would be what else are you hiding from us? And at that point, if you said no, no, no, this is everything, people wouldn't believe you and they would you can't blame them for not believing them.

Yeah. And then it'll be like, show us the aliens. They'd be like, we don't have them. We just have the craft. Your lying. Speaking of aliens offline, you mention elves, yeah, and psychedelics. Yeah, what do you think about psychedelics? In terms of the kind of places they can take. Your mind. The kind of journey you can take you on, Mike, what do you think what is what do you think the psychedelics do to the human mind?

And what does that say about the capacity of the human mind? And just in general, like the mysteries of all this out there?

I don't know that we understand what they do. The way I heard it explained to me is that much of the human mind isn't about receiving information, but blocking information. Right. Because we're so there's so much data coming in any moment that you basically have to train yourself to see and to hear only what you want to see and to hear. And that what psychedelics do is they tear that away and suddenly you're much more aware of what's out there. And also you're going to be noticing patterns that you hadn't noticed before.

And you had that researcher on the show and he can discuss this at some length.

I mean, Rogen is the person who popularized DMT more than obviously the person DMC more than anything. I don't know anyone who has even researchers who have anything close to a coherent explanation of why this drug, which is exists everywhere, would have this very specific, very extreme effect on so many people who are going to be experiencing such bizarre consequences as a result of it. I think it's very interesting that this is about the government. You know, the CIA start experimenting with LSD.

They killed one of their own people, drug the suicide. And there was a lot of research into Terence McKenna talking about this into this field. And then very quickly, once they got into the mainstream, they shut it down, even though it's not addictive, doesn't cause you to go crazy or anything like that. And there was a lot of propaganda against its use, which I think thankfully is now somewhat receding. I think Colorado just legalized mushrooms, something like that.

And I think it'll be very interesting to see what happens as a result of this. Yeah.

And the interesting thing is there doesn't seem to be for certain psychedelics, like psilocybin, like mushrooms. There doesn't seem to be a lethal dose, which is fascinating. Like Matthew Johnson, the the the Hopkins professor, the mentioned. I'm definitely going to do one of the studies.

It's it's a really cool way to do what he calls a heroic dose of sideburn.

Oh, I want to do it, but I have to do it. Let's let you know. So he's he is a heroic dose.

Holy crap. Yeah, but it's safe.

What's the how many grams are we talking? I don't know, but it's just as big. He's he says that is going to have a kick. Yeah.

So he says that, I mean he also studies cocaine, he studies all kinds of drugs and he's like the psilocybin is the heroic dose of cocaine kills or heat.

You can't. You can't. So you can't even come close. So he says, like, the problem with studying cocaine is you have like people who are addicted to cocaine. Yeah. Or so on. You give them the kind of doses that we can in part of the study is like it's nothing to them. Right. Psilocybin is the only one where like even like daily users are like regular users like are blown away by the dose they give them off.

So you can go to Russia in your mind.

Yeah, you could go to outer space, maybe maybe you'll become an astronaut or astronomer after all.

Maybe I'll be your guy. I'll let people look that one up. Holy crap.

Wow. What is love, what do you think this thing is like, our attachment to other human beings, and is it something that we should give to just a few people? Yes, that's for sure.

When I was working with D.L. Hughley in his book, he didn't use the term, but he was describing like low key depression. And he talked about how he was in the airport and he noticed a girl had a red dress and he went up and thanked her. And she is a great thing for and he had realized he hadn't registered color in, like, weeks. And I think love is like that when you see someone and you just like, oh, like like your eyes are open, like this is something I've never seen before.

I want more of this, that kind of thing. It's really it really disorients and reorients.

You're thinking, don't you find that like the world is full of that, like nonstop. It's not just like a person either. It's like but yes.

But when it's in a person, it's a whole other level because it's like I could have this is going to be great for years. It's like, you know, every day it's something new. I mean, that is and that is rare.

Do you think it's rare to find someone who you could talk to them for years and not run out of things to talk?

That's true. For years. Yes, that's rare.

And know that they really if you leave the room, they will do right by you. That's really rare. Well, from a Russian perspective, you just don't give them another choice. For this is the whorish New Year, New Year's Eve. Uh. So you talked about secession in the world burning down and you holding the match at the end, you're standing with a big smile on your face. Yes. Why so serious?

But let me ask you. If it doesn't include flame and secession and destruction and laughing malice and make up in a white suit at the end, how do we bring more kindness and love to the world than twenty twenty one? Oh, easy.

Be comfortable saying I want to be happy. And if there's someone who interjects and gives you attitude arm's length them surround yourself with people who also want to be happy. Here's a great example. My buddy Chris Williamson, who I mentioned before, he's a podcast or does modern wisdom. He's he's an awesome dude. And we became very close friends this past year. And he was in Dubai recently and he sent me picture of Dubai by the pool, just loving life.

And it took me a week and then it clicked in my head. And I'm like, you know what? For some other people, if they saw him, underwear model. At the pool, they would think this is him bragging or humble bragging, and that never entered my head, I'm like, Oh man, I'm so glad my boy can be having a good time and is sharing his joy with me. That's the kind of people you need to surround yourself with where never enters their head to be resentful or anything other than sharing in your bounty.

What makes you happy? I'm happy all the time, and one of the points I made my life is like, I really hate it.

I really did not like to give advice because I feel don't give advice until you know what you're talking about. And to me, what makes me happy is being self actualized. I am in a position with my career where I could be myself 24/7, where I never have to engage in small talk, where I never have to interact with someone I don't want to. And I'm very blessed to have that. Very few people have that. And to have that be not only to have it be rewarded and having people find that something of value to them makes me very, very happy.

But also being an uncle, you know, I have two little nephews. They make me very, very happy. Sure. My sister's raising them Russian, so they talk like immigrants. But that's OK. We're going to change that. We have to dismember her. That's fine. That makes me happy.

And to be able to be able to finish this book and know it's going to give people a sense of hope that's really validating.

What are you most grateful for, for our conversation today? You're stealing my bet. What am I most grateful for? I am very grateful. That I can come in here not knowing what we're going to talk about and no, it's not going to be something I have to be on guard about or I have to watch my words and that neither you or your audience is going to be responding derisively.

I feel safe here. You're welcome. Perceiver, thanks for talking to Michael Huzzahs.

Thank you for listening to this conversation with Michael Mallis and thank you to our sponsors, NetSuite business management software, Athletic Greens, All-In-One Nutrition Drink. Sun Baskette, mail delivery service and cash up, so the choice, success, health food, our money, she's wisely, my friends and if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Emma Goldman on anarchism. People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take, thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.