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Speaker 1

00:00

The following is a conversation with Michael Malice. This is a special holiday episode, and it is made extra special because it's announcing the release of Michael's new book called, "'The White Pill, A Tale of Good and Evil." Michael and I disagree on a lot of ideas in politics and philosophy, and we have a lot of fun disagreeing. But there's no question that he has a deep love for humanity and puts his heart and soul into his work, especially into this heart-wrenching, deeply personal book. So I ask that you support him by buying it at white pill book calm That should hopefully forward to the Amazon page As always we each dressed up in a ridiculous outfit without coordinating For the chaos that makes life so damn interesting.

Speaker 1

00:49

This episode is full of humor, darkness, and love, which is the best way to celebrate the holidays. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Michael Malice.

Speaker 1

01:08

We probably should have coordinated this better, shouldn't we? I think so. Have you, since this is a Christmas special, a holiday special, Have you been a good or a bad boy, Michael, this year? Well, that's interesting.

Speaker 1

01:22

1 of the people in

Speaker 2

01:23

the book, Grendel Hicks, his autobiography starts with, I was a good boy and he wasn't a very good boy.

Speaker 1

01:30

On a scale of 1 to 10.

Speaker 2

01:32

I'm trying to think of what bad things I've done. Oh, okay, there's that. Okay, wait, that's not, that was, that was

Speaker 1

01:38

not a bad thing.

Speaker 2

01:39

That's all right. I would say 9. 9?

Speaker 2

01:42

Yeah, I try to do the right thing. Okay. What about you? Is it gonna be a 1 or a 0?

Speaker 1

01:48

Yeah, no, I'm extremely self-critical. I push the 0. Okay.

Speaker 1

01:51

I reach for the 0. Well, mission accomplished. So this episode is announcing the release of The White Pill, a book you wrote. Which is, I've gotten the honor, the privilege, the pleasure of being 1 of the first people to read it.

Speaker 1

02:08

So I'm really, I

Speaker 2

02:09

don't know if nervous is the word, but you are the first person who has read it that I am speaking to about it. My first, my last, my everything.

Speaker 1

02:18

Yes. You say that to all the girls, but I'll

Speaker 2

02:21

take it. All the fembots. All the fembots.

Speaker 2

02:23

But yeah, it

Speaker 1

02:24

was a truly incredible book. It's basically a story of evil in the 20th century, and throughout it, you reveal a thread that gives us hope. And that's the idea of the white pill.

Speaker 1

02:36

So there's the blue pill and the red pill. There's the black pill, which is a kind of deeply cynical, maybe apathetic, just giving up on the world, given that you see behind the curtain, and given that you don't like what you see, given that there's so much suffering in the world, you give up, that's the black pill. And the white pill, I suppose, is even though you acknowledge that there's evil in the world, you don't give up. Yes.

Speaker 1

03:00

So if you're listening to this, and you're a fan of this podcast.

Speaker 2

03:04

You go

Speaker 1

03:04

to whitepillbook.com and it'll go to it. Whitepillbook.com and if you don't know how to spell we'll probably have a link that you can click on. So for people who also don't know, Michael Malice is not just a troll, not just a hilarious comedic genius who hosts his own podcast, but he is an incredible, brilliant author.

Speaker 1

03:23

Dear Reader, the unauthorized autobiography, Kim Jong-il. So that's a story of North Korea. The New Right, A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics. That's the story of the extremes of the United States political movements.

Speaker 1

03:41

And then the anarchist handbook that's talking about the ideologies, the different flavors of ideologies of anarchism. But on top of that, you're now going in, going into the darkest aspects of the 20th century with the Soviet Union and the communism with the white pill. So Let me ask you, let's start at the beginning. At the end of the 19th century, as you write, the terms socialist, communist, and anarchist were used somewhat loosely and interchangeably because the prophecy Marxist society was 1 in which the state had famously withered away.

Speaker 1

04:16

There was a great disagreement about what a socialist system would look like in practice, but 2 things were clear. First, that socialism was both inevitable and scientific, the way of the future, and second, that the capitalist ruling class were not going down without a fight. So what are the key points of disagreement between the socialists, the anarchists, the communists along that, at that time? At the end of the 19th century, at the beginning of the 20th century, the possibility of the century laid before us that eventually led to the first and the second World War.

Speaker 2

04:49

The idea when the Industrial Revolution came and Marx was very much a product of Industrial Revolution era thinking was, okay, now that we have technology, now that we have science, we can scientifically manage society. We saw this very much with Woodrow Wilson and this kind of idea of progressivism that we could use technology and kind of not, capitalism in their view, unfettered capitalism was wasteful. You're making too much stuff.

Speaker 2

05:14

You have surpluses, you have shortages. If we produce just exactly what we need and you have these people, engineers, they're engineering society, then everyone will be happy and you won't have to have any suffering or waste. So socialism at that time was used as a broad umbrella. It's not used in the term that it means today of necessarily state socialism.

Speaker 2

05:36

It just meant the idea of having society scientifically run. So you had a huge argument, they're different wings, you even had it from the beginning with Marx versus Bakunin, because Marx was for obviously state socialism, the absolute state running everything. Although even with Marx and Engels, it was a means to an end. After man is remade in his very nature, then the state withers away and everyone's equal and you have this kind of heaven on earth situation.

Speaker 2

06:04

But Kuhnen was the opposite. He regarded the state as inherently immoral and wanted to have kind of like workers collectives and things like that and ultra localized control.

Speaker 1

06:14

So the end was always stateless. It's just that some people viewed the state as a convenient, effective intermediate state.

Speaker 2

06:21

Intermediate process. Well, I think at least Marx and Maxwell, and there were plenty of others who just regarded it, you know, have the state owners, have the workers control the production via the state.

Speaker 1

06:30

By the way, how does my hat look?

Speaker 2

06:31

It looks great, festive.

Speaker 1

06:34

Is this side better than the other side?

Speaker 2

06:35

I think you want it on this side so people can see you.

Speaker 1

06:38

Oh no, no, no. I want it, you know like when you have like hair

Speaker 2

06:42

over your- Peekaboo hair, it's called. Veronica Lake, I think was her name.

Speaker 1

06:45

And then I just glance flirtatiously towards the camera sometimes. I gotta, stay, don't go. Sure.

Speaker 1

06:53

Yeah, put

Speaker 2

06:53

on gloves. Oh, 0. No glove, no love.

Speaker 1

07:00

The bad, The bad aspect of white gloves is the blood stains them. So you have to get new ones every time. And now I glance flirtatiously after that.

Speaker 1

07:14

I'm sorry, okay, but who needed marks? Go ahead. So

Speaker 2

07:18

there were other socialists who did not regard this kind of end times where the state would do it the way at all. And there were various strains in between where you'd have some capitalism and some socialism. The concept of a safety net came out of socialist thinking.

Speaker 2

07:35

The Labour Party came out of the Fabian Socialists in Great Britain. Their logo was a wolf in sheep's clothing. And then when that was too on the nose, they changed it to a tortoise, meaning we're gonna get to socialism slowly in the sense of either gradualism or boiling a frog. And also the big part of this thinking at the time, this is again the late 19th century, is the idea that there's going to be a worldwide workers' revolution.

Speaker 2

08:00

It wasn't going to be that, you know, in 1 country, you know, it was going to happen and then all the other countries would be capitalists. The idea was, all right, like the workers in Germany have more in common with the workers in America than the workers in Germany have with the capitalists in Germany. So the idea is, all right, like the working class all over the world at 1 point, they're gonna be like, we're being exploited. It's getting worse and worse for us.

Speaker 2

08:23

We can't feed our families. We're getting injured and so on and so forth. And there's no compensation for this. We're just gonna overthrow our chains and we're gonna run everything ourselves.

Speaker 2

08:31

We're the ones running it already anyway. And this was a- Doing all the work. And we're doing all the work, so why shouldn't we be getting all the benefit?

Speaker 1

08:41

What's the role of violence in all of this?

Speaker 2

08:45

So this was a big source of contention. So the Fabians, for example, in Britain, who were all socialists, they were very heavily of the idea that we can do this through the ballot box, we can advocate and agitate and get the people to be voting for their own self-interest and furthering the state at the expense of the capitalist class. Then there were the people who were the hardcore anarchists who were like, if voting changed anything, they wouldn't let us do it.

Speaker 2

09:15

And the only way to have a revolution is to have a revolution, to kill, to overthrow, to seize these factories and this was a big argument and it also fed into the idea of where does free speech end? Is it legal to be giving speeches advocating for violence and revolution? Is it legal? Johan Most, who I discuss in the book and in the Anarchist Handbook, he published a book in the 1800s about how to build dynamite and how to build bombs.

Speaker 2

09:48

And this is a big free speech concern at the time because now anyone in their own house can make a bomb and kill lots of people. And this is something that was happening with enormous frequency at the time. And people tend to think, because we have these kind of prejudices, or we only remember what's happening now. But this was, I mean, World War II, oh, excuse me, World War I got started with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Speaker 2

10:13

There were lots of people, McKinley's another 1 who I discuss in the book, his assassination, there was lots of violence happening very regularly and with the creation of dynamite, it kind of exponentially became more dangerous and threatening. Even now on Wall Street, there was a bomb that went off, I think in the 1920s And the shards of shrapnel are still in the JP Morgan building, I believe.

Speaker 1

10:36

Do you ever think, if you were alive during that time, what you would be doing? You think of yourself as an anarchist? Right.

Speaker 1

10:44

Where would you be? Would you be a socialist, a communist? Which parties would you attend figuratively

Speaker 2

10:49

and literally?

Speaker 1

10:49

Well, the

Speaker 2

10:50

thing that was so interesting back then is there was a woman named Mabel Dodge Lujan, and she ended her days in Taos, New Mexico. She founded an artist colony. And she had an apartment on 9th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan, a chateau salon, and everyone got together and talked.

Speaker 2

11:07

And you'd have Emma Goldman, who was an anarchist, Margaret Sanger, who invented Planned Parenthood and advocated for birth control. And you'd have the people from the Wobblies, the hardcore labor unions. And everyone kind of, Ed Sheeran Mencken didn't attend, but he was friends with them all. So there was this very weird, with the birth of modernism in art and in kind of modernist thinking, there was this idea of like, all right, like this was the first time where you could be intellectual as a class, where there really was this space for people who are thinkers.

Speaker 2

11:36

And they just sat around being like, all right, what are we gonna do with ourselves? And you had it in modern art, you had it in literature, you had it in politics. So it was a very exciting time where people were like, all right, everything is now on the table, what are we gonna do with this? And they very much were aware that this was a break with the pre-Industrial Revolution kind of farmer labor era.

Speaker 1

12:01

Do you see, do you think for you violence would be compelling?

Speaker 2

12:05

No, first of all, I'm just too small.

Speaker 1

12:08

But second, I just- Dynamite doesn't care about your size. Yeah, but

Speaker 2

12:13

I mean, retribution does. And I think, I don't know, but to me, violence is the kind of thing where you think you're running it, but it's running you. Once you cross that line, violence sings its own song.

Speaker 2

12:28

So whenever I hear even contemporary times where people are advocating for violent actions. It's like, when you start a fire, you're not like, I'm just gonna burn down this house. And there's many cases over and over of people who are building bombs or trying to assassinate someone or things like that. And it ended up literally, literally, literally blowing up in their own face.

Speaker 2

12:51

So, and violence doesn't really work necessarily because if you have an assassination, you're not assassinating the presidency. If you take out a president, there's another president instantly there. So what have you accomplished? Someone's husband, dad is gone.

Speaker 2

13:08

You replace them with someone who now is in a position to crack down and retaliate with even more violence. So It's, the calculus for me isn't there. Would I be advocating for it then? Who knows?

Speaker 2

13:22

But I mean, I don't know if I'd be able to have the space to be, I certainly wouldn't have the space to be a podcaster or like a media personality. That wasn't really a thing. To some extent it was in the 1920s with the Algonquin Roundtable and all the people from the New Yorker magazine. But they were all drunks.

Speaker 2

13:40

It was very much a weird kind of situation to be a thinker.

Speaker 1

13:47

What would you think you'd do? Work at a carnival? You look good in lipstick, so.

Speaker 2

13:51

Thank you. I look good in anything. What would I, I don't know.

Speaker 2

13:55

I mean, you're not building robots. I mean, you could have been a Tesla, right?

Speaker 1

13:58

Okay. I

Speaker 2

13:58

didn't mean a car, I meant the person.

Speaker 1

14:01

I understand. Oh, thank you for explaining the witty comments to me. I didn't,

Speaker 2

14:04

I just- It wasn't witty at all. Cause you wouldn't do Einstein, cause he was an immigrant.

Speaker 1

14:07

So I wouldn't work with an immigrant? What does that even mean?

Speaker 2

14:09

No, you wouldn't have been a Tesla-like figure. There's already a Tesla, so you wouldn't literally be Tesla. That's why you said, ah, Tesla.

Speaker 1

14:15

Oh, ah, Tesla. Okay, so, all right. I thank you for the explanation.

Speaker 1

14:19

See, Michael doesn't only make funny things, he also explains them for you.

Speaker 2

14:23

It wasn't funny. Mansplains them. It wasn't funny at all.

Speaker 1

14:26

That I agree with. Okay. Okay, so yes, when you achieve.

Speaker 1

14:31

See, this

Speaker 2

14:32

is why Kanye didn't like you, it's this.

Speaker 1

14:35

All right, I'm downgrading you from a 9 down to an 8. And if you keep talking like this, a 5 is a real possibility. All right, so the kind of vacuum that's created with violence is usually filled with a harsher figure.

Speaker 1

14:56

So you don't think violent revolution ultimately leads to positive progress in the short term?

Speaker 2

15:02

Well, sometimes it does. The American Revolution, I think, was a positive example. And overthrowing the czar, which was done peacefully, was a positive example.

Speaker 2

15:11

But again, when violence happens, people get scared and they want the violence stopped immediately. And that's a call for authoritarianism. And you see it time and time again. And they also want retribution.

Speaker 2

15:23

They were like, bring this back to normal. And they don't really worry about things like civil liberties or things like that. It's a very, And then it also creates this space for invasion from foreign sources or demagogues, you know, like, oh look, they're killing us in the streets, now you gotta support me. It's a very deadly game, obviously.

Speaker 1

15:44

I remember somebody told me that, I forget where it was, but they told me that from the very beginning it was obvious that communism is an evil system, or a system that leads to evil. And to me at least that's not, if I had to put myself in the beginning of the 20th century or at the end of the 19th century, that's totally not obvious. They are trying to elevate humanity, the basic worth of a human being, of a hardworking human being, of the working class, of the people that are doing the work and the striving and just really trying to build up society with their own hands.

Speaker 1

16:20

It just seems like a beautiful ideal. So I guess the question is, can you see yourself believing in that, in the ideas of socialism and communism? Yeah, Let's say if you were living in Russia.

Speaker 2

16:32

Oh yeah, easily. So first of all, I don't think anything is obvious in politics. It's not obvious that humans have rights.

Speaker 2

16:40

It's not obvious that liberty is better or the markets either. Whether you're for a welfare state or you're for more free markets, not that those is obvious, both of them involve enormous amount of thought and background information. So when someone says something is obvious in politics, they really mean something is apparent. Well, it's not apparent on its face that if we all get together and promote a society based on equality and we all chip in, that it's gonna really be good for everyone.

Speaker 2

17:09

I mean, that to me is the promise of communism. And it was also very appealing to many people because it was new. So the idea was, all right, we've tried it these other ways. There's all these negative consequences.

Speaker 2

17:25

You have all these slums. You have people getting fired and then they have no recourse. You have women with 10 kids and they can't feed their kids, infant mortality, you don't have sanitation, you don't have food, everyone's illiterate and uneducated. And then you're saying, look, if we all chip in together, everyone will have clothes, everyone will have food, everyone will be educated, everyone will do their part, it's gonna be rough in the short period.

Speaker 2

17:49

That's a very compelling case to be made for communism. It's really easy in many ways when something hasn't been tried to make it sound compelling because you just talk about how great it's gonna be and then no 1, people are always arguing about how like Venezuela and Sweden, like, oh, you want democratic socialism to be like Sweden, you don't want to be like Venezuela. The Venezuelans didn't vote for Venezuela, they voted for Sweden. They ended up with Venezuela.

Speaker 2

18:19

So it's, I think, and the thing with communism, especially at that era, it was very much a, correlated with people who are too smart for their own good. Because they had the idea that if we're just put in charge, instead of these like business people or these heirs to great estates, if the people who are smart and get it, like us, I don't mean you and me, like the people at the time who were advocating for it. Once we're in charge, since we're good people and we want what's best for everyone, we're going to make sure everyone's taken care of. And they always talked about how much they cared about the little guy.

Speaker 2

18:57

And so I'm sure some of them meant it a lot. And they're like, look, if the guy in charge is very much concerned with the little guy, he's not gonna slip between the cracks and it's just gonna be absolutely great. And we don't have to worry about, you know, you know, the capitalist class just basically exploiting people and having these huge estates while these people can't even feed their own families.

Speaker 1

19:18

Since we have a little bit of momentum, can you steel man the case for socialism? At that time and even today. I don't know if it's, I don't know if there's a rhyme and a similarity to those, to socialism as implemented at that time and what could possibly be implemented today, but maybe you can dance between the 2.

Speaker 2

19:39

The steel man argument for socialism is if you have everything up to private industry, you do not have a guarantee that someone won't fall between the cracks. And the other concern is, in any other context, if someone is, let's suppose, mentally ill, right, through no fault of their own, or someone's handicapped, you know, they can't feed themselves, or mentally disabled, or something like that, If you have everything up to charity, some, you see this with like endangered species, right? The species that are cute, it's easy to raise money for them and protect them.

Speaker 2

20:15

Some weird kind of frog somewhere that no 1 cares about, you can't raise money for it. There's people's interests are to what they find interesting. So if someone is someone who's like not socially appealing in some way, whatever capacity, they're going to fall between the cracks and they're screwed. Under socialism, if you have a government taking care of everything, no 1 is left behind.

Speaker 2

20:38

You are guaranteed that the lowest of the low and the worst of the worst are still going to make sure that they're not starving the street or just left behind. So that is a big moral case to be made for having the state running everything. In terms of economics, it's a lot harder, but the argument there would be, it's why, it's not fair, a term which in my view does not actually have a good meaning, but it's not fair that because you were born a Rockefeller and I was born in Poland, that you never have to worry about food for the rest of your life, whereas I have to worry about paying for a doctor for my kid. Like you won this lottery when you're born and now I have to be screwed and I have to respect all your property, why?

Speaker 2

21:26

So that is another strong argument to be made for socialism. And the other argument is, if you have a media apparatus that is operated under profit-seeking principles, it is going to feed into people's worst qualities, most basic animal-like qualities and sensationalist qualities, and will be used as a mechanism for capitalist control. Whereas if the government, which represents all of us, is running things, then everyone will have a right to have their voice heard and won't be manipulated. That's the argument.

Speaker 1

22:03

What about the reaching towards the stateless version? Sort of because you espouse the ideas of anarchism, it kind of has the same conclusion, which is reaching towards the removal of the state to where we, I guess, have some distributed reallocation of resources that are quote unquote fair.

Speaker 2

22:24

But the thing is the Marxist vision of the state withering away and becoming anarchism, it's really kind of like the underpants gnomes, because it's like- Tell me more. I will. Step 1,

Speaker 1

22:37

you have Marxist- Tell me slowly. I'm sorry.

Speaker 2

22:41

You have full communism, the state's running everything, including education. Step 2, question mark, step 3, anarchism. So their idea was that after enough time, the nature of man himself was going to change.

Speaker 2

22:56

Changed it. And then the government would be superfluous because we would all be equal and we would all naturally or socially, whatever term they would use, want to act the part that we would need to do. And in fact, Reagan had a great joke about this where there were 2 commissars, I think, in Moscow. And 1 of them, they're walking around, they're going, is this it?

Speaker 2

23:20

Is this, have we done it? Have we reached full communism? The other goes, oh no, it's gonna get a hell of a lot worse. So, you know, that's kind of the counter argument to that.

Speaker 1

23:30

Do you think culture, society can change the nature of man?

Speaker 2

23:34

No.

Speaker 1

23:37

You don't think this idea that, for example, America's been founded on, that all men are created equal, that that idea can't permeate the culture and thereby change how we see each other, how we think of the basic worth of a human being and thereby change our nature.

Speaker 2

23:56

That's epigenetic, I don't think that changes the nature of man. I think, for example, if I say someone, at which I agree with, that someone is innocent until proven guilty, they're not literally innocent. They're regarded in a legal context as innocent, but that person is or is not a murderer, a thief, or so on and so forth.

Speaker 2

24:13

So we can legally and ethically regard everyone as equal, but as Thomas Sowell pointed out, a human being isn't even equal to himself over the course of a day. Twins who are genetic clones are not equal to 1 another. So it is a important thing legally, and it's a good yardstick, but it's not literally true.

Speaker 1

24:33

But don't you think that law becomes ethics? So we, that idea of justice starts to, we start to internalize it, that we just, the way we behave, the way we think about the world?

Speaker 2

24:47

No, I think it's a complete red herring, because no 1 is... No, you're a red herring.

Speaker 1

24:54

Okay.

Speaker 2

24:56

See what I did there? Zelotka. Because people are still going to always prefer their family to strangers, or their in group to out group.

Speaker 2

25:06

So in terms of if you're gonna have equality, that means it's gonna not matter to you whether someone is your mom or someone down the street, and I don't see how that will ever become the case.

Speaker 1

25:18

Do you think it would be possible if you were an intellectual like you are at the beginning of the 20th century, would you be able to predict the rest of the 20th century?

Speaker 2

25:29

No, I don't think at all. I think there was so many out of nowhere turns that no 1 would have seen them coming. And as an example, Lenin seizing power and making the Bolshevik Revolution a reality was regarded as utopian and insane.

Speaker 2

25:49

The fact that he pulled it off is close to miraculous and it was quite literally unprecedented. The fact that, so that's a very big 1. Which aspect of it, sorry to interrupt, which aspect was hard to predict that a singular figure with just some ideas would be

Speaker 1

26:04

able to take so much power.

Speaker 2

26:07

And maintain that power and remake that society so drastically, so quickly, despite such opposition.

Speaker 1

26:12

Also not just a set of temporary protests by hooligans that lead to turmoil in the short term, but then stabilizes, but literally changes the entirety of the society.

Speaker 2

26:23

Yeah, Ludendorff, who was the German general, he's like, all right, we got to get the Russians out of World War I. He's the 1 who's like, all right, let's get this lunatic Lenin, who already tried and failed to have a revolution in Russia. Let's send him back there and he's just going to cause problems to everybody and it's going to be great because it's going to weaken Russia and then our Eastern front isn't going to have to be a problem.

Speaker 2

26:44

And then to his surprise and everyone else's, including anarchists and communists worldwide, they pulled off this October revolution. And then for a while, it's like, all right, I mean, I mean, I think my understanding is even people at the time in St. Petersburg and in Moscow were like, what does this even mean? Right, like no 1 took it seriously.

Speaker 2

27:04

And then very quickly you had the Cheka and the secret police and all these other kinds of implementations of the communist state and people like, oh, they're not messing around. But they're like, all right, this is not gonna last for long. And you know, the USA, the US and A, we didn't even recognize the Soviet Union's legitimacy for a very long time. There were no diplomatic relations.

Speaker 2

27:26

After a certain point, it's like, who's the, if you don't recognize Lenin and Stalin's government, who's the government of Russia or the Soviet Union? Is it the Tsar? You have to recognize it. It's just, they're not going anywhere.

Speaker 2

27:38

So that was something that was not, I think, very predictable. The Great Depression, In retrospect, there were certain things that were predictable, but it was not at all the case that it needed to last as long as it did in the States as FDR made it do. So there's all sorts of things. I mean, if they fought Germany's remilitarization, your World War II could have been prevented if you didn't have the Treaty of Versailles.

Speaker 2

28:04

Would you have the hyperinflation? Would you have Hitler? These are all, I think, choose your own adventure moments where things could have gone in other directions. I don't believe this kind of idea.

Speaker 2

28:13

This is a very Marxist idea that like history is inevitable and once you start with certain premises, the contradictions kind of unfold. I think that's ridiculous. I feel that there's power

Speaker 1

28:24

in the Santa Claus outfit. Yeah. I mean, it's a fundamentally communist idea, right?

Speaker 1

28:30

How? Santa Claus. Arbitrary redistribution of wealth. It's not redistribution.

Speaker 1

28:35

Well, at least I decide who's good and bad. Only I, only I know this. And I mean, I am somehow getting funding from somewhere, right? No.

Speaker 1

28:47

Okay, listen, I have so much to teach you.

Speaker 2

28:51

You have a workshop.

Speaker 1

28:51

Little Michael. Workshop, yeah, and how many people do you think are employed in this workshop?

Speaker 2

28:57

They're slaves. Yes. I don't know how many elves are in the workshop.

Speaker 1

29:01

I think the rest of you are gonna have to look into it. No, anyway, and the red colors and everything. Is that the biggest holiday of all time, Christmas?

Speaker 1

29:08

Like just in terms of the intensity of the festivities? No, I think Christmas is a very recent phenomenon.

Speaker 2

29:15

I think historically it was not a big deal.

Speaker 1

29:17

No, I know historically it's not been, but in terms of how much it captivates, how intense it is, I guess from a capitalist perspective, like how much is going on, how visual it is, how intense

Speaker 2

29:28

it is, how

Speaker 1

29:29

it grabs a whole population.

Speaker 2

29:30

I think it's because the idea of Christmas is probably 1 of the most powerful holiday ideas. Easter's probably up there. Easter's obviously up there because you have Christ dying, his resurrection.

Speaker 2

29:43

So that's kind of a big 1. But Christmas is this symbol of brotherhood and kindness and magnanimity. You know, 1 of the things I despise about our culture is this glory and something I'm fighting very heavily with this book, or at least attempting to, is this glorification of cynicism. This kind of like, oh, you like this song?

Speaker 2

30:01

That's cute, stupid. Whereas Christmas is the 1 time of year where you could be happy and joyous and kind and people don't get to roll their eyes at you. They get to stop being too cool for school and they get to be like, I enjoy your friendship, my sister, my brother, my dad, my mom, whatever. And it was Ayn Rand's favorite holiday.

Speaker 2

30:27

I adore it, especially Christmas in New York. And it's just this idea of like, even though we're cold and it's dark outside, it's still this kind of, like it's still cozy and the next, let's hope the next year is, because with Russians, Ded Moroz, Santa comes on New Year's.

Speaker 1

30:46

So it's

Speaker 2

30:46

kind of like, let's make this next year an even better 1. So it's very much the holiday of hope and joy.

Speaker 1

30:52

And like love for family, for friends, for friendship.

Speaker 2

30:55

And kindness and benevolence,

Speaker 1

30:57

yeah. And like almost the whole, that whole rat race of chasing material possessions and all that gets put on hold for a brief moment and it just all goes quiet.

Speaker 2

31:06

But it's also about giving people material possessions. Like here, like I value you. This is something that brings you joy, yeah.

Speaker 1

31:11

Yeah, you write in the book, which by the way, people should go get, buy it right now. If you support this podcast, or if you support the ridiculous outfits that Michael wears, the more books you buy, the more outfits he is gonna wear.

Speaker 2

31:25

I've got 2, my next 2 appearances in the show, assuming I don't burn this bridge. I've got some good ones. This bridge has been burning for a

Speaker 1

31:34

long time. We've been going across the road by canoe at this point. Next time we're gonna be swimming.

Speaker 2

31:42

How the hell are you gonna swim? You're made out of lead.

Speaker 1

31:46

Yeah, that's true. Sink to the bottom, get dragged across by rope. Okay, you write in the book, cynics like to lie and call themselves realists, hoping for positive outcomes, can thus be dismissed as being naive or utopian.

Speaker 1

32:00

Can you elaborate on this point, just like you said right now? I mean, it seems like a, I don't know if it's a fundamental characteristic of our society today or just societies throughout history, but there is a cynicism. You write in the Soviet Union, it was a really, there's a deep cynicism.

Speaker 2

32:19

Well, that was good at the end, yeah.

Speaker 1

32:23

But there is a cynicism today as well, at least in like public discourse. Yes. Why does it happen and How can

Speaker 2

32:30

we fight it? I think it is easy to be like, everything sucks. You know, I had my friend Lux, she was a blogger, she was an author.

Speaker 2

32:44

She had this great line, cause you know, we worked in media and she's like, if you're at a party and someone starts talking about a new app or website and you don't know anything about it, just say, oh, I was on that for a while, it sucked. And that's all you need to say. I'm like, that's a great line. But I think it is, and especially I'm sure you had to, you experienced this as well with your family.

Speaker 2

33:05

I certainly did with mine. There's this idea, especially in Russian culture, but in American culture to some extent as well, where if you have aspirations, I remember there was this show called Russian Dolls. It was, oh, I just got it, like the Matryoshka. Okay, I just got it.

Speaker 2

33:23

That's the name. Okay. The show is called Russian Dolls. It was about Brighton Beach, which is the Russian Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Speaker 2

33:28

It was supposed to be their version of Jersey Shore. It was on Lifetime and it had no ratings. And I remember the last 4 episodes, they had to burn them. So they just ran it through like 8 a.m.

Speaker 2

33:37

To 10 a.m. 1 day. And there was this 1 scene where 1 of the girls, I forget her name, probably Natalia, and she'd been in college And she had been wondering what she wanted to major in. Right?

Speaker 2

33:50

And this story was so perfect, I'm sure I've told it before. And she took an aptitude test and she went with her mom to get like mani pedis or something. And she goes, mom, you know, I've had like 80 majors. I didn't know what I wanted to do.

Speaker 2

34:01

And she goes, I took this up to test. It really made sense to me. I am gonna go to law school. I wanna be a lawyer.

Speaker 2

34:07

And there's something I enjoy. And the first thing out of her mom's mouth is how are you gonna pay for it? And the girl, and I really related, because if you didn't have this Russian upbringing, you watched it, you would think her reaction was completely insane. She just lost it, just screaming.

Speaker 2

34:20

She's like, people pay for law school all the time. I'll figure out a way. Why is your first reaction to look for a problem? Why is your first response to be like, oh, are you sure you've thought this through?

Speaker 2

34:30

I have been struggling with 1 problem for years, what I wanted to do for a living, and now as soon as I solve this 1 big problem of identity, your first reaction is like, let's find a new problem. Why is that your, instead of, let's figure out how we're gonna pay for it. And that kind of approach is so deadly and it gnaws at you. And I don't like giving people advice because who the hell am I?

Speaker 2

34:57

And also if I don't know the context of the problem, I'm not informed enough to give advice. But this is piece of advice that I do for comfort giving. If you are someone who has around you, people who as soon as you have any accomplishment or any hope that their first reaction is to be like, well, what about this? You have to get rid of them or sit them down, maybe give them a chance because that is something that is so demoralizing and it drains you.

Speaker 2

35:23

And it's like, you know, the example I've used all the time, all the time, all the time. I say, if you wanna be an author, right, You can go to any bookstore and look at all the shitty, shitty books like the White Pill. And you could say to yourself, I could be the shitty author. You don't have to be Hemingway.

Speaker 1

35:41

So people should buy your book just to know that It doesn't take much. It really does not take much.

Speaker 2

35:47

What shitty writing is all about. And boring.

Speaker 1

35:51

Yeah, you could just pick a random period in history and just write a bunch of crap about it. Yes. And put a pretty stamp on the cover and just go.

Speaker 2

35:59

It was pretty, yeah. Yeah. But I mean, like for you, right?

Speaker 2

36:04

You don't, I don't mean you, Lex,

Speaker 1

36:05

but- I was raised by the wolves.

Speaker 2

36:08

The wolf bots. There's lots of standup comedians who aren't Jerry Seinfeld, right? If you wanna be a podcaster, you don't have to be Joe Rogan.

Speaker 2

36:16

You could be someone who's got a medium audience and are enjoying it. So like the idea that like something has to be, you have to be a massive superstar or you're a failure is also ridiculous, but that's cynicism.

Speaker 1

36:27

I mean, you can even be a failed comedian like Dave Smith. Yeah, I don't, This is a generic name I came up with as an example. I think he has a podcast of some kind.

Speaker 1

36:39

He's not very funny. I don't know why he would call himself a comedian. He's being ironic. Don't you think?

Speaker 1

36:47

Yeah, so even then you could do something special.