Modern Wisdom - #329 - Michael Malice - Is Anarchy The Answer?

Episode Date: June 3, 2021

Michael Malice is an author, political commentator & podcaster. No matter your perspective, politics isn't working very well at the moment. The world is divided along more lines than we can count and the powers that be don't seem to have the electorate's best interests at heart. Is the solution just to tear it all down? Expect to learn why Michael refuses to vote, what the hardest question for anarchy to answer is, why a democracy doesn't give you choice, why I've been forgetting words recently, what we're going to do about our cancelled Russia trip and much more... Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy The Anarchist Handbook - https://amzn.to/2ReU6zH  Follow Michael on Twitter - https://twitter.com/michaelmalice Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is none other than Twitter's Loki Michael Malice. No matter your perspective, politics isn't working very well at the moment. The world is divided along more lines than we can count, and the powers that be don't seem to have the electorate's best interests at heart. So is the solution just to tear it all down? Today, expect to learn why Michael refuses to vote, what the hardest question for Aniki to answer is, why a democracy doesn't give you choice, why I've been forgetting words recently, what we're going to do about our cancelled Russia trip, and much more. Honestly, when I first started talking to Michael about his perspective on Aniki and

how the ruling class don't care about the people that are below them. I thought, well, this is kind of cute, but really it's just a fiction and a theory. But more and more, we're seeing the mask slip. This situation with Facebook flip-flopping around the COVID origin story. More and more, there seems to be opportunities for my faith, my well-intentioned British faith in the people who look after our countries to just be completely undermined, and Michael's arguments become more and more convincing every time that I speak to him.

But now, it is time for the wise and wonderful Michael Males. Michael Males, welcome to the show. Thank you sir. How are you dude? I'm phenomenal. Doing phenomenally well. Yeah, me too. This has been a very good week, I think, for both of us. Oh, OK, we're talking about you now.

OK. I see how it is. Where are you in the Amazon charts now? I know you've been crushing it recently. I think I'm only 39. How embarrassing. Oh, no. I have all books. Let's I'm only 39. How embarrassing. Oh, no. Of all books.

Let's check right now. Let's look. Let's have a little look here, exactly. Let's check it out. Like Steve Rool says. So we're going here. And we are at, let's look at, do you want Amazon? It is

to to to to to to 37. Oh, the shame. I know. Down with the plan. The shame, I feel I feel so embarrassed. Yeah. Well, I love the idea of having an Amazon link, which is essentially a one word or a one UR answer to a question that you always get asked about Anarchy. Well, I get asked a lot.

And this is what the whole point of the anarchist handbook was so people could stop bothering me and read themselves. What happened was when I first started doing this sort of thing, being a media personality for lack of a better term, I always had a strategy. And my strategy was say something interesting, or say something uninteresting in an interesting

way because there's no shortage of these people who go on these shows. You know, exactly what they're going to say. It's going to be Republican talking points, Democratic talking points, you know, Tory talking points, labor talking points, unless this Diane have it, then you definitely want to watch it because that's the best. And at a certain point, you know, my platform increased, and I keep talking about anarchism and people kept asking me, and I'm like, I don't want to explain all this. Just do the homework, leave me alone. And at a certain point, I'm

like, oh, people do care what I think. And I'm like, well, this is all the answers that they want to know about historic, there's a, you know, it's a collection of historical essays from all the prominent anarchists in the past. But I don't want to say all, but the best majority of them. So why do a collection of essays, rather than give your own interpretation of the philosophy and the way that the politics put together? I think it's a good way to give respect to those who have paved the way. I think there's some people in there who I've sort of rescued

from the dustbin of history who've been forgotten and to be able to sort of redeem people who died, you know, who murdered or killed for their views, to be able to bring that back. So also demonstrate, you know, showing versus telling, I could tell people that the black flag of anarchism comes in many colors But it's nothing for them to read and to see why these people may agree on certain things But they are all over the map in terms of you know other things. So I think And a lot of them will say better than I will It's it's I'm not gonna outdo like Sanders Spooner when it comes to his essay on the Constitution So why even try so

and you know maybe at some point I will be able to Do that book of my own, but I think it's it's premature and and kind of superfluous Why do you choose the name because there's the anarchist's cookbook, which is a very different sort of book Why do you just the one that you went for? I don't know. I just felt like it felt like an organic. I said, it wasn't some subversive reference to something else. I didn't even think of the anarchist cookbook when that happened. It might have been a subconscious thing. Yeah, I guess is all I don't have a good answer.

Who would you put in that you couldn't? Oh, maybe Chomsky. I didn't think to put him in because he's less theory and more of application. I know Chomsky would probably be the biggest names. Maybe a few, like some Christian anarchists or lefties, but it's already 365 pages and all like there's no question all the major name to represented. So what's the best definition that you've got for Aniki? Just elevate a pitch. You do not speak for me.

That's interesting. I think, as I've heard you say, Anikism is the belief that citizenship is better when based on ideology than on geography. Yeah, so that's the application of the principle, the concept of, you might be on, I don't even know what the cell phone companies they have over there. You might be on Big Ben. I'm sure cell phone companies they have over there. You might be on big big Ben I'm sure big Ben network. Yeah. Yeah, you're on big Ben And you're on morning tea

honesty sure I'm on high peers When we're calling each other right One company is I don't know how clear as the market. Does my company pay you? Do they split it? Is it the receiver is the caller? To have it, you know, if it, to have things based on geography as post the individual, it's like your phone is attached to where you live as opposed to where you go. And if the ostensible purpose of the basic purpose of government, which anarchists dispute is protection of a person and their person and property, that would be the right wing anarchist would believe in property.

There's no reason for that to be based on the physical domicile as opposed to where that person goes. It's a father. And we have that in a very poor sense today, which is if someone's a tourist, you know, they're still under the protection of their home country. If someone is a diplomat, they are not subject to the laws fully of the country where they're staying at. They're still regard to sovereigns of where they used to be. You see things like Julian Assange, even though technically he's in Britain, he was still in the embassy, which is not considered British soil, because that's a legal arrangement. So, you know, those are examples, we're using governments about how this would apply,

but it would just be extrapolated fully as opposed to these one-off cases. Why do you refuse to vote? Well, there's an essay about that. See, this is exactly why I did the book. So when people are like, why do you refuse to vote, I'll be like, just buy the book. But basically, the premise is,

you know, there's a few slogans don't vote it only encourages them. But also, I do not think that if you, if I would vote, I would have a right to complain because if I'm hiring a lawyer and that lawyer, I'm saying speaks for me, you know, this person represents me. If I'm hiring an accountant, this person, you know, I'm out so I'm, I am voluntarily granting the authority. If I go and say I want this person to be my representative and they do, they change their word, which they will inevitably do, I, brother, I asked for it. I said I want this person to represent me and I do not believe any politician does or can represent me. So it's avoiding being complicit in the game. Yeah. And it also, first of all, it's just the waste of time.

So in terms of like ways to use your time, if you want to make the world a better place, there's old people who are lonely, there's a dog you can foster, there's kids who don't have a dad who you can mentor. There's so many different ways where if you want to work for the common good and make society better place, if you just commit that one hour, you actually feed someone who's hungry by some work for an hour and buy a poor person clothing. There's just infinite ways that we could all marginally increase the happiness in the world around us. So voting is a ritual that validates those who slaughter hundreds of thousands of people in the name of us. So voting is a ritual that validates those who slaughter, you know, hundreds of thousands of people in the name of patriotism and things like this. So it's, it's,

uh, you know, not a fan of democracy to put it mildly. How do you feel then in the build up to an election when, obviously, you get asked a lot, I've asked you on this show, ideas and insights around the election, is that, does that feel a little bit like playing somebody else's games? It feels a little bit like, oh god, I just can't be bothered to even discuss this arcade institution that I can't be bothered to get into. No, not at all. It's the opposite. I'm being able to discuss it without the facade that this is some kind of noble endeavor.

Because you got no agenda. I do have an agenda, which is the destruction of the state. But it's also just exposing the manipulations and machinations of the parties, the corporate media, social media, and all these other various figures. So it is of great interest to watch how this sociologically plays out, even though I don't regard any of it as valid. What's your favorite essay from the new book? I, John Hasnass, who's a Georgetown University professor, he's a lied to give me permission to do it.

I would say that one because he talked about the myth of objective law. So the big sticking point for most people to make the full transition to anarchism is to have a legal system. And, you know, the argument is, okay, look, at the very base, we need to have a system of law where everyone can come together and have a base agreement, you can't do this, you can do that. And his being a law professor, he demonstrates that the idea of objective law is not only does not apply in reality. It's literally impossible even in theory that whenever you he gives many examples of like look, whatever this legal case is and these are, you know, not these are just basic legal cases like this person as a sweater, this one does and so like that and then nail

at each other. You are going to have whoever is adjudicating this process, they are going to bring their worldview to the judgment inevitably. So there's no reason why everyone has to be under the same principle of law. And I'll give you a great example. That's a very, very easy people to solve. You and I are both eBay. We have an eBay exchange and you're supposed to mail it to me and somehow it gets lost in transition, right?

So you can very easily imagine one legal system where you're the seller. It's your responsibility to get to my hands. If you don't get to my hands, I get my money back. Another legal system you could say, well, I Sent it. My hands are clean. Take it up at the post office, right? Both of those scenarios, if they're explicated ahead of time, which one is right? Which one is just? They both make perfect sense. And there's no reason why you can't choose which system of rules will govern your behavior.

Now, it gets much trickier when you're coming to things like violent crime and murder of things like that. And that's a kind of a separate issue that we can get into later. But in terms of regarding that there has to be one legal system with one set of rules that everyone has to follow is the monster we false. Second, the claim and any literally any lawyer will tell you, if objective law were possible, then you would know for a fact how that judge is going to rule in your case, right?

If I buy something at the supermarket and it's expired milk, I'm getting a refund. You know ahead of time. But if this is a legal system, you have not only do you have no idea of the outcome, you can be certain that the attorneys fees are going to be exorbitant and are going to, this is why how often are people in the law suits? It's regard as a nightmare, right? Because the claim is that equality in the law, even if you're very, very poor, you have to have access to this system of adjudicating disputes. But everyone knows, poor people do not have access to lawyers and things like that.

They'll have access to it if they're to defend it. They'll have a public defender, at least in the States. I'm sure probably the same thing is written. But in terms of a lawsuit, they do not have access to this service, which defenders of the government will say is crucially necessary to everybody. How would that be fixed in an anarchist society?

When you have everything would be resolved. Look, we have it fixed right now in terms of eBay, right? So right now you and I have a dispute and eBay steps in and either gives me the refund or says I'm out of luck, Chris sent the sweater. And even if I don't get the answer I want, I at least don't have to buy a lawyer. And it's resolved in seconds. Anarchism is not utopia. There's still going to be theft.

There's still going to be killing. There's still going to be missing sweaters in the mail. The difference is the resolution of these problems is going to be much more efficient, cheaper, and much more conducive to peace as opposed to imposing judgments that entire portions of the population find to be important. That makes sense in a very binary scenario that's easily trackable, like an eBay situation. Sure. But if it was a more complex one, stuff to do with litigation in business law, business

to business transactions, merges, money taxes, what about that? Surely that's just equally complicated. Sure. So it would be the same thing as going to practitioner versus going to a surgeon, right? If you're going to have things that are that technically complicated, you are going to have some kind of higher level court system to resolve it. But again, even in that case, it's still going to be cheaper because they'll be competition and different firms that we have that right now, again, private arbitration.

Different private arbitration would have the capacity to compete in terms of efficiency. Now, the question becomes, well, I don't, what if I don't respect the judgment of this private arbitration? That's when you have to, you have things like ostracism, things like credit scores, and so on and so forth. Having a bad credit score, which are done by it, it's not these are a mastercard or, you know, American Express or Britain Express, I'm guessing you have,

which are the ones who are kind of adjudicating the system, you have credit reports, right? And they tell both the credit card company and you what your credit score is, and they're saying, in my opinion, these are the odds this person is reliable in terms of repaying their debts. And not only is there one, there's three of them. So you would have the same sort of situation where it's like, okay, should you deal with, you know, Williamson Coe, well, historically, it's only going to take one. Williamson

Co agreed to abide by the judgment of this third party. They refused, and that's basically going to very factually say it's much riskier to deal with this guy than it is to deal with them where even if they don't agree with the judgment, they still, even if they personally don't agree, they still follow through the result. It seems like there's a lot more work to be done on the front end then with that. You might get through the litigation side more quickly for deploying the law, but coming into it, it's going to be a little bit more effortful at least in the beginning, because imagine how much all of this would be to set up and you'd have to have some sort of agreed rules and principles between the different agencies that might be representing

someone, so everyone would need to format their everything in the same way. So there still needs to be agreed rules and procedures and regulations over the top. But as we said earlier, like, let's go back to the cell phone example, I don't know, and you don't know what happens when I call you and we have different cell phone providers.

And we never need to know because before those cell phone providers came to market, they already established procedures on how to deal with every other cell phone company so that their customers don't ever have to worry about or think about it. So look at it this way in terms of fashion. The problem if anything with fashion is we have too many choices, too many options, we have books and magazines telling you which to choose, but when it comes to the law, you don't have choice. It's much more expensive and costly.

Their reason the law is such a concern, as opposed to fashion, never being a political issue, is precisely because whatever the government does, it does poorly. That's to put it modally. What do you think is the hardest question or the most difficult issue for an anarchist society to try and overcome? What do you do about the kids? Because if you don't have a state and kids are basically under the dominion of their parents, how are you going to resolve cases which there are no shortage of

when parents are bad actors toward their children? That is a tough one. And that's a tough one under any scenario. That's the thing. One of the big issues in terms of people attacking anarchism, which of course is their prerogative, is they'll say, well, anarchism is bad because it's gonna lead to war.

I'm like, wait, wait, wait, the system you're advocating doesn't lead to war, so you can't have this kind of double standard. So this is a criticism. It's like, OK, you're not going to have child protective services possibly, or maybe you wouldn't have private sense, like you have a private complex. And I don't know how they would resolve it. The point is, it's horrible now.

Like the foster kid system, like many kids are subject to abuse, and it's horrible now. Like the foster kid system, like many kids are subject to abuse and it's certainly less than my deal. So that's a good tough question and I do not have a good answer. But I don't think any system that's been positive has had a good answer. And that's because typically there's an agent within an anarchist society that kind of opts into some of the services which then get used, but in a situation where the only legal agent is the bad actor themselves

and you have a dependent that requires somebody to step in, you have this vacuum which is not being filled by something. Correct. Yeah, that is a nasty situation. Yeah, and it's just, it's just nasty in general. I don't know, I mean, that's, yeah, that's an ugly one. What about, what about if a country went to war with another country? I know this is in the second half of one of the, one of the essays that I looked at. Yeah, well, first of all, wouldn't be no the country would be an anarchist area. But we already see examples of this in the past,

which is there is a, this is hilarious, which is the criticism of anarchism that like if you get help from a state, it's not anarchism at all. It's like, well, if someone mails me food, it doesn't make them the government. They're just someone who's providing a service, right? So as of right now, like literally today, I as a private company can hire the US government to provide security for me. This in no sense makes them my government any more than hiring a chauffeur is the one who's

not chauffeur. They're the ones taking orders, not giving them. So there are many countries on earth already. This argument is, well, at the US one anarchist, they'd be invaded tomorrow by China. Well, why aren't we invading, why isn if the US won anarchist, they'd be invaded tomorrow by China. Well, why aren't we invading, why isn't the US invading Canada by this logic? Why isn't the Vatican being invaded by Italy or Monaco by France? There's many examples of countries on Earth right now that do not have any military whatsoever and can easily be overrun. So, there's there's sure there are bigger governments, but no

one is saying, or I'm certainly not saying, that for anarchism to be considered successful has to be worldwide. There's no reason why, you know, Ireland was anarchist for thousands of years, and

as used as an example historically of how an anarchist system would work. So if you had an invasion, we saw what happened with Kuwait. Let's pretend Kuwait instead of a government have been an anarchist area. You saw a lot of self-interested nations with big armies step in.

And also it's much harder to invade and conquer an area where everyone is armed and trained in using their weaponry. But I mean, look at Afghanistan, look at Vietnam. I mean, this argument people say that, like, well, there's an anarchist area, like, you know, they'd be conquered immediately. China's not having a fun time conquering Hong Kong. So the claim that this is something that's just done, like with a snap of snapping fingers

is nonsensical. It's very, very hard to invade and conquer and at the very least, very expensive. Can you see there being an anarchist state in your lifetime? Well, no, because by definition, there wouldn't be an anarchist state, but anarchism is a relationship. How should I keep on getting that wrong? How should I refer to it? Sure. Just an anarch, you could call it anarchist area or anarchist society, but anarchism isn't a location. It's a relationship, right? So you and I have an anarchist relationship. Neither of us has an authority over the other. If It's a relationship, right? So you and I have an anarchist relationship. Neither of us has an authority over the other. If there was a dispute, we would not be calling the state, which state would we call? I mean, the possibility of this kind of international

lawsuits and uncensical. And even if you were here or are there and we got drunk and someone got violent, we're still not calling the cops. So, you know, it's, and every country isn't an anarchist relationship with one another. The example I use in the book is if a Canadian kills an American in Mexico, there's no one to call that's above them, right? The three nations have to have some system in place ahead of time to adjudicate this process. And as we said earlier, we can be certain that they have adjudicated this ahead of time. In that, it's not like when that happens, they're like, well, what do we do?

Well, it's called Congress. The process is already in place ahead of time. So whenever someone is in the process of providing services, they're going to anticipate as much of these things as possible so that their consumers are satisfied with it. And we see this done in a very haphazard and hamphisted way with governments right now. Okay. And you can't see in your lifetime there being an area that turns... Oh, I can't.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, it's not going to be that hard either. It just has to be even just like... There's many organizations right now that are trying to basically make things like this happen like C-steading or there's such situations. I think if people read between the lines, there has been in recent years, as you would say, yes, a lot of hand-ranging over the increasing lack of legitimacy of the state and increasing distance between populations and their governments and they're not feeling represented. And that's something that's healthy and from my

perspective, you should be encouraged as much as possible. Although, of course, members of the corporate media, I think this is a nightmare and disaster because they go hand in hand with state power. Where do you think would be the most likely anarchist area to rise up first. Oh, I have no idea. In the same way that Marx had said, there's no way that Russia's ever gonna go communist and that's where it had ended up happening. Russia ended up going to communist. That's where it ended up happening.

So it could be just someone creates a new physical space or someone creates some kind of microsity somewhere. I mean, this is the beauty of markets. You don't know, you can't predict where, how they will operate or where they'll pop up. What was unique about the process for creating this book? I know that you were really proud and interested in that. What was unique about it? I think knowing that this, I think it's very seriously, what was unique is knowing that this is something that's not going to be dated for many, many years, something that's like very seriously, what was unique is knowing that this is something that's not going to be dated for many, many years, and that it's going to be the go-to reference book for a

lot of people about an idea which in their internet circles at least is gaining increasing currency. So that was kind of something special. You talked me through the writing process and the publishing process. You said that there was some lessons to be taken from that. Sure. So there again, I've been getting asked about this constantly because I talk about this stuff on all these different big podcasts. And the only thing that had been somewhat comparable to what I was looking for was this book called Patterns of Anarchy from the 60s. And one of my supporters, this woman named Marla, I was doing a live stream and she went

in the Super Chat and she goes, why don't you do an audiobook of this? And I go, that's a good idea. And I go, wait a minute, these are public domain. I should just redo it in a contemporary way, update it with, you know, bigger names and more contemporaneous essays. And, you know, and I also, you know, being a collector of many things, I knowing how to curate a collection. I knew, okay, these are all the names

I have to have covered, and also which are the concepts I want to have covered. So to kind of have that grid was the process. And you managed to get it from idea to market in three, you know, half months? Yeah. It was three and a half months, and now I'm recording the audiobook. What's the lessons from that?, and I'm recording the audiobook. What's the lessons from that? I have to start recording the audiobook. The lesson is, I don't have good enough sound quality in this room yet, so I have to figure out how to do it.

Yeah, I bet you don't, but you went self-published as well. Correct. And I was the top nonfiction book on all of Amazon for over a day, beating literally everyone. There was a novel ahead of me and Dr. Seuss and I was number three. So this guy, Obama, you might have heard of Oprah Winfrey. You might have heard of her. Every president, every PM, I was Gordon Brown, get out of my way.

You got nothing on the Jeffrey House, sorry. I was just running the table and still am. And it's very validating to show people that you can do it yourself and do. And this is another example. We're just talking earlier about in terms of dedicating disputes. If I'd gone through a mainstream publisher, let's assume the sales would have been the same at the very least it's coming out in 2023. So even if the results were identical, I'm still saving two years of my life or my career. That is an enormous, enormous difference.

Well, dude, I was sort of tweet from Tiago Fauté who's a productivity coach, Guru, who's got a deal for his first book, which will be really, really awesome. And everyone's excited about it coming out in the productivity community. And he hit the nail in the head and said, the weird thing about a book is that you need to be able to project the trend two years out

and then catch it just as it's hitting the inflection point. And he was really fortunate because he talks about building a second brain. It's a personal knowledge management system where you can have all your notes and your summaries and such like organizing a very good way on your computer. And notion and Rome have all had these huge influxes of investment and there's lots of interest and it's been, there's lots of press and publishing around and he's like, this is great because I think he's maybe one year into the process. So he's looking at the start, February 2022, I think is when he's looking at doing it, he's thinking, right, yeah, I have managed to time it.

But all of this investment and all of this cloud that's just occurred within the industry that he's written a book in is totally out of his control because the lag time between him coming up with the idea and even between him finishing the book and then the book finally hitting market is so vast. There's a couple other things. No editor who hires me is going to know this field as much as I do. So there's going to be arguments just based on their limited knowledge in terms of why do you have this session, what do you have that one? I don't need to explain myself because I know what I'm doing in this very specific regard.

Number two, and this is something people might not appreciate. I did a book a few years ago called Confidential. I was the co-author. And there's a typo page, the end of page chapter one says, I'm about to T O O. I told, we told the publisher, they didn't fix it for the paperback, they don't care. With the Amazon program which I used to self publish, there was a typo in the book, you fix it, you re-upload it, and since it's print on demand, instantly it's fixed. So to have that kind of dynamic publishing system is also of a

enormous benefit and a huge advantage. It shows now just it kind of explains why people are so concerned with status and cloud in 2021 because with the right audience that's sufficiently bought in and broad enough, you can do some pretty powerful things even up against the powers that be all of the previous pathways and avenues and contacts that they've got one guy with a 100k on YouTube and a couple of 100k on Twitter can do some damage. Yeah, that's the thing. It's a people want to when you see someone making it happen on their own, you want to be

a part of that. This isn't someone who's got some big book deal with Simon and Schuster and they're rolling out. And like, oh yeah, this book sounds good, I want to buy it. But if you see someone who's like this book is something I would buy anyway, but it's also someone who I fan of doing it themselves and beating the corporations at their own game, then you really want to cheer them on and feel it. And there's also that kind of feeling of like, this is my opportunity to actually make

a difference and invest what, $20, $19.01, you know, to kind of say, this is what I want to see more of. So, you know, I'm a big fan of Albert Camus. He did not, he did not like being called an existentialist, he regarded himself as an absurdist, but the existentialist idea that we are self-created. When you see someone who is, you know, you have the guy who is killing it on Amazon and running circles around all the publishers is awesome, and I had the opportunity to be him. circles around all the publishers is awesome. And I had the opportunity to be him.

So I mean, that kind of mindset, I give talks and networking sometimes. And I tell the kids, I'm like, if you know someone is in town and they're having their birthday and they're not doing anything, take them out. And I do it for, I say I do it for selfish reasons. And they laugh and I go, no, no, no.

That guy is awesome, but that could be you. The only thing stopping you is $30 and an hour of your time and people don't think in those terms. I think this is one of the seductive qualities of a glass door policy when doing any sort of creative process. So people have known that this was coming. You know, it happened at least in terms of the origin on a live stream that other people would have seen.

So they've seen it, right, from seedling to fully grown plant. And for such a long time, the creative processes had this sort of mystique and this magic behind it. And now being able to watch that unfold, it's like when you go into a car factory and you go, okay, so that, those four points are going to turn into wheels and then a chassis and then all of the engines are going to be put in.

And you can watch it and then it becomes a car. And there's something fascinating. People say, was it that you don't want to know how TV or sausages are made? The sausage, yeah. Yeah. But watching a book be produced. And even seeing the artist go through all the vicissitudes of the difficulties, had a really bad day writing, had a really good day writing, founding it hard, finding it easy. I think this, yeah, people like that because

they buy into stories and narratives, right? And not just the ones that you publish, the meta narratives that are about what was the process of publishing this like. If, as an anarchist, you're saying, we can win and we keep beat these huge establishment entities who have been entrenched for centuries. That's a big, that's a big ask. That's a big bold claim. So to have that concept be demonstrated in any capacity and to have it be demonstrated and unambiguously is, I think, of enormous motivation to many people, even if they're not anarchists at all but are simply people who want independent creators who are you know sticking their neck out to succeed. That's the guy called Jack butcher who's on the speedn on the show recently and he's a british guy in the states who's one of the most innovative creators I think in the world at the moment he's doing incredibly well. at the moment he's doing incredibly well. And one of the main reasons is that he is so glassed-door with everything that he does when he's considering a new project, till post

about it on Twitter. If he's had a really good day with the shop, he'll upload his Shopify stats, he'll show the back end of what he's working on, who he's spoken to, potential projects that are happening. And people just love that, they love being involved in the narrative. And it makes sense, because why are people bothered about sitcoms? You have fucking friends coming back after 25 years off or whatever, people have bothered about that because they're brought into the story arc of what's going on with this person. And I think we're really only just scratching the surface

about what the creator economy can do with opening the creator's own personality aside from the work. So the art and the artist are now being sold as two separate entities that come together to form like OnePlus 1 equals 4 with this and they create even more. And here's the other thing. It's like if now I can tell people with a straight face for $500, right? You can send me to Miami to do Andrew Shelter's show, or if you're interested in spreading these ideas, that pays for half of an office of some random, what a think tank

to write white papers that no one's going to read. Which of these is going to see a better return on investment for you? And again, this is, it's an easy sell to make because this is unambiguous. So again, one of the reasons I am an anarchist is I am such a fan of all the people in the book who really were marginalized, complete pariahs, fought for their vision, sometimes were killed for their vision. And to whatever, I just think that such a guy thing to do, to make your own path were not had existed before and show other people the way in that it's possible. I mean, that to me is just something very primal about that.

There's something that I really enjoy as well, grabbing yourself by those bootstraps and getting going. As well, it makes me think of, I know you're a fan of crypto and Bitcoin stuff. It makes me think about the proof of work concept. So being able to watch a creator go through this process, all of the different areas and stages and then even reflect on it once it's happened and then thinking about what comes next. That is proof of work, right? You're not going to get scammed. There was no way that you were going to do this. And this book actually be 360 pages of blank sheets. And you are actually, my entire career leading up to this point was just a big Ponzi scheme sort of shill thing so that I could then pull a couple of grand out of everybody and run

away. That was never going to happen because people have this proof of work. Look at all of the time that I've invested. And yeah, man, long way to continue. Yeah, I am really, really stoked. And I'm also really stoked at the reactions. Because people are feeling, I think, correctly, that their faith in me has been well placed. And that's something I take quite seriously.

You talk about Bitcoin. This is like getting it on, talk about crypto. This is like getting it on Bitcoin when it's 50 bucks. Yeah. Yeah. I like that as well with creators because I've been using this for a while saying like, look, if you subscribe now, then you can say that you listen to modern wisdom before it was cool.

Yeah. And being that first one in, because you never know how big it's going to get, you never know how high that hockey stick and inflections going to go. And I think I'm just safe to assume that you can just hold your market share now. And the amount that the creator economy is going to increase, all of the different ways, stuff that Dave Rubens doing,

the way that people can now accept different payments, the stuff that's happening on blockchain so that you can have guaranteed products that come to you, all of the clever stuff that's happening there. It's only further and further enabling individual creators. I look at the money that people on Twitch are making, even just small guys in their bedrooms. You know, they were doing this anyway. They were playing these games anyway.

They've hooked up a camera. We would have had this chart in any case. You know, we just hook up a camera and then you go away and yeah, it's crazy. I don't even think though it's about the money per se. I think it's just about like, you can just have a roof over your head, like a very basic Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This is something people I think don't often appreciate because they think, well, you know, if they want to be a standard comedian, for example, it's like, who do you think you are in Jerry Seinfeld? It's like, you don't have to be Jerry Seinfeld to be a working comic. There's literally

thousands of comedians you and I haven't heard of who are still making a living, maybe even making a great living at practicing their craft. So the more demonstrations of this that there are, that you don't have to hit, you know, be the top seller in Amazon like myself, but you could certainly do a decent job and be proud of yourself. And that when you go to meet your maker, you could point to your bookshelf and be like, hey, I wrote that crappy book that sold 500 copies. That's, that's a big deal.

That's more than 99% of people can say. I was reading through the book and one of the questions that I had for you was, what's wrong with how democracies are run? And there's this quote that says, people will say with a straight face that having one choice for dear leader is tyranny, but having two is freedom. Is that second choice on the ballot really the qualitative difference? That's so good. But it's true. If you go to this, I don't know what brands you guys have over there, but if you go the store and your choice are Coke and Pepsi and someone could say with a straight face, hey, you can choose whatever you want.

It's, it's, or, or if you, the choices are, let's put another way, if you're partisan, the choices are Coke or, or literal or strict nine. It's also, you know what I mean? But if, if there's, if your system is set up by design, both in America, we have primaries, right? So there's a whole year where all these people who want to be the candidate for Republican or Democrat are whittled away. So you're left with two candidates.

So the whole process by design is to eliminate your personal choices. And they're saying, well, we don't have any other options. Well, the option is, well, I don't want your crappy system. If your system results that I go into the store and I can only buy Pepsi Cola or Coca-Cola or Coca-Cola and Stric 9, something needs to change on a fundamental level. There's no reason to be represented by someone you dislike or despise or disagree with. And it's not reasonable for you to expect me to buy into your chicaneery. It is bizarre that you hear people talk about what this was the worst of the best of a bad bunch.

Right. We're talking about the people that determine the standard of our lives. The lesser of two evils. In no other context, are you forced to do this? other context, are you forced to do this? Can you imagine like you're you're rested and it's like we got two barristers for you, I'm trying to use the lingo. It's like this one, you know, it doesn't speak English and this one, you know, is in a coma. Like what is going on here? Have you learned any lessons that you've really cherished recently? Yes, this was a very, very intense one I learned. Some of the people in this book had been largely forgotten.

And that I got to that I have the power to be the one to redeem them in a sense and bring them to a mass audience. And, you know, 100 years after they died, that was a big lesson and it really did a number on me. I imagine that's beautiful to think about. Yeah, but it's extremely intense. Like who the hell am I? You know, I'm not a modest person, but in this context, it's like, you know, these people are hanged. Louis Ling was the cover model. He was sentenced to death. He blew off his own jaw and prison

wrote on the wall, hooray for anarchy in German. He was like 23, 24, just total hunk. And he's, people forgot about him. And this is someone who valued this worldview enormously and his courtroom speech, where he tells the judge, the judge who just sends him to death. Like, he's like, I told the cops, you come at us with guns, we're gonna come at you with dynamite.

And he's like, I'm for force. And I despise this court, hang me. So like to have his voice, and you know, permeate through the decades, and I'm the one who made this happen is a very intense. Now, obviously I'm not an advocate of, you know, dynamite to put it modally, but it's still this is someone who was a very interesting figure. It's something that I've been thinking about. I heard Rogan say on a show a couple of years ago,

one of the best things about having a podcast is being able to find people who are brilliant but don't have a platform and giving them that. And Joe said that about Lex when I was on. Yeah, he's like, I love that I can take this amazing treasure, Lex Friedman, and and give him a bigger audience and now he's killing it. Yeah. And you see that now, it's interesting watching the arc

because when you begin a show as a creator, especially like this, you're asking people favors. The power dynamic is that they are doing something for you as a fledgling podcaster or YouTuber or whatever. But then after a little while, that power dynamic actually starts to shift. And you actually start to think, well, hang on a second, you are the prize,

which I love to use as an example from pick a party tree. I keep on thinking, well, hang on a second, that Jordan Peterson gets to come on here. No one else's clip of him did 1.6 million views. No one else's clip of him did 1.1 million views the week later. No one at blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You think, well, actually, after a little while, you get to do that. And then you go, okay, and not only can I stand toe to toe with these people that I really

admire and look up to, which is a beautiful thing to be able to do, but I can also find these diamonds in the rough out of nowhere. Found this guy called Adam Lane Smith on Twitter, wrote a really good, fascinating tweet thread about human psychology being just some bloke that had been a counselor and a therapist for two decades. And I was like, this is fucking awesome. This thread is shit hot. If this guy can podcast half as well as he can tweet,

this is gonna be unsurner, brought him on, and he crushed it. Second highest played podcast, this guy's a nobody in terms of cloud. half as well as he can tweet. This is gonna be unsure enough, brought him on and he crushed it. Second highest played podcast, this guy's a nobody in terms of cloud. Second highest played podcast, of this year behind Jordan Peterson on audio, ahead of monsters,

absolutely including yourself. And I was just like, he messaged me the other day, I was like dude, everything's changed. Michaela's brought him on, her show he's now gone on hers, because she listened to it and she loved it. And he was like dude, I've got. Michaela's brought him on her show. He's now gone on hers because she listened to it and she loved it.

And he was like, dude, I've got clients coming out of my ears, I've got all of the office to come on a podcast. And you know, this isn't some sort of simple whimpering guy. This is a very capable human being that just required a little bit more pullback on the elastic band of the slingshot.

And it's fucking awesome. So I totally get what you mean. Platforming people, being able to give voices to those that deserve one, is, yeah, it's sick. It's endlessly rewarding. And it's also even more intense when these are people who gave their lives. So like Albert Parsons was one of these people. He was, there was a bomb in Haymarket in Chicago in the late 1800s. He had left the rally. They, him and his comrades were, there was a war on out for them. He was on the lamb. He said, I'm going to stand a solidarity. Nothing's going to happen. They're all sentenced to death.

You know, we have the letter from these people to their children. His wife wasn't allowed to see him hanged. And when he went to the gallows, he's like, can I say a few words and then mid-sentence they killed him. So, and she had his picture on his wall until she died in 1942. There's a picture her pointing to it. So, you know, to be able to, I'm going to get into him, you know, on some livestream or something like that, but be able to tell his story. You know, he was, he, some of the men were told, if you ask for forgiveness, the governor will commute your sentence, and some of them did, and Parsons said,

no, because that's admitting guilt, I didn't kill anyone. I spoke it a rally and I left. Like, you sent us me to murder for my views, and they did it, they killed him. He was later posthumously pardoned. There's a monument to him. And the other is in Chicago right now in a cemetery. But yeah, it's to have people point out,

to be the one to point out these, they're not giants in terms of clout, as you would say, but there's certainly giants in terms of narrative and in terms of inspiration and in terms of inspiration and in terms of a story. That's so, it's very humbling. And I hate that word because it has, it's all, often, sounds phony, but it's,

let's put it, let me use different language. It's very jarring and like awe, inspiring that I'm in this position to be able to kind of make sure he hasn't been forgotten. What's interesting is that someone's quality of work and their ability to deploy that and get it seen by the masses don't always necessarily align. We all know the people that have huge platforms and really don't do anything with them. But similarly, there are people who would have deserved a platform, who would have been absolutely phenomenal, but for some reason wrong timing, wrong place, wrong whatever, didn't

do that. And yet, it's odd being able to think, well, hang on, this person might be even more capable than me, even at something which I profess to be capable at. And yet, I'm somehow the enabler of their access to market or to an audience. It is, I can understand why it's jarring, yeah, to good way to put it. Yeah. Yeah, there's this concept called arbitrage in business where basically, I think I, if I'm using this correctly, please don't yell at me.

But basically, if I see a stock that's a $40 and I know that the market value is $60, I buy it quickly and then I flip it because, and I kind align it with with the market and that's I think kind of what I'm doing here is this person is right now in terms of Historical values low because he's not known and be like well hold on a minute This is someone who did matter and someone who was important so to be able to kind of take them out of that Dustbin as I said earlier and and you know to put them back on a pedestal I think it's just just absolutely a wonderful position to be in. Dude, I got this lesson, I've got to tell you, right?

So last couple of months, maybe two months or so, I noticed that my thoughts were getting really slow. And yeah, it was odd, man, because usually it feels like skating on ice and it was like walking through a swamp. It was so not like me. And I was walking into rooms and forgetting while I was there, and I was doing podcasts and stuff and losing words.

You know, I pride myself on precise speech and precise thoughts, and I was forgetting words. I forgot this place called Blackpool, near Manchester, C-Side Town in the UK. And I spent five minutes internally trying to desperately remember this place on the West Coast, and then eventually got Blackpool. And I was like, what?

The actual fuck is going on here? Is this early onset dementia? Am I going seen it? I made some jokes with somebody. I was like, oh, like the aneurysms coming on, blah, blah, blah. But after the Blackpool incident, I was like, right, there's something severely up here. This is beyond me just being tired.

And I was constantly tired. I was going to bed at nine o'clock at night, really fatigued. I wasn't performing in the gym. I was constantly drowsy. So anyway, message to my buddy who's a good job. Hold on, because this happened to me also last year, and I figured it was a, I developed a dairy sensitivity. Okay, this, it's not a dairy sensitivity. It might be, it might, it might have been enabled by that. For people listening, if this is happening to you, try to, because I eat the same thing

every day because of my regimen, try experimenting with your food, which is so in this hippie stuff, but in my case, this was the case. I'm sorry. Elimination diets work like that. Yes. Specifically for that reason, FODMAP diet, if someone wants to look at the most common foods

that cause inflammation and stuff like that, use FODMAP and you take everything out and you add the main one back, one by one, it's a really easy way to do what you're advising there, but it's wholesale approach rather than, oh, let's just get rid of the dairy. So anyway, I'm doing this, I message my buddy and I'm like, look, what's going on? And he said, dude, tell me about what supplements you've been taking, any changes that you've made, any medication.

And I thought, I actually, sort of about two months ago, this very boring medication that I was on since the start of the year, super like normal pill, the doctor had said to double the dose, who told me to double the dose about two months ago, sent it to him and he was like, dude, that's a anti-colynergic drug and co-lean is one of the key neurotransmitters. Oh my God. So what it does is it down regulates that, and sure enough, you do a little bit of digging,

you go through common side effects for moderate high doses, which is what I would have gone to once I went to double dose. Drowsiness, fatigue, memory loss, dry mouth, which I didn't have. And I was like, do tick, tick, tick, tick, like this is all me, right? I was like, well, great tick tick tick tick tick, like this is all me, right? I was like, well, great, like not an aneurysm, but I had managed to knock 30 points of my IQ and

basically retard myself to this state where I couldn't remember Blackpool. And I'm like, what's going on? So anyway, easy solution, right? Easy solution, not an aneurysm, just So anyway, easy solution, right? Easy solution, not an aneurysm, just stop taking this particular medication. But what it taught me that it really was quite profound was the inevitable end point that we're all going to get to with our cognitive decline. And it was really scary, man,

because you and me and most of the people that are listening probably, we rely on our cognitive horsepower, raw, sheer force to just pull us out of problems. We know that it doesn't really matter whatever kind of a problem we get ourselves into, because we have faith that the decision engine between our ears is going to be able to fix it, but there's something so vicious and cruel about the thing that you rely on to fix the problems being taken away from you. And I have a friend whose dad was going through some sort of cognitive decline and he said, this disease has taken everything from me.

You know, it's even taken myself. And I was like, wow, like that quote didn't make sense. And after this last period, I'm aware, like I forgot the word blackpool. And I was, you know, misspelling right with right and going into rooms and not knowing why I was there. And thankfully, it's reversible. But man, like if people go back, they can listen to podcasts.

And they might not notice, but if they listen carefully, they can. I'm forgetting words. I can't find the word that I mean, which is totally not like me. So for a brief period, I kind of had, it was a decline. It wasn't to this, you know, something chronic. It wasn't something as severe as it could have been. But it was really, yeah, it's really sort of made me see a lot of things in a different light.

It was really insightful, but terrifying the same breath. And look what it's done to your speech, half these words you're not pronouncing correctly. This happened, this happened. Shoot up what? The school. This happened to my mentor Harvey Peacar before he passed. He was telling me how he was dealing with memory issues and he got so scared. He'd like sit there and start trying to remember old phone numbers and people's addresses just kind of test himself Yeah, I was thinking but I don't think that helps

I think that just is like you can't it's not like like if you're out of shape You go to the treadmill and you're gonna get some good cardio in I don't think that these little sprints So to speak in your mind are going to do anything other than make you afraid or make you be like, okay, next time this happens, it's gonna take, like you said, five minutes, but it's very, very, very, very scary. Well, the same reason I think why you do that is why it's really difficult to not think

of a terrible action once you put it in your mind. So imagine that you're looking at a kid by the side of the road. And you might have the thought, wonder what it would be like if I pushed that kid in out into traffic. You go, that's terrible. That's a terrible thought.

And you're just telling yourself, which is kind of dumb, because who the fuck are you talking to, right? You're just telling yourself. And also listening and also disgusted with you. And you think, right, I'm gonna push that kid. No, I'm obviously not gonna push the kid out into the middle of the road.

But I want a terrible thing to think. I wasn't thinking about it. And then you immediately start to think about it even more or you're with someone at work or whatever that you really know that you shouldn't be looking at or thinking about doing something to and then you're like, I can't stop thinking about. The reason is that the mind's teleological, right? So we posit a goal. That's it.

What? I think the reason is there's a certain percentage of this audience that is higher than 1% and less than 50% that looks at you and thinks this guy must be a sociopath. And not a maybe not American psycho, but British psycho. OK. And not to have you be like, oh, yeah, I wonder what it's like to push this kid

or what it happened. Yeah, OK. Half as you would put it there on some. Yeah, yeah. But the reason is, right? I'll take the subject, he's outing me. I'm not. I'll take the subject, I'll explain. To fucking explain something,

without you just coming in with your American Russian accent. Anyway, so the brain's teleological. You set yourself a goal, and then what you do is your brain is constantly measuring how far you are from that goal. But the problem is, the very thing that you are trying not to do is what it's set the goal as, oh my god I can't believe that's a thing. I mustn't think about it. How far away from the thing am I and in the act of working out how far away from the terrible thought about the kid in the road or whatever, you continue to bring it back up. And I think it's kind of the same with the memory loss situation that you think, okay,

this is something that I'm concerned about and I really don't want to have happen. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to see how far away, how long is it for me to remember this person's phone number from 20 years ago or whatever it might be. Oh my God, well, it's this long. Oh my God, well, it's this long. And then you end up with this metacognizant,

two layers, three layers removed. And that's when it becomes really vicious, right? Because you start to be the architect of your own discomfort. You are the voice inside of your head that is telling you the things about the thing that is happening. And that being your own torture and that way is, yeah, again, particularly cruel with now increasingly or decreasingly less ability to deal with the problem because it's inherently reducing your capacity. Yeah, many years ago, I read a book called Don't Talk, Don't Think About Monkeys. It's about people with Tourette's and they're writing essays trying to explain what it's

like. And I thought, so people think Tourette's means you're always yelling at curses and inappropriate things. That's Coprolalia and that's actually a fairly small percentage of people with Tourette's. But they do have things like ticks, they do blur things out and so on and so forth. And they're like, try to imagine, you know, you meet a genie and the genie says, I'll give you any three wishes you want on one condition, you don't think about monkeys and at that point it's just like a crap. So that's kind of what it's like for them and it's not fun. Yeah. What do you think about the Bill and Melinda Cates breakup?

Yeah. What do you think about the Bill and Millen deGrate Gates breakup? I have not been following this at all. I don't find him to be an interesting figure. I think he's a nefarious figure, but I don't have enough kind of data to back that up. Yeah, it's just one of those things. There seemed to be when Bezos had his breakup. It kind of made sense because you look at Jeff and you've got this sort of nerds to chad,

sort of artist to alpha trajectory that he's been on. You think, well, yeah, obviously, like obviously he's the sort of guy walking around looking like Terminator with his AVR. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lather jacket and stuff. You think, well, yeah, obviously this was going to happen. But Bill and Melinda, you know, you've got this,

Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and so on and so forth. Yeah, it just seemed like an interesting cultural artifact. Obviously, it's kind of highly tied to this Jeffrey Epstein thing. And then it would appear that some of the people that were accused co-conspirators for the Jeffrey Epstein case, have you seen that they are now testifying against Jolaine Maxwell?

You see this? Yeah, I did see that, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I don't understand how that works either because can someone implicate themselves during their testimony about somebody else? Have they been given deals so that if they testify against to they're not going to, they're going to be safe from no matter what so that they can completely open up

about the situation. Are they going to be hard to avoid perjury? And that's the other thing about anarchism is we're told about equality and the law, but that's completely a lie. And this is a great example, which is a plebe who pleat up, right? I, you are a drug dealer and I want to, you know, get your boss. And as the prosecutor, I say, I'm, I'm choosing not to punish you for your crimes in exchange for your testimony.

So in other words, I am as the government as a monopoly in providing security, choosing not to enforce this so-called objective law for the sake of someone who I think is better. That's a value judgment. So as opposed to, can you imagine a store or a bodyguard saying, well, I'm not going to protect you this person for whatever do this reason. So that's a good example of how the state and its claims of being fair, reasonable and objective on a daily basis throws that out the window and says this person is more important than this one. Now, there might be something to be said for that, but it certainly is not the case that it's equality under the law. That's a really good point, because it's a,

you could say this person is further up the food chain because what? Because they make more money because they tend to be in charge. But it is at the end of the day a subjective viewpoint. Why would that person be more of a criminal than this person? Or if they're both criminals, how are you the one who's like, yes, no, no, no, yes, in terms of who you're going to prosecute? What about the COVID turn around from Facebook now that COVID skepticism in terms of the origin of it, if you had a look at this? Yeah, oh yeah, they're dropping their, this is, I think, going to be very revelatory to

very many people hopefully and I my I pray Every day to Loki that this is going to make some people realize how duplicitous The overlords are Why well because you know to come in with Global pandemic you're coming in you're asking. We're gonna shut down the earth You we're gonna shut down any discussion about certain aspects of this. Like, if you question it, we're just going to lose your social media account, which is something that is something very necessary for very many people, obviously.

And now to be like, oh, yeah, maybe we're wrong. It's just like that's an enormous amount of power for people to have and to assume that this power is being used reasonably or objectively has been demonstrated to be false. Just to show that they don't have capacity, these people aren't the clairvoyant all-seeing eye that they really need to be. The only way that you would be able to deploy this sort of a rule is if you were omnipotent and you knew, I know all of the fact and I can make the most educated decision. But when essentially what you had was

people who knew more than the political fact and the fact-checking organizations and Facebook and Twitter and such like, and they were penalized as much as I hate Brian Rose and I think the guys are pleb. He has someone like David Icon and he talks about I mean, I think it was 5G lizard people or whatever for him but Still the skepticism about the origin of COVID was true Much of the pain much as it pains me to say that um But people were penalized for holding what now is actually considered to be plausible if not a

Realistic view and let's also talk about nuance. Let's suppose okay It's considered to be a plausible, if not a realistic view. And let's also talk about nuance. Let's suppose, okay, it's completely ridiculously and absurd and nonsensical that COVID was made in a lab in China. That might be factually true, but what is truthful is that governments, and I'm not saying this would happen in Antarctica, because I'm just saying entities are currently trying to bioengineer viruses. Like, that is a broader point that needs to be addressed

rather than the specificity of this case. So, you're doing this baby bathwater situation where you're saying, okay, you can't discuss this even as a hypothesis, but at base, there is a 100% certainty that things of this nature are being carried on all over the country by various governments. And you could easily make the case that it's something that's a good thing. If you buy a engineer one, you can reverse engineer it, make your diseases.

It's just not to be nefarious. But what is nefarious is to kind of arbitrarily, as Mark Zuckerberg or as Dr. Fauci, who's one individual, draw the line and say, not only can you not discuss this, if you do discuss this, this is going to have great personal consequences for you. When it's something where it's not even a person that's the best at interest in, it's not like I'm committing slander, I'm going online, I'm saying Chris Williams, this and that, and you can see them coming in and be like, all right, we're not going to have our platform being used to spread literalized, that Chris did, so on and so forth. These are, if there's anyone

who should not be given the benefit of the doubt, its governments in general, and if there's any one government that should not be given the benefit of the doubt, it's the Chinese government. Yeah, and there's no recourse either, right? You lose your account or you're locked out of whatever for X number of months or weeks. The recourse is having these entities be regarded with increasing skepticism and disdain and creating alternative pathways to information flowing, which I think there's an enormous movement online from people who are much smarter than both of us put together to create

these workarounds so this sort of thing can happen in future. Dude, every couple of videos has a comment from someone citing a new platform that I don't know about, that I need to upload my videos to. I've got a list of them, I've kept a list somewhere. It's like five or six other video hosting platform. Well, this one's decentralized, this one's on the blockchain. This one's... I'm very used to one, I think, that everyone likes or artists.

Rumble. Rumble. I wasn't up to one, yeah. Told about what, look, you know, there you go. There's three. There's three different platforms that we're talking about. But, man, I remember the first conversation that mean you had about anarchism and what you were talking about was the fact that how many times do you need to be hit over the head with a stick or mistreated by powers that be so that they show you that they do not have your best interest at heart?

Before you start to see That there might be something in this here, and I don't know whether this is a quirk of my personality or whether it's a British thing I think it may be both British I think tend to be relatively orderly we haven't rioted as much when things have occurred. There doesn't tend to be the revolts. That might be a chronic situation. It might just be an acute one for roundabout now with the way that the culture is at the moment.

But for the most part, we tend to stick to the rules and I've tended to respect rule makers and such like. Sure. But dude, the number of times, since our conversation on the beginning of this year, where I see something, I'm like, okay, the masks slipped again that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The masks slipped again that.

And it really is a red pill because once you've seen it, you can no longer unsee it and you start to see it more and more and more because the pattern recognition begins to kick in, right? That particular activating system is so highly attuned that you start to think, well, I'm a little bit skeptical about that. Now, a little bit skeptical about that. And then you have something as blatant as this COVID, Facebook turn around. And you go, well, this is, this is just a big billboard saying, we don't know what the fuck we're doing. And we make arbitrary rules.

And you get punished when they're wrong, even if you were right, before we knew, and we can admit that we were wrong, but you don't get any sort of recompense or apology. And at a certain point, you asked yourself, wait a minute, why was I ever under the belief that Jeremy Corbyn's Sir Care, Nicholas Sturgeon, Boris Johnson care about me or have my best interest as a heart when they've never even met me or no I exist. And to expect powerful people to not be self motivated or self driven makes no sense. At the very least they're not going to be in that position if they do not have this hunger for power because it takes so much work to get elected especially at the highest levels.

So even as a thesis it's completely and coherent and unsensical. Now, you can make the case, which is, I think fairly easy to defend, that their careers will be best served when the country itself thrives, right? It's easy to get reelected when the economy's booming. It's much harder when things are disastrous. So they would want to seek out those policies that for the country. And I do think all those people do want in general probably what's best for for and they just have different views of getting there. But to say that they're entirely just motivated by service when you see how they talk, you know, is just bizarre to me.

Did you see the recent local election outcomes in the UK? Oh, yes, I did. Oh, very much. What did you take away from that? Oh, I was a giddy. I was giddy because I enjoy seeing any time politician's squirm, because they're very good at hand waving away, finding excuses, and so on and so forth. So to have, so labor went from Corbin who is regard as the left of the party understandably, we have new leadership remotorating,

we're changing our face, and to have, it's kind of like we're talking early about having Coke or Pepsi, it's like, okay, my teeth are rotten, I'm gonna stop drinking Coke, well I'll just start drinking Pepsi, that's the other choice. So labor has this somewhat center left,

it's circular or the harder left as Corbin. They're like, okay, this didn't, it's also funnier because it went milliband Corbin, Sir Kear, right? So it's like, okay, the moderate didn't work. Let's try the alternative. And that's a reasonable A B testing. Okay, this was a complete disaster. We've had our lowest level since like the Great Depression. We're going to go back to the center. Nope, it's still going down. It's like, I, there's only two, there's only two buttons. Like, what am I supposed to do? So, that is, is glorious. And I do think it is also wonderful to demonstrate the insincereity of politicians and the labor is the perfect example of this. Not that I think Jim, Boris Johnson is a good person. Let me just make that clear, but labor just codifies this principal

and about to demonstrate. They're called labor. The party is called labor. It's not called the Democrats here. It's specifically the party of labor, can't are the Fabian society, the unions, and so on and so forth. As soon as those labor unions working men started voting Tory to any extent, they're being vilifies little Britoners, backwards, illiterate, racist, so on and so forth. working men started voting Tory to any extent. They're being vilified as little

Britoners, backwards illiterate, racist, so on and so forth. It's like, whoa, wait, so you never cared about labor at all. You never claimed to represent, you did not really represent the views of your countrymen or else you would have been changing your policies accordingly. You just used them or saw them as a means to gain power. And now that there're threats to your maintaining power, you condemn and despise them. And there are many members of the labor party who publicly were like, look, I forgot the guy's name, I apologize, I'm sure people know him talk about it in the UK, who were like, we've become this party of like university jerks who have disdained for the common man.

This is not who we're supposed to be about. Nor is it a path toward winning elections. And I think he's absolutely spot on and right. But what's hilarious to me is they have no idea of what to do next. And you see this in country after country in Germany, the social democrats, which are the equivalent of the labor party, who have been a coalition with Angela Merkel for a better part over a decade, they're now polling like 13%, 13%. I mean, just imagine it being in a country where one of the two main parties has now down to 13%. So in country after country, historically, these big parties, which I've had decades

of, you know, often running the state, or, you know, certainly having being number two, are imploding, and that, to me, being number two, are imploding. And that to me as someone who has disdained for democracy is something absolutely wonderful. The situation. It's also funny that like in just sorry one thing, British politics, you have labor, which is a complete disaster. And then you have Boris Johnson in other hand, he's not exactly a great guy. Is this the guy that's defeated us? This one, like, Bongo, Bongo land.

This is going to be our PM. It's like, but that's where we are. So it's, it's, and the thing I love is in American, there is such a, uh, uh, pretension to, to Brits looking down on us and, oh my God. It's like, you guys have a lot of low lives at the very top. And one more thing that just happened recently, I, I was happy, I forgot what it was, I had this tweet and I mean it. I said, no matter how bad of a day you're having right now, realize that's somewhere to

resumé's miserable. And when you put it down to the floor, it's just like it's great. I got one a horrible one. Yeah. I don't know, man, watching that situation unfold was crazy, especially from being from the northeast of the UK, which was this labor stronghold. Hardly pulled, yeah, is where I used to play cricket for yours and yeah. What was it?

The crystal, the crystal, I have seen story. Cricket for yes. The arch, what was it that I was talking about? The chief constable of Hamshaya police or something and he took a like into him. But you're totally right when you say that it just seemed like, okay, what can we do now? What do you want us to say now?

This was Labour's campaign. So what should we say now? What would you like us to tell you in order for us to stop depreciating everywhere that we thought that we were safe? So this is the thing that I found that was really interesting, man. So if it hadn't been for the fact that Trump had lost in November, or that Trump didn't win the election in November, people get mad when I say that he lost.

He didn't lose. So if you accidentally say that George Floyd was killed, he was like, no, he wasn't, he died. You're like, oh, fucking, come on, mate. It's just term of phrase. Anyway, the fact that Trump is no longer the president, right? If that hadn't happened, I think that you would have a fairly robust case

to be made that look. All of this super lefty, woke-ism stuff, it's just not resonating with the electorate across the board. Two of the cultural leaders when it comes to the west, the English-speaking countries, it's just not happening. But the Democrat win seems to throw a bit of a fly in the appointment of that hypothesis. No, you're seeing it wrong from across the pond. So I don't think you're following American politics during the primaries, but Bernie Sanders, who is kind of the Jeremy Corbyn equivalent roughly, although he's much more amiable and more and much more liked and respected person than Corbyn was much less divisive.

He was, we have something called Super Tuesday, so basically we have 50 states, and each state has their primary caucus, and they're not all in the same day. It's a staggered period. So basically, kind of the playoffs as you you know people fall away And then you get the nominee for each party and we have super something called super Tuesday Which is a day when a huge chunk of states all have their primary caucus on the same day the day before Bernie who only joined the Democrat he's always been independent. He only joined the Democratic party, see the presidential nomination I said four years earlier. He was ahead in the polls in literally every state, other than I think Minnesota, where Senator Klobuchar, Amy Klobuchar had been running as well, which was her home state. So he had a lock on the

nomination. You know, they were going to have a social, Democratic Socialist as their nominee. The Democratic party publicly called all the other nominees. They said you're ending your campaign today and endorsing Biden Biden's our guy. And they did it. Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Mayor, it was doing well. And they had been doing better than Biden in polling and delegates. That month, Super Tuesdays Tuesday, Monday, they all suspended their campaigns. Kamala Harris who had suspended pro-pres, endorsed Biden and that put Biden over the

top. So, it was a defeat by the Democrats of the wokest, who would be the champion of the wokest left. The hard left had been defeated very heavy-handedly and publicly by the party leadership. So, the left, the center left or a sensible center left is much more effective in many ways at defeating the harder left than the right or the center right is, at least here in the States, that said that didn't really happen in Britain because it was just Biden won and you had those off your elections. And I think labor is

pulling even lower now than Corbin's historic defeat. Yeah, it's crazy. And it's also counterintuitive the data because not that long earlier when Theresa May called her snap election, Corbin did better than Miliband had done previously. So if you're looking at the data, you can't say, you know, the Corbin approach is a disaster because there was one election where he gave her a run for her money. She blew up like a 20 point lead of something crazy. Then there's another election where it's their worst result in like 90 years. And then you go, okay, we're

going to go to Cirqueur. Now it's going, it's like, if I were laborer, there's a lot of conflicting data here. And I don't blame them for being confused. Yeah, but do you see my point to do with America that I understand you can have top down people litigating or telling the candidates that they need to move in one direction or another, but bottom up, the electorate, again, it's questions about the validity of the election aside. The electorate seemed to not have this total whitewash or conservative wash. As you say, what do you think's different there? What was the key

difference is, why are we seeing such a conservative push in the UK and not in the US? I don't know. I don't know that I'm familiar enough with the differences to be able to make, I'm sure a lot of us do with personalities. Biden, Sir, here aren't the same phenomenon. Boris Johnson maybe and Trump are more similar than the two those other two. And it would have to do with the different populations. I do think from what I understand and please correct me if I'm wrong. You guys have Brexit. Obviously we didn't have a big issue like that. So to have a, you would think that in that red wall where so many people were for Brexit, even though there were reliable labor voters, for labor to then be like, okay, we're, this is what you got, like Theresa May was a remainder. And she was like, okay, I'm still pushing

through Brexit. When she was on the steps of number 10 or her first day, she said, Brexit means Brexit. I'm going to, you know. Now she wasn't really able to do that, but she wasn't like I'm going to do this election. But with labor, it's my understanding. This is something was a very populist thing. The entire establishment, largely, or almost the entire Tory establishment, all the largely the labor of people, even the Corbin, apparently quietly was a remainder. They didn't really know what to do as opposed to this would be a good example for them to pivot and maybe be like, okay, we're going to, we're, thank you forget it's like at what 1945 when Winston Churchill stood there on the balcony and he told the people, this is your victory and the yelled at him, no, this is yours.

So it would be smart, I would think. I'm sure the labor people are smarter than I am in terms of what it's like a UK politics to say like, all right, thank you, Boris, for delivering us Brexit. We'll take it from here. You Tory leadership has been a disaster. You're great at alienating us from Europe, but we're going to make sure that Europe has a good relationship with the United Kingdom, which it always has had in our labor. You know, you can, the speeches kind of write themselves, but I think they, for whatever

reason, shows not to do this. And I think a lot of it, because so much of the left increasingly are, you know, at the mercy of corporate media, which is much harder left, especially in the States than the politicians themselves are. It's an interesting point. I do think that Brexit makes a huge, huge contribution to this because it was such a landmark point for everybody in the country, and you didn't have that single issue in the most recent American election, right? Right.

You just didn't have that one thing that could be grasped onto. Whereas, I think when Trump got first elected, perhaps was a little bit, it was a simpler, a simpler campaign to look at, right? You have this woman is a crook, she's going to do terrible things to this country, build a wall, there we go. It was a fairly sort of simple campaign to wrap your head around,

but this one, I don't think was so much, it was more multi-variant. And also 2010 is a better example because Obama's elected in 2008. He had super majorities in both houses of Congress. They stopped pushing through Obamacare, which at the time was enormously unpopular. The polls were violently against it. The Democratic Party still pushed it through, and then you had the midterm elections, and they were a bloodbath. Now, they were starting from

a huge level, so they weren't completely destroyed, but it was really when you have these one issue elections or that shadow was floating over the electorate, that's something that it's very easy for the other party to leverage or at least for the party in power, even if the other party can't leverage it, they're still going to lose a lot of their cloud. Why do you think that the left have so much contempt for the working class? Because it's a lot easier to train a smart dog than a dumb dog. And I don't, in general. So educated college university people

are much more easily manipulated by the media, much more subservient by the media because they've been spent all these years training, whereas people who are intelligent but uneducated, like the working class, are much more skeptical. If you're a factory and your boss is telling you how you're all a big family, blah, blah, blah, you're like, sure thing, boss, and you go, you go to your boys and you roll your eyes because you know he's telling you what he wants to hear. But if you're in management, you might start

to believe it. So I think this kind of two paths to perception is a big part of it. I don't think the working man correctly believes that the media regards them with respect to put it mildly. Well, the media definitely not. Right. And if you have the media and labor saying largely the same things and this population thinks you're a jerk and a horrible person. Well, you're agreeing with everything else. I would bet that you're saying these things

behind closed doors, and they're probably right. That's a really interesting insight that the vehicle which used to be prized or still perhaps is prized as the delivery mechanism for a lot of the talking points from politicians. The normal working class view, their interpretation of that industry at large is perhaps becoming so jaded that even the association with it is now tarnishing any potential messages, which it was. This is like being judged during an execution of yourself.

You're kind of hamstrung by your own situation. Yeah, and it also, it's as simple just about putting food in the table. This is what happened in 1978 when Thatcher was head of the Tories. And she hired Sachi and Sachi. And they had a brilliant ad campaign with all the welfare accused.

And the slogan simply was labor isn't working. I mean, just a brilliant ad campaign with all the welfare accused and the slogan simply was labor isn't working. I mean, just a brilliant turn of phrase. And at a certain point, you know, democracy, this is the best thing you could say about democracy. There is this on your particular, like, okay, if there are these two choices and this one isn't working, and I have two alternatives, it's not a hard choice. I'm at the very least going to at least try this other one, no matter what you tell me

about this woman, because as things stand now, this is not working for me. Now, it's very easy to make the argument that she was very bad for the working class, you know, the minors, so on and so forth, and that's a big argument to be had. But in terms of, you know, feeling this connection as a working man and the powers that be, I mean, the Tories exploit it very well in 78. And obviously that lets her election in 79. What do you think of the relationship between the left and the working class in America? Oh, it's being gloriously diffricated.

And there is increasing, I don't think people in Britain understand, and I, as someone who's in, you know, need deep in this world, have trouble understanding how radicalized and how quickly the working class is in the States. And I had this tweet, and I said this on Rogan, that if they started putting up Gila Teens, corporate journalists will be tripping over themselves to make fun of how dull the blades are. I think there is a lot. a meaning like they don't realize that they're playing with fire, that these people are really being very radicalized in very dangerous ways, that they feel correctly, that the corporate media is their enemy. Now when you regard someone as your enemy, my result is, I don't want to talk to them,

I don't want to deal with them. But it's very dangerous when a lot of people identify another group as the enemy and someone's going to get ideas. And that is something I'm very, very concerned about, something I'm warning against. But they're sitting in their offices, well, now in their homes, thanks to COVID, and they're like, ha, ha, ha, look at these idiots, you know, putting up these gallows. It's like you guys, this, if you taught, and the left knows this historically, when you have, when you marginalize a person or a group, and they

have nothing to lose and you keep poking them. What do you think is going to happen? It's going to end up in it's going to blow up in ways no one wants and I'm very very concerned about this. What do you think happens roller clock forward? I don't even want to speculate because this is the kind of thing where it's like tender boxes, you know, like you like that match and violence things that's on song and I desperately hoping we did not reach that point. And while we will wait and see, dude, so good to have you here. We are not doing, wait, doesn't look like we're going to get to do Russia, Russia, Russia. Yeah, you're going to have to, we're going to have to, yeah, you're going to do, we need to do something else.

Well, across the pond, baby, we got a, I can't get in. I literally can't get into your country the whole shenzhen Shenzhen zone is Shut off. You like a walled fucking nation at the moment One of us is gonna cross that Atlantic one where I know that we're gonna have to meet and hand or something swim Yeah, what dude? Man, we need to do something so you had this Russia thing planned to go and it'll be a year's in a row Yeah, yes, and we're not going to get to, well, maybe I guess, but something fairly sort of dramatic would have to change, I guess. But we need to do something, man.

So we will, we'll get some plans made. I could not be more looking forward to this content that creates as a result, because this is going to be the buddy comedy movie in real life. Right? Don't you think? I think it makes an interesting pairing, yes, definitely. going to be the buddy comedy movie in real life, right? Don't you think? I think it makes an interesting pairing, yes, definitely.

It's not as crazy as Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, but it's still going to be fun for a lot of people. Plus, wait, you laugh, but let me get serious for a second. I think one of the things I despise a cynicism and this kind of, it's a too cool for school attitude, which is very common in media. So I think a lot of people have had a very lonely time. So when they see two people who are good friends, having fun, it's good, spiritual fuel for

them and clowning each other. So yeah, although it's going to be going more and more in one direction than the other, but that's fine. Fantastic. Well, we're going to have to pay back some way, aren't we? So, man, thank you so much. The anarchist handbook will be linked in the show notes below at Michael Mallis on Twitter and all of that other good stuff.

It's just anarchisthandbook.com. That's all they need to know. That's a really cool thing to finish up with. That's a really smart idea that I haven't seen other people use before. Most other authors, when they need to direct people to where to get the book. It's searching on Amazon or use one of those am am z dot t o slash da da da da da da da. Link as opposed to what? Z. Oh right. Yeah. Sorry. Why is that? It's not a person's name that makes no sense. X Y Z. X Y Z comment below below if I've got Z wrong as a British person. I don't know. You got it right, but it makes no sense that the letter would have a name.

Well, I mean, let me just remind you, this isn't your language anyway. Actually, we speak closer to British English than you guys do. What? As a Russian? No, as a Russian. As an American, you guys are the degenerate. But where were you born? Russia, right. Okay, so this I can't believe that I can't believe that a Russian is trying to tell me about how to speak my language No, well the chief constable of West Hamshire will be will be making a call to you sir Is he going to tell me that's not cricket? He will be saying that's not cricket

I don't just love it. Okay, uh anarchisthandbook.com you