Michael Malice is a political thinker, podcaster, author, and anarchist. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - House of Macadamias: https://houseofmacadamias.com/lex and use code LEX to get 20% of your first order - InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off - NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour - SimpliSafe: https://simplisafe.com/lex EPISODE LINKS: Michael's Twitter: https://twitter.com/michaelmalice Michael's Community: https://malice.locals.com Michael's YouTube: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5tj5QCpJKIl-KIa4Gib5Xw Michael's Website: http://michaelmalice.com/about Your Welcome podcast: https://bit.ly/30q8oz1 Books: The White Pill (book) http://whitepillbook.com The Anarchist Handbook (book): https://amzn.to/3yUb2f0 The New Right (book): https://amzn.to/34gxLo3 Dear Reader (book): https://amzn.to/2HPPlHS PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (07:43) - Santa and the White Pill (10:30) - Marxism and Anarchism (25:48) - The case for socialism (29:59) - Human nature and ideology (38:20) - Cynicism (54:05) - Twitter (58:46) - October Revolution (1:01:56) - Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin (1:06:22) - Communism (1:30:08) - Suppression of speech (1:52:04) - Twitter Files (1:59:08) - Self-publishing (2:12:27) - Kulaks and starvation (2:49:42) - The Great Terror (2:58:00) - Lavrentiy Beria (3:04:25) - Joseph Stalin (3:13:00) - Iron Curtain (3:25:29) - Ideologies vs leaders (3:29:21) - Emma Goldman (3:33:41) - White pill moments (3:45:04) - Hope for the future
Chapter 1: What themes are introduced in the introduction of the Christmas Special?
Thank you. Thank you. 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 whitepillbook.com.
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. This episode is full of humor, darkness, and love, which is the best way to celebrate the holidays. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
It's the best way to support this podcast. We got House of Macadamias for delicious macadamia-based snacks, Inside Tracker for biological monitoring, NetSuite for business management, and Simply Safe for home security. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.
I try to make them interesting, but if you must skip, please still check out the sponsors in the description. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by a new sponsor, a delicious sponsor, House of Macadamias, a company that ships delicious, high quality and healthy macadamia nuts directly to your door. I've gotten a shipment, what is it, two weeks ago? Two weeks ago.
And it brought happiness to my heart. I won't mention which episode. Perhaps you might know. But it was a very stressful episode. I was getting attacked a lot online. And I was just very stressed. And I was feeling lonely. I was feeling... You know, out of it sometimes, sometimes you're hard, sometimes your mind can take you to some low places.
So I was sitting there on the couch, and I got this shipment. The doorbell rang, and I came outside, and it was a mysterious box. And I brought it in. Like it was the holidays, but it wasn't the holidays yet. And I opened it up, and there was like a variety of delicious snacks.
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Chapter 2: How does Michael Malice's book 'The White Pill' relate to the holiday spirit?
They were extremely healthy and extremely delicious. And I partook in the snackage and it was glorious. I immediately felt better.
It's just for many reasons, obviously it's delicious, but also brought joy to my heart that there's people out there that really care about crafting like a culinary art, essentially crafting out a snack from really good ingredients that you could just tell a lot of love went into it. Nutritionally, there's a lot of nice things I could say. It's 30% less carbs than almonds.
Let us not debate how I pronounce almonds or almonds. I think I'm horrible with this. I forget which is the right way. It's the only nut rich in omega-7s. This is basically the healthiest nut. I feel like there's a good joke in there. Anyway, go to houseofmecadamias.com to get 20% your first order. You will not regret it, my friends.
This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data. What I want to know is the data that was coming from my heart and mind during the partaking of the macadamia snackage, the great, the glorious happiness. I wonder how the body communicates happiness. Short term, like moment by moment, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, weeks, years.
So there's the progression of human life, the ups and downs. There must be signals in there. And I think that's a really promising direction to take health advice, to take medical advice. to collect the full raw set of signals your body provides to help you determine the different turns to take in life, whether that's lifestyle or diet changes, all that kind of stuff.
I think that's obviously the future. That's why I'm excited about InsideTracker. They're taking those early big leaps into that future. You can get special savings for a limited time when you go to InsideTracker.com. This show is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. They manage everything.
Your financials, human resources, inventory, e-commerce, if you're that kind of business, and many business-related details. They automate the messy, the difficult, the challenging processes that are required to run a business online.
For me, the idea of running a business is really exciting, not for all the things I just mentioned, but for the idea generation, for the design, for the engineering, for the mass production, achieving scale, for all the challenges of bringing down the cost while bringing up the quality, all of those trade-offs.
and all the different people involved, getting to work with them, getting to be inspired by them, rethinking how things have done in the past, doing things in a totally new way, taking huge risks, all that is super exciting. And ultimately, you do that to help some aspect of the world. In my case, the dream is to add a little bit of love to the world with things that create.
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Chapter 3: What are the key differences between socialism, communism, and anarchism discussed?
I take my safety and security extremely seriously. But for most of us, the basic low hanging fruit solution should be a good, easy to set up, easy to use security system. SimpliSafe is the best of the best for that. Like I said, I have it set up on my place and I love it. Go to simplisafe.com to get a free indoor security camera plus 20% off your order with interactive monitoring.
Part of me wants to have a nearly infinite number of cameras in my house so I can do full 3D reconstruction. And at some point... uh, transform myself into a virtual world and not know it like somebody else sets it up. So I'll be living in a virtual world with the exact same experience as I have in the physical world. And I wouldn't know it. And it'd be some fascinating experiment.
And in that place too, there would need to be security and it would be a perfect reconstruction of the simply safe system. But in a virtual world, that would be incredible. Anyway, it's simply safe.com slash Lex. 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.
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. One of the people in the book, Grandal Hicks, his autobiography starts with, I was a good boy and he wasn't a very good boy. On a scale of one to 10. 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's all right. I would say nine. Nine? Yeah. I try to do the right thing. What are you?
Is it going to be a one or a zero?
Yeah, no, I'm extremely self-critical. I push the zero. Okay. I reach for the zero.
Well, mission accomplished.
So this episode is announcing the release of The White Pill, a book you wrote. I've gotten the honor, the privilege, the pleasure of being one of the first people to read it.
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Chapter 4: How did the October Revolution shape political ideologies?
Yes. You say that to all the girls, but... All the fembots. All the fembots. But yeah, it 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. 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.
So if you're listening to this and you're a fan of this podcast. You go to whitepillbook.com, 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.
Dear Reader, the Unauthorized Autobiography of 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. 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 moments. 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 prophesied Marxist society was one in which the state had famously withered away. There was a great disagreement about what a socialist system would look looked like in practice, but two 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 at that time?
At the end of the 19th century, at the beginning of the 20th century, the possibility of the century lay before us that eventually led to the first and the second World War.
The idea when the Industrial Revolution came and Marx was very much a product of Industrial Revolutionary 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.
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Chapter 5: What insights does Michael Malice share about the impact of collectivization on Ukraine?
He died of syphilis. It was from prostitutes. Was it? Okay. Possibly, yeah.
You're asking me like I knew the guy. I heard it's from... He never had a deep, loving, fulfilling relationship. He had a very skewed understanding of the way he wrote about women. Although somebody wrote to me and said that's a mischaracterization, that he was actually very respectful of women.
Yeah, but he had that line, if you're going before women, bring a whip. Wasn't that him?
If I were to quote you from your Twitter, I think I could make a very convincing argument that you're sexist, racist, and probably a Nazi.
Well, I do own some of Hitler's stuff. Exactly. I got the- I rest my case.
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Chapter 6: What was the role of the kulaks during Stalin's regime?
I feel like I'm a Nuremberg. I'm going to be hung by his own tie. This isn't a tie, it's a noose.
You should have thought about that when you were saying all those things. Okay. What do you think of the leak of the Twitter files?
I was so happy. that Elon gave the information to Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss, who are both by any metric lefties, who are both professional journalists of longstanding with great resumes. And overnight now they're doing PR for the world's rich, or whatever the party line was.
The fact that you had all these corporate journalists now having to play catch up and not having control of the microphone to me was just absolutely amazing. I think transparency is what brought down in many aspects of Soviet Union and what will bring down what negative aspects of the regime we have here.
when you see the machinations behind the scenes, and then when you see the rationalizations after the fact, you realize, oh, these people are not acting in good faith. The fact that, for example, the New York Post article about the Hunter Biden laptop and how the New York Times covered it as well, they didn't mention any kind of dick pics. Twitter made it so I couldn't even DM you
the link to the New York Post article, which was a tool they had previously used only to prevent child pornography.
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Chapter 7: How did the Great Terror shape Soviet society?
So that shows to what extent they were willing to put their thumb on the scale, but it also shows that for any layman when they're looking at this to realize what you are perceiving as news or information is very much sculpted, edited and guided by powerful people who have a vested interest in maintaining their power.
I think to me the important lesson is this is not a left to right thing. Oh, not at all.
It's power versus powerless, yes.
And also the important lesson there, I think at least in the case of Twitter, in our society, it's a slippery slope. You don't get there overnight. You start using those tools a little bit, a little bit to slow down misinformation, just a little bit. You start sending emails to each other a little bit, and it becomes more and more... You start forming justifications.
You start getting a little more and more comfortable kind of talking about this stuff. I think... There are several ways to fight that. One is having hardcore integrity up front. So don't even open the door. But I think realistically, human nature is what it is.
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Chapter 8: What reflections does Malice have on the Iron Curtain and its historical significance?
And so I think the only way is through transparency. This is why the nice... I hate the fact they got politicized. I really hate that the right have run with it. Like, look, the left is... planning the rigged elections and so on. To me, it shouldn't be left or right. It shouldn't be about politics. It's that transparency is good. Other companies should do the same. Facebook should do the same.
And in fact, that transparency will protect Facebook. It will protect Google. Look, this is our situation.
Tell us what to do and we'll do our best. I remember when I was writing The New Right, Twitter's line was, we're not going to tell you guys what the metrics are by which we ban or censor people because then bad actors are going to navigate around them. And it's like, what are you doing? Like, just tell people in any establishment what are the rules for which behavior is permissible.
If I go to a store... If I return the sweater, is it cash back? No refunds? Or if I get store credit, you know what I mean? So that they were having this place, which was presented as a huge international space for public discourse, and they're not telling you ahead of time, this is what we will tolerate. This is what we'll warn you about. This is what we'll kick you out overnight.
That to me was crazy and outrageous. And I'm really pleased that with to what extent Elon is being open with their policies. And what I really want to commend him about is, now I'm triggered, because one of the things that he took over, he's like, our first priority is getting rid of child pornography and child exploitation, right?
That was, he's like, racial slurs, homophobic slurs, anti-Semitic slurs, yeah, yeah, that's cool. Kids getting harmed is number one. And he fired the old task force because they weren't doing their job.
Eliza Blue, who you know, she had been on this for a long time, but people who were victims of child pornography, child exploitation, were emailing Twitter being like, these are my images, get them off. And they're like, too bad, porn is allowed on Twitter. He starts trying to crack down on it. This is a very hard problem because these bad actors have mechanisms to evade being banned.
They want to get their... for lack of a better term product out there, Forbes magazine, who is an agent of the devil, had a tweet and they tweeted this nine times. You know, now that Elon's here, Twitter's child porn nightmare has gotten much worse. They tweet this nine times. I looked up, anyone listening to this can look up, look at Forbes and do a search.
They never mentioned this problem before. So now that Elon is doing something about it, now it's a problem for you. No, it's a problem. Elon's the problem. It's not the child porn that you guys had a problem with. And that to me, He's like, yeah, I understand that you think that Elon is a bad guy because he's upset your apple cart. This isn't a political issue. This isn't a gotcha moment.
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