Malice, or the Establishment? | Michael Malice | The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - S4: E30

[Music] hello everyone i'm pleased to have as a guest today mr michael melis an author columnist and media personality he was the subject of the graphic novel ego and hubris by the late harvey picard of american splendor fame he is the author of dear reader the unauthorized autobiography of kim jong-il 2014 as well as the new write 2019 a book that i've been reading deeply this week that was reminiscent to me of the new journalism anthropology of tom wolf he's the co-author of seven additional books including made in america the new york times best-selling autobiography of ufc of hall ufc hall of famer matt hughes concierge confidential with michael fazio 2011 which was one of npr's top five celebrity books of the year and most recently 2006 black man white house comedian comedian d l hughley's satirical look at the obama years also an nyt bestseller he served as a cultural and political commentator on podcasts with joe rogan dave rubin tim poole my daughter michaela peterson twice and has his own youtube channel and podcast you're welcome my producer put a note at the bottom of this aisle um uh autobiography michael is a comedian with a harsh and fast sense of humor he's a big fan of yours but be prepared for a little bit of crazy i got that impression reading your book but in the best possible way i would say so let's talk about the new right if you don't mind i'd like to dive right into that so i said in the intro that it was reminiscent to me of the new journalism of the 1960s when i first read the electric kool-aid acid test which i would recommend to everyone as a brilliant journalistic anthropological investigation into what became the psychedelic culture in the early 1960s it's a brilliant book um and i got the sense in that in the new right you were doing much of the same thing for whatever it was that was happening from the time of maybe 2013 to 2016 something like that something that actually seems like history already interestingly enough and you talk about from an insider's perspective in some sense because you were an insider and an outsider at the same time in these groups but you talk a lot about 4chan and memes and all these subcultures that exist online that are uh major forces and social domains in their own right but that are if not ignored completely by the mainstream media so to speak consistently misunderstood and so but but then by the same so i'd like to ask you about that uh we could start with 4chan maybe and and maybe you could walk us through first what it is and then what it was and then what it is now if it's anything because i did get the sense as well that this happened already something else is happening now and i don't know what it is but whatever it was you were writing about that's five years ago which is a long time in internet terms sure uh i think right now first of all discussing 4chan publicly in context like this in some kind of studious or serious context violates the ethos of 4chan one of the big rules about 4chan is you know normies get out re so by talking about it or automatically i'm kind of positing myself as someone who's an outsider i'm not you know on 4chan all the time but 4chan is kind of emblematic of a broader section of the internet which was driven wasn't literally only 4chan but was driven by irreverency was driven by this idea of that which is presented to us with earnestness should not be taken at face value that this earnestness is often used as a cudgel and as a mechanism of affecting uh social control uh certainly you've been the subject of many memes i'm sure you're you're familiar with yes but yeah and the other the point that they figured out there's an expression that they say meme magic is real the premise being you know the before the new right the idea was um you'd have these organizations putting forth some kind of claim or idea often absurd on its face and the argument be like well that's not accurate that's not fair and the new approach was why are we taking this agit prop at face value instead of mocking it clowning it and basically rendering the tool um impotent so that was kind of uh 4chan's pull board you had the donald subreddit on on reddit uh so there is this but you say that it's misunderstood by the mainstream press i always use the term corporate press because i don't really regard it as mainstream but i don't know that it's misunderstood so much as misrepresented well i think it's probably both because it's not easy first of all there's an immense divide between people who don't use the internet as a social mechanism or as their primary source of information and people who do there's an unbelievable divide and maybe maybe if you're older than 50 you're in the world of 1970 and if you're younger than 40 you're in the world of 2010 and those are really different worlds i mean you talk about the corporate press and i've been thinking a lot about the the technological impact of youtube and and podcasts so and this is why i'd like to dig into the misunderstood part first before we go to the misrepresented part what i see what i saw popping up in your book continually was two things happening in 4chan there's there's a there's troublemaking that in some sense is there for its own sake and i'd like to talk to you about that there's there's a political uh there's political movement but then there's also this exploration of what is actually a technological revolution so you think about um legacy media so i've noticed that when i've gone to tv stations and been interviewed by a journalist i'll have a discussion with the journalist in the green room and i'm talking to a person then but as soon as the cameras go on i'm not talking to a person anymore i'm talking to someone who's an adept mouthpiece for a massive corporate organization but but that was actually a necessity because the bandwidth for television was so expensive that it wasn't possible to grant any individual untrammeled access to it and so it was inevitable that a corporation was never going to allow except in exceptional cases any journalist to have what would truly be an individual opinion and certainly wasn't going to let them explore ideas in real time too expensive too risky um but then now we're in this weird situation and i the 4chan guys were playing with this to some degree where it isn't obvious that the corporate media platforms have any advantage whatsoever over anyone who's technologically able i mean the fact that we can have this discussion for example so there we have one go ahead i would say they have one very big advantage which you've seen yourself which is the concept of legitimacy so your previous book the uh the new york times refused to basically acknowledge it as being printed america so you can't say it's a new york times bestseller even though the number it's sold is just you know a huge amount is hugely successful right so uh the deer reader the book i did for about north korea which we'll talk about later i did that with kickstarter as a result of that on amazon it looks the same it's going to have a page listing like another page listing but the new york times uh you know all these other elements they're in a position i got an hour on c-span's book tv so that is changing in that regard but it gives them an opportunity to pretend that this book doesn't exist so unless a book is being published by certain um outlets that have legitimacy basically it's just like i i don't know if you watched wrestling growing up i certainly did the wwf when i was a kid there were rival organizations and they literally acted as if these rival organizations didn't exist and if a wrestler came over from the nwa to the wwf they acted like he was this new discovery that he had no history to him it was very odd because all you had to do was change the channel and they're acting in certain other mechanisms so that is a big advantage because if you go to talk to mom and you say where'd you hear this i heard this on cbs where did you hear this i heard this on 4chan it's it's very clear which one mom is going to choose no i i agree but but part of what the 4chan guys were doing by your own account to some degree was testing these new technological platforms to see how much power they actually had so these these trolling games that you described so you describe trolling as something that's actually quite specific it's in its intent when it isn't just being say adolescent foolishness it's something like can we create a narrative and string along um legacy media types and some of that's a joke but some of it's also a test is like does this new technological platform have enough power to to bend and twist what what has been the standard means of delivering the cultural narrative for decades and the answer to that frequently was yes and increasingly the the legacy media uh outlets are suffering from dela legitimization they lose money they lose their ability to fact check and because they don't have this technological advantage anymore they have the remnants of their brand it's something like that yeah and there's also something there's a very big asymmetry between honesty and dishonesty right if you and i are good friends and i tell you one major lie well that's one statement out of tens of thousands that one statement is still going to do much more damage than one honest statement because i've lost uh there's an amount of trust lost so their brand has been and they say this explicitly cnn had ads not that long ago saying this is an apple we only report facts if you are if i'm coming at you and saying that i am only reporting facts as soon as i'm caught in one misrepresentation even if it's innocent which i don't think it is in most cases right away uh there that just kind of collapses the souffle because i trusted you i relied on you and now you're giving misinformation but most importantly and this is where i differ from more mainstream conservatives who have think they think things have become corrupted you made mistakes i've made mistakes everyone makes mistakes all the time this is going to be inevitable simply from a lack of knowledge what steps have you taken once these mistakes have been made to make amends and also put yourself in a position that you won't make the same mistake again and if you see with corporate media oftentimes they'll do things that are disingenuous but let's give them benefit doubt let's just say they were sloppy but no one gets fired there's no mia culpa like you know what like a tylenol is a great counter example back in the early 80s i believe it was tylenol got some was poisoning tylenol bottles people i think were dying or at the very least were getting very sick so title had this huge ad campaign that said this is the steps we've taken you know you got the child proof calf you got the seal you got the cotton whatever it was this is how you know that we are safe you can rely on tylenol you don't see that with cnn or fox or abc whenever they do these egregious things they just pretend that they never happened all along or say that this is some kind of you know you can't listen to the conspiracy theories on the internet so this is why there's this kind of another loss of trust because there seems to be very little effort to maintain and foster that trusting relationship between the channels and the audience and make amends when things have gone wrong so um let's let's i want to go i want to continue with 4chan for a bit can you walk me through exactly like you you said that one of the mistakes that cnn did made for example and also hillary clinton's campaign was treating 4chan like it was actually a person and and as if there was someone who could represent it and speak can you lay out what exactly what what it is and how it works and then maybe we can talk about the meme culture that's associated with it sure so 4chan and there's others there's a chan there's a reddit and other such uh their message boards so basically 4chan i don't remember how many boards they have some are completely innocuous so fitness is their fitness and health board fa is their fashion board guys can ask does this do these pants look good on me you know what what kind of hat will look good with my hair you know innocuous stuff paul pol is their politics board so basically it's anonymous and it's not um i believe after there's 15 pages and after there's no updates on a thread the threads vanish into the net they're in the netherworld wherever you can't see them anymore uh impermanent correct you can identify yourself with the flag if you want when you when you log in but it's there's no usernames it's not like facebook so basically you know the hillary clinton campaign in in 2015 2016 were positing about these sites and like how is it that this is allowed to happen but it's not the kind of thing where it's like facebook and you call mark zuckerberg and he banned certain users the users are ephemeral um you don't know who they are it's the posts are ephemeral you know they just vanish off the board so this claim that you know the the comparison i had i believe in the book was kind of the more al-qaeda it's very decentralized you know you you can't really take out one person and then the whole thing falls apart other than you having to take try to take out the site which they tried to do earlier this year and in late 2020 um but it's an entirely different model and i think people who are have that bureaucratic mindset people have that elitist in the sense that you have this managerial elite running things they can't even conceive of an organization or a location or a website which is decentralized and there's no like uh um you know big bad vampire to kill once you take out this vampire well i mean but that is part of what i well i thought was in some sense you're documenting something that's so revolutionary that even the people using it don't know how revolutionary it is you know and so because we have these massive communication technologies now and they all have slightly different rules and just by tweaking the rules a tiny bit you can create a whole new organization like tick tock let's say which has videos of a certain length and at least to begin with almost no other it's all of a sudden that's a huge social network doing all sorts of things that no one has ever done before so the rules for 4chan are really crucially important to understanding it so it's anonymous decentralized and evanescent and that's something yeah and they have no one the two rules are no child pornography and uh there if there's pornography it has to be stick to the pornography board but so it's pretty much the wild west when it comes to free speech right and the fact that it's not uh permanent also so it's anonymized and impermanent which means you'd think at least in part that that it would encourage a lot more risk-taking because one of the things that would mitigate risk is the fact that it could be attributed to you but also that it would be permanent yeah that i mean that's the comparison of 4chan let's say twitter where you know someone's old tweets will be there at the very least they're going to be archived somewhere you're going to have a consistent username uh so even if it's not jordan peterson if you're just going to be like jack smith 37 they'll be able to track jack smith 37's posts over time you can't really do that um on a site like 4chan or or 8chan but there's other sites like this i mean what what what they have figured out is you know you know the corporate press might decide for chance the devil for chance the devil 4 chance the devil you take down 4chan well they'll just go to discord or they'll go to all these other sites so technology is what allows people it's designed in contemporary terms for people to communicate so if you're going to kind of take out one location where they're gathering and trying to communicate it's going to take minutes uh to find a new location now if there's going to be a cost because you have to get the word out through other means about this is where we all are now but it's very very hard when people are basically effectively teleporting right if for me to go from one location to another physically after getting a plane a car or train whatever but if you go to one website to another it i have to type in a web address so if you just ban one address it the amount of effort it takes to shift to another one could not be more minimal so okay so you documented put so no one's in charge of this but something happens and and it's a communication network and and it attracts people who what it attracts people who are communicating in a like man minded way across time why did it become a place that was dominated at least by your observations by the thought that was associated with the new right why did it converge on that because 4chan historically has been a site for great irreverence so they had had campaigns to um troll and by trolling let me say specifically what i mean trolling is it's not just you know you know you have a twitter account and i say at jordan peterson you're a jerk f off that's not trolling that's just being obnoxious trolling i i i regard the first troll as andy kaufman the comedian where what by your performance you're turning a third party by exploiting their weaknesses into an unwitting performer on their own for example there was a great wrestler uh to bring it back to wrestling called the honky tonk man from the 80s and his shtick was he was an elvis impersonator right and when they interviewed him he would say oh no elvis stole my act now elvis had been dead for 15 years at that time it makes no sense whatsoever but this would get the audience really enraged and they'd flip out so when you are calmly causing someone else to have an extreme reaction and in this case and in good trolling he's exploding exploiting their innocence and they better i mean they're taking what he's saying at face value even though it's a complete absurdity and what follows suit you know on some case can be put in their lap so they used to what what 4chan would go would be known for is you know for example you had a mountain dew right and they had name the next flavor of mountain dew it's just a corporate mechanism i talked about this in the book it's a corporate mechanism to sell you know your sugary soft drink uh what name should we call it and they basically got enough people together and this is kind of like rent seeking right if you have an organized um goal seeking minority as opposed to a different majority that organized goal seeking minority is going to be able to punch very much above its weight in terms of getting the achievements at once how many people are caring about this mountain dew pole very very few other than the trolls so they got the number one result to be hitler did nothing wrong right now they're not nazis they're not they don't think the holocaust is something that is didn't happen or is bad they're putting now this mountain dew who's trying to use this fun to sell you this poisonous sugary garbage now the corporation is in position are they going to follow through with this poll or are they going to pull it whatever they choose they have been forced into making a choice that they themselves would not have wanted because you have someone in a meeting trying to hey this is gonna be fun for the kids and they ended up pulling uh the poll because they're like okay the internet won so to go from that and this kind of extreme um distrust if not contempt for corporate irreverence and corporate humor and corporate fun to have basically can i curse on this you can do whatever you want okay well not everything so to have uh someone who was basically a [ __ ] poster on twitter running for president uh who was just there in these debates insulting these politicians to their face in often very below the belt terms that was that ethos brought to life because no one could have imagined in decades that you would have a presidential contender who's looking at a sitting senator in the face who's who's doing well in the polls and telling that senator i've never made fun of your looks and there's plenty of material there believe me that much i can tell you you know this is something that was completely unprecedented and new and we've been taught for decades um that you know politics should be about respect it's these are tough choices these are people's lives that's all very true but there's this very new left from the late 60s perspective idea that uh these kind of powerful entities use respect and decorum and decency as a mechanism to stifle dissent and to basically make their victory a feta complete and if you kind of mess that up and force them to show their hand that these are not kind caring people who care about your grandma and your neighborhood these are power hungry sociopaths who will smile at your face and do whatever they need to when the lights are off that i think uh was something is very useful in terms of exposing our politics for what they are so it's it struck me over the last decade or so that the alignment of comedic satire with right-wing philosophy or or political philosophy or views was something that was completely also completely unprecedented i thought well all of a sudden the right wing are the jesters or at least among the right wing are these jesters and i really didn't know what to make of that i mean you seem to regard it in your book the new right you you seem to regard it as um a kind of right-wing anarchic rebellion against but it's a strange it's strange what they're against because on the one hand there's the corporate voice let's say that characterizes the media and on the other hand there's the left-wing progressives and you can't really put them in the same camp all that easily well hopefully we will be putting them in the same camp um but they are in the same camp because one of my quotes is conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit so much of conservatism buckley got his start william f buckley who's the i think the big villain of the book god has started complaining how terrible things are and how mistreated he was at yale the new right perspective isn't complaining about how things are yale it's let's say tanks let's send tanks to harvard's harvard yard and raise it to the ground so these are two different approaches and much of conservatism for decades this besides being inherently humorless uh which is a personality thing which is perfectly fine if that's your thing it has been about a reaction so the left would have some idea of the moment we need to do this and that the right would just dig in their heels get dragged along and it's a ratchet effect constantly moving us toward a more and more progressive society the national reviews slogan was standing at thwart history yelling stop and then at certain point people realized how about instead of yelling we actually stop it how about we actually try to put a wrench into these gears how about we try to you know metaphorically tar and feather some of these people instead of just complaining that it's not fair let's be aggressive and let's take the fight to them okay and you see and now you clearly see an analog between the tricks that trump used let's say the humorous tricks that he used and and the manner in which he appealed to the public and whatever was going on in places like 4chan and on reddit and with memes as well and you spend a lot of time in your book talking about pepe for example so what what is it that you see as the connection i mean look i saw this t-shirt in florida last year that i thought was really apropos it said uh trump 2020 because [ __ ] you twice yeah and i thought yes there's something about that that's really uh interesting and i've i've talked to my progressive friends about this a lot and because i'm trying to figure out exactly what's going on and and being appalled at least to some degree at the shenanigans of of the democrats among others especially the identity politics types because yes look i'll tell you what what i see in re relationship to my books for example so hypothetically um this is the standard legacy media critique of my books i would say is that i'm peddling nonsense that if not trite is outright dangerous and which is kind of a strange combination two nerdwells who are so far beneath contempt that any attempt to help them is to be met with suspicion and that's something that really really uh puzzles me because when i meet the people that i'm communicating with you know when i walk around or when i go to my lectures you know i see individuals because i look at individuals i see individuals who are trying to get their houses in order who are off often in desperate straits and they come up to me and tell me you know some step they've taken towards improvement sort of shame-facedly and but also happy about it and you know i'm very happy that that's happening and tell them that and that's my experience but then i see in in in the response to my hypothetical audience which is a misrepresentation to begin with nothing a contempt that's so deep that the contempt is even there for the attempt to help and then i think well you progressive types at least in principle you're all for the downtrodden but i don't know what it is maybe if they stay in their place and act like they're supposed to there's this contempt among the helping class let's say for those they're hypothetically helping that's so deep that and i think it i think it destroyed hillary clinton's campaign that contempt her comments about the basket of deplorables and the democrat abandonment of the of the working class and and trump tapped into that somehow and and you draw connections and so i'd like you to elaborate on that a little bit if you would sure and i whenever i try to talk about people i always try to steal me on their arguments and present them in the most strong position possible when the left is at its best it's as you mentioned it is about concerning about marginalized people people who are forgotten uh the far left you know historically would care about prisoners rights and how bad it is that this prisoner is treated for most people it's kind of like lock em up throw away the key and that's kind of a left-wing idea that like this guy's been forgotten let's make sure he has food he's not being you know assaulted on a daily basis things like that so they understand also in other contexts that when you have a young males who have nothing to lose who are completely marginalized who are spat on and called every name in the book in other contexts whether the middle east in the inner city they realized you keep pushing someone at the bottom and keep telling him you're nothing you're you deserve to have nothing that young male is going at the very least trying to get some kind of monaco respect try to get some modicum of status and this often has literally very violent consequences because if i have nothing to lose but i can make a name for myself or i could for five minutes have a sense of power some people are going to do that arithmetic and it's a very very bad thing and this is broadly speaking oh everyone will do that arithmetic virtually as unfair equality multiplies unfair inequality multiplies that that just becomes more and more likely that response so to your point is so in other contexts they understand this but now we're talking about your audience right these are young uh men who aren't doing so hot and now they're being told you're they they don't have a girlfriend they desperately want to have a girlfriend and now they're told you're a loser for not having a girlfriend it's like well i'm trying to get out of that situation i'm not trying to be some kind of date rapist i'm not trying to be some sexual predator i just want to be normal i just want to have maslow's hierarchy of needs met but because they have been assigned to be you're supposed to be here at the bottom you've had your turn you're the whipping boy of the moment on an individual level this is going to have very deleterious consequences and because you are telling them listen you don't have to be even if you're going to be at the bottom you could still be a better person tomorrow than you are today well now you're kind of going to their house and rearranging their furniture uh and messing up their schemes so of course they're going to react in uh very aggressive ways towards your teachings i think well it's funny too because that notion of my audience is a caricature to begin with you know but i don't care about that in some sense i'm interested that the caricaturing is occurring it's like there's a reason for it why they're all male they're all angry they're all white it's like no that's not right um and even if they do skew mail that's at least in part a legacy hangover from the fact that most of the people who watch youtuber are male um but anyways nonetheless that's that's the categorization but then there's the emergence of that contempt and i think well that is driving just as you pointed out there that that that insistence upon the despicableness of that status is driving i could see that in the 4chan right and the writing about 4chan that you were doing that's that there's a there's a testing and a pushing back that's going on there and some of it is clowning and some of it is like pointless troublemaking as far as i'm concerned but there's more going on in there than that and that's for sure so and then it coalesces around these right these more right-wing ideas which i also find somewhat surprising and so what do you make what do you make of that exactly is it because those ideas are the ones that are most specifically forbidden or and and and the satirical comic rebellious types just glom onto them for that or what do you think it is i think you hit the nail on the head it's that if you tell someone who's got nothing going on and you say you know if you push this button right here it's going to have some really hilarious consequences for some people who think they're better than you and have no problem telling you to your face they're better than you a lot of people are going to push that button especially when the results are often um hilarious so it is going to give them that sense of power and i don't know that they're making the wrong choice um i i don't think it's very useful to tell someone who's not really being particularly aggressive uh that you know you suck and you're terrible and that you know what it is like i don't make fun of people for being overweight like i go after people for a lot of things i don't go after people who are going overweight i had a friend who passed away because he had morbid obesity another friend who had a gastric bypass because when you make fun of someone who's overweight you're making fun of all your friends who are overweight you know they're seeing it as well and here's the thing that person knows they're overweight they know they're going to be treated differently they know they're going to be you know looked down on and all these other things they're painfully aware and it's the same thing here if someone is marginalized and you're calling him a loser he knows he's a loser at that point it just becomes a bit of cruelty and bullying and also anytime you try to tell someone especially in america or in the west at least to sit down and shut up it's like why who are you to tell me to sit down and shut up because now you don't have the power to tell me to sit down and shut up you have that power in school you have that power in the office maybe you had that power when there were three networks now that there's infinite networks if you look at the internet you can't silence me so i am going to talk and if i see that it's upsetting you and you hate me even though you don't know me yeah it's gonna be a value for me to upset you because i do think you're a bad actor i think is the mindset and i don't think that mindset at all irrational so let's dig into that a little bit i mean i got memed like mad when i first rose to whatever prominence i've risen to or or notoriety or whatever there were memes and i think that's probably still the case there are memes being generated in in the hundreds like weekly it was crazy and i was watching them and i thought if i behave myself properly those won't get unbearably cruel okay i thought if i can take a joke then they're going to tilt in a manner that's more positive rather than more negative because i could see that there was a testing going on there you know that these jokes were being pushed at me and i suppose to some degree pushed out whoever was listening to me that and had i responded negatively to that in any um i remember when i worked on working class working crews you know that one of the things that almost always happened was that when someone knew joined a crew there'd be a test period where you know various forms of insults and and would be hurled at them and it was an attempt to see how they responded and if they responded with good humor and accepted their stupid nickname with some good grace and and could laugh about it maybe could say something funny in return then you know after a week or two if they did their job then everybody accepted them and the way they went but if they got all uh uptight about it then it just got meaner and meaner until they were driven off and i could see that happening with the memes and you know i was compared to kermit the frog for example and that sort of morphed into a peppy thing and um i was watching that and and hopefully was able to take a joke when one emerged and at least one of the consequences of that seemed to be that it never got truly toxic and so i'm i'm struggling with the morality of the 4chan approach you know because there's a part of me that thinks jesus christ don't you have anything better to do but there's also a part of me that thinks well wait a second there's something really complicated going on here that has to do with the redistribution of power and also the acquisition of a voice by people who are individuals and not part of a corporate group let's say but who have access to tremendous technological power and they're serving the function of gestures and they're serving the function of comedians and like i think comedians in particular are the canaries in the coal mine for a free culture as soon as the comedians are threatened you know some things as soon as the comedians are nervous you know something's up because you should be allowed to make fun the biggest meme of yours that i use this meme of yours constantly on twitter is the kathy newman meme and one of those examples is you know that famous interview you have people don't know where you were saying things that were pretty straightforward or maybe people disagreed with you and she would just ask you a question that seemed to be complete non-sequitur to what you had just said and this kept going on for the whole time the the one that comes to mind is a picture of you saying i had bacon and eggs for breakfast and her reply is so you're saying kill all vegans um so often times if someone if you have something on twitter and some responds with a non-sequitur reproach you just reply with a picture of her and people right away know oh so what you're saying is it has nothing to do what it is you're actually saying i think what you're what you are saying to be the opposite of cathy newman in this context is accurate in that a lot of powerful people are there through inertia are there through uh nepotism are there through you know corporate means because memes because they play the game if i'm not part of the game why should i be playing the game and here's the other thing where i think these people are uh heroes is the thing that they're best at is when it comes to the thing that is the worst which is war we are constantly uh proselytized in corporate media that war is great we need to have people overseas we need to have more and more more troops more whatever if you have a president who is regarded as contemptible if you look at trump versus barack obama it's a lot harder for that president who isn't venerated to send young men and women to die because if there's a skepticism about his pedestal that he's on right away you really have to make sure you're selling this war uh or otherwise there's gonna be this it's just easy to clown you because the arguments used for these wars are often so ridiculous on their face so what was you what was the conclusion that you've drawn now it's been a couple of years since you wrote um the new right so and what what what are your later thoughts on and on on boards such as 4chan and what's happening in 4chan now it doesn't seem like i think 4chan has to some extent falling away as a cultural force i mean they were i mean they were trying to meme trump into the presidency and that happened successfully in 2016. uh the donald which was the board on reddit was banned uh during the election i think they respond as the donald duck win uh and these other you know and again with these decentralized things if you try to figure out where everyone's going you know then you're going to have subgroups people define themselves by opposition not by unity so anyone who has any kind of ideology will tell you the people they argue with the most are the ones who are basically one degree of separation away from them within that ideology so i think right now there is kind of a of what happens next now that there's a biden presidency but the focus has shifted and i think this is extremely healthy for those of us who value liberty it has shifted from washington and this has always been kind of the background to corporate media and understanding that nancy pelosi and joe biden and mitch mcconnell and ted cruz will never despise you and will never have as much contempt for you as the editorial board the new york times or the people at the new yorker uh it's it's they're much or let alone many academics so having the trolling and the memes be much more focused on what manchester small block called so why do you think that's why do you think that's do you think that's true and why do you think that's true because that's quite a radical statement i would say but i i think it does speak to this t-shirt that i mentioned earlier yeah you know so your your sense what you just told me was that there is this elite contempt and to some degree it was associated with the political class but on further analysis it's not the political class it's the chattering literary the chattering educated literary and i actually happen to think that that's the case that that's actually true so why do you believe that sure i'll give you a couple examples first and the the arch villains and i i'm not trying to troll you are the university professors that's where the poisoning really really starts but let me give you an example to demonstrate which is wagging the dog whether it's because the ar used to be the argument was about washington andrew breitbart you know who certainly falls into this new right kind of context made the quote about politics being downstream of culture and the idea was wait a minute if we're fighting in washington by that time it's already you know fourth down and we're down how many points it's it's it's a the consequence of what led up to this let's suppose i was a democratic congresswoman or congressman and i thought president trump was a nazi klansman horrible hitler every name in the book at the same time i did not think that there was any kind of collusion with russia or or any kind of something wrong with that phone call maybe he's a jerk but i certainly don't think he should be impeached or moved from office all my constituents have been hearing for months from the televangelists to the left don lemon rachel maddow trump russia trump russia trump russia how could i as a democratic congressman go back to my constituents and say guys i agree with you this guy is the worst president in history and he's a despicable human being but you don't impeach someone over this this is you know ratcheting up and nonsensical as a congressperson i would not be in the position to make that claim and i think that is a good demonstration of who is in charge of whom there's a clip online i'm sure people can find where don don lemon from cnn had john kasich on former uh i think uh house budget direct budget committee chairman uh governor of ohio he was a major presidential candidate 2016 and he's yelling at him john john john and you're sitting there and it's like it's very clear who regards themselves as the authority and who regards them who is regarded as the subject in that relationship so okay so what if i said um maybe we should just stop caring about that too because the technological playing field for communication has been leveled so drastically that the new york times and the legacy media types are basically dead in the water and that's just going to play out like inevitably over the next three or four years and i i was let me give you just a quick example one yes they were if they were dead in the water the lockdowns couldn't have happened i don't i don't think they're dead in the water now but i think the writing's on the wall i agree that's why i'm i'm going to write a book called the white pill because i'm so optimistic i think they're they're borrowed time then we can also talk about what happens next and we can talk about the difference between podcasts and legacy media too which i think are i'm trying to think through right now and because i think the youtube podcast long-form uh uh structure is very is revolutionary in all sorts of ways that we are just starting to understand um i was talking to russell brand a week ago you know and he talked about voiceless people and how we're increasingly becoming voiceless and i thought well wait a second that's true in one sense perhaps but it's very untrue in another sense that might be more important because now everyone's a tv station if they want to be and everyone's a radio station if they want to be and everyone's a publishing house if they want to be it's right there at their fingertips and there's no apart from impediments that get thrown up now and then like youtube banning people and so on it's it's if you want to have a voice all you have to do is buy a 100 microphone and use your laptop and bang you know you have whatever audience you can draw in yeah and so and that that that is playing itself out in our culture extraordinarily rapidly and so maybe maybe that's just like the 4chan discussion that's drawn from your book the new right the culture's moved past that that's already history it might be the case that the the continued dominance of the main narrative by the legacy media types that's already done we're just mopping up the ashes uh that that's ex that's exactly my perspective and this is why it's often so frustrating with me on social media because i think it's inevitable i don't see how if my if i'm the new york times or if i see i ask myself this question fairly often i said if i'm cnn what could i do to regain the trust of this young population like what steps would i take and they're really in a bad it's it's like marlboro like one of my quotes is i said the battle is one when the average american regards a corporate journalist exactly as they regard a tobacco executive you are never going to have the guy who runs marlborough be someone that you trust and think is like an unwitting unmitigated good person you understand his job you might say look these have to be legal it's a horrible habit of and so on and so forth and i get how he's getting a paycheck and i get how it could be used in moderation but regardless this is there's better ways to improve humanity than selling tobacco well i i look at the bbc for example um tried to to formulate a channel for young people and they did exactly what you'd expect appeal to progressive causes and yeah the truth of the that didn't work at all and and why didn't it work it's because for young people broadcast tv is so dead that they don't even notice the corpse yeah like right right it's it's just not there it's just not an issue and no wonder because the technological advantage of of on-demand video both production and consumption is so that the advantage of that is so great that those old forms are just they're terminally dead and so when i go and and have an interview with a tv person you know it feels like i'm going back into the 70s and i'm not doing them anymore for and i can get into that in in a little while but what happens is you know the the person that you're talking to isn't the person and whatever it is that you're having isn't a conversation we're having a conversation when we're doing this right you know i'm sure we bring our flaws to this and our in our arbitrary preconceptions and our biases and all that but my sense is that when a podcast goes well i can tell because i'm interested in the conversation and the reason i'm interested in the conversation isn't because i'm i've got some viewpoints that i'm hammering forward that you have to attend to but that i've got some ideas that i can throw at you and then i can see what you do with the ideas and take them apart and add what you can to them and then i can have different ideas and and and we can do that collaboratively over the course of the dialogue and we can include all the people that are watching this in the process and that's like it's like this long form allows for the truth being something like an investigation into the truth instead of the truth and right well we don't want to underestimate how much of that is purely a consequence of the technological revolution because now there's time right we can make mistakes and and and and it doesn't matter because the bandwidth is unlimited yeah if i'm a roulette player player and i mention this in the book as well all my money is on technology being what saves us i do not i think politics literally only causes problems and it's not a place for any kind of solution you cannot look to washington for solutions uh what's funny is when you listen to corporate media a lot of times they will acknowledge something's a problem but then when that problem is solved exterior to it they start to panic we have heard you and i are both old enough to remember that there was a lot of hand-wringing correctly that we live in a sound bite culture that it's not reasonable that a politician who might have a new innovative way to save solve for poverty to solve for the environment to solve for you know out of wedlock births they have some program but they have to wrap it up in 10 seconds it's very hard to make that point and as a result this rewards glib people or people who have good one-liners but someone who's inarticulate who has great ideas that person is going to be dead in the water and that's going to create results that we necessarily like so then people like you know what this is true like you have people talking past each other the republican versus democrat you know broadly what you're they're going to say it's fun when they get a zinger in but i'm not going to have the needle moved i'm rooting for my team and it's kind of a sports phenomenon podcasts come along we're going to have a long conversation where both of us are listening to each other i might disagree with you i don't have a political party behind me neither do i hopefully you'll disagree with me hopefully okay that you'll do hold on not only will you disagree but more importantly that you'll do it in an interesting way that's interesting also to me because yeah if you disagree with me there is some possibility that you know something i don't and if you disagree i could learn something from you yeah the smartest person the smartest person is ignorant of 99.99 of knowledge we that i mean this is the the mistake that these kind of overeducated people think they think just because i'm smart i know everything you're still going to be profoundly ignorant you're just going to be knowledgeable about certain things very specifically but getting back to the point i was saying earlier now that we have these long conversations and people can really delve into ideas and if people listening to us might think we're both full of crap but now they're at least challenging their own views and being like why do i disagree with both of them you don't have that space on cnn by nature of its organization and now what cnn and other outlets had correctly posited as a problem has been resolved but it's been resolved their expense so now the the human cry is there's misinformation people are being told dangerous ideas yeah it's dangerous to your agenda it's it's dangerous to your prominence uh cnn brian stelter had a whole segment i don't think he named timpool by name by saying how is it that these youtube shows news shows have orders of magnitude bigger than us what do we do about this it's like this is literally every market like i'm a publisher or i make apples someone comes along their apples are people like those apples better you know you don't call in the state you don't regardless some kind of uh you know abomination against the natural order of things you're like okay crap what are they what nerve that is tim striking that i can learn from but they're never interested in that because they're not interested in learning they're interested in teaching or more specifically training their audiences what to think and believe and you see this in social media i made this joke over the weekend in the same way that christians regard the trinity as one god and three person you have these entire populations which is one mind in many many persons because the people will watch john oliver or they'll watch you know some other show on the right and the next day not only will they be repeating these views but they're repeating them verbatim and that is when you realize oh there's no mind there this we're trained since we're kids correctly that it's important for us to be informed on current events so what these shows do very uh perniciously is they will bring up an issue that the person hadn't heard about before which is important for us to understand sure but immediately we'll train them on how to look at this issue and what the correct emotional response is and people are hungry for that because they want to present themselves as informed but they don't have the time or the capacity uh to uh undertake the critical or independent thought to do that so it comes prepackaged for them so it's kind of the tv dinner of the mind well that's a good metaphor but the the the the network format all of it the whole technological apparatus including the corporate funding as a consequence of the expense of bandwidth absolutely demands that you know like i never feel more like content than when i go to a tv station and everyone in there is is is in some sense held hostage to the limitations and advantages of that particular technology and you know what well as marshall mcluhan said the medium is the message you know and yeah a lot of what a lot of what looks like even corporate think or corporate malfeasance is merely a consequence of that strange technological limitation the the the networks have to assume that everybody watching has no memory and no education and no attention span because the bandwidth requirements demand that and now that's all gone so let me ask you about this so now all of a sudden the network everyone's a tv station okay so now one thing that that that the dominance let's say of the three major tv stations from say 1950 or thereabouts till 1995 maybe something like that there was the imposition of something like a coherent uh um national narrative and now you can object to that and you should because in some sense it's imposed but but you know it's it's a collaborative imposition between these technologically powerful companies and the government the journalists couldn't go to couldn't be too corrupt if they chased after the politicians because then they wouldn't get access and the politicians couldn't be too corrupt because the media would you know disrobe them but there was this sense of unity and now you get this immense multiplicity and so i mean you're more anarchically oriented i would say temperamentally than i am but i am an anarchist yes right right but but you know there is there is a danger in fragmentation that's the i mean that's diversity is fragmentation but but you know enough fragmentation you get nothing but endless conflict as people try to work out how they're going to cooperate so i i don't think that's necessarily true because i don't think it's i think you're taking it as a given that cooperation is desirable or that this unity of some kind is desirable i think what's coming up in certain circles which i was the first one to posit this in 2015 is in america at least the idea of a national divorce uh recognizing that we've had at least two cultures since the very beginning they're being held together through you know often nefarious means and if one group regards donald trump as literally hitler and an authoritarian strong man which you can very easily make the case for that and the other group regards you know joe biden is basically someone sitting in his own urine behind the resolute desk there's no reason other than some kind of sense of inertia for these two two or more groups to be under the same polity or both there's no reason for you to have the president you don't want and increasingly as conversation becomes and discourse collapses uh because i think social media does tend to drive our ideologies to their logical conclusions which leads to extremism which could be both a good thing or a bad thing it is going to be harder and harder to the point where it's impossible to you know have this uh sort of conversation and we're seeing it also in europe okay but there are reasons for for the the necessity of the unity i mean so you talk about jonathan height in the in the in your book in the new right and there's a lot of uh psychological investigators myself included when i was doing research who were looking into the temperamental basis of political affiliation right and so you know roughly speaking on the left end of things you get the high open people who are creative in their thinking and and yes and who who are temperamentally in favor of the free flow of information um and tend to be lower in conscientiousness particularly orderliness and then you have people who lie on the other side of that who are higher in orderliness and lower in openness and i tried to figure out why that was the fundamental political axis because there's five temperaments yes so why only those two as the major determinants of political affiliation and it what it boiled down to me for me is that and i think this this isn't my discovery precisely but i think it's the most significant discovery in political psychology in the last 50 years is that it's probably that because borders are the fundamental political issue and i don't just mean borders between countries i mean borders between concepts i mean borders between categories countries states towns people the conservative types think you have to hold things together yep because if they dissolve they die and the liberal types think well wait a second you bloody well need to maximize information flow and the truth of the matter is sometimes one of those perspectives is right for that situation and sometimes the other and it's cont i mean even with look at the advantages of free trade and then the disadvantage of you know a worldwide epidemic that's a great example it's like well are open borders good well they do facilitate the transmission of disease and it turns out that the probability that infectious disease will be transmitted in a given political locale is actually a very good determinant of political belief within that locale so wherever there's more infectious disease people are much more conservative and it's a huge effect so something very fundamental is going on at the bottom of our political thinking but having said all that it's that also means you know that both of those types are necessary because sometimes one has the right solution and sometimes the other but even more importantly is that there's no way of getting rid of that dichotomy if you have groups of human beings and so if we can't imp if we can't have a unity emerge that allows both those types of people to coexist then what we're going to have as a consequence is conflict like and who knows how severe that can become so we have we don't have a we have a choice it's like unity however fragile that might be or the degeneration into something like like conflict and that's not preferable to cooperation all things considered oh i disagree i think it is comparable and i don't think the alternatives excuse me i don't think the unity means cooperation i think unity means oppression well sometimes you look look i i i don't disagree with that in some sense i'm saying all the time unity through politics always means oppression because the political system can only be used to silence people and force them to do what they otherwise would not want to do otherwise they would do it on a voluntary basis so any of these calls of unity in my view are you are always slight of hand to marginalize or oppress a certain population now sometimes that's necessary classic post-modernism that that post-modernist that's the fundamental claim of the power theorists the french power theorists and there's there's some i'm that's not an insult by the way sure um but but look if you take 10 kids and you have them play the same game all the kids get to play the game but not all of them get to play the game they wanted to at that moment but at least they all get to play a game and so there's cooperation there and there's utility in it now you can say well the the tyranny of the game has been imposed and that's true but both of those things are true at the same time and it doesn't seem reasonable to equate cooperation with tyranny it's reasonable to point out that cooperation can degenerate into tyranny i think you just kind of uh um drop the mask a little bit because you in your example positive these are children so by its very nature all these things that you're talking about in a positive sense have to force some group to be a second-class citizen or at least obedient to some kind of elite uh and this is something that i think is the benefits of this at the very least are enormously overblown i think you could freedom means every kid can play the game that they want uh their mind but not with other people that's the problem you know so and i used children as an example because i was concentrating on games and because it's out of games that the polity emerges over the course of its natural development so it's not a rational top-down imposition all things considered it's the it's the emergence of a game-like structure that incorporates more and more people and see the if if you take two-year-olds two-year-olds play their own game and and and each of them plays their own game but by the time they hit three or four they have to be able to integrate the game they're playing with with what other children want to play so that they can play they can play games with other children which they're unbelievably motivated to do and it means that each of them have to subordinate their instincts so to speak for the moment but hypothetically they gain as a consequence of their mutual subordination to this higher order game i i don't see it as support so if my choices are play this game by myself or play this game i like second with a lot of other people i i would value this it's the i'm i'm playing a game in order to have fun so in that case the first game which i which is my most favorite game if no one wants to play with me it's not going to be that fun so i am it is rational and not at any sense of subordination to choose my second preferred game because now i'm having fun being able to play it well let's look i would say that what we're doing here is a is a game and i don't mean that in any you know in any um what negative sense you're allowing by participating in this conversation you're allowing for the possibility and the belief i would say that whatever we're doing collaboratively is of more utility at the moment than whatever you could be doing individually at the moment because otherwise you won't be doing it okay so and i would say that we we are cooperating we're also competing and we also might be tyrannizing each other to some degree but there's something in this mutual interaction that we're about that we're we're engaging in voluntarily that is cooperative and that isn't being enforced by some external agent right it's entirely cooperative and this is my whole point this is why i'm an anarchist because this is when people are doing things voluntarily they are going to choose the things that are preferable to them the problem and when you have conflict is when you have a third actor coming into our conversation and being the state and forcing both of us to do something we would not want to do for their sake and that when you play that out that game on a national international scale that is the definition of oppression instead of you and i having a podcast why aren't we in the factory making socks for poor people uh that's more utility says the you know the third party who's not involved here and that's the danger in my view and the legitimacy of that kind of third party it is so the development i i picked up a reasonable number of my ideas about the relationship between games and morality and higher order social structures from the developmental psychologist jean piaget and he was interested in the science of ethics essentially and his goal was the re reunification of science and religion actually although very few people know that about psja and he pointed out quite clearly that um a cooperative game would out-compete a tyrannical game over time because the tyrannical game had to waste resources in enforcement whereas a cooperative game didn't because people were voluntarily going to go along with it um so that then you say well it's i think you can make a perfectly credible case that if you could choose between two games and one of them involved force and the other didn't and they had the same end let's say that the cooperative game is to be preferred and it's also more sophisticated but i would say as well we actually don't know how to pull that off some of it's just just lack of ability well when you integrate so many people like you have 330 million people in the united states it's really hard hard to organize a cooperative game well that's the role of the corporate press the corporate press uh puts forth the agenda of the power class and gets everyone persuaded to do uh that which they had wanted to do mario cuomo whose book i got sorry andrew cuomo the governor of new york whose book i got paid to read he said explicitly in his book that if this wasn't done through voluntary compliance i wouldn't be able to pull off half of this and what what what is allowed to happen is you have decentralized enforcement of these uh rules and we saw this during the lockdowns where every low-status person had an opportunity with certain dominance over somebody else by going up to them and yelling at them that they're not wearing a mask even though going up to them ostensibly is going to put your life in danger and just you made a very cogent point about how persuasion is a lot cheaper than force a lot of people use all these orwellian 1984 comparisons and i think the comparison to contemporary terms is much closer to brave new world and it's through the use of pleasure and the carrot because it's a lot cheaper to tell people persuade people it's in their best interest go along uh you're going to give up your freedom but i'm going to give you safety and they'll be champing at the bit to do that h.l menken the great cynic of the um early 20th century uh said that the average man does not want to be free he simply wants to be safe and for those of us who are fans of freedom who regard liberty as a high value the issue is how do you engage in a polity with people who don't really find liberty of use and would rather have every minute of their life whether through their corporate job or what they watch on tv or what they wear pretty much decided for them i mean the the speech in the devil wears prada that miranda priestly makes about how you're wearing that blue sweater because the people in this room you know chose the cerulean jacket five years ago then it went to the fringe designers then it became in the mall then you found it on clearance and you think it has nothing to do with you but it was because we had made these decisions and it percolated down to you and i think that top down approach i mean ed bernays talked about this walter littman talked about this in the books propaganda and public opinion this was something that they figured out a hundred years ago specifically during the woodrow wilson administration how do you get over the complete you know fascist takeover of the united states of course under wartime premises and get everyone involved in something that would have been completely alien to american thought just five years prior that we're gonna send all our kids over to europe to fight a european war this was a major revolutionary shift in how america regarded its relationship between the state and the population and between america and the rest of the world woodrow wilson was the first president to leave america as president fdr just went to panama but that was like american territory at the time uh sorry teddy roosevelt so this was that's what so we've been they've been at this for a hundred years so they're playing the long game and now it's starting to fall apart thankfully okay so i i got three things i want to ask you now sure i want to know who they is okay so then i want to know in the devil were prada were you on miranda priestly's side or on the side of the naive injunu who you know was hypothetically tyrannized by her and now i can't remember the third one we'll we'll stick with those two for the time being so who's the they exactly sure so because it's a shorthand right and it's a conspiratorial shorthand so it's worth pa it's worth unpacking sure a conspiracy is just an organization that you don't approve of the constitutional convention was a conspiracy the founding fathers got together in philadelphia to reorganize the artists of confederation that was what they had been their assigned tasks that they had sworn to they get in there lock the doors they go yeah we're starting over right guys like yeah yeah and they swore themselves to secrecy now we don't say conspiracy because we don't like that term but this was very much a conspiracy okay conspiracies usually involve deception and secretiveness too so they they swore themselves to secrecy philadelphia and there's a conspiratorial element there for sure but there's lots of things that people do behind the scenes so to speak that aren't necessarily conspiratorial because they do them they're not hiding them so but back to the they you know so basically so the model is you get the kids at a very young age and you put them in government schools they are taught many things that are nefarious such as that your self-esteem should be a function of this mediocre person from the room uh that everyone should have the same work hours that you're forced to be in a relationship with violent peers that in no other situation are you forced to be locked into a relationship with them with like bullies or just people who are you know disruptive um but this it starts with the universities and this was by design the american economics association which was started i think in the late uh 1890s by richard eli who was woodrow wilson's mentor there and they use they always use orwellian language uh country myself but the idea is we're training the next generation of elites so basically you have an entire population who go to these best universities who are taught the same faith and this was they had something at a time which has degenerated now called the social gospel uh the quote what would jesus do which contemporary christians say all the time this was posited by a socialist christian because the idea was instead of an individual soul being able to be saved which was kind of the central idea of christianity and a big innovation in terms of historical individualism the premise was a nation has a soul and a nation can be saved now once a nation has a soul and can be saved there is nothing outside your purview just like when we're talking about individual soul the bedroom the boardroom how you are in public these all tie into your salvation um and eli and other in um in the uk it was the fabian society whose logo was literally a wolf in sheep's clothing the premise of was it's kind of gramsci's march the institutions we're going to train the next generation of leaders they're going to self-identify as leaders because they have the diplomas and degrees and they're going to go out there and basically be infect and take over the country and it's going to be this top down idea and you see that it's it's percolated through this day so you have it starts with universities then you have all the journalists and people working media who are trained at these universities and the same ideas and then the final consequence is uh the politicians now for decades what had happened was you had the nancy's pelosi of the world go on tv and say truthfully and honestly give me money re-elect me i'm fighting mitch mcconnell and the wicked republicans and the mitch's mcconnell went on tv and say give me money i'm fighting nancy pelosi and the democrats meanwhile while these two are engaging this pantomime the new york times harvard are lobbing grenades over their shoulders and they're not taking any fire at all what has happened now is people are realizing people like biden mcconnell these are puppets of larger actors and that's where the focus needs to be in terms of affecting change and liberating uh the west okay okay so so let me let me act as defender of the patriarchy momentarily sure and so and and to and i remember i remember the third question and this relates back to 4chan is what and and to anarchism for that matter is that there's this there's this critique of the social contract that's obviously in order and needs to continue and the satirists and so forth are are our right to do what they do but then there's the separate issue of what responsibility you owe your polity and so and maybe none you could make that case but but i want to address that but but in any case let's look at the elite institutions in the united states and what's happened to them over the last 40 years for better for worse so i know i know how this worked so a hundred years ago harvard yale the ivy leagues they were essentially aristocratic institutions and you were in them as a consequence of birth okay by the 1960s that changed and it changed to iq based meritocracy okay the sat is an iq test now people swear up and down it's not but that's because they don't know anything about iq tests right so to make an iq test all you have to do is draw 20 random questions from a set of abstract questions sum up the right answers and rank order them across the population that's basically all an iq test is it's that powerful an sat is an iq test now increasingly at the elite levels in the universities iq is the determining entrance requirement and the average iq of people in the ivy league schools has gone up precipitously since the early 1960s when it wasn't much higher than average and now it's way higher than average now you can debate about whether or not that's a good thing that's a separate issue but that is what's happened and the reason there was a bunch of reasons for that i mean one was the realization that iq is actually the best predictor of success in colleges it's not that good but it's five times as good as the next best predictor and it's also relatively fair in that your your sat scores are um they're a better determinant of your success in university than which school you graduated from so a very very bright kid from a very bad school has a reasonable shot at ivy league admission um compared to say a very bad scoop student at a very uh elite school yeah so there were socialists who were pushing the use of iq as well as people who are more conservative but in any case there's no there's no conspiracy at work there precisely there's there's a decision on the part of the institutions as a whole that it would be better for the elite institutions to be based on merit as as assessed by iq and that overall that would be better for the general population because hypothetically having smarter people make decisions because they can make decisions using more information is better for all concerned and so that's so there's a lot more going on at the upper ends of the elite institutions let's say then the mere conservation of of multi-generational power there's a positive element that that that i think is overlooked to in in a in a way that looks to me like the shirking of responsibility in revolutionary movements like those even that are spawned off of 4chan or that characterize anarchism it's like well what responsibility do you have to what it is that's brought you to the point where for example you can have this technology-mediated conversation with me criticize a way but like where's the where's the where's the emphasis on where's the positive contribution and and perhaps even the gratitude it's in the toilet where it belongs i mean i reject totally the idea that somehow i oh we're on zoom right now i've got a mic uh from uh i don't even know what brand what i owe them is the cost that it paid me to buy their product and what i owe you is to treat you with which isn't much of a cost at all with courtesy dignity and respect uh anytime people start talking about duties and responsibilities and gratitude that's them invoking uh the unearned wait wait no no i don't i don't i don't think i don't think it's that cut and dried even in your formulation because you said well you pay for it and fine i'll leave that be and say that's a perfectly acceptable answer but you did say that you know that there's a that that you believe that you have a moral obligation to what we're engaged in right now right you're going to treat me with you you said three words dignity respect something else courtesy yeah courtesy so so you do recognize that there's a there's an ethos that should govern our interactions no i think you've earned all those things i don't care everyone's fine that that i have no problem with that but but and i i i'm not trying to undermine your argument either i'm i'm really curious about this issue of responsibility because i pushed it a lot you know and i've tried to figure out what response so look from my perspective i would say well your your thought centers on the tyrannical element of the great father and like yes fair enough like that's a major existential concern so in terms of problems to focus on it's a major problem it's not the only problem but it's a major problem you know you could focus on the evil in your own soul you could focus on the catastrophes of the natural world well those are valid dope large-scale domains of concern as well but but for me it's like okay well there is the tyrannical aspect but there's the there there's the aspect of culture that well that you have enough food to eat that you have heat and that you have you're the beneficiary of the structure that you're criticizing and you could say well my criticism is making the structure stronger but there's this element in your in your book and then on in the 4chan culture and so forth it seems to have this like it's this random destructiveness that that that looks to me it's not driven by it's not driven by something that's going to be clearly spoken of and it's not driven by something that's aiming at a good end i i think it's aiming toward a more honest end because very often we're told things like this person's a hero that person's a hero they should be valorized and even if that conclusion is accurate you know who are you to tell me that i need to valorize that person i mean one thing if it's like showing versus telling like good writing right if you tell me this person has this accomplishment that accomplishment that accomplishment the natural rational responses this is a quality person and we need more i would love it if there was a world that had more people like this but if there's so many outlets more than you can count greta thunderberg is a great example you have some random high school dropout who won't go to back to school until literally everyone on earth changes the weather for her and time magazine is calling her person the year i think to have that undermining of time magazine and i got to tell you there's lots of things you could say positive about her you know that's very easy she's made something of herself but it's time magazine that's far more of the target than her it's these agencies that presume to tell me who i should respect and value and it's not on my terms it's on their self-serving terms you don't need to tell me that black lives matter i know this i'm from brooklyn and you don't need to tell me literally every five seconds uh and only we decide altogether that they matter this month and then next week it's going to be gay history so trans labs are going to matter then we go back to black lives mattering it's like so what if fine fair enough you know that's that's a that's a compelling sequence of statements it's like what is it exactly i'm not being smart i mean that i know no i i i that's something i would say when i am being smart so that's why okay okay you know well but but i'm i'm that's a compelling series of statements that is observing it i'm observing it you know because you put the argument you put the argument forward with force yeah and it's interesting to me to listen okay so i know there's something to it so i'm trying to figure out exactly what it is so then i think to myself well what exactly is it that you're objecting to like is it no you said well it's flavor it's moral flavor of the month it's something like that and it's the imposition of the moral flavor of the month that's objectionable and that's somehow tied to the contempt the this elitist contempt and i think that's fair but so but it's the question to say you say they and the they contains the enemy in some sense and so my question is well exactly what is the enemy and who is the enemy and where is it exactly and uh harvard yard uh the new york times offices and uh congress and the white house and corporations oh absolutely okay where isn't it it isn't right here you and i okay why because why right here and now why isn't it here right here and now i'll tell you why because neither of us are doing anything other than presenting our own perspective we are letting people agree with us or disagree with us from their own choice it's not going to matter to me or to you whether someone agrees or disagree you're speaking your truth i'm speaking mind to use a cliched expression and at the very least i hope that people are watching this and being entertained and having their thoughts provoked i am not in any way regarding and i certainly don't have the power to impose the idea that if you think i'm a jerk and full of crap that somehow that makes you a bad person or that you should have some kind of posi social consequence as a result these different organizations absolutely do and let me give you one example and this kind of speaks to cancer culture which is obviously you know a very hot topic at the moment the head of uh crossfit which is you know this big gay fitness organization he came out dur when we were all caring about specifically black lives matter he said look we're about deadlifts and burpees what i don't know we're we don't regard races anything we're about fitness and we're very diverse what does that do with us and he got fired a result of this so again it's fighting against this that's the big difference neither of us are in a position to nor would we i can't speak for you but i bet you you would agree with me ever dream of telling someone this is my example north korea right i did my book on north korea dear reader it's an issue that means a lot to me there's a lot of americans who just simply don't care i don't think they're bad people because i think there's very little they can do about it there's very little i can do all i tried to do with my book was move the needle and have people perceive the nation and its population differently but i haven't liberated north korea so it's perfectly legitimate if they have different concerns or if they're not interested but this is not how the cathedral works okay okay so i've been sitting i've been spending the last when i give a lecture i i i i know what i'm doing enough to keep the audience interested but i also know what i'm doing like i can say what i'm doing i i have the practice but also a theory and they match and so before i give a lecture i figure out what problem i'm addressing i have to have that question in my mind and then i have like okay i'm gonna investigate this problem and i'm gonna push my thinking more than i've already pushed it on my feet and i'm gonna use these eight tools or places or stories as investigative tools and then i'm gonna see what comes out of that and so that's and if i sit down and i really think about it think it through then the lecture will go well and what i am doing as far as i can tell is thinking on my feet and people seem to like watching that okay now i've been thinking all right what are we doing in a tv a standard tv interview and what are we doing in a podcast because now i have this podcast and i'm enjoying it and it's such a thrill for me because i can reach out to virtually anyone in the world and say look i'd really like to find out what you think and they'll say yes and i can talk to them and so it's unbelievably it's an unbelievably great thing to do and then i've been thinking well i can feel when it's going well and when it isn't when it goes flat and when it's going well we're doing what we're doing it's kind of engaging and there's a there's a pugilistic element to it and but but there's no rancor there's no outright anger um right or it's not directed at the process we're engaged in this mutual exploration that's what it looks like to me and i've been trying to formalize that so you know when i have a guest i have a series of problems that i'd like to investigate with them and then i invite them to participate and so then i think well to me that's the logos in operation that and that's why people like it the logos is this it's exploratory verbal activity something like that and people really like that and i talked to a wall street journalist journal journalist the other week about podcasts and he said that the reason he likes them is because he doesn't know where they're going to go yes right exactly right so they're so in they're they're agenda-less in that sense right because yes and it's and sincere in that sense because you have to have some element of honesty if it's improv yes exactly well and i also think these new forms really punish people who don't engage in that so like now and then i'll talk to a podcast host who's a legacy journalist and they'll slip into well here's a question it's like yeah yeah is that your question or is that a question you know and it's sort of like a lecturer who reads the powerpoint slides instead of talking spontaneously about the topic i i completely agree and i think this also speaks to why this kind of mechanism for conversation is so popular people very rarely and even you and i i mean have the opportunity to see two intelligent informed people who might disagree about things have that long conversation with virtually no possibility of it being hostile if it's not at a party so you can hear each other you can listen to it at your own leisure and you're going to be learning something or you're at the very least gonna have it's just fascinating conversational dynamics even if you and i were arguing over cake versus pie and which is better and obviously the answer is cake because pies are messy but at the same time it's fun because they're watching minds at work it's just like when you're watching a gymnast for example it's a great dancer it's just exciting to see an aspect of the human mind the human anatomy at its finest or maybe we're getting a b i don't know but the point is to watch that engine yeah but when you see corp when you see corporate anything it's always unnatural there's is there anything more ironic than the expression reality tv by its own nature they admit this is not real the it's a lot of it's improv it's all staged it's all edited uh whereas what we're doing we're not editing and we're going to say almond ah and you know oh yeah we're going to have the spree descalier we're going to cut off the mics and i'm like oh gosh i wish i would have said that and you're going to say something else but that i think is what uh earnestness in a positive sense people are missing out and that's the opposite of corporate america corporate america is synthetic phony earnestness i i had this quote i say if you look at times square during gay pride only corporate america can make sodomy and perversion seem downright boring i mean if you looked at the corporate presentation of people who are gay you think what that means is hugging each other after brunch and and shaking hands it's it's this complete divorce from uh any kind of reality of any kind of culture i would say that the the the attribution of this the identification of this with corporate america with the universities with with the legacy media all of that it's it's not it's like the marxists criticizing capitalism for inequality of distribution it's like inequality of distribution is a way deeper problem than any critique of capitalism will ever formulate properly or solve and i would say like we're we're getting at something here that transcends the anarchist critique of structure not at least as it like or or you could say or you could say forces it deeper look the old the the ancient egyptians had two gods osiris and horus and osiris they didn't have two they had a ton of them yes they had two main gods that made up their conception of sovereignty sorry yes that the pharaoh modeled himself again over modeled himself on the interaction of these two gods there was osiris who was the state for all intents and purposes structure per se and his sin was willful blindness and and um and and and stultification and horus was the attentive eye and in other formulations the ability to speak and so there's a dynamic there that was recognized a very long time ago that that that that that centers on this issue that you brought up about sincerity and truth you know you're complaining and rightly so when you hear stale repackaged ideas that are being presented for reasons other than the actual reason it's something like that isn't it it's like i can't trust what you're saying because you're actually using that language to manipulate me to do something that you're not stating correct and and that would be mountain dew and the naming it's like isn't this fun it's like well maybe it's fun but really you want to sell you know mountain dew and if you came out and said that we wouldn't make fun of you but if you're going to pretend we're going to go after you and when it gets very pernicious it's you're claiming you're fighting racism but what you're really wanting is to promote war and killing of many many people so that is when the critique is more than mountain dew is what it is it's selling it's mountain dew is fun i enjoy mountain dew i don't drink it much because i'm in my late 80s but basically kids like it the different colors different flavors it certainly serves a purpose you know you want to get buzzed out of your mind and the caffeine more power to you there's nothing other than some cavities there's nothing really nefarious there is something very nefarious when amy rohrbach is caught on a hot mic saying that they had everything on prince philip or prince albert i always get them confused uh who was friends with jeffrey epstein that they had everything on the clintons and they got a call from bubba buckingham palace and because there was a megan markel interview you know on the table that they killed this entire story this is her talking in a hot mic meanwhile if that camera turned off and you said is it true that you had this international pedophile ring and one of the people in buckingham kallus was involved and that you know their lawyers called and you killed the story she would say are you crazy that's a conspiracy theory harvey weinstein is another example of this there was a conspiracy we all knew uh bill cosby was another one he got outed by hannibal burris who was a comedian who just said look it up all this stuff was bubbling under all these women they weren't all completely silent so i think that's the big difference between mountain dew and the corporate press we're not talking about people who are promoting cavities we're talking about people who are promoting war and depravity okay so if i said well maybe when i was when i was reading your book and thinking about it a lot and thinking about 4chan and all of the things we've talked about i thought well have you been on 4chan since you have you actually looked at it no i'm i'm complete i'm ignorant about how 4chan works so it's just a message board right right well i i guess i knew that much but i would also say i'm not familiar enough with message boards to re to really you know to have us a built-in sense of what that means that's not an area of social communication that i've engaged in and i'm not saying that with pride it's a form of ignorance you know i mean i've learned not to despise social media platforms you're a fool if you allow your willingness to despise them because you don't know anything about them to stop you from learning how to use them right or from taking them seriously they're serious those things so oh yes they're revolutionary those technic okay so i read and i think well wait a second you're you seem to be um not segregating the critique of corruption from the critique of structure and this is also what i think is happening with the postmodernists they look at hierarchies and they think well they're all based on power and here's the evidence of corruption it's like yeah no kidding but that doesn't mean they're only based on power and it's the same with corporations like i know lots of people who work in corporate environments and some of them are really admirable and the things they do in the corporate environments are also admirable and i would also say that my experience has taught me that when corporations start to act the way you conceptualize them theirs their their doom is sealed far more rapidly than people generally realize they collapse so so you're not objective so it's useful to disaggregate the critique of structure from the critique of deceit you know what i i think the deceits baked in i i don't like using the word corruption because that implies these people can be saved and these organizations can be saved i do not believe that they are and even if they are i'm not interested in saving them see i don't see them as this is the they problem you see look part of the reason i think do you want to talk about walter durante i mean you want to talk about walter durante these are this these are the same exact actors that have had so much blood on their hand for hands for decades and have never had any accountability let me give you one example we could always think that that's me not them i don't i don't why is that you you don't work for the let me give you one example you can answer if you say this sounds like you we're all taught in school about william randolph hearst the spanish-american war remember the main yellow journalism right and how the media would gin up these problems which had literally thousands of deaths that needless debts as a consequence then there's a record scratch and all of a sudden all these outlets have no agenda and are objective and our decent actors my point is there was never a record scratch this has always been a problem for a very long time and especially this is something i would think would be very much up your alley the amount that these um organizations and and the equivalence of contemporary actors have their role in putting over and maintaining the soviet union and specifically stalinism which they have never apologized for which they've had never no accountability for and now they're presuming to sit here and lecture the layman about being a decent person and being responsible that to me is a complete abomination i agree with all of that except the attribution of blame so let me ask you i'm going to go sideways just for a second but it's in service of this particular discussion you said a little while ago that you were you know that one of the rules of engagement for us as far as you're concerned right now is that you were going to treat me with dignity respect and there was something else courtesy courtesy okay okay and then i said well you know those are the cooperative rules and you said to me no you earned it and so i want to ask you like and then we'll go back to this other discussion if that's okay um what makes you think i've earned it because i know a lot of people whose lives you have personally made better because you're my friend's dad so that automatically there's no situation where i'm going to be mean to my friend or disrespectful to my friend's dad certainly not in public um i think you are in many ways self-made uh the fact that you are a successful author and you're encouraging a lot of people to you know get their crap together and and you're not telling them one of the things i tell and and this is something you and i have in common is you're not you don't the goal isn't to be a perfect person but you could certainly be a better person tomorrow than you are yesterday and if you have that in your mind you could say that objectively with a straight face that goes a long way towards fighting feelings of anxiety or depression or hopelessness because when that voice in your brain which we all have is telling you you you're never going to find another job you're never gonna find another girlfriend look at you're sitting around playing video games you're gonna wait a minute i went to the gym today and i've got the numbers here that shows i lifted more than last week i'm objectively improved in one capacity that is enormous people don't i should talk to you you're absolutely right about that i was stopped by three separate people this week who said they they thanked me and and so whenever that no one likes it no one likes a show off jordan when when that happens i have i i always ask people what their name is to begin with because they're usually they want to be seen well they don't know if they should interact with me they don't know if they're being rude they don't want to look stupid you know there's it's complicated but if i ask them their name and then engage then they calm down right away and then they'll talk to me but what i want to find out always if someone says well you were helpful i want to find out okay well exactly why right what did i do that fixed that help you because then i can do it better hypothetically so three people told me the same thing this week which is exactly the point that you just made which is quite cool was that they restructured their internal reward system they stopped comparing themselves with other people well you know stopped but yeah yeah started to stop and they started to learn how to reward themselves for making incremental improvements so that was really cool and and i do think that you picked up picked up something there that's absolutely crucial so but but then i could also say to you well look i'm also the face of the professoriate because yeah i know right right so so but but what that so what does that signify to you does it signify that i'm an outlier or that no it just means you'll be the last one up against the wall no it's in all seriousness one of the points i have made recently is that as awful as corporate journalists are and as humorless and self-righteous and pompous they are still better by all these metrics than university professors and i'm not speaking about you personally but you can if you look at the thing that twitter did so amazingly is that back in the and i'm thinking of someone specifically who i'll um i'll mention in a second back in the day you would think i'm a harvard law professor that if i don't even know who this person is that's going to tell me certain information this is one of the highest quality minds in america this person knows his industry inside and out if he tells me something i can take it to the bank and that's actually true because harvard the harvard law faculty is making the law in america far more than congress because it's their interpretation and those people are trained then you look at lawrence tribe uh on twitter and you look that he is tweeting exactly verbatim the same kind of miserable anti-trump things that your spinster aunt is tweeting and you realize wait a minute this emperor has no clothes this person might be very bright which there's no question he's brilliant there's no question he knows the law inside and out but in terms that this person should be an object of veterans and this is like one of the great minds of all time it's a ridiculous absurdity when you see them give an opportunity to express themselves in public okay so i would say the emperor has some clothes you know because i've met i worked at harvard for quite a long time and many of the people i met there were were genuinely estimable and i've worked in that's of course okay okay well it's that's the differentiation here that's of of such critical importance you know and um pinker's the blank slate is a book everyone should read i'll i say that without any asterisks it's an amazing accomplishment and you don't go beyond that and say well look at the structure that gave rise to that and i guess it's the tinker is not a fun that book is not a function of harvard that book is a function of him and his ideas and his work and there's no no no it's no it's also a function of harvard one of the things that i really noticed about harvard this the psych department in particular when i was there was that it was like this is odd but one of the things i've noticed among many academics is contempt for books interestingly is that right yes it's far far more common than you would ever think um but that wasn't true at harvard what if you were a professor there in psychology and you wrote books that was valued genuinely valued the people that i associated with there and that that was the bulk of the department like they were by and large as genuine an article as i had come across and so the the and the institution actually did now look i'm not happy with what's happened to the universities at all i'm not i think it's it's appalling it's appalling but when i was there in the 90s the institution was set up so that people like pinker could exist and be rewarded and even more importantly the institution was set up at that point to actually benefit the undergraduates so the hierarchy of concern was the undergraduates now you could be cynical and say well harvard treated its 18 year olds like potentially generous baby 40 year old millionaires i don't think it was just that it wasn't just it wasn't just it wasn't and and after them was the senior professors the full tenured so so it was a a a an institution that had its ducks in order as far as i was concerned and it was really quite a privilege to work there as a consequence and a tremendous amount of academic and intellectual freedom within that structure and that was built into the whole structure so it was it was a genuinely respectable and remarkable institution and it did a great job of of finding uh students who were of incredibly high caliber you know like in the typical undergraduate harvard class a third of the class would be made of individuals who were as smart as anybody you'd ever meet you know so this whole conservative idea that people who they don't like are also dumb is really one of the stupidest concepts in contemporary discourse it's a lot easier to train a smart dog than is to train a dumb one and many of the people who are putting over some of these extremely malevolent nefarious ideas they're very very bright there's no question about it but my and my respect for they weren't just bright they were they were also they were also ethically admirable in a deep sense and you see that with pinker saying you see that with jonathan height who's a centrist a moderate centrist but you know he's a tough character he stands up for what he believes in he makes coherent and cogent arguments and he's no pushover and i i praise height very heavily i know you do i know well that's partly why i'm i'm you know taking this apart because i mean our the the anar there's this element of the of the of the anarchy philosophy that that that is i suppose evident in 4chan as well and but in your writing that it seems to me to have the danger of of producing a premature cynicism and and oh i wouldn't call it cynicism okay i mean i'm a big fan of kamu and kamu albert camus a french novelist and philosopher he regarded cynicism as the enemy i completely agree i think it's important to just because an enemy exists just because malevolent actors exist even if you don't want to say it's the harvard graduating class which i'm not saying that in no way means that human beings are inherently evil or inherently corrupt it just means that there's a population and you have to you know just like an infection work your way around uh whereas so i think cynicism is a very very very uh uh just it's i it's the cost of cynicism on an individual level it cannot be overstated it's the worst yes and and one of the things i fought for in this book and i fight for it in when i do podcasts in social media is there are so many people who think it's hopeless and then they give up and then they're just kind of it becomes their mindset whereas the point is if there's any chance that you're gonna come out ahead you better stand on your feet and go out swinging and even if you lose you're gonna go down at least knowing i did everything in my power and you're going to have happiness pride and self-esteem as a consequence so i i reject all forms of cynicism and and if that is what i am implying then i'm doing something wrong well i'm uh look i'm not saying that my reading of what you wrote or or what you're doing is canonical i mean you're not the only anarchist in the world after all and so i'm not going to dump all of this on you but um you know the reason that i have been concentrating on people's individual development i think well apart from the fact that i'm a psychologist and and i think there's also less danger in that in some sense because the revolution just occurs within you know and sure people who don't want your goddamn revolution aren't aren't forced into it right um i i guess by concentrating see you said that you you implied that i'm not the corporation and that you're not the corporation but you see i actually don't believe that's true i believe that i am in fact the corporation and that i me i'm even the evil corporation and i'm so tangled up in that world like we all are that we bear responsibility for that fact and so and so i think well what do you do about that and it seems to me that you try to get your act together on a personal level just to to identify the enemy within which is the right place to start and then work outward from that but your critique is basically a social critique as far as i can tell that you're starting with the institutions themselves even though it's not the institutions exactly it's the corruption of the institutions i but corruption it makes it seem like this is something that could be salvaged whereas in my view these institutions are inherently malevolent i know that's your view but they're no more inherently malevolent than individuals are there are plenty of individuals who are inherently malevolent that that's their they go into politics well not everyone who goes into politics is inherently malevolent you know i've met with many many politicians and i'll give you an example because that just means they're good at passing no no it doesn't just mean that i i had a dinner in washington with a group of democrats and republicans it was part of an attempt to you know they never talk to each other they don't have time like i would not want the job of an american cause no they don't their time is so stop stop no no they're not they're not they're not running an ambulance they're not an er doctor it's just not a priority for them they have time give me a break they just have to just take stuff don't call back your lobbyist and call that call they have are you kidding me you're telling what people if there's one thing people in washington have it's time things go at a glacial pace look look you you you're making a an uh an attribution of of corruption to complex structures and so i'll accept that but i don't use the word corruption but go ahead well pick a word that pick a word that's more suitable because i'll i'd be happy to use it if it's more suitable malevolent gravity malevolent level that's it fine fine power and malevolence okay well when you're a congressman and you're tossed into the congress yeah the the structure produces such an intense surround for you that it's extremely difficult not to just go along with it especially when you're new and you don't know what the hell you're doing so you end up spending a tremendous amount of your time for example a disproportionate amount of your time even though you hate it in an office that isn't yours in some warehouse phoning people for money and that's like half your time and you think well you don't have to do that it's like well you have to because all the others have to right okay so in any case they don't end up talking across the aisle for for and their time is very tightly scheduled and we brought them together to have them talk and i wanted to do a bunch of that but my health collapsed and couldn't do any more of it but in any case each of them went around the room and said why they went into politics they were these were mostly younger congress people and if you would have been there there's two things that would have impressed you and surprised you i think one would be how common the stories for motivation were across the participants regardless of their party affiliation and the second would be how believably and genuinely sincere they were in that narrative you wouldn't have walked away with the pr with the assumption that those people were any more corrupt than people you admire and respect that's what makes them good at being corrupt because they can pass well but i would say the same about all of us i i'm not voting to have people sent overseas to slaughter innocent human beings so i agree with you i don't believe in voting well i agree or if you don't vote i agree with you completely that we should be skeptical of people and their motivations i do not agree that if someone is nice to their family i have no doubt that all these politicians adore their family that they have genuine concerns that i'm sure they said they want to make the world a better place if you are comfortable using force to send armed men to harm innocent people i don't care if you're nice or have good motivations you're a bad human being so i just i just finished a podcast with jocko willink okay it released today and he did all that like really and it isn't obvious to me that he's a bad person in fact jacob's a jacka was in politics how was he no he was his soldier and he was a commander well i mean he made decisions that you know he he was a politician in some sense because he had to make strategic decisions about how policies were going to play out on the actual battlefield so because he was a commander you know there's a political element to his job because it's nested inside the democracy and he is making decisions and so you know and i i find it very and it is perplexing to some degree it's very difficult to walk away from a conversation with jocko and not think anything other than that's a really admirable person and it does tangle us up in this problem that you just described which is well well what about force and what about the army and what about the police for that matter but it isn't them you know it's us again it's the same i'm not a cop i'm not a cop it is them i'm not a cop i would never put my hands on a peaceful person and try to force them to come with me in my car i would never club an old man in the head simply because he's in a park i would never force people to be defenseless in their own home by enforcing unlawful gun right laws would you stand up for someone who is being beat in public it depends on the context fair enough look are there circumstances under which you could imagine doing that oh i was just gonna say yeah like listen if it's one guy versus 50 cops me jumping in is not going to help him right but if yeah there's absolutely circumstances i would i would do that not even a question i've done it too the circumstances that you would use force i don't i don't know well i don't because i'm a small guy you know i mean i'm not trying to be glib but in all seriousness like uh you know i'm short and i'm small so if it could be if there's here's something that has happened this is not particularly courageous on my part if you have two guys who are getting into it and getting each other's face and you know they're that posturing thing where they're about to fight i have been in between and be like come on step away so in that case yes but in terms of having to use a gun or club someone to death thankfully i've never been in a position where i've had to make that decision and i do not begrudge people having to make that decision either it's not an easy choice there's no there's no good answers in that situation but if you take tax money and as a result of your job you're going to be harming innocent people in traumatic ways i do not agree you should sleep easy at night so you know people have criticized me i suppose for concentrating on individual development moral development say well there's all these global social problems that are best addressed at a sociological level and you know who the hell cares if you clean up your room when there's systemic racism and and i think well if you're going to address systemic racism then you better have a clear head while you do it and if you can't get the simplest parts of your life let's say an order well maybe that's what you should be concentrating on it's not like i don't think that people should go off and solve even more complex problems i mean there's an element there seems to be an element of externalization in the criticism of power structures that i find psychologically um counterproductive you know because i wouldn't look when i studied the horrors of the 20th century the holocaust and the stalinist horrors and um i always imagined myself as the perpetrator instead of the victim you know because the question for me was how it was that we could do this that we could do this to each other that we are doing it to each other and i mean we and i do also think the reason i've got away with my finger shaking moralizing let's say to the degree that i have got away with it is because i do include myself in the target of moral reprobates who could use some improvement and i see the like the emphasis i don't see that there's much of a distinction between the emphasis that you place on a broad-scale social critique um assuming corrupt power is the what fundamental organizing principle that large organizations adopt to organize and the same thing that leads to identity politics on the left i don't think every organization is inherently built on corruption i don't think tropicana is built in corruption okay so okay so how all right so how do you make the distinction tropicana doesn't use force and doesn't try tropicana says look my our orange juice is the best freshly squeezed they get it to your store at a cheap price at a cheap price i'm assuming it's cheap i haven't bought in a long time you are choose you're free to choose it or not as you want your tropicana doesn't try to make you out to be a bad person if you prefer apple juice or soda or water right these other organizations are playing mind games with people okay so it's for deceit it's at least in this part of the use of the series and let me speak to something you said earlier it's different for you and your i was born in love in western ukraine uh i was you know we came here when i was one and a half but i was raised in a household when we spoke russian i'm jewish that was one of the reasons i fought so hard when i wrote my north korean book and why i've been talking about north korea as an issue because my family was the victim you know being jewish under stalin you know during that period these are really two big bullets that we dodged and one of the reasons i went there to write about and why i talk about it so constantly is because there were for the grace of god i could be a north korean concentration camp right now so i think there is i don't know if there's a um a duty but certainly if i'm in a position to you know advocate for people who are not in a position to really speak for themselves and these are the people who no one disagrees has it the worst no one disagrees that whether you're conservative trudeau trump abide whatever that we need more liberalism north korea we need more human rights we need these people treated with a certain modicum of decency it's just unconscionable i'm like i'm gonna do something about it in my very very little uh uh a way so i think it's different given your and my background um how you're approaching these horrors of the past because that was my grandma and my grandparents well i look is there a difference i i don't i guess it isn't clear to me exactly what the difference is i mean you're well you're absolutely i wouldn't have been used to this deceit and power and sure and and violence though i was i would not have been in a position to have been that nazi quite literally i wouldn't have been a position to be that uh gpu agent and one of the reasons i am an anarchist is i do not feel comfortable tell forcing another person to live as i see fit i just think you know who am i yes well i think look i i think that's an admirable moral principle it isn't obvious to me that the logical conclusion of that is anarch is anarchism i suppose that would be my objection i mean and i also i do believe that degenerate power structures exist and they use deceit and that that's reprehensible and should be fought in in every possible way i mean my sense has been that there isn't anything more powerful to fight that than than spoken truth i agree and humor well because if they're using yeah it's very rare go go ahead talk about humans using manipulative tactics in order to further their goal as opposed to rational discourse as you and i having we're putting our cards on the table if you're using things like deceptive editing and you know characterizing things out of context i am you're not owed a rational fair response you're not acting as a decent fair actor so humor is very useful in this mechanism because it explodes not only the particular thing you're saying but your role as someone who's worthy of uh courtesy uh respect and decorum when i interviewed when i was interviewed by kathy newman there was a point where i asked her i guess why she felt she had the moral right to offend me during she was questioning me and it stopped or the question stopped her and that was when the person emerged from the corporate shell let's say or the ambitious the corporate shell slash ambitious persona because that's what i was talking to what wasn't a person and she emerged and she was set back you know and i had a second or two to think then about how i would respond to the fact that her mask dropped momentarily and i said gotcha and it was a calculated risk it was supposed to be funny and i do believe that people responded to it as if it was funny and i thought well is this a time is this a place where i can drop a joke is this a place where i can say something and i wasn't thinking about it strategically precisely i was thinking about it more in terms of its hopefully in terms of its ethical appropriateness you know and i do believe that humor is a as a an immense uh what would you say an immensely important element of the search for truth for sp just as play is and and and humor is is there's something about it that's an act of of self-transcendence too if you can laugh at yourself right because you're simultaneously the thing that needs to be laughed at which is already behind you if you're laughing at it you know you're moving ahead to the better you in the mere fact of allowing yourself to satirize yourself and and so what you're saying is you're going to be a standard comedian well i think i have more affinity with stand-up comedians in some sense than with any other sort of person that's true yeah because you are getting on a stage you're putting on performance there's going to be moments of uh uh unexpected twists and terms in in the in what you're saying and as a function of that it's going to cause hopefully things to put together in their brain so yeah that's and you know when i'm not very healthy it's hard to be funny and but it's a lot it's a it's a loss like the the best lectures that i ever gave have humor in them and and i mean hooray for that and you know that's partly why i toured with dave rubin too was to add some levity to what i mean i learned early on that even if you're discussing things of incredible seriousness you know like genocidal seriousness that that if you're if if let me give you an example because that's the whole premise of my book dear reader the north korea book it's farcical because it's kim jong-il's autobiography i went there i read all their literature and i took the things that these people are taught and they're since it's in his voice they're presented at face value and let me give you one example of this kim jong-il is having and how and how the truth comes in between the lines of you know an anecdote so kim jong-il is at this meeting the dear leader of north korea and someone's giving a talk and he's working on papers and every so often his assistant is asking him for your input and the speaker stops and kim jong-il goes why are you stopping goes well you know dear leader you're working on those papers you've got your assistant he goes no no i could do all these three things at once and they said from that point on people regarded kim jong-il as looking at time as not a plane but a cube and that he had the ability to shrink time and my friend said to me do they mean multitasking and they did and according to north korean propaganda kim jong-il is the only person in north korea who knows how to multitask and when you have these anecdotes put forth in this manner you realize how removed from reality it's not that he's a magical figure it's just like something that's just absolutely banal is being presented as some kind of major historical accomplishment so humor to you know is and another example there was an amusement park and one of the things how north korea claims that they're different from other totalitarian states is they have something called field guidance whenever you read the newspaper they have they have field field guidance fields guidance yes so whenever you read their newspapers is whoever the current leader is he's at the bottle factory he's at the munitions plant he's at the farm he's giving them guidance on how to make these things better and as a consequence of this the implication is everyone north korea is incompetent other than the leader so you better have him in place but there was one story that i include in the book where there's an amusement park and it starts lightly raining and kim jong-il insists on riding all the rides twice to make sure they're safe for the children the elderly and everyone on the platform the dignitaries are all crying at his courage and it's like the guy's taking a roller coaster ride like you're regarding him as the kind of like the planting the flag in iwo jima but he's on this this roller coaster so this kind of contrast between something that is uh you know fun and for kids and silly but being presented as this great courageous moment and this guy's a hero that absurd distance is what drives a lot of the narrative did you see the strange death of stalin oh that book is as close to dear reader uh the last days of stalin you mean the movie yeah the the yeah did i get the title wrong you said strange death i think it's last days i thought it's the last days of stalin it's by anthony yanuchi who made veep as well no and i was it's the it's the death of stella and we're both wrong we're both wrong that's probably characterizes our whole conversation i was so glad that book came out after dear reader because it's exactly the same tone as i used to the point where i would be accused of stealing that movie and that's just just one moment just how they use humor to present stalin's air of terror stalin has a stroke he's dying he's in his own urine in his room and the two guards are out there and they hear this noise inside the bedroom and one that goes should we go in there and look and the other guy goes should we shut the [ __ ] up so but that's the thing it's like be quiet head down stalin at this point obviously would genuinely want your assistance and we want your help but because yeah but it's a little too late for that but maybe it wasn't they didn't know that right right but because these rules are in place yeah these rules are in place the focus is always on fear and not speaking out of turn even if ostensibly it could have saved the greatest man in the world you know so okay so when i read your book and when i looked at the memes that these young guys were generating years ago you know and that me too and and then considered the role of satire and all of that now i'm just remembering what i told my kids when i was raising them because we i encouraged my kids to be funny that was very highly valued in our household to be witty and witty and funny is really hard because you have to push right to the edge yep yep and not go over and the closer you get to the edge and not without going over the funnier you are the more daring you are because in part you you show your sophisticated mastery you're so such a sophisticated master of the social dynamic that you can go right to the edge of breaking a rule and not break it or maybe you can break it just enough to show that it should be broken in exactly that manner right and then that's really witty that's really funny and so there's no doubt that that ability to be funny to be satirical to be witty is a a potent manifestation of the truth but then you know with my kids i was also watching them constantly you know you can get sibling rivalries that that go completely out of control in a household and so i'd watch them teasing each other and playing with each other and and would intervene and say look you know that's not funny anymore that's not a game that's where it starts to deteriorate into tyranny or deteriorates into a power game it's like stay on the right side of funny you're you're pretending that you're being funny but really you're being mean okay and we also see this with racist humor a lot of times a joke we have a racial element and it's humorous but a lot of times someone who's being a racist is just putting up feelers by saying okay you've accepted this joke can i drop the mask and you could just engage in pure hate so yeah it's even worse right because you're using something that really is a tool for the good let's say humor and you're perverting it so that you're masking something awful so that's analogous in some sense to this corporate malfeasance that you were discussing and so i guess in the the sense i get when looking at the the the irreverence of these young guys essentially on 4chan i think just bloody well make sure you stay on the right side of funny and there's always doubt in that and maybe there has to be but but but it's still the right moral imperative it's like go ahead with your humor man but like watch your tongue like watch your tongue it's also the idea of claptor where you had all these comedians going after trump or whoever and the audience instead of laughing which is a visceral reaction would applaud and it's like they're not they don't think you're funny they're agreeing with you it's it's kind of like people whose favorite kind of music is like religious music it's like you don't necessarily which a lot of which is very good a lot of christian rock is very good don't get me wrong they're very talented people but do you like this song because you like the beat do you like how it makes you feel or do you like this song because you happen to agree with the person these are entirely different phenomena yes well there has to be an element of surprise and humor right yes oh yes and that and that that also accounts for that um uh spontaneous laughter which is an indication that the arrow hit its mark right that the target is being specified properly and precisely and it really is a form of art to do that and so well then i think i always had mixed feelings about the the the satirists in on 4chan for exactly that reason it's like well are you really watching what you're saying carefully enough like hurray for your humor hurray for your courage all of that but this is like the stephen pinker's in any population you're going to have a small percentage who rise above who are quality and and that um whatever it is at its best and the vast majority of people bring nothing to the table and then there's plenty of people who actually use that mechanism to make things much worse right well and that's interesting as well because it also like i always think well wouldn't it be great if there were only good restaurants and then i think well wait a second how many bad restaurants do there have to be in order for there to be one restaurant and the answer isn't zero yeah yeah there's definitely some because people have to practice and they have to make mistakes and they have to learn and well right and so you look at 4chan too and you can think well how much wretched humorless racist noise do you have to tolerate in order to generate something of true value and the answer to that is i think two one is we don't know that's the first answer and so beware of clamping down on it too precipitously but the second is maybe that's also something that each of the people who are involved in that kind of activity should should be attending to you know within the confines of their own soul so to speak i mean they're anonymous and it's evanescent but that doesn't mean that you bear no moral responsibility for what you're saying yes and i think cruelty for the sake of cruelty is really a sign of weakness it's the kid pulling the wings off of a bug or like you know putting tin cans on a cat's tail uh it's a way for people to just feel some modicum of power over another human being but that's a very parasitic way of looking at things uh and using this other person as a means to an end and this person might not be a great person but really what are you accomplishing you're just both miserable now uh that there's there needs to be in my view a joyousness to what you're trying to do and i certainly hope that permeates my work and my uh uh output that's a good place to stop thank you sir thank you very much i hope you enjoyed this it so far so good [Laughter] such an honor thank you can i ask you what do you have to bounce right now or do you have time for one question i have time for a question uh in your absence i've been kind of taking a lot of young men under my wing and kind of mentoring them i saved one kid's life when he reached out to me he was suicidal and now he's just kind of has bad days which yes that's that's all you need that's something yeah like yeah that bad days if you're not a threat to your life whatever what advice would you have to me or to your past self when this started happening for you uh because i'm very scared of saying the wrong thing and making things worse you there's no way you can pay too much attention okay like ignorant attention watch the person and you do that when you're in in conversation you know yeah paying attention more attention and you can't offer advice in some sense you have to listen okay yeah yeah yeah yeah like it's still hard but if you pay attention like if you pay attention your your good habits will take over and and you'll walk down the right course okay humility and attention that's good humility and attention as i'm sure you've seen it's amazing how many young people just want someone to listen to them and they it's it's just have some that they respect and once that happens they feel so validated yeah well they really just want you to say something that they're doing that's good to someone yes and have it be recognized as good yeah yeah yeah yeah that's superb advice thank you so much it was such an honor jordan okay take care thanks michael [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,054,987

Rating: 4.9053283 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism

Id: L9HqHzA3atQ

Length: 131min 0sec (7860 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Cuzndwyne]

Jordan Peterson is a solid conversationalist, Malice is as well. The flow of the conversation feels smooth.

Agree or disagree with the views expressed, it's a thought worthy listen.

[u/CampusSquirrelKing]

Thanks for sharing this today, OP. I try to listen to a podcast when I work out. For today's workout, I looked at Peterson's latest podcast episode and saw this one, but the description didn't hook me, so I passed on it. I'll give this a listen tomorrow and update with my thoughts.

[u/bethhanke1]

Just got done watching. Anarchism makes Peterson uncomfortable and it was interesting to watch peterson hash through and contemplate Malice's ideas.

I also think both of these men are often much more intelligent than the people interviewing them and so many of the debates fall flat. In this case they are both articulate, well educated and have fully formed yet very different ideologies. Good times.

[u/GeeTheCurious]

The objectivists vs subjectivists in the comments.