Latest / DarkHorse Podcast / Anarchism Cataclysm: Michael Malice on DarkHorse

Transcript

Anarchism Cataclysm: Michael Malice on DarkHorse · DarkHorse Podcast

• 0:00
  Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast, Inside Rail. I am sitting this afternoon with Michael Malice, somebody I have come to love and respect.(...) We are obviously not in the home DarkHorse studio. We are here in a studio being loaned to us by Mikki Willis and being manned by Matt Guthrie. Matt Guthrie is the director of the film that premiered last night, Follow the Silenced. Mikki is the producer. Anyway, thank them for loaning the studio.
• 0:28
  Michael, welcome to DarkHorse.
• 0:30
  I would have loved to have gone to that premiere like you promised me you'd invite me to and then you never gave me the info. And I was on the list too.
• 0:38
  Do you know when I realized that I didn't give you the info? Just now? No, no, I realized it when I walked in and there was a reserve seat for me since I was going to be managing the panel after the film. And I realized that there were two seats labeled by Stein and I thought, okay.
• 0:55
  I was giving you a plus one?
• 0:56
  Yes, you were my plus one. Our sponsor on this episode of the DarkHorse inside rail is Helix, which makes truly fantastic mattresses. Everyone has had bad sleep. Sometimes that's attributable to modernity, the light shining in your window, the noises of humanity that you can't shut out, the churning of your brain over all the tasks you have to do, your physiology managed and mismanaged by fake food and pharmaceuticals. All of that contributes to bad sleep, but so does a bad mattress. We have probably all had the unfortunate experience of being totally ready for sleep, but finding ourselves on a mattress that just wasn't conducive to it. It's sagged or grown, it was lumpy or uneven. There are a lot of ways for a mattress to be bad and a few ways for a mattress to be good. And Helix has discovered many of them. Their mattresses are fantastic. That feeling of relief when you discover a great mattress, one that lets you sleep comfortably through the night, Helix makes that mattress. Every Helix mattress combines individually wrapped steel coils in the base with premium foam layers on top, providing excellent support for your spine. Helix Sleep offers 20 unique mattresses based on your individual sleep preferences and your size. Take the Helix Sleep quiz online and in less than two minutes, you'll be directed to which of their many mattresses is best for you. Do you sleep on your back, your stomach or your side? Do you toss and turn or sleep like a log? Do you prefer firmer or softer mattresses? Once you've found your perfect mattress, it's shipped straight to your door free of charge. Then you'll have 100 nights to try it out without any penalty in the unlikely event that you don't love it. Helix mattresses are made in America at their very own manufacturing facility. And unlike many mattresses now on the market, all of Helix mattresses are 100% fiberglass free. Helix mattresses are built for human bodies and built to last. Helix also supports military first responders, teachers and students by giving them a special discount. We've had our Helix mattress for almost three years now and look forward to it providing us with many more years of excellent sleep. Helix is now offering a DarkHorse exclusive discount of 27% off site-wide and a free bedding bundle, which includes a sheet set and mattress protector with any lux or elite mattress order. Go to helixsleep.com slash DarkHorse. That's helixsleep.com slash DarkHorse. This is a fantastic offer and it won't last long.
• 3:06
  With Helix, better sleep starts now. Our second sponsor is Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club. We love these guys and their olive oils so much. Extra virgin olive oil is delicious and nutritious. There are all sorts of health benefits that we can mention from being heart healthy to preventing Alzheimer's to being high in antioxidants. But you've been living on this planet. You know these things. Olive oil is of course a cornerstone of Mediterranean diets and is used in everything. If you've never had excellent fresh olive oil, however, you may wonder what all the fuss is about. Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club is the brainchild of TJ Robinson, known in some circles as the olive oil whisperer. He brings the freshest, most flavorful, nutrient-rich olive oils from harvest to your door.
• 3:47
  When we tasted TJ's farm fresh oils, we couldn't believe how delicious they were.
• 3:51
  There are several varietals with noticeably different flavors, and we've used them in all the usual ways. A light dressing on a caprese salad, marinade for grilled chicken, tossed with carrots and coarse sea salt before roasting. We've never been disappointed, and Heather has also made an orange olive oil cake, recipe sent by Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club. It's amazing. You will not believe how good this olive oil is and how many uses there are for it. Olive oil is a succulent, delicious food that like pretty much all fats is best when it's fresh. But most supermarket olive oils sit on the shelf for months or even years, growing stale, dull, flavorless, even rancid. The solution is to have Fresh Pressed Artisanal Olive Oil shipped directly to you after each new harvest, when the oil's flavor and nutrients are at their peak. As an introduction to TJ Robinson's Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club, he's willing to send you a full-size $39 bottle of one of the world's finest artisanal olive oils, fresh from the new harvest, for just $1 to help him cover shipping. And there's no commitment to buy anything now or ever. Get your free$39 bottle for just $1 shipping and taste the difference freshness makes. Go to getfreshdarkhorse.com. That's getfreshdarkhorse.com for a free bottle and pay just $1 shipping. And anyway, I will just put it to you this way. You enjoyed the film greatly. I did. Yes, you cried several times during it.
• 5:11
  Funnily enough, I was crying at home at the same time. So yeah. Were ya? No.
• 5:15
  Oh, well, if you had been watching the film, which we broadcast on our channel, you might have been, because it's actually, I've seen it now three times and each time it's tough for me. What's it about? It's about the, I don't wanna overly narrow a description, but I would say it is about the fate of the vaccine injury.
• 5:33
  Oh God, don't get me started. Do not get me started. It's the most terrifying story I know, because you can get lost in all of the technical details of COVID, you can argue about which evidence to trust and which evidence to discount.(...) But when you watch what was done to the people who did what they were asked, got these shots, and then were gravely injured or worse, it's just jaw dropping. And then-- And then they're told they're crazy.
• 6:01
  Right, then they're gas lit. Right. And here's the one that's even beyond gas lit, right? The gas lighting makes me so angry. But even beyond that, at the point that these people have been told, you're not sick, it's in your head,(...) right?
• 6:18
  This is you and not us. What's a coincidence? It's a coincidence. And then they find each other online, they establish Facebook groups, and they start to help themselves. They're not given any help by a system that forced them to the shots.
• 6:33
  They try to help themselves. And then the government strong arms Facebook into shutting down their groups so they can't even talk to each other.
• 6:39
  It's mind blowing. And what about those women who lost their kids?
• 6:46
  How much of those? Absolutely. I had Count Dankle on my show, he's talking about there was a miscarriage rates in Scotland when they're through the roof.
• 6:51
  How do you explain that? Just what's coincidence this year? It's just, you know, it's even funnier. So one of my books was about North Korea. And when the famine hit in the 90s, it was those same people, the honest, obedient people who died first. Because they thought the government's gonna come take care of us.
• 7:11
  They'd take care of us all our lives, the foods around the corner, and the ones who stole and did what they needed to survive were the ones who lived. So it's the honest, obedient people who are always the first victims. And maybe this is part of my Soviet upbringing. I was raised in America, but the household certainly had the Soviet values is that the idea that people in power in any sense are your best friends is so crazy. And I think people broadly speaking understand this, but somehow when it comes to their particular case, one of the reasons I wrote this book, not to just give it a plug, but there's a good segue, Americans have this idea that if someone is evil, it's a guy with a weird mustache banging a desk and fumbling at the mouth. And no, it's that 50 year old woman who's manning a desk at her little office, who's got a little bit of power, and you need something from her, and God help you, she will do whatever she can to make sure you don't get it with a smile on her face and won't lose a moment of sleep.
• 8:10
  Yes, I think what I realized somewhere recently was that actually you only need to make one counterintuitive assumption in order for the rest to fall into place, which is you need to understand that there is some group for which you would assume that you had some sort of in-group status who is treating you as absolutely out-group, because we know that human beings do absolutely ghastly things to those that they see as other. And so as soon as you realize, oh, well, that might be my own federal government treating me as cattle or worse, then it begins to make sense. Oh, all the advice I got was upside down. Oh, well, maybe the thing that is giving me advice actually sees me as the enemy. And if it did, then it would make sense why it was giving me all of that cruddy advice about my health.
• 9:05
  And also doesn't want to spook me as the enemy as it was made me docile. Right.
• 9:10
  So I wish obviously the COVID pandemic and every issue surrounding it got politicized, which of course should never have been the case. We were all faced with a medical situation and the need to keep civilization humming, that should have galvanized us and it did exactly the opposite. But the plight of the vaccine injured should cut across every political line.
• 9:40
  You don't need to think in political terms at all. And you don't need to accept that those of us who said that these shots were very dangerous turned out to be right. We can just simply agree, if there are five vaccine injured or 5 million, it doesn't matter. If you took that shot because civilization asked you to do it and you got hurt, you deserve absolute compassion and all the help we can give you to get your life back. So that should allow us to sidestep politics and just simply look at these stories.
• 10:11
  And it's hard. I mean, look,(...) I don't cry almost ever, but watching these stories,(...) it brings me to the edge of it every time.
• 10:22
  There's this guy,(...) Ernest Ramirez,(...) who shows up at all of these events where the vaccine injured are gathering.
• 10:34
  And he's not vaccine injured as far as I know, but he lost his son.
• 10:40
  And it breaks my heart. This man is so broken by what happened to him.(...) And, you know, as a parent, I mean, I just, of course, it's like, you know, it's that far away. I can feel it as if it was me.
• 10:58
  (...) And it just stops me on my tracks every time I see him. And it's also the fact that for a lot of people, it's an eye roll, like what happened to him. Like, yeah, right, your son lost it. Yeah, whatever.
• 11:10
  Like it doesn't enter their head as a possibility.
• 11:13
  Even though, like, here's the thing.(...) Everyone understands that peanut butter, milk, like let's go down the list of things that like, that can have for a very small percentage of people, horrific consequences, right? But somehow this is the one substance on earth where there's no horrific consequences for anybody.
• 11:30
  The one where we hijacked yourselves to produce a foreign protein.
• 11:33
  It was just like whatever, just benign.
• 11:36
  People, there's lots of like everything else.
• 11:39
  I interviewed a woman relatively early in the COVID madness. An Australian woman who for whatever reason had been injured by something in the past and was wickedly sensitive to a huge range of things, including one of the ingredients in the shots.(...) And you'll remember that those of us who were healthy were told that one of the reasons we had to get these shots was to protect the people who couldn't have them. But this woman was not being given an exemption. In fact, she was literally told that even though anaphylactic shock was a likely result of the vaccine for her, that the right thing for her to do was to have an EpiPen available.
• 12:25
  I, it's funny because it's interesting how you and I have different reactions.
• 12:30
  Because you see these, I haven't seen the film, I would say because I wasn't invited. But if you were invited, I wasn't told where it is.
• 12:38
  That's not really an invite.
• 12:41
  When you see it, it makes you cry.
• 12:43
  But for me, it makes me, and I'm not using this loosely, violently angry. Like I just want to commit sadistic violence on these people.
• 12:55
  I think the victims, the perpetrators.
• 12:56
  Right, of course.
• 12:56
  Just be clear. Of course.
• 12:58
  I think the way we can reconcile these two things is that the level of depravity is so great that a normal, well-adjusted person struggles to find the right toolkit to process.
• 13:15
  You mean like with kind of guillotine? Or with kind of screwdriver or what? I mean, I don't think it's hard at all.
• 13:25
  I don't know what toolkit to, I am simultaneously broken up by these stories.(...) And I struggle to control my anger over them.
• 13:37
  Let me give you a humorous example.
• 13:40
  Roseanne Barr lives here now, and I've become friends with her, which were the great privileges of my life. So I've been watching some clips of her show, Roseanne.(...) This is an old episode where Jackie, her sister, comes home, and it turns out Jackie had been beaten up by her boyfriend. And she's very embarrassed because she's uneducated, how this happened to me, Roseanne's consoling her, Jackie's hysterical, Dan, John Goodman, is watching this, right?
• 14:01
  And they just go into the other room and Jackie's crying, and Dan just looks around and just kind of does this, and he grabs his coat and leaves, and just goes and just beats the shit out of the boyfriend.(...) And calmly, it's like, all right, like I'm gonna take care of business. And I thought there was more of that in America, and there isn't.(...) And it doesn't have to be huge numbers, but I'm shocked how docile Americans are.
• 14:33
  Yeah, I am too, and I think I've also witnessed it happen.
• 14:39
  I think I'm a bit older than you are. How old a person are you?
• 14:43
  I'm an ancient evil from times of memorial.
• 14:45
  No, no. I'm 48. You're 48 in Earth years. All right, I'm 56.
• 14:53
  One of the things that I've seen, let me start a different place. I grew up as a kind of standard West Coast liberal, maybe a bit more enlightened in some ways, but definitely I believed a lot of the standard stuff, including that the Second Amendment was one of the great errors of the founding fathers. I now of course no longer believe that, having seen tyranny encroaching and understanding that actually the Second Amendment is a big part of fending off tyranny, even if you don't understand why, you need to think more deeply about it, if that's your situation. But anyway, the point is, I have come to interface with gun culture late. I've understood things about it as something other than a cartoon late in my life. One of the things I've understood is the understandable terror that people who have a responsible relationship with firearms in this country have with the predicament they are put in. In other words, there's tremendous fear about legitimately using a firearm for exactly the purpose that it's intended for, to protect yourself from harm in a case where somebody else has chosen to put you in harm and therefore you're defending yourself.
• 16:09
  And the problem is that in the wrong jurisdiction, frankly in almost any jurisdiction in the country,(...) you can end up shooting somebody legitimately according to the intent of the Second Amendment and well-established law, and you might be prosecuted for doing so.
• 16:28
  This is one of the reasons I'm in Austin, because I have a lot of cool stuff in my house. Sometimes I have pictures on Instagram, and I knew full well that if someone broke into my house and tried to take my stuff, and I did anything to defend myself, I'm infinitely more likely, and this was in Brooklyn, to have problems than they would. And I'm like, this cannot stand. So now that I'm here, I feel much more, I sleep with a gun under my bed, I hope I never have to use it, I hope I never have to touch it in this context.
• 17:00
  But, and I don't know that the first thing I would do would be use it. The first thing I'd do is hide or whatever, depending on the situation, because I want to avoid going to that extreme at any cost possible, but I'm glad I live in Texas for that reason. And I think Castle Doctrine is being spread state by state.
• 17:17
  Well,(...) suffice to say that there is something about the state of our culture, where somebody who was threatened or whose family was threatened would be thinking more about the legal situation than simply protecting.
• 17:35
  Kyle Vittenhouse, Jordan Nealey, these are being made examples of to teach people exactly that.
• 17:40
  Right, and so in a sense, it's the soft way of disarming people. It's causing them to obsess about their legal jeopardy in a moment where that should not be primary on their minds. Their actual jeopardy, in fact, is supposed to be the only thing on their mind. If you're shooting somebody in self-defense, it's legitimate.
• 18:00
  Right, and heroic.
• 18:02
  Yeah, so anyway, I think Americans have been rendered docile, and that that was not, if I'm remembering the world I was born into correctly,(...) that was not the way it was even recently.
• 18:19
  So was that somebody's plan? I don't know, but it certainly has that sense to it. Of course there's somebody's plan, what do you mean? Well, see, the thing is-- It does that to literally one person.
• 18:30
  Right, but is it a plan, or is it an emergent phenomenon is the question? It's clearly a plan.
• 18:36
  Yeah, I think that's likely true. I mean, I think it is maybe our obligation not to start with the opposite assumption and allow us to be persuaded that it's a plan, but I agree with you. There's too much evidence pointing in that direction.
• 18:50
  Our final sponsor is Vanman. We absolutely adore Vanman's products, and we are certain that you will too. Vanman takes an animal-based approach to skincare using 100% grass-fed and finished beef tallow as a key ingredient in its skincare line of balms. A compelling ad for Vanman could just be a read of the complete list of ingredients in one of their products. For instance, hopefully you don't need sunscreen often, but when you do, here's what's in Vanman sunscreen. 100% grass-fed and finished beef tallow, organic olive oil, organic beeswax, organic unrefined shea butter, non-nano zinc oxide, organic cocoa powder. That's it. The product that the Vanman company is best known for is tallow and honey balm, and it surpasses even very high expectations. Vanman's tallow and honey balm works on everything from anti-aging to athlete's foot. It's made with 100% grass-fed and finished beef tallow, raw honey, beeswax, olive oil, and essential oils, including sandalwood, frankincense, and neroli. And they've got a version without the essential oils, if that's your preference. And Vanman stepped it up even further by making bison tallow and honey balm. It is out of this world, smooth and rich, decadent and healing. It's got tallow from 100% grass-fed bison. Bison are fairly lean, so their fat is particularly nutrient-dense. Manuka honey, which has considerable antibacterial properties, organic royal jelly, what the hive produces for queen bees to eat, and organic cold-pressed olive oil. Vanman also has a fantastic deodorant that contains magnesium, shea butter, and coconut charcoal. Because it's Vanman, their lip balm has no seed oils, of course, but check out the ingredients on other lip balms and you'll see just how rare that is. They've got a tallow and honey soap, an all-natural insect repellent, a tooth powder containing both hydroxyapatite from beef bones and bentonite clay, and more.
• 20:35
  They've just introduced travel sizes, too. Get 10% off your first order when you go to vanmanscompany.com slash darkhorse and use the new code darkhorse10 at checkout. The link is vanmanscompany.com forward slash darkhorse. Try their amazing tallow products now, you won't be sorry.
• 20:56
  Which, this might be the place to talk a little bit about your book, which I will confess up front I have not finished.
• 21:02
  Oh, you started it?
• 21:03
  Yes. That's why I even started, okay.
• 21:04
  Oh, and I was tremendously enjoying it and was regularly educated about things.
• 21:11
  Oh, okay, wow, okay.
• 21:12
  So anyway, yes, it's a great book, "The White Pill." I recommend people-- The first third. Either read it-- I recommend the first third. I recommend the first third, I guarantee nothing after that.
• 21:21
  It's a real peace, Cerner, until--(...) Well, here's the thing. I actually have kind of an arms distance relationship with books, frankly.
• 21:32
  I read shorter stuff.
• 21:34
  I have no expectation, whatever I go on a show, because I've never read any of my work. I think that's ridiculous.
• 21:38
  Well, I was listening to it. Which is great, you read it yourself. So I don't have to impose your voice on it. Your voice is right there, which is cool. And I learned a ton about the Soviet Union and the psychopaths who started it.
• 21:49
  Anyway, interesting stuff. But there is a way, if we step back, one of the things that I discovered regularly during COVID was that people who had lived under widely recognized tyrannical states had a very different reaction to what was going on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They would frequently say, "I don't understand you Americans. Why don't you see what this is?" Right?
• 22:14
  And so anyway, I quickly incorporated that. It's like, oh, I get it. This is visible if you have had experience. But if you're naive, you're wasting too much time trying to figure out what it could mean. So tell me what you saw.
• 22:27
  Well, I'll give you another counterexample very quickly, which is Greta Thunberg.(...) In what other context is any adult looking to this special needs teenager for advice on politics? In no other context, like, oh, there's this teenage girl who's a high school dropout, who's a little screwed up in the head. I wonder what she thinks.
• 22:47
  That's not a thing. But somehow she's person of the year and everyone's just like, she's so bright and she's so wise.
• 22:53
  It's crazy. And it's clearly an example of propaganda. So one of the things I think people who come from, there's two Russian newspapers, Pravda, and I forget what the other one's called, and Pravda means truth, and they say this one's not true and this one's not news.
• 23:09
  The premise that the people on your screens(...) are there to convey you truth and information kind of like objectively without any sort of agenda is just insane.(...) It's just completely insane. Any more insane, the idea that like, if you're watching some kind of drama, that these people just spontaneously appear in the show and start having these arguments. It's like, you understand there's a script, you understand there's actors, you understand there's a story there trying to move forward and there's nothing wrong with that. But when you have something like the news,(...) and I think it's very hard, like I said earlier, for Americans to think, this is how I explained it. I said, try sitting down, this is how I explain blue pill people, people who take the media narrative and face value, try sitting down with someone, one of your neighbors, and telling them that the weatherman is lying.(...) Not just that he's wrong, but that he's lying. And you sound like a crazy person, right? Because even if he's wrong every single day, he just sucks, right? That would make more sense, why would the weatherman lie? And then you realize, okay, let's take a step back. Do you understand that there are giant, you've seen every 80s movie, there are these giant multinational corporations and sometimes they don't really care about what harm they do as long as it makes themselves better? Sure, okay, do you understand that they're not gonna call themselves death core or evil core?
• 24:37
  They're gonna call themselves happy core or momsvaccines.com? And like, yes, I'm like, okay, port that to, but they can't do it. They can't. They can't. Because they only look at the surface and the presentation because all of Hollywood is based on the idea that for the most part, evil people are visible on site.(...) And they're not going to be someone who it looks like you and me, they're going to have the uniform or they're going to have, again, the mustache or they're gonna be somehow visibly different from everybody else.
• 25:15
  I think that's part of it, but I think there's another piece. Sure, I'm sure there's more, yeah.(...) The...
• 25:24
  Here's an experience I have. Sure. I am berated on the regular on the internet.
• 25:31
  Okay. Right? Happens all the time. We all are, yeah. Almost never does anybody say anything the slightest bit negative in person.(...) Okay. Almost never. It's happened like literally three times since 2017. Two of those are me.
• 25:45
  Right.
• 25:47
  But the point is there is a reason that it doesn't happen in person. And it doesn't, it's not because people like me better in person. It's because human beings are naturally careful in person because it's easy for conflict to get out of hand, right?
• 26:02
  I think it's also a lot of these people who are this toxic aren't going to be in the same room with you.
• 26:07
  They're going to be low functioning.
• 26:09
  That's true, but walking through airports, right? Oh, sure. It's like two or three people walk up and they say just the nicest things that are really generous about what dark horses meant to them or whatever.
• 26:21
  Can I say one more thing? Yeah. Because people always think I'm a, I try to play up what an asshole I am. I am shocked by how often people come up to me and have good questions. I'm sure you've had the same experience. Sure. It's not some dumpy comments like, "Oh, wow, let me think about this." No, if somebody is really engaged. It's really exciting.
• 26:37
  It's marvelous. Yes. But the point I want to make is in a world where people instinctively moderate that stuff. In a world where people instinctively moderate this stuff. In a world where people instinctively moderate that because it is in everybody's interest to not let conflict get out of hand, it is hard to believe that somebody would lie to you directly in a way that would cause massive harm. And that you need to actually think about, you know, let's start with fiduciary responsibility. If you don't understand what fiduciary responsibility to shareholders means, then you can't really extrapolate to whether or not Pfizer would lie through its teeth in order to get you to inject something into you that was going to potentially do serious bodily harm from which you'd never recover.
• 27:33
  Have you had Cheryl Atkinson on the show?
• 27:35
  No.
• 27:35
  She wrote a book called "Follow the Science," and she just goes through receipts after receipts of these companies who were caught red-handed. And what she points out is for fiduciary responsibility, a lot of these companies, it's easier to just write off the $2 billion lawsuit for the damage they caused because they're making $20 billion.
• 27:54
  It's just math. And this is the thing. If you understand that there is a large category, nobody can say how big a category it is, but there's a large category of behavior within our markets where somebody enlarges their slice of the pie while shrinking the pie. Yeah, right. Right? What we should do is want a society in which that is not profitable, in which that is penalized such that it's not possible. And if you can't enlarge your slice by shrinking the pie, then you will default to enlarging your slice by enlarging the pie. So that's what we should want. That's the strength of capitalism, is that if you make yourself wealthier, you make us wealthier too, and that's what we should want. That's what the brochure says about capitalism. But a lot of it is this parasitic or predatory stuff that we just fail to stamp out.
• 28:39
  And, you know, okay, yeah, they can write off the $2 billion of lawsuits. But if you take an industry like pharma, pharma that's really good at this game, oh, well, liability. We'll take it off the table, all right? How are we going to do that? Well, you certainly want somebody producing vaccines for children, don't you? And we're going to stop unless you relieve us from any liability. So the childhood vaccines need to be liability free. Can we agree on that? Yes, as the Reagan administration. Okay, then you get the issue of, well,(...) anything that is on the childhood schedule should have immunity from liability for the adult vaccine too. Really? Okay, good. Now what do you get?
• 29:17
  Now you get-- But I didn't do anything on that. There's one more point, which is you have your lobbyists call every congressperson and have them be on board with this to be like, hey, you know, these kooks are going to sue us out of business unless you put laws in place to protect us to make sure we can't get sued. Because you know how these crazy juries are? Absolutely. What's my campaign contribution?
• 29:38
  And they sign off on it.
• 29:39
  Right. Then they buy up all the advertising on television, not for the purpose of reaching anybody in their seats in their living room, but for the purpose of having editorial control. And the point is, oh, there's a game theory unfolding here in which a sufficient amount of control actually lets their behavior run wild, in which they can actually formulate plans, which are going to create a huge amount of unnecessary harm to people's health, shortening of their lives, and it's profitable to them.
• 30:08
  And they've already stepped on the slippery slope. They already are producing-- it starts with producing products that you know are going to kill a certain number of people, but maybe they have more benefit than harm. And then you might kill a certain number of people, but it's a small number. But at some point, you end up with like, well, all right. I'm in an industry that people are being killed in. You really need to talk to her.
• 30:27
  Is that right? This is literally a premise of her book. It's all about the money and now this interlock.
• 30:31
  It's just her book verbatim.
• 30:32
  Well, let's put it this way. Once you have seen this once-- Right. Then you can extrapolate to other realms, and you can say, OK, I get that this is not intuitive to me because I'm a person and I interact with other people, and it's hard to imagine a person doing this. But it's not hard to imagine a system doing this. And it's not hard to imagine how people embedded in that system come to rationalize their roles. Yes. That's the thing.
• 30:59
  And right. And also, it's the kind of thing where there's an asymmetry between truth and lying, which is if I tell you a thousand truths and one big lie, you're going to regard me as a liar, right? So once you see that one penny drop, you're like, oh, OK, I can't look at you. It's like someone cheats on their spouse. If it happens once, even if you forgive them, you're always going to wonder. It's never going to be healed completely. That one thing is going to be like, all right, I don't see you as I saw you before.
• 31:25
  Yeah. Well, in the space of corporations, though, of course, they rebrand themselves. They hire people to-- PR agents. PR agents to refresh the reputation.
• 31:40
  And they also-- there's a model that I've sort of built up that I call the game of pharma, where you come to understand that maybe for most of us, we started really paying attention during COVID. But for pharma, this is a decades-old problem. And there are just canonical features of it.(...) Well, you've got a drug. It has some plausible benefit. But there's some better drug. It's already on the market.
• 32:07
  And it's got a well-established safety protocol-- or a safety profile, because doctors have used it. And they've seen what it interacts badly with. So you're going to need a team on demonizing the better drug in order to make your drug look good. You need another team on figuring out how to make your drug look more effective than it actually is, right? Then you're going to need to deal with what the long-term consequences are going to be. In other words, it's just a set of problems. They're the same each time. You need--(...) how are we going to increase the number of people who are diagnosed with the condition for which our drug is a treatment, right? So they've got their tentacles into the diagnostic criteria. And sooner or later, you realize somewhere, the relationship with, for example, medicine changed.
• 32:54
  Somewhere, your doctor went from somebody who you were hiring to provide a service and over whom you had some leverage because they needed to not harm you in a way that would be deemed negligent, somebody decided to put them on commission.
• 33:15
  And to relieve them of risk of being sued by creating something called the standard of care, where it doesn't matter what's right for you and whether your doctor can figure out what that is. Your doctor is in jeopardy if they depart from the standard of care. And your doctor is safe if they act according to the standard of care. So they've become an automaton who is no longer doing what doctors are supposed to do, which is a kind of one-on-one science trying to figure out what's wrong with you and what might be the best way to fix it.
• 33:41
  Another thing that's funny about our contemporary culture, so much of our media and corporate environment is you, Brad, are so smart. I am so smart. When I go into the store, it's all about what I want. Customer is always right. When I call MasterCard and I'm on hold, please stay on the phone. Your line is-- your call is important to us. Like, oh, wow, the machine values me. This is-- I have some body. And as a side effect of this, we very commonly have this belief that the smart people alive today and people in the 60s were all stupid. We're so much smarter now. And you and I both understand that if I went back 3,000 years and talked to someone from 3,000 years ago, if we could understand each other in a linguistic sense, we'd probably be able to understand each other quite well. Like, in some ways, they'd be very foreign in their thoughts. But in terms of explaining each other logic and things like that, we'd be able to get on quite easily. So 60 years ago, the doctor is saying, you should smoke camels and not new ports because that's going to be better for you. And everyone now laughs at this. It's like, these aren't Martians from another galaxy. This was us.
• 34:51
  We did not violently change as human nature. Did not violently change in the last 60 years.
• 34:56
  No. And if you could simply-- you just take any snapshot and you say, OK, doctors used to prescribe mercury for all kinds of disorders. Oh, absolutely. It was the go-to medicine. It's a very powerful-- That's what made the man had her. Of course. And the point is now-- Really? Oh, yeah.
• 35:17
  Absolutely. As a laxative.
• 35:20
  It works great. It works great.
• 35:21
  It's called Quicksilver.
• 35:22
  It must go in through there.
• 35:23
  Actually, I'm trying to remember the name. There was an especially something like-- somebody's something bullet. I mean, it was like-- Oh, wow. You know, the magic cure for constipation.(...) So yeah, mercury used to be a very important medicine. We now regard that as an absurdity.
• 35:43
  Likewise, removing people's tonsils is stupid. Is that done? No one does it anymore? It happens, but it's much rarer.
• 35:51
  Anyway, the point is you could go back through medical history and find all of these just facepalm moments in which some incredibly dangerous thing becomes fashionable. And the answer is OK.
• 36:05
  It happened.
• 36:06
  There hasn't been some major upgrade in the way we think of medicine.(...) What are we doing now that we will look back on and think the same stuff? Here's one.
• 36:14
  (...) Injecting mRNA into people, hijacking their cells without some sort of targeting mechanism that adjusts which cells are going to do the translating of these messages. This is madness. But at the moment, it seems reasonable because the propagandists have given us a way of thinking about it that on first pass, it kind of sounds like a cool technology that we have that-- it's a pity we didn't have 20 years ago.
• 36:41
  So I have on my wall in my home Alex Jones' tin foil hat. You do. I do. The one from the clip. And next to Tim Pool's beanie.
• 36:50
  (Laughter) I'm not serious.
• 36:53
  And it's the January 6th shaman who's staying in my house this weekend, painted my face recently for January 6th. So I have the makeup wipe framed underneath that. It's a nice little wall of cool stuff.(...) And so I know how to speak in spirit theorist. And I don't regard that as a slur. So I always ask myself, what would need to be true for what your-- work within the context? I don't say you're crazy. This is stupid. Yeah. I just had Kurt Metzger on my show. And someone asked him, what's the craziest conspiracy theory you've ever heard? He goes, the one I heard recently that I'm trying to wrap my head around is nukes don't exist.(...) And I'm like, OK, what would need to be true for nukes to not exist? Like, let's follow the logic.
• 37:32
  What would need to be true is the right way to approach the question line.
• 37:35
  Right. So what's fascinating to me about the vaccine story is their argument is children who cannot get this disease(...) should be given a shot every six months in perpetuity. And I'm like, this is what you're advocating. Right. And this isn't me, Alex Johnston, foil hat. This isn't bread, whatever. I'm like, your argument is kids don't like getting shots. I didn't like getting shots. So explain this to me. And there's no explanation.
• 38:04
  It's so bizarre on its face.
• 38:07
  Yeah. You said one thing I have to correct, because we're going to take crap over it. Children get COVID. They don't die of it. Healthy kids. Sure.
• 38:13
  But they don't get it to the point where it's like an emergency.
• 38:16
  Right. Yes. I'm sorry.
• 38:16
  Yeah.
• 38:16
  Healthy kids don't.
• 38:18
  And it doesn't prevent transmission or contraction. There's no logical or medical or epidemiological justification for giving this to them. And there's a hell of a lot of risk. And it doesn't need to be very big to overcome. There's no good reason to give this to them in the first place.
• 38:34
  Right. But also, it just hurts kids. It's upsetting any shot.
• 38:39
  Well, I mean, forgive me. I agree. That should be reason enough not to do it, given no positive reason to do it. But here's the kicker is the number of reasons not to do it, even before you get to the debate about how serious the harms are, are substantial. So for example, a child is in the process of developing an immune system that will protect them for the rest of their life.(...) The maniacs who created SARS-CoV-2 and allowed it or released it into the world, whatever the explanation might be, have stuck us now with a disease that we are apparently going to be faced with repeatedly over a lifetime. The cost to humanity of having stuck us with a new flu-like disease is incalculable. But never mind. We're stuck with it. You're now telling me you know enough about the way you're going to interfere with the immune system of a newborn child that you're sure this is going to be positive for them over a lifetime, rather than allowing an immune system, which literally evolved in order to allow you to fight pathogens that you've never seen before successfully. That system has elegantly evolved for that process. And you're telling me you know how to interfere in their first year of life in a way that is going to make them better off over the course of an entire life?
• 40:06
  I'm calling bullshit.
• 40:07
  But it's just fascinating to hear people say, you don't have to believe in evil Machiavellianism to be like, well, we know what the long-term consequences are.
• 40:17
  How? No one intentionally is ever like, you know what? This medicine works great.
• 40:22
  But let's make it so that in 40 years you go senile. That's not a thing. It's that you learn. Oh, shit. A lot of these things, like once it plays out, and evolutionarily, just natural substances, oh, you know what? You eat a lot of this as a kid. By the time you're 80, there's going to be some consequences. That's how you learn. There's no way something that's a new material, you're going to know what it's going to do in 40 years.
• 40:41
  How? You don't have time machines.
• 40:43
  Especially, I mean, the distinction, here's what I think happened a lot of the time, at least.
• 40:48
  Can I say one more thing?
• 40:51
  We can sit here until we're blue in the face, right? But the average human doesn't look at knowledge through a true false filter, but through an us-them filter, right? So if Michael and Bret are them, and Anderson Cooper and Quiz Cuomo are in us, we could have all the receipts in the world. We could have the electron microscope that shows where the DNA changed, and their eyes will just glaze over. It's completely pointless.
• 41:19
  So Heather and I have this repeated pattern. And I don't mean to take Heather to task for this. I really just think it's-- I'm on to you, Heather. It's telling.(...) So Heather will see something, some piece of craziness. And she will say, I don't understand how people could possibly believe that. And I will say, you are forgetting that what they mean by I believe that has no relationship to what you mean when you say it. And if you could spend five minutes in their head, you'd understand how they could come to believe it. And I think your version of it, which I'm going to have to mull over a little bit, but the idea that the us-them filter is a substitute for the true false filter, I think, is at least a proof of concept.
• 42:11
  This is what it would be to believe in some other way that is immune to evidence, because your team is still saying this.
• 42:19
  Well, I have been arguing to everybody who will listen that we have to get to the bottom of what took place during COVID, not because of COVID, but because COVID is the best chance we are ever going to have to understand how sick our system is.
• 42:37
  Can I say something? Sure. You're singing my song. I said, COVID, whether intentionally or not, gave some very, very evil people some very, very useful information about what the limits are of American docility and what it's going to take for people to start flipping over cars and things like that. And there's precedent for this. And the precedent for this is World War I.(...) World War I, the Great War, was the first time America was involved in a war overseas.
• 43:07
  Woodrow Wilson's reelected in 1916. He kept us out of war. A few months later, he drags us into World War I. The top marginal tax rate went from 7% to 70%, which is something crazy.
• 43:20
  When they were arguing for the income tax amendment, they would say, let's make it 15. And I think people were like, no, no, no, because then people hit it very quickly. So it was some crazy stuff.(...) Centrorship of males, people going to jail, saying the draft is unconstitutional,(...) complete kind of bureaucratic tyranny, right?(...) 1920 comes, Warren Harding's elected. That all goes to the past. So when FDR gets elected in 1932, he could say with a straight face, look, we did all this stuff before for the Great War. Is the Great Depression less of a threat to America? He's right, it's more of a threat. The Great War wasn't a threat to us. So all of these dictatorial things that you guys went through just 12 years ago, how are you gonna argue against it now? Because now this crisis is on our shores, it's affecting everybody. We saw four years of insane unemployment, bread lines, we're gonna reinstitute it. And same thing with COVID, it's like it's gonna be a lot easier the second time.
• 44:15
  Just like with cheating on your spouse, the second time it's like, I got away with it once, it's really gonna be easier the second time.
• 44:21
  Well, I instinctively believe you're wrong, but I believe that we need to actually lock down our gains in order to make sure it isn't easier the second time.(...) What do you mean to say they're wrong?
• 44:35
  What happened during COVID is the rebels won. They didn't win decisive. Sure, that's fair. But we blocked their plan, whatever it was, successful. In America? Yes.
• 44:52
  Not in Canada and not in the UK. And not in Australia. Right, and New Zealand I'm sure, I think is by the court.
• 44:58
  So this is why I think here in the US, we have to get to the bottom of what it was and what it meant because well, A, what I keep telling people who are very focused on COVID is, oh,(...) not even the people who are most focused on COVID. People I'm worried about are the people who didn't know what to think, understandably.
• 45:22
  And now are embarrassed about what they didn't spot. Maybe they feel bad, they got the shot, they're concerned about what they've done to themselves, all understandable.
• 45:33
  And what they desperately want is to move on and not have to rethink what they did.
• 45:39
  Such a terrible instinct. And so my point to them is you can't do that because they're not done with you, right? They're not done with you. All of the madness over that shot(...) was about taking this platform, which is a goldmine from the point of view of pharma and a terrifying blunder from the point of view of medicine and epidemiology and normalizing it. They've got lots of other mRNA shots.
• 46:08
  But it's hotter than that. It's not specific to medicine. It's like, okay, we have the blueprint of how we can control every aspect of a country from literally every aspect, every. Including where people stand in a store. And it's like, all right, what worked? How long did it work? Who put up with it? Who didn't put up with it? And the data is just infinite. Right.
• 46:28
  Goliath got a graduate course in how to effectively engage in tyranny under current technological and social conditions.
• 46:40
  And I hope everyone watching this has read "Brave New World." Right.
• 46:43
  Because it was very analogous.
• 46:45
  Well, my feeling is actually you could look at almost any high quality dystopian narrative and find elements of the COVID story that actually. It was amazing actually how many,(...) everything from, you know, Brazil to catch 22 to 1984, they were all present.
• 47:05
  But Goliath learns from experience.
• 47:09
  Goliath is dumb with anything he hasn't seen before. But when he has an experience, he learns from it. And if you don't learn at least as much as he learned, the next time you're gonna be back on your heels. So we have to learn the lesson, at least as well as he did.
• 47:22
  And- Can I say something just to interject? Sure. Because a lot of people are like, they can never pull it off again. If I went to 2019 and asked you, could they pull it off? You would have said no. Right. And they did. Right. So wake up.
• 47:32
  Yeah, wake the hell up. But even just the fact that by any normal metric, the vaccine rollout was a complete unmitigated catastrophe.(...) Right?
• 47:47
  Tremendous number of people were injured.
• 47:49
  The thing had no positive effect on controlling the pandemic.
• 47:54
  It created all kinds of uncertainty about medicine. It embarrassed the profession.
• 48:00
  (...) Unmitigated disaster.
• 48:03
  Which did not dissuade the people who deployed it at all. They are going ahead full steam on reformulating as much of medicine on the mRNA platform as they can manage. They're not only reformulating on the mRNA platform, they are building out the platform. Self-replicating so-called vaccines are next on the list. Is that true? Yes.
• 48:25
  Good word, okay.
• 48:26
  So this is madness. These people are completely insensitive to any sort of embarrassment that might cause you to admit this was a mistake and to do anything differently.
• 48:38
  So. But you would expect, you expect that there's an emergency situation. We're gonna get some things wrong and learn from them. Right.
• 48:43
  How can you not? And when they don't, when they don't respond to the evidence that there's massive harm that they didn't anticipate, it means, well, maybe they did anticipate it and they just budgeted for it, right? So if you're in that vast camp in the middle where most people are, where they're not taking the shots anymore because they know something's wrong with them, but they don't very much like the sound of the conspiracy theorists who are trying to raise the alarm. So they're gonna remain agnostic and quietly not take the shots and hope that the whole thing goes away.
• 49:14
  Well, the answer is they're not done with you. They are planning to inject you with more of this stuff. Why would they? In the state of Washington, the governor just signed a law. I'm shocked that it got to the governor signing it without me knowing it was coming, but I heard about it from Glenn Beck in the aftermath.
• 49:30
  The governor just signed into law the right of the governor in the case of an emergency, of course, ill-defined, to mandate medical treatments. My state just signed into law a bill that allows the governor to decide whether or not I have to take a shot.
• 49:47
  And also we just saw the definition of an emergency is too many people hawking their horns.
• 49:53
  An emergency is whatever they needed to do.
• 49:55
  Right, no, but that literally was the Canada. We got the truckers hawking their horns. This is 9-11. Right. That law in Canada was passed for the sake of a 9-11 style emergency. And we could go through many different examples. My favorite one would be what happened to, you remember when the Department of Homeland Security released its memo on misdiss and malinformation? No.
• 50:23
  In COVID, it must have been 2022, I think. The Department of Homeland Security released a memo saying that misdiss and malinformation constituted terrorist threats. That's right. And you will remember, misinformation was mistakes.(...) Disinformation was intentional mistakes, and malinformation were things based in truth that caused you to distrust government. We're defined as terrorism. Now, I don't know if we were first to spot that, but we were very early in pointing that out, Heather and I.(...) But what people didn't get was, okay, that's funny at one level. Like you're gonna define two things as terrorism.
• 51:09
  I don't think it's funny at all.
• 51:10
  Well, it's not funny if you know that terrorism is not a normal word. It's a legal status, and it basically obliterates your constitutional rights.
• 51:20
  Once you've been defined in this category of engaged in terrorism or supporting some kind of-- You can be tortured. You can literally be disappeared from any street in the world without notice to anybody. You lose your habeas, corpus rights. You literally don't have any constitutional rights. You can be taken to a black site and tortured and the government can deny they have you, right?
• 51:42
  So at the point that the Department of Homeland Security is saying, if you are speaking online about true things that cause you to distrust government, you're a terrorist in our eyes, that is declaring war on reality, right? So once you see that, once you see that they're capable of with a straight face saying such a thing, you know, you have to get to the bottom of this, right? You cannot just fend it off for now, and I don't feel that much jeopardy at the moment, and maybe it will never happen again. No, no, no, they've retreated, they're regrouping, and they're going to come back, and we damn well better be ready.
• 52:17
  So what's fascinating about this is when you hear, a lot of people hear what you just said about the DHS, the enemy of terrorists, their eyes roll because it's like, all right, they didn't do anything with it, right? Which is true to a point.
• 52:29
  (...) Right, but then it reminds me of Rob Henderson's Four Steps,(...) because the four steps, the first step is, it's not really happening, then it's like, yeah, it's happening, but it's not a big deal, then it's a good thing, and then the people complaining about it are the problem.(...) So that's how you boil the frog. So what would happen is under this plan, a few people vanished, it would be like, here's Alex Jones, right? You know what, he paid more for saying Sandy Hook was a hoax than if someone actually killed the kids. Because wrongful death suits happen every single day. OJ Simpson had to pay money for the wrongful death of Nicole Brown Simpson and the guy who got it, Ron Goldman, and it was nothing compared to what Alex just made. So for example, okay, Alex Jones said something egregious and complete rustling, okay, that's fair, if that's your opinion, but it's just Alex Jones. Then a few more people, then it's like, okay, then it's like, well, all these people are causing this terrorism,(...) you gotta do something about it, and then it's like, you're the one complaining, you're encouraging them, you're the problem.
• 53:33
  That's how it works. It's systemic.
• 53:36
  It's a process. It's a process, it's a plan, and it works. And that means,(...) at some level, we are in the state of-- But can I say, here's another, I'm sorry, just here's an example where everyone can look in their own lives and our histories, how this worked, the term racist.
• 53:51
  The term racist used to be, I show up to Bret to work for Bret, Bret looks at me, I'm wrong skin color, we're not hiring you, get out. And everyone in America at this point is like, that's horrible, that cannot be allowed to happen, that's just disgusting. Then it becomes, oh, you didn't know, I'm from another country, you didn't pronounce my name correctly, or you were on the elevator and I didn't get on the elevator with you for whatever reason. And the term, or if I'm a CrossFit, a gay health company, and I don't have the black square for Black Lives Matter during riot month, somehow I'm racist. And that term had become used just to mean anything I don't like. So the same thing with terrorism in this case, it's just like, you're saying something I don't like, I'm putting you in the same box as Muhammad Ali.
• 54:36
  Yeah, it's literally what happened is,(...) there was a thing called terrorism, and then the idea is, oh, well, if you're gonna allow me special rights anytime something's in that category, then I'm gonna take that category and I'm going to extend it to be completely meaningless, and that is what happened.
• 54:55
  One of the reasons I'm an anarchist, and I argue this with conservatives all the time, I go, there is nothing you can put, because they think like sovereign citizens, they think there's nothing you can put in writing that will bind the hands of people who aren't acting in good faith. When the Constitution says, shall pass no law, oh, well, except for political speech. What are you talking about? You're basing this out of nowhere.
• 55:20
  So if their definition of terrorism would just very quickly be someone I don't like, and who are you, because if you have their own judges who are gonna adjudicate it, it happened in Canada, yep, you're right.
• 55:32
  Yeah, well, in fact, the NDAA of 2012, which is a giant omnibus bill that we pass every year, the National Defense Authorization Act, had these two egregious provisions in it that allowed for the government to eliminate all of your constitutional rights, except maybe your Third Amendment right to not have soldiers in your house,(...) based on the executives'(...) unchecked declaration that somebody was a terrorist. So it basically created an emperor.
• 56:07
  And when these provisions were challenged, the Obama administration actually argued that it didn't matter because they already had that power.
• 56:20
  Strangely, they didn't even deny, they'd haul you off any street in the world and detain you indefinitely.
• 56:28
  But the key thing is this becomes tyrannical(...) based solely on whether people accept it. In other words, under ordinary circumstances, our system has a check, which is-- The Second Amendment.
• 56:46
  Well-- That's the check. That's the point of the Second Amendment.
• 56:48
  That's the real check. Yes. But the other check is supposed to be a court has to decide whether that interpretation is correct. But if I say that actually once you're a terrorist, then you don't have a right to access to the court, then the point is, well, that becomes tyranny as soon as the people who do the hauling you off the street accept that a court doesn't get to check it.
• 57:08
  And I would ask people listening to this, do you have any doubt that if Officer Harris or Hillary Clinton was in court with you and was asked, do you think members of the NRA are terrorists, that they would say yes legally? Right, of course they would. Of course they would, I'm sorry. They would pause for a second.
• 57:25
  Right.(...) I mean, you know-- And that's the NRA. They're the milquetoast ones.
• 57:30
  Right. So, you know, I mean, remember that in May of 2023, I would-- no, May of 2023, it is May of 2025. Yes. I mean May of 2017,(...) I was, for a brief moment,(...) hauled onto YouTube as a vile racist. Is that right?
• 57:47
  Oh, yeah, of course.
• 57:48
  Yeah, the whole story.
• 57:49
  The whole story that brought me to public attention. So the point is that's how meaningless this definition is, right? If a liberal egalitarian is suddenly a vile racist, then you know the term has lost its meaning.
• 58:01
  And these definitional games end in tyranny, real tyranny. And you're right, the Second Amendment is the one unfudgable if people understand what it is and are willing to step up at the right moment, which it's not clear that they would be for reasons that we discussed at the beginning.
• 58:21
  You still regard yourself as an egalitarian?
• 58:23
  Well, it depends. I've heard that term challenged. And I guess the question is, depending on what the definition is, what I would say the definition is, the one that I resonate with.
• 58:33
  I'll ask you, I'll simplify it. Do you hold equality as a value, a high value for you?
• 58:38
  Quality of opportunity, level playing field.
• 58:41
  That's the communism, buddy.
• 58:43
  No, it isn't. Yes, it is.
• 58:44
  You know who came up with that term?
• 58:47
  You know who came up with that term? You tell me. Richard Eli, who was Woodrow Wilson's mentor, who founded the American Education Association, whose goal it was was to stop liberalism and to introduce socialist elements into the capitalist economy. So there's no such thing as equality of anything.(...) Wait, wait, wait. Hold on, let me finish my thought.
• 59:06
  OK. And what the goal should be for free loving people is maximizing opportunity.
• 59:12
  (...) Equality is of no utility in this context, or in any context, roughly.
• 59:17
  Well, I think you and I are stumbling over a definition. OK, let's go. Because my point is structurally equal access, that the structure cannot be biased.
• 59:28
  Why?
• 59:29
  Because-- Every structure is going to be biased to some degree?
• 59:32
  Yes, it is. So it is a standard to which we aspire. It is not a realistic endpoint.
• 59:38
  OK, so let me ask you-- let's take another question.
• 59:41
  Yeah.
• 59:41
  Which would you rather have? OK.(...) A house with-- the three people have houses. Yeah. So on this street, a house worth 50,000, 50,000, 50,000, right? Or on this street, a house worth 200, 250, and 40.
• 59:59
  Right. Which would you rather have?
• 1:00:00
  But this is a straw man.
• 1:00:03
  No, because people-- no, no, no, no, no.
• 1:00:04
  Jonathan Haidt asked this question. OK.
• 1:00:06
  And people chose A, a lot of them. Sure.
• 1:00:10
  That's what I'm asking you. It's not a straw man. What do you mean by straw man? I'm asking you.
• 1:00:15
  You think there's any chance in the world that I'm going to select A?
• 1:00:18
  Yes, because a lot of people do.
• 1:00:20
  But you know me.
• 1:00:21
  But you said you're a egalitarian.
• 1:00:23
  I'm not a commie.
• 1:00:24
  Well, I don't know, man.
• 1:00:26
  That's a lot of commies, too. No, I'm not. They said that in the 50s, too. They said that in the 50s, too, Brad. You got me. But let me explain what I mean so you understand how to model B better. OK. I think the-- Let in good style of bed.
• 1:00:44
  No, I've read enough of your book. You've listened to another thing.
• 1:00:49
  It's the same thing, man. I've had you read it to me. How's that? OK.
• 1:00:54
  I think inequality of outcome is excellent. Right.
• 1:00:59
  Right? OK. And inevitable.
• 1:01:02
  But forget inevitable. It is absolutely positive. It is what makes the system work. Yep. Right? I want a couple things.
• 1:01:10
  I want as close as possible to make any behavior that shrinks the pie unprofitable for the people who do it.
• 1:01:17
  Yep. OK? Right. And I want those who enlarge the pie to be rewarded appropriately. The more enlarging the pie they can do, the better they should live.
• 1:01:26
  They should have the good real estate, the best views. They should be the most impressive to potential mates. All that stuff.
• 1:01:33
  Great.
• 1:01:34
  So I love the inequality at the outcome stage where we've actually bought something with it, right? Where we've gotten people to put their minds to innovating in a way that makes us wealthier. That's what we should do.
• 1:01:44
  Yeah. Right? So what I'm interested in, though, for that to work, it works best when the maximum number of people have access to the market to play that game.
• 1:01:55
  Maximum. Opportunity. Not equal. Maximum.
• 1:01:57
  That's what I'm saying. Well, no. I am for equality of opportunity. No. You're for maximum opportunity. That's what I was just saying. That's not the same.
• 1:02:05
  No. I am for every person as a principal.
• 1:02:10
  I am for every person having access to the market. Right. But some are going to have more access than others.(...) That is a consequence I accept.
• 1:02:19
  OK, great. Yeah. Great. OK. Then you're not for equality from maximizing. No, no.
• 1:02:22
  I'm for equality of opportunity. But I'm not going-- it has to be we get as close as we can by making sure that the structure itself isn't biased.
• 1:02:32
  Are you in favor of limiting some opportunity to encourage more equality of opportunity?
• 1:02:39
  Oh, no. OK, then you're not for equality.
• 1:02:41
  No, I am for equality. That's what equality means. It's an objective.
• 1:02:46
  Here's an example of an opportunity for you to increase equality. You're saying no.
• 1:02:52
  OK, but you didn't ask me if it is my highest value.
• 1:02:57
  You asked me if I'm for it. And in principle, I am for equality of opportunity.
• 1:03:01
  Yeah, sure. But this is the kind of thing I talk about in my book, then you write.
• 1:03:04
  Nancy Pelosi can say with a straight face, in principle, she's for a balanced budget amendment. But she'll always pick these other four things first. So yeah, if you're for it, but you never actually activate for it, it's of no utility.
• 1:03:16
  No, I mean, again, I do think that's a bit of a straw, man. OK, go ahead. I am telling you that in my model, when the maximum number of people have access to the market, we collectively end up wealthier. Yes. Right? Because if you are occupied with something dumb that prevents you from getting to the market, then the point is whatever you would bring to our collective wealth generation project won't get brought.
• 1:03:42
  It's also the fact that we can't pick winners preemptively. In the same way, there was that leak-- please, I have the facts wrong in this one. My understanding is there's that leak in the Gulf of Mexico and there's some high school kid who came up with the idea of throwing tennis balls at it, whatever it was, that solved that leak. Point being, you never know a priori who's going to have the one with the great idea. That's why you have these brainstorming sessions. Like, throw out 99 stupid ideas, and we have one good one. This has been a huge success.
• 1:04:04
  Yeah, absolutely. OK. And frankly, I love the stories best, where it isn't the person who's-- Of course. It's the general question. Best in some mind-numbing education. Yes, yes. Yeah, I love it when it's somebody who comes from left field. And that's very American at its best. Yes. It is. And frankly, I think we've got the whole educational puzzle wrong in part because of our mythology that that's where intelligence comes from. The fact is, education has a purpose, but it's a supplement. You educate in a formal sense when you don't have a better opportunity.
• 1:04:35
  Education and intelligence is like money in class.
• 1:04:39
  Fill that in. Meaning you could have a lot of education, or you could have a lot of money. Doesn't mean you got a lot of intelligence or a lot of class. Yeah, well, that's true. And you could have very little money and have a lot of class, and you have very little education and have a lot of intelligence.
• 1:04:50
  In fact, you can be educated out of intelligence. Of course, yes. And that's a very common phenomenon.
• 1:04:56
  Yes, it's easy to train a smart dog than a dumb one.
• 1:04:59
  Yeah, well, so-- All right, I don't know where we-- We're talking about communism.
• 1:05:05
  (Laughing) It's a funny thing, is I was never sympathetic to communism. Apparently, yes, you were. No, I would, I really, you're sticking to that, even though I think we've gotten past it. We, oh, look at this, Commie-Speak, we. I thought we had an understanding about, are you still better about my not giving you directions to the premiere last night?
• 1:05:25
  I was crying at home. I could have been crying next to you.
• 1:05:30
  You could have been, you could have been. All right, let us sidestep the rest of that conversation.
• 1:05:37
  I think people got, but they need to-- They got the gist, yeah, all right. So what, I have a feeling we've had this conversation before, but it never quite satisfies.
• 1:05:48
  I know you to be a highly intelligent person and a very thoughtful person. You don't reach conclusions lightly or reflexively. What?
• 1:06:00
  No. Okay.
• 1:06:02
  No, but, so therefore, when you say that you are an anarchist, my mind throws an error.
• 1:06:09
  Okay.
• 1:06:10
  Okay, because I think there are fatal arguments against anarchism as I understand it.
• 1:06:21
  Now, when I say my mind's a fatal error, I'm not saying,(...) Michael, you got this wrong and I'm gonna tell you why.
• 1:06:27
  I'm saying something is off. Either my understanding of anarchism is off or my understanding of what you're saying when you-- Sure, sure, yeah. Can you fill in, what does it mean that you're an anarchist?
• 1:06:37
  Sure, anarchism, if it can be reduced to one sentence, is the thesis that you do not speak for me and everything else is application. So what it means, it's not like voting Republican, it's a worldview that regards political authority as always inherently illegitimate and everything else is just kind of application. Political authority-- Is always inherently illegitimate and everything else is extrapolation of that.
• 1:06:59
  Okay, so-- And I'll give you an example of how everyone to some extent believes this. Okay.(...) Let's suppose you like your weed, right? Let's pretend. You and I go to Singapore and there it's like, or what country where it's grossly illegal?
• 1:07:14
  Like Dubai, I think it's illegal there.
• 1:07:16
  And we're sitting there with some friend, he busts out a joint and we might ask ourselves, okay, what are they, as we're gonna get caught, what are the consequences, how likely is blah, blah, but at no point in your head will it be like, well, the government here says it's wrong, so I'm not gonna do it because of that, right? That's never gonna enter your head as consideration.
• 1:07:36
  Right, it's not wrong because the government here says it's wrong. If I think it's right back home, then I think the fact that the government here says it's wrong is annoying.
• 1:07:44
  Right, and it's certainly of no moral relevance. Yeah. That is the anarchist approach to law.
• 1:07:49
  Okay, so then I know where the error that my mind is throwing is. Okay.
• 1:07:54
  You agree with me that it's bad that people who shrink the pie can walk away with an increased slice?
• 1:08:04
  Sure. Okay.(...) Does your, to reconcile those two things, does that mean that you are against shrinking the pie to enlarge your slice in principle, but you would not allow any structure(...) to neutralize the profitability of shrinking the pie?
• 1:08:26
  I think what I would say is government is the most effective method that people use to shrink the pie because if you do have free enterprise and certainly if you have the free exchange of information, it is very difficult to have that kind of closed system. You need those cops to make sure that, A, the bad people aren't punished, and B, that the good people aren't rewarded.
• 1:08:51
  So the leftist argument against capitalism is something I think is more true than conservatives want to admit.
• 1:08:58
  And what they mean by that, because people hear what they want to hear now, what someone said is, historically speaking, and there is an enormous collusion between corporate America and government, and they basically feed off each other. And this is an example of pie shrinking, is that you make sure those regulations are in place, that I, Exxon, or Fis or whoever, can maintain my share of the pie, and make the cost of entry almost impossible, if that literally illegal for other companies. Okay.
• 1:09:28
  Now, I'm struggling for the right example.
• 1:09:35
  It seems to me that there are lots of instances where, so I think what you're arguing is that a malignant governmental structure is the most effective way of transferring wealth from others to you, and in the case of shrinking the pie, I think it's indisputable though, you know? Yes, a malignant government. So maybe it's impossible to have anything but a malignant.
• 1:10:07
  Correct.(...) And by the way, some are certainly more relevant than others.
• 1:10:10
  That's indisputable.
• 1:10:11
  But what do you do with something like one of these massive pork producers that have these lagoons of pork feces, and they decide that the way to inexpensively deal with the lagoon is to atomize it into the air, destroying the health and quality of life of adjacent neighborhoods.
• 1:10:37
  But that's the whole point. Like right now, this should be a tort.
• 1:10:41
  Like this is very, if I go to your Bret's house, and I set off like a stink bomb, it's not like, well, oops, sorry.
• 1:10:49
  This is much worse than a stink bomb. If I set off something that's causing you, and it's very quantifiable and AROB, the government is protecting these people and consequences.
• 1:10:59
  Right, but in a world with no government, But you would still have resolution disputes.
• 1:11:07
  How?
• 1:11:08
  You have arbitration right now.
• 1:11:11
  Why does the pork producer have to submit to it?
• 1:11:14
  Hold on. First of all, you would have to have banks. The banks, right now, if you and I have a dispute, right? And you say, and I win, and you're like, I'm not paying you, I can just go to your bank and get it. eBay right now is a great example of this. I can buy sneakers from somewhere, I don't know the guy's name, literally. I don't know where he lives.
• 1:11:34
  We have a dispute, eBay resolves it.
• 1:11:37
  Yep.
• 1:11:38
  First of all, it's resolved quickly, it's resolved efficiently, so on and so forth.
• 1:11:42
  I don't know, there's never gonna be utopia. Right. Right, that's my point. So if you're going, if not saying you, what's interesting when you have a radical philosophy is they compare the radical philosophy to utopia and say, oh, you're a failure because you're not giving us utopia, but when you're dealing with reality, it's just like, well, what are you gonna do? So there's always going to be externalities, and how do you deal with them? At a certain point, maybe it's gonna be violence. I don't know. How much are people willing to put up with it?
• 1:12:10
  I agree that there's always gonna be externalities, and I also believe that our system, whatever it is, has to be diminishing returns aware, which is to say that there's a point at which the sweet spot is to accept the imperfection that you've got because any attempt to cure it is gonna make things worse.
• 1:12:29
  Right, right, right. But in the case of the pork producer.
• 1:12:34
  Let's forget anarchism for a second.
• 1:12:35
  Okay.(...) What would you do right now with the government to solve this problem?
• 1:12:40
  How would I cure the malignancy of the government?
• 1:12:44
  How would you cure the malignancy of the pork producer?
• 1:12:46
  The lagoons, what would you do? That's why I ask you. We get anarchism.
• 1:12:49
  I would make a law that says that you can't externalize the consequences of your animal husbandry onto an adjacent neighborhood.
• 1:12:59
  Yeah, but at a certain point, if it's being released into the air, it's going literally everywhere, right?(...) Sure.
• 1:13:05
  Are you just gonna bad pork?
• 1:13:06
  No, no, no. But let's put it this way.
• 1:13:10
  There are ways of raising pork that do not destroy the quality of life for adjacent properties. Okay.
• 1:13:18
  I would hold you to that, which is going to change the price of pork. Okay.(...) So my point is there's a cost being paid for the pork. Sure. The idea that it's the people who happen to live next door to the farm doesn't make any sense. Sure.
• 1:13:31
  They didn't do anything wrong. Why should they be punished? Correct, I agree with you. Why should they be subsidizing the pork that you're eating somewhere else?
• 1:13:37
  So yes, we should regulate in such a way.
• 1:13:41
  But I don't think it's even regulate. I think, forget anarchism, under the current system, if you're next to me and you are causing harm to me in my home, you should be bankrupted. Yeah.
• 1:13:53
  But that's not happening now.
• 1:13:55
  Oh, I agree.
• 1:13:56
  This is where we're hanging up then.
• 1:13:58
  Our government is utterly malignant.
• 1:14:02
  But this is where I disagree with you.
• 1:14:05
  Because I think our government is almost as benevolent as the government you're gonna find in the face of this earth.
• 1:14:13
  But I think, no, I think you diagnosed it better earlier when you were saying that-- Joe, wait, just say, wait, if I'm saying is the best on this earth, doesn't mean it's good. Right. Someone could be five foot four and be the tallest guy in the room. Right, least bad.
• 1:14:25
  Yes. Yeah. But what I'm struggling with is when you say that you're an anarchist, it sounds to me like you think that we would be better off with effectively no structure.
• 1:14:36
  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, okay.
• 1:14:38
  Okay.
• 1:14:39
  This is, people get hung up, thank you for bringing this up. People get hung up, that's all the time.
• 1:14:45
  Governments are very bad at providing structures because they're providing them with force. Let me give you examples of anarchist structures. Cuisine,(...) language, physics, music. These are all structures where there's no president of music.
• 1:15:01
  It's sometimes even fun when you don't have someone in charge because you could be the old school French chef, it's not a bullion base unless it's herring and I could be the new American go, I'm making a bullion base of salmon and you might hate me because it's not an effing bullion base and I'm like, no, no, this is how it is but it's fun because there's no governing authority. So these are structure and these kind of structures which are made voluntarily by literally millions of people over thousands of years are far stronger and far easier to resolve disputes than something when you introduce the state.
• 1:15:35
  Amen, brother. Oh, okay, great. Well, but let's figure out why I'm saying amen.
• 1:15:40
  Because my feeling is, if you say, are you a socialist? I'm not a socialist.
• 1:15:46
  I don't know, a wild opportunity, man.
• 1:15:48
  That's kind of teasing.
• 1:15:49
  Yeah, I know you are. But here's the thing, am I in favor of socialism as an ingredient? Yes. What does that mean? It means that there are places where you need a little bit.
• 1:16:00
  I'm in favor of the fire department. I like being able to pick up the phone and get 911 to come.
• 1:16:05
  But Bret, why does that have to be through the government?
• 1:16:09
  It doesn't. And in fact, in the early colonies, we had a different system in which you had to buy a service.
• 1:16:16
  Why do you, okay, this is where, okay.
• 1:16:19
  Let's talk about the cops.
• 1:16:21
  Yeah.
• 1:16:21
  Okay.
• 1:16:23
  Security is like the most important thing, right? So people understand when you have a monopoly and you're not any good or service, it's expensive, no accountability, and there's less of it.
• 1:16:34
  When governments have monopoly on food, you have famines, right? So we saw very clearly in 2020, when the police just decided, you know what? We're not gonna enforce the law. We're gonna stand down.
• 1:16:47
  And when a kid is like, I'm gonna protect this gas station, he's the one hauled in front of the courts. I made an example of. These are the dangers of having a monopoly on security.
• 1:16:57
  And the idea that only governments can provide security is demonstrably false.
• 1:17:00
  See, it's very clever of you to have shifted from the fire department to the police.
• 1:17:06
  The fire department's, we need,(...) it's not even clever because how many times you call the fire department?
• 1:17:12
  Very rarely. Right. But security is something we all have to deal with day to day.
• 1:17:16
  Right, but-- That's a bigger concern. But that's not the test of whether or not socialism as an ingredient is useful,(...) right? Can we agree that salt is a useful ingredient, but very sparingly-- No, I'm not moving on to this one.
• 1:17:29
  No, no, I'm coming back. Okay.(...) Salt is an ingredient. It's very easy to use too much of it.(...) Sure. Okay. So salt is an ingredient. I'm claiming socialism is an ingredient that needs to be used very sparingly, but there are places where it is useful. And I'm arguing that the fire department is a demonstration of one such place.
• 1:17:47
  First of all, you're not arguing that because you have never used the fire department.
• 1:17:50
  You don't know that. I said I don't use it regularly.
• 1:17:52
  Fine.
• 1:17:54
  I and most people listening to this have almost never used the fire department.
• 1:17:57
  Because it would be insane for anyone to say, I'm going to not take as many steps as possible to prevent fires in my home.
• 1:18:05
  I'm just gonna rely on this fire department. I agree with you that fire departments are necessary. And I agree with you that it's the cost of benefit there. It's like, I gotta pay five bucks a month to make sure that when I call 911, guys are gonna be here right away.
• 1:18:18
  That's something we all need. We're on the same page. Perfect, same page. That said,(...) it's crazy to insist(...) that only a government can provide this very easy service. And we see what happened.
• 1:18:29
  Hold on, let me finish. Hold on, you said socialism. That's why.
• 1:18:32
  Yeah.
• 1:18:32
  Let me finish. You see what happens in California when it's the government's jobs, I'm not kidding at all. Oh, I know.
• 1:18:38
  To prevent fires. Yeah. So I can't even wrap my head around the idea that you think this has to be done through the state.
• 1:18:47
  No, no, look, first of all, you're a reasonable guy. I'm a reasonable guy. We mostly know. I'm not. Oh, okay, I'm a reasonable guy enough for both of us.
• 1:18:55
  Fair.
• 1:18:56
  But I think what's going to happen here, because I do think you're reasonable, is that we're gonna discover that a lot of the stuff that seems like it doesn't fit actually kinda does fit. Sure. So it sounds to me like you are in favor of the fire department.
• 1:19:09
  Yes.
• 1:19:09
  I'm in favor of the fire department.
• 1:19:11
  Right. Do you agree that it is socialist? No.
• 1:19:14
  I agree if the government provides it socialist. Okay, so.(...) Okay. But I mean, can you not see a private alternative? That's very easy to do.
• 1:19:22
  Can I see-- You just said yourself that you see private alternatives. This is why I don't understand you're insisting on being socialist.
• 1:19:27
  No, I said,(...) if I remember the conversation correctly, what I said was that a private alternative is conceivable, and then in fact, we had it.
• 1:19:37
  No, you're talking about that. We had it by some way of saying yes. Right, so yes, of course it's conceivable. And it could work. But it has worked.(...) Yeah, but how well did it work?
• 1:19:47
  A better than California.
• 1:19:50
  Go back to my point about malignant government.
• 1:19:53
  Okay.
• 1:19:53
  Look, I don't know what's going on in California. Part of me thinks that the inhospitability of the state-- I know some wildfires. I know it for me, but that's part of it. Okay.
• 1:20:04
  Part of me thinks that something is unnatural about the level of dysfunction.
• 1:20:09
  Right, we're on the same page. Very clearly.
• 1:20:13
  Ayn Rand said mistakes in this magnitude are never made innocently. Right.
• 1:20:16
  Right, yes. What this is, whether this is a real estate scheme or something else, I don't know.
• 1:20:22
  The reason I was pivoting toward the cops is because fires are emergencies that most people, God willing, very rarely have to deal with them, right? Security, especially in big cities, is something people have to worry about 24-7. So that's a much more dated, something you think about all the time as opposed to how often you think about fires. Hopefully never.
• 1:20:40
  Right, but the only point that I was trying to make was that there is an ingredient called socialism that like salt is very easy to overdo. I would never argue for a menu of salt,(...) right? That's not a meal. Okay. So my point is I want salt involved. I don't want more salt than is good, but I do think salt is necessary.
• 1:21:02
  But the example you used is an example of it being necessary.
• 1:21:07
  Fair, it's not necessary.
• 1:21:09
  Right. I think it's superior.
• 1:21:11
  Based on what?
• 1:21:13
  Based on the fact that it mostly, over the course of my lifetime, the fire department has worked very well.
• 1:21:24
  I mean, for one thing, the fire department isn't just trucks and handsome dudes. Sure, sure. It's also fire hydrants and water that show up at the right place when your house is on fire.
• 1:21:34
  Sure, that's correct, right.
• 1:21:35
  But the point being, there was this episode of The Simpsons, and Lisa goes, "Look, I've got this rock.
• 1:21:43
  It keeps away bears." And Homer goes,"I'll give you 50 bucks." And goes, "Dad, this is specious, this one's talking specious reasoning. It's just a rock, doesn't keep away bears." He goes,"Hundred dollars." She's like, "All right." As she gets to the rock. So you're saying the fire department works when it's never had to been used. It's not a good example. And to say it works superior, you'd have to have data from this other universe. Okay, I grant you-- So that's why I'm saying cops are a better example, because that's something we have a lot more data on.
• 1:22:12
  So let me ask you a question. Yes. And I don't mean to straw man you. Okay, sure.
• 1:22:16
  But if it was yours to say, would you eliminate the public fire department in the hope that a proper alternative would arise?
• 1:22:29
  Wait, wait, eliminate a how?
• 1:22:33
  I would eliminate everything.
• 1:22:34
  Decommission it. I would eliminate everything. That said, I would take steps to be like, "Hey guys, we're decommissioning these fire departments."(...) The thing is you could just privatize those very easily. The building's already there.
• 1:22:46
  Right, so effectively,(...) I'm gonna give your argument the strongest shot it has.
• 1:22:52
  You've got the post office.
• 1:22:54
  Sure. You've got FedEx, UPS, DHL, and it could be, you don't want the chaos of the post office just putting up a closed permanently sign. Sure.
• 1:23:06
  You have some off-ramp in which the other private companies take up the slack.
• 1:23:12
  It's not even, the thing is, you might know, people might not know, it's illegal to deliver first class mail unless you're the post office. They have a monopoly. Oh yeah. And people hear this, it's crazy because there's no reason, literally right now, the UPS can't do the job.
• 1:23:26
  Right, but okay, so let's say-- Or Amazon, so you can have an example.
• 1:23:29
  Again, I'm trying to give you your argument as much generosity as I can. Sure.
• 1:23:35
  You allow the big parcel companies to hire the people that just lost their job at the post office to buy the vehicles, whatever it is that they want, maybe buy the buildings.
• 1:23:50
  And then, what if you get collusion amongst those parcel deliverers to jack up the price?(...) Okay.
• 1:24:03
  So, suddenly the service becomes unaffordable.
• 1:24:07
  Okay, let's talk about, forget Atticism.
• 1:24:09
  Okay.
• 1:24:10
  Forget Atticism, Atticism's on the table.
• 1:24:11
  Right now, FedEx, UPS, and DHL get in a room. And like, all right guys, this is what we're gonna do. Anyone wants to deliver a package overnight, it's gonna be $1,000.(...) What would be the result of that?
• 1:24:24
  Well, it doesn't work because you've got the post office which allows you to-- Let's post office, not also, okay?
• 1:24:29
  So, you just managed the post office?
• 1:24:31
  No, no, forget Atticism. So, we got the post office and DHL and UPS. We go to the post office. No, no, no, no, they're all sitting there. Hold on, let me finish.
• 1:24:40
  The five of them, sit down, they go from now on.
• 1:24:43
  What is the incentive of the post office to do that?
• 1:24:46
  Just can you work with me? Sure.
• 1:24:49
  They're saying, we're gonna sit down and from now on, if you wanna deliver a package through one of us five, it's gonna be $1,000. What would happen next?
• 1:24:57
  Some other company pop up.
• 1:25:00
  Right.(...) But, no, but I mean, look, we've seen this game with pharma, right? But pharma is very, very intertwined with the state. Understood.
• 1:25:11
  But the reason that DHL and FedEx and UPS are not conceivably going to collude is because the post office is there and works well enough.
• 1:25:22
  I don't think that's necessarily true at all. It's because that, like you just said, that other company is gonna come in and take literally all their business.
• 1:25:28
  But, no, there are barriers to entry. In this case, the question of how you can create an entity.
• 1:25:35
  Well, this happened already historically.
• 1:25:36
  Oh, by the way, let's talk about it.
• 1:25:37
  There's somebody named Les Sanders-Spooner and one of his essays in the anarchist handbook. And he had a private mail delivery service. It ran from New York to Philly. Framed in my house as one of his envelopes with a stamp that he used, the American mail company was called. And he was undercutting the US Postal Service. And the law said, well, because the Constitution says the government is allowed to create post services, and therefore it means only the government can do it. And they sued him and sued him and sued him. They ran him out of business. There's no reason right now why that should be made illegal.(...) Yeah. Okay.
• 1:26:07
  Yeah, there's no reason that should be illegal.
• 1:26:10
  But, so I feel like what you're doing is you are pointing to the vast collection of governmental abuses as if they invalidate the possibility of government being effective. And maybe they do, but I'm not convinced that no matter how many examples you come up with of cases where the government is disrupting function, that they invalidate the idea that sometimes government is the right and only solution to a problem.
• 1:26:44
  But, right now we've talked about fire department. You agreed we could have another alternative post office.
• 1:26:50
  I agree that another alternative is possible. We haven't established that it's preferable.
• 1:26:53
  But the point is it's possible. You talked about the post office. You said right away someone could do that privately. So where is it that only government is that you said only? So where, find me the space where government is the only answer.
• 1:27:05
  Okay, how about the protection of fisheries?
• 1:27:10
  Okay, let's talk about this, because I'm not familiar with the protection of fisheries. So please, here's how to do it.(...) Isn't that the case right now where certain entities have ownership over bodies of water?
• 1:27:23
  Or fishing rights? No, we have actually anarchy in the open oceans.
• 1:27:29
  And the result is the collapse of populations of fish because there's no disincentive for bycatch. Well, I know a lot about marine life. So there's something that means a lot to me. One of the things that, forget anarchism, okay, or whatever. We have governments and they're not stopping this, right? The best way to stop this is through the culinary industry, through the restaurant industry and through education. Because there's certain species of fish that become taboo to have because like the Patagonian tooth fish where they call it black, what's the best name, they have another name for it. I forget what it's called.
• 1:28:09
  I don't know this fish.
• 1:28:10
  Yes, you do. They have a nice thing for it. It's really called the Patagonian tooth fish, right? Patagonian tooth fish.
• 1:28:16
  Right, but it's called-- What kind of fish is it? What's the easiest fish to cook? It's very buttery, it's white.
• 1:28:23
  Should I get my phone out, is that okay?
• 1:28:24
  Yeah.
• 1:28:25
  It's on every menu.
• 1:28:27
  Every menu, you're talking about the halibut?
• 1:28:31
  No, no, halibut's a flat fish.
• 1:28:33
  I know it's a flat fish. Matt is indicating that you must have meant halibut, so-- I did not mean halibut.
• 1:28:38
  It's, they gave it a culinary name.
• 1:28:48
  We're gonna feel stupid in two seconds.
• 1:28:50
  Yeah, you better believe it. It is really known as Chilean sea bass.
• 1:28:58
  I was gonna say that, but that's too exotic. Chilean sea bass is literally, is actually Patagonian tooth fish. They gave it a nice name, it's not a bass at all.
• 1:29:05
  It's a deep sea fish.
• 1:29:09
  It's over fished, it's low reproduction rate, it's maturity a long time. The point is, what they did with that is, ethical, you go to a restaurant, when they have Chilean sea bass, ethically farmed, right? There was a huge movement, we got guys don't get this, we're destroying them, so on and so forth. That is the only effective mechanism in our system that's going to stop this.
• 1:29:30
  Doesn't work, doesn't work. For one thing, in the absence of a structure, what's to stop you from just labeling-- What's stopping it now?
• 1:29:38
  Nothing, but the point is, it's nothing because we have anarchy in the sea.
• 1:29:42
  Okay, so again, forget anarchism.(...) What is your answer?
• 1:29:47
  International agreements.
• 1:29:48
  Sure, another example of anarchism, what anarchism is, is where everything is property rights. So what I would very easily do is, if someone is a fish organization, so on and so forth, they homestead that area of the ocean, and they say no one can fish here.
• 1:30:06
  Who is this?
• 1:30:06
  You have some endangered species organization, or conservation organization, they get ownership or husbandry over a certain area, and they just say no one's fishing in here. You have preserves right now.
• 1:30:20
  This is what you're not like. Okay, and so what stops somebody from warlording and setting up a strip across which some species migrates and holding that species hostage?
• 1:30:31
  What's stopping them, forget anarchism, what's stopping them now? What's stopping them from warlording the government, in your opinion?
• 1:30:39
  Oftentimes there's no difference, but there's a big difference to me of good governance, which works but is unstable. So is a warlord just a negative governance?
• 1:30:51
  Yeah, it's malignant. It's governmental power exerted(...) for the profit of individuals.
• 1:30:58
  We're gonna take anarchists off the table again. This is an issue right now, because many see some migratory, and you have business interests,(...) and that pupfish doesn't have access to lobbyists,(...) and the developers do, and it's like screw this pupfish that is only in these two ponds,(...) two watering holes. We gotta put up condos, right? This is a problem right now. So the issue is you have to have someone have that area where the pupfish live and designate it as, we're not building anything here, and you have to have education. These don't think two things that preserve any things that are of value, and this is not an anarchism issue either, because unless you have people, one of the issues with government is, if five people care about this thing, and everyone else doesn't, a lot of times they're gonna get their way because they're much more invested. So the only way to take care of any of these species is that people care more about wildlife, which I strongly encourage, and to have activism.
• 1:31:59
  So I'm now seeing our disagreement with greater clarity. I don't think we have almost any examples of non-malignant government on Earth today. Okay, great.
• 1:32:13
  Welcome. Right. So the problem is that that's-- Welcome to anarchism. No, that sets the bar artificially low for anarchism, because effectively you're competing with a predatory entity disguised as a public-spirited entity.
• 1:32:27
  I'm gonna take this as a clip, beautiful.
• 1:32:28
  Okay, well good. But this is what I wanted to happen, is to figure out, I'm sure we agree on almost all of this. The question is, in the end, does anarchism provide any stable, functional alternative to government, or is the right alternative to figure out how to stabilize good governance?
• 1:32:46
  I think any stable structure is an anarchist structure. I think people working voluntarily with shared goals is the definition of what makes a stable structure.
• 1:32:58
  Right, but there's, I mean, you will be well aware of all of the collective action problems in game theory, multi-color traps.
• 1:33:07
  Absolutely, but those apply in any system. They do. Yeah. Right, but the point is-- Again, I'm not promising utopia.
• 1:33:14
  Believe me, I think utopia is the worst idea humans ever had. Sure, sure. But I do believe in good governance, I believe in diminishing returns, and I believe in setting objectives that are in the right direction and not imagining that you're gonna get all the way there on any of them.
• 1:33:27
  Sure, but I don't think governance(...) is a function necessarily of the government, because if we all-- Agreed.
• 1:33:34
  Me, you and Bobby, and Angela, and a bunch of people were like, all right, we wanna make this wildlife preserve, so on and so forth, it doesn't have to be through the state. We could just own it and be like, this is gonna be hands off, and this is the one place where this fish lives, and we're gonna guard in perpetuity.
• 1:33:51
  Right, but a lot of goods are effectively public.(...) Like what?
• 1:33:59
  The seas, the atmosphere.
• 1:34:00
  Sure, these are, one of the things that drives me crazy about libertarians, because I know a lot about,(...) I know way too much about zoology. So the argument is, okay, this species is endangered, just put in a zoo or breed it, and it's just like, and I go down the list about how you can't keep great whites in captivity, we don't even know how they reproduce.(...) There's billions of, maybe it's not billions, but millions of species in literally every, ecosystem on Earth, and some of them transnavigate the globe, and the idea that you can just put them all in a box, and they'll be happy, is just completely-- It's ludicrous, I mean, and for one thing, it's almost DOA for any bird or mammal, because the point is part of what that creature is, is the culture about how to survive in its actual habitat.
• 1:34:48
  But the other point is, even with government, a good government like you want, that good government is only gonna be good as long as the population is informed and cares, right? And it is a lot easier, if a population is informed and cares, to be like, we're gonna make a wildlife reserve, and privately take our steps, then wait years and years for some lobbyists, and fight the real estate industry. All right, well-- And that's happening in Africa, like the elephants went from doing very poorly, and now they have to cull them.
• 1:35:23
  Right.
• 1:35:25
  So I think where I come out on this is, my argument in favor of good governance is not an argument for more governance. I want to see as little governance as possible to solve the problems that can't be solved more elegantly the other way. And it's not a, I in no way disagree with you, in that many of the best features of life are the ungoverned features, whether it's language, or food, or music.
• 1:35:55
  And just to point out, ever listening to this, all those things do have rules. They're not chaos.
• 1:35:59
  Right, I'm not, yeah, yeah. Just people listening, yeah. I don't understand that, I don't think this is a chaos issue. I think self-governance is best where it works, but it runs into problems when you scale things up across many domains that we can't afford to surrender.
• 1:36:14
  Right, but that's also the issue with government.
• 1:36:17
  Government-- When you scale up, when you want to get this issue-- I think your strongest point in favor of anarchism is that government makes the exact problems I'm trying to solve worse when it becomes malignant. And I don't have a credible answer for how you prevent malignancy.
• 1:36:33
  Sure, and you also point out that all governments so far on Earth are malignant.
• 1:36:37
  At the moment, they are all malignant.
• 1:36:38
  Yes, I believe so. I do not believe that has always been the case. Okay.
• 1:36:43
  So, you know, and as I was hoping, it does leave me with a real question, because I don't see an alternative to advocating for as limited and elegant a governance structure as can be produced.
• 1:37:00
  But the only thing that limits governments is guns.
• 1:37:04
  I agree that the Second Amendment may rival the first for its importance to maintaining a free society, absolutely. So I believe that.
• 1:37:17
  You know, it may be the only credible answer to a watch the watchers is that ultimately we have to maintain the right to look out for ourselves. People have to have consequences, yes. Yeah, people have to have consequences.
• 1:37:29
  Why wouldn't they? If I do something bad, I got away, if I steal from your store and nothing happens, I'm gonna do it again, why wouldn't I?
• 1:37:36
  Right, and the fact is there are, you know, up to a fairly substantial size, you can have a community of people that self-polices. So it's not that I disagree that anarchy is-- By counterexamples, eBay.
• 1:37:54
  So this is a community of literally millions of people all over the world that is being policed and having arbitration and resolved in very peaceful way.
• 1:38:02
  But it's also effectively a demonstration of the power of governance. It's just that you decide to move to eBay.
• 1:38:10
  Sure. Right, so you decide to move to eBay and submit to its governance structure, which works great.
• 1:38:15
  Yes.
• 1:38:17
  So anyway, it's not clear to me that it is a demonstration of the power of anarchism more than it is a power of government demonstration.
• 1:38:25
  But eBay is not a government.
• 1:38:26
  It is, it's a de facto government.
• 1:38:28
  Well, no, you agree to participate in this market.
• 1:38:32
  That's anarchism, okay? If you are there voluntarily, if I go to Macy's, right, and Macy says, "You don't wear a shirt,"you can't come in here," Macy's is not a government. They can't tax me, they can't draft me, they can't do anything else, all they can do is refuse me to enter there, right? So eBay can kick me out, or since the agreement is they can take money in my bank to undo an exchange, but their powers are limited and finite, and they are in no sense of sovereign over me. Yeah, but I'm not so sure that this is-- I am so sure. If you're gonna sit here with a straight face and say eBay is a government, that term is you're not using that term in any specific way.
• 1:39:05
  I think it's a distinction without a difference. It's a big difference.
• 1:39:08
  A company town-- I told you the difference. eBay cannot draft you, eBay cannot tax you, eBay cannot come to your home and throw flash grenades in your baby's cribs that have no consequences.
• 1:39:16
  I'm not arguing that it is, obviously, you know, I'm on eBay, but I'm also an American. It's not like I surrendered my American citizenship, but I am submitting to the governance structure of eBay for the purposes of engaging in the behavior in the mind, and I can leave it anytime.
• 1:39:32
  (...) And yes, it is a more difficult affair when we're talking about governments that have a deeper power over you and a deeper capability.
• 1:39:42
  Is it your belief that any organization is a government?
• 1:39:46
  No, I don't think so.
• 1:39:49
  I believe any organization involves governance.
• 1:39:53
  Sure, correct.
• 1:39:54
  Yeah.
• 1:39:54
  So how is, can you give me an example of an organization that is not a government?
• 1:40:02
  Yeah, a choir.
• 1:40:06
  Okay, so that's a great example, right?
• 1:40:08
  Yeah, sure. Someone's running that choir, and if you're off, they can fire you. You can quit whatever you want. How is a choir not a government, but eBay is?
• 1:40:20
  Thank you.
• 1:40:24
  I would say that a choir, well, obviously, not obviously, I've never been in a choir, so I don't really know how they work, but the rules at the door, I believe, are a key feature of a government.
• 1:40:42
  But the choir's gonna have rules at the door.
• 1:40:45
  Does it? Yeah, you have to sing, you have to show up.
• 1:40:48
  Yeah, but I see, I think your point about the way music works, maybe choir was the wrong example, because I don't know enough about it.
• 1:40:57
  No, but we can expect a choir. A band.
• 1:41:00
  You got, there's five of us in the band. The Beatles.
• 1:41:04
  Okay, sure, well, clearly John's the king.(...) No, clearly John isn't the king.
• 1:41:08
  But the point is, but no, but my point is, I bet you the Beatles didn't have rules at the door.
• 1:41:14
  They did, because they kicked out Pete Best.
• 1:41:17
  No, no, of course, but was that because Pete violated some rule, and which one?
• 1:41:22
  But every band has people getting kicked out for violating the rules.
• 1:41:25
  Right, right, I think I've been-- Are you saying the band's a government?
• 1:41:27
  You and I have switched positions somehow. No, are you saying the band's a government?
• 1:41:29
  No, I'm saying the band isn't a government, because there are no rules.
• 1:41:32
  But no, we just agree that every band has some rules. No, there's reason.
• 1:41:36
  The band is an emergent structure, and the band gathers, and they say, "We gotta get rid of Pete, he's dragging us down." Okay, that's not like a,"Hey, there's a rule against--" Okay, let's take another example, because I think the rule is just not articulated.
• 1:41:49
  If me and you and a bunch of people are forming a band,(...) and rehearsals every Tuesday,(...) and someone does not keep showing up, and we get together, we're like, "Let's get rid of Sarah."(...) Are we a government?
• 1:42:03
  How is this even a question for you?
• 1:42:05
  Well, because you're looking for, here's why.
• 1:42:10
  Let me just say one more thing. Every group of people that engages in any kind of interaction are going to have rules emergent.
• 1:42:17
  Right, rules emergent is different than posted.
• 1:42:21
  Right, but rule, yeah, but rules-- And I prefer the emergent rules where they are sufficient to accomplish the goal.
• 1:42:27
  Sure, but my point is, you're never going to have any kind of, even mom and her kids, me and you right now.
• 1:42:34
  The point is, these are not all governments. Not every interaction is a government.
• 1:42:37
  I'm not, how are we not agreeing?
• 1:42:40
  Because eBay is a lot closer to this podcast than it is to the federal government. Oh, I don't think so. What power does eBay have over you?
• 1:42:48
  eBay has the power to exclude me from-- But you can exclude me from this podcast right now.
• 1:42:52
  Right, but if I exclude you from this podcast, I'm gonna do my part. You wish.
• 1:42:59
  It would be a total disaster. No. His viewers were zero, I've never seen such low numbers.
• 1:43:05
  Okay, I think here's the distinction, and we're gonna have to wrestle this another time. Okay, sure.
• 1:43:13
  A self-governing of the body. The fish, the human body? The human, any animal body. Okay, sure. Is a self-regulating system. Okay, okay. It is an emergent phenomenon. Sure, sure. Okay, that is different than a set of rules and obligations and opportunities that are explicitly laid out. Okay. So is that a sufficient distinction? I'm not sure we need the distinction you're looking for.
• 1:43:46
  We do need the distinction. No, hold on, let's agree why we might not. Okay.
• 1:43:52
  At what point does a pamphlet become a book?
• 1:43:56
  How many pages?
• 1:43:58
  I honestly, I'm not even kidding. I would say the difference between having a spine and having staples. Okay.
• 1:44:04
  That would be my difference.
• 1:44:08
  What's a spine?
• 1:44:09
  A spine is when the pages are glued together.
• 1:44:12
  So any glue at all?
• 1:44:14
  Glue at a level of thickness, yeah.
• 1:44:15
  Level, at what level of thickness? Well, it's visible. Visible, so I mean, you can do that with a staple.
• 1:44:22
  No, but you see the staples as a platform.
• 1:44:24
  Right, but I mean, you see where we're going.
• 1:44:25
  No, I don't, honestly.
• 1:44:26
  Do you agree that rivers and, or valleys and mountains exist? I do agree.
• 1:44:32
  Are you doing Zeno's paradox here?
• 1:44:34
  Kind of, and not because I think it's useful, but because I think the point is, if we agree that a mountain and a valley exist, and we can't agree on exactly where you go from the mountain to the valley, that doesn't invalidate either concept.
• 1:44:47
  Fine, I tell you where I think your thinking is wrong. Okay. The difference between an organization and a government is whether this organization is recognized as legitimately allowed to use force on its members.
• 1:45:04
  So what does that do with Pete Best?
• 1:45:07
  Pete Best, the Beatles were not a government.
• 1:45:10
  So I agree that the Beatles were not a government.
• 1:45:13
  You before was, okay. So there, if the Beatles have rules and say-- I'm not sure that the Beatles did have rules.
• 1:45:21
  I think the Beatles probably got together and voted and decided, you know what, Pete's gotta go.
• 1:45:25
  But that rule would have to be, he's gotta, the rule is you have to play at a certain level or else you're out of the band.
• 1:45:31
  You think that there was an explicit level or Pete's dragging us down?
• 1:45:35
  I don't know enough about the Beatles, I'm sorry.
• 1:45:36
  I would guess it was Pete's dragging us down.
• 1:45:38
  Point being, okay, couple points. You agreed that any time humans get together, there are rules,(...) right?
• 1:45:47
  Yep.
• 1:45:47
  Because this is one of the big, not you.
• 1:45:48
  A lot of you have this on your own, you have no rules. Rules are always gonna be there.
• 1:45:52
  Right, whether they're a merchant or posted at the door.
• 1:45:55
  There is, in my view, and I think the view of most people, an enormous distinction between rules like, we're playing Scrabble, right? Triple-word scores here, this, so and so forth.
• 1:46:06
  There's rules in there and a state which can have no consequences of what it does to you, can tax you, can draft you, can imprison you, and so on and impose its rules on you. The imposition is a big difference. eBay can't force you to do anything that you did not agree to. Governments can.
• 1:46:30
  eBay can force you to do things within the confines of eBay.
• 1:46:34
  Right, but the point is you always have that exit.
• 1:46:36
  Yeah, I know, but you could also make this argument, it's not my argument because it's not my belief structure, but you could argue that earthly governments have power over your body but not your soul. So I think it's a similar kind.
• 1:46:50
  It's not similar to mine, what does that mean?(...) Well, it means-- Can eBay put me in jail?
• 1:46:55
  No. Can the federal government put me in jail?
• 1:46:58
  I'm not arguing there's no distinction between eBay and our government. The question is whether they both fall under the category of a government.
• 1:47:06
  Okay, so here's how we're gonna define government.
• 1:47:09
  If an organization can block you up(...) and not have any consequences for it, that is my definition of a government-- So what do you do with the company town?
• 1:47:18
  What do you do with a company town?
• 1:47:20
  So,(...) not my area of expertise, but a company town functions in the stead of a government, but it's a private entity.
• 1:47:28
  Or like an HOA.
• 1:47:30
  Yeah, like an HOA, exactly.
• 1:47:32
  So right now, forget anarchism. Anarchism is off the table.
• 1:47:36
  Thank God.
• 1:47:39
  We're in the same HOA.
• 1:47:40
  Yes.
• 1:47:41
  I hate Bret, him and Heather are blasting their hippie music till all hours, screw the Beatles. What are my options?
• 1:47:51
  I can either buy you out, I can move, I could pitch a fit the HOA, the board makes a decision.
• 1:47:57
  You can get in the way of my application for a permit to do something.
• 1:48:01
  But that's not the same as, hey, Bret's blasting music, I call the cops and you go to jail.
• 1:48:07
  I'm not arguing that your penalty of being thrown out of eBay is similar to going to jail, obviously.(...) And obviously you haven't chosen to live in eBay and not the US, so I'm not arguing that they're symmetrical. I'm just arguing they're both inside of a category, I think.
• 1:48:24
  But if this category is universal, I don't see the utility.
• 1:48:28
  Yeah, I don't remember it either. Okay.
• 1:48:32
  All right, Michael.
• 1:48:33
  For more about this, read the anarchist damn book available on Amazon.
• 1:48:37
  Yes, and actually, do you wanna talk for a moment about the White Pill before we close this episode out?
• 1:48:43
  No, I want you to finish it and I'll be happy to come back to the show assuming this bridge hasn't burned. No. I would discuss that, like, because it's a timeless story that's of great relevance.
• 1:48:53
  This is exactly what I was expecting this discussion to be like. It was wonderful and maddening at the same time as they seem to always be with you. Anyway, Michael, I appreciate you for that. And anyway, thanks for doing it.
• 1:49:05
  You are welcome.
• 1:49:07
  (Laughing) All right. Awesome.