Michael Malice - Is Anarchy The Answer? | Modern Wisdom Podcast 329

Michael Malice is an author, political commentator & podcaster. No matter your perspective, politics isn't working very well at the moment. The world is divided along more lines than we can count and the powers that be don't seem to have the electorate's best interests at heart. Is the solution just to tear it all down? Expect to learn why Michael refuses to vote, what the hardest question for anarchy to answer is, why a democracy doesn't give you choice, why I've been forgetting words recently, what we're going to do about our cancelled Russia trip and much more... Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy The Anarchist Handbook - https://amzn.to/2ReU6zH Follow Michael on Twitter - https://twitter.com/michaelmalice Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #michaelmalice #anarchy #politics - 00:00 Intro 00:38 The Anarchist Handbook 06:17 Why Michael Doesn't Vote 08:57 Anarchy & Objective Law 16:09 Difficult Scenarios for Anarchists 22:52 Creating the Anarchist Handbook 36:24 What's Wrong With Democracy? 38:24 Giving a Voice to Anarchy's Martyrs 45:52 Battling Cognitive Decline 54:24 The Bill & Melinda Gates Break-up 57:13 Social Media 1:04:21 Differences in UK & US Politics 1:21:55 Chris & Michael's Russia Trip - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

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

• 0:43Chris Williamson?

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

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• 2:33Chris Williamson?

  But now, it is time for the wise and wonderful, Michael Malice.

• 2:55Chris Williamson?

  Michael Malice, welcome to the show.

• 2:57Michael Malice?

  Thank you, sir.

• 2:58Chris Williamson?

  How are you, dude?

• 3:00Michael Malice?

  I'm phenomenally, doing phenomenally well.

• 3:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, me too, me too. This has been a very good week, I think, for both of us.

• 3:06Michael Malice?

  Oh, okay, we're talking about you now? Okay.

• 3:10Michael Malice?

  I see how it is.

• 3:12Chris Williamson?

  Where are you in the Amazon charts now? I know you've been crushing it recently.

• 3:15Michael Malice?

  I think I'm at thirty, I'm only thirty-nine. How embarrassing.

• 3:20Chris Williamson?

  Oh, no.

• 3:20Michael Malice?

  Of all books. Let's check right now. Let's look.

• 3:24Chris Williamson?

  Let's have a little look, yeah, exactly.

• 3:25Michael Malice?

  Let's, let's, let's check it out. Like Steve Brule says, so we're going here.

• 3:32Michael Malice?

  And we are at, let's look at, you on Amazon?

• 3:38Michael Malice?

  It is, duh, duh, duh, duh, thirty-seven. Oh, the shame.

• 3:44Chris Williamson?

  I know, done with the plebs.

• 3:46Michael Malice?

  The shame, I feel, I feel so embarrassed, yeah.

• 3:50Chris Williamson?

  Well, I love the idea of having an Amazon link, which is essentially a one word or a one URL answer to a question that you always get asked about anarchy.

• 3:58Michael Malice?

  Well, I get asked a lot, and this is what the whole point of the anarchist handbook was, so people could stop bothering me and read for themselves. No, you know, what happened was, when I first started doing this sort of thing, being a media personality, for lack of a better term, I always had a strategy. And my strategy was, say something interesting, or say something uninteresting in an interesting way. Because there's no shortage of these people who go on these shows, and you know exactly what they're gonna say, it's gonna be Republican talking points, Democratic talking points, you know, Tory talking points, Labour talking points. Unless it's Diane Abbott, then you definitely wanna watch it, because that's the best.

• 4:38Michael Malice?

  And at a certain point, you know, my platform increased, and I keep talking about anarchism, and people kept asking me, and I'm like, "I don't wanna explain all this, just do the homework, leave me alone." And at a certain point, I'm like, "Oh, people do care what I think." And I'm like, "Well, this is all the answers that they want to know about." There's a, you know, it's a collection of historical essays from all the prominent anarchists of the past. Well, I don't wanna say all, but the vast majority of them, so.

• 5:03Chris Williamson?

  Why do a collection of essays, rather than give your own interpretation of the philosophy and the way that the politics are put together?

• 5:11Michael Malice?

  I think it's a good way to give respect to those who have paved the way. I think there's some people in there who I've sort of rescued from the dustbin of history, who've been forgotten, and to be able to sort of redeem, people who died, you know, who murdered or killed for their views, to be able to bring that back. To also demonstrate, you know, showing versus telling. I could tell people that the black flag of anarchism comes in many colors, but it's another thing for them to read, and to see why these people may agree on certain things, but they are all over the map in terms of, you know, other things. So, I think, and a lot of them will say it better than I will.

• 5:54Michael Malice?

  It's, I'm not gonna outdo Lysander Spooner when it comes to his essay on the Constitution, so why even try? So, and, you know, maybe at some point, I will be able to do that book of my own, but I think it's premature and kind of superfluous.

• 6:12Chris Williamson?

  Why did you choose the name? Because there's The Anarchist's Cookbook, which is a very different sort of book. Why did you choose the one that you went for?

• 6:18Michael Malice?

  Um, I don't know. I just felt like it's felt like an organic.

• 6:21Chris Williamson?

  So it wasn't some subversive reference to something else?

• 6:24Michael Malice?

  I didn't even think of The Anarchist's Cookbook when that happened. It might have been a subconscious thing. Um, yeah, I guess is all I don't have a good answer.

• 6:33Chris Williamson?

  Got you. Who would you have put in that you couldn't?

• 6:36Michael Malice?

  Oh, uh, maybe Chomsky. I didn't think to put him in, uh, because he's less theory and more of application. I know Chomsky, probably the biggest names. Maybe a few, like some Christian anarchists or lefties, but it's already 365 pages and all like, there's no question all the major names are represented. So.

• 6:54Chris Williamson?

  What's the best definition that you've got for anarchy? Just elevate a pitch.

• 6:58Michael Malice?

  You do not speak for me.

• 7:02Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. I think is it, I've heard you say anarchism is the belief that citizenship is better when based on ideology than on geography.

• 7:10Michael Malice?

  Yeah. So that's the application of the principle, the, the concept of, you know, you and you might be on, I don't even know what cellphone companies they have over there. You might be on Big, Big Ben.

• 7:21Chris Williamson?

  Big Ben Network, yeah.

• 7:23Michael Malice?

  Yeah, you're on Big Ben.

• 7:26Chris Williamson?

  And you're on Morning Tea, Breakfast Tea.

• 7:29Michael Malice?

  Sure. I'm on High Piers. Uh, when we're calling each other, right? Um, one company is, I don't know how clear is the market. Does my company pay you? Do they split it? Is it the receiver is the caller? Uh, to have it, you know, if it, to have things based on geography as opposed to the individual, it's like your phone is attached to where you live as opposed to where you go. And if the ostensible purpose of the basic purpose of government, uh, which anarchists dispute is protection of a person and their person and property, uh, that would be the right wing anarchists would believe in property. There's no reason for that to be based on the physical. domicile as opposed to where that person goes that she followed and we have that in

• 8:12Michael Malice?

  a very poor sense today which is if someone's a tourist you know they're still under the protection of their home country if someone is a diplomat they're are not subject to the laws fully of the country where they're staying at they're still regard to sovereigns of where they used to be you see things like Julian Assange you know even though technically he's in in Britain he was still in the embassy which is not considered British soil because that's a legal arrangement so you know those are examples using governments about how this would apply but it would just be extrapolated fully as opposed to these one-off cases

• 8:47Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Why do you refuse to vote?

• 8:50Michael Malice?

  Well, there's an hesse about that that see this is exactly why I did the book so when people are like why do you refuse to vote I'll be like just buy the book uh but basically the premise is uh you know there's a few slogans don't vote it only encourages them but also I do not think that if you if I would vote I would have a right to complain because if I'm hiring a lawyer and that lawyer I'm saying speaks for me you know this person represents me if I'm hiring an accountant this person you know I'm outside I'm I am voluntarily granting them authority if I go and say I want this person to be my representative and they do they change their word which they will inevitably do I brother

• 9:33Michael Malice?

  I asked for it I said I want this person to represent me and I do not believe any politician does or can represent me

• 9:40Chris Williamson?

  So it's avoiding being complicit in the game?

• 9:43Michael Malice?

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

• 10:28Michael Malice?

  of democracy to put it mildly

• 10:30Chris Williamson?

  How do you feel then in the build up to an election when obviously you get asked a lot, I've asked you on this show, ideas and insights around the election? Is that, does that feel a little bit like playing somebody else's games? It feel a bit like, oh god, I just can't be bothered to even discuss this archaic institution?

• 10:46Michael Malice?

  No, no, no, not at all. It's the opposite. It's that it's I'm being able to discuss it without the facade, that this is some kind of noble endeavor.

• 10:55Chris Williamson?

  Because you've got no agenda.

• 10:56Michael Malice?

  That's why I do have an agenda, which is the destruction of the state. But it's also just exposing the manipulations and machinations of the parties, the corporate media, social media and all these other various figures. So it's, it's, it is of great interest and, and, you know, to, to watch how this sociologically plays out, even though I don't regard any of it as valid.

• 11:22Chris Williamson?

  What's your favorite essay from the new book?

• 11:25Michael Malice?

  I, John Hasness, who's a Georgetown University professor, he's alive. He gave me permission to do it. I would say that one because he talks about the myth of objective law. So, you know, the big sticking point for most people to make the full transition to anarchism is to have a legal system. And, you know, the argument is, okay, look, at the very base, we need to have a system of law where everyone can come together and have a base agreement. You can't do this, you can't do that. And his, being a law professor, he demonstrates that the idea of objective law is not only, does not apply in reality, it's literally impossible even in theory. That whenever you, he gives many examples of like, look, whatever this legal case is,

• 12:06Michael Malice?

  and these are, you know, not, these are just basic legal cases, like this person has a sweater, this one doesn't, or something like that, and they nail it to each other. You are going to have, whoever is adjudicating this process, they are going to bring their worldview to the judgment inevitably. So there's no reason why everyone has to be under the same principle of law. And I'll give you a great example, that's a, they'll be very easy people to solve. You and I are both eBay, we have an eBay exchange and you're supposed to mail it to me and somehow it gets lost in transition, right? So you can very easily imagine one legal system where you're the seller. It's your responsibility to get it to my hands. If you don't get it to my hands, I get my money back.

• 12:52Michael Malice?

  Another legal system, you could say, "Well, I sent it. My hands are clean. Take it up at the post office," right? Both of those scenarios, if they're explicated ahead of time, which one is right? Which one is just? They both make perfect sense. And there's no reason why you can't choose which system of rules will govern your behavior. Now, it gets much trickier when you're coming to things like violent crime and murder and things like that. And that's a kind of a separate issue that we can get into later. But in terms of regarding that there has to be one legal system with one set of rules that everyone has to follow is demonstrably false. Second, the claim, and literally any lawyer will tell you,

• 13:35Michael Malice?

  if objective law were possible, then you would know for a fact how that judge is going to rule in your case, right? If I buy something at the supermarket and it's expired milk, I'm getting a refund. You know ahead of time. But if this is a legal system, you have, not only do you have no idea of the outcome, you can be certain that the attorney's fees are going to be exorbitant and are going... This is why, how often are people involved in lawsuits? It's regarded as a nightmare, right? Because the claim is that equality in the law, even if you're very, very poor, you have to have access to this system of adjudicating disputes. But everyone knows,

• 14:18Michael Malice?

  poor people do not have access to lawyers and things like that. They'll have access to it if they're the defendant. They'll have a public defender, at least in the States. I'm sure probably the same thing in Britain. But in terms of a lawsuit, they do not have access to this service, which defenders of the government will say is crucially necessary to everybody.

• 14:38Chris Williamson?

  How would that be fixed in an anarchist society?

• 14:41Michael Malice?

  When you have, everything would be resolved. Look at, we have it fixed right now in terms of eBay, right? So right now you and I have a dispute and eBay steps in and either gives me the refund or says I'm out of luck, Chris sent the sweater. And it's, even if I don't get the answer I want, I at least don't have to buy a lawyer. And it's resolved in seconds. Anarchism is not utopia. There's still going to be theft, there's still going to be killing, there's still going to be missing sweaters in the mail. The difference is the resolution of these problems is going to be much more efficient, cheaper and much more conducive to peace as opposed to imposing judgments that entire portions of the population find to be abhorrent.

• 15:25Chris Williamson?

  That makes sense in a very binary scenario that's easily trackable, like an eBay situation.

• 15:30Michael Malice?

  Sure.

• 15:31Chris Williamson?

  If it was a more complex one, stuff to do with litigation in business law, business to business transactions, mergers, money taxes. What about that? Surely that's just equally complicated?

• 15:42Michael Malice?

  Sure. So it would be the same thing as going to a practitioner versus going to a surgeon, right? If you're going to have things that are that technically complicated, you are going to have some kind of higher level court system to resolve it. But again, even in that case, it's still going to be cheaper because there'll be competition and different firms that, we have that right now, again, private arbitration. Different private arbitration would have the capacity to compete in terms of efficiency. Now the question becomes, well, I don't, what if I don't respect the judgment of this private arbitration? That's when you have to, you have things like ostracism, things like credit scores and so on and so forth.

• 16:24Michael Malice?

  Having a bad credit score, which are done by, it's not Visa or Mastercard or, you know, American Express or Britain Express, I'm guessing you have, which are the ones who are kind of adjudicating the system, you have credit reports, right? And they tell both the credit card company and you what your credit score is. And they're saying, in my opinion, these are the odds this person is reliable in terms of repaying their debts. And not only is there one, there's three of them. So you would have the same sort of situation where it's like, okay, should you deal with, you know, Williamson Co? Well, historically, and it's only going to take one. Williamson Co. agreed to abide by the judgment of this third party. They refused and that's basically going to

• 17:07Michael Malice?

  Very factually say it's much riskier to deal with this guy than it is to deal with them where even if they don't agree with the judgment, they still, even if they personally don't agree, they still follow through with the results.

• 17:19Chris Williamson?

  It seems like there's a lot more work to be done on the front end then with that. You might get through the litigation side more quickly for deploying the law, but coming into it, it's going to be a little bit more effortful, at least in the beginning, because imagine how much all of this would be to set up and you'd have to have some sort of agreed rules and principles between the different agencies that might be representing someone. So everyone would need to format their everything in the same way. So there still needs to be agreed rules and procedures and regulations over the top.

• 17:49Michael Malice?

  But as, as we said earlier, like with the, let's go back to the cell phone example. I don't know and you don't know what happens when I call you and we have different cell phone providers and we never need to know because before those cell phone providers came to market, they already established procedures on how to deal with every other cell phone company so that their customers don't ever have to worry about or think about it. So look at it this way, in terms of fashion, the problem, if anything with fashion is we have too many choices, too many options. We have, you know, books and magazines telling you which to choose, but when it comes to the law, you don't have choice and it's much more expensive and costly. And the reason the law is such a concern as opposed to fashion

• 18:31Michael Malice?

  never being a political issue is precisely because whatever the government does, it does poorly and, and that's, to put it mildly.

• 18:38Chris Williamson?

  What do you think is the hardest question or the most difficult issue for an anarchist society to try and overcome?

• 18:47Michael Malice?

  What do you do about the kids? Because if you don't have a state and kids are basically under the dominion of their parents, how are you going to resolve cases which there are no shortage of when parents are bad actors toward your, their children? That is a tough one. And that's a tough one under any scenario. That's the thing. One of the big issues in terms of people attacking anarchism, which is of course is their prerogative, is they'll say, well anarchism is bad because it's going to lead to war. I'm like, wait, wait, wait. The system you're advocating doesn't lead to war, so you can't have this kind of double standard. So this is a criticism, it's like, okay, you're not going to have, you know, child protective services possibly, or maybe you would in a private sense, like you have

• 19:31Michael Malice?

  an apartment complex and, you know, I don't know how they would resolve it. The point is, it's horrible now. Like, the foster kid system, like, many kids are, you know, subject to abuse, and it's certainly less than ideal. So, that's a good, tough question, and I do not have a good answer. But I don't think any system that's been posited has had a good answer.

• 19:52Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, and that's because typically, there's like, there's an agent within an anarchist society that kind of opts in to some of the services which then get used. But in a situation where the only legal agent is the bad actor themselves, and you have a dependent that requires somebody to step in, you have this vacuum which is not being filled by something.

• 20:16Michael Malice?

  Correct.

• 20:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that is a nasty situation.

• 20:20Michael Malice?

  Yeah, and it's just, it's just nasty in general.

• 20:26Chris Williamson?

  I don't know, man. I mean, that's, yeah, that's an ugly one. What about, what about if a country went to war with another country? I know this is in the second half of one of the, one of the essays that I looked at.

• 20:37Michael Malice?

  Yeah, well, first of all, it wouldn't be another country, it would be like an anarchist area. But we already see examples of this in the past, which is, there is a, this is hilarious, which is a criticism of anarchism, that like, if you get help from a state, it's not anarchism at all. It's like, well, if someone mails me food, it doesn't make them the government, they're just someone who's providing a service, right? So as of right now, like, literally today, I, as a private company, can hire the US government to provide security for me. This in no sense makes them my government, any more than hiring the chauffeur, is the one who's my chauffeur. They're the ones taking orders, not giving them. So there are many countries on earth already. The argument is, well, if the US went anarchist, they'd be invaded tomorrow by China. Well, why aren't we invading, why

• 21:22Michael Malice?

  isn't the US invading Canada by this logic? Why isn't the Vatican being invaded by Italy, or Monaco by France? There's many examples of countries on earth right now that do not have any, any military whatsoever, and can easily be overrun. So there's...

• 21:39Michael Malice?

  Sure, there are bigger governments, but no one is saying, or I'm certainly not saying, that for anarchism to be considered successful has to be worldwide. There's no reason why, you know, if Ireland was anarchist for thousands of years and is used as an example historically of how an anarchist system would work. So if you had an invasion, we saw what happened with Kuwait. Let's pretend Kuwait, instead of a government, had been an anarchist area. You saw a lot of self-interested nations with big armies step in. And also, it's much harder to invade and conquer an area where everyone is armed and trained and using their weaponry. But I mean, look at Afghanistan, look at Vietnam.

• 22:20Michael Malice?

  I mean, this, this argument, people say that like, well, there's an anarchist area, like, you know, they'd be conquered immediately. China's not having a fun time conquering Hong Kong. So the claim that this is something that's just done like with a snap of snapping of fingers is nonsensical. It's very, very hard to invade and conquer and very, at the very least, very expensive.

• 22:40Chris Williamson?

  Can you see there being an anarchist state in your lifetime?

• 22:44Michael Malice?

  Well, no, because by definition, there wouldn't be an anarchist state, but anarchism is a relationship.

• 22:49Chris Williamson?

  How should I, I keep on getting that wrong. How should I refer to it?

• 22:51Michael Malice?

  Sure, just an anarch, you could call it anarchist area or anarchist society, but anarchism isn't a location, it's a relationship, right? So you and I have an anarchist relationship. Neither of us has an authority over the other. If there was a dispute, we would not be calling the state. Which state would we call? I mean, the possibility of this kind of international lawsuits is nonsensical. And even if you were here or I were there and we got drunk and someone got violent, we're still not calling the cops. So, you know, it's, and every country is in an anarchist relationship with one another. The example I use in the book is if a Canadian kills an American in Mexico, there's no one to call that's above them, right? The three nations have to have some system in place ahead of time to adjudicate this process.

• 23:33Michael Malice?

  And as we said earlier, we can be certain that they have adjudicated this ahead of time in that it's not like when that happens, they're like, well, what do we do? Let's call Congress. The process is already in place ahead of time. So whenever someone is in the process of providing services, they're going to anticipate as much of these things as possible so that their consumers are satisfied with it. And we see this in a, done in a very haphazard and ham-fisted way with governments right now.

• 24:01Chris Williamson?

  Okay, and you can't see in your lifetime there being an area that turns?

• 24:05Michael Malice?

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

• 24:47Michael Malice?

  Although, of course, members of the corporate media think this is a nightmare and disaster because they go hand in hand with state power.

• 24:53Chris Williamson?

  Where do you think would be the most likely anarchist area to rise up first?

• 24:59Michael Malice?

  Oh, I have no idea. In the same way that Marx had said, there's no way that Russia is ever going to go communist, and that's where it ended up, Russia ended up going communist. That's where it ended up happening. So it could be just someone creates a new physical space or someone creates some kind of micro city somewhere. I mean, this is the beauty of markets. You don't know, you can't predict where, how they will operate or where they'll pop up.

• 25:22Chris Williamson?

  What was unique about the process for creating this book? I know that you were really proud and interested in that.

• 25:28Michael Malice?

  What was unique about it? I think knowing that this, something I took very seriously, what was unique is knowing that this is something that's not going to be dated for many, many years and that it's going to be the go-to reference book for a lot of people about an idea which in their internet circles at least is gaining increasing currency. So that was kind of something special.

• 25:53Chris Williamson?

  Talk me through the writing process and the publishing process. You said that there was some lessons to be taken from that.

• 25:58Michael Malice?

  Sure. So there was, you know, again, I've been getting asked about this constantly because I, you know, I talk about this stuff on all these different big podcasts. And the only thing that had been somewhat comparable to what I was looking for was this book called Patterns of Anarchy from like the 60s. And one of my supporters, this woman named Marla, I was doing a live stream and she went in the super chat and she goes, why don't you do an audiobook of this? And I go, that's a good idea. And I go, wait a minute, these are public domain. I should just redo it in a contemporary way, update it with, you know, bigger names and more contemporary essays. And, you know, and I also, you know, being a collector of many things, I, knowing how to curate a collection, I knew, okay, these are all the names I have to have covered. And also which are the concepts I want

• 26:43Michael Malice?

  to have covered. So to kind of have that grid, uh, it was, was the process.

• 26:48Chris Williamson?

  And you managed to get it from idea to market in three and a half months?

• 26:54Michael Malice?

  Yeah, it was three and a half months. And now I'm recording the audiobook.

• 26:58Chris Williamson?

  What's the lessons from that?

• 27:00Michael Malice?

  I have to start recording the audiobook. The lesson is my, I don't have good enough sound quality in this room yet, so I have to figure out how to do it.

• 27:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I bet you don't. But you went self-published as well?

• 27:11Michael Malice?

  Correct. And we, I was the top nonfiction book on all of Amazon for over a day, uh, beating literally everyone. Uh, there was a novel ahead of me and Dr. Seuss and I was number three. So this, this guy Obama, you might have heard of Oprah Winfrey, you might have heard of her, every president, every PM, I was Gordon, Gordon Brown, get out of my way. You got nothing on me, Jeffrey House, sorry. I was just running the table and still am. And it's, um, very validating to show people that you can do it yourself and do, and this is another example, like we're just talking earlier about in terms of adjudicating disputes. If I'd gone through a mainstream publisher, let's assume the sales would have been the same. At the very least,

• 27:55Michael Malice?

  it's coming out in 2023. Yeah. So even if the results were identical, I'm still saving two years of my life in it or my career. That is an enormous, enormous difference.

• 28:05Chris Williamson?

  Well, dude, I was, uh, saw a tweet from Tiago Forte, who's a productivity coach guru, who's got a deal for his first book, which will be really, really awesome. And everyone's excited about it coming out in the productivity community. And he hit the nail on the head and said, the weird thing about a book is that you need to be able to project the trend two years out and then catch it just as it's hitting the inflection point. And he was really fortunate because he talks about building a second brain. It's a personal knowledge management system where you can have all your notes and your summaries and such like organized in a very good way on your computer. And Notion and Rome have all had these huge influxes of investment and there's lots of interest and it's been lots of press and publishing around. And he's like, this is great because

• 28:48Chris Williamson?

  I think he's maybe one year into the process. So he's looking at the start February 2022, I think is when he's looking at doing it. He's thinking, right, yeah, I have managed to time it. But all of this investment and all of this clout that's just occurred within the industry that he's written a book in is totally out of his control because the lag time between him coming up with the idea and even between him finishing the book and then the book finally hitting market is so vast.

• 29:13Michael Malice?

  There's a couple of other things. No editor who hires me is going to know this field as much as I do. So there's going to be arguments just based on their limited knowledge in terms of why do you have this essay, why do you have that one? I don't need to explain myself because I know what I'm doing in this very specific regard. Number two, and this is something people might not appreciate. I did a book a few years ago called Concierge Confidential. I was the co-author. And there's a typo page, the end of page, chapter one says, I'm about to T O O. I told, we told the publisher, they didn't fix it for the paperback. They don't care. With the Amazon program, which I use to self-publish, there was a typo in the book. You fix it, you re-upload it. And since it's print on

• 29:55Michael Malice?

  demand, instantly it's fixed. So to have that kind of dynamic publishing system is also of enormous benefit and a huge advantage.

• 30:03Chris Williamson?

  It shows now just, it kind of explains why people are so concerned with status and clout in 2021. Because with the right audience that's sufficiently bought in and broad enough, you can do some pretty powerful things, even up against the powers that be, all of the previous pathways and avenues and contacts that they've got. One guy with a 100K on YouTube and a couple of 100K on Twitter can do some damage.

• 30:33Michael Malice?

  Yeah, that's the thing. It's a people want to, when you see someone making it happen on their own, you want to be a part of that. You know, this isn't someone who's got some big book deal with Simon and Schuster and they're rolling out and like, oh yeah, this book sounds good. I want to buy it. But if you see someone who's like, this book is something I would buy anyway, but it's also someone I'm a fan of doing it themselves and beating the corporations at their own game, then you really want to cheer them on and feel and and there's also that kind of feeling of like, this is my opportunity to actually make a difference and and invest what 20, $19 and one cent, you know, to kind of say,

• 31:14Michael Malice?

  this is what I want to see more of. So, you know, I'm a big fan of Albert Camus. He denied, he did not like being called an existentialist. He regarded himself as an absurdist. But the existentialist idea that we are self-created, when you see someone who is, you know, you have the guy who is killing it on Amazon and running circles around all the publishers is awesome. And I had the opportunity to be him. So I mean, that kind of mindset, you know, I give talks in networking sometimes. And I tell the kids, I'm like, if you know someone is in town, and they're having their birthday and they're not doing anything, take them out and do it. I do it for, I say, I do it for selfish reasons. And they laugh

• 31:56Michael Malice?

  and I go, no, no, no, that guy is awesome. But that could be you. The only thing stopping you is $30 and an hour of your time. And people don't think in those terms.

• 32:05Chris Williamson?

  I think this is one of the seductive qualities of a glass door policy when doing any sort of creative process. So people have known that this was coming. You know, it happened, at least in terms of the origin on a live stream that other people would have seen. So they've seen it, right? From seedling to fully grown plant. And

• 32:25Chris Williamson?

  For such a long time, the creative processes had this mystique and this magic behind it. And now being able to watch that unfold, it's like when you go into a car factory and you go, okay, so that, those four points are going to turn into wheels and then a chassis and then all of the engine's going to be put in and you can watch it and then it becomes a car. And there's something fascinating. People say, what is it, that you don't want to know how TV or sausages are made.

• 32:47Michael Malice?

  The sausage, yeah, yeah.

• 32:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but watching a book be produced and even seeing the, seeing the artist go through all the vicissitudes of the difficulties, had a really bad day writing, had a really good day writing, finding it hard, finding it easy. I think this, yeah, people like that because they buy into stories and narratives, right? And not just the ones that you publish, the meta narratives that are about what was the process of publishing this like?

• 33:13Michael Malice?

  If, if as an anarchist, you're saying, we can win and we can beat these huge establishment entities who have been entrenched for centuries. That's a big, that's a big ask. That's a big bold claim. So to have that concept be demonstrated in any capacity and to have it be demonstrated unambiguously is, I think, of enormous motivation to many people, even if they're not anarchists at all, but are simply people who want independent creators who are, you know, sticking their neck out to succeed.

• 33:47Chris Williamson?

  That's, there's a guy called Jack Butcher, who's on the, been on the show recently and he's a British guy in the States, who's one of the most innovative creators, I think, in the world at the moment. He's doing incredibly well. And one of the main reasons is that he is so glassed all with everything that he does. When he's considering a new project, he'll post about it on Twitter. If he's had a really good day with the shop, he'll upload his Shopify stats. He'll show the backend of what he's working on, who he's spoken to, potential projects that are happening. And people just love that. They love being involved in the narrative. And it makes sense because why are people bothered about sitcoms? You have fucking friends coming back after 25 years off or whatever. People are bothered about that because they're bought into the story arc of what's going on with this person. And I think we're only, really only just scratching the surface about what the creator

• 34:32Chris Williamson?

  economy can do with opening up the creator's own personality aside from the work. So the art and the artist are now being sold as two separate entities that come together to form like one plus one equals four with this and they create even more.

• 34:49Michael Malice?

  And here's the other thing, it's like if now I can tell people with a straight face, for $500, right, you can send me to Miami to do Andrew Shelt's show, or if you're interested in spreading these ideas, that pays for half of an office of some rando at a think tank to write white papers that no one's gonna read. Which of these is going to see a better return on investment for you? And again, this is, it's an easy sell to make, because this is unambiguous. So again, I'm, one of the reasons I am an anarchist is I am such a fan of all the people in the book who really were marginalized, complete pariahs,

• 35:32Michael Malice?

  fought for their vision, sometimes were killed for their vision. And to whatever, I just think that's such a like guy thing to do, to forge, to make your own path where none had existed before, and show other people the way in that it's possible. I mean, that to me is just something very primal about that.

• 35:53Chris Williamson?

  There's something that I really enjoy as well, grabbing yourself by those bootstraps and getting going as well. It makes me think of, I know you're a fan of crypto and Bitcoin and stuff.

• 36:02Michael Malice?

  Oh, sure.

• 36:02Chris Williamson?

  It makes me think about the proof of work concept. So being able to watch a creator go through this process, all of the different areas and stages, and then even reflect on it once it's happened, and then thinking about what comes next, that is proof of work, right? You're not gonna get scammed. There was no way that you were going to do this, and this book actually be 360 pages of blank sheets, and you are, actually, my entire career leading up to this point was just a big Ponzi scheme, sort of shill thing, so that I could then pull a couple of grand out of everybody and run away. That was never gonna happen, because people have this proof of work. Look at all of the time that I've invested. And yeah, man, long may it continue.

• 36:45Michael Malice?

  Yeah, I am really, really stoked and I'm also really stoked at the reactions because people are feeling, I think correctly, that their faith in me has been well-placed. And that's something I take quite seriously. You talk about Bitcoin, like this is like getting in on, talk about crypto, this is like getting in on Bitcoin when it's 50 bucks.

• 37:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that as well with creators because I've been using this for a while saying like, "Look, if you subscribe now, then you can say that you listened to Modern Wisdom before it was cool."

• 37:17Michael Malice?

  Yeah.

• 37:18Chris Williamson?

  And being that first one in, because you never know how big it's going to get. You never know how high that hockey stick and inflection is going to go. And I think it's safe to assume that you can just hold your market share now. And the amount that the creator economy is going to increase, all of the different ways, stuff that Dave Rubin's doing, the way that people can now accept different payments, the stuff that's happening on blockchain so that you can have guaranteed products that come to you, all of the clever stuff that's happening there. It's only further and further enabling individual creators. Like, look at the money that people on Twitch are making, even just small guys in their bedrooms. You know, they were doing this anyway. They were playing these games anyway. They've hooked up, they've hooked up a camera. We would have had this chat in any case. You know, we just hook up a camera and then you go away and yeah, it's crazy.

• 38:01Michael Malice?

  I don't even think, though, it's about the money per se. I think it's just about like, you can just have a roof over your head, like a very basic Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This is something people, I think, don't often appreciate because they think, well, you know, if they want to be a stand-up comedian, for example, it's like, "Who do you think you are, Jerry Seinfeld?" It's like, you don't have to be Jerry Seinfeld to be a working comic. There's literally thousands of comedians you and I haven't heard of, who are still making a living, maybe even making a great living, at practicing their craft. So the more demonstrations of this that there are, that you don't have to hit, you know, be the top seller on Amazon like myself, but you could certainly do a decent job and be proud of yourself. And that when you go to meet your maker, you could point to your bookshelf and be like,

• 38:46Michael Malice?

  "Hey, I wrote that crappy book that sold 500 copies." That's, that's the big deal. That's more than 99% of people can say.

• 38:54Chris Williamson?

  I was reading through the book and one of the questions that I had for you was, what's wrong with how democracies are run? And there's this quote that says, "People will say with a straight face that having one choice for dear leader is tyranny, but having two is freedom. Is that second choice on the ballot really the qualitative difference?" That's so good.

• 39:13Michael Malice?

  But it's true. If you go to this, I don't know what brands you guys have over there, but if you go to the store and your choices are Coke and Pepsi and someone could say with a straight face, "Hey, you can choose whatever you want." It's, or if you, the choices are, let's put it another way, if you're partisan, the choices are Coke or literal or Strick9, it's also, you know what I mean? But if there's, if your system is set up by design, both in America, we have primaries, right? So there's a whole year where all these people who want to be the candidate for Republican or Democrat are whittled away. So you're left with two candidates. So the whole process by design is to eliminate your personal choices. And they're saying, "Well, we don't have any other options." Well, the option is, "Well, I don't want your crappy system."

• 39:58Michael Malice?

  If your system results that I go into the store and I can only buy Pepsi-Cola or Coca-Cola or Coca-Cola and Strick9, something needs to change on a fundamental level. There's no reason to be represented by someone you dislike or despise or disagree with. And it's not reasonable for you to expect me to buy into your chicanery.

• 40:21Chris Williamson?

  It is bizarre that you hear people talk about what this was the worst, the best of a bad bunch.

• 40:28Michael Malice?

  Right.

• 40:29Chris Williamson?

  We're talking about the people that determined the standard of our lives.

• 40:32Michael Malice?

  The lesser of two evils. In no other context are you forced to do this. Can you imagine like you, like you're arrested and it's like, we've got two barristers for you. I'm trying to use the lingo. It's like this one, you know, doesn't speak English and, and this one, you know, is in a coma. Like what is, what is going on here?

• 40:55Chris Williamson?

  Have you learned any lessons that you've really cherished recently?

• 41:00Michael Malice?

  Uh, yes. This was a very, very intense one, I learned. Uh, some of the people in this book had been largely forgotten. And that I got to, that I have the power to be the one to redeem them, in a sense, and bring them to a mass audience. And, you know, a hundred years after they died, that was a big lesson, and it really did a number on me.

• 41:30Chris Williamson?

  I imagine that's beautiful, to think that.

• 41:32Michael Malice?

  Yeah, but it's extremely intense. Like, who the hell am I? You know, I'm not a modest person, but in this context, it's like, you know, these people are hanged. You know, Louis Ling, who's the cover model, he wasn't, he was sentenced to death. He blew off his own jaw in prison, wrote on the wall, "Hooray for Anarchy" in German. Um, you know, he was like 23, 24, just total hunk. And, you know, he's, people forgot about him. And this is someone who valued this worldview enormously. And his courtroom speech, where he tells the judge, the judge who just sentenced him to death, like, you're gonna cut, he's like, "I told the cops, you came at us with guns. We're gonna come at you with dynamite."

• 42:14Michael Malice?

  And he's like, "I'm for force, and I'm, I despise this court. Hang me." So, like, to have his voice, uh, and, you know, permeate through the decades, and I'm the one who made this happen, is, is a, um, very intense. Now, obviously, I'm not a advocate of, you know, dynamite, to put it mildly, but it's still, this is someone who was a very interesting figure.

• 42:41Chris Williamson?

  It's something that I've been thinking about. I heard Rogan say, on a show a couple of years ago, one of the best things about having a podcast is being able to find people who are brilliant but don't have a platform, and giving them that, and...

• 42:53Michael Malice?

  Yeah, Joe said that about Lex when I was on. Yeah, he's like, "I love that I can take this amazing treasure, Lex Friedman, and like, give him a bigger audience, and now he's killing it."

• 43:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. It's, and you see that now. It's interesting watching the arc, because when you begin a show as a creator, especially like this, you're asking people favors. The power dynamic is that they are doing something for you as a fledgling podcaster or YouTuber or whatever. Um, but then after a little while... That power dynamic actually starts to shift.

• 43:24Michael Malice?

  Yeah.

• 43:24Chris Williamson?

  And you actually start to think, well, hang on a second. You are the prize, which I love to use as an example from pick apart history. I keep on thinking, well, hang on a second. That Jordan Peterson gets to come on here. No one else's clip of him did 1.6 million views. No one else's clip of him did 1.1 million views the week later. No one at blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You think, well, actually, after a little while, you get to do that. And then you go, okay. And not only can I stand toe to toe with these people that I really admire and look up to, which is a beautiful thing to be able to do. But I can also find these diamonds in the rough out of nowhere. Found this guy called Adam Lane Smith on Twitter, wrote a really good, fascinating tweet, thread about human psychology, being just, just some bloke that had been a counselor and a therapist for two decades.

• 44:08Chris Williamson?

  And I was like, this is fucking awesome. This thread is shit hot. If this guy can podcast half as well as he can tweet. This is going to be, and sure enough, brought him on and he crushed it. Second highest played podcast. This guy's a nobody in terms of clout. Second highest played podcast of this year behind Jordan Peterson on audio, ahead of monsters, absolutely, including yourself. And I was just like, he messaged me the other day and was like, dude, everything's changed. Michaela's brought him on her show. He's now gone on hers because she listened to it and she loved it. And he was like, dude, I've got, I've got clients coming out of my ears. I've got all offers to come on a podcast. And you know, this isn't some sort of simpy whimpering guy.

• 44:49Chris Williamson?

  This is a very capable human being that just required a little bit more pullback on the elastic band of, of the slingshot. And it's fucking awesome. So I totally get what you mean. Platforming people, being able to give voices to those that deserve one is, yeah, it's sick. It's endlessly rewarding.

• 45:08Michael Malice?

  And it's also even more intense when these are people who gave their lives. So like Albert Parsons was one of these people. He was, there was a bomb in Haymarket in Chicago in the late 1800s. He had left the rally. They, him and his comrades were, there was a warrant out for them. He was on the lam. He said, I'm going to stand in solidarity. Nothing's going to happen. They're all sentenced to death. Uh, you know, we have the letter from these people to their children. Uh, his wife wasn't allowed to see him hanged. And when he went to the gallows, he's like, can I say a few words? And then mid-sentence, they killed him. So, and she had his picture on his wall, uh, until she died in 1942. There's a picture of her pointing to it.

• 45:50Michael Malice?

  So, you know, to, to be able to, I'm gonna get into him, you know, on some livestream or something like that. But be able to tell his story. Uh, he was, he, some of the men were told, if you ask for, um, uh, um, forgiveness, uh, the governor will commute your sentence. And some of them did. And Parsons said, no, because that's admitting guilt. I didn't kill anyone. I spoke at a rally and I left. Like, you sentenced me to murder for my views. Uh, and they, they did it. They killed him. They, he was later posthumously pardoned. There's a monument to him, um, and the others in, in Chicago right now in a cemetery. But yeah, it's, it's to have people point out, to be the one to point out, uh, these,

• 46:33Michael Malice?

  they, they're not giants in terms of clout, as you would say, but they're certainly giants in terms of narrative and in terms of inspiration and in terms of a story that, that's so, it's, it's very humbling. And I hate that word because it has, it's all, often sounds phony, but it's, it's, let's put it, let me use different language. It's very jarring and like awe inspiring that I'm in this position, uh, to be able to kind of make sure he hasn't been forgotten.

• 47:00Chris Williamson?

  Well, what's interesting is that someone's quality of work and their ability to deploy that and get it seen by the masses don't always necessarily align. You know, we all know the people that have huge platforms and really don't do anything with them. But similarly, there are people who would have deserved a platform. He would have been absolutely phenomenal, but for some reason, wrong timing, wrong place, wrong whatever, didn't do that. And yet it's, it's odd being able to think, well, hang on, this person might be even more capable than me, even at something which I profess to be capable at. And yet I'm somehow the enabler of their access to market or to an audience. It is, I can understand why it's jarring. Yeah, it's a good way to put it.

• 47:45Michael Malice?

  Yeah, there's this concept called arbitrage in business where basically, I think if I use this correctly, please don't yell at me. But basically, if I see a stock that's at $40 and I know that the market value is $60, I buy it quickly and then I flip it because, and I kind of align it with the market. And that's, I think, kind of what I'm doing here. It's this person is, right now, in terms of historical values, low because he's not known, and be like, well, hold on a minute. This is someone who did matter and someone who was important. So to be able to kind of take them out of that dustbin, as I said earlier, and, you know, to put them back on a pedestal, I think is just absolutely a wonderful position to be in.

• 48:22Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I got this lesson, I got to tell you, right? So the last couple of months, maybe two months or so, I noticed that my thoughts were getting really slow. And yeah, it was, it was odd, man. Because usually it feels like skating on ice and it was like walking through a swamp. It was so not like me. And I was walking into rooms and forgetting while I was there and I was doing podcasts and stuff and losing words. You know, I pride myself on precise speech and precise thoughts and I was forgetting words. I forgot this place called Blackpool near Manchester, seaside town in the UK. And I spent five minutes internally trying to desperately remember this place on the West Coast. And then eventually got Blackpool. And I was like, what the actual fuck is going on here?

• 49:02Chris Williamson?

  Is this early onset dementia? Or am I going senile? And I made some jokes with somebody. I was like, oh, like the aneurysms coming on, blah, blah, blah. But after the Blackpool incident, I was like, right, there's something severely up here. This, this is beyond me just being tired. And I was constantly tired. I was going to bed at nine o'clock at night, really fatigued. I wasn't performing in the gym. I was constantly drowsy. So anyway, messaged my buddy.

• 49:25Michael Malice?

  Wait, hold on, because this happened to me also last year and I fact figured out I was a, I developed a dairy sensitivity.

• 49:31Chris Williamson?

  Okay, this, it's not dairy sensitivity. It might be, it might have been enabled by that.

• 49:36Michael Malice?

  For people listening, if this is happening to you, try experiment, because I eat the same thing every day because of my regimen. Try experimenting with your food, which is so in this hippie stuff, but in my case, this was the case. I'm sorry.

• 49:46Chris Williamson?

  Elimination diets work like that specifically for that reason. FODMAP diet, if someone wants to look at the most common foods that cause inflammation and stuff like that, use FODMAP and you take everything out and you add them in one by one. Really easy way to do what you're advising there, but it's wholesale approach rather than, oh, let's just get rid of dairy. So anyway, I'm doing this, I messaged my buddy, I'm like, look, what's going on? He said, dude, so tell me about what supplements you've been taking, any changes that you've made, any medication? And I thought, oh, actually, sort of about two months ago, this very boring medication that I was on since the start of the year, super like normal pill, the doctor had said to double the dose. They told me to double the dose about two months ago, sent it to him and he was like,

• 50:26Chris Williamson?

  dude, that's a, an anticholinergic drug and choline is one of the key neurotransmitters.

• 50:36Michael Malice?

  Oh, my God.

• 50:38Chris Williamson?

  So what it, what it does is it down regulates that. And sure enough, you do a little bit of digging, you go through common side effects for moderate high doses, which is what I would have gone to once I went to the double dose. Drowsiness, fatigue, memory loss, dry mouth, which I didn't have. And I was like, dude, like tick, tick, tick, tick, like this is all me, right? I was like, well, great, like not an aneurysm, but I had managed to knock 30 points off my IQ and basically retard myself to this state where I couldn't remember Blackpool. And I'm like, what's going on? Like, so anyway, easy solution, right? Easy solution, not an aneurysm, just get, stop, stop taking this particular medication.

• 51:22Chris Williamson?

  But what it taught me that really was quite profound was the inevitable end point that we're all going to get to with our cognitive decline. And it was really scary, man, because you and me and most of the people that are listening probably. We rely on our cognitive horsepower, raw, sheer force to just pull us out of problems. We know that it doesn't really matter whatever kind of a problem we get ourselves into because we have faith that the decision engine between our ears is going to be able to fix it.

• 52:00Chris Williamson?

  But there's something so vicious and cruel about the thing that you rely on to fix the problems being taken away from you. And I have a friend whose dad was going through some sort of cognitive decline and he said, this disease has taken everything from me. It's even taken myself. And I was like, wow, like that quote didn't make sense. And after this last period, I'm aware, like I forgot the word Blackpool and I was, you know, misspelling right with right and going into rooms and not knowing why I was there. And thankfully it's reversible, but man, like if people go back, they can listen to podcasts and they might not notice, but if they're listening carefully, they can. I'm forgetting

• 52:44Chris Williamson?

  words. I can't find the word that I mean, which is totally not like me. So for a brief period, I kind of had, it was a decline. It wasn't to this, you know, something chronic. It wasn't something as severe as it could have been, but it was really, yeah, it's really sort of made me see a lot of things in a different light. It was really like insightful, but terrifying in the same, same breath.

• 53:04Michael Malice?

  And look what it's done to your speech. Half these words you're not pronouncing correctly. This happened, this happened, shoot up what? The school? This happened to my mentor Harvey Picard before he passed. He was telling me how he was dealing with memory issues and he got so scared, he'd like sit there and start trying to remember old phone numbers and people's addresses just to kind of test himself.

• 53:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 53:25Michael Malice?

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

• 53:49Chris Williamson?

  Well, the same reason, I think, why you do that is why it's really difficult to not think of a terrible action, once you've put it in your mind. So imagine that you're looking at a kid by the side of the road, and you might have the thought, I wonder what it would be like if I pushed that kid in out into traffic. You go, that's terrible. That's a terrible thought. And you're just telling yourself, which is kind of dumb, because like, who the fuck are you talking to, right? You're just telling yourself and also listening and also disgusted with you. And you think, right, I'm going to push that kid. No, I'm obviously not going to push the kid out into the middle of the road. But what a terrible thing to think. I mustn't think about it. And then you immediately start to think about it even more. Or you're with someone at work or whatever, that you really know that you shouldn't be looking at or thinking about doing something to. And then you're like,

• 54:32Chris Williamson?

  I can't stop thinking about it. The reason is that the mind's teleological, right? So we posit a goal.

• 54:39Michael Malice?

  I think the reason is, there's a certain percentage of this audience that is higher than 1% and less than 50% that looks at you and thinks this guy must be a sociopath.

• 54:50Michael Malice?

  Not maybe not American psycho, but British psycho.

• 54:52Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 54:52Michael Malice?

  And not to have you be like, oh, yeah, I wonder what it's like to push this kid in for the traffic.

• 54:58Michael Malice?

  They have, as you would put it, their answer.

• 55:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, they, yeah. But the reason is, right?

• 55:03Michael Malice?

  Change the subject. He's outing me.

• 55:05Chris Williamson?

  I'm not. Fucking explain something without you just coming in with your American Russian accent. Anyway, so the brain's teleological. You set yourself a goal. And then what you do is your brain is constantly measuring how far you are from that goal.

• 55:20Michael Malice?

  Okay.

• 55:20Chris Williamson?

  But the problem is, the very thing that you are trying not to do is what it set the goal as. Oh, my God, I can't believe that's a thing. I mustn't think about it. How far away from the thing am I? And in the act of working out how far away from the terrible thought about the kid in the road or whatever, you continue to bring it back up. And I think it's kind of the same with the memory loss situation, that you think, okay. This is something that I'm concerned about and I really don't want to have happen. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to see how far away, how long is it for me to remember this person's phone number from 20 years ago, or whatever it might be. Oh, my God, well, it's this long. Oh, my God, well, it's this long. And then you end up with this metacognizant, two layers, three layers removed. And that's when it becomes really vicious, right? Because you start to be the architect of your own discomfort.

• 56:01Chris Williamson?

  You are the voice inside of your head that is telling you the things about the thing that is happening. And that, that being your own torturer in that way is a, yeah, again, particularly cruel with now increasingly or decreasingly less ability to deal with the problem because it's inherently reducing your capacity.

• 56:21Michael Malice?

  Yeah, many years ago, I read a book called Don't Talk, Don't Think About Monkeys. It's about people with Tourette's and they're writing essays trying to explain what it's like. And I thought, so people think Tourette's means you're always yelling out curses and inappropriate things. That's coprolalia. And that's actually a fairly small percentage of people Tourette's. But they do have things like tics, they do blur things out and so on and so forth. And they're like, try to imagine, you know, you meet a genie and the genie says, I'll give you any three wishes you want on one condition, you don't think about monkeys. And at that point, it's just like, oh, crap. So that's kind of what it's like for them and it's, it's not fun.

• 56:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What do you think about the Bill and Melinda Gates breakup?

• 57:01Michael Malice?

  I have not been following this at all. I don't find him to be an interesting figure. I, I think he's a nefarious figure, but I don't have enough kind of data to back that up.

• 57:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's just, it's one of those things that there seem to be when Bezos had his breakup, it kind of made sense because you look at Jeff and you've got this sort of nerd to Chad, sort of autist to alpha trajectory that he's been on. You think, well, yeah, obviously, like, obviously, he's the sort of guy walking around looking like Terminator with his aviators on and his leather jacket and stuff. You think, well, yeah, obviously, this was going to happen. But Bill and Melinda, you know, you've got this Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and so on and so forth. Yeah, it just seemed, it seemed like an interesting cultural artifact. Obviously, it's kind of tied, highly tied to this Jeffrey Epstein thing. And then it would appear that some of the people that were accused co-conspirators

• 57:55Chris Williamson?

  for the Jeffrey Epstein case, have you seen that they are now testifying against Ghislaine Maxwell? You see this?

• 58:01Michael Malice?

  Oh, yeah, I did see that. Yeah, yeah.

• 58:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So, but I don't understand how that works either because do you, can someone?

• 58:09Chris Williamson?

  Implicate themselves during their testimony about somebody else? Have they been given deals so that if they testify against her, they're not going to? They're going to be safe from no matter what, so that they can completely open up about their situation? Are they going to be hard to avoid perjury?

• 58:24Michael Malice?

  And that's the other thing about anarchism is we're told about equality under the law, but that's completely a lie. And this is a great example, which is plea bill who plead up, right? I will, you're, you are a drug dealer and I want to, you know, get your boss. And as the prosecutor, I say, I'm, I'm choosing not to punish you for your crimes in exchange for your testimony. So in other words, I am, as the government, as a monopoly in providing security, choosing not to enforce this so-called objective law for the sake of someone who I think is better. That's a value judgment. So as opposed to, can you imagine a store or a bodyguard saying, well, I'm not going to protect you, this person for whatever dubious reason.

• 59:05Michael Malice?

  So that's a good example of how the state and its claims of being fair, reasonable and objective on a daily basis throws that out the window and says this person is more important than this one. Now, there might be something to be said for that, but it certainly is not the case that it's equality under the law.

• 59:21Chris Williamson?

  That's a really good point because it's a, you could say this person is further up the food chain because what? Because they make more money, because they tend to be in charge. But it is, at the end of the day, a subjective viewpoint. Why would that person be more of a criminal than this person?

• 59:36Michael Malice?

  Or if they're both criminals, how are you the one who's like, yes, no, no, no, yes? In terms of who you're going to prosecute?

• 59:43Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What about the COVID turnaround from Facebook now? That COVID skepticism in terms of the origin of it, have you had a look at this?

• 59:51Michael Malice?

  Yeah, oh yeah, they're dropping their, um, I, I, this is, I think, going to be very revelatory to very many people, hopefully. Uh, and I, my, I pray, uh, every day to Loki that this is going to make some people realize how duplicitous, uh, the overlords are.

• 1:00:11Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:00:12Michael Malice?

  Well, because, you know, to come in with global pandemic, you're coming in, you're asking, we're going to shut down the earth, we're going to shut down any discussion of a certain aspect of this, like you shouldn't, if you question it, we're just going to lose your social media account, which is something that is something very necessary for very many people, obviously. And now to be like, oh, yeah, maybe we were wrong. It's just like, that's an enormous amount of power for people to have and to assume that this power is being used reasonably or objectively has been demonstrated to be false.

• 1:00:43Chris Williamson?

  Just to show that they don't have capacity, these people aren't the clairvoyant all seeing eye that they really need to be. The only way that you would be able to deploy this sort of a rule is if you were omnipotent and you knew, I know all of the facts and I can make the most educated decision. But when essentially what you had was people who knew more than the politifact and the fact checking organizations and Facebook and Twitter and such like, and they were penalized, as much as I hate Brian Rose, and I think the guy's a pleb, he has someone like David Icahn, and he talks about, I mean, I think it was 5G lizard people or whatever for him, but still, the skepticism about the origin

• 1:01:24Chris Williamson?

  of COVID was true, much as it pains me to say that. But people were penalized for holding what now is actually considered to be a plausible, if not a realistic view.

• 1:01:41Michael Malice?

  And let's also talk about nuance. Let's suppose, okay, it's completely ridiculously and absurd and nonsensical that COVID was made in a lab in China. That is, might be factually true, but what is truthful is that governments, and I'm not saying this wouldn't happen in a, because I'm just saying, entities are currently trying to bioengineer viruses. Like, that is a broader point that needs to be addressed rather than the specificity of this case. So you're doing this baby bathwater situation where you're saying, okay, you can't discuss this even as a hypothesis, but at base, there is a 100% certainty that things of this nature are being carried on all over the country by various governments. And you could easily make the case that's something that's a good thing. If you bioengineer

• 1:02:25Michael Malice?

  one, you can reverse engineer it, maybe cure diseases. It doesn't have to be nefarious. But what is nefarious is to kind of arbitrarily, as Mark Zuckerberg, or as Dr. Fauci, who's one individual, draw the line and say, Not only can you not discuss this, if you do discuss this, this is going to have great personal consequences for you, when it's something where it's not even a person has a vested interest in. It's not like I'm committing slander, I'm going online and saying Chris Williamson's this, this and that. And you could see them coming in and be like, all right, we're not going to have our platform being used to spread literal lies that Chris did, so on and so forth. These are, if there's anyone who should not be given the benefit of the doubt, it's governments in general. And if there's any

• 1:03:08Michael Malice?

  one government that should not be given the benefit of the doubt, it's the Chinese government.

• 1:03:13Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah. And there's no recourse either, right?

• 1:03:16Michael Malice?

  Correct.

• 1:03:16Chris Williamson?

  You lose your account or you're locked out of whatever for X number of months or weeks.

• 1:03:22Michael Malice?

  The recourse is having these entities be regarded with increasing skepticism and disdain and creating alternative pathways to information flowing, which I think there's an enormous movement online from people who are much smarter than both of us put together to create these workarounds so this sort of thing can happen in future.

• 1:03:40Chris Williamson?

  Dude, every couple of videos has a comment from someone citing a new platform.

• 1:03:45Michael Malice?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:45Chris Williamson?

  That I don't know about, that I need to upload my videos to. I've got a list of them. I've kept a list somewhere. It's like five or six other video hosting platform. Oh, well, this one's decentralized. This one's on the blockchain.

• 1:03:58Michael Malice?

  Library is the one I think that everyone likes or Odyssey.

• 1:04:00Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:04:23Michael Malice?

  Right.

• 1:04:24Chris Williamson?

  Before you start to see that there might be something amiss here. And I don't know whether this is a quirk of my personality or whether it's a British thing. I think it's maybe both. British, I think, tend to be relatively orderly. We haven't rioted as much when things have occurred. There doesn't tend to be the revolts. That might be a chronic situation. It might just be an acute one for roundabout now with the way that the culture is at the moment. But. For the most part, we tend to stick to the rules and I've tended to respect rulemakers and such like.

• 1:04:56Michael Malice?

  Sure.

• 1:04:57Chris Williamson?

  But dude, the number of times since our conversation, only at the beginning of this year, where I see something, I'm like, okay, the mask slipped again there.

• 1:05:04Michael Malice?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:05Chris Williamson?

  The mask slipped again there. And it really is a red pill because once you've seen it, you can no longer unsee it and you start to see it more and more and more because the pattern recognition begins to kick in, right? That reticular activating system is so highly attuned that you start to think, well, I'm a little bit skeptical about that and I'm a little bit skeptical about that. And then you have something as blatant as this COVID Facebook turnaround, and you go, well, this is, this is just a big billboard saying, we don't know what the fuck we're doing and we make arbitrary rules and you get punished when they're wrong, even if you were right, before we knew and we can admit that we were wrong, but you don't get any sort of recompense or apology.

• 1:05:44Michael Malice?

  And at a certain point, you, you ask yourself, wait a minute, why was I ever under the belief that Jeremy Corbyn, Sir Keir, Nicholas Sturgeon, Boris Johnson care about me or have my best interests at heart, when they've never even met me or know I exist? And to expect powerful people to not be self motivated or self driven makes no sense. At the very least, they're not going to be in that position if they do not have this hunger for power because it takes so much work to get elected, especially at the highest levels. So even as a thesis, it's completely incoherent and nonsensical. Now, you can make the case, which is, I think, fairly easy to defend, that their careers will be best served when the country itself thrives, right?

• 1:06:29Michael Malice?

  It's easy to get reelected when the economy's booming, it's much harder when things are a disaster. So they would want to seek out those policies that, for the country. And I do think all those people do want, in general, probably what's best for, and they just have different views of getting there. But to say that they're entirely just motivated by service, when you see how they talk, you know, is, is just bizarre to me.

• 1:06:52Chris Williamson?

  Did you see the recent local election outcomes in the UK?

• 1:06:56Michael Malice?

  Oh, yes, I did. Oh, very much.

• 1:06:59Chris Williamson?

  What did you take away from that?

• 1:07:01Michael Malice?

  Oh, I was giddy. I was giddy because I enjoy seeing any time politicians squirm, because they're very good at hand-waving away, finding excuses, and so on and so forth. So to have, so Labour went from Corbyn, who was regarded as, you know, the left of the party, understandably. We have new leadership, we're moderating, we're changing our face. And to have, you know, it's kind of like, we were talking earlier about having Coke or Pepsi. It's like, okay, my teeth are rotten, I'm going to stop drinking Coke. Well, I'll just start drinking Pepsi. That's the other choice. So Labour has this, you know, somewhat centre-left, Sir Keir, or the harder left, as Corbyn, they're like, okay, this didn't,

• 1:07:43Michael Malice?

  and it's also funny because it went Miliband, Corbyn, Sir Keir, right? So it's like, okay, the moderate didn't work, let's try the alternative. And that's the very reasonable A/B testing. Okay, this was a complete disaster. We've had our lowest level since like the Great Depression. We're going to go back to the centre. Nope, it's still going down. It's like, I, there's only two, there's only two buttons. Like, what am I supposed to do? So that is glorious. And I do think it is also wonderful to demonstrate the insincerity of politicians. And Labour is the perfect example of this. Not that I think Boris Johnson's a good person, let me just make that clear, but Labour just codifies this principle I'm about to, to demonstrate. They're called, they're called Labour. The party is called

• 1:08:26Michael Malice?

  Labour. It's not called the Democrats here. It's specifically the party of Labour. It came out of the Fabian Society, the unions, and so on and so forth. As soon as those Labour unions, working men, started voting Tory to any extent, they're being vilified as little Britners, backwards, illiterate, racist, so on and so forth. It's like, whoa, wait. So you never cared about Labour at all? You never claimed to rep, you, you, you did not really represent the views of your countrymen, or else you would have been changing your policies accordingly. You just used them or saw them as a means to gain power. And now that they're a threat to your maintaining power, you condemn and despise them. And there are many members of the Labour Party who publicly were like, look, I forgot the guy's name, I apologize, I'm sure people know who I'm talking about in the UK,

• 1:09:10Michael Malice?

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

• 1:09:54Michael Malice?

  often running the state, or, you know, certainly having, being number two, are imploding. And that to me, as someone who has disdain for democracy, is something absolutely wonderful.

• 1:10:05Chris Williamson?

  The situation.

• 1:10:06Michael Malice?

  It's also funny that, like, in, in just, sorry, one thing, British politics, you have Labour, which is a complete disaster. And then you have Boris Johnson, on the other hand, he's not exactly a great guy.

• 1:10:16Chris Williamson?

  He's not a slick operator, no.

• 1:10:18Michael Malice?

  Yeah, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:19Chris Williamson?

  Is this the guy that's defeated us? This one?

• 1:10:22Michael Malice?

  Like Bongo Bongo Land, this is gonna be our PM. It's like, but that's where we are. So it's, it's, it's, and the thing I love as an American, there is such a, a pretension to, to Brits looking down on us and, and, oh my God, haha. It's like, you guys have a lot of lowlifes at the very top. And one more thing that just happened recently, I, I was having, I forgot what it was, I had this tweet and I mean it. I said, no matter how bad of a day you're having right now, realize that somewhere Theresa May is miserable. And when you put it in those terms, it's like, it's great.

• 1:10:54Michael Malice?

  God, what a horrible woman.

• 1:10:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, um, I don't know, man. Watching that situation unfold was crazy, especially from, being from the northeast of the UK, which was this Labour stronghold.

• 1:11:09Michael Malice?

  Yeah, the hard wall.

• 1:11:09Chris Williamson?

  Hartlepool, yeah, is where I used to play cricket for years and, yeah.

• 1:11:14Michael Malice?

  Cricket for years.

• 1:11:17Chris Williamson?

  What was it?

• 1:11:17Michael Malice?

  The Chris Williams story, cricket for years.

• 1:11:20Chris Williamson?

  The arch, what was it that I was talking about? The chief constable of Hampshire Police or something? And you took a liking to him. But you're totally right when you say that it just seemed like, okay, what can we do now? What do you want us to say now? This was Labour's campaign. So what should we say now? What would you like us to tell you in order for us to stop depreciating everywhere that we thought that we were safe? So this is the thing that I found that was really interesting, man. So if it hadn't been for the fact that Trump had lost in November, or Trump didn't win the election in November. People get mad when I say that he lost. No, no, he didn't lose. So if you accidentally say that George Floyd was killed, it was like, no, he wasn't. He was, he died. You're like, oh, fucking come on, mate.

• 1:12:05Chris Williamson?

  It's just a term of phrase. Anyway, the fact that Trump is no longer the president, right? If that hadn't happened, I think that you would have a fairly robust case to be made that, look, all of this super lefty wokeism stuff, it's just not resonating with the electorate across the board. You know, two of the cultural leaders, when it comes to the West, English speaking countries, it's just not happening. But the Democrat win seems to throw a bit of a fly in the ointment of that hypothesis.

• 1:12:37Michael Malice?

  No, you're seeing it wrong from across the pond. So I don't, I don't think you're following American politics during the primaries. But Bernie Sanders, who is kind of the Jeremy Corbyn equivalent roughly, although he's a much more amiable and more, much more liked and respected person than Corbyn was, much less divisive. He was, we have something called Super Tuesday. So basically we have 50 states and each state has their primary caucus and they're not all in the same day. It's a staggered period. So basically you kind of have the playoffs as you, you know, people fall away and then you get the nominee for each party. And we have super, something called Super Tuesday, which is a day when a huge chunk of states all have their primary caucus on the same day. The day before Bernie, who only joined the Democratic, he's always been independent. He only joined Democratic Party seeking the presidential nomination, as he did four years earlier.

• 1:13:22Michael Malice?

  He was ahead in the polls in literally every state, other than I think Minnesota where Senator Klobuchar, Amy Klobuchar had been running as well, which was her home state. So he had a lock on the nomination. You know, they were going to have a social, a democratic socialist as their nominee. The Democratic Party publicly. Called all the other nominees. They said, you're ending your campaign today and endorsing Biden. Biden's our guy. And they did it. Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, mayor who was doing well. And they had been doing better than Biden in polling and delegates. That month, Super Tuesday's Tuesday, Monday, they all suspended their campaigns. Kamala Harris, who had suspended previously endorsed Biden and that put Biden over the top.

• 1:14:02Michael Malice?

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

• 1:14:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 1:14:42Michael Malice?

  And it's also counterintuitive, the data, because not that long earlier, when Theresa May called her snap election, Corbyn did better than Miliband had done previously. So if you're looking at the data, you can't say, you know, the Corbyn approach is a disaster because there was one election where he gave her a run for her money. She blew like a 20 point lead or something crazy. Then there's another election where it's their worst result in like 90 years. And then you go, okay, we're going to go to Sir Keir. Now it's going, it's like, if I were Labour, there's a lot of conflicting data here and I don't blame them for being confused.

• 1:15:17Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah, but do you see my point to do with America that I understand you can have top down people litigating or telling the candidates that they need to move in one direction or another. But bottom up, the electorate, again, questions about the validity of the election aside, the electorate seemed to not have this total whitewash or conservative wash, as you say. What do you think's different there? What was the, what was the key differences? Why are we seeing such a conservative push in the UK and not in the US?

• 1:15:53Michael Malice?

  I think we are, I don't know, that's, I don't know that I'm familiar enough to, with the differences to be able to make, I'm sure a lot of it has to do with personalities. Biden and Sir Kira aren't the same phenomenon, Boris Johnson maybe, and Trump are more similar than the two, those other two, and it would have to do with the different populations. I do think, from what I understand, and please correct me if I'm wrong, you guys had Brexit, obviously we didn't have a big issue like that, so to have, you would think that in that red wall, where so many people were for Brexit, even though there were reliable Labour voters, for Labour to then be like, okay, we're, this is what you got, like Theresa May was a Remainer, and she was like, okay, I'm still pushing through Brexit, when she

• 1:16:36Michael Malice?

  was on the steps of Number 10 her first day, she said Brexit means Brexit, I'm going to, you know, get this through, and now she wasn't really able to do that, but she wasn't like, I'm gonna undo this election, I'm gonna, but with Labour, it's my understanding, this is something that was a very populist thing, the entire establishment largely, or almost the entire Tory establishment, all the, largely the Labour people, even though Corbyn apparently quietly was a Remainer, they didn't really know what to do, as opposed to, this would be a good example for them to pivot, and maybe be like, okay, we're gonna, we're, thank you for get, it's, it's like, what, 1945, when Winston Churchill stood there on the balcony, and he said, and he told the people, this is your victory, and they yelled at him,

• 1:17:19Michael Malice?

  no, this is yours, so it would be, it's smart, I would think, I'm sure the Labour people are smarter than I am, in terms of what, it's like UK politics, to say like, all right, thank you Boris, for delivering us Brexit, we'll take it from here, you, Tory, Tory leadership has been a disaster, you're great at alienating us from Europe, but we're gonna make sure that Europe has a good relationship with the United Kingdom, which it always has had in our Labour, you know, you can, the speeches kind of write themselves, but I, they, for whatever reason chose not to do this, and I think a lot of it because so much of the left, increasingly... Are, you know, at the mercy of corporate media, which is much harder left, especially

• 1:18:03Michael Malice?

  in the States than the politicians themselves are.

• 1:18:05Chris Williamson?

  It's an interesting point. I do think that Brexit makes a huge, huge contribution to this because it was such a landmark point for everybody in the country. And you didn't have that single issue in the most recent American election, right?

• 1:18:23Michael Malice?

  Right.

• 1:18:24Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:18:53Michael Malice?

  And also 2010 is a better example because Obama's elected in 2008. He had super majorities in both houses of Congress. They stopped pushing through Obamacare, which at the time was enormously unpopular. The polls were violently against it. The Democratic Party still pushed it through. And then you had the midterm elections and they were a bloodbath. Now, they were starting from a huge level, so they weren't completely destroyed. But it was really when you have these one issue elections, or that shadow is floating over the electorate, that's something that is very easy for the other party to leverage, or at least for the party in power are gonna, even if the other party can't leverage it, they're still gonna lose a lot of their clout.

• 1:19:33Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that the left have so much contempt for the working class?

• 1:19:37Michael Malice?

  Because it's a lot easier to train a smart dog than a dumb dog. And I'm, I don't, in general. So educated, college, university people are much more easily manipulated by the media, much more subservient by the media because they've been spent all these years training. Whereas people who are intelligent but uneducated, like the working class, are much more skeptical. If you're, if you're, if you're in a factory and your boss is telling you how you're all a big family, blah, blah, blah, you're like, sure thing, boss. And you go, you go to your boys and you roll your eyes because you know, he's telling you what he wants to hear. But if you're in management, you might start to believe it. So I think this kind of two paths to perception is a big part of it.

• 1:20:21Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, that is interesting.

• 1:20:23Michael Malice?

  I don't think the working man correctly believes that the media regards them with respect, to put it mildly.

• 1:20:31Chris Williamson?

  Well, the media, definitely not.

• 1:20:33Michael Malice?

  Right, and if you have the media and Labour saying largely the same things, and this population thinks you're a jerk and a horrible person, well, you're agreeing with everything else, I would bet that you're saying these things behind closed doors, and they're probably right.

• 1:20:48Chris Williamson?

  That's a really interesting insight, that the vehicle which used to be prized, or still perhaps is prized, as the delivery mechanism for a lot of the talking points from politicians, the normal working class view, their interpretation of that industry at large, is perhaps becoming so jaded that even the association with it is now tarnishing any potential messages which it was. This is like being judge, jury and executioner of yourself, you're kind of hamstrung by your own situation.

• 1:21:25Michael Malice?

  Yeah, and it also, it's as simple just about putting food on the table. This is what happened in 1978, when Thatcher was head of the Tories, and she hired Sachi and Sachi, and they had a brilliant ad campaign with all the welfare cues, and the slogan simply was "Labour isn't working." I mean, just a brilliant turn of phrase, and at a certain point, you know, democracy, this is the best thing you could say about democracy, there's this inarticulate, like, okay, if there are these two choices, and this one isn't working, and I have two alternatives, it's not a hard choice, I'm at the very least gonna at least try this other one, no matter what you tell me about this woman, because as things stand now, this is not working for me. Now, it's very easy to make the argument that she was very bad for the working class,

• 1:22:07Michael Malice?

  you know, the miners, so on and so forth, and that's a big argument to be had, but in terms of, you know, feeling this connection as a working man, and the powers that be, I mean, the Tories exploited this very well in 78, and obviously that led to her election in 79.

• 1:22:24Chris Williamson?

  What do you think of the relationship between the left and the working class in America?

• 1:22:29Michael Malice?

  Oh, it's being gloriously bifurcated, and there is a increasing, I don't think people in Britain... Understand, and I, as someone who's knee-deep in this world, have trouble understanding how radicalized and how quickly the working class is in the States. And I had this tweet, and I said this on Rogan, that if they started putting up guillotines, corporate journalists will be tripping over themselves to make fun of how dull the blades are. I think there is-

• 1:23:01Chris Williamson?

  What's that mean?

• 1:23:03Michael Malice?

  Meaning, like, they don't realize that they're playing with fire, that these people are really being very radicalized in very dangerous ways, that they feel correctly that, you know, the corporate media is their enemy. Now, when you regard someone as your enemy, my result is, I don't want to talk to them, I don't want to deal with them. But it's very dangerous when a lot of people identify another group as the enemy, and someone's gonna get ideas, and that is something I'm very, very concerned about, something I'm mourning against. But they're sitting in their offices, well, now in their homes, thanks to COVID, and are like,

• 1:23:43Michael Malice?

  "Ha, ha, ha, look at these idiots, you know, putting up these gallows." It's like, you guys, if you talk- and the left knows this historically, when you marginalize a person or a group, and they have nothing to lose, and you keep poking them, what do you think's going to happen? It's going to end up, it's gonna blow up in ways no one wants, and I'm very, very concerned about this.

• 1:24:06Chris Williamson?

  What do you think happens? Roll the clock forward.

• 1:24:09Michael Malice?

  I don't even want to speculate, because this is the kind of thing where it's like tinderboxes, you know, like you light that match, and violence sings its own song. And I am desperately hoping we do not reach that point.

• 1:24:22Chris Williamson?

  And while we will wait and see. Dude, so good to have you here. We are not doing, well, it doesn't look like we're gonna get to do Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia.

• 1:24:30Michael Malice?

  Yeah, you're gonna have to, we're gonna have to, yeah.

• 1:24:33Chris Williamson?

  What are we gonna do? We need to do something else.

• 1:24:35Michael Malice?

  Well, cross the pond, baby. We gotta-

• 1:24:37Chris Williamson?

  I can't get in. I literally can't get into your country. The whole Shenzhen, Shenzhen zone is shut off. You're like a walled fucking nation at the moment.

• 1:24:47Michael Malice?

  One of us is gonna cross that Atlantic one way or another, or we're gonna have to meet in Japan or something.

• 1:24:51Chris Williamson?

  Swim, yeah. Well, dude, man, we need to do something, because we had this Russia thing planned to go, and it'll be-

• 1:24:56Michael Malice?

  Two years in a row, yeah.

• 1:24:57Chris Williamson?

  Yes. And we're not gonna get to do, well, maybe, I guess, but something fairly sort of dramatic would have to change, I guess. We need to do something, man, so we will um we'll get some plans made.

• 1:25:08Michael Malice?

  I I am could not be more looking forward to this content that creates as a result, because this is going to be the buddy comedy movie in real life. Right? Don't you think?

• 1:25:21Chris Williamson?

  I I think it makes an interesting pairing, yes.

• 1:25:24Michael Malice?

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

• 1:25:58Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Right. Well, we're gonna have to pay back some way, aren't we? So man, thank you so much. Um. The anarchist handbook will be linked in the show notes below at Michael Malice on Twitter and all of that other good stuff.

• 1:26:07Michael Malice?

  It's just anarchist handbook dot com. That's all they need to know.

• 1:26:11Chris Williamson?

  That's a really cool thing to finish up with. That's a really smart idea that I haven't seen other people use before. Most other authors, when they need to direct people to where to get the book, it's search it on Amazon or use one of those am amz dot to slash da da da da da da.

• 1:26:26Michael Malice?

  AMZ.

• 1:26:28Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to what?

• 1:26:29Michael Malice?

  Z.

• 1:26:30Chris Williamson?

  Oh, right. Yeah, sorry.

• 1:26:31Michael Malice?

  Why Z? It's not a person's name that makes no sense.

• 1:26:35Chris Williamson?

  X Y Z.

• 1:26:37Michael Malice?

  Z.

• 1:26:38Chris Williamson?

  Comment below if I've got Z wrong as a British person. I I don't know.

• 1:26:41Michael Malice?

  You got it right, but it makes no sense that that letter would have a name.

• 1:26:45Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, if this isn't, let let me just remind you, this isn't your language anyway.

• 1:26:49Michael Malice?

  Actually, we speak closer to British English than you guys do.

• 1:26:54Chris Williamson?

  What? As a Russian?

• 1:26:55Michael Malice?

  No, as a Russian. As an American, you guys are the degenerates.

• 1:26:58Chris Williamson?

  But where were you born?

• 1:26:59Michael Malice?

  Russia.

• 1:27:00Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay. So this, I I can't believe that I can't believe that a Russian is trying to tell me about how to speak my language.

• 1:27:10Michael Malice?

  No, well.

• 1:27:11Chris Williamson?

  The chief constable of West Hampshire will be will be making a call to you, sir.

• 1:27:17Michael Malice?

  Is he gonna tell me that's not cricket?

• 1:27:19Chris Williamson?

  He will be saying, that's not cricket. I don't just love it. Okay, anarchist handbook dot com.

• 1:27:37Speaker 04

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:27:41Speaker 05

  On October 2nd.

• 1:27:42Speaker 04

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:27:46Speaker 05

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:27:54Speaker 06

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 1:27:58Speaker 05

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:28:01Speaker 06

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:28:02Speaker 05

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9.0 Without Parent.