Michael Malice joins Joe Rogan to expose media manipulation, like CNN’s suppression of vaccine efficacy studies (Johnson & Johnson’s protection dropping from 88% to 3%) and natural immunity research, while debating the Streisand effect and institutional bias. They defend Dave Chappelle’s comedy against transphobia claims, critique outrage cycles ignoring bombings but amplifying Trump-related scandals, and contrast legacy media’s gatekeeping with independent creators’ authenticity. Rogan’s skepticism of mandates—from masks to vaccines—highlights systemic hypocrisy, where compliance is enforced selectively while transparency fails, revealing deeper trends of tribalism and power-driven narratives over truth. [Automatically generated summary]
And there's one that's not a meme, it's just a funny picture, but...
What do I use all the time?
Like the one I use is, it's not a meme, it's a gif, when people on Twitter ask me like a bunch of questions in a row in like one tweet, I just reply with the Riddler because it's all these question marks, but that's not that clever particularly.
It's this very severe form of blood cancer that severely impacts the immune system, apparently, and might have even rendered his vaccination ineffective because he was vaccinated.
Do you know that six months after the vaccine, some hospitals are not counting you as vaccinated, six months after fully vaccinated?
This comes from some woman that was working at a hospital that was talking about cases of vaccinated versus unvaccinated people that were admitted to the ICU. And she was saying the people that are in the hospital, in her particular hospital, she was saying when someone's been vaccinated six months ago, they list them as unvaccinated.
But I think it goes the other way, that if the efficacy is only six months, they're jacking up the numbers of people who are vaccinated to try to make it seem like only a tiny minority aren't, when that 70% or whatever it is, some of them are no longer effectively vaccinated.
And then, you, single-handedly, you and Alex, make him into an internet laughing stock, and he doesn't know what to do about it, and he starts yelling about Rogan mutton heads.
Well, it's kind of like when you have that hysterical girlfriend and you're sitting there smiling and nodding and she just gets more and more hysterical and at a certain point it just becomes funny.
It's just like, look, you are doing this to yourself and that is trolling at its purest.
Like his fiery dialogue, like the way he would write those...
He would write these speeches, you know?
These monologues.
They were very good.
At one point in time.
Whatever that was, it's like a man at some point in his life has a certain balance of passion, but hope for the future, and you have your sex hormones, you have your life ahead of you, you have hope, and you want to change things.
And at some point in time, things become imbalanced.
And then you no longer have hope.
And your hormones aren't functioning correctly anymore.
Well, it's a time where, you know, when these narratives, right, when you could sit down and have these monologues, it used to be a rare thing, you know, where someone had the freedom to, like, write a monologue like that, so it was impressive.
But now everyone with a YouTube channel can sit in front of a camera, and you have these brilliant people that aren't On a platform like MSNBC or Fox or CBS or whatever, they're just in their house with a screen behind them.
Because of that, Lex Friedman is one of the most respected and interesting commentators on the internet.
I mean, his internet...
Discussions with people are fucking amazing.
His David Fravor, the one with that fighter pilot that encountered that strange craft off the coast of San Diego, is one of the best interviews I've ever seen in my life.
I mean, he's so good at communicating with people.
Again, with humility, but the way he discusses things, even when they're controversial, when, you know, he feels like something needs to be said, the way he says things is never like, I am better than you.
Like, if you walk around Park Slope, which was the neighborhood next to mine, like, stores, that family store has been there since the 70s, you know, for rent.
There's not like, okay, this is the thing that's so sick about politics.
We bailed out the banks in 2008, but there's not really any talk about these stores that were the staples of their neighborhood, that gave it character, that made it special.
It's like, not too bad.
It's disgusting.
Shalom, Japan barely reopened, but my favorite place in New York, Zenkichi, which is basically you go in, it's a secret door.
Every seat's like a Japanese, it's like an Oriental Express train car.
You're not allowed to have kids in there.
They haven't reopened.
Ice and Vice, which is the best ice cream store in the world, they're done.
So just store after store.
And if you were opening a restaurant or a boutique or a bookstore, why would you do it in New York now?
Look, I have friends who have restaurants in Los Angeles, and they're talking to me about Austin.
They're like, listen, man, I gotta get out of here.
Because they're scared that anything...
Look, the flu rolls around.
The flu rolls around.
Like, we already have a precedent that's been set where when something that kills people...
Which most diseases kill a certain amount of people because some people are very, very vulnerable.
And when something can kill people, now they already have a precedent set where the government can come in and dictate whether or not you can be open and whether or not your business can function.
And make it so that people no longer have the choice as to whether or not they would like to just take a chance and go to a restaurant because the flu is around.
Now you no longer have the chance because big daddy government is going to look after you.
And I have a friend whose brother works for the state, and he's a part of this whole COVID commission, and told him point blank, they were having a conversation in Los Angeles about closing outdoor dining.
And he said, but there's been no transmission ever connected to outdoor dining.
And the woman who wound up closing everything down said, it's about the optics.
But imagine!
Thousands of restaurants!
They're fucking barely hanging on after the pandemic.
And someone comes along and has the fucking balls or ovaries to say it's about the optics.
But what this has done is allowed educated urban people who live in a state of anxiety, neurosis, and fear to have an external reason for their state of mind.
It's not that I'm messed up.
It's not that I'm a neurotic.
It's that everyone is living under the gun, so it's appropriate that I'm living in this state.
I don't have to look inward.
I can look outward.
Now, COVID is obviously a very big deal.
a lot of people have died, but it doesn't explain their extreme sense of terror.
They're more scared of getting COVID than of having COVID.
What would it be like if there was no social media in terms of the hyperbole, in terms of everything getting blown into this wild, anxiety-ridden frenzy?
Don't you think that the social media also accelerates all of the anxiety?
Well, not only that, I listed off a laundry list of medications, and that's the one they focused on.
I said I took monoclonal antibodies.
I said I took prednisone.
I said I took Z-Pak.
I said I had IV infusions of NAD and of vitamins, and I also took ivermectin.
I mean, it should be no surprise.
I had Dr. Pierre Corey, who is one of the doctors from the frontline critical COVID care group, that has been treating people, including, by the way, 200 Congress people have been treated with ivermectin for COVID. Did you know that?
200. I believe you could probably find it in Dr. Pierre Corey's Twitter page.
Yeah.
Before there were vaccines, this was a common treatment, an off-label treatment for COVID. Now, I do not know what the motivation for demonizing this particular medication is.
Again, I'm not a doctor and I'm not a scientist.
But I would imagine some of it has to do with money.
The reason being is that it is a generic drug now.
The patent has run out.
So anybody can make it and it's worth like 30 cents a dose.
Now, Merck has its own antiviral that's supposed to do the same thing that they claim Ivermectin does, as does Pfizer.
They're both about to release it.
I don't know if that's why the FDA is making snarky tweets about it being veterinary medicine, but I do know that it was used for humans for fucking years before they ever started using it for animals.
And I also do know that There's a massive amount of medications that have veterinary applications, including penicillin.
I don't think it's necessarily about the money so much it's about obedience because they're the ones who are promulgating how everyone has to act and then you have this guy from Austin over here, this comedian, telling people there was another way and the science isn't as settled and all of a sudden their sense of authority is diminished because when you have choices that means that person who wants to be the one to go to no longer is the one who has all the answers.
But dude, I disagree with you because when you're saying that you can't just have people lying, we're all taught in high school about yellow journalism and the Spanish-American War and they lied to get us into that.
Then there's a record scratch and they pretend that they're objective.
They've been lying for a very, very long time.
Here's another very easy example.
We were told that unless we have boots in the ground in Syria, which means American troops dying, the Kurds are going to be exterminated from the face of the earth.
This is another genocide.
All the boots weren't on the ground.
The Kurds were not exterminated.
The story vanished from the headlines.
And none of those people advocating for war who are claiming if we don't do this, it's going to be genocide had any consequences for their lives.
Well, you know, when you have the chief reporter on the beat of COVID for The New York Times talking about how questioning or pursuing the question of the lab leak is racist, the world has gone mad.
When you're not able to say out loud and in public that there are differences between men and women, the world has gone mad.
When we're not allowed to acknowledge that rioting is rioting and it is bad and that silence is not violence, but violence is violence, the world has gone mad.
People that work at networks, frankly, like the one I'm speaking on right now, who try and claim that, you know, it was racist to investigate the lab leak theory.
Yeah, these are extraordinary times, but because Barry Weiss used to work at the New York Times and decided enough of this bullshit, and has the courage and the principles to leave, and now she's got over 100,000 people on her substack, and please subscribe to her substack, because it's excellent!
Well, they have a playbook and it's only like two pages long.
And one of them is somebody has to be the bad guy.
And the bad guy, you know, when it comes to this COVID stuff, there's anybody who questions the narrative, anybody who goes over the data and finds flaws in it, anybody who has some sort of an alternative perspective, you're the bad guy.
And you're Trump.
And that's what they attempted to do to me.
That's what this is all about.
This weirdness that's going on.
And when someone like Barry Weiss, who you can't put in that box, goes on CNN and just says something more sensible, more poignant than anybody who's ever fucking said anything on that network.
When that happens, you realize you've got a problem.
Because the great minds are not there.
The people that are saying things that are important and critical and crucial to our understanding of why we're so fucked right now.
They're people like Barry Wise.
They're the people that go on these networks and say, hey, this is fucking madness.
They made a meme of a guy, Trump wrestling, they put CNN's logo and they tried to find out who it is and they said, we still reserve the right to sue you.
And someone somewhere just identified, oh, this is Barbara Streisand house.
She tried to, she sued it and it had no views.
She sues him or threatens the lawsuit, it blows up, and as a consequence of her trying to keep it hidden, it became 100 times more visible than it would have been otherwise.
So if she just kept her mouth shut and let it blow over, none of this would have happened.
So I went to what CNN had, and it goes deeper into the person that they talked to, and then who's a person on Reddit wrote these apologies, which then seems that's a little like, I don't see anybody on Reddit really ever doing that.
It may have happened, but that's not typical for me.
He says, first of all, I'd like to apologize to the members of the Reddit community for getting this site and this sub embroiled in controversy that should never have happened, he wrote.
I would also like to apologize for the post that...
For the post made that were racist, bigoted, and anti-semitic.
I am in no way this kind of person.
I love and accept people of all walks of life and have done so for my entire life.
CNN is not publishing this gentleman's name because he's a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology for that fucking nonsensical meme.
Let me clarify this, because this is important, because Gupta's getting attacked.
Sanjay Gupta is a neurosurgeon.
He's a guy who worked literally like a fucking 110 hours a week for years and years and years to become a neurosurgeon.
He's a socially awkward introverted guy who's a medical pundit on CNN. When he's communicating with them and he's doing these like short-form conversations when he's dealing with like a powerful personality like Don Lemon, it's very difficult to get your point across.
One of the things that he's been accused of that is not correct is that people said that he agreed that it was a veterinary medicine.
That's not what he agreed.
What Don Lemon said, Don Lemon said that it was also used as a horse dewormer and it's not approved by the FDA for use for COVID. And he said that's correct.
That's what he meant was it's not approved for COVID. He tried to talk and Don interrupted him and He actually called me and we had a conversation about this.
And Sanjay, of course, is also the author of the new book, World War C, Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic and How to Prepare for the Next One.
So Sanjay, look, I think this is really important because Joe Rogan is listened to and popular with a lot of people who aren't consuming mainstream media and mainstream science, right?
Now, I think we talk about this, obviously, on your program, on CNN, all the time, but there's a lot of people who still aren't getting the message.
And I don't know, maybe it was a silly idea of mine, but I wanted to go talk.
I think if you're serious about public health, you've got to go reach people who aren't typically hearing these messages.
And I think it's Joe, I also felt that Joe was willing to have a dialogue.
I mean, we had talked on the phone a couple of times.
He wanted to have this conversation.
So I thought there was room for a real dialogue out of which maybe some new knowledge for his listeners could come.
unidentified
So I played part of the vaccination conversation, but as I said, it was three hours.
So it wasn't the only time you tried to convince Rogan to get vaccinated.
I wanted to play another instance during an exchange that you had when you guys were talking about immunity to COVID. Testing is obviously testing you to see if you have the virus.
The therapeutic is to treat you because you have the virus.
Because the vaccine protects you from a bad infection.
And then you get COVID, so then you get the robust immunity that's imparted from having the actual disease itself, which is far more complex and comprehensive than you're getting from the vaccine that targets one specific protein, right?
Because I have better immunity than I would if I was vaccinated.
unidentified
Okay, so Sanjay, I mean, as many times you try to explain that, I mean, the obvious things of nobody knows how long that natural immunity lasts or how it differs from person to person, and of course it would only be better if you had the vaccine on top of it, all of these basic facts.
Do you feel like you broke through or that he will ever embrace the vaccine?
I hate to say that, but he just was very steadfast in this.
And when I cited him data saying, hey, look, there is the people who have natural immunity, people who have vaccinated immunity, and while the natural immunity may be strong for a period of time, reinfection rates are twice as high among people who have natural immunity versus vaccinated immunity.
Not only do I not believe that's true, but people who have been vaccinated have had breakthrough cases and died.
I think the number of people who have had COVID twice and died on the second time is...
Incredibly small.
I was reading an article about this recently, where they were trying to find instances of people who caught COVID, survived, got the antibodies, and then died on the second case.
Everyone that I know, I know four people that have, I know 13 people now that have had breakthrough cases.
So another thing that he said during the show that I didn't challenge, he said that breakthrough cases are incredibly rare.
They're not incredibly rare.
With time-dependent, let's call him Powell's breakthrough case.
But obviously he has a different situation because he had cancer.
I know 13 fucking people that have had breakthrough cases.
The number of people that have gotten COVID and recovered and then had it again and then died is so small.
Not only that, they think that there was an article that published recently, and I know I'm giving you a lot to Google, Jamie.
That said that there was a study that they believe that the antibodies imparted from natural infection are not only more robust, they're 6 to 13 times better based on the Israeli study of 2.5 million people.
6 to 13 times better than the immunity that's imparted from the vaccine.
But this study from this, when they were dealing with SARS, they're showing people that have immunity of SARS-CoV-1, right?
The original one.
That it's better, it's not just better than the vaccine, but people have immunity from SARS that have recovered from it 18 years later.
Like this article that was recently published with this study, they were saying they believe that it imparts lifetime immunity.
Well, they always talk about how you need boosters, so this is not even in dispute that the vaccines are limited.
I was under the impression, and again, I'm not Sanjay, I'm not a doctor, that once you have it, you're set for a very long time in terms of your antibodies.
The Moderna one, though, has the most side effects because it's the most potent.
Okay.
So the thing is that Johnson& Johnson is the least potent, and Fauci has said recently that they should have probably made the Johnson& Johnson for two doses, not for one.
Michael, you've done a lot of these shows, and I think part of, and this is, again, I don't, I have no disagreement with Erin Burnett.
I think the problem is these goddamn short-form shows.
This is no way to discuss something that's incredibly nuanced and very difficult to discuss and very important, and you're dealing with the differences in, there's so many variables in terms of age, in terms of, Immune systems, health.
There's so many factors that we need to take into consideration when we're talking about people that get sick.
Well, Rolling Stone also printed a completely fake story about gunshot victims in Oklahoma needing to wait to get into the ER because there were so many people that were overdosing on horse medication, which is a fucking total lie.
Not only that, the amount of ivermectin you would need to take to have an overdose is fucking massive.
I have friends that are journalists that tell me, their editors tell them this.
That you have to, even if you're being deceptive in your headlines, and maybe sometimes they will submit something with one headline and it'll be changed.
And they're trying to get as many people to click on it as possible, and if they can do it by being deceptive, it can make a difference if 10-15% clicks, which is huge!
Or maybe even more!
They're fucking starving, right?
There's no one paying for this shit.
No one's paying for journalism.
I pay for a few.
But very few people are paying to subscribe to the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or Rolling Stone.
They're just consuming things online, and they have an abundance of options.
There's so many options.
To get people to click on things, you have to make it inflammatory.
But I also think making it inflammatory gives them power because if you're the one who's getting an emotional reaction of a person, you're creating a bond with them.
I think the only people that are thriving in this market are the Matt Taibbi's and the Glenn Greenwald's and the Barry Weiss's who are independent, who have low overhead and have moved to Substack.
Those are the people that are thriving.
Because people are like, someone, or the Alex Berenson, someone please tell me the truth.
But this is also why people who work at these kind of institutions, they do not have it in them to have people attract them on a personal level.
So they have to repeat the party line because someone who works for Let's Suppose Reason magazine isn't going to be someone whose podcast you're going to want to listen to or the sub stack you're going to subscribe.
I used to deliver the Boston Globe, that was my main account, and then I also had the Boston Herald, and I got a New York Times account.
I was like, I'm But it was too much of a pain in the ass cuz I lived in Boston and like the routes were so Wide like I would have to drive like seven miles to drop off 30 papers It was too crazy whereas with Boston I would go this house gets it this house gets it that house doesn't this house get it was so many houses got the globe and then the Herald was like half the amount and then the times is like 1 8th the amount of Boston a lot of people did get the times but you gotta A blue bag for
That's when they teach everyone to kind of promulgate these demented ideas and spread them out through academia or through entertainment, through the corporate press.
It's no individual is to blame, and it's not their intent to do things wrong.
They get caught in a trap.
You ever been in an argument with someone, like you hate someone, you don't like them, and then some way or another, either they reach out to you or you reach out to them, and then you become friends?
Even the way CNN does what they do, like, the only reason why they're allowed to do what they do is because no one's there to say, hey, This is not right.
This is not accurate.
This is not true.
That's communication.
They have no two-way communication.
When you have one-way communication, you run the risk of being this person who disseminates disinformation or propaganda without even realizing what you're doing is wrong.
Look, I'm sure he's a nice person, a friendly person, Jeff Zucker.
But if he's seeing all this feedback, and he's organizing his organization in the same way that has prior, that causes people to end up lying, that the buck has to stop somewhere.
Well, this is one instance where I can prove that it's a lie.
And it's like, it's in your face, and it's because it's me as a human being, you know, and I'm aware of it.
We have this thought that a large percentage of what CNN and most mainstream media sites say are curated and cultivated and there's a motivation behind it and it's not objective sort of You know, like, what's the gold standard of news today?
I mean, I don't even...
I mean, my gold standard of news now is independent people.
If you go to FuckTards.org, you can see my tweet threads from 2019, article after article talking about Kamala Harris, and none of them mentioning Tulsi Gabbard.
That is a lie.
To say that Tulsi didn't nuke her in a post-mortem of her campaign is dishonest.
Because after I said that to him, I think you should be vaccinated and then get COVID. Bam!
Look at this article in the Courier-Mail.
If you're fully vaccinated against COVID, the next step to improve your immunity may be to actually catch the virus.
Folks, listen.
I was joking around with Sanjay, and we were drinking whiskey.
This is another thing that Aaron Burnett didn't bring up in that clip.
We were drinking.
Like, we're being silly.
I was like, I think you should get COVID. Like, I don't really hope he gets COVID. I hope COVID gets eradicated.
I hope they get therapeutic so that no one ever gets COVID again.
This is what I really hope.
But when I was saying that, it's not...
Like, when he's saying, I should get vaccinated, and I'm telling him, well, there's a greater chance of complications if you've already had COVID and get vaccinated, and I have friends that have actually been vaccinated after COVID, and most of them were fine, but three of them that I know personally got fucking wrecked.
A hundred percent, because anxiety can exacerbate your immune system and fuck it all up.
But here's the thing.
This is only one part of this giant puzzle.
And my confusion on this, I understand where it's coming from, but my frustration is that it's really obvious that other things can be done to enhance our immune systems and there's no promotion of that.
Whether it's a change in diet, whether it's exercise, whether it's meditation, there's a lot of things that you can do to enhance your immune system and none of those are being discussed.
The only thing that's being discussed is things that are capable of generating money.
If I don't understand how you can say these aren't bad people when they are trying to internationally create a society where if you do not get this vaccine, which in many cases, like your MMA guy, Having deleterious consequences, these people are going to be fired and can't go to a supermarket.
That is not something, there's room for nuance in this and they're trying to make it as if it's a black and white issue, which it is clearly not, as with anything medical.
I think control is a natural consequence, in this instance, of people that truly believe they're trying to do the right thing and they're attached to a machine that wants control.
Good and evil I don't think are useful necessarily in this context.
What I'm saying is you go to the university and you are punished if you do not follow the overwhelming philosophy and you're rewarded if you are submissive and repetitive and are going to promulgate that philosophy once you leave the university system.
In the same way that everyone, if you go to McDonald's in California, you go to McDonald's in Massachusetts, you go to McDonald's in Florida, it's going to be the same food.
That's not a conspiracy.
That's an organization that is spreading forth, in this case, its product, which is burgers.
The university system are of one mind in spreading an ideology.
And that's why all those college graduates who end up at CNN, who end up at MSC, New York Times, or in Hollywood, they're going to have the same worldview.
And you're going to have this perception of unanimity.
It's not a conspiracy.
They're all just trained at the same places to believe certain things, and they were punished severely for not believing those things.
What happened is over 100 years ago, people like Richard Eli, who started the American Economics Association, I talked about this in an old book of mine that you write, basically his idea is we need to introduce the idea of a mixed economy into economics.
This whole classical liberal thing isn't working for us.
This is like 1910s, 1900s.
As a result of that, there's an understanding.
They talk about the university about creating the next generation of leaders.
What that means, it's an Orwellian way of saying we're training people who are going to be the overclass, who are going to rule and manipulate the country for good reasons.
And if you're a member of the overclass, you have stature.
You have status.
It's important for you to be perceived as a good, honest person, but I'm still a good, honest person above the rest of you.
And when the rest of you start criticizing me and start being defiant, you're confused because you were trained to think you are in a position to rule over them and lead over them.
So is it a natural state where groups lead over other groups?
Yes.
Right?
It seems like if you looked at the human race objectively, if you didn't attach yourself to culture, you looked at it objectively, like how many of these groups of humans Form into this organization where one person rules with fear and force.
Because the premise of Lord of the Flies, which we're all taught in high school, it's still a signed reading, is if you had a bunch of kids stuck in a desert island...
They'd start killing each other and be savages and it'd be violent, right?
Because the idea, the Hobbesian idea is civilization is very thin underneath that human beings are basically violent.
That's not true.
Human beings are basically animals, but we're benevolent social animals.
And in fact, we don't even have to guess because there was a real story.
A bunch of kids did get shipwrecked on an island together.
They were lived together for 18 months and they got along so well.
And in fact, when one kid broke his leg, they didn't crush his skull in.
They made him, they set his leg.
They gave him a throne.
They treated him like a king.
And when they found these kids, they were all thriving and getting along well together.
So this is a very big lie.
The reason Survivor, that show, the reason that people have to fight, because they have to vote each other off.
But if you watch the show, the first thing is, let's put together a tent to live in.
You could get the wrong guy on an island and then you have a slaughter fest and people start cannibalizing people.
All it would take is the wrong guy to kill one of the people and to keep everybody in fear and then everybody would plot to kill that guy and he would try to kill you when you're sleeping and then the next thing you know it's a fucking, it's a terrible story.
Or you could have Lord of the Flies Turned out, the way you're saying, where the kids get together and they help each other and the kid breaks his leg and everybody comes together.
Like, if you get a thousand humans, one of them is going to be out of his fucking mind.
And if you were on a boat with that guy, and that boat gets shipwrecked, and then you realize that no one is in charge, and that motherfucker could just run shit and tell you that he eats all the coconuts, and you gotta fight him, and he's bigger than you, and you're like, fuck!
That's how it goes down.
It's not always the guy gets his leg broke and everybody lives together.
Basically, they're that guy who convinces everyone else to stop cooperating and stop being benevolent and to think of each other tribally and to turn one group against another.
And they're aided and abetted by this by people in the corporate press who want us to have a binary worldview that you're either for vaccines or you're for Trump.
And then they laid out what a sociopath is and what a corporation is.
And like, there's...
There's a thing where it's not a person anymore, but it has all this power.
It seems to be like it's always going to try to get ahead.
And if things are always going to try to get ahead and they're not going to take into consideration the way it makes people feel, because you're not thinking about feeling anymore when you deal with numbers, right?
So you have a corporation that's battling other corporations.
What are you battling for?
Market share, stock prices, there's numbers.
Like, numbers are not feelings, but we operate on feelings.
So if we are part of a corporation, then we're a part of a thing that doesn't take into consideration what it means to be us, to be feeling.
But this has historically been the strongest aspect of the left, which is skepticism of corporate America, and understanding that giant corporations do not care about mom and pop or you, that they are there to get money, and that they have no choice, because they have a duty to their shareholders to make as much profit as possible, And this whole corporate responsibility is often a good veneer for this.
But now, it's like we have to be on our knees blowing Pfizer because they're saving us all.
And people on the left were saying this with a straight face.
And that human beings, we operate on this really wide range.
It's a giant spectrum, and we should have agreements of how things go and what's important and what's not important, and we should talk about these things, but we have to recognize, first and foremost, that we're instinctively tribal.
It's a part of our DNA, and it's fucking us up.
Because we have this need.
So if you have anxiety, if you have a problem, we have this need where there's another person out there who is your enemy.
And you think about them.
And whether you call them a Republican or whether you call them Libertarians, those people are your enemy.
And if you're freaking out all the time, thinking of this other group of humans that probably shares way more in common with you than they don't, like when it really gets down to politics, like what does everybody really care about in life?
They care about their loved ones.
They care about finances.
They want to make sure we don't go to war.
They want to make sure that, you know, soldiers are protected and the streets are safe.
I saw him in LA once at the Echo or the Satellite.
I forget what it's called.
And ahead of me at the table were a couple on a date.
And I see the girl who's basic as fuck turn to her date.
She goes, what is this?
What?
Wait, this is the best Neil Hamburger moment.
So he was opening for Tenacious D in Ireland or England, right?
Sorry to confuse the two.
They didn't know who he was.
They're booing the fuck out of him.
And he goes, alright, alright.
Do you guys want to see Tenacious D? Do you guys want to hear your heroes of my Tenacious D? Okay, if I do this next joke and you don't boo me, I'll bring out Tenacious D. And he goes, uh, what did Santa Claus get Paris Hilton for her birthday, for Christmas?
Dude, some of those gals, when I watch them at the Comedy Store, I'm like, the fucking poise to carry a tray of drinks and walk through drunks, a maze of stumbling drunks, and the sheer number that are successful versus, like, crashes.
I think they're trying to put different individuals or groups on a pedestal and kind of make them sacred.
And when you have someone comes along and knocks them off that pedestal, all of a sudden you're trying to undo what I'm trying to do, which is to make this person holy.
And now you are my enemy because your agenda is the opposite of mine.
If you and I were fucking with each other, we're saying ridiculous shit to each other, we would both be smiling while we did it.
This is what Roast Battle's all about.
My friend Brian Moses.
This is what a lot of what Kill Tony's about.
It's fun.
There's fun in making fun of each other.
And we have to accept that.
And then I need to know your real feelings about gay people.
Your real feelings about trans people.
Your real feelings about all religions and all races and all ethnicities.
But we gotta be able to joke around about each other.
And if you get down to Dave Chappelle's real feelings, he's a lovely person.
He's one of the nicest people I've ever met in my life.
He loves everybody.
He's not a hateful soul.
He's beyond jealous.
He's just a guy who loves this art form called stand-up comedy and he tries to do his best navigating through this world of talking shit about things and saying outrageous things that get huge laughs or Placating really sensitive groups that feel like they're in a protected class and then the other people that pile on to that that also feel like this is a protected class and they equate to Any jokes with hate.
And this is where they're wrong.
Like, I'm telling you that Dave Chappelle does not hate anyone or anything.
He's not that person.
His jokes are just that.
They're just jokes.
And if you really pay attention to what he's saying, Whether you agree with him or not in some of his jokes, like whether or not they're funny, just really pay attention to the overall message.
But this is a way for low-status people to try to compete with Dave and try to get on his level.
Because if I'm some kind of rando journalist and I take down Dave Chappelle or Joe Rogan or somebody else, this elevates my status and my rank and takes him down a peg, and that's useful for me from an evolutionary point of view.
You have to equate that in anything you think about when you think about a guy like Dave Chappelle.
But then you also have to realize that the problem is in listening to everybody You're gonna get a certain group of people that want people to not be able to work anymore.
They want to, like, stop you.
They want to pull things down.
They want to change, like, what's available.
You don't have to like it.
Like, here's the thing about Dave Chappelle.
Look, he's clearly the most popular comedian on planet Earth.
When you have options You don't have to like it, but if you want Netflix to take it down and you say it's hateful This is this is an incorrect way to do this If you want to make your own special about what was wrong with Dave Chappelle's special- Or go on YouTube with your monologue like Keith Alderman.
Go for it and good luck to you and maybe you'll have a point That person that you're criticizing can take into consideration and go, maybe I could do better at this.
Because if something does bother you, if someone says something ridiculous about you, and it doesn't make any sense, it doesn't have any effect on you.
The things that bother people is things that are at least slightly accurate.
But I think this just kind of speaks to what we were talking about earlier, how they're trying to have their be...
in the same way how intentionally or not it's trying to push everyone to be an Amazon or a Walmart customer they are trying to have everyone only consume media approved sources.
If you're not reading the New York Times or CNN or the Washington Post or whatever, that means you're doing something wrong.
So this is what they're doing, that process of elimination, by trying to funnel people into certain outlets that they themselves can control, and that creates uniformity and cohesion among the population.
What he's saying in this, he's telling a story about a real person that he was close with that died, that died.
Became friends with him through comedy.
There's a whole story to it.
I don't want to give it up because I think you should watch the special.
I toured with Dave.
We did a lot of shows together.
This is his story that he had about this person that he loved that died.
It's not a transphobic story, but there's jokes in there.
And in those jokes, he's poking fun at everything, including himself.
I mean, this is a part of his act.
It's part of any comics act.
There's a lot of it that's just designed to be funny while he's telling a story.
It's one of the things that Dave does so well.
He tells these stories and he figures out a way to get his point across while being really funny.
But when you're going to be really funny, you're going to make fun of yourself, you're going to make fun of other people, you're going to make fun of everything.
You have the Jewish guy, you have the Italian guy, you have the Puerto Rican guy, you have the black guy.
Everyone's busting each other's chops, and that's how you symbolize that you're comfortable with each other.
I'm safe with you by saying things that would get me in trouble in other contexts, and I trust you enough to know that you're not going to use that in a bad way, that we're all bros here.
30 pairs, one for every day of the week, every month.
I'm going through all the boxes.
I have 100 boxes, all my shit.
The denim's gone.
And then I'm like, the thing is, when you lose something that means a lot to you, even though it's just sentimental, and the thing is with raw denim, it takes years to break them in and so on and so forth.
There might be an Excel sheet involved that I'm not going to talk about.
But the thing is, when they've taken that, you have to wonder, what else have I missing?
So every day when I was unpacking these boxes, I was like, what?
And I'm not going to remember what's gone, because it's like, I have what I have, but I don't remember what was left in Brooklyn.
And last week, I was opening up this wardrobe box, which was as tall as me, seven-eighths empty, and under some frames was all my denim.
It was like pulling a sofa out of a wallet.
And I almost cried.
But it was so stressful for that month of waking up every morning and just dreading unpacking.
There's guys out there digging into the side of a mountain in the Congo with a stick to try to get the minerals to use to make your iPhone, and people are listening on that iPhone to you talking about you couldn't find your pants.
Yeah, there's a big – because there are these machines called – I forget what they're called.
They're made in Switzerland to print American money.
And apparently North Korea – there's some dispute whether they have this – are like the world's best at making counterfeit U.S. dollars because they're making real U.S. dollars on the machines that we use.
But if there is a group of people in 2021 that are living like the people are living in North Korea that are under the grip of that government, that's possible anywhere.
With the wrong things, with the wrong set of circumstances, the wrong events taking place, the wrong people getting to power.
Just like you could get shipwrecked with the wrong person and wind up in a fucking horror movie, or you can get shipwrecked with the right people and wind up in a beautiful movie.
Well, that's why I went there, because, you know, Being born in the Soviet Union, by that time the Soviet Union was nowhere near as bad as it had been back in the day, but this was my only chance to see what my family could have gone through, you know, and they have concentration camps, like being Jewish, I could have been in a camp in Eastern Europe very easily, so to see what it was like for my family in a parallel universe, you know, is very eye-opening.
I hesitate to even bring this up because I don't want to take it out of context, but our positions, when it comes to just ideas about mandates and vaccines and how we mask or no mask, just these weird sort of tribal issues, these things that happen with people, when we start looking at each other as the other...
As someone who is less than, when we have power over the other, when we want to control the situation because we're the good people, and we want to do it by any means necessary, there's a slope.
The reason why the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights the way they did is they're like, okay, there's some patterns that we need to mitigate.
Some real patterns of human behavior.
And we got to make sure, first of all, you can say whatever the fuck you want.
Because I can't know.
I can't know who's right unless both people talk.
If two people talk and I get to figure it out, we get to debate back and forth.
And if we're honest about it, we can figure out who's right.
But if you can say that person can't talk because I'm right, now I'm in the dark.
I didn't get ratioed because I said, if you replace the word coronavirus with Jews, all of a sudden the behavior of the 1930s German population becomes eerily similar.
And what I meant by that is, we all wring our hands about how the Holocaust happened.
How did the Germans go from a normal people to within four years being like, comfortable with or turn their blind eye to genocide?
And what we're seeing with the corona, And we got a long ways to go before it's Nazi Germany.
Let me be clear.
I'm not trying to get everyone to freak out.
But how eager people are to be informants.
After Germany reunified, they opened up the Stasi files.
The Stasi were their secret police.
It was the biggest fail in society other than, I think, perhaps North Korea that the world had ever seen.
And you could find out who spied on you and who turned you in.
And what they found out, it wasn't that like, you know, they got to your wife and we got the wife to snitch on Joe.
People were eager.
To snitch on their neighbors because they felt that they were doing the right thing and it gave them a sense of power and a sense of status.
So when you see, we're talking about human beings, a lot of people are very eager to drop that dime and pick up that phone call because then they would turn it on Anne Frank and then they'd boast about it on social media.
I think there's like a state that we need to reach.
As an organism, as a human organism, there's a state we need to reach physically where we feel like we're in homeostasis, where everything's balanced out and most of us don't get there.
Most of us, we don't ever achieve that state physically and so we have this compounding anxiety.
From not achieving that state physically, that piles into the way we look at it mentally, the way we view the world, the way we think about things.
That gets more anxiety-ridden because you haven't taken care of the needs of the body, so it's not balanced.
Because at the very least, if we're going down, we're all going down together, I'm part of the in-group, the numbers are in my favor, so I can compete on the metric of obedience.
If I have nothing to offer, at least I can follow orders and be a good person in the world.
You should have like a thing that catches how much COVID's coming out.
Tell me how these fucking things work.
Because what if it's zero?
Or what if it's 100%?
What if, like, if you're near a person, if we realize that cotton doesn't work, but this shit, you know, you make hemp, hemp masks, or whatever the fuck it is, like, this one works 100%.
Like, it stopped.
Well, then you'd be an asshole if you didn't wear a mask.
There's a website called minimallycompliantmask.com, which I used to wear to the gym because it looks like you're wearing a mask, but you're not wearing a mask.
and i think and and when you're a politician and you're trying to save uh something a population for something that's largely out of your control you have to keep doubling down because you can't just say well i'm powerless against this because i'm going to get voted out because the next asshole is going to say i'm going to fix this we have a problem with We have these primal instincts in these human reward patterns that existed to make us survive against invasions of foreign mercenaries and barbarians and shit.
places where we have an interest but invade america and it's like how would that even be possible even if our military was half the size that we wouldn't see it coming it's nonsensical but they it used to be russia now it's china you know china just long china's a little more interesting than russia because they have a far greater economic power than russia ever had what china has is this unusual integration With capitalism and communism that's
never existed before on mass scale like this, also in the world of the internet.
Like, it's a wild thing that they're able to do.
But what China just recently launched, they found out that they launched a supersonic weapon.
I mean, if you imagine a spacecraft that moves like a missile, a supersonic missile.
But it's a spacecraft.
Whatever it was, it did low orbit launches at phenomenal speeds.
Where it shook the people that examine military capabilities.
They didn't understand this.
They didn't see it coming.
They're like, holy shit.
So they've obviously been developing something.
Their position is like if you read anything about China's view or you talk to people about China the way they view the world, it's so unique that their business and their government is completely intertwined.
No, it was something to do with AI. It was some sort of component of these super advanced computer systems.
And they went into business with China, and they had this deal, and all of a sudden, they tried to remove the Chinese guy From the company.
They're like, hey, we got to, like, separate from you guys.
Like, what are you doing with our intellectual property?
And then they cut off communication, and China just reopens this company, because they bought, like, 51% of the company, and they just take their internet ideas, like, whatever they're...
You know, the thing about AI was, whatever they actually designed there, and then they opened it up in China under a different name.
They just changed the name like we own it.
So Sagar did a whole piece on it calling the heist of the century.
It is fucking fascinating because you realize that these people are like, hey, we're going to get rich, Bob.
I'm telling you, you're going to get a brand new jet.
Anyway, Sagar's breakdown of it was fucking fantastic because he was explaining that you're not hearing about this on mainstream publications in the news and newspapers.
He goes, this is a really important story.
And what was their product they made?
Semiconductors?
Semiconductors, that's what it is.
I keep wanting to say like silicone chips because I'm old.
It's a real problem if Apple decides to give in and start banning these applications based on religious beliefs.
Like, you're gonna ban it because the government doesn't want you to have an option to click on something that is about, you know, the Quran or the Bhagavad Gita or whatever the fuck it is.
You can't do that.
That's censorship.
Like if you're willing to accept censorship, and I've heard this argument from someone that I am friends with that used to work with Google, they used to work at Google, and they were doing something with China, and they were really concerned because they were communicating with China, and this was the attitude.
If we don't do this, China is just going to copy everything that Google does.
They're going to steal Google, like steal all of the infrastructure, they're going to find a way into it, and they're going to make their own Google.
So they're trying to work with Google.
So, but the way, or with China rather, but the only way to work with them is you've got to follow their rules.
This is why Apple is in a precarious position, because if the world knows that you're willing to ban this one application that studies the Quran, what is the app?
When someone's perspective is equally well thought out but differs, we are all in competition, whether it's physically or mentally or financially or status-wise, and sometimes we'll get caught up in ideas.
And I think it's the best, for everyone alive, it's best we don't look at ideas as something that's a part of us.
So if your ideas are wrong, one of the things that people do that's so common is you argue For your idea as if it is you.
Like you're connected completely to it to the point where you're willing to lie about whether or not the idea is accurate, even if you know it's not accurate.
Like saying something is horse dewormer, when you know it was prescribed for humans for years before it was prescribed for horses.
That's well known when you're saying that.
But what you're trying to do is just win.
You're trying to win because that idea is connected to you.
He wrote The Stranger, and he wrote The Rebel, and The Myth of Sisyphus.
about how, you know, you're for this, what would happen as a consequence of this political system if like your mother went to jail and he just made the comment, he goes, I like justice, but I love my mother.
So like if you do have these kind of ideologies and push comes to shove, it makes you be a bad person to your people, to your friends, your family.
It's the ideas that are wrong.
And it's the relationships that matter much more.
And this is another thing I really despise, and I block people about this all the time.
Some people came at me on Twitter asking me to denounce Lex because he had something to do with the masks.
Well, you're an asshole and you're also trapped in this ideology of wokeness that's not applicable to friendships.
You don't know where a person was coming from, what actually happened, you hear a story, and then all of a sudden you're taking the side of...
One over the other and you're not even calling that person.
Public displays of any kind of opinions or feelings or outrage have to be examined very carefully because there's a thing about deciding to do something publicly.
You are broadcasting it in full awareness of your own personal image.
There's something about that that we don't say while a person is doing it, but we all kind of know, but we're willing to ignore it if enough people pile on and agree that this is a good message.
So people will try to have these public displays of virtue where you know why they're doing it.
This is a little fucking fake, man, but I'm going to...
Yeah, he's saying some good shit.
All right, go for it.
And then people develop careers based on that.
Careers based on...
Licking their fingers, figuring out which way the wind's blowing, and then making some grand statements and maybe calling someone out.
Oh my god, Michael Malice called someone out.
And that calling out shit, what are they doing?
Did they call the guy first?
Did they call the woman first?
Did they have a conversation first?
Or did they just decide to make this big, public, virtuous event of them having an opinion It differs from that other person's opinion to cloud chase.
What kind of person are you and of what use are you?
You're good, maybe I could chat with you at a party, but if things are going bad for me, I want someone who I could call up on the phone and be like, hey, shit's hitting the fan, do you have my back?
You don't have to have it publicly, but can you at least kind of give me some kind of comfort or sucker?
I have a video that I never released, because I'm like, this is irresponsible.
But it's me listening to Led Zeppelin, a whole lot of love, and like, Moving my hands around the steering wheel, not really driving at all because we're on the PCH. How much do they cost?
And he was a very prolific journalist and a very successful journalist.
And they had asked these people who understood Technology and military applications, whether or not it was possible at that time to pilot a car and drive it into it, to take control of a car.
He said, absolutely.
He said, absolutely.
That exists.
Now we know it exists.
If you have a car today, like a modern car with electronics and an internet connection and all that jazz like most cars do, it's 100% possible for some shenanigans to take control.
Even though I don't agree with her politically, she's tough.
And I was asking her, I'm like, look, every president has to make the choice about war.
And they know when they're making that choice about war that they're going to kill a lot of American soldiers, and even if we pretend we don't care about lives of people in other countries.
I said, if that person is in that mindset, why would you put it past them to kill one or two people who are in their way?
If they're comfortable killing all these soldiers, why wouldn't they kill that one person who's threat to power, just psychologically?
And she's like, yeah, I agree with you.
Now, it doesn't mean that every one of these things happen, but G. Gordon Liddy, who was one of Nixon's Watergate people, He was on Fear Factor, by the way.
But in his autobiography, when he was facing all three branches of the federal government, he was talking to his contact at some part of the deep state.
I remember who it was.
And he says to them, look, if you've got to take me out, tell me what street corner to be on.
I just don't want you to kill me in front of my family.
And the guy says to him, we haven't gotten to that point yet.
But there was no claim that this is something that never happened.
We try to assassinate people in other countries all the time.
Trump just killed that general, that Iranian general, and there were no consequences as a result of that.
Joe, just this past summer, the U.S. government drone strikes a bunch of children and called them ISIS-K, because K stands for kindergarten in this context, apparently.
And no one who did this had any consequences for it.
It wasn't the right people to kill, and the idea that their lives aren't as important, like, if that was done, like, let's imagine that that same drone strike was done, but it hit the Trump family, and it was Ivanka Trump and Jared Trump and Barron Trump and Melania, and they all got murdered by a drone, you'd be like, holy shit!
Like, we're sorry, we thought they were terrorists.
If that had happened and it was Trump and Trump had killed a bunch of people accidentally and seven of them were children, that would be a giant story.
Because it's about the commodity of bear fat in the early days.
It was a huge trading thing.
Bear fat was very valuable, and bears were very valuable.
During the pioneer days, during those days where the settlers were making their way west, in Arkansas in particular, where he's from, bears were more important than deer, more important than any Yeah, they're a game animal.
Oh, when whole genome sequencing indicates that while dogs are genetically divergent subspecies as a gray wolf, the dog is not a descendant of the extant gray wolf.
Rather, they are sister taxa which share a common ancestor from a ghost population of wolves that disappeared.
At the end of the late Pleistocene, oh my god, I sense a movie!
Tom Shalhoub, who I think he's still on Fox, I don't remember, like he had a book and I read his book and he talked about how when he was a kid in Boston, like in the 50s or 60s, there'd be packs of dogs that would maul kids on their bikes.
And I'd be like, wait, wait.
And he's just like, yeah, that's what it was.
I'm like, how is this normal that you're on a bike and these dogs just attack you?
And he just basically played it off.
And I'm like, I still can't wrap my head around, are they killing the kids?
Are they dismembering them?
He's like, no, no, they attack you and then you kind of chase them off.
And I'm like, you seem to be pretty blasé about something that seems to be very, very disturbing.
But if you don't use a certain van for two weeks, that's terrifying.
Here's the thing, like, I don't know how those things work, but if the lock works on the outside, but there's no handles on the inside because you've got prisoners, you could easily open that up and go, I'm going to take a nap in here.
And all of a sudden it's 75. You're like, oh my god, I have to drink my own urine.
So then you're trying to figure out, you, Michael Malice, you, trying to figure out how to stay alive, tripping balls.
You were hanging out with Burt Kreischer, and he got you hammered, and he climbed into a police car, and you're like, fuck the police, and you took a nap.
Yeah, and I think that if you looked at what it is, if you could take what a human is, what entails being a human being, and you could narrow it down to a specific group of elements and ingredients...
We're the same thing.
Exactly the same thing.
So, it's possible with the wrong set of circumstances, the wrong events, the wrong humans in charge, to get to a point where people are so fucked that they're eating their kids.
In the late 1800s, early 1900s, the talking point was, we're never going to have war again, because now we're civilized, and we have technology, and we figured it out, and then came the Great War.
And as a result of that, they had to invent plastic surgery because it was the first time you had human beings meeting metal machines of war and coming back all disfigured and completely deformed.
I don't think should is the word I would use, but I think that this is why I'm so hopeful for this country.
I think it's inevitable.
Look at when you and I were kids, there was Sam Goody and Coconuts and The Wiz and those are the record stores and you can only get a certain amount of records and now those stores don't exist and there's more music than ever.
And you get it the press of a button and for virtually nothing.
So I think there's no reason for news to be as commodified and to be as centralized as it is.
There's plenty of artists who are making it happen.
Look, for example, my books, you can bootleg them, and I'm not seeing a cent, but there's enough people who are paying that enables me to have that be my income.
My book, The Anarchist Handbook, which I dropped in May, was the top nonfiction book on Amazon for a few hours, and I didn't go through a publisher.
This is a new means of publishing, and I'm very, very excited about what that means for the future.
Don Miguel Ruiz wrote a book called The Four Agreements.
It's really beautiful.
And if you get the audio version, it's really easy to digest because it's read by Peter Coyote, the actor.
And it's, one, be impeccable with your word.
This is the idea.
These are the four agreements.
Be impeccable with your word.
There's no reason to say something you don't really believe.
If you think that it serves you, this is my interpretation, but if you think that it serves you to be a liar and to be disingenuous, ultimately, based on my own experience, it doesn't serve you.
Because any victory you gain through deception You lose points in how you feel about yourself.
The people that I value the most are the people with humility and self-deprecation and honesty, and they can look at themselves for what the fuck they really are.
So here's another one.
Don't take anything personally.
If there's anything out of this book that's helped me more than anything, it's don't take things personally.
Because if people say mean shit about you, people immediately want to lash out.
They immediately want to attack.
They immediately want to make it their goal to destroy that person.
It's...
It's a waste of energy like if you want to discuss it publicly like we just did on this podcast like me even this maybe an argument against that but Taking it personally is fucking dangerous, but I come on.
Some people ask me how I deal with all the garbage on social media, and I'm like, look, I'm from New York, right?
If you're in New York and someone gets up to you on the subway and starts cursing you and calling you stupid and all these other things, you're not going to take their comments under advisement.
Your only thought is, how do I get away from this person as fast as possible?
So that is a similar model.
If there's a stranger who's berating you on Twitter or Facebook, it's fine.
But there's lots of things I take personally.
If I value someone's opinion, if they have an intimate relationship with them and they say bad things about me, yeah, it's going to hurt.
But you might decide, because you're defensive, that you read someone's interpretation of what you said and they get angry.
My point is that there's a lesson to be learned about human beings interacting online that Hasn't really existed before this era that we're living in right now with the internet.
When I say don't take anything personally, listening to what he's saying, I think we're dealing with a whole new level of that.
And if you could just say, people just talk, like if you say something crazy or whatever you do, if I talk to you, I won't take anything personally unless I can look you in the eye and have a conversation with you.
And not just a short one.
If we have a disagreement, I want to know what you think and why you think it.
And I want you to be able to listen to what I think and why I think it in a way that's going to be the most digestible.
So I'm going to say it in the most nice way possible.
That's my goal.
So when I say don't take anything personally, Don't make it harder.
But I think the other thing young creators don't appreciate is make sure if you're creating a product, whether it's a book, podcast, whatever, that you're doing it for yourself.
If you're comfortable, if you enjoy it, and it doesn't resonate with the audience, it doesn't mean that it's the wrong thing.
Like, a lot of times I'll do things that people find stupid, but I'm having fun.
Yeah, for sure.
And if I'm having fun, then it's easy for me to produce.
And when you're young, you're going to ask your dumb little friends for advice, and they don't want to seem stupid, so they'll give you what they know, but they don't know what the hell they're talking about either.
When a fucking cage-fighting commentator and a dirty comedian who started a podcast to talk shit while getting high with his friends, if that becomes a problem, why is that resonating with people?
Do you know that back in the day in comic books, and this is Jermaine, they weren't allowed to have characters named Clint because in comic books when the letters are all written out in capitals, it looks like cunt.
So they just put together a clip show for my YouTube called Malice Clips, but we're going to call it Malice Cups because it just looks fucking like that.