Heated Debate on Anarchy w/ Michael Malice | PBD Podcast | Ep. 248
PBD Podcast Episode 248. In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Michael Malice, Adam Sosnick and Tom Ellsworth. Protect and secure your retirement savings now with this complimentary precious metals guide. Go to http://goldco.com/pbd 855-594-2758
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Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Why would you bet on Goliath when we got bet tape?
Value payment, giving values contagious.
This world of entrepreneurs, we get no value to hated.
Howdy, running, homie, look what I become.
I'm the one.
So we got a special guest here all the way from Buffalo, New York, who got nine and a half hours of sleep last night.
He just wrote a book called Why You Don't Need More Than Four Hours of Sleep.
Guys, be ready.
Michael Malice is breaking into dick.
I think we should have probably recorded three minutes before us going to the podcast.
Literally, Tom was about to have his first fist fight, and it was going to be pretty intense.
Him and Michael going at it, but it's going to be friendly.
I'd like to see who's going to be.
It's good to have you on the podcast.
The anarchist side of the room in here.
Russians don't use fists.
We use knives.
So there was not going to be.
What do Canadian use Tom?
Or they use that.
Apologies.
Or they use that.
Not the Quebec road.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Canadians don't apologize, just the Quebecois, which are sort of like recycled French.
Anyways, this is what happens when you have a guy that comes on a podcast.
It takes half a second.
He describes himself as an anarchist.
Is that correct?
Michael Malis.
That is how I describe myself.
Yes.
Without adjectives.
Yes.
He has a book that just came out a couple months ago, The White Pill, A Tale of Good and Evil.
Yeah.
Michael Malice, the man, the myth, the legend, in the flesh today.
How you been, man?
How you doing?
I am doing great.
Relatively, yes.
Yeah, relatively.
So tell us your sleep pattern.
You said you became an author, and I think the audience wants to know what is the— So I had several reasons to become an author, none of which are particularly because I like writing books or I was particularly good at it.
But I wanted, I had a list of things I wanted to visualize and accomplish in my life.
Never have to talk to someone I don't want to.
Work for myself, have a legacy, and also sleep in when I go my natural sleep pattern.
So I go to bed at 2 a.m.
I wake up at 11.
And I've been doing this for years.
So whenever that's kind of messed up, I am just low-key angry.
Michael, you literally go to sleep at 2 a.m. and you wake up at 11.
Every day, Monday through Sunday.
Wait.
So when we said podcast 9 to 11, you thought it was late night.
No, I didn't think that at all.
You said, come do the show.
And I said, sure.
Then you're like, oh, it's 11.
So you did a bait and switch on me.
Yeah.
You never have a morning meeting in your life.
Michael sends me a message.
I used to do Glenn Beck's show in the morning, and that was hell on earth.
I'll say one thing.
Back to the end of the day.
Your schedule is the exact opposite of what I was looking for in my life.
Because I used to work in nightlife in Miami.
Right.
And I was sick of waking up at noon every single day.
I would go to bed at four or five in the morning, a little later than you.
Right.
And wake up at noon.
And I was like, I got to get my life together.
But this is my biorhythm.
Hey, listen.
And what's the point of being successful if you can't set your own terms?
Michael, if those are your biologists.
You worked in Britain.
What the audience wants to know is what are your pronouns?
That's also.
Sir.
Okay, I got you.
And if you can somehow convince Pat to get on your schedule, you are a great salesman.
But she should be on his schedule.
It might not work for him.
You should take advantage of the whole pronoun there and just make your pronouns tired and shut up.
i'm not tired i'm just kind of that's his pattern tom yeah let the man sleep What's wrong with that?
You know what's crazy?
So yesterday, while we're talking about this, yesterday I do my executive physical that I do every couple years.
You go in at 6.30 in the morning, kind of time you wake up, and they literally take you from doctor to doctor to doctor.
And they test everything, right?
They check your heart, your skin, your breathing, your, you know, everything.
It's phenomenal.
You see nine or 10 doctors in the span of nine hours, okay?
And the lady asked me a question.
She says, so how much sleep do you get per night?
And I felt compelled to sell her my sleep pattern.
I said, listen, I just want to let you know, you know, that aura ring thing that people wear.
So, yeah, so I wore it for like six months.
And it's not how much sleep you get.
It's how much deep sleep you get.
Because according to Aura, I get a lot of deep sleep.
And she says, really?
I said, yes.
She says, you still need to figure out a way to sleep seven hours a night because I'm doing four to six, whatever the time is for me.
And I said, like, it works for some, it doesn't work for some, but it is what it is.
And I think that's what it is.
Some people are, you know, the whole morning person, night person.
I think there is some truth behind that.
No, certain people are not.
You're awake in the morning.
You're not a person.
There's something wrong with you.
Early bird is not getting the worm in your house.
No, they're getting the shotgun.
But Rufus, why do you know what I mean?
But the thing is, I think extremely successful people often are the ones whose evolutionary advantage is they get by in four hours of sleep.
Like Clinton had four hours of sleep.
Thatcher famously had four hours of sleep.
And they could just get by.
You're getting nine hours of sleep.
I'm getting nine.
So I'm a failure.
I'm like modern 12 to 15, we hear sleep.
Well, if there's anything you're not is a failure, people love listening to you, your opinions.
But maybe people thinking.
But maybe they're failures.
Yeah, but that's a perspective to have, right?
You're failing.
I'm winning.
I'm Michael Malice, right?
I'm the White Pill guy.
Anyways, okay, so for the audience that doesn't know you, Michael, take a, we did a podcast together.
It was a Zoom.
It was the first time we had an interaction together.
And I was trying to learn about you.
A lot of people kept saying, Pat, you got to talk to this guy.
You got to talk to this guy.
We had a great conversation.
I enjoyed it.
That's why I'm here.
And he messages me, says, you said, I thought we had a good conversation.
I'm like, Michael, we had a very good conversation.
We were trying to get on the podcast.
So our booker, when you and we were trying to get a time to get on the podcast, they're like, hey, Michael, not right now, maybe later.
And anyways, we eventually made it work.
Wait, that's not what happened at all.
So he said, do you want to do the show?
I said, yes.
I don't hear from him.
I check in and then he goes, they're not interested.
It wasn't later.
He was like, it's a no.
But the guy's name is who?
Who was Alan something?
Alan.
That's not our booker.
Right.
That's our booker.
He also texted my sister somehow.
Yeah.
So did I, by the way, but that was a separate question.
Alan wants to date.
She doesn't, she likes her sleep also in different ways.
You know, you know, I, I, I, uh, was that a subtle?
How is that subtle?
How is that subtle?
It's like, listen, you want subtle?
I'll do it at 11 p.m.
Michael, give us your background.
So how does one like you don't?
Become who you are today with your ideas.
Tell us about it.
Where do you get your ideas from?
I don't, what do you mean?
What do you mean by that question?
Exactly what I asked you.
Like, how did you come up with the ideas that you have today?
Well, I didn't come up with them per se.
I mean, a lot of my ideas, being an anarchist, are historically, you know, I did something called the anarchist handbook, which we discussed.
It was a collection of the tradition of anarchism.
And this tagline for the book is the black flag comes in many colors because there are different schools of anarchism.
But basically, anarchism is the understanding that political authority is illegitimate and you do not speak for me and everything else is just application.
So when you're saying anarchists, we've interviewed libertarians, Democrats, Republicans, progressives.
For me, this is my first anarchist.
Well, Dave Smith's been on.
He's a very failed anarchist.
Yeah, he's more.
I like a lot.
So do I, but he's a very failed anarchist.
He's your most frequent guest, I think you said.
Yeah, when we did the lockdowns, we did cross-uffers.
I think he's a stud.
Stud?
Okay.
I realized the line.
Relax, Malin.
Listen, I know there's that line about you got to wake up pretty in the morning, but to convince me that Dave Smith's a stud, you really got to wake me up early in the morning.
Dave's six hours of sleep.
Dave's a six-hour guy.
In his mind, that's a stud.
And by the way, you're talking to a guy that also respects people who get proper ample amount of sleep.
Okay.
So he's part of the Ariana Huffington campaign.
Go ahead.
You're going to ask you a question.
Sleepy Dave.
Sleepy Dave.
Well, anyway, so you're unique.
So I guess part of Pat's questioning is you're a nice guy.
So for you, you're probably like, yeah, I'm an anarchist.
It's like I roll out of bed at noon.
It's what I do.
I'm an anarchist.
But for the most of the people in the audience, probably not too familiar with what the substantive beliefs of anarchy are.
When I hear anarchy, I'm like, this guy's a wild man.
You seem pretty nice guy.
So explain what anarchy is and why people should maybe consider that for their ideology.
Well, I remember when I was in college, I was taking a bioethics course, and there was this kind of chart that spanned the range of what the bioethics range of ideas were.
And one part of the chart was legalism, which is basically the idea that what the government defines as moral is moral.
And the other half is said antinomianism, which is the belief that morals are independent of the law.
And the author went on to say, well, since no one believes in antinomianism, it's somewhere else in this chart.
Well, that is the belief in antinomianism, that something is not moral simply because it's legal and something is not immoral simply because it's legal, that morality precedes law, and that politicians or anyone else who tries to assume authority have to be held accountable to a higher power.
But also the belief that government, democracy, all these things are inherently illegitimate and can never be made valid or coherent even.
So you're saying there's a difference between morality and legality.
Yes.
And I don't think that's a particularly controversial perspective of that aspect of anarchism.
And then how do you define morality?
Who's the authority on morality?
Is it the Bible?
Is it God?
Is it Jesus?
Is it Muhammad?
Where do you come with morality?
Is it human?
Muhammad.
That's what I want to say.
That's where it is.
No, as a Jew.
As a Jew.
Yes, it's Muhammad.
I mean, I really bet on the wrong bank on this one.
No, morality is something Ayn Rand talks about very frequently.
And this, again, is independent of anarchism.
Morality is something that we all have to deal with.
We have no choice.
We all have to face moral issues on a daily basis.
We may not tend to think of them as moral, like, okay, am I going to go to the school to check up on how my kid's doing?
Or am I going to spend time at business?
Or am I going to be with my mistress?
These are all moral questions, even though they may not be framed on maybe the last one most certainly would be.
So the point being that morality and our conscience is something that is inescapable.
And there are very many mechanisms promulgated by the corporate press to try to make things seem morally ambiguous or seem morally incorrect.
And this is just one of the many reasons why I and so many other people, not specifically anarchists, have so much contempt for corporate journalists.
By the way, I just searched what is anarchy, right?
Anarcho-pacifism is a form of anarchism which completely rejects the use of violence in any form for any purpose.
The main president was Henry David Thoreau, who through his work, civil disobedience, influenced both Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi's advocacy of nonviolent resistance.
So I think when you and I talked last, and I'm trying to, I asked, I said, would that be possible today in America?
You were pretty confident that it wouldn't be hard to get there.
So if we wanted to, if you had it your way, let's just say today Michael Malice wins 2024 election on nine hours of sleep.
But how am I running for office?
I know you're not, but let's just say if you are, okay?
Dream big.
And you're able to do certain policies that you would like to implement in U.S. What would some of those policies be?
You mean like what kind of guillotines?
There you go.
That's one.
French Revolution vibes?
Who goes first?
Great question.
This is what happens when you wake me up early.
Who goes first?
This is what happens when you wake up.
Who's on the Charlie block?
The mask stops dropping and it's like, all right, because I do have a list.
No, I do not believe.
I'm not even really kidding.
I don't believe that someone can ethically be a politician and serve.
But to answer your question in a different way, no, I'm not a pacifist.
And the only policies I would be interested in doing is to destroy as many swaths of government as possible and to have consequences for government officials as much as possible for their depravity.
So get rid of, so if you don't, then the government runs without having any politicians and the people are managing themselves with the laws and the guidelines and the rules, all of that.
That's kind of how it works.
It's not necessarily managing themselves.
For example, if I go to like a department store, right, there's a system of governance in place.
I can, no shirts, no shoes, no services, something like that.
There's some store will have you can return things.
Some stores have it, you can't return things.
So basically, you would have this kind of localized, excuse me, very localized, very decentralized sense of governance because there's this kind of myth that anarchism is the idea of no rules, but that's not accurate at all.
If I go to your house, you know, if you're having a white party and I got to wear white, it's certainly within your rights to say you're not wearing white.
Get the F out of my house.
So it is, you know, it is inescapable that someone is going to have jurisdiction over certain areas.
The point being to have someone insinuate themselves as the state in between these relationships is illegitimate.
How does that look like?
So you're saying it would be self-regulated.
Like we would self-regulate.
We do that now.
Again, I'm here.
I came at your time.
I am doing your podcast.
I can't just do whatever I want.
I'm following certain principles.
And then if I don't, at a certain point, you can either tell me to leave or if it gets extreme, you call security.
So this is something that not only is not hypothetical, it's something we live 24-7, you know, 365 days a year.
And anarchism is, you know, voluntary cooperation in exchange is the basis of any healthy society.
And the problems only come through public crime, governments, or private crime, criminals.
So if that's the case, where right now, what country today is running on that system?
So anarchism isn't a location.
Anarchism is a relationship.
So anytime you have two people or two organizations or two entities or more where they have no semblance of authority higher than them, that is an anarchist relationship.
And let me give you a good example.
We don't have a world government, right?
So if an American, I apologize for this.
And if an American kills a Canadian in Mexico, who has jurisdiction?
No one.
But they still have some mechanism in place between the three of them because every country is in a state of anarchism toward every other country.
So anarchism, again, isn't like a place.
It's a relationship between different entities.
How does that work in interpersonal relationships?
So let's say with a husband and wife or a business partner.
The husband's in charge.
That's it.
Bottom line.
It's the best answer I'm going to hear all day.
That's what Muhammad was right.
Yeah.
Okay.
So it almost sounds like you sound like a pastor.
It's like, you know, you got to have a relationship with God.
It's what it is.
You know, it's not a Christianity is not a religion.
It's a relationship with God.
You know, Muslim is not, it's a relationship.
It's a relationship.
But at the same time, if you say anarchy, so if, because the way you sound, you sound super convincing.
Okay.
And you're obviously very sharp guy.
Your history stuff, you know, guys coming up to you helping out with writing.
You do such a good job that they thank you, but they say, please, let's make sure we don't have to say that you did this because of your background and what you believe in.
You're a very sharp guy with your background.
You've been on Rogan.
I don't know how many times you've been on Rogan.
It's either eight or six.
Okay, that's a lot of times to be on Rogan.
How do you not know the number?
He pulled two episodes because we had the N-word.
Okay, so we're going to talk about anarchy, really.
But okay, so you sound convincing.
If it's that convincing, Michael, why aren't more people doing it?
Is it the argument is I'll tell you.
I can answer your question.
Yeah, absolutely.
So there's an essay in the anarchist handbook by Emma Goldman, and she gets into why the majority cannot reason.
So the vast majority of people are not capable of rational discourse, particularly when it comes to politics.
So any kind of, and democracy exploits this.
First of all, they don't often have time, but second, they often don't have the mental capacity.
But again, the popularity of an idea is not at all a testament to its veracity or lack of veracity.
If that were true, then the funniest show in history would be how the Big Bang Theory, which, of course, I don't think anyone will say with a straight face is the case, but that's the most popular sitcom that either now or has ever been.
Ridiculous.
So there are several reasons.
One is why it's not more popular.
People in power, especially those who are in power illegitimately, have an enormous vested interest and enormous incentive to maintain their power and to increase their power.
And for over a century now, the state has been raising America's children as its own, taking them since now they want it younger and younger, and inculcating them with ideas that if you received them for the first time as an adult, you would regard as absurd.
But since you've been kind of trained to accept them as plausible since you're four or five years old, you don't even bat an eye when they're repeated to you as an adult, such as the idea that we all understand here in this room, maybe it's different for the Canadian, that aristocracy is illegitimate, right?
Just someone was born to some king, and now this guy's going to some queen and now this person's going to have some kind of position to dictate terms of your life, take money from you.
This is crazy.
But somehow, if there's a lot of your neighbors believe something that they now as a group have the power to take your freedoms away, that is regarded as sanity.
In the anarchist perspective, it's as completely insane.
What was the first anarchy community?
What was the first anarchy community?
I don't know what you would consider the first anarchist community.
I'm just Googling it right now and I put anarchy and it says list of anarchist communities.
Wikipedia.
So which one would be meaning because you said it's not a country, it's a relationship, right?
That's what you said.
But again, so these little communities are very much kind of in the anarcho-capitalist, excuse me, anarcho-communist way, and they often didn't last very long.
Yeah, I guess, but the idea of anarchy, what was the first inception of the idea of anarchy?
What year was that?
Again, zero, the year 5000 BC.
Anarchism, again, is a relationship.
So whenever you have people interacting with each other without any kind of sovereign or ruler over them, that is an example of anarchism working.
It's not a place and it's not a time.
So an example would be two friends.
Okay, here we go.
I'll give you some examples.
Okay, ready?
Here are some examples.
Stop Googling.
Listen.
I'm going to read this to you.
I'm going to read this to you.
And then maybe give me the idea.
Anarchy is a society without a government.
Okay.
Okay.
It may also.
I don't care what the computer says.
Because for me, for smart guys like you, you don't need it.
I'm trying to get, you know, but I don't think Wikipedia is.
I know.
Let me just read this, Michael.
Okay.
So anarchy is a society without a government.
It may also refer to a society or group of people that entirely reject a set hierarchy.
Anarchy was first used in English dictionary in 1539.
An absence of government.
That's kind of what I was wanting to know.
Like, when did it get started?
So 1539, the idea came about like first time using a dictionary.
Pierre Joseph Proudhon adopted anarchy and anarchists in his 1840 treatise, What is Property?
And then it goes into explaining the rest of it.
But go ahead.
You were going to say something about anarchy with the relationship of friends.
Just because the word was used for the first time in a certain year does not mean the concept or the philosophy was original to that year or time.
I'll give you examples of anarchism working.
Music, cuisine, mathematics, astronomy.
These are all anarchist systems, meaning there is no sovereign, there's no government regulating it.
These are individuals and organizations working together voluntarily and creating systems.
Those are all examples of working anarchist systems.
So go to the bottom.
But the question becomes, can that be, can those philosophies, so for you, if anarchy is a relationship and it's used in those different sects, then what would be an ideal situation for you for there to not be a government?
Well, I don't know about ideal because I think when you start getting into ideals, it starts becoming a little bit incoherent.
But yes, not necessarily not be a government, but the understanding that the government is inherently illegitimate.
And frankly, a lot of what the government does, and I'm sorry, I have my back to you, by the way.
A lot of what the government does is a function of so many people being trained to regard it as legitimate and basically bend the knee when they otherwise have to.
Interesting.
You were going to say, go ahead with the music.
So the examples we're using on the music side, if you can elaborate.
I think part of the reason that Pat's Googling stuff and I'm asking these questions is because we generally don't know about this kind of stuff.
So for you, you're like, I talk about this every single day.
No, no, I'm saying that Wikipedia is often a very incoherent and poor resource when you're dealing with...
Fair enough, but it gives us a good baseline for what's going on.
I think it gives a bad base.
That's my point.
If you're starting with- You are a true anarchist, bro.
I can't even Google this.
I just don't regard Wikipedia as really a coherent resource when it comes to most things.
I don't think it's a controversial opinion.
Okay, so why don't we go a little bit more modern?
Tom's got a question for him.
Can you, Rob, maybe this is at his standard?
And before we go into chat GBT and what anarchy is, let us go to our sponsor, Goldco, okay?
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Rob, tell us what ChatGPT.
Maybe that's at Michael's standards because Wikipedia is obviously questionable by everybody.
Okay, you're right.
Yeah.
What is chat?
Anarchy?
Yeah, exactly.
Did you question it already or no?
Is it currently down?
Capacity, but I may be able to try it over here.
Yeah, you keep doing what you're doing.
When you get it, let us know.
You had one job.
Yeah.
Rob.
You can't even get on ChatGPT.
It sounds like complete anarchy what's going on at ChatGPT.
Rob's had a rough couple of weeks, even though I know he's doing his best.
But go ahead.
So a question for you.
Every now and then, Whether it's missionaries or anthropologists, discover small groups of people, indigenous people, that have hitherto been not discovered.
And observation is they have some very basic mores and folkways, and they've just sort of assembled among themselves.
Would you call that anarchist groups?
No, because they almost always, if I want to say almost always, because I'm not an anthropologist, but they do have a very rigid legal and hierarchical structure.
There's a chieftain and there are laws that are enforced.
And so, even though absent influence of any of the government structures or but they do have a government structure, they have a judicial system, it's just primitive, right?
They're in the finish, sure.
Okay.
So they're absent any of like, oh, you live in Luxembourg and there's the king or whatever.
They've been absent that.
There hasn't been an outside influence on them like that.
They've just grown inside.
But because they've grown a hierarchical structure, maybe it's patriarchal, whatever it is, that is their government.
And therefore, that's not an anarchist group.
Right.
And I think it also depends on the size, right?
I don't think some of these primitive societies are actually quite, are not just like a dozen people.
They're actually quite sizable and do have a functional government structure.
Something that just came to my head.
So where do you stand on the whole defund the police?
Because obviously police or even military, this is part of government.
I'm for police abolition and having the market provide security.
Whenever you have the government having its security, it is far too important of a service to have a monopoly on it, let alone a government monopoly.
And when you have a government monopoly on any product or service, the consequence is always strife, shortages, and other negative externalities.
So you want the free market to be the authority on anything, security, police.
I wouldn't say the authority, but yes, the free market provides security far better, just in a way that provides food far better, education far better, and everything else far better than would the government monopoly.
Because there's no accountability when it comes to having any kind of monopoly.
People understand this about, you know, if you had like, let's suppose an oil monopoly, which never happened, but let's suppose you had an oil monopoly, that monopoly is not going to be accountable to consumers or the market.
But when you have a government monopoly somehow in security, everyone's like, well, what are you going to do?
Well, the answer is to have decentralization and also to have as much of an armed population as possible.
And then, and how does law and order, constitution, just basic framework of what's going on in democracy?
How would that filter in?
Anarchism is the mother of order, not the daughter.
So if you have, again, the best way to have order between any kind of peoples or organizations is to have it be voluntary and agreed upon.
So they have contracts, right?
If I go into a business with you, we sit down ahead of time and basically work out the divorce.
We're like, all right, these are your responsibilities.
These are my responsibilities.
What happens if you get sick and you can't work it out?
What happens if I get sick if I don't fulfill my terms of the contract?
So whenever you have any sort of voluntary interchange between two people or two or more organizations, it's going to be far more peaceable.
And when you have far more of an idea of self-reliance and you have accountability in the entities that are providing any given service, it's going to be far more efficient and far more pervasive and widely available.
Food used to be a huge problem even in this country.
Nowadays, you know, the problem is there's too much food and everyone's obese.
So clothing is another one.
We make so many clothes.
You know, back in the day, people had one pair of shoes and you had to wear it all your life.
Now we have so many clothes, we're shipping them overseas and there's literally landfills of these crappy t-shirts.
What do you think about communism?
Well, that's the point of this book.
Okay, tell us about it.
Well, it's really bad.
The point of writing the white pill, and this has nothing to do with anarchism at all, the book.
The point of the white pill is I was kind of disquieted, you know, being born in the further Soviet Union, to what extent it has been almost being forgotten.
And this is something that ended in our lifetime, the lifetime of everyone here and probably the vast majority of people listening as well.
And what people went through for decades on the far side of the Iron Curtain was so disturbing and also so hard for us to wrap our heads around.
I don't know if any of you have diabetes.
I don't, right?
If someone tried to tell you what it's like living with diabetes, it's going to be very different from actually living it, right?
We can wrap our heads around, okay, I can have candy.
Are there other health externalities?
You know, can I exercise?
Maybe if I want to take a marathon, I'm going to have to do certain things.
We're still not going to get there intellectually unless you live it.
So we can maybe understand, okay, I'm in school, I'm taught certain things, or someone's listening to me on the phone, or people get arrested and you're powerless to do anything about it.
We can maybe understand each of those elements individually.
But in terms of understanding that pervasive atmosphere, the tagline of the book, it's, let me get the exact quote.
When Rand was testifying in front of Congress, he said, it's almost impossible to convey to a free people what it's like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship.
So I tried to explain throughout the course of this book just what it was like.
And even I don't really understand it.
My protégé was just in Prague.
They have something there called the Museum of Communism.
And, you know, what's great about this museum is it's not written this Western style in this scholarly manner because it's like, according to these demented ideas, we were all supposed to have food, but instead we were starving.
And when I was, when he sent me all the photos of the captions, because I wanted to quote one for the book, it made me appreciate for the first time what it was like for my family in the sense of totalitarianism.
You know, this is a stupid pun, but it's not a pun, but it means total.
So it's everywhere.
There's nowhere to go from the moment you're born till the time you die and you're told you can't leave.
So let's suppose there's a politician you hate or you hate politics in general.
You hate Trump.
You think Biden's a fool.
You can watch sports.
You can listen to music.
You can read books, historical books or contemporary books.
Yes, there's trying to put politics into everything, but there's certainly very many venues where you could escape or even just talking to your friends.
They didn't have that.
And even just talking to your friends, you have to wonder, all right, did Pat Turn?
Did someone get to him?
Or is he just doing this for status, for money?
So that kind of sense of having something, the government and that ideology govern every aspect of your life is something that I think is important for those of us who love any semblance of freedom, Republican or Democrat, to appreciate.
So you know, that argument, again, goes to that could work for those that are independent.
They can take care of themselves.
But if you can't and you and I have to police everybody, do I already want to deal with police and everybody?
Do I already want to, you know, if there isn't.
Are you growing your own food?
What do you think about law and order?
What do you think about law?
What do you think about law and order?
Wait, hold on.
Are you growing your own food?
What do you think about law and order?
I'm in favor of order.
I don't think law is a good mechanism of getting order.
Okay, so what order are you a fan of?
Just the people in a community deciding what it is?
I'm in favor of people behaving peacefully, which is overwhelmingly the norm.
And in fact, the problem is that so much crime is granted legitimacy and is not punished as a consequence due to having a government monopoly in policing.
Okay, so you're not a fan of law.
No, I think having a monopoly means that product or service is not going to be distributed well, or if at all.
We have right now, and no one even thinks this is weird.
Prosecutors, a lot of times, will be like, yeah, I'm not going to prosecute this.
How is that law?
That's crazy.
I understand you're taking one element of it.
But if you we had Gordon Chang on.
I don't know if you know Gordon Chen is.
So Gordon Chen, who lived in China for 20-some years, and he says China was a mess when there was no law because little to no law.
And he says in 1984, some number like that, he said there was four universities that gave away law degrees because it wasn't something that was popular.
And they realized capitalism doesn't work without laws because somebody can bully and take advantage of the other person.
What is your POV of not needing laws?
Wait, wait, wait.
I find it crazy to think that there's no bullying in China, especially via the state.
I mean, the whole point of the communist system— A lot less than before.
This is why their innovation grew the way it has the last 40 years, because they added laws, which they didn't have before.
But they did have laws, but that law was basically the will of whoever the CP official was.
And that's the problem.
The problem is the laws don't apply to Joe Biden or Donald Trump like they would apply to you or me or to someone who's much poorer than us.
If you had a system where services are provided by freedom, it's going to be a lot more equitable and it's going to be a lot more coherent because if I am trying to get, I'm promoting a product or service, I need to be able to put my money where my mouth is.
Whereas if a cop shoots someone, it's like, well, oops, you're just going to be suspended and get a pension.
It's absolutely the double standard between something with a monopoly and something that is provided when there's an element of competition is just night and day.
So you're saying if there's no cops, people won't rise.
I'm just saying there's no, I was saying if there's no government monopoly.
There's no government cops.
Let's just say there's no government.
I'll give you an example that's happening.
This isn't hypothetical.
So everyone here, if you go to a bar, which is full of young males full of testosterone and alcohol, it is still safer there than in the places where the government is providing security, such as city parks at night, alleys, the subways.
When you have, there's no incentive for a government monopoly to provide its service.
And in fact, the worse it provides a service, the more taxes the politicians are there in a position to demand that the populace pay in because they could say, look, we have a problem.
We need more of this.
We need more of that.
So when things are provided privately and you at hotels is another good example, everyone in a hotel is not native to the area where they're in.
It's still safer in a hotel than in public housing where everyone actually lives there and you know who lives there.
You sound so convincing.
But how do you argue with this?
But here's the part.
You sound so convincing.
If your ideas are so perfect the way you sell them, how come others are not implementing it?
You can't tell me it's because, well, you know, the way the world has ruled is the people of power are so power hungry that they eventually go up there and all of them unite and they don't want to do anything and they're not willing to give up their powers and their privileges.
And this is why the idea of anarchy has never been, because I get it and these other guys don't, right?
So if it's so perfect the way you do it.
When you say perfect.
If it's as good as the way you sell it, why aren't smart people out there implementing it?
Because the government co-opts smart people.
The whole point of our university system is to train the next generation of maybe 80%.
Do you want to hear my answer?
Maybe 80%.
There's a couple of things.
First of all, I think all of us would agree here that alcohol prohibition was a bad idea, which did not, I don't think at all decrease the amount of alcohol consumption in this country or maybe marginally, but vastly increased the amount of crime in this country.
How was it that alcohol prohibition was such a popular idea that it got two-thirds of the Congress and three-quarters of the states to ratify it?
Because there's very many examples.
Broader speaking, politics are non-rational.
There's an entire system in place where people will vote for their tribe as opposed to the other tribe and not really care if any of their ideas or views are implemented just so long as their team wins.
And this is something we're taught.
If you ask conservatives why are you voting for Dr. Oz, he supported Jesse Smollett, he supported trans kids.
They're going to say, well, what do you want me to do?
Vote for Federman?
These are my only options.
So we're trained since kids that your only options are voting.
And the two choices are Republican or Democrat.
No, I don't disagree with that.
I don't disagree with what you just said.
And also one more thing.
Just sorry, this is very key.
Because Noam Chomsky, who's also an anarchist, a prominent linguist as well, he has this great quote.
I'm sorry, I'm going to butcher the exact wording.
He goes, The way to control a society is to have strictly delineated terms of argument, but have very vigorous debate between those terms.
So Jimmy Dora, I don't know if you ever had him on the show, just great.
I'm surprised that Noam said that.
And when I asked him if he would ever debate Thomas Sowell, he avoided it.
Well, I'm not surprised at this right.
Yeah, I'm very surprised he didn't want to talk to Thomas Sowell.
Jimmy was on two weeks ago.
Jimmy's great, but he gave an example of this.
Like, if you watch The View, the choices are going to be, should we, can I curse?
Yeah.
Should we bomb the shit out of Syria or should we bomb the fucking shit out of Syria, right?
We're always presented with a very limited range of options on, and then you think, okay, I either have CNN or Fox, but that's basically where the Overton window lies.
So any ideas that are a radical threat to the governing structure are going to be marginalized.
And you're going to be told until very recently when you had independent venues like this, that you're crazy or this is impossible or it'll never happen.
And for many people, there's a still to this day, there's a huge social cost in adopting an adopting an ideology that is regarded as marginal or unpopular.
I don't know about that.
You don't think it's a social cost?
No, I okay.
So what I think you're doing is super necessary is because you're making people think, right?
You're making people think and say, okay, he sounds convincing.
He sounds very confident.
It doesn't necessarily mean you're right, but it's good the fact that we're having this discord, right?
And the audience can be like, well, Pat, you made a good point.
You don't know what you're talking about.
You need to do your research on this.
We got to go read this.
Okay, well, Michael, Patrick asked that question.
You didn't really give the right answer.
Great.
Let them decide on what they want to do.
But here's the part.
So what I think has happened the last few years is we've shown with this tool, we got right now, whatever, 9,100 people live watching.
By the time this is going to be done within a two-hour period, 100,000 people will watch it, 24 hours, all the clips together.
Say we got four or five million people that watch this to get this argument.
Okay.
We didn't have this 20 years ago.
So 20 years ago, Michael Malice, you would have had to gone the traditional way of maybe instead of sleeping nine hours, you would have slept seven and a half hours to make it because a tool like this isn't out there to market it.
So it would have been much harder for a guy like you to make it to where you are today, right?
Today, the tools allow you to live the life that you've always dreamt about living, which is phenomenal.
Yes.
However, here's what I think is this tool is given.
And you may disagree.
If 20 years ago, somebody said, guys, in 20 years, trans people are going to be accepted.
Men are going to be transitioning into women and competing.
And the Democratic Party, who's always been, they claim they're for women, they're feminists, they're going to be okay with men saying they're women, competing against women, beating records, and they're going to be cornered to and trans.
They're going to be all over the place.
And Drew Barrymore is going to bring a person in, Dylan, and she's going to get on her knees in front of him and say, I totally understand your pain.
That'll never happen.
I'm telling you, that's what's going to happen.
But let me tell you what else is going to happen.
What's that?
You don't need these CNN, the Fox, all these guys.
What about him?
They're going to get crushed by this guy named Joe.
What are you talking about?
Just regular Joe.
It's just a regular Joe.
He's not a regular Joe.
I'm telling you, CNN and Fox are going to be crushed by a guy named Joe.
What does this guy do?
Is he a billionaire?
Does he have more money than them?
No, he just talks and makes people think and brings different people on.
So what has he done?
Do you know marijuana that is illegal today?
Yeah.
That guy's going to make people think marijuana is not a big deal.
And matter of fact, he's going to bring the richest guy in the world on, and that guy's going to smoke wheat.
And then he's going to, the next day, the market's going to come after him.
But now smoking wheat is no longer what it was before.
Get the hell out of you, Michael.
You're out of your mind.
That'll never happen in America, conservative.
No, it is.
It is.
I'm telling you.
And you're not even going to think twice.
Last week, I'm in Bahamas three, four days ago.
I mean, the other day I'm in a game.
We'll walk by my kids.
What is that smell?
It's a, what is that animal that smells like weed?
It's a skunk.
That's what a skunk smells like.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a skunk.
I'm like, oh, really?
Yeah, that's a skunk sound.
That's what it is.
Okay, cool.
That's not skunk, man.
It's like five minutes later, Dylan's smiling.
I'm like, no wonder this guy's so happy right now.
So no one cares about smoking wheat today.
20 years ago is crazy.
So this is the point I'm trying to make to you, Michael.
And take this personally.
I want you to get upset.
I'm not going to get upset and say, screw you, Pat.
I'm not going to say it.
That's good.
Here's what I would say.
If the last 20 years, some of the craziest, wackiest ideas are now being talked about, and some of the things that the conservatives would have never accepted are now saying, it's just weed.
Maybe your argument isn't that good.
Or maybe you're just not good at presenting your argument for other people to pick it up.
Because if there's ever been a time to sell your philosophies to be received by millions of people around the world, now is the time.
How come there's not that kind of momentum yet?
The anarchist handbook hit number three on Amazon.
20 years ago, that book wouldn't have been published.
So if you're asking me why we haven't gone from the state in 2003 to anarchism today, I haven't been at it that long.
Secondly, I don't think you're going to deny, regard if you look at social media and other outlets, which are imperfect, but certainly loose vectors or metrics rather by how popular ideas are, the views that I'm putting forward are infinitely more popular than they were 20 years ago.
And it is a result of exactly what you're talking about.
The fact that now you do not, when we were, before we were born, I think you and I are around the same age, you had three television stations, and it's ABC, NBC, CBS.
And if you argue, if you went back in time and you're like, you've got, they're like, we have choices.
My friend really loves CBS, but he's an idiot.
You know, you got to listen to ABC.
And what it all was was corporate media.
And they all basically had the same message, if not identical message.
Nowadays, then Fox started.
And it's like, oh, my God, we have Fox.
We got to put Fox out of business.
These people are crazy.
I think most people on the internet now have to look at Fox.
They think that the average age of a Fox viewer is deceased.
And that it is to regard Fox as a vector of kind of radicalism as opposed to maybe like a hardcore Republican outlet is absurd.
You're not going to really find much radicalism on Fox other than maybe sometimes the mass drug.
By the way, you know what would be a great commercial?
You know what would be a great commercial?
You just gave me an idea.
If CNN or any of these guys wanted to kind of make a commercial to bash Fox, all they have to do is go run out of cemetery, put a TV there and Fox TV all over the place saying the only people that listen to Fox are dead people.
Listen to CNN, listen to ABC.
That'd be a pretty good thing.
But let me ask you this.
So your position is that it's a great thing that this trend stuff is happening in sports?
No, I don't think.
I'm just saying, if a crazy idea like that has created this kind of momentum, how come your wonderful idea hasn't?
Think that ideas necessarily become popular as a function of how true or but I think Joe's idea is a great idea that created momentum and people who were not on his side said that makes sense.
Right.
So what I'm saying is sometimes great ideas do catch fire and become popular and sometimes really deranged ideas do catch fire and become popular because we do because how ideas are formed in this country and in most countries isn't a function of people sit down, they do the research, they look at both sides and they kind of maybe argue with their neighbors.
This is just this enlightenment delusion about how people come to their political conclusions.
People far often read Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind.
People come to their political conclusions for evolutionary reasons, meaning I wanted the bandwagon effect.
You know, when after Kennedy was shot, they asked people who you voted for in the 1960 election, which was the closest election in American history.
And the percentage of people who had remembered, I think sincerely, that they had voted for Kennedy over Nixon was far more than the number of people who actually did it because we tend to want to think of ourselves as being on the winning side.
Low-status people have an enormous incentive to not rock the boat because they're not in a position to kind of have radical ideas.
Because think about it, if I go to an office and I have some kind of wacky ideology and I'm not empowered, right away I'm outgroup.
So this is one of the many reasons why ideas that are radical are not necessary.
But something broader.
I don't care about popularity of an idea because I don't think politics is moved by the majority.
Politics is often disagree.
Let me just finish.
Politics is always moved by an informed, ideological, usually radicalized minority.
And this country was founded by a bunch of very small percentage of people who had a vision and they didn't even bother asking the masses what they thought.
So then that says if since 1539 this has been an idea, how come it's died?
I don't think it's died at all.
I think the idea that government is inherently legitimate is more popular now than anything.
I don't think that's an anarchy philosophy.
I think that is.
That's the definition of anarchy.
No, but a lot of people, both on the left and the right, would agree that the government is too big.
Not the government.
I didn't say too big.
Not the government, government itself.
The concept of government.
So in your world, there shouldn't be a government.
Or the idea of the government is not legitimate, yes.
I don't think people would say the legitimate, defined legitimate.
Something legitimate.
For a government to be legitimate means it is in a moral position to enact its edicts upon its subjects.
Okay.
So in other words, I don't think government is legitimate, meaning it's not necessary.
No, it's doesn't like I don't have a right to go in your wallet and take money, right?
But somehow the withholding tax is people think, well, taxes are the price you pay for a civilized society.
That, to me, and to other anarchists is not legitimate.
How far off are you from Ayn Rand's philosophy?
Well, Rand hated anarchists.
She's on the cover of the book.
You know, she's the first chapter is her testifying in front of the House of America Activities Committee.
If you, it's funny because, you know, her kind of objectivism, I don't like calling it a cult, but it basically has cult-like aspects.
But what she describes as Galtz-Gulch in Atlas Shrugged is effectively a private anarchist community.
Who else is on that book, by the way?
Thatcher.
Margaret Thatcher, Emma Goldman, and Elena Ceaușescu.
And why'd you pick those four?
I wanted the, since the book is dealing about starving, the holiday more, starving millions of people in Ukraine, concentration camps, the gulags, the show trials, the Stasi, and ultimately the fall of the Soviet Union and its subject satellite states.
I wanted the, there's a, Jane Wheedland was a singer, was, excuse me, the rhythm guitars for the Go-Gos, and she had this comment about their music, which is very new wave music, that it sounds very chipper, but if you look at the lyrics, they're very, very sad.
So I wanted the cover to be like, all right, the content is going to be very, very dark, but I want it to be like sunny and almost silly.
So the cover looks like kind of like a 1970s movie poster or play poster, and you would think it's kind of a romance novel, but I want it to have that bright, sunny cover, given that the contents are so dark and disturbing.
Michael, were you born in Ukraine?
Yes, sir.
Okay, so what do you think about what's going on right now in Ukraine?
I don't think I have a very informed perspective on what's going on.
My big concern, my background, you know, we talked before I did a book on North Korea called Dear Reader about Kim Jong-il.
And my big concern is that we're facing a replication of the Korean War.
In the Korean War, you had North Korea with the great leader Kim Il-sung backed by Mao and Stalin, China and Russia, respectively.
You had Sigmund Rhea in the South backed by the U.S. and the UN.
And what ended up happening is Korea, the Korean Peninsula was leveled and the devastation for the people was enormous.
So I'm very concerned that there is enormous pressure, understandably, to not reach any kind of settlement and that the people who are going to end up paying the price are the Ukrainian people.
That's my concern.
People who are going to end up paying the price are Ukrainian people if they don't find a way to settle.
Or even it seems like there's no good solution here.
Because if they're settling and you're going to say, okay, not you.
I mean, the argument is you're validating Putin's aggression.
He's going to do it again.
That's a fair argument.
Then it's like, well, you can't settle, not give an inch.
But then like, yeah, but we're here in America.
We're not paying the price.
But in an anarchy philosophy, you've got to kind of leave it alone, right?
And let them kind of do their own part.
I don't think this is really a question of libertarian, Republican, Democrat, or anarchist.
I think this is just a question of right.
What is the facts of the matter?
And I don't think I have the facts on this issue.
How is that possible?
It's like your homeland.
Like if something happens to you.
This is my homeland.
No, I left here.
I get that.
But like even, is there any affinity to Ukraine for you?
None.
Zero.
No, we spoke Russian.
I don't even speak Ukrainian.
You were born in Ukraine.
But I left when I was one and a half, so it's not like I have fond memories.
It's not like we left because it was so great.
And again, but this was the Soviet Union.
So Ukraine in 78 is going to be very different from Ukraine in 2023.
And also Moscow in 78 is going to be very different from Moscow.
It's a little strange, though.
You're a pretty well-read guy, and you're a pretty smart guy to say, I don't, like, you know, I don't have any opinion on the country I was born in.
That's going, like, it's the topic of discussion on every single channel right now.
Yeah.
Okay.
So if there, so, so, okay, so let's, do you support the fact that U.S. is given the kind of money they're giving and they're helping them out in this war in a proxy war type of a thing that's going on?
Do you support that?
I would, I don't know because I don't know where this is going.
Are we going to say that we're going to just fund it interminably?
Yeah.
Because that seems to be the premise, in which case the Ukrainians are going to be emboldened to fight.
And then one day, what are we going to do?
Cut and run.
And then they're left holding the bag.
So that is my concern.
Okay.
Here's the thing.
It's not like Ukraine, Russia, or the U.S. are going to somehow disregard the legitimacy of government overnight.
So this is not a situation where there's like an anarchist answer or I'm in a position or an authority to speak for anarchism.
Then if that's the case, anarchy will never happen if that's the case.
It's happening right now.
This is us.
This is anarchism.
No, but this is at a very, very low level.
Anarchy, well, let me rephrase that.
For anarchy to happen at the highest level, based on what you're saying, it'll never happen.
But there is no highest level under anarchism.
The whole point is that, fine, if you want to say that anarchism can only work in a small community, fine.
Let us have our community and leave us alone.
Okay, so then that's what you're, then you would much rather have your own community you go live in with a bunch of anarchists and you guys create your own guidelines, you got to land, you're happy with it.
They don't have to be anarchists.
I mean, it doesn't, here's the thing.
Do you regard If one of them is ambitious and he says, look, I have ambitions in an anarchy system, that guy's eventually going to go and say, here's what I think we should be doing.
And if that guy's got better ideas than yours or is better at selling it than you, then eventually it's going to convert into a different kind of a government when you die.
Not necessarily because I don't think...
That doesn't make any sense.
I'll answer what I'm saying.
I'd love to hear it, yeah.
Better ideas are not the ones that always went out, as prohibition demonstrated, because then we repealed it several years later.
There's many examples in the markets where bad ideas work for a temporary period, then they're rejected.
But let me just speak to your point earlier.
If the Chinese government right now passed a law that said everyone has to wear orange all the time, would you regard those laws as valid?
If China did what?
If China passed a law, an edict that said everyone, everyone on earth has to wear orange, would you find that as legitimate?
It'd be weird.
That's not what I asked you.
Would you regard it as legitimate?
Would you start wearing orange?
No.
Why not?
Because they don't look Dutch.
Is that true?
They wear orange in Holland?
I wouldn't wear it.
That's why I'm not living there.
Right, but why wouldn't you wear it?
I like my choices.
Okay, but do you regard that law as legitimate or not?
No.
Okay, so all anarchism says is that it regards Washington's laws as legitimate as those of Beijing.
You can say that all you want.
All I'm saying to you is you should.
This is anarchy.
But you should say that.
That's great.
But to think that this is at the top level, you know, so if I ask you those questions and then I say, well, what do you think about what's going on with Ukraine?
And I'm not educated enough to come.
But you're from there.
Yeah, but I'm an American myself.
I understand that, but you're from there.
Yeah, but I left when I was a year and a half.
I don't remember anything.
I'm more like, I speak Russian.
Okay, I get that, but you have these ideas of anarchy in a situation like anarchy.
What should happen over there?
Well, we're not there right now for us to give that opinion.
Then your argument loses weight because it can only carry, that argument can only be sold in low-level conversations, not at high-level conversations.
A conversation that carries weight and momentum has got enough backing to say it would work.
If right now, let's just say the world was ran this way.
Here's what would happen between Russia and Ukraine.
Leave them alone.
Okay, then Ukraine would become Russia.
Well, that's their business.
That's not it at all.
My point is I think it's important when someone gets on a mic to come at it from an informed perspective.
And I think just because an issue is very popular in the news, that does not mean that it's – are you going to let me finish or not?
That does not.
Shaking my head doesn't mean you can't finish.
Fine.
It doesn't mean that I have to have an opinion on every single issue.
And I think a big problem in our culture is that everyone feels to have an opinion on every single concern.
I'm not a Ukrainian.
I'm not in Eastern Europe.
I've never stepped foot there since I was one and a half.
So I don't, I agree with you.
I don't know how anarchist principles would happen in the middle of a war between Russia and Ukraine.
I don't know who the good guys are.
Listen, then it's a good conversation to have, you know, to go on shows and all this other stuff, but it doesn't carry enough weight on its own to rule or to have a country around it.
That's kind of what you're saying.
But I'm saying it wouldn't be a country.
It's a relationship.
So number one, and second of all, hold on.
I don't think that if the U.S. was communist, fascist, liberal, conservative, progressive, I don't think any of those would inform the question of what should the U.S. do vis-a-vis the Ukraine and Russia.
It's not a function of what government we have, what the right thing to do is over there.
So do you have a vision with anarchy?
I was just going to ask that question.
What's your vision with anarchy?
Like, in an ideal world.
There's no ideal world.
That's the problem.
It's not a utopian system.
What's your vision?
What's your vision with anarchy?
My vision is a situation where more people are responsible for their own lives.
Which we have today.
I said more people.
More people are responsible.
I don't think we have that today at all.
More people are responsible for their own lives.
There's less of a reliance on corporate news sources.
There's less respect for the university system.
And there's an increasing amount of absolute contempt, if not levels of hatred, toward government and government officials.
I think we have all of those that we're making progress on today.
All of them.
I don't agree.
I would easily sell it to you.
I think Biden will go down in the history books, at least out of all the presidents that we've had, as the guy that drove more homeschooling than any other president of mankind.
I think we're making progress.
But that was Trump.
That was COVID.
It's not Trump.
It's COVID.
It was COVID.
It's not either of them.
But it's COVID Biden because of what's going on with pushing these education.
And even DeSantis, I would also say, was the spokesperson to drive people to consider saying, I'm either going to do private school, I'm either going to leave the state, or I'm going to do homeschooling.
I think it's a combination of COVID, Biden, DeSantis together are driving that.
So that's progress.
Next one, the data that's coming out that says in K through 12 schools, 99% of health teachers gave money to the Democratic Party.
97% of English teachers gave money to a Democratic Party.
And 87 out of 100 math and science teachers gave their money to the Democratic Party.
That means they got a monopoly on that mindset that they're teaching the kids.
And for every 13 professor or 12 professor that's a Democrat, one of them is a Republican.
So these numbers are coming out and people are saying, that's not cool.
So you're either going to create a university or I'm going to do online schooling.
I don't even want my kids to go to college.
Why would I want to send my kids to college?
People are making decisions.
We're making progress.
Progress.
And then social media, you know, mainstream media, I think it's very obvious.
Can you realize Jeff Zucker got fired when?
When did Jeff Zucker get fired?
Less than a year ago.
Now, what's going on with Chris Licht, where he's at?
What's going on with Chris Licht?
He's either just got fired or he's about to get fired, right?
Is he really?
He's in a deep, you know, he's not in a good place.
If you pull up Chris Licht about to be fired.
So mainstream media, when Russell Brand goes on Bill Maher and annihilates an MSNBC guy to his face to the point where Bill Maher gets uncomfortable, we're making a lot of progress.
When a number one guy that's pushing back on mainstream media is a former UFC, not a UFC, former fighter and actor, Fear Factor shows, and he's putting people in their place where they can't go around, you know, saying, hey, you better get vaccinated or else this.
And all of a sudden, people are saying, well, I kind of like what he's talking about.
What is this about Iver Mecton?
I think the progress is being made.
Does that mean that we're leaning towards anarchy?
No, it just means we're making progress.
Because if on 100 different issues, if we wrote on a piece of paper, an anarchy, a libertarian, a capitalist, we may agree on 77 different things or 78 different things or 82 different things.
And then you may disagree with you on four different things.
He's like, oh, great.
Liberty.
No, no, no.
Dave Shaman.
No, no, we have to say this.
But you know what?
There's a lot of things that we all want to see have progress happen.
I think we're making it.
Do we want to have a big government the way we do today?
No.
Do we want to see them printing money the way they're doing today?
No.
I think they're being exposed by both sides.
Does that give credibility to the anarchy argument?
I don't know about that.
I don't agree with most of what you just said, but let me break down a few points where I disagree with.
First of all, I don't think there's such a thing as a big government.
There's only government you approve of.
Any government that is big enough to impose its will upon you will be regarded by you as a big government.
And if a government is so small that the night watchman state where you could drown in a bathtub, then it's not in a position to impose any kind of weak law and order regardless.
So there's no coherent argument from minarchism, number one.
Second, I don't think it's at all accurate, and I'm friends with Joe.
I've been on his show several times, to regard his amount of influence or amount, how much he's trusted is in any way comparable to the New York Times or to someone who's a law professor at Yale.
These are, to me, still night and day.
I don't think at all there is a view of both sides, if you mean like Republican and Democrat or liberal or conservative, that they regard the state as illegitimate.
There is no incentive and no move in Washington, let's just take it from the conserve perspective, to shrink the size of government by $1.
You had Trump and two years of a Republican congressional majority.
There wasn't even an attempt to abolish a single government agency, let alone to shrink the size of the government.
So this idea that if you want to be kind of have a libertarian perspective and say people are realizing government's too big, even if people are realizing this, DeSantis didn't shrink the government at all.
I think he grew it even faster than his predecessor.
So in terms of, you know, 77 out of 100 things, if you and I both have the exact same vision of a house we buy, what it want to look like, and you want to sell it and I want to move in, we do not have the same goal, even if we have the same vision.
Yeah, but in your world, it's your way or the highway, Michael.
And that's very hard because the way you sell your ideas, our conversation started off when I asked you and you said, well, you know, my book is ranked number three on anarchism and da-da-da-da.
On Amazon.
On Amazon.
And you say, and I'm making progress.
Great.
All I'm saying is progress.
Progress.
I didn't say it's happening.
I'm giving your point back to you.
We're making progress.
Joe is making progress.
Joe is not New York Times.
We all know how big New York Times is.
It's massive.
It's a behemoth.
But we're making progress.
Elon Musk buying Twitter.
It's progress.
All of these things are progress.
We are making a lot of progress towards the concept of freedom of speech and people questioning things they didn't question before because we're all collectively getting smarter and saying, this shit just doesn't make sense.
We're not getting smarter.
We're getting more informed.
I'm going to be pedantic on that because that's important because I don't think people are necessarily getting smarter, but we have more access to information.
That is crucial.
And that's what brought down the Soviet Union.
But again, I think you're kind of mixing up several things.
You asked me earlier why anarchism.
I'm not mixing up anything.
I'm just telling you, we're making progress.
And just like you're saying, the argument of anarchy is making progress.
I think collectively, more people are informed today, whatever definition you want to give it, informed or smarted, more people are informed today to realize this shit doesn't work.
We're unifying.
When a Bill Maher, what are we talking about?
Like Russell Brand?
Are you kidding me?
Like when Bill Maher and Russell Brandt and Joe Rogan, who endorsed Bernie Sanders a couple years ago, when they're coming up and they're saying, here's where we are, nobody in a million years could have guessed this was going to happen.
The weirdest people are unifying today, which I believe is major progress.
But go ahead.
You were asking earlier why anarchism isn't more popular, right?
And I was giving you examples of A, we're making progress on that issue.
And one concrete objective, as opposed to my personal feelings, is the fact that the book hit number three on Amazon.
So I agree with you that we're making progress in terms of both understanding the nature of the state and the power elite, and also more specifically in terms of promoting anarchism as an ideology.
Point being, I'm not a utopian, right?
So even if I had, for example, a magic wand and marijuana.
But you are dude.
You are a bit of a utopian.
And by the way, Michael, let me manage something with you.
In a conversation that's two hours, I may jump in and interrupt.
That's fine.
If it makes you uncomfortable, it's going to happen 50 more times.
I understand.
If you interrupt me, I'm fully comfortable.
You're not going to offend me.
I'm a big boy, and I'm expecting you to be a big boy as well.
I'm a very little boy.
Perfect.
That's totally fine.
Yeah, totally fine.
I should be in my bed.
You should be in your bed and you chose to be here.
I'm not a utopian.
And I do not appreciate being called a utopian because what I was about to say is if all that happens is drugs become legalized, that's nowhere close to an anarchist society.
I'm not going to say, fuck you, that win doesn't count.
That's a huge win.
If people aren't put in jail for illegitimate reasons, I will take that as a goal.
I will accept it and celebrate it.
The reason I wrote this book, The White Pill, was about the fall of the Soviet Union.
The people in Russia, Ukraine, Romania, they're not living in some utopia.
They just, things just got significantly better for them.
And that is important for those of us who fight for freedom.
You take the wins you can get and you don't say, oh, well, they still have this law or they still have that law.
No, you go, look, things in our lifetime, in places that are not some weird country that you can't find the map, moved fundamentally, enormously in a better direction.
And they did it relatively peacefully and relatively easily.
And that, to your point, which I agree with it, is something that is important for those of us to stay motivated who fight for freedom.
So this is why I think the anarchism question in this context is a bit of a distraction.
You don't have to believe in anarchism to still fight for freedom and to work with me and other people think like you and to take the wins when you have them.
Yeah.
So what I like about, you know, competition is if your ideas are great, you're going to attract good people.
You'll attract money.
People will come to you.
If you don't, you're going to lose good people.
Okay.
At this table, his family's from Canada.
Tom doesn't live in Canada.
Okay.
You were born in Ukraine.
Yes.
You don't live in Ukraine.
You're here.
You live in Buffalo, New York.
Yes, right?
Sunny Buffalo.
Sunny Buffalo.
By the way, that's a joke.
He's in Austin.
Which is sunny.
Which is sunny, yes.
I was born in Iran.
Okay.
I live in the U.S. Adam's family's from Israel.
Well, I'm Jewish, but my family's Ashkenazi Jews from Russia.
Mata, what's it?
There you go.
Ashkenazi Jew from Russia.
He grew up in Miami.
Family chose to come here.
If in a split second, U.S. all of a sudden came up with shitty ideas and it kept going the way it was, I don't think you have kids.
I got four of them.
And I know you're a legacy guy because you said that in the first video.
Like you want to make an impact.
Yeah.
So for me, if climate got bad and it was to the point where I'm being forced to do something I don't want to do, I'm either going to run for office.
I'm either going to make money to have a platform.
I'm going to speak up.
I'm going to write a book like you're saying.
Here's what I believe in and people have to read it and see where it's at.
Or I'm going to say, you know what?
I'm going to go raise my kids in Singapore.
I'm going to go to Belize.
I'm going to go chill.
You know what?
Here's what we're going to be doing.
We're going to go to XYZ.
I think the world would be a very weird place if we all, 100% of us, believed in the same exact thing.
It would be quite boring.
So a part of the fact that you're talking about this, you're forcing the rest of us to question our arguments.
And we're sitting there saying, well, you know what?
He seems confident in this.
He seems confident in that.
Where's the leak in the argument here?
So to wrap this part up before we go into current events, Rob, I'm going to pull up this.
I'll give you the final thoughts and then we'll go into current events.
So can you pull up what our friends at ChatGPT said about anarchy?
This is very important.
Zoom in because some of us can't.
Okay, there you go.
Let's see the question first because it's important.
Michael knows.
What is the definition of anarchy?
Anarchy is a political philosophy or system that advocates for the abolition of government, centralized authority, and hierarchical organization of society.
Anarchists believe that individuals should be free to govern themselves and make decisions collectively without the need for ruling class or state apparatus.
Anarchy emphasizes the importance of individual freedom, direct democracy, or volunteer association, as opposed to the use of force or coercion.
It is important to note that anarchy is not synonymous with chaos or lawlessness, as anarchists often propose alternative forms of social organization and dispute resolution.
Right.
How do you feel?
You like what he says.
Are you okay with it?
I am okay with that.
I'm just going to make one more point.
I don't need 100% of people to agree with me at all.
I don't have an opinion on how Macy should have the refund policy.
I understand that this is Macy's.
They're not doing it right.
They should honestly.
Let's not go that far.
I'm not willing to go that far.
Point being, there's lots of issues.
This is why I'm against democracy.
There's lots of issues where most of us shouldn't have an opinion because it's not our business.
I have one simple question.
Everything you're saying is great.
You know, you're saying sort of a low-level conversation.
It works.
But we live on Earth.
We all have to live in a country.
Sure.
And we have to live by that we live on Earth?
No, that everyone is a member of one country or another.
Okay, got it.
Well, we are in modern times.
I mean, we're not going back to biblical times.
So everything you're saying is great.
That's amazing.
Relationships, police, everything.
I guess what country is closest to even coming close to implementing any of this anarcho-types of philosophy?
Is there any country that even comes close?
And I'll ask this question, but I'll strike country so that you don't pick on that.
Is there some place or some group or something on earth that comes close?
It not just comes close.
It is practiced all the time whenever any people work together voluntarily towards a common goal.
So it's not a location.
It's not a certain type of government.
So it's not like you say, it's not like you're going to say, well, America has an anarchist government.
That's not how it works.
Whenever you have peace, freedom, and interrelationships with people on a voluntary basis, that is anarchism being put into practice.
And where on earth, whenever anyone uses cuisine, whenever one does mathematics, whenever people use music internationally, all these things, fashion, these are all examples of international historic anarchist system.
You're driving these guys insane.
They want you to give them the country so they can move there.
I don't know why.
Get the hell out of here, Michael.
And you just want to fucking play with the game.
Fine, Israel.
Israel.
All right, let's go into Courtney.
Let's go into Courtemas.
Let's go into Courtney Mez.
Tom, give us an update on what's going on with Silicon Valley and Credit Suisse because a bunch of stuff came out just yesterday.
You saw their stock at the beginning.
The DAO was down 600 and then it ended up a couple hundred down.
What's going on with the markets right now?
Well, speaking of utopia.
No, overnight, this is very interesting.
This can be summed up in one chart.
Do you have the chart that came from Apollo?
So this very interesting chart that comes out assessing the balance sheet risk of the banks.
Can you pop that up a little?
And the arrow up there that's toward the left side is pointing to Silicon Valley Bank.
Everything to the right of Silicon Valley Bank is actually more risky and slightly worse off than the Silicon Valley Bank balance sheet was.
And then if you go all the way to the left, you've got at a score of 15, JP Morgan showing strength, prudence, and, you know, probably, you know, the utopia banking experience there because it's risky.
So what overnight has happened is that there is the realization that there is a lot of risk at a lot of banks.
That's happened overnight.
Right before the market closed, First Republic, remember they said that was the other bank everybody was concerned about.
It has been downgraded and officially given the rating as junk.
And Moody's came out and said, you're not pinning this on us.
We're just going to say the whole sector is downgraded.
And they downgraded the entire sector to like this questionable status.
And so right now, literally, Pat, what we are waiting for, we are waiting for the markets to show us market response to the stocks of the public banks and waiting for the other shoe to drop because it's not just New York and it's not just SVP and it's not just First Republic.
It's Credit Suisse yesterday morning coming out saying with a stock price of $2.44.
So they're down the street from being delisted.
I mean, they're not far away.
I think it's 90 cents for so many days and something.
They would be put on a suspension and then ultimately delisted.
So what's going on is there's a huge amount of uncertainty, Pat, and there's a big amount of a certainty that no one can have an opinion on.
Can I show you a poll real fast about what is the Fed going to do in the face of all this madness?
And I put a poll on Twitter yesterday.
So here's 326 votes.
Do you think, and I asked a very just sensible, straightforward question.
Okay.
Consumer price index shows inflation is about six, six and a half for the year.
Still a problem.
And with the SVP collapse, what do you think Jerome Powell will do with interest rates when he announces them next week on the 21st, 22nd?
Half a point as expected, a quarter point and be a little more gentle, or zero and then revisit it on May 2nd, which is the next scheduled official meeting of the Fed.
Look how close it was.
41% said he's going to, you know, just do a quarter point.
And 32% said a half a point, 26%.
For most of the life of the poll, and this is 326 votes, and these are public people, not a bunch of banking industry folks.
It stayed pretty even, which means everybody actually wasn't very sure.
So we're going to find out next week.
And we're watching and waiting each day, along with getting more realization, Pat, that a lot of banks have very weak balance sheets right now.
And there's a lot of turmoil in the sector.
By the way, when's the last time Moody's downgraded an entire sector the way they just did that specifically?
That's crazy.
Right?
No, and I'm not exactly banking.
That is what they did yesterday before the market closed.
They said, okay, we're downgrading the sector.
When's the last time?
Is that a, have you heard of that before?
Was it like a, because it's 9-11 wasn't a sector.
Like it wasn't like we're going to, you know, 9-11 was.
So it makes you, it makes you think.
Yesterday, I'm talking to the folks at Morgan Stanley.
I'm like, so what's going on?
He says, look, you can't raise 450 bibs in 12 months and not expect these banks to go through what they're going through right now.
So, but here's the question.
The question becomes the following.
Okay, Janet Yellen, you guys build out those, you know, however many people at Silicon Valley Bank with above a quarter million dollars FDIC.
So we're not bailing out Silicon Valley Bank.
We're bailing out the depositors is what we're doing.
Okay, fine.
No problem.
Banks will fail, going to get sold, but we're helping the people.
Okay, no problem.
Great.
How many more can you handle?
One more?
Right.
Five more?
It's dominoes.
10 more?
20 more?
Like, you know, you know, I had a friend of mine.
He started making, he was the top interior designer in Hollywood.
He was making $1.6 every year, and I'm his advisor.
He's sitting with me.
I'm doing a needs analysis.
I said, so tell me, your expenses, how much you have in savings?
I got around $500,000.
Okay.
How much you have in 401k?
Zero.
How much you have in stocks?
Zero.
You only have a half a million dollars?
Yes.
How long you've been making a million and a half?
About a decade.
I said, what's your mortgage payment?
Mortgage payment is $15,000 a month.
Okay.
What's your car payment?
I got that SL $500, $2,000 a month.
Okay, great.
Where's the money going?
Where's the money going?
So watch what he says.
He says, I give my mom 10 grand a month.
I give my dad 10 grand a month.
And my mom asked me to help this sister out, my auntie.
I give her eight grand a month, and I give my dad's brother now eight grand a month.
He was giving his family $40,000 every month.
Oh, my God.
You know what ended up happening?
Eventually.
The government failed?
Well, await happens.
Once a wait took place, they're no longer, he's no longer, he goes from 1.6 to 200 grand a year.
Okay.
Yeah, there's no more interiors to design.
So I'm like, so what are you doing?
Well, the houses are done.
He's the government and he fails.
He had to make four phone calls.
What are those four phone calls?
His mom, his dad, the sister, the brother, all that.
He was the most hated man in the family.
I can't believe you're doing this.
I'm 80 years old.
I'm da-da-da-da-da.
Here's the problem.
You can make one company happy, Silicon Valley Bank.
You can make two signature, maybe three.
Dude, you can, if this shit hits the fan and 20 banks smaller than Silicon Valley Bank that secretly are sitting here saying, don't expose us.
And on top of that, they have a target of money being pulled out.
How much did B of A just get?
B of A number.
$15 billion.
$15 billion in Silicon Valley Bank fails.
JP Morgan says, claims they got $2 billion.
How many more banks, after seeing something like this, are saying, babe, let's take our money out?
If this thing goes next level, it's going to be a scary, scary side.
Janet Yellen and Biden can see noble doing this, but these guys, very soon they're going to have to say no to somebody and it's going to hurt.
And the rich will just get richer with these big banks.
They're all just going to go to Wells.
They're going to go to City.
They're going to go to Chase.
They're going to Bank of America.
There's going to be four big banks at that point.
The interior designer should have just made one phone call and then blamed it on that one person.
It's mom's fault that I can't pay the rest of you.
It's the wife.
You got to say, honestly.
My wife wants to leave.
Moody's downgrading an entire sector.
I mean, my brother and sister and I got out of hand.
My mom got moody and downgraded all of us, but I've never seen Moody's downgrade an entire industrial sector.
And then someone's going to be in the super chat and tell us.
And by the way, if you know it, put it in the super chat and let us know because I honestly don't recall.
There's a problem of perception becoming reality, right?
If there's less of a belief that these banks are stable, that's going to encourage more and more people to have a run.
And then it becomes this kind of dominant sector.
That's even worse.
That's even worse.
And that was the run they tried to prevent.
You're correct.
They wanted to prevent anarchy from happening.
And so what they said is the government usually does.
We're going to protect.
We're going to peck the depositors.
So please don't run on the banks.
So it was like they took 25 billion out there to prevent a trillion.
That was the point.
And then it just becomes what?
A self-fulfilling prophecy where it's just like, no, this is happening.
And then I'm glad my money's in crypto.
Yeah, that's worked out well for the last year.
Not 100%, but yeah.
You can't be serious, Michael Malice.
But you're glad your money's in crypto.
I am right now.
Of course I am.
Yeah.
Right now?
Yeah.
What if over the last year where it's gone down 70%?
I bought low, kept it.
I hodled it.
Then it went down.
It's still there.
I'm not going to sell it when it goes down.
I will tell you.
I will tell you.
And I'm not a pro-Bitcoin or an anti-Bitcoin guy.
Like, I'm not, you know, during the entire, hey, can you do a sponsorship for FTX?
We've never done it because I'm not, that's not my world.
So we've never taken a sponsorship from a lot of any crypto guys.
And we've got a lot of requests.
Kind of like how you say, I'm not educated enough on the Ukraine to give a.
I'm not a crypto guy to say hey, here's what we're doing with this.
But I will tell you this, if I am a Bitcoin guy, your argument right now is getting stronger.
Okay, that's why Bitcoin went up 20% in a day, went from 20 to 24,000 the other day.
This is a very good time for the Pro-Bitcoin folks to be selling what they're selling.
There is a.
The only challenge they have right now is the following is, My concern has always been, we've had Michael Saylor on a few times and we've had a bunch of these guys.
My only concern's always been that these guys going to want to regulate.
So the whole CBDC, they come out there, try to regulate the crypto community, what that's going to look like.
And they're going to use this crisis to say, you know, what if this happens to crypto?
What if this happens to this?
They're going to figure out a way to regulate that.
If they don't, I think Bitcoin's a good place to be if they don't get their hands on it.
But again, we'll see what's going to happen there.
All the DeFi guys are out there saying, see?
Told you.
Yeah.
No, by the way, exactly.
They should.
They should.
They should say it.
This is a time to say your argument.
If gold pops, Peter Schiff should come out and say, I told you so.
I told you so, right?
It should be able to.
My big concern is that at some point, maybe you're right, that they're going to have to be like, all right, we got to stop the contagion, bail it out, and then you have to get inflationary as a consequence.
That's on top of the inflation that's already happened.
And what that ends up screwing over is the poorest of the poor.
So that is really my concern here.
We're on the same page there.
100%.
They're going to want to get their hands on it.
So let's talk a little bit about reparations.
San Francisco, I'm sure you're a big supporter of this.
So San Francisco, to consider a $5 million reparation check for black citizens, and it's actually, they're getting pretty close to it, are considering a draft plan for a reparation package that would pay $5 million lump sum payments to eligible black residents in addition to eliminating personal debt and tax burdens and providing guaranteed annual income of at least $97,000 for 250 years to an under determined,
undermined...
number of black.
Guys, I'm a little bit flabbergasted.
Let me read that one more time.
On tax burdens and providing guaranteed annual incomes of at least $97,000 for 250 years.
The plan also proposes allowing black families to purchase homes in expensive cities for just a dollar.
Critics have slammed the proposal as financially impossible with one estimate suggesting it could cost the city roughly $50 billion and another suggesting that each non-black family in the city would have to pay at least $600,000.
However, proponents argue that $5 million figure is actually low when considering the harm caused to black community.
The state of California is also considering some reparations proposal that would cut $360,000 checks for every eligible black citizens.
So the state of California, can I point something out?
So yesterday I was reading, and it's very interesting.
When did California abolish slavery in California?
They never had slavery.
That's correct.
That was a trick question.
And then I looked back at all the other states that actually had legalized slavery, Massachusetts, Connecticut.
It was really shocking.
California has never had slavery.
So even going back into California history to say, well, at this point, we really feel the state was not acting and had done this and had these laws.
No.
So how does the state offer reparations for something that actually historically it never actually did?
See, you're thinking 2022, it's 2023, and it's not reparations for slavery, it's reparations for racism.
So they're talking about California had like discrimination.
What did they have those covenant clauses in a contract?
Like if I sold you a house, both Dianne Feinstein, Michael Huffington, when they ran against each other percent, I think it was in 94, it turned out they had a house that had a clause that says, I will never in perpetuity sell this house to an African American.
And people ignore them, but they're still in the books.
So this is paying for all of that.
And the point is, it's never going to end.
And the point of reparations, right?
Pat, you burned down my house.
You give me the value of my house and some cost, you know, suffering.
Then it's, I have reparations.
I'm restored back to zero.
The point of reparations is once it's resolved, you move on.
But does anyone seriously think that if this actually happens, that's like, okay, racism is done and we're going to move on as society and people are going to stop complaining about racism in California?
Of course not.
I'm in favor of this because the faster California gets driven into the ground and the more of a kind of understanding that government is just basically a shakedown system, the better it'll be for everyone.
But how does it work?
Because it's San Francisco, so it's a city.
So it's not the state, right?
They'll figure it out.
Oh, they'll figure it out.
Yeah.
They just tried to ban 3D printers in all of California.
Why?
Because the law says, I don't know if they passed it yet, but if any object is used primarily or largely to 3D print guns, it's going to be they're trying to ban it in California.
Can you find that article?
Yeah, look up 3D printing God.
It's right there.
I just saw it.
Go the fourth one.
Yeah.
California passes new three.
That's 26.
That's an older one.
Yeah, if you can find a newer one.
It was just in the last couple of weeks.
It's pretty wild to be thinking about this $5 million.
So, you know what it makes me think about?
When I was talking to Roland Martin and Roland said, I grew up in this community and I'm like, okay, and what happened?
I left.
Why'd you leave the community?
Everybody left.
I don't understand.
If you really want to help the community, why are you leaving a community?
Well, because everybody else left.
So, anyways, he'll respond to this on Twitter with some kind of a link and follow.
And I like it when he does that because it allows me to go and look up a few other things.
But what's going to happen if they can buy expensive homes for a dollar?
Okay.
So you mean to tell me they can go buy homes, expensive homes, at a dollar and they're going to get $5 million and $97,000 over how many years of 250 years, man.
If they're going to live 250 years, that's respect, right?
If you got that kind of thing.
But no, no, not necessarily.
If inflation, like five years, $97,000 is going to be worth a soda.
Yeah.
But if you think about that, then here's a perfect case study for people that are going to say, well, I can't believe you.
If people, if they do this, you're actually right.
If they do this just to see what happens as a case study, it's a great case study for everybody else.
Let's see what happens.
I'm actually really curious what happens.
Oh, yeah.
Go for it.
Do it.
Give them the money.
Let's move forward.
Let's see what happens to San Francisco.
Let's see if San Francisco becomes a better city.
Let's see if it becomes more vibrant.
Let's see if more business owners want to move to San Francisco.
If it does, then guess what?
We officially have a case study.
If it doesn't, you also officially have a case study that it doesn't work.
I think we maybe have some, I agree with that.
And I think we have some mini case studies out there.
When you take a look at megalotto winners and what they do, they effectively allow their relatives to buy a house for a dollar because they just give it to them.
And when you take a look at also athletes of all diversities and all backgrounds, you take an athlete that's suddenly given this monstrous contract when they get drafted by the NBA and the NFL.
Remember hockey and baseball.
You have this rookie contract that goes five years, as you know, Pat.
But then you've got the sports where you just walk in the door and you've won the lotto, right?
Because you're one of the top three kids coming out of college and there you go.
And then you buy a house for your mom and you give a car to your brother and you give house to your sister.
Go take a look at the condition of those assets and go take a look how they care for them.
I'm telling you.
We have many case studies.
We have little mini case studies that follow exactly what you're showing.
People will not take care of it.
I want to see it, though.
I'm alive.
I want to see it.
America says this work.
I want to see it.
See, we figured it out.
Let me actually see.
We have unity in the house.
They say right here.
Wait, can I say some more thing?
Yeah, go ahead.
The Chinese were enormously oppressed in California.
So they're going to be next on this list.
And they have more of a reason historically with California than the African Americans do.
So reparations for them as well.
Am I wrong?
What a noble request.
Does it not make more sense for them?
Sure.
There were all these laws.
That was my question: is the slippery slope effect of here?
Because right here it says, Why don't you throw Iranians in there?
There you go.
Who used to live in California and go there for vacation?
Now I live in Florida.
I think we should figure something out there.
Where's your Iranians?
Only Americans know about oppression.
Right?
If you watch the corporate press, you and I, our families, we don't have oppression.
No one, no, no one left the elevator when we started.
Very healthy upbringing, you know.
It was nice.
And we had a party.
It was useful.
Adam, just clear your throat real loud and go for it.
Rosewater ice cream.
It's a slippery slope effect.
So it says it's going to cost the city roughly $50 billion.
So let's say, you know, you're a white guy, you're an Asian guy, you're a Latin guy, whatever.
You're an Iranian guy, and you're like, yeah, all right, cool.
I agree.
Maybe this is something they should do.
Let's, you know, make right the sins of our forefathers.
All right.
So let's say you do agree with this.
Okay, great.
But by the way, part of this is each non-black family in the city would have to pay at least $600,000.
So hold on.
So as a white guy, all right, maybe you can make the argument.
All right, well, you're not black.
Your forefathers were maybe the oppressors.
All right, it's time for you to pay.
All right, well, now the Mexicans got to pay, though.
The Asians got to pay.
The Native Americans got to pay.
Like, where does it end?
Like, how do you determine who ends up paying?
So if it's only, if it's all non-black residents, so now we're all paying.
So my family just moved here four years ago or 40 years ago from Mexico.
I have to pay for something.
It's just like, where does this end?
Politics isn't about logic or reason.
It's about power.
And that is kind of central to anarchist thought.
So what you're saying makes logical sense.
But again, this isn't even about reparations in the sense of reparations of making people whole.
This is simply basically a cash grab and a way to kind of get a voting block in place in perpetuity, quite obviously.
But if you're going for a voting block, you already have the vote.
It's just as liberal city as it gets.
This also appeals to Karen because white liberal women love stuff.
Am I wrong?
Love stuff.
Let me tell you, Karen.
I'm going to tell you right now.
I'm telling you right now, Adam, I want to see this happen.
Oh, yes.
I'm for it as well.
I want to see it happen.
And you know who else I want to see duplicate this?
New York City.
This is.
Oh, do it.
I want San Francis to do it.
New York City to do it.
Chicago to do it.
LA to do it.
Do it.
Let's see what happens.
This is why I donated money to John Fetterman.
I want to see.
I want, and he's my candidate for president.
I want to see this happen.
The faster the Senate becomes Arkham Asylum, the better it is for everybody.
You just want to see the country.
There's a part of it that's funny, but there's a part of it that honestly, for me, we have a relative, and I'll tell you what, this guy was a very prominent figure on TV, okay?
Very, in the Persian community.
And at the tail end of his career, he had a stroke.
And the family was okay with people coming and visiting him.
And there's no way he would ever want people to come and see him in a condition like that.
It was horrible, if you know what I'm talking about.
And the son was not okay with this.
Like, this is not cool for this to be happening.
I'm totally, I can't say anything.
I'm a nobody in the family to say, hey, guys, what are you doing here?
They have to make the decision.
If something like that happened to you and I, and if my wife put me in the public, I would be, I'd be waiting for her in heaven for her to show up and say, what were you thinking?
Allow me to be in public.
Fetterman's family and Democrats to just put him up front like that to say, well, he's great.
He's this, he's that.
That's a form of abuse, what they did to that guy.
He could acquit at any time.
You're removing agency from him.
He has aphasia.
He's not literally like Terry Shibo, brain dead.
And this guy's entire life has been seeking political power.
This is the monkey's paw, right?
It's like you have a genie's wish.
It's like, I wish I was senator.
It's like, all right, but it's going to cost you.
It's like, I don't care.
And now I'm hoping for the day when some on the Senate floor, when his head just explodes and covers 99 other senators with brain parts, blood, and skull bits.
You would want to see that.
Oh, desperately.
Well, you are an anarchist.
There you go.
I'm an American.
Like every American worth his salt wants to see a senator's head, just like JFK, head explode out of nowhere.
You just took it to a whole different level.
Your game just went to a whole different level.
Okay, let's talk about something else.
Let's talk about something else.
Let's talk about this.
Let's talk about a little bit of a, I don't know if you heard of this guy.
They both live from this one state called Florida.
One guy's name is Ron.
The other one's Donald.
I don't know if you're following this word close to that.
And they're very competitive.
Very competitive.
So CNN is.
The most competitive.
No one's ever been this competitive.
Not at all.
Most competitive.
I don't say it.
Other people do.
So CNN poll Michael.
So obviously these guys know what they're talking about.
So CNN poll.
Most Republicans care more about picking a 2024 GOP nominee who agrees with them on issues than one who can beat Biden.
Okay.
So this poll shows that only 30% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe that the country's best days are still ahead of it.
This represents a significant shift from 2019 when 77% of Republicans were optimistic.
When asked about the 2024 GOP nomination, 59% of Republicans prioritize a candidate who agrees with their views on major issues over one who has a strong chance of beating President Biden.
The poll also shows that 38% of Republicans view increasing racial, ethnic, and national diversity as a threat, which is twice as high as four years ago.
Additionally, 78% believe that society's values on sexual orientation and gender identity are changing for the worse, and 79% think that the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses.
What do you think about this?
I think the reasons people give for why they vote the way they do are almost never the actual reasons, right?
No one says, I voted for the better-looking person, I voted for the taller person, but they're going to have a rationalization after the fact that, like, oh, I like him more for the issues or I like his career.
Kind of like the Kennedy thing you were talking about.
Right, exactly.
So I think when people are asked what you're looking for, it's not necessarily what they're actually going to do in the voting booth.
Number one.
Number two is, I don't think Trump has a very good shot, pun intended, because as soon as they start talking about the Fauci stuff, especially with the base, as soon as you start talking about his staffing decisions, it's going to look pretty bad for him.
And I also think that there is enough impetus on the Democratic side for him to be either kind of charged with some kind of crimes, because I think they're very.
If I'm an attorney general and I have the possibility of prosecuting a former president, that's going to catapult me, a state attorney general, to some national fame and history books.
So the incentives are very much there for uh, you know, Democratic party operatives to push him as far as they can.
Why wouldn't they now, when you say you don't think he's got a shot uh, define that meaning he has a great shot of winning the Republican primary?
No, I don't think he has.
I think general election might.
I don't think he has to go to shot the primary.
How could you possibly say that?
He's just 60 in the sea pack?
He's going to tell you if you don't stop.
Stop interrupting me, Michael Mallis.
CPAC is irrelevant, as you know, because if you last CPAC, what it was at this point in 2016, I don't think Trump's name was even there, or maybe he was because he's just spoken.
Number one, number two is he's going to have an issue with fundraising because now he's become so radioactive that if I'm a big businessman and I'm giving him money, it's going to be a problem for me and my customers because all the press is going to be on top of it.
There's going to be an enormous amount of there's a space now.
If I am Facebook or CNN or Fox, for me to say no to his ads because now it's been established that this guy fomented insurrection.
I don't believe that's true at all, but that is the argument.
So it's easy for me as a corporation who's going to be almost always left of center to be like, oh, I can't take your money because you're not a patriot, so on and so forth.
So he has a lot more stacked against him now than he did even in 2016.
So let me go to a story.
Let me go to a story and then you guys can continue with this.
So maybe there is an event that could take place that could help him out.
Here's what it is: Donald Trump's Truth Social cuts staff as his SPAC languishes.
This is a Bloomberg story.
Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, has laid off about half a dozen people, including senior members of its rank, such as the chief technology officer, which, by the way, that's in the technology company.
Yeah.
That's like number one above everybody else, William B.J. Lawson.
It's like you wake up in the morning and fire your own heart.
That's tough right there.
Yeah.
The company done.
Yeah.
The company.
That's actually a good joke, Tom.
That's two in a row.
Okay.
So the company estimates it can fund operations through September at present spending levels.
Trump media executives were once optimistic about the advertising revenue truth social could generate, but the reality of launching an advertising business has proved more complicated.
Truth Social monthly web and desktop visits reached a high of 11.5 million in visitors in August 2022, but I've seen a decline.
Holy moly.
This is a real number to 5.7 million in February.
So 11.5 million to 5.7 is a little over 50%.
It's 51%.
So here's what I think.
And I want to get your thoughts and you guys can talk about this.
This could help him out.
Why?
Here's why.
How long has he been free to post on Facebook, Twitter, for a while, Instagram, right?
But he hasn't.
Okay.
Why?
He's trying to drive value to Truth Social, SPAC, money, all these people, your friends, they put up money.
Here's 5 million, here's 10 million, here's 50 million, whatever the number is, right?
You're raising it.
SPAC is a very, very risky thing.
And it's probably the worst time ever that they had a SPAC.
Possibly the worst time ever when they did the SPAC at the tail end of a peak of SPACs when all these guys were doing SPAC, SPAC, SPACs.
We almost did a SPAC down for $400 million.
You remember that?
Last minute we had a meeting.
We decided we're not doing it.
By the way, we were like all the way in to decision on a Zoom.
Nope, we're moving on.
We didn't do it.
Last point for those of you listening, it was a profitable company that had been profitable for many years.
Yeah, it was a solid EBITDA.
Yeah, we weren't trying to go out and be a public company just because we were a profitable company because we wanted to go out.
And even we decided no.
Everybody we called, they said, if you would have done it five years ago, yes, this is the worst time to do SPAC.
So if truth goes under, now he's not fully committed to posting stuff on truth.
So he's going to be active on what?
Twitter, Facebook.
So maybe Truth Social going out of business could actually help his campaign.
I agree completely because the reason people like Trump and what I like the most about him is because both his foes and his friends every morning would wake up and be like, what is this asshole tweeting about now?
Right?
Like I could the fact that when you had the Democrats go into a military base overseas and he pulled their permission slips and they just circled the bus around and then kind of get off the bus, that was the funniest shit ever.
So him on Twitter was what got him the presidency.
It was integral to him getting the nomination and getting the presidency.
And it would behoove his campaign to have him back on it despite all the people who are like, take his phone away from him.
That said, he hasn't been on Fox in months.
The vast conservative media establishment has turned their backs on him.
He's not fresh like he was in 2015 when no one's seen anything like him before.
I think it's going to be very hard for him to regain that fire that he had now almost a decade ago.
I can't believe you guys think this is actually going to be a good look for him.
I hear what you're coming from because if you want to win a national election, you're going to want to be on all the major social media platforms.
You're going to want to be on Twitter.
You're going to be on TV.
You have to have a megaphone.
You have to.
But there's a reason he's not using it right now because he's doubling down on his SPAC, Truth Social.
I would argue that the worst thing to ever happen to Donald Trump on a social media situation is Elon Musk taking over Twitter.
Okay.
Because Elon Musk has basically enabled Twitter to be a free speech platform.
That was the whole point of Truth Social.
So the whole marketing agenda was like, this is a free speech platform.
Come join us.
This is where it is.
All it has turned out to be is a right-wing echo chamber.
I don't know any moderate or even liberal that's even going close.
Or even conservative, not MAGA.
Look at Tom just pointed at himself.
He's like, I don't go there.
So the last thing that Donald Trump, I mean, Donald Trump's got, you might, some may argue that he's got thin skin.
Some may argue in order to make it to where he's at, he has to have thick skin.
We don't know what exact type of skin he has.
It's orange.
It's orange.
We know that.
But the last thing that he wants to be labeled is a loser.
Okay.
And you're about to say that he is a loser.
I would argue, you know, he's won a bunch more than he's lost, but lately he's been losing.
But I don't think this is a good look for his brand.
So what's his brand?
Whether it's Trump hotels, Trump casinos, Trump stakes, Trump's waters, a lot of these businesses have failed.
So now you're telling me the one business, Michael, the one business you've been working on since you lost the election, Truth Social, is now going to fail.
Tell me how that empowers him to be the president of the United States again.
Well, I don't see it.
I don't think Truth Central, as he called it, Troth Central, is going to be central to his brand or his identity.
I think he's riding on, I was the former president.
I'm the one who could take on Biden.
I had results in the past.
I'm going to have results in the future.
What MAGA people don't appreciate is that his last year in the White House, he took L after L after L after L.
It was an entire year of L's.
It wasn't, and the fact that even if you regard the election as having been stolen, the fact that they were able to drag this carcass across the finish line, if he couldn't stop that in 2020 with the power of the White House behind him, how is he going to stop that in 2024 with the power of the White House against him?
Now, you could argue that whoever they put up, they're going to take it.
He doesn't have a chance.
Okay, I could wrap my head around that argument, but that's not a good argument for Trump specifically as opposed to someone who's fun.
But one could also argue without COVID, Trump would have beat Biden.
Pretty fairly.
But I think a lot of these MAGA people think that no matter what happened, it would have been stolen from him.
Yeah, well, we've seen what's happened with the Fox lawsuit with Dominion.
If you're trying to talk to Trump's supporters, that's where they are.
So I guess as an odds perspective, I love getting the odds.
Like this wouldn't 100% hurt him.
It wouldn't 100% enable him.
Give me the odds of why you think this would be good versus bad.
I think this would be a bad look for his truth social specs to fail.
I think you were talking about two different things.
You're talking about it would be an L on his business legacy and bother his ego.
I think Pat was talking about something else.
I think both of you, Michael, respectfully, are very naive.
And you have to accept it.
They're very nice.
And utopian.
Let me explain to you why.
Here we go.
Okay.
Here's why.
Here's why.
So let's just say if you were best friends and we've known each other from high school, okay?
We always hung out.
We got along.
We've been tight forever.
We have each other's back.
Okay.
We're now, you know, you go through your first divorce after being married for seven years.
And we get to call, hey, guys, you guys got a minute?
Yeah, what's up?
I got to talk to you guys.
What's that?
Mary and I are going through a divorce.
Oh, shit.
Sorry, bro.
40 grand a month?
Yeah.
So kids, this, that.
No, man, it's just reached a point.
It's just not going to work out.
We're going through a divorce.
Trust me, I'm kind of dealing with it.
You guys mind if we meet up somewhere tonight?
Yeah, no, no problem.
Let's go.
We'll go meet up.
Okay.
So we feel bad for you.
You, six months later, you meet Jackie.
And you go, hey, it's Jackie.
Oh, it's good to meet you, Jack.
Everything good?
Yeah, yeah.
It was tough for about three months, but Jackie and I met, you know, on Bumble and, you know, it was phenomenal.
I'm like, we're happy for you, man.
Everything good, Michael?
Yeah, yeah.
One sentence.
My friend Jackie is currently in the hospital and she's so caring.
She called the cops on the nurses two days ago.
So shout out to Jackie.
You're joking.
No, I'm not.
You want me to change your name?
No, no, no.
I love her.
She's a great person.
So you're dating Jackie and you're happy.
And then all of a sudden we come to your second wedding.
Okay.
And you're up there, you know, you're doing what you're doing.
Me, Tom, and Adam walk to the side and we're having a drink and we say, okay, guys, over-under.
What are the chances of this one working out?
Adam says, I don't know, bro.
I think it's 10%.
Tom says, no, this one's going to work out.
He loves her and 80%.
I'm like, I don't know, man.
I'm kind of like at 30% mark.
Okay, cool.
It sounds good.
This one, nine months later, give us a call and you say, dude, this chick's crazy.
She's a Karen.
She's this.
She's in a hospital.
This is not going to work out, right?
So what are you doing?
I'm getting a divorce ASAP.
It's just not going to work out.
Great.
No problem.
The third time you call us for the wedding, our schedule is probably busy.
Okay.
What's the point here?
Like, ah, he's getting married again.
Leave it alone.
I'm not inviting you.
You never believed in me.
We were friends since high school and you're taking bets at my wedding.
Fuck you.
Go back to that shit.
Fuck him.
Dude, that was nice.
Jackie was a good woman.
That was high school, dude.
Now you go through women every time the clocks change.
Come on.
So for those of you guys that are upset saying, Pat, get to the point.
Here's the point.
The point is, how many stories are there with stakes, with this, with that?
No one gives a shit about Truth Social going out of business.
Nobody does.
This is not the first divorce.
Let me make my point and please don't interrupt.
Okay.
This is not the first, second, or third.
I think statistically, it'll take us a week, two weeks to get over it.
They'll take shots.
But what are you going to say?
He's filed this many bankruptcies.
Never work.
He's done that.
Never work.
This guy's going to be able to get more eyeballs if this thing goes out of business.
He goes on Twitter.
His first tweet, Michael, if it's the right tweet, it'll be the most liked tweet of all time, ever.
Ever, ever.
And he can create momentum if he gets back there.
And quite frankly, guess what?
Elon Musk is not in a business of running nonprofits.
Okay.
And he joked the other day saying, I'm officially running the biggest nonprofit of all time because they're not making any money.
The revenues are down, some ludicrous, crazy number that's down.
He's going to sit there and say, dude, we kind of need the profits.
We'll take memberships from Republicans, from MAGA, from whoever it is, even from anarchists.
Come and buy membership.
We don't care who you are.
I think Truth Social going out of business is going to help his campaign.
Go ahead.
You're saying two contradictory things.
So it will help his campaign in the long term, but in the short term, it is going to be a problem.
And this is going to be an albatross round.
And it's different from the bankruptcies in the past.
No one cares about Trump's stakes.
That happened in what, the 80s or 90s, wherever it was.
Point is this was their mothership.
This is where they went to.
And now it closes down.
They get kicked out of their house.
They're not going to like it because people make friends on social media.
You know what I mean?
So it's going to be.
And the thing is, yes, it doesn't really matter because it's not that big of a deal, but they're going to make it matter.
Because even Fox is going to 24-7 be like, look, another disaster from Trump.
Correct.
The TDS is going to be everywhere.
And I think one thing you got to, everything comes down to sort of the news cycle.
If this does fail, it'd be better to fail sooner rather than later.
I think his spin is going to make it worse because he's not going to say, all right, we tried our best and it didn't work out.
He's going to have some cockamame excuse, and that's what they're going to have.
The left-leaning Democrats didn't want this to happen.
They wanted to see me fail.
By the way, the only recommendation I would give is I would give the strategists that are working closely with President Trump to have him realize there's a different approach you have to take as the favorite than as they, as the underdog.
He's using the same strategy as an underdog in 2015.
It's not going to work.
You have to take a very different approach as a favorite because he's coming across as a bully to DeSantis right now.
And it's not attractive.
Yeah, but this goes back to what I always say.
He's not going to change.
Like everything he's done.
When we've ever seen him change, here's what happens.
Should he change?
Should he take some counsel?
Of course.
We could solve this problem.
But he's not.
Michael, you're the solve it.
All he has to do is sell Truth Social to Kanye West, and the problem is solved.
Yeah, because everything he's done with Kanye West has worked out far well over.
All his arrangements with Kanye have worked out well.
This one is specifically for you.
And I need your insight.
Yes, sir.
You have to.
You should have told me that.
Even though I should be in red.
Yes, I will.
Here we go.
By the way, Rob, can we send what kind of mattress do you have?
I have a sponsor that's a mattress company.
You've got to be committed to them.
I am.
I like it.
Okay.
All right.
But I need a twin.
A new twin.
I can continue.
Do you really?
Yeah.
I have a guest room.
Do you need a twin?
I'm trying to make it haunted.
No joke.
So you want like the you got a girl?
You don't know.
You got a stitch.
It's a guest room.
What do you mean with the girl?
The girl's not a guest room.
When you're done, you say go in the guest room.
No, no.
I said go in the Uber.
You're speaking like you're an anarchist.
Like the wife sleeps in a different room.
You're not thinking like.
You don't bring the girl over the house if you're married.
Are you crazy?
Oh, that's the mistress comment you made, Attienna.
I got you.
I'm following you.
I'm following you closely.
Michael, my apologies.
Jackie's a big fan of the show.
My apologies.
This is why after nine months, it's over because of you, Pat.
I apologize.
Please restore.
She's blowing up my phone right now.
All right, here we go.
Here we go.
I need your insight on this one, Mr. Michael Malice.
Republicans knock Ron DeSantis after Florida governor says helping Ukraine is not a vital U.S. interest.
Several high-profile Republicans, including Senator Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley, Liz Cheney, and Lindsey Graham are pushing back against Florida governor's Ron DeSantis argument that helping Ukraine fend off Russia's invading forces isn't a vital national interest.
In a questionnaire sent by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, DeSantis declared that becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not of vital interest to the U.S. and criticized the Biden administration for Ukraine, funding Ukraine.
Rubio argued that Russia's end goal is to overthrow the Ukrainian government and rule the country.
And he said the war should not be compared to other conflicts or territorial disputes settled with treaties or peace agreements.
Haley accused DeSantis of copying former President Donald Trump's stance on Ukraine and Cheney accused DeSantis of weakness and forgetting the lessons of Ronald Reagan.
Graham tweeted that allowing Russia to succeed in conquering Ukraine invites aggression by China and Taiwan.
Thoughts?
I have a hashtag called Limbs for Liz, where people who lost their arms and legs in military service can send their prosthetics to Liz Cheney's house because there's not enough corpses and dismembered people for her taste.
She needs a second house.
She needs a second condo.
This woman is pure evil.
And frankly, my understanding is that she was the model for Miss Piggy.
If you put a picture of them side by side, you can't see the difference.
I think what DeSantis is doing is he's running for the nomination.
And I don't think Nikki Haley, Liz Cheney, and Lindsey Graham between them, see, that's identical.
If you have any, am I wrong?
That's offensive, Michael.
Why?
Because it's Haram?
I don't think between the three of them, they have any kind of clout with the Republican base.
I think the Republican base has become increasingly radicalized.
And I think a year from now, when you're in New Hampshire and Iowa, to still be supporting pumping more money to Ukraine is going to be extremely unpopular with the Republican base, whether that's a good thing or not.
Adam.
Yeah, I think what we're getting is a little insight into Ron DeSantis's mindset.
If he were to run for presidency, which we all expect him to do, it could be as early as May, I think, is when after the Florida government situation kind of dissipates, but he's sort of queuing to the base: hey, this is where I stand on this.
And he's drawing a strong delineation between what Biden stands for, which is obviously doubling down on Ukraine.
He's sent.
All that.
He sent every one of, you know, who was the latest person that he sent over to Ukraine?
It was he sent Janet Yellen, and then he sent Merrick Garland, I believe, to Ukraine.
Basically, he's doubling down to Ukraine.
He's basically saying, this is the difference between me and Joe Biden.
And if that is who ends up running against if he does get the nomination, he's sort of giving a heads up.
This is where I stand.
And here's why this is smart, because the big whispering campaign coming out of Trump and MAGA World is that DeSantis is a closet neocon.
When he was in Congress, he's basically another, you know, George W. Bush.
And there's a big concern that he's a wolf in sheep's clothing and that once he gets into office, he's just going to be a product of the military industrial complex and just push for war, something that Trump, from their perspective, did not do.
So this is a great way for him to get ahead of that criticism and be like, I know you're worried that I'm another war hawk like you get year after year with Republicans, but I'm really different and I'm not going to be like what you're fearing I'm going to be.
I think I agree with that to a certain extent.
It's really early.
And that's what I, every time I see these things here, I just bang it around in my head.
It's just like, okay, next, it's really early.
You know, Nikki Haley has her motivations clearly.
Lindsey Graham and Liz Cheney, you know, they've got their motivations.
And I think also the classic technique, you know, of whenever you have somebody emerging is to start picking up them.
Mitt Romney didn't have the entire Republican Party behind him when he was emerging.
People were picking at him.
I think, you know, it's power brokering.
It's people like Nikki Haley.
She's competing with him.
She's a competitor.
Just call it.
She's competing for the Republican nomination.
So she's a hard-nosed competitor.
So we're not surprised about her.
Check.
And everybody else has got their motivations.
And he is the emerging frontrunner.
And I think a lot of people are trying to shift the power where they want it to be.
You know, one of the things that I think is a sign of a guy that's got the chances of winning is you have to take a hard position and get a ton of backlash and still stand firm.
And then the market says, wow, good for him.
And then the argument creates momentum, kind of like what you're doing, right?
So think about like your argument of, no, let me tell you, here's a, no, no, no, no.
So yeah, okay, well, maybe he's got a point.
Now you got to have your tipping point for that argument to really go.
But I think DeSantis has to take this position.
I think it favors him.
Now, whether people like it or not, it is what it is.
There's a lot of people right now that are kind of sitting there that were all pro-Ukraine.
Let's help these guys out.
Change the flag colors on my Twitter profile.
Now it's like, I don't know about all this money that we're spending and we're experiencing America.
So I think it could help him out position-wise.
I'm not sure the level of credibility with the other guys.
You don't want to be the group of 18 people that disagree with the one guy.
Right, because you're going to market differentiate.
Like, why am I buying R.C. Cola?
Because I'm cheaper.
There's got to be something that distinguishes.
RC Cola is also better, though.
Okay.
There's got to be something.
I'm a Dr. Pepper guy.
There's got to be something that distinguishes me from the other, from the other brands.
And I think This is the most extreme time in our lifetime where there is a disconnect between a party and its base, specifically between the Republican Party and the Republican base.
I don't think we've ever seen anything like it, the animus that the Republican base has towards the Republican Party.
Can I say one more thing about this?
Do that, and then I want to go to the next stage.
Just real quick, because they keep using the word of national interest.
This is not, DeSantis says specifically, helping Ukraine does not fend off invading forces isn't of national interest.
One could argue, yes, this is not of national interest, but this is of our international interest.
So obviously NATO is an international alliance that is there to protect typically Europe against Russia's invasion.
And one could argue that, all right, if we allow this to happen, what's next?
What's the slippery slope that happens with Poland or Finland?
And we've seen that Finland and Norway or whoever it is just recently been introduced to NATO.
And then here you have here is Lindsey Graham even tweeting that allowing Russia to succeed in conquering Ukraine, speaking of slippery slope, now invites China to invade Taiwan.
So where does it end if U.S. doesn't draw the line on these types of situations?
But then where does it end?
Because at a certain point, then China is going to even more so be on Russia's side.
So if you want to play brinksmanship, it's not going to be like the good guys always win if you're assuming that we're the good guys, as we just demonstrate in Afghanistan.
Yeah, well, no, I completely understand on that.
But at the end of the day, one can say that this is what I said a couple weeks ago.
I think this is a vital U.S. interest to stand pat on what we believe in, democracy.
You can't just invade countries.
I think that's something that we should, whether it's soft power, hardpower, throwing money on it, that we should stand behind.
Are you willing to send troops?
This is my, no, not whatsoever.
The one that you could always argue is how much money?
How much money can we be spending?
Where do we draw the line on that?
Right now we're at $100 billion.
Are we willing to commit another $100 billion?
How about a trillion dollars?
We spent, what, a trillion dollars in Afghanistan, if not more?
We spent $4 trillion fucking dollars in Iraq.
So one could argue, hey, the money just doesn't make sense whatsoever.
But standing firm on what we believe in, I think is there's no amount of money that we can put behind that.
Would you regard it as somehow wrong if Putin started targeting American resources?
Like if he started bombing American bases?
Well, now he's in.
Just somewhere.
Would you regard that as somehow illegitimate?
What do you mean by illegitimate?
Meaning like, okay, is that an act of war?
Then yes.
But the point being, like, would you be surprised?
At a certain point, if you're going to keep funding his opponent, we start becoming parties to this war ourselves.
No question about it.
So you're playing a very dangerous game where you, it's easy to be like, we're the good guys for democracy.
You're not going to do it, but we're not going to send troops.
At a certain point, he's like, fuck you.
And that's going to be very, that's something I'm terrified of.
I totally understand.
And that's a great argument.
But at the other, the other end of the spectrum is, all right, do we just allow Putin to do whatever he wants with no consequences and we don't step up?
We're America.
I mean, like, the world goes as America sort of goes.
Like, if we don't step up, if we don't lead, who leads then?
China, Russia, Iran?
Like, we need to stand for something here.
I hear what you're saying, but at a certain point, the problem, Thatcher very famously said the problem with socialism is eventually run out of other people's money.
We have limited resources.
And this idea that we can fund wars everywhere across the world in perpetuity, wherever so-called democracy is threatened, I think flies.
That is the utopian perspective.
And at a certain point, we have to be like, all right, this sucks.
North Korea is a great example.
If I had my brothers and talk about utopia and if I had a magic wand, I would liberate the North Korean people.
We can't do that because the military and so on and many other China has their backing.
So yes, I like the idea of protecting liberalism in whatever form it takes throughout the world, but at a certain point, we're making ourselves the targets and we're going to have other 9-11s.
Yeah, I agree.
And that's essentially my point is that what amount of money are we willing to commit to this?
I think speeches, soft powers, saying what we believe in, that doesn't cost anything.
And I think that's what we should be doing.
And I think it's fully in our right to argue, hey, this is where else could this money be used?
I think that we need to stand for what we believe in and not invading sovereign nations.
I think it's sort of tantamount to democracy.
But what does stand for what we believe in mean?
That can mean anything up to boots on the ground.
If I'm not sending troops, am I really standing for what I believe in?
If I'm not, you know, putting lives in risk?
Or I'm just talking out of my ass at that point, right?
You're saying that you have to send troops or send people together.
If I really want to stand for what I believe in, then there's no price too high.
The heavens fall.
Are you going to the speech he gave about you Americans will need to send their sons and daughters?
No, I'm just going to his point that like, look, listen, if we have to stand up for what we, let's make Putin, it makes it even easier.
Putin's like a Hitler figure, like really just pure evil and the Ukrainians are.
Well, she's not.
And that's what I'm saying.
He's not.
No, but the point is like labeling that.
Are you comfortable always allocating no matter how many resources we have to always fighting dictators?
And at a certain point, the answer is we can't.
At a certain point, we're going to run out of military.
We're going to run out weaponry.
We're going to run out of people's patience, too.
And that's a big problem.
I agree with you.
I'm saying that we're limited.
No, I know, but money shouldn't be the only situation that we're looking at.
I agree.
We can't just go down the rabbit hole of another Afghanistan of trillions in Iraq.
Let's go to the next story.
Let's go to the next story.
DeSantis administration revokes Hyatt Regency Miami alcohol license after it hosted a drag queen Christmas.
This is an insider story.
The DeSantis administration is revoking their license after the party with minors present in the audience.
The state's business department accused the Miami venue of several violations, including a prohibition of, how do you pronounce that word?
Les vicious, lesvious, lascivious.
Lascivious.
What does that even mean?
Sexual.
Okay.
Sexual exhibition before people younger than 16.
The department said performers were wearing sexually suggesting clothing and prosthetic female genitalia, as well as simulating masturbation.
Republican governor DeSantis of Florida supported the license revocation and his press secretary said that sexually explicit content is not appropriate to display to children and doing so violates Florida law.
Equality Florida and LGBTQ rights organization said that DeSantis was selectively weaponizing state agencies against businesses to target drag performances, saying such decisions should be left to the parents.
Yeah, so the corporate press won't discuss what the content of these shows are.
It's literally two male dancers in their speedos humping each other on stage.
And if you look up Jimbo Tits in a Box, Jimbo's won these queens.
I'm a big fan because drag is transgressive and it's good art for adults, but he's performing with the songs literally called Tits in a Box, with dancing around with his big tits in a box.
And there's kids there who are like five, six, or seven.
And one, the queens was, the queens were addressing the children in the audience as well.
So yeah, if you look at this, this is not appropriate for children, but it's perfectly appropriate as adult risque entertainment.
No doubt.
But here's my question.
Five, six, seven-year-olds aren't just getting in an Uber and showing up by themselves.
It's the white liberal taking them there.
Because white liberal moms want to show their dad how progressive they are.
And they put a man in makeup and they think it's a second coming.
So then here's the question.
This is not appropriate for children, although it's hilarious.
But isn't it the parents' decision as to what's appropriate for their kids or not?
Yeah, I would never take any of my kids, my nephew, to anything like this.
But if Karen wants to take her daughter to this event, that's her decision.
Why would the government step in and tell you what you can and can't do with your children?
If you're antithetical to what we stand for.
Honestly, you can stop it.
It's totally fine.
Yeah, Robert, you're getting a little excited about it.
Would you be fine with Karen taking her kids to a bar to dispensary?
Well, you can't be under 21 to be in a bar.
But that's what DeSantis is trying to do.
He's saying you can't be under, I think it was 18 to show like this.
I thought the whole premise of the Republican Party was limited government and being able to do what you want to do.
Again, I'm not defending this whatsoever.
I think it's fucking absurd.
But isn't it the, well, it used to be.
No, but isn't I?
Limited government.
You can call 21 for alcohol and things like that.
I don't think you're going to be able to do that.
That's a non-sequitur, limited government.
You're right, but I don't think that one really applies here.
You're telling me that Republicans don't stand for the limited government and getting out of that like that.
No, they don't.
They don't?
No, they don't.
But that was the whole premise.
No, no, no, no.
But they don't.
Where am I getting that?
Keep going where you're going.
Stay on the art because that is the argument.
The argument of some people on the left will be, isn't the right, the freedom of speech and not censorship?
Why are they censoring this?
Your argument is, well, this is an age.
Same thing with a dispensary.
Can Karen take their kid to a dispensary?
So are you saying, is there a law for age right now where this is illegal?
Was there a law broken for this?
I'm not familiar with exactly this specific thing.
I'm going to find out if a law was broken.
My point being, it is not at all crazy to me that there are mechanisms in place where children are not exposed to sexually explicit material.
I think that's a lot of historical precedent.
Cultural precedent.
They used the phrase violation and they were stating an age.
So I assume that the DeSantis administration was acting on something that was precedent.
I'm assuming.
Go back up.
The business has 21 days.
What?
Go back up?
All the way up?
Yeah, the business has 21 days to request a hearing.
Beth, a spokeswoman for the department told insider American generalizer, hotel liquor license still in effect and said that the hotel was reviewing the complaint.
Third-party operator manages the Knight Center's programming and ticketing while the hotel, a third-party operator manages the Knight Center's programming and ticketing while the hotel provides food and beverages concessions.
Republican governor said widely considered to be an amounting presidential sexual.
Yeah, what I want to know is what law was broken?
Okay, because these are two different conversations.
What law was?
I think it's more like if you're going to be serving alcohol, because he took the liquor license, he didn't put anyone in jail.
So I think the premise is if you're going to have a liquor license establishment, you're not allowed to have underage people.
But that's not true, though, because when I go to Armenian weddings, trust me, there's a lot of liquor and there's plenty of kids around.
But maybe those laws aren't being enforced in those situations.
But one more, to your point, we could all wrap our heads around kids not being able to go to strip clubs or to Chippendales, right?
Doesn't mean they shouldn't exist.
They should be banned.
So I think this is just kind of more of the same, but in a gay context.
Yeah.
And again, I'm not, I would never take my nephew to anything like this.
That's not for me.
But I'm just giving the counter argument where it's like, okay, what's acceptable and not?
So if you go back to that video, it's like, where do you draw the line?
Like, let's say kids want to go see a clown or you want to go see a magician.
Go back up?
Go back up to the First Amendment.
Yeah, right.
The fundamental tenet of First Amendment is that the government should not punish people simply because it disapproves of the content of their speech, yet the decision will harm a business simply because it supported speech of government, speech the government doesn't like.
Right.
Legislation provoked against someone including Florida has targeted drag performances with this year Tennessee becomes the first to ban adult performances, including drag.
Okay, but that's where I'm going with it.
Where I'm going with it is the following.
Here's where I'm going with it.
Great.
If you want to take the license away rather than taking the license away, do what Tennessee does.
Ban adult performances, including drag from public spaces such as parks and schools.
If you want to do that with kids being present, make that a law.
But if it's not a law, they didn't break a law.
If they did break a law and do you revoke their license, fine, it's a law.
I don't know if it's a law or not.
If it's not and you do it, then you give an argument to the other set to come in and say, well, aren't you doing this?
Aren't you doing that?
Oh, I thought you were for not censorship, all this other stuff.
First of all, yesterday I'm talking to Frank from Gays Against Groomers.
I don't know if you're familiar with Gays Against Groomers.
They do a very good job.
And Frank and I were trying to get a time.
He's the executive director to get him on the podcast.
I'm looking forward to having the conversation with him for him to give his perspective on how he feels about this.
These guys do a very good job, and I want to learn more about them.
You know, if it is a law, then you can prevent the kid.
You can enforce it.
If it's not, parents are uncomfortable with drag coins being shown to kids.
But then your argument is, well, shouldn't the parent have the decision?
The kid didn't get an Uber go there.
It's the parents' decision.
You want to take your kid and watch a scary movie or something?
You took the risk.
It says rated R, except with what?
Parental guidance or PG-13?
But if you got parental guidance, whatever, you can go watch the movie.
The parent took the risk.
This is a form of that is kind of what you're saying.
But I think the argument, it's more like X, though.
It's what?
It's more like rated X, where you can't take a kid to porno.
I don't think it's soft porn because I don't think there's anything, I don't think it's soft.
I think this would probably be considered rated R. Even NC17 is when they show, you know, to getting naked and, you know, but I think this is an R thing that the parent took the risk.
Regardless of it, regardless of it, trust me when I tell you this.
DeSantis taking the position, the people who are saying, I can't believe this, he was never going to get their vote anyway.
So he's not losing or gaining anybody there.
But the people that were sitting there that were for him, who are parents with kids, they're like, dude, I don't care whether it is or it's not.
I like the fact that it's defending something like this.
He got those people that will support him, which is, that's the vote you want anyways.
And this is, I mean, look, it's no secret that DeSantis has his whole agenda is the war on the woke.
This Florida's where woke comes to die.
DeSantis is basically revealing his playbook for 2024.
Okay.
Anything the trans, I'm out on that.
Against it.
Boom.
Ukraine, we're getting out of there.
He's revealing what he stands for, and he's delineating between himself with Biden, with Trump, and he's just, he's showing us who he is.
And by the way, I don't think many people would agree that they want young kids around trans stuff.
I think there's going to be an over 50% majority that are going to support this.
I think my only question is, isn't it up to the parents to make that decision, not the government?
Well, I think it depends on how comfortable you are with what kids are being allowed to see.
Because at a certain point, everyone would agree that if you're giving a kid drugs or alcohol, we're going to take that kid away from the parent.
On the other hand, if they're just showing them, you know, always sunny in Philadelphia, very few people are, even though it's not appropriate for kids.
Amazing show.
Yes, very few people are going to say, all right, let's call CPS.
Isn't that a libertarian argument?
That's the libertarian argument.
No.
I'm just putting more perspective.
So the question is, what are you comfortable with?
Maybe it's different on a state-by-state basis.
The difference is, well, you're right that a majority of people aren't for the trans stuff with kids, but this is constantly being portrayed in the corporate press as just simply anti-LGBT.
They're not acknowledging or addressing the content of these shows.
It's not a guy in a dress singing some nice song and it's nice, wholesome family entertainment.
It's explicitly, sexually suggested performances and sexually explicit material.
And that is very different from how, if you watch The View, you're going to perceive what's happening.
Yeah.
By the way, again, for me, if you're campaigning, you have to take some risks.
Yes.
And DeSantis is taking the right risks.
Watch two conversations he's in, which is exactly what you need to do if you want to create momentum.
One, you got Republicans to vote against you and disagree with you.
Rubio, Haley, you know, whatever, Cheney, Ukraine, phenomenal.
You have one position.
That's a risk.
The other one, hey, we're doing this to these guys.
That's a risk.
Who am I gaining?
The millions of people that are also asking, why are we sending all this money to Ukraine while we have a bank going out of business here?
Why are we having our kids be exposed to transgender?
I'm sorry, I'm not good with this.
So I think he's taking the right risks.
There is risks.
He has to take it.
If I ask you right now, what's Nikki Haley's position?
Give it to me.
Give me one risk Nikki Haley's taking.
What's her position?
Give me one risk Marco Rubio's taking.
What's his position?
Give me one risk Liz Cheney's taking.
What's her position?
The only risk Liz Cheney took is what?
After the comments being made about her father, he turned against January 6th.
That was a risk she took because she'll never get MAGA.
But Liz Cheney is better off today becoming a Democrat than staying a, you know, what do you call a rhino Republican?
I don't know where you put her, where she's at.
So the risk she took, that is also a risk, but that's a big risk.
They thought Lincoln project was going to be bigger than it actually ended up becoming.
Well, not necessarily.
And she got crushed in her election.
She didn't win.
The risk reward did not work out.
It kind of did because we all know her name.
She's very well positioned to get a book deal, to be a pundit.
If that's what you're solving, you're right.
If she's solving being a congresswoman, then it was a horrible risk.
Yeah, but I mean, she's got the Cheney money, Cheney name.
She has other paths to power.
She wants to lock off.
If she wants to get her show on MSNBC, she just signed that deal locked in.
Exactly.
She would like to do that.
Or the view.
I would like to do two business stories and then we wrap up, if that's okay with you guys.
Tom, Mark Zuckerberg on how to run a company in 2023.
This is a Wall Street Journal story.
Mark Zuckerberg has announced an update vision for the company in a year of efficiency focused on cutting costs and improving productivity.
This comes after a year of slow growth and economic uncertainty.
The company plans to cut 10,000 jobs over multiple rounds of layoffs while leaving an additional 5,000 open positions unfilled.
It will eliminate middle management and flatten its corporate hierarchy by converting many managers into employees with no supervisory responsibilities.
In other words, an anarchy.
Low priority projects will be canceled and internal tools will be strengthened to help software engineers write code faster.
The company will also pause new remote work applications and request to transfer to another office through the first half of the year as some employees have performed better in person.
However, Mehta is committed to allowing both remote and hybrid work.
Tom thoughts.
I found this to be like the death of a thousand cuts.
He's pouring money into this hole called the Ukraine War.
I mean metaverse.
And so he's doing that.
And then they've laid off some people.
Now, wait a minute.
We have to the year of efficiency.
It's just a year of job cuts.
He's trying to align what was this bloated cost with the economic reality, the revenue they bring in, cutting 10,000 jobs and closing 5,000 open jobs.
Basically, he's showing that this company has been completely caught out.
And now he's having to walk back and re-optimize.
And he's not getting any number one.
And the reason you're having to do that, he's not getting any traction on the metaverse.
But actually, they had a pretty good Q4 that showed signs of light that with the right number of folks, they still are a volcano of ad money, which is good.
But the humorous part for me is pausing new remote work applications.
So let's read that.
Pause new remote work applications.
No one is getting permission to work remote anymore.
And then some employees have performed better in person.
And then to quell the revolt before it happens.
However, we're committed to allowing both remote and hybrid work.
So I think Mark is sort of an enigma wrapped in a contradiction these days.
Michael.
I don't know that.
Listen, I know Mark Zuckerberg.
He knows his business and his company infinitely better than I do.
But from my understanding of social media and social media dynamics, I don't know how you turn the ship around.
Because once an internet social media site is regarded as kind of outdated or grandma, it becomes a lot harder to get the kids, which are what you, it's kind of like cigarettes, right?
You want that young generation to kind of keep it going to sustain it.
I haven't been on Facebook in a couple of years.
I know for a lot.
No joke.
Do you use Instagram or no?
I use Instagram, Facebook.com slash Michael Miles.
You could see my last post a couple of years ago.
It hasn't hurt.
It hasn't hurt my.
Why haven't you, though?
What's your reason?
It drove me crazy that he changed it so I couldn't see everyone's updates in a reverse chronological order that you're going to curate my feed for me.
It's like, this isn't what I want.
I want to see everyone who I follow.
You'll see all their posts.
How many fans do you have on Facebook right now?
I have no idea.
I'm sure thousands.
Can you see the number?
Yep, 11 is important.
Well, you don't have a fan page.
That's just your personal.
Do you have a fan page or no?
I don't have a fan page.
Michael, I think you ought to consider having a fan page.
Let somebody monitor it, not even you doing it.
Have somebody add your clips.
Only reason I'm saying this, if it's not important, don't do it.
You are a brand that could generate an additional 10 to 20 a month off of Facebook.
If it's not, it's important to you, don't worry about it.
But you'll blow up on Facebook and the monetization is actually working effectively.
But good point to say who's even using that, right?
That's kind of what you're saying.
Right, exactly.
And it's certainly not like something that's regarded as a cutting edge or hip or anything like that.
How do you do that?
It's very hard.
Yeah.
How do you do that?
Tom, the question becomes, he makes a good point.
How do you make it cool again, right?
Because to me, you know, you know how sometimes a parent screwed up with the kids and they try to win the kids over and they lower the standards.
Well, guys, moving forward, you don't have to make your bet.
Thank you.
You didn't improve your situation here, right?
Hey, moving forward, babe, in our relationship, I will be more, you know, XYZ.
No, no, you didn't make yourself more attractive.
I think there needs to be a vision that's attractive to get a new market.
Facebook is officially the company that buys companies right before they're about to blow up, and that's the brand.
And you've talked about that before, but how do you make Facebook cool again?
That's the trillion auto question.
I also think you can because you know those little, you know, they're on t-shirts and everywhere and it shows evolution where you have the primate and then he slowly starts to stand up and then he's walking.
Well, basically, you can look at social media like that and you've got AOL, then you got Friendster, then you got MySpace, and you got Facebook.
I don't think you go back.
I think once a new generation decides that that is the arcade, social media has proven, let me say that, has proven that once a generation turns its back on the prior and goes forward, that's it.
I mean, ask the people at Snapchat who are sitting there every morning at church praying for TikTok to be shut down in the United States so that they have a chance to be rejuvenated.
I don't think you turn it around, Pat.
And that's why you're hearing things like, we're going to that, I think Mark knows it, and that's why he doubled down on the metaverse.
Call it dumb, call it smart, call it what you will, but he's doubling down because he needs a new play.
And now they're coming out and saying, we're going to make this open format, you know, messaging platform with interrelated relevance to the messages.
Okay, so why don't you just say you're trying to make a Twitter competitor at some point?
And that's what you're working on in the back room.
I don't think you can turn back the clock.
Yeah, so I think you can.
I think you can.
And I think you believe you can as well.
But I think the gift, Tom, the gift of doing that, Mark doesn't have.
Okay.
Just like, you know, you know what true social needs?
First of all, they need a Trump, they need Elon to Not Buy Twitter.
That screwed up truth social.
The day he bought Twitter, it's over with, right?
That was game over.
Yep, sure.
But, but take Sheryl Sandberg outside of Facebook.
What's Facebook?
Nothing.
Take, look at the names I'm about to tell you.
Take Sheryl Sandberg out.
It doesn't have the value shit it has.
Number two, take who's the guy that came from Napster?
What was his name?
The Napster.
Take Sean Parker out.
What's the vision?
Sean Parker was the vision.
Okay.
Sheryl Sandberg was the money ads.
The twin, whatever the guys were the idea.
Zuck is an operator and an executor and a driver.
That's what he'll do.
But he's not that guy.
So I think he needs to find the next, give you a perfect idea.
Most people, when you think about Fox News, you ask the average person Fox News, who's the founder of Fox News.
They're going to think the guy that's the founder of Fox News is who?
Rupert Murdoch.
No, no.
If you have Roger Ailes, they have no idea.
They have no idea.
They have no idea the guy's Australian with an Australian accent.
Rupert Murdoch is an Australian guy with an Australian accent.
What took Fox to be a behemoth was a guy named Roger Ailes.
You take Roger Ailes out, it's not going to happen.
The best thing Zuck could do right now, the best thing Zuck could do right now, stop coming up with ideas.
It's not your strength.
Go find the biggest badass innovator, creative that wants to prove a point.
Give him a fat salary with a big upside.
Let them come in.
Rather than coming up with ideas, go find your Roger Ailes.
Go find your next Sandberg.
Go find your next recruit.
This is recruiting season.
I think the approach he's taken is not going to work out because he's not a vision guy.
He's an executor.
And by the way, Zucks are very, very hard to find.
Very, very hard to find.
There's a reason why he's worth what he's worth.
But he can go find the other guys.
They're out there.
I don't know a single person, and obviously that's a very bad metric for saying something like this.
But I just want to put that caveat who's on the metaverse or spends time.
Exactly.
And all my friends are big influencers in very many fields.
If I don't have one data point to the contrary, that says something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So anyway, that's my, I may be wrong.
All I'm saying is go recruit a guy like that.
You have plenty of money and attractive platform to give it to somebody.
And by the way, that guy becomes a savior.
Just 20 years ago, not even 20 years ago, 1976.
When did Apple get started?
72 or 76?
What year did Apple get started?
1971?
What year does it say?
76.
Okay.
1976.
April Fool's 1976.
Pretty wild.
So they get started 76.
And an accidental millionaire book comes out.
Trashing jobs, right?
And then what happens to him?
He gets fired.
And then Apple's about to die.
Scully, the guy that he brings from Pepsi, ends up firing him, right?
Jobs goes to Home Fries.
What do you call it?
Pixar.
And he sells Pixar to who?
Disney.
Then Apple comes in.
He starts working next computer.
Next program.
Yes.
So then they come in.
Then they bring him back.
And then, boom, it takes off.
I think Facebook needs to go find a recruited talent.
By the way, watch what happened here yesterday.
This is 16 hours ago.
U.S. threatens ban if TikTok Chinese owner don't sell stakes.
Okay, this is all over the place.
Axios wrote it.
NBC wrote it.
They wrote it.
And this isn't something that was started by Biden.
Trump proposed this.
And I don't know if you remember at one point, there's a bunch of people that were going to buy it.
I don't know what the company.
Twitter was, I think, there was a couple companies that were going to buy this guy.
TikTok.
I want to say it's not a bad buy for Facebook, but I don't think it's a good buy for Facebook because they already got it.
It's Instagram.
I think this is a very good buy if Elon buys TikTok.
I don't think it matters who owns TikTok.
I think it matters what TikTok is connected to.
If Elon buys it, he'll find it'll be TikTok files and you'll see everything.
If they force them to pull out the China.
Look at what Vivek Ramaswani's campaign is right now.
You know what he wants to do?
Did you hear what he said yesterday?
He said a lot of things.
Can you go to Twitter real quick?
Here's what he said yesterday, which I found very interesting.
So you know what Vivek wants to do?
Here's what Vivek wants to do.
What Vivek tweeted yesterday, this is the kind of stuff that your life is on the line.
So let me find this tweet here, what he said.
He says, if you vote me in, he wants to do to the U.S. government what Twitter Elon Musk did with Twitter files.
I don't know if you know what I'm saying.
They put him six feet under in two seconds.
Of course they would.
But he came out and he says, I will be exposing the FBI files, the disfiles.
It's a very, you know, what's the word? Utopian idea to have?
I don't know.
He better not walk through the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel.
Yeah.
What are you talking about?
Look, he is.
He's got guts.
He's got audacity.
And I don't even mind.
Right there.
Just as Elon Musk did at Twitter, as president, I will release the state action files from the federal government, exposing every instance where the feds pressured companies to take constitutionally prohibited actions.
I like this.
This is good.
But if Elon buys TikTok, combine TikTok and Twitter, I don't know.
There's something attractive about that.
But will Biden and his camp allow TikTok to be sold to Elon?
You know, that's not going to be happening.
They're going to get in the way.
Whoever buys it has to untangle it from all that.
Yes.
That word is reappearing.
The entanglement.
It's Chris Rock's favorite word right now.
So, anyways, I don't know what's going to happen there, but that was the one story.
Tom, I'll do the mortgage story and I'll give that one to you and we'll wrap up.
Mortgage demand increased for the second week in a row with the total application volume rising by 6.5% compared to the previous week, according to Mortgage Bankers Association.
Despite mortgage rates being higher, mortgage applications to purchase a home increased by 7% for the weekend.
Homeowners, homebuyers, concerned rates will continue to rise.
However, applications to refinance a home were 74% lower than a year ago.
It's a big number.
The average contract rate for 30-year-fixed mortgage with conforming loan balances decreased to 6.71% from 6.79.
That's not a big number.
But rates were largely higher for most of the week before dropping sharply on Friday due to news of Silicon Valley Bank failure.
So is this like Tom, just a small little movement here?
Is this like, you know, what do you think this is?
Yeah, this is a blip.
And I dove into this because I saw the headline.
I'm like, what the hell?
You know, and to find out what it is.
And this was CNBC making a headline where there really isn't one.
And I dove into the stuff Diane Olaf was talking about.
And what happened was there's always buyers right on the edge.
Even in a bad market, there's a percent of buyers that are right on the edge.
And when they saw the madness happening with SVB and they hear, you know, the week prior is what really drove it.
It really wasn't SVB.
It was driven the week prior when everyone was trying to talk Powell.
You know, buddy, you don't need to do 25.
You need to do 50.
And it was Larry Summers on the weekend and all the weekend news shows.
Larry Summers says he really needs to put a half a point on this, not just a quarter point.
People on the edge were reacting to that saying, well, if we're going to do it now, we better do it now.
Take 6.71.
Otherwise, it's going to be 7.
This wasn't the market moving back to buy houses.
This is people on the edge, Pat.
It's on a blip.
They jumped in.
They locked at 6.71 and they bought some houses.
And also, there was an increase in sale of newly built homes in that last week, which is temporary because you know what that was?
If you're a home builder like Toll Brothers or Lanaire, Pat, what can you always do?
You can use part of the home price to arbitrage the rate.
Tell you what, you go get the rate, and what I'll do is I'll pay one point.
So instead of 6.75, you'll get 6.25.
And so home builders pushed a little blip on that too.
But this is a blip.
This is not a change in the mortgage market according to everything that I dove into.
I'm not particularly informed on this specific issue, but the housing market has been historically kind of boom and bust.
I know Austin specifically, the rates for renting and for home ownership went through the roof in the last couple of years.
Now they seem to kind of, if you look at Zillow, which I kind of do regularly, all the home prices have an arrow going down.
So the market is kind of correcting itself.
But again, mortgages and banks are obviously so extremely interconnected that if banks start failing, this is going to have some kind of cascading effect.
I'm just wondering what the mortgage brokers are telling their potential clients.
Because in any sale, it comes down to what?
Urgency and scarcity.
Right?
So, hey, you know, the rates just dropped.
They're not going to drop anytime soon.
You see what Powell's doing out there?
Rates are expected to go up.
You're lucky if you get it at six and a half at this point.
That's a great point.
I know, hey, you know, we can't go back to a year ago where you could have got three and a half.
You should have chose then.
Now we're at six and a half.
It could be seven and a half next year.
Time to go, time to go, time to go.
Inflation around the corner.
I read it was a blip, and that's exactly if I was in mortgage broker, what I'd be saying to people, we don't know where this is going to go, but it doesn't look good.
You've been right on the edge here.
Why don't you pull the trigger on the home?
Let's get you locked in.
Yeah, but if I'm that guy that was looking to buy a house a year ago and I missed the rush and I could have gotten it three and a half, now you're trying to sell me on six and a half.
That's an uncomfortable situation.
Are you going to say something?
No, no, I completely agree.
It's trying to be an Ostradamas here.
Gang, this has been a blast.
Two things.
One, go order the book.
The White Pill came out December 1st, five stars by Michael Malis.
Let's put the link below in the description as well as the chat for people to go pick up.
Again, go pick up the book, White Pill, Michael Malice, A Tale of Good and Evil.
I got a surprise gift as well for you.
It just arrived, your gift, two days ago.
And rather than doing it on your birthday, you were out of town.
I want to do it right now before it's too late.
And I know your birthday was a minute ago, but it just arrived.
Can we open a door and get this gift for this guy?
What is happening right now?
I think you're going to like it.
I hope you like it.
This is what is happening.
It's a gift.
Dude, put it behind him so at least the audience can see.
Hopefully he likes this gift.
Oh, bro.
Are you freaking kidding me?
Open it up.
Let's see if you like this gift or not.
It's my birthday today.
We ordered a bed for your wife.
All right, let's see.
So the reason why I got you this gift is for obvious reasons.
Okay.
So this is a Isaiah Thomas autograph jersey for Adam Sauce because Adam grew up, your pops, Detroit.
Happy birthday, by the way.
That's the bad boy.
It's beautiful.
This is such a sick gift.
Isaiah Thomas, everyone was a Michael Jordan guy.
Everyone was a Larry Bird guy.
I was always Isaiah.
I like the hipster aspect of that.
Yeah, thank you.
I appreciate that.
What's crazy, I only own one other jersey, and it's an Isaiah Thomas jersey, but it's not framed for the money.
Now you got an autograph frame.
Put it up in your bed.
Isaiah, if you ever see this, Zeke, put it up.
Put it over your friend.
So cool.
Okay.
All right.
Anyways, we had a blast.
Michael, once again, thanks for coming out.
I know it was too early for you, but we had a good time.
Hopefully we woke you up, and I know you woke a lot of us up as well.
Florida's where Welcome to Die, apparently.
That's true.
Well, it used to.
But it's changed.
It's used to, but it changed.
Anyways, gank, have a great weekend, and we will do this again next week.
