Michael Malice and James Smith dissect the contradictions of Objectivism, critiquing Yaron Brook's rigid definitions of "selfishness" and his false equivalence of communists with Nazis. They analyze how minarchists inconsistently support state monopolies on force while rejecting similar logic in healthcare or education, exposing the religious dogma surrounding Ayn Rand despite her admiration for Catholic saint Thomas Aquinas. Ultimately, the discussion argues that true libertarian consistency requires dismantling all state functions rather than worshipping ideological idols or tearing down movement leaders like Lew Rockwell over minor errors. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Amazon Email Permission Questions00:12:36
All right, let's start the show.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the gas digital network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
The crossover episodes continue.
These are everybody's favorite episodes.
I just have gotten nothing but wonderful feedback over the last year that we've been doing them.
Of course, I am joined by author, podcaster, and overall truly unique human being, Michael Malice.
How are you, brother?
I'm pretty giddy, not gonna lie.
I imagine you are, and I think I know why, or at least one of the contributing factors to that.
And this is, I think, about as big a white pill as I've been offered, at least over the last couple years.
And that is that your new book, The Anarchist Handbook, is killing it.
Just killing it.
Congratulations, man.
I don't understand it.
And I'm not trying to be modest because I'm a numbers person.
You're a numbers person.
I'm currently at number 26 on Amazon, all books.
Jordan Peterson is like 90-something.
There's no metric by which I'm competitive with Jordan Peterson, regardless of what you think of us as individuals in terms of Twitter followers, YouTube, media attention, press attention.
I didn't do a big rollout.
So I thought, okay, you have sometimes things spike, right?
And then you're going to have some statistical anomaly for an hour or two.
I went to bed like 12 hours ago.
It was ranked 27 on Amazon.
Now it's 26.
So that means for 12 hours, it's been consistently selling very high.
And it does not make sense to me because it's also exponentially harder at the top, meaning it's a lot harder to go in terms of Amazon rankings from 50 to 40 than it is to go from 60 to 50.
Like it just gets harder and harder.
So I don't have nothing to explain this except I'm enjoying it enormously.
And you are the.
The.
You trolled me in a way by making it all emotional, because you're the one who pointed out that, thanks to this book, I'm the one who's going to get a lot of people to read Anatomy Of The State, which is all in there.
I'm the one who's going to get a lot of people to read Lysander Spooner, which is all in there, the entirety, and that that's a really major deal and it is and I'm like, oh crap yeah, and I think one of the things that's really fascinating about anarchist philosophy um, that we are, it's hard to really appreciate because we've been so ingrained in it for so long that it is really wild for people who have never been introduced to this.
Like the idea that the whole statist model, which is all you know, is just taken as a given, like of course you have to have a state, how that's just part of the world, in the same way you have, like you're not questioning whether we have clothes or oxygen, that's just, that's there, it's a given.
And this throws all of that into question and lets you know that actually there's a whole tradition of brilliant thinkers who reject this idea.
It's, it's beautiful that you could be introducing this to so many people.
Yeah I, I I don't know what to say I, this was something.
The other thing that's exciting for people is Marla, who's a supporter of mine.
She had the idea for this in february february, it's now may and it's to market and i'm crushing.
Stacey Abrams, Jake Tapper you know all these, everyone like.
Unless you want these 26 people i'm beating you right okay, 25 people, so that I don't understand but the fact that I don't know honestly, that I could have gotten a book deal right, it's number 26 on Amazon and I don't know that a major publisher could have given me a book deal and if they had, it would be out february 2023.
Yeah probably yeah yeah, that's one of the things that's uh, i'd imagine.
I mean, i've never written a book and you, you've written a few but one of the things that's got to be really challenging about it is that I mean, you kind of pick a topic and then it's years later that it ends up being released and oftentimes it's like you know, the topic was really like you really wanted to talk about this two years ago, so that's pretty challenging.
It's not only that.
I've mentioned this before.
Saint Martin's never told me the release date for the New.
Right to this day I only learned because it was an Amazon listing.
So when people have their ideas of what publishing is like, it is you know how like we think.
When you're young, you think dating all you know is from watching, like she's all that, and that you think like that's how dating works.
And then you come to reality and you're like this is how it works at all.
Yeah, so the ideas we have of publishing, I guess, or being an actor or being a chef, is like from watching these shows, and the reality is so different that it almost sounds farcical when you tell people what dealing with publishers is really like.
Yeah yeah oh, this is it.
I really would not have guessed this.
I mean I, I would have.
I would have thought that well, when you put out the New Right, it was you know there, there was a big like promotion behind it.
You went on these huge shows talking about it.
There was a big publisher behind you.
I wouldn't have thought that this book, where you, you didn't do any of that and didn't have the big publisher behind you, would be killing it the way it is.
So i'm like just oh, I can't express how pleasantly surprised I am to see that it's doing this good.
Not that I didn't think it would be successful.
I just didn't think it would jump like this high onto the charts.
This makes no sense and it doesn't.
But the other thing is, uh, when it comes to and um projects or goals, I am very goal oriented in the sense that i'm not thinking about the day after.
So I was really concerned with getting this puppy out the door.
And let me just tell you and like the, the audience, they might find this of interest like dealing with self-publishing through Amazon isn't a treat either.
So what happens is you upload it on sunday right, and you have to upload one file for the kindle and one file for the trade paperback.
I'm still working on the audio book for Audible.
That's something separate and you get two emails and they're like, okay, we're looking this over, okay.
Then you get emails that say, this looks like this work is public domain.
We need to make sure you have permission to include all this, which is, of course, very valid on their part.
So I sent them all the info.
This is when these people died.
This is when the books were published.
Blah blah, blah.
Kindle says, all right, approved.
The paperback was like, we need more data.
Send us more links.
I'm like, here's more links.
They go, well, we can't accept this because the permissions you got from, like Jeff Dice, from Mises, from David Friedman, John Hasnas, these emails that you got permission from, went to a separate email address.
We don't know that this is the same person.
I go, okay, here's the email from this email address.
Here's the email from that email address.
We're the same person.
Then they're like, well, we don't know that Anatomy Of The State already exists a book.
We don't know that you have permission for that.
I go, here's who Jeff Dice is.
Here's the Mises.
Here's the I think the Colophon it's called where, at the very beginning of the book, where it says copyright Mises Institute.
And I was still Dave, I swear to god, knowing how these people work, I was still being like, well, it's not good enough, we're not going to take that chance.
And then one day they're like, it's approved, it's going to be out within 48 hours.
So what I i'm going to do, going forward and I know this is edifying for a lot of people, who are seeing this as an alternative model which i'm demonstrating is viable to my wildest dreams uh, i'm going to set a pub date for the white pill of like, let's suppose, december 15th.
I'm going to get everything sent to them on like november 15th so that it's queued up and approved so I could have an official launch.
So this is something I learned during this process.
Here's the other thing, I I I, you and I are constantly, constantly asked, how would anarchism resolve this?
What's the anarchist answer this?
What's the anarchist you know?
And it's kind of like, what's the anarchist answer to open borders?
I'm like, well, do you have half an hour?
Because there's a lot of there's a lot of speeches to be had here.
So my goal with this was to get people to be like here, read a book, like it's all in there.
Well, not open borders, but read it all.
You're gonna get an idea of the different colors of the black flag and so on and so forth.
So that was my point.
It wasn't even to be the idea that this would be a successful book to this level.
It's like it's not a thing.
Yeah yeah no, I know exactly what you mean and I think that a lot of times with with the anarchist stuff, a lot of times at least this is how it happened for me and I think, for a lot of other anarchists who I know, that it's not a lot of the questions, the specific questions that you might have.
Well, what's the anarchist solution to crime, or what's the anarchist solution to poverty, or to open borders, or whatever the issue may be.
A lot of times it's because you're not um, how do I put this you're not thinking through the the kind of like logical, you know lines of anarchy, and that's why you have all of these questions.
And if you get enough of them answered, you start to realize like oh, i'm thinking about this in a in a statist way, and that's why i'm asking what the central plan for this would be.
And you start to realize that it's like, no, that that's actually not the question.
The question would be, it kind of just switches the burden on on to onto the status, to say, why, what argument do you have that there should be a monopoly on violence or on initiation of violence at the top, centrally planning this.
And once you start to think about things like that, so oftentimes if you answer enough of the questions, the other ones just kind of fall by the wayside, because you're like, oh okay, it just doesn't need to even be like this.
I, I don't need to think of this through the lens of my starting point is, well, there'd have to be a government but um so, so for this book, but with something like the White Pill, I mean, in terms of getting permission to use other people's work, i'd imagine this one would be much more tedious than the other books that you've put out that were not, you know, collections of, of other people's work.
But i'm just explaining the process, you know, for people who you might have to go through it at some point in the future.
But I, i'm just, I i'm delighted and I don't know what to make of it.
Yeah well Tom, it reminds me of uh, which I believe I have up here, Tom's book right here for anyone who can see.
I know that doesn't always come through, but he wrote a book called we, who dared uh, to say no to war, which was a similar type of thing, and I thought it was really so valuable.
Did uh?
I do not believe it was this high on the um the the, the rankings, but you know, Tom's a very, a very failed author um, very failed compilation.
This is a compilation of very failedness um, but there there's something that I thought was so powerful, and I remember he's gonna call his memoir Vf the Tom Wood Story.
It's just a list of what Tom Very failed at throughout his life.
It's gonna be longer than Alice Shrugged.
There's gonna be a speech in the middle that he's gonna try to wrap up and he's gonna go on for 200 pages because he can't even get his speech done correctly.
She go, it really puts you to sleep for like 150 pages and then it really wakes you up and you, but then you go back to sleep again.
It's a whole cycle.
Yeah, it is um, but I will say that I loved this book.
I remember I first got it um, I mean, it's got to be probably Maybe 10 years ago or something like that, that I read it.
But there was something really powerful, and I had already read a few of Tom Wood's books, but there was a whole different value in putting together a compilation like that and kind of seeing, and it's kind of reminds me of what you did with the Anarchist Handbook.
Convincing Neighbors to Like Music00:02:07
That you see that, oh, there are these traditions that are both left and right, where people have in real time stood up against this idea that we all kind of take for granted.
Like wars happen sometimes.
Sometimes two governments have to go on mass killing sprees, you know, to settle a dispute.
That's just something that has to happen.
And you're like, oh, no, there were all of these really brilliant, courageous people who stood up against this and was like, it doesn't have to be this way at all.
We absolutely don't have to be doing this.
And so it's just, man, it's the idea that so many people are reading this.
Poof.
I mean, that's like I said, I think that's about as big a white pill as I have swallowed in some time.
And it also, if I am by any metric, able to outsell the 1619 project, I don't want to hear from people, well, a majority of my neighbors, blah, blah, blah.
If a majority of your neighbors don't like the music you listen to, which is, or is not to their taste, which I'm sure is the case, that is of no relevance.
The relevance isn't whether people approve of your actions.
The relevance is if they are going to do something about it and if they have the capacity and the mindset that it's appropriate to do something about it.
I'm not a Democrat.
You're not a Democrat.
This is what a lot of people who are ostensibly, you know, swimming in similar circles to ours do not understand.
They think, well, we're not going to be able to convince a majority of people to agree with me.
It's like, you don't have to convince a majority of people to like your music.
All you have to do is convince them to either leave you alone or that it would be very expensive for them to not leave you alone, in which case they better think twice.
Those are two very different metrics by which to judge success than persuading everyone, which I agree is a fool's errand, no pun intended, and of complete waste of time and just totally stupid.
Yeah, no, I mean, I think we want to convince as many people as we can, but the idea that it's like democratic brainwashing, I don't mean the party, I mean just the idea of democracy, that it has to be 51%.
Blue Light Causes Eye Strain00:03:33
I mean, just look at the bad guys right now.
They don't have a majority behind what they do.
There's super majorities of Americans want to end the wars.
If you look at the polling data, doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
Because there was never really like a majority of Americans who thought through and said, hey, should the punishment for drugs be we lock you in chains and throw you in a cage?
It doesn't matter.
It's just that the state has the incentives and the power to get away with it.
So they do.
So if we have the incentives on our side, we can make this happen with 10% of the population believing it.
I mean, certainly, if you just think if 10% of the population were true, you know, natural rights anarchists, we would live in a vastly different society.
It doesn't matter what the politicians wanted or who voted in what way.
This would drastically change society.
So yeah, it's interesting that the next book you're working on is The White Pill, and that this book you just put out is like, to me, the biggest white pill in itself, just in how it's being received.
So that is pretty awesome.
This book got nothing on that one.
I'm not saying this to be a hype man.
I am writing the white pill with the purpose in mind of getting people motivated, excited, and foaming at the mouth.
So it's really going to be one for the ages as far as I can, my limited talents allow me to create this one like that.
Okay, absolutely.
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All right.
So I wanted to talk to you a bit about the show that you did with Yaron Brook on Lex Friedman's show.
Now, I know this is a few weeks old at this point, but it's up there and a lot of people have watched it.
And I was really curious to talk to you about this.
I really enjoyed it.
It was a fascinating show.
Objectivist Approach to Scripture00:15:40
It was really long, but interesting the whole way through.
It was over four hours, I think.
We went almost five.
And, you know, I had plans.
I didn't know how long we were going to go.
And it is, I mean, you've done Rogan, and that's pretty different because that's one-on-one and it's more collegial.
I'd never done a show this long and with two other people.
And at a certain point, I mean, I was so focused on being on, especially against Yaron.
At a certain point, I'm like, all right, like, are we good?
And Lex is like, it's only been two and a half hours.
Do you want to break?
And I'm just like, I don't know what those words mean in the conjunction that you just put them together.
So it was his longest episode ever.
The other thing that people might not appreciate, and I'm curious if this was your reaction on Rogan and Ethan Suppley, who was just in Rogan, had the same thing that happened to me, which is when I leave Rogan, I don't remember any of it.
Like, I don't remember what I said because you're trying to be natural.
And then, like, when I was watching that, you're on stuff.
Like, I had a lot of funny one-liners.
I don't remember saying them at all.
So I'm like, oh, this is really funny, but it's like watching another person.
Like, I have no memory even watching it of having said half the things I said.
Yeah, I've had that experience every time I've been on Rogan.
And then it's almost like when I leave, like if I'm on my way back to my hotel or something like that in the car, I'll start thinking back.
I'm like, okay, was that good?
And then like little things come back to me.
Like I'm like, oh yeah, I said that and I said that.
I was like, oh, I'm glad I got that point off.
But then, you know, when I watch it back, and I don't, I don't think I've ever actually watched back an entire episode of My Rogan, you know, but like you'll start watching some of it back and you kind of start remembering.
Oh yeah, that's right.
That's right.
And then there are some things that you don't even remember.
Like, I don't even remember that we said this.
It's a weird thing the way your brain works and those performances.
I'll give you one example.
I was just on Dave Rubin dressed as the JQ.
And afterwards, I had forgotten that he'd asked me my opinion of who's the one who's the art who coined the term Axis of Evil?
That horrible putrid man.
Dick Cheney?
Was that?
No, no, he was a Boltwitz.
No, he's on Twitter now all the time.
He's this like Republican Lincoln Project D type.
Oh, from, from.
David Frum.
Yeah.
Just really as despicable a human being as you can get.
And as disgusting as he is on the outside, he's even more disgusting on the inside, to paraphrase President Trump.
And Ruben asked me my opinion of him.
And I had said, I only remembered this like two days later.
I'd said, it's really sad, given America's history of how we've treated women, gays, minority groups, people of color, that the only appropriate terms to describe David Frum have either a misogynist or homophobic subtext.
And I'm like, that's a really good line.
And you know, it's going to get to him because he's so putrid and disgusting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it's the, the, you know, there's something to me about the neocons, particularly those who were very active in the George W. Bush administration, who look down their nose and morally condemn everybody who falls short of their, you know, whatever, whatever their demands of others are.
You know, this person said the wrong thing or this, they're so quick to attack someone for being racist or sexist or not inclusive.
And it's like, motherfucker, you guys killed a million Iraqis.
Like, and everyone knows, including you, that it was a big mistake.
Just go away forever.
Stop judging others.
I just think it's more, how are you in a position to judge people where you look like you should be in Java's palace?
You're just despicably disgusting.
It's like, you know how the picture of Dorian Gray, like in Dorian Gray's attic, there's this painting where it's just getting grosser and grosser.
Like that's what I imagine David Frum looks like.
Like he's the painting come to life.
Just this disgusting, everything about him is so repellent and horrific.
And it just also just what a humorless, miserable, I can't use the right word, person he is.
And all of them are.
Yeah, 100% agree.
So what were your thoughts?
Obviously, this was a, it was a very interesting dynamic between you and Yaron.
So he is probably the most well-known objectivist today, at least the guy who goes on the most platforms and kind of speaks to the Randian legacy and philosophy.
And you are somebody who is very influenced by Ayn Rand, but has rejected some of her views and has disagreements, which basically is not allowed in the objectivist camp.
So it was an interesting dynamic.
It wasn't like Randian versus anti-Randian.
It was Randian versus almost almost the best person to attack an objectivist from the objectivist, you know, point of view.
But so I really enjoyed it.
I'm just curious, like, obviously you're describing a very long show, but what were your takeaways?
How did you feel about it?
I was, first of all, I was flattered and validated that he would be willing to do this because I know he has a rule not to talk to like libertarians or anarchists.
I know that kind of fell away.
Yaron Brooke is like the first person I introduce in the New Right because it starts with me basically at FEE, the Foundation of Economic Education, going to hear a talk of his and meeting someone who later was an NCAP and troll board and all this other good stuff.
I also knew he's the thing that I was concerned that he would be trying to talk over me and like give these like long Randian speeches with objectivists or want to do.
And, you know, I was ready for that.
I knew the philosophy inside and out and I knew the rhetorical tricks objectivists play.
Rand trains them with a few of them, which you are oblivious that they're rhetorical tricks until you stop and think.
And you're like, wait a minute, this is like she talks about something having no metaphysical significance.
And that's just a fancy way of saying, well, I don't care about this and it doesn't matter.
It's like, that's really kind of a bold, you know, at the same time, your whole ideology is based on not faking reality and not evasion.
But then you're like, oh, this is of no metaphysical significance.
It's like, wait, wait.
So this just you're going to pretend it doesn't exist.
Like that's basically what it comes down to.
The other thing is there was this talk that Leonard Peekoff, Rand's heir, gave at Ford Hole Forum.
She used to give them every annual, every year.
They used to call it the Objectivist Easter.
He took over.
And basically the entire talk is him setting up a straw man of whether like, should we look for our heroes to have feet of clay or be hero worshipers?
And I'm like, I don't think those are the two choices.
And I think it's really, that's a very false, dumb binary to say like Ayn Rand's a badass who did some screwed up things.
And that's a perfectly reasonable approach to most things.
And Rand said this herself when she was describing John.
This is what I also like when I was ready to like quote objectivist scripture at every point because then he wouldn't have nothing to do.
Like Rand, when she was writing John Galt, the character, she goes, you don't want to get too close because this is man-made God.
And her point being like, yeah, when you see when you're dealing with the real person, there's going to be little flaws.
And those flaws don't really matter.
But to pretend none of them exist is a little bit preposterous in my opinion.
So that was part of it.
I was ecstatic by how I let him or gave him the space to drop his guard and have a sense of humor and be collegial.
That is a side of him I don't think I've ever seen before, him cracking up and having fun, which is a huge problem with Randian philosophy as a whole.
I'm very curious to hear your thoughts on the whole anarchism discussion because David Friedman, whose work I do excerpt in the anarchist handbook, he made the point.
I talked to him when I was at Porkfest a few years back, that when Rand is missing gaps in her philosophy through argumentation or through whatever her reasoning, she just kind of, what's the word he used?
Like fills in the gaps with emotion.
And like when we were talking the anarchist stuff, he was more informed about anarchism than I thought.
But to me, he seemed at that point to get much more agitated than elsewhere.
And I think we tend to get agitated when we are not on firm ideological footing.
Or we get agitated when someone is speaking some huge evil casually.
And I don't think this was the second one.
I don't think he would say this was the second one.
Yeah, right.
So I'll say, I thought the debate on anarchy started later into the show.
So there was like at least an hour or two before.
I think it was about three.
Yeah.
Yeah, maybe right.
It was a lot before then.
And I really enjoyed a lot of what he had to say before then.
I thought he made some very good points.
And when you guys were discussing, you know, objective reality and the kind of the nature of man and all of these things.
And I thought he made some really great points.
And of course, it was the best of objectivism was, you know, in a lot of the stuff he was saying.
I think there's a theme that jumped out at me.
And it's something that you kind of just touched on when you said, I, you know, when you use the term scripture, that I'm going to, I can kind of quote objectivist scripture.
And almost as if you're arguing, you know, with a devout Christian that they should be anti-war, you're going to be like, well, look, here are these scriptures that back up my point of view.
That's going to be a more powerful way to reach that person because they are devout Christians.
Whether you agree with them or not, this is what's going to mean something to them.
And so one of the themes that jumped out at me that I thought several different times throughout the show, and this is something I've noticed in life in general, is that it's just very, it's very odd or interesting that so many of these militant atheist groups end up being so religious in their worldview.
And this happens all the time.
If you look at any group where they are hardcore atheists, now this isn't true necessarily for every individual, but almost every group that revolves around being atheists with no wiggle room, like you do, a rejection of religion, something else comes in and fills that void, and you end up worshiping that.
This is true of social justice warriors.
It was true of Leninists, Stalinists.
It was true of Nazis.
And I think it's true of objectivists.
I prefer them to all of those other groups, but it is by a lot.
But it is unbelievable that, and I think this is where a lot of Jaron being agitated came from.
The fact that it's like you're challenging scripture.
And when you do that, it's like, well, Rand could not have been wrong about this.
And that was just one of the takeaways that I had.
Go ahead.
It was also kind of funny to me when I got to be like, look, one of the big reasons Rand was against this idea of anarchism was because it was Rothbard's idea.
And she had a lot of antipathy towards Rothbard.
And I said, I completely understand that if you despise someone or dislike them and they have a worldview and you're like a big name, you're just emotionally going to be averse to kind of being receptive to it.
And I don't think that's unreasonable.
I think it just makes her a person.
It's what she hasn't had enough accomplishments.
Give me a, you know, it's like when someone was going after Mises because he had, he said values subjective instead of the Randian idea of objective, but individual.
And she just said, leave him alone.
He's done enough.
You know, so that's completely my approach to her.
It's like, oh, no, she's a minarchist.
Okay, relax.
It's just, I mean, the woman has done so much and so courageously.
But it was funny to hear him be like, no, that's not it at all.
It's like, okay, first of all, you've never met her.
So let's relax.
And you're not going to tell me you know her motivations.
But it was also really funny at that point.
Lex joins in.
He doesn't have a horse in this fight.
He doesn't know who these people are, really.
Not certainly to that extent that you're Ron and I do.
And he was just like, wait, wait, you're saying it's not possible that if she didn't like Rothbard, she's not going to be receptive to his ideas.
Like, how does that even make sense?
And he's like, no, and he just kind of insisted.
And it's just like, you're not being coherent to how the human mind works.
And this is no disrespect to Rand in the slightest.
Well, I really appreciate that you put it that way.
And I think that I remember you made this point on Dave Rubin's show a while ago on one of your appearances on his show, but you were just talking about how you just have utter contempt for the liberty-oriented people who do nothing but tear down the great people who have contributed to the movement.
I mean, I just like hate that.
I hate it so much.
I see it all the time.
I was in a Twitter argument with people the other day.
That doesn't sound like you.
Oh, yeah.
Every now and then.
Every now and then I get into it.
But it was people tearing down Lou Rockwell.
And I'm just like sitting here and it's like, okay, so you're a libertarian.
This is the guy who created the Mises Institute, is personally more responsible for keeping the ideas of Mises and Rothbard alive than any other human being on the planet.
And you'll sit here and go, yeah, but he wrote this one article in the 90s that I thought was really wrong.
And it's like, okay, but then he wrote like probably, you know, a thousand articles in the time between then and now that are great on almost every subject, you know, like police brutality on the war on drugs and all of this different stuff that libertarians would love.
So you're saying like, look, I have no problem with somebody who would say like, look, I think Lou Rockwell is incredible and he's got a great body of work.
I really disagreed with this one piece in the 90s.
Like, of course, you know, go ahead, say that.
You can talk about where you disagree.
But to have this kind of like this, this attitude of like, look, look what he said.
What an awful person and what an awful, and not give any kind of, not acknowledge the body of work or what he's contributed.
And it's oftentimes these people who have done nothing.
Like you've contributed nothing to this cause that you supposedly love.
So have some goddamn respect for the people who have.
I just, I hate that.
I got to tell you with having a Russian upbringing, like those kind of people in like Russian culture are regarded as basically like close to pedophiles.
Like if you're of the mindset that you're going to throw your own people to like the mob for the sake of nothing, like and because back in, think about it back in the Soviet times, right?
If you're the one who's going to be turning people in, there has to be an enormous social cost to make sure this doesn't happen because this result in a lot of people dying and so on and so forth.
But if this is your approach, you are so repulsive and repellent as a human being that there's really no discussion to be had.
If your priority is to, you know, not to criticize, we're not talking about criticism.
Quitting Smoking with Fume Cores00:02:43
That's something different.
If your priority is to basically deliver your own for like the sacrifice of like the mob, like you are just completely regarded as, you know, just outside the human race.
Any phone call?
No, I apologize.
Just some little urgent matter came through.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I understand regarding people in this way.
I think that it's like you, you are, you're basically just being a punk ingrate.
I don't know how else to describe it.
You're being a snake and Dante in his Inferno, the lowest pit of hell was for traitors.
Now, they could say, I'm not being a traitor.
Lou Rockwell doesn't espouse my ideals, which is perfectly fine.
But invariably, they try to have their cake and eat it too.
Yes.
Speaking of which, I am outselling the Unibomber, so that's pretty cool.
Oh, there you go.
That was always, I know, a big goal of yours.
I'm glad you were able to achieve this.
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Defining Humility in Anarchy00:15:00
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So there's, yeah, okay, so back to the conversation with Yaron.
When it came to the anarchist-minarchist debate, I guess what I was kind of surprised by is that you have this guy who's so, you know, is clearly a very bright guy, had so many great things to say in the first couple of hours.
And I was just, I was really just shocked by how weak the arguments against anarchy were.
And it seemed almost like this mental block where he was just unwilling to actually weigh the arguments you were making and think through the possibility.
Like it seemed like he was unwilling to acknowledge a possibility that you could be right.
And I think that that's one of the real keys to being successful when arguing somebody.
Like if you if you can open your mind up to the possibility that they could be right and then kind of try to steel man their arguments and take on the strongest arguments that they have.
And this is why it comes off very religious to me is that it just seems clear like he is he is in the position that there is no way this can be wrong.
That is a given.
And now let me work from that premise.
Because some of the arguments were just like, you know, I mean, goofy.
When to me, which I was shocked about, was at one point where he goes, well, you're not arguing for anarchists and you're arguing for voluntarism.
I'm like, fine, call it Soviet unionism.
I don't care.
Just let me have it.
It was, it was really odd.
And also this insistence, which I completely forgot in objectivists do during the Christian segment when he was talking about humility.
And he goes, well, the real definition of humility, I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait.
This is a philosophy which understands that knowledge is and information is contextual, right?
If you, if I say Dave's my brother, I'm not saying that in a biological sense.
And objectivists understand that the term has different meanings depending on context.
So for him to be like, no, the real definition of humility, words don't have real meanings.
There are concepts and they're different concepts, but different people use, that's why objectivists are always big and let's define the terms, right?
So for him to say, that's not anarchism, and he wants to argue something that I don't believe in, like whatever, like having no security.
I'm like, okay, like this is a complete waste of time and just silly.
I still don't understand his thought process there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, there was, there was one point where he said to you that anarchy is legalized violence, which was a line that a lot of people jumped on, where it just, this was kind of what I'm getting at.
There's like, but now try to apply this to statism, which is literally legalized violence.
Well, what if I just his insistence that the guy with the biggest gun wins?
I'm like, how are you going to win against 50 people with guns?
And he's like, oh, I'd win.
And it's, and someone just made a meme of Yaronbo, like one man, one rocket launcher.
It was just like, you're, you're talking nonsense.
Like, if you're one person, maybe if you're Bruce Lee and everyone's fighting you one at a time, but I don't care how many arms you have at a certain point, the numbers are going to win.
And I, and again, it's just if the person with the biggest gun is going to win, then what if that person is in the state?
I mean, why does this?
It does just seem to me that all of the arguments can just be thrown back at the statists and that they fail by a larger measure than anarchists do.
And anyway, it was very bizarre to watch.
It seemed almost like a mental block.
Like he just could not allow this thought to enter his head.
And this also, this concept of like voluntary taxation and basically if you don't pay, if you're the protection, if you're the government, right?
It's not going to be a protection company.
And if I don't pay you, Dave, you don't enforce the contract between me and Lewis.
It's like, well, why does it have to be one?
Why can't either of us say, okay, this is going to be our security company?
And if they agree that the contract has been fulfilled, we both get our payout.
If they disagree, there's arbitration.
But why can't it be company A versus company B who's guaranteeing this?
It makes no and the other thing is it's it's it might be hard to get people from where we are to anarchism.
It's not hard to get people to go from here to what if instead of calling 911, you call Uber for cops, meaning there's a bunch of different agencies.
Uber figures out which is closest, fastest and cheaper.
If you want SWAT, it's going to be like Uber X. Everyone can wrap their head around that.
And it's like, okay, now we're 90% of the way there.
Yeah.
Well, that's a very strange thing about objectivists or minarchists is that they are starting from 90% of the way there.
This is what's so bizarre.
And then they end up falling back into these arguments, which would be arguments that you could use to justify any inch of statism that you already reject.
And they'll get, you know, and I mean, it really is.
And it's funny.
And this is why I love that you put out this anarchist book.
And that, because like what I was saying before of this kind of thinking and the anarchist mentality, you realize that there really is when you're talking about security and why there's there's not a need for government to have a monopoly on security.
It is all of the same arguments for why there's not a need for government to have a monopoly on medical care or education or all of these other things.
It's really fundamentally, philosophically, the same argument.
And yet they'll fall right back into the arguments that would justify these other.
And so and it goes all the way to law.
Like you don't need the government to have a monopoly on law either for the same reasons.
And you would think if somebody were a minarchist and they and as minimalists, I mean, Ayn Rand is literally advocating a night watchman state.
Like the state basically does nothing except they have a few courts and they write some laws, which would only be objective law or whatever.
And then if you're like, okay, well, we can get rid of this last little bit, you would think this would excite a minarchist to be like, ooh, that's an interesting possibility.
I can apply everything else, I believe, to this.
Yeah, it's like, what are your arguments against poor people who get cancer?
What are your arguments about poor children who aren't in a position to get good education through a government public school?
They would tell you immediately, well, that's specious.
It's like, okay, what about poor people having security and not being like raped and killed in their neighborhoods?
Well, you need a government monopoly.
It's like, why is this?
Those are two.
Education and healthcare are two extremely crucial things as well.
In fact, more crucial, you're more likely to need a doctor than a cop, especially in an armed society.
How often do people call cops versus how often do they get medicine, right?
Or how often do they read a book or get educated?
So, and you could argue, okay, sure, the security undergirds the other two, but there's no reason that that's a function of the state so much as people being armed or something like that or having private like bouncers, you know, roaming the streets.
So it's, it's really odd to me that they're, and I think a lot of it has to do with constitution worship, right?
Because once you're throwing that out, you've been taught that you're a communist who hates America.
So they're very worried about that, but that's not the case here.
So it was, it was pretty unusual.
And also, I really, just to totally change topics, I thought both Justin Amash and Eric Weinstein independently asked me on their shows or Amash on my show when I talked to a class for him about why I find it a good idea to be intentionally off-putting and turn people away and be confrontational, basically in my language.
But when he was going off about Christians and the real definition of humility and how Christ is evil and all this stuff, I'm like, talk about being needlessly off-putting.
Like, I don't see who this is gaining you.
And I don't think the idea that there's a real definition of humility is certainly not his definition at all.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that's right.
And this, it's another thing.
Both of these things are frustrating to me about objectivism.
But number one, that they, and this is right with the word selfishness always there, but they will insist that this word is wrong.
And then if you start pushing them on it, they just insist on their own definition of the word.
And you're like, okay, but this is, this is silly now.
You're using a word that is not used in this way by anybody else.
This is not what people mean when they say the word.
People, when people use the word selfishness, they don't mean what's good for everybody is also better for me or whatever.
Like that's not what they mean by it.
So just abandon the word.
If you're in the business of communicating, then stop using the word that means something different to everybody else.
And he was doing that again with the word humility.
And the other thing, as I kind of mentioned earlier, is I just, I really disagree with their whole take on religion.
And there is something about being married to this kind of all or nothing thing.
Like you have to take the whole package.
If you are a Christian who really believes in the night watchman state, you are rejected by anarchists.
I mean, by objectivists.
You are just not in their camp because you don't accept the whole thing.
And I just have a very different view on religion.
I see Iran acting in a very religious manner.
I think that people, I think the instinct to worship is very, very deep in human beings.
And there's a pretty, you know, obvious, plausible evolutionary answer for that.
And that I think they end up worshiping something.
And so if they want to worship Jesus or if they want to worship Allah or whatever it is, I don't think that's any worse than worshiping Ayn Rand as if she was a god.
She was a great thinker, but she's not a god.
But she also explicitly always said that the three philosophers you should study are the three A's, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Ayn Rand, right?
So Thomas Aquinas, St. Thomas, was one of the great fathers of the Catholic Church.
You know, he invented basically scholasticism.
So you can't sit here and say one of the other two, you know, the only philosopher in the Christian era that you like is a hardcore theist and be like, blah, blah, blah, religion is always terrible.
It's like, well, you know, that's not what your data tells me.
Right.
Right.
And also that it's all equally terrible.
Like it's the same thing to be someone who is like a jihadi as opposed to someone who's like a like a Christmas Christian.
Like what?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that's right.
And that's like, and it also, like you said about being off-putting to so many people, I mean, it's like you completely destroy the ability to like coalition with other people to say, okay, we have this in common, but not this.
And there, there's no, as you just indicated, like there's no, you don't allow for degrees of wrong, even if you think somebody else is wrong.
Like it's a very different, you know, level.
And so, right, I think that I just, I hate the idea that you have to accept this entire thing.
And I also really don't like the hostility toward Christianity.
I got to say the other, you know, aspect to it that happened to come into my mind is that the Jewish aspect.
And I certainly think, and this isn't really an argument on the merits of what he's saying, although I do, as I just said, reject them.
But you're like, look, man, like you're a Jewish guy.
Ayn Rand, although rejected Judaism, was Jewish, and you're having this conversation here.
And to be so hostile toward Christianity, which is the majority of the country that you live in, and the majority of the country, with the exception of Israel, that every Jew lives in.
I mean, what is the, this just seems wrong to me to have such contempt for the tradition that built the society that you're living in.
I don't know.
I don't like that.
I didn't get it at all.
And it was also kind of interesting where I did get him to backpedal at one point because he was just like, well, you know, if someone's a communist, basically they're the same as a Nazi.
I'm like, okay, let's hold on a second.
First of all, we'd be dead.
So there's one minor difference.
It's life or death for us.
But also bringing up Emma Goldman and being like, she was a commie.
She told Lenin to his face, he's full of crap.
And when she got out of Russia, she denounced it to the West in as far left terms as you can get.
And he's like, oh, well, you know, she should have known better.
It's like, that's not how the human mind works.
What if she's dumb?
You know, and she just can't see put two and two together.
Rand would explicitly always say you can't expect moral perfection in the sense of all being all-knowing, that people are going to have gaps in knowledge.
One of the big plot points of Atlas Shrugged is that one group of heroes is ignorant of the other group of heroes.
So they end up being antagonistic to one another by both being good people and acting on their values.
So I thought that this kind of like, listen, I'm not a fan of commies, but to say that there were no, like much of the work that was done to denounce the Soviet Union was done by commies.
So it's to say that they're all the same and they all have their hands dirty in the Soviet Union.
I get his argument that it inevitably leads to genocide.
And I think that that's true.
But people are perfectly capable of having cognitive dissonance and being delusional and being sincerely thinking I'm for communism and especially in 1920 that I think we can make this happen without the genocides.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Sure.
I think that's that's just factually true that there were lots of people who felt that way.
What were there any other big takeaways to you from the show?
Was there anything that stuck out in your mind?
I no, I was more impressed with him than I thought I would be.
I really liked seeing the sense of humor, which I didn't know that he had to that extent.
So it was a lot of fun.
I really enjoyed it.
It was the first time I did one of these with another person.
So that was kind of a learning experience as well.
And yeah, I'm glad people got to see it and got to enjoy it, I guess.
What was the feedback?
What was the response?
Did you hear from, all I saw in my corner of the internet was people, you know, like Team Malice, you know, kind of dunking on Yaron.
But did you hear from the objectivists?
There were very few.
And they were just like, oh, Yaron, just demonstrate that Malice's ideas, you know, are like don't work in reality.
And I'm like, you thought this already.
So this is a wash, basically, in my opinion.
United States Think Tank Failure00:04:50
I don't, from my perspective, it's all upside for me because I don't think there were going to be anyone coming in who was like familiar with anarchism and rejected it, who basically was grounds for converting.
But there are plenty of people who from the Randian school who would be receptive to it.
I mean, to argue that Galtz Gulch isn't like anarchism is just, I think, silly.
And he was insisting that it is.
It's like, okay, you need to believe this, but, you know, I disagree.
So I thought it was a good experience and I really enjoyed it.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, that's great.
And I think overall that's positive.
I agree with you that I don't think there was anybody who came into that being an anarchist who would have been persuaded by the points that Yaron made.
And that's, you know, again, I think it's because he's not really taking on the arguments.
And I've always been kind of surprised by how few good minarchist arguments there are against anarchy.
It seems like it's frustrating a little bit that you can grasp all of this, but not just take this one step further.
And in terms of the stuff of, you know, saying like, well, this doesn't happen in reality or this doesn't, you know, it's too far to get to there.
It's like, yeah, all those same criticisms can be launched against of minarchism.
You know, it's just that's that's if you accept that, then you can, you'd have to reject that based on the same thing.
I thought it was interesting.
One of the moments that stuck out to me was when you made the argument that Atlas Shrugged was a story of anarchy.
Yeah.
That John Galt was led in anarchist society.
And he objected to that on pretty strange grounds, that it wasn't a separate country because it was within the United States, I think, was even though it's secret and hidden.
It has fully closed borders and all the property is private and held by, it was just very odd.
Yeah.
So, because there's something, you know, again, it's, it just seemed to be like, you don't want to give that up because that would be really tough to admit if you're going to argue against anarchy.
And even your hero's own book was of an anarchist society being created within the United States.
He said, no, it wasn't.
It was still part of the United States.
But it was separate, but it was in.
They had their own constitution.
What are you talking about?
You know, it's like, what?
Yeah.
No, I'm with you.
Well, I will say I'm really glad you guys did it.
And I'm glad that it was cordial.
I've seen things out of Jaron before where he has, he certainly has some disdain for Ron Paul, Murray Rothbard, I think the Mises Institute guys and stuff like that.
So I was glad if there was someone who was going to kind of bridge that gap, you were the guy, right?
Because you are the guy who's got kind of feet planted in all of these camps and is willing to kind of be that bridge.
So I thought overall that was very good.
Well, in all seriousness, his disdain is perfectly justified and correct.
That very failed think tank.
That very failed think tank, the Mises Institute.
That's right.
I mean, they made Tom Woods a senior fellow.
So they must be.
It's a disaster.
That's pretty failed.
They've got some other good people there, though.
They do.
They've got a nice Tom's there, man.
It's just a matter of time.
He'll break it down like building seven.
Jeez.
Okay, so we got a few minutes left, but I kind of covered everything that I wanted to talk about.
So what's next for Michael Malis?
What do you like?
You're moving to Austin.
Is that official?
Well, I don't know what official means in this context, but yes, it's certain.
I'm looking for a house.
It's going to be great.
I'm going to launch the book on Lex Friedman.
I got to set that up.
He's in Austin.
So that's going to be exciting.
And the Jordan Peterson episode still hasn't dropped.
People ask me about it every five minutes.
Oh, yeah.
Everyone keeps asking.
Oh, but I saw that he commented on.
Oh, that was a troll.
Oh, I thought that was real.
I was doing a live stream and Jordan Peterson air quotes commented.
I'll release the episode for One Bitcoin, but it was a very big account.
Okay.
So when is that episode going to be released?
I can't believe I fell for that.
When is that episode going to do with it?
No further information.
No.
All right.
And I don't know when the audiobook's going to be done.
Hopefully within a month.
Okay.
All right.
Well, sounds good.
Well, people, I cannot recommend enough.
Go buy the anarchist handbook.
I'm so excited that it's doing so well.
And I can't wait to get a copy of it right over there.
Yeah.
On my shelf.
You can have it facing outward.
Hell yeah.
Hell yeah.
Absolutely well.
All right.
My brother, Michael Malis, thank you so much for your time.