Modern Wisdom - #277 - Michael Malice - Connecting The Dots Of Chaos

Episode Date: February 1, 2021

Michael Malice is an author, political commentator & podcaster. The first few weeks of 2021 have been madness. Michael joins me today to connect the dots of chaos and give us an insight into why the world is slowly turning upside down. Expect to learn what a modern anarchist's perspective is on politics, what Michael thinks about the WallStreetBets and Gamespot debacle, what his predictions for a Biden presidency are, why the Capitol Hill Siege will never be forgotten and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount off perfect teeth at https://www.dwaligners.co.uk (use code WISDOM10) Extra Stuff: Buy Michael's Book - https://amzn.to/31soCH7 Follow Michael on Twitter - https://twitter.com/michaelmalice Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello beautiful humans, welcome back. My guest today is Michael Malice, an author, political commentator and podcaster, and also my road trip buddy for a journey that we're taking out to Russia later this summer. The first few weeks of 2021 have been madness. Michael joins me to try and connect the dots of chaos and give us an insight into why the world is slowly turning upside down. So today, expect to learn what a modern anarchist's perspective is on politics, what Michael thinks about the Wall Street bets and game spot debacle, what is predictions for a bride,

a bride and presidency, a bride and presidency are, why the Capitol Hill siege will never be forgotten and much more. You're also going to get to hear him take the piss out of the way that I say Russia much more. You're also going to get to hear him take the piss out of the way that I say Russia. Constantly throughout this episode. So yeah, enjoy that, I suppose. I absolutely love having him on. He's become such a good friend since you first heard him on the show. Nearly a year ago now, and I can't wait to go and visit his homeland later this year. But for now, it's time for the wise and Russian Michael Males. What do you mean? You've been trying to copy me. What? Yeah, because I not copy you, but like you say words in a unique way. Russia.

Oh, Russia, yeah. It's the word, Russia. That's it. Yeah. Wow. Here's what it is. How are you today? You good?

I'm very good. Yeah, man. I'm excited to have you here. I want to try and get a proper understanding of your political position. Now, we're going away to Russia. Later this year. Later this year. And I feel like I need to kind of really get my teeth stuck into what you believe.

So what are the principles of your political position? Well, one of the principles is that you don't need to get into what I believe because I think it's a very insidious concept that we have to be friends with people who agree with us or to discuss politics at all. There's this concept that politics have to permeate every aspect of every person's life. And they have to constantly be discussed. This is something I'm completely opposed to. I think it's really a horrible idea. And it's tribalism, which I'm not entirely opposed to at its worst.

If someone is, if you're having an emergency at home, you don't quickly run a scan. Oh, well, I want to call this person what they voted the wrong way or something like that. My political views, and you're referring to anarchism, it's simply being against politics as a mechanism of resolving disputes. And everything just follows as a consequence of that. It's, I mean, we can unpack it, but that's basically it in a nutshell. Is that a typical perspective on anarchism? I don't know that there is a typical perspective. There's different schools of anarchism. There's like I think it's, there's an anarchist LaPelpins website and they have the standard flag of anarchisms

the black flag, but there's black and red, black and gold, black and pink, black and blue. So all the different schools of anarchism. So and they disagree very heavily, but it's going to be a vent diagram. Yeah, I understand. I mean, the main reason I wasn't necessarily trying to agree, but I'm curious. I'm interested. I don't see many people saying that there are anarchists in 2021. So what, why do you find it compelling? What's interesting about it? Well, I think it closely explains what we're seeing in politics, I think it's an effective predictor of future social political behavior. I think it's the only worldview that allows someone to have a clean

conscience with what they advocate politically. And I think that's just basically what it comes down to. I also want to point out that anyone who has a radical philosophy is going to come off as either moron or lunatic. If you told me that you had a friend who's quite tall, and I said how tall, and you said he's 6'10", or whatever, 2.1 meters, it's like, okay, that's pretty tall. But if you said that they're 10 meters tall or they're purple tall, it's nonsensical, right? So at a certain point, once an ideology is so divorced from what is presented as part of the normal realm of discourse, people will automatically preemptively dismiss it, although that's decreasing in the case.

How do you transition from a situation where we are now to one where there's ever Anarchy at large? By definition, you can't have an anarchist party. Well, we'll show you, Ken. They have had them in the past. I mean, they could just be there to kind of gin of the works and cause. Anarchism just means voluntary association. Now anarchists are opposed to political activity but you can certainly say like look you know I'm opposed to war

but I'm going this is a case where it's a self-defense situation so there's the argument to have made for that with things like voting um well I'm sorry I wasn't sorry the question trying to work out how you transition oh how you get there. Yes. So anarchism is in a location. It's a relationship. And the vast proportion of our lives, especially in the West, our anarchist, you and I have an anarchist relationship. There's no position, possibility we're calling the police. If there was some kind of even we were somewhere together, we got violent, we're still not calling the state. If we were at a bar, you know, I'd get kicked out of you to get kicked out. So this claim that all kind of

Peace and prosperity as a function the state is really from the anarchist perspective a kin to saying well If it wasn't for all these exorcists, we'd all be possessed the norm between human beings is peace Not on a large scale because that's a function of government's governments give war But we generally tend to be more peaceful than not for the simple reason, not because people are basically good, but because violence is expensive. Because once there's violence in a situation, then other people who aren't at all associated,

you see this at barfights, like people jump in to try to quash it because people understand very easily that these things tend to escalate and then it becomes very expensive to everyone. It's asymmetrical. Let's put a stop to it, you know, right quick. So how do you get there? Well, there's certain mechanisms. It's delegitimizing the state. It's encouraging aggression, not violent aggression, but just interpersonal aggression and hostility towards agents of the state. It's casting aspersions upon democracy and democratic process. And it's not a numbers game. So a lot of people think, well, you're never getting a majority to agree with you, but you're only, your win condition of having a majority is based on democracy.

Other systems do not base their win condition on having majority of people agree with me. And they once every four years go into a ballot box and flick a switch. It seems like at a small level, an interpersonal level, individual, me and you, we do have quite an anarchist relationship. But as you say, when you scale that up, is it realistic that you can allow an entire 330 million person country to exist like that? Well, you would have need it. It's not a it wouldn't be a country at that point, but let me give you an example of how this is already status quo Every country is in a state of anarchy towards every other country, right?

So if a Canadian kills a an American in Mexico, I don't know what happens You don't know what happens, you don't know what happens, but we know that there's a process put in place. So if security was private, where would be a function of your cell phone instead of your geography, you know, if I attacked you on the, I have one security firm, you have another one, and we're at someone else's domicile, what would the situation be? We don't know, but we know it would be resolved in advance without the consumer having to work it out.

For the simple reason that if I'm on one phone company and you're at another, it works out and we have no idea what happened behind the scenes. If their goal is to provide security and generate profit at that, they're going to make it as easy for the users as possible as opposed to governments who generate funding and generate revenue as a function of creating problems and creating stress and

having that as an excuse to raise taxes and seize more assets from the populace. Does anarchism need capitalism in order to facilitate that then? No. The original anarchists were violently anti-capitalists and they viewed capitalism in a sense more similar to what we would call nowadays corporatism and their analysis of this is spot on. 2020 we saw the systemic destruction of medium and small businesses that was cheered on by corporate America both with rides and looting here in the States,

and also the COVID lockdowns. It wonders for companies like Amazon or Walmart, all the little stores here in New York that I'm a fan of, they went out of business because they couldn't sustain it. So what the original anarchist people like Emma Goldman and even before her, Becunin and people like that Karpotkin, what they were concerned about is this collusion between large business and the state. And in that regard, they are spot on that this is the worst of all, well, not the worst of all worlds, but it's pretty darn bad.

And by getting rid of the state, you can get rid of that collusion. Right. Because you're not going to have a monopoly without the government forcing everyone to be a subscriber to that product. What governments do in every industry is create barriers to entry for smaller companies because those offer competition to the large dinosaurs that effectively seize large parts of the market in the past. I had Andy know on the show last week and he was talking about who I'm sorry Andy know. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And he said that anti for identifiers, anarcho communists and revolutionary Marxists, how close or far is this from the purity of a normal anarchist? It's closer

than it's pretty darn close. A lot of, you know, and caps and arcopapalists think antifa doesn't have a right to call themselves anarchists and they certainly do. The early anarchists were very, especially in the UK, the term in the UK was synonymous with terrorists. This is why the sex pistol song, you know, I'm anarchy in the UK was so shocking because there he's Johnny Rodd is explicitly saying,

I want to destroy pastors by. It was this, and they're also called nihilists at the time. This was an ideology where we're going to have violent revolution. We're going to blow up businesses or business people and assassinate. So there is this very long history for better or for worse, with the black flag that Antifa is in regard to self and some regards in some senses as an air to. Does that not make it difficult to try and get people on board with though, if the thin end of the wedge,

like the front end of the funnel is rioting and looting and violence and black flags and black block, that doesn't seem like a very fun world for me to step into. I am disturbed by how much of a recruiting tool that has not become in America because the degree to which people have become comfortable with violence towards state actors and people who they regard as opposed to them is happening at an astronomical pace when the capital was stormed a couple of weeks ago. The protesters, riders, what

everyone would call them, they put up a gallows in front of Capitol Hill. And I think there is an enormous sense especially with these lockdowns. An enormous sense of people becoming comfortable with the idea of doing very bad things. And I'm extremely concerned about this because violence follows its own logic.

It's not the kind of thing where you know, if you just shoot the king, everything resolves itself. Once you start going down that road, no one has any idea where it's gonna end up other than what you are guaranteed of is more oppression, more violence, innocent people being hurt. And it's really something enormous concern to me in the beginning of 2021. And because there is this attempt by the corporate media here to kind of sweep it on the rug. And when you have a population that's become comfortable with the idea of violence and they're kind of ignored, A, they're going to be able to do it and no one's going to see it coming.

And B, they're going to be encouraged to do it because now they feel that they've been being invisible, nothing to lose. Didn't you say at the very beginning, though, that being averse to state actors was part of the anarchists agenda? Yeah, but averse doesn't mean like shooting people in the head. It means contempt. It means do not regard the cops as heroes. I was on Tim Poole, not that long with Alex Jones and one of my favorite British isms is they call the cops the filth. In fact, one of this is actually a funny story. I was on the BBC radio like this would have been 15 years ago. radio, like this would have been 15 years ago.

And I always thought, and maybe I'm wrong, that the British are a lot more culturally liberal than the states that were all more funny dutdies here. Maybe this was a misconception. And the interviewer said, oh Michael, this blog you have, you guys take a lot of shots at the cops. And I said, well, it's like my dad, I was an immigrant from the Soviet Union, Russia. I said, my dad always told me,

and I said this innocently, you know, because I thought this is your update, gonna have the same perspective as a Russian perspective. I said, my dad always told me wherever you go, wherever you get up in the world, the stupidest people always at the cops. The guy audibly gasped, and he said, Michael, this is a family show and changed the subject and I was very surprised to see that having been the case.

But that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. So Carl Benjamin says this and I totally agree with him that the British are very procedural. Like, if you look at the, there was those scenes at the Capitol Hill riots where the rioters had broken into the Capitol, but as they were walking through one of the main halls, their atrium had stayed inside of the ropes. Yes. And that is so British, that is precisely the sort of thing that a British person would do. You know, they'd, they'd make sure, I saw a guy the other day who was outside of a butcher's shop. This is before lockdown and he was, he had gloves on, mask on, smoking.

Gloves on mask on, smoking outside of it, very procedural in the way that we go about things. And perhaps that's contributed to it a little bit because obviously the police are basically the enforcement of the procedure. Right. What about... So you mentioned about the Capitol Hill and the other rights that we've seen over the last year. Do you look on that and see it as a misuse of your particular political ideology? Oh no, I think whenever you have politicians hiding in fear, as the way they had the rest of us hiding in fear in their own locked in our homes for a year, the imagery there

cannot ever be unseen. Everyone is going to stand there and tell you how strong the regime is and how powerful it is. And when you have 20 people who can just walk into the capital, including a guy from Burning Man, I think literally he was a Burning Man person. This demonstrates that, for better or for worse, this is not a system that is going to be able to protect you. And that is the big selling point of the state. It's that you give up your choices, and we're going to keep you safe. Big brothers watching. I know they have those signs unironically in London. And it's like, well, they're lying to you. So if they can't even keep these, you know, delist barbarians out from their, you know, sacred temple, they're not going to be able to protect you. And this is going to cause a lot of people to recalibrate their view of the state

and the state authorities. So you see people break into the capital building or take downtown Portland or create a capital hill autonomous zone. How do you stop people from losing so much faith in society as a whole that they become nihilistic? Even if they don't necessarily subscribe to the anarchist movement, you just think, oh, God, I had all of my faith in the state. And now what have I got left to support me? Well, that's the goal is to have them to lose faith in the state. Now, if there's people who's entire sense of identity was faith in the state, and now they feel lost, I can't help you. You're not one of my people. I think both of those positions are untenable and kind of sad.

But I think once you, you know, it's like everyone leaving home. It's like once you realize that this is all a sham, this is enormously liberating because now you're either free to or in a negative sense are forced to confront your undestiniated and confront your own choices. This is one of the things that drove people crazy about, you know, these masks, they're being told this is giving you a sense. If you follow orders, you're going to be safe. It doesn't matter what the efficacy is, what matters is, I get to be obedient and in turn, I'm being guaranteed that my life isn't in danger. It's nonsensical, but that's where we are.

Is there a value of despair that newly indoctrinated anarchists tend to slip into? There must be a point at which you go, right, okay, all of the old rules are gone, and none of the new rules and the new freedoms, liberties that must come along with being an anarchist have, they haven't arrived yet. Well, yeah, but that's not exclusive to anarchism. That's the danger of citizen, right? Once you realize, you know, you're in line to all your life and it not mistakes, it's technically lied to, there's the danger of getting into this stupid catcher in the

right mindset. Everyone's a phony. This all sucks. I'm going to listen to, you know, the cure, right in my diary with fingerless gloves. So my goal is to kind of speak to those people and be like, like slap them side-to-head metaphorically and be like, you're being silly. This is teenage, you know, nonsense. And now is your opportunity to be an adult and make your mark on the world.

Or just find your bliss. Given that the Capitol Hill riots have been probably managed to beat even the election and COVID in terms of news coverage over a short period of time, what do you think people should have taken away from that? That there is, that Trump was the, they thought Trump was the river, but he was the dam. They thought Trump was the source of all this kind of,

all the things that they hated. And that once you get, like he's, I'd use this matter before, he's like the head vampire. Once you go to the head vampire, all the other vampires dissolve and you can return to what you perceive as normal. There's not gonna be a return You the enemy class will never have this absolute power that they had before even anywhere near it Increasingly people are becoming not just hostile to them, but How do you have a have a conversation with someone who doesn't just distrust you, but it's completely un-interested and anything you have to say?

I don't see how you can put that healthy dumpy back together again. I think that is going to be, so they're only metric is silence the opposition, right? Because basically if you have two options and then I get rid of one by default, everyone's gonna go to me, well, it's very hard to silence an entire population, a world where there's technology, an entire internet based on allowing people the opportunity to speak and present the points of view.

I don't see how it's done. And it's also, and the left historically has understood this, when you drive a population underground, and they have nothing to lose, this is going to radicalize them and blow up in very dangerous ways. So I have thought for a long time what I would do if I were, you know, the corporate press to try to reintegrate this population society, and they're basically doing the complete opposite of what I would advise And I'm not surprised because if they're capable of learning they wouldn't be the enemy class What would you advise? Let's say that Michael Miles gets put in charge of the media. How do you bring the disaffected groups back in?

I would have some sort of It would be tough because since I have for decades been, you know, advocating for war, a lot into a population just brazenly shamelessly, go to their children, it's going to be really hard to get them back on board. But I would do things like I would take some sort of marginal figures and put them in some kind of ceremony position, and pretend, okay, we're going to make an effort to reintegrate. I would stop trying to, I would have these places where people could have these discussions, but try to build as many modes around them as possible,

instead of trying to silence them completely, let them talk to each other, but try to have that talking not reach the mainstream consensus, that's going to be hard. And I would stop trying to do things like, if you're sitting there talking about calls for vengeance and people can hear you, this is really going to give them an incentive to strike first, right? Because then it becomes self-defense. So all of Twitter was all about we have to persecute these people. We have to drive Josh Hawley from the Senate,

Ted Cruz from the Senate. We have to make sure this never happens again. It's like Trump's numbers went up from in terms of the voting share from to 2016. So you really have a problem if for four years of going after someone who is not particularly a good person or a nice person, and he had more

people voting for him the second time around, strategically, whatever approach you had did not work, because even though he did lose the election, it did not decrease the number of people who are comfortable going in that ballot box. And for whatever reason, flicking that switch on his behalf. Is that not the modest thing that the media, the legacy media, the left, everybody through everything that they had at that election? Kitchen sink went, the cat went, the baby and the bathwater, and only just scraped through a democratic victory?

Yeah, and they lost a huge, a significant number of seats in the house. Joe Biden is the last time the incoming president didn't have the Senate. He has a 51 to 50, but this is marginal, was Richard Nixon. So that is not a governing consensus in the House. It's something like 219 to 212. These are, I mean, and because it's here in the States, each party is basically coalitions of different groups. 219 Democrats is not as cohesive and coherent as people think, because you're going to have different wings, and they're going to have different perspectives, and

it's going to be very, very hard to get that majority through, especially in the Senate, where one person and you're done, and every senator, of course, represents different states and his different egos. So it is amazing. And the articles were already written. If there had been any metric other than losing, of course, where Trump kind of went down, Trumpism has been repudiated, the American people have come to their senses. They were just championing it a bit. And yes, Biden won and they try to put that over, but it fell completely undefears. And again, I don't know what they can do to get people listening to them again. Naval Ravikant on Rogan said this quote, and he didn't cite where it's from, but it's

the best thing that I've heard around this. He said, the left won the culture war. Now they're just driving around shooting the survivors. Yeah, I don't know that they won the culture war they created culture historically. Yeah, the right just didn't bother getting involved. Right and the thing is there's an enormous asymmetry between right and left because when there's left wing like cultural violence it's riding but when you have right wing cultural violence, it gets really ugly really really fast because they're not playing they're playing for keeps and it's it's quick and it's very brutal. So I am desperately hoping it doesn't reach that point and I don't see any mechanisms of it slowing down. That's precisely what I've said for the last few months. This tip for tap mechanism. I do a thing to you.

You do it back to me a little bit more. I do it back to you a little bit more and it just escalates. What have you got left? There's only two ways that things happen. It can either be dictatorial, top down, or it can be emergent, bottom up. The culture is not slowing down. We've got frictionless communication, which permit everyone to go from brain to fingertip or mouth to internet world with basically absolutely no restrictions at all. That on its own accounts for an awful lot of why we're seeing more

vitriol online. Like we're not built to have our thoughts be broadcast to the entire world. Like you shouldn't do it. Think about 200 years ago, you'd get a quill out, a piece of paper, maybe like a pigeon or a raven or something like that, and you would send it to the local battlements. Like if you're gonna say something, you better make sure that it actually is meaningful. You can't just like toilet tweet something

that ends up going viral and getting you in loads of trouble. Yeah, is this about when you guys bring down the White House? Because we're not about to. I didn't know that Russia had a had a White House. Yeah, it's a crystal palace, I think. Yeah, there's that new one billion pound palace man. I want to get on to that. Obviously, I had a guy called John Sweeney, who was the BBC's correspondent for

Panorama out in Russia for quite a while. And he was telling me about this Alexa and a Valkyrie thing. Before that, what do you think about this whole chaos of GameStop and Wall Street bets? And then today we found out about the market trying to shut the traders down. Is this a digital form of Anarchy? I don't know if it's Anarchy per se, but it's certainly anytime people's pompous posturing and there be a, I've been following it closely because I know once I sit down for and follow this story through from everyone who's been forwarding to me, like my pants are going to be ruined because I'm just, it's going to be downright pornographic. Like everyone's like, you don't understand,

this is what you've been predicting and calling for. So I need to sit down where I have nice pants. You want to do a separate ball and stuff. Yeah, she's under, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because this is, everyone's like, this is exactly what you like. Whenever, pomposity and pretension, which is a form of deceit, is undermined, especially in a populist way,

or just by in a clever way, this is something I absolutely adore. I don't think this is all exclusive to, you know, anarchism, per se, but it's wonderful. So, and what else is very useful is, I think we're a lot closer to Brave New World in 1984. It's a lot easier to manipulate a population through pleasure than through force and through oppression.

If you just give them a little bit of cheese and you give them a job, it's gonna be very hard to get them to be riled up and you could just milk them all day long. So, whenever if you're going to win a war as I intend to or I hope to, it's of enormous utility when they take the gloves off and they have to demonstrate that underneath they are perfectly happy to use brute force or whatever just be unsophisticated like okay we're just going to shut it down. And then it becomes a lot easier to demonstrate that these people don't give a damn about you.

They're looking for their own best interests, which is their prerogative, but this pretence, this corporate BS that we're all in this together and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's just complete sociopathy and nonsense. And a lot of people will never appreciate this and that's fine, but you don't want them on your team anyway. A lot of people who can be one over, they're going to see things like this and they're going to be like, okay, like I'm starting to get it, like this is just a complete facade. I'm trying to work out what the particular quirk is with my makeup. I think it is partly being British and enjoying the procedure.

I'm also moderately orderly. That I'm an orderly guy. My bedroom turns to be tidy and I put things away in rows in the cupboard and stuff like that. And for me, I enjoy watching people like Alex Jones. I enjoy learning about alternative world views and I enjoy questioning, at least indulging myself in thought experiments around what is the state ulterior motives and stuff like that. But it does feel usually a little bit like watching a pantomime. You're like, yeah, yeah, like that looks good. But I know that the guys will go backstage and take their clothes off and it'll all just be normal, like the way that

I know the world to be once it's good to have all finished. But increasingly, there are things happening, and this is such a stark example. You see the market move, which is quantifiable, which makes it really interesting, because you can actually see what's happening. It's not just a sentiment, right? It's not just how people feel. It's quantifiable metrics there in front of you. And you see this market move, and then these different structures of power start to come in. So Robinhood decided that they're going to stop trading

and then other platforms say that they're going to stop trading and then there's questions about circuit breakers being put into the market so that they can stop the price moving at all. You see people 50% of Robinhood clients hold some game stop stock. So by stopping that trading, not allowing anyone else to buy,

you're just sending the price in one direction. Like, and then the most interesting thing about it all is that when you have a distributed network of people who have far too much time on their hands and are smarter than they are kind of moronic like they all call themselves like a proud community of artists but like you don't want to fuck with those people they know they're not going to forget anything they know what they're talking about they just can't look you in the eye whilst they say it. I whilst I had a chapter about this in my last book about gamer gategate because part of the Evangelical left is the idea

that these political principles have to be implemented in every aspect of your life, including sci-fi and fantasy and movies. So even places you go to escape the earth, you know, these eat-ex have to be followed through. One of the examples I used, which, you know, you want to talk about autism, I got it right here, was on Star Trek, they finally had a, they finally, that's the word they used, had a black Vulcan. And if you want to talk about autism. I got it right here was on Star Trek. They finally had up, they finally, that's the word they used, had a black Vulcan. And if you want to go full autistic, the idea that human race is evolved in parallel

and other planets is absolutely right. But, right? If you're gonna look at it from that perspective, from that perspective, no, you have to have diversity, even though if it makes no sense. There was a video game that took place in the middle ages of Europe and they were complaining

there was enough diversity there as well. So it becomes completely very top-down and nonsensical. So this, when the corporate journalists came for this community, like you were saying, this is an entire population with too much time in their hands, who also spend their time trying to figure out how the enemy, in this case, in the video games, the enemy works and what weapons do I need to do to conquer this enemy? They don't look at it in terms of, so it becomes a game to them. It's like, okay, let's do A, B testing, let's try different tactics tactics and it's decentralized. So you have an army of these people It's like al-Qaeda, right? There's no you can't kill the one guy and everything falls away

They're used to this they've been training for it their entire lives, right? They have Right, but no, I mean literally the spending hours trying to accomplish these goals that have been set for them with adversaries in the way. So it's a beautiful, you know, one of the things you and I talk about, you know, personally is kind of this whole generation who, they are getting more attention, but they're kind of being told that they don't exist of these kind of alienated young males, right? So in some cases, it goes in a very, very bad direction. You know, you kind of have this white nationalism,

the sense of, oh, your life is bad because there's two minorities and now this racial identity means you can look at what your grandfather supposedly did and now your great person. But this is another example. You could be at your desktop, you're what they call them, like, worst station

and you can cause systemic carnage against some really nasty people and have lulls at the same time. Isn't that great? So I am a big fan of, I don't know about the specifics of this case, to be honest, but I'm a big fan of this ethos. It is, I think the first time that you heard about it was me telling you perhaps, or maybe Trey, or mutual, and mutual, but he is also a big Wall Street Bets follower. But I spoke about it last year. I'd seen some mad shit that they'd done last year. These guys, what is it? They call it, like, Farchan Founder Bloomberg Terminal.

They call themselves. And it really is, They're your people. That could be the party of Males. There, there's 3.5 million of them in that subreddit now. It's a wonderful thing. And that's what else the Solaris, they're like, well, we'll just shut down the subreddit. As if, somehow on the internet,

there's any shortage of places to create communities. When you have 3.5 million people, let's propose one percent of our programmers. Like how hard is it gonna be where all they're interested in doing is being able to text each other. They're not trying to build spaceships, they just need a space to exchange information

where there's a worldwide infrastructure designed to facilitate this, as you said earlier. It's glorious. Did you see that Jar Rule got involved today? I did. I'm not really sure who he is for racist reasons. I'm assuming he's a rapper. He is. Yeah, he was, his trend was filed under hip hop. Wait, I mean, that's fairly, that's fairly racist by Twitter. I had nothing to do with hip hop.

Like, you know, he's an entrepreneur. He's a budding entrepreneur. He's part of Fire Festival. Yeah, someone, oh, okay. Someone posted the Dave Shapel bit going like, why the fuck do I care about what Jar Rule thinks at this moment, it's from one of his old stand-ups. And it was just an entire thread of people posting that below. It's, I think that's also this great thing,

you know, blue-pilled red-pilled. It's like, you're sitting at home and you have some people have political perspectives or one kind or another, but then it's like, why am I getting political orders from actors who are puppets made out of meat? Like it makes no sense on any level. And it's such an insincere propaganda technique that I think people increasingly, and I'm doing what I can, start to resent it. It would make more sense if someone was a writer of these sitcoms, because writers

have to create a narrative, writers have to be coherent and logical. Writers, to some extent, have to be in touch with the reality. And actor, you don't really, you have no original thoughts, the thoughts you do have aren't part of your job. It feels to me like there's a common thread, and I haven't worked out what it is, but a common thread through a lot of what we're seeing the moment I spoke to John Swini who like I said is the Russia correspondent or used to be ex for panorama BBC. And he was talking about Alexei Navalny who's just gone back to his home country and was immediately I can't keep rushes because you make me laugh. Went back to his home country, it was immediately arrested upon arrival. We've had the Capitol Hill, we've had the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, we've had Portland riots, we've had this that we're seeing happening with Wall Street bets.

The iterative speed of the devolving of what used to be these structures. Is this one common thread? Is there something going on? And what is it? You hit the nail on the head. I mean, that's a very good insight because states are not quick actors. A lot of times with these COVID, for example, let's suppose, you's suppose every aspect in emergency is exactly this is presented. You have governors issuing these edicts, but even in that case, this is a very dynamic system where the virus, one state is going to go down, it's going to be another state, it's very, very hard, and no one will deny this for any kind of government to act or react to a dynamic situation compared to that to Twitter, someone

on Twitter or someone on Reddit or something like that. Yeah, where you have all these people, it's decentralized, everyone can be on top of it and the information spreads more quickly. Whereas with the state, you have to have, you know, Fauci and then this has to go out and then you have to go over the press release and check the wording. It's never going to be and it can't really be because it has to be out and then you have to go over the press release and check the wording. It's never going to be, and it can't really be because it has to be official and by the book and you're talking about the whole government, the whole country. It really has to be a very proper process as opposed to this kind of free process, which I'm more of a fan of, and that's an enormous asymmetry.

By the time something reaches Biden's desk, these guys will be moving on. I mean, think about how many hoops something has to jump through before it reaches Boris Johnson's attention. There's an entire process in place. He's got his cabinet and all his assistants to make sure the only things that reach his attention are things that require the PM's direct attention. At the same time, they're not necessarily going to have the foresight like you did to be like,

wait a minute, this is something that's up in common because to them, they're not spending time in Reddit. They don't know the internet. So this is going to be completely hit them upside the head out of nowhere. And by the time they are like, let's sit down and figure out how to react, it's two weeks later, and they've already moved on. This is another reason I'm so enormously optimistic about the future of the West. Is it a function of frictionless communication? Is it something inherent to do with the population growth being where it is? Is it the fact that everyone's got access to information and knowledge so that there aren't these gated communities of understanding anymore. Have you got any sense of why people, this common, common threat

appears to be occurring? I think it's a lot of it's also the enormous disconnect between how people in power are presented as moral, superior, people who should be listened to and obeyed as opposed to the reality. And when you have this enormous disconnect and it gives people the opportunity to undermine it and be enjoy themselves and feel empowered that they're doing something about it, this is a very dangerous combo for the elites. How do you avoid, that's something I just thought of, how do you avoid normalistness and meaninglessness within an anarchistic society? Because if you're stripping back a lot of the previous institutions that people would have

relied on to find their sense of self and both me and you were big proponents of personal sovereignty and upward agency and all that sort of stuff. But you know But we have to concede that that isn't for everybody. Some people require those bigger structures to hold themselves together. How would you propose supporting those people? Oh, I don't support them. I don't care about them. They're ballast. They don't really gain ballast. They are. They have no ideas. Yeah, they bring nothing, well, that's a prejord. They bring nothing to the table. And if they were in maybe Iran, they'd be radical jihadis.

And if they're in Britain, they're this and the American, they're this. They don't really think critically. And that's fine. But in terms of what can be done for them, I mean, I don't really know, I can't empathize with them. Whatever system works out, they will just obey whatever is the rules of the game, and

they will be able to kind of follow suit. They'll watch the sitcoms and live this kind of docile, cow-like life. But I don't spend much time thinking about them. This is something that I stress a lot with people who are followers of mine. They're like, look at all these people who are mindless. I'm like, how are these mindless people of threat to you? They're like trees. Are you like, well, we can't win because there's all these trees.

It's like, what does that have to do with anything? Any population, an enormous percentage of it is going to be with people who really are in a very fundamental way mindless, who have no kind of inner voice, who are opposed or incapable. This is a big argument. Are they imposed or incapable of thinking critically?

And are, you know, H.L. Mankin, the great American kind of cynic from the early 20th century, said, has this great quote, but the average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe. And I think you're seeing that a lot more in Britain, sadly, than in the States nowadays, how they really want to be told what to do and kind of like just follow suit. And I know you're an entrepreneur and kind of really trying to become much more self-actualized than you've talked to me about this. This is something that you find.

It's not only frustrating to be surrounded by it, but it's also maddening the sense of like, how are you like this? Like, we are so blessed with so many opportunities and you just want to watch celebrity big brother and whatnot and just have a pint and then go to bed. Not to the same anything wrong with that? But that's their highest, that's their highest aspiration. I love trashy TV. I love having a drink or whatever, but there's a time and a place for both.

My tragedy, the tragedy that I see is people doing that every decade for three or four in a row. That to me is a life wasted. Yes. And it's their life to waste, but it still doesn't mean necessarily that I need to be an advocate or supportive in any way of it. I wonder whether it's a particularly British phenomenon. I can't speak for other people, other nations, maybe some of the people can let us know in the comments from why they're from and how they find their culture with regards to this total lack of personal sovereignty and upward mobility and an ability to do anything

sort of, uh, literally as well to think like, okay, here is the path that I'm on. Let's just see what happens if I take a big left turn. But let's just see. Maybe it totally wrecks everything, but maybe it's actually not that bad. And, um, I've had this idea for a while that it's because we're water-locked, because we're quite a small nation, because the weather's quite bad. Even if you look at it. Excuse me. No, so this is me saying what are the things that feed it into the British culture more so?

I know, but these are right, but you know what I mean? You'll always find a reason not to achieve or not to hope or not to think critically. There's no shortage ever. Do you see this? Can you imagine like someone saying like the reason I don't wanna aspire to, you know, run my own like toffee shop is because of the weather? I get that, but we're mimetic creatures, right?

Mimetic desire is a big thing. And I feel like in a place that had more, there was more cosmopolitan, for instance, as one thing, if you had a bigger country with more international visitors, you may have more people coming and going that would actually be able to broaden your mindset. If you had slightly better weather, people would be able to do more things outside of just like at the moment, it's dark at 8.m. and 4.30 p.m. and it's raining all day every day. There isn't a massive amount of stuff that you can do if you could perhaps that would broaden your perspective. Maybe I don't just need to go pub Netflix

work, pub Netflix work. Yeah, you're not going to tell me London's not international enough. I mean, this is, it's really, and there's so, I love British culture. And in fact, I've been to the UK once and I did not have a good time and I interviewed Ari up. She was from the band The Slits, old school punk band, Johnny Rotten's stepdaughter. And she said, yeah, I'm not going to do her accent. She had this Jamaican accent. She passed away not the long go.

And she said, yeah, we all hated London. We couldn't wait to get the fuck out of there, her words. And she's like, no wonder you didn't have a good time. And to me, the best thing about Britain is how it, you know, you know, obviously the British Empire, I'm sure, is something that's very mixed, emotional people, but residents from people from England.

But the idea that you had all these countries from all over the world under the sway of the queen, or whoever the king was at the time, and you imported elements to it to Britain, and it made this kind of cosmopolitan culture, like tea time coming from Japan. I mean, music, and I mean music and the British Museum, are you kidding me? It's just, it's just an amazing miracle of civilization. So I,

I don't buy into that at all. Just because it's, if the rain is going to stop you from like becoming a better person, it's not the rain. It's a good point. I think I might be slightly jaded because I mean, Newcastle, which is the last city before Scotland, and there is a very much a small town mentality. As soon as you get pretty much out of London, you go to even the biggest cities, Manchester, Birmingham, you have people like born, live, die. Well, aren't those kind of like, like, shit hole? I mean, aren't they like really kind of, like, relics of what they used to be and that they're kind of like like shit hole? I mean aren't they like really kind of like Relics of what they used to be and that they're kind of very depressing used to be much more industrial and this kind of like I think that's most I think that's most of the UK man like you know

Yeah, really what have we got we it's not like we have natural resources The only thing that we can export is our intellect and our accent like those are the two biggest tech sports that we have My friend was is a micronsons daughter. He was bowies guitarist and he was from hall intellect in our accent. Those are the two biggest tech sports that we have. My friend is a micronsons daughter. He was Bois guitarist and he was from Hull. And she's like, you don't understand what it's like going there. It's like maybe it's like Detroit, but it's really, when the sex pistols think about there's no future, there are those places in the UK and you'd obviously know it's better

than I do, where you grow up. it's in those cases the weather does matter because if everything is run down and the weather sucks and it's dark, it's very hard to see sunshine and emotional levels. So I'll accept that certainly. Moving forward, what are the main changes that you think people should expect, especially in the American media and culture without Trump in office anymore. Obviously we had this knife edge that it was, could it go one way, could it go another, and four more years, we could have probably had a good understanding of what to expect, just more of the same, but now that he's no longer there, what do you reckon is going to happen? It is going to be so deed this year that people have no idea

What's coming it's been at what two weeks into the Biden administration and we're ready seeing like they're talking about putting on second masks and And you know what we're just seeing with game stop and so on and so forth The thing with chaos and chaos and energy are not synonymous, but I'm a fan of both, is you never know where it's going to be coming. One of my favorite moments of the Trump presidency was there was some dispute between him and the Speaker of the House and anti-Police, and there was an entire busload of Democratic congressmen, and they were going to take a plane to visit an American base, I think maybe in Iraq or something, and Trump has command commanded chief pulled the authorization for the military plane.

So they had to bring the bus back to the cap room. They all had to get off the bus, like the school trip's been canceled. And we were just sitting there peeing her pants as all these congressmen just didn't know it. Because they had to get off the bus and that had to be on video. And it was just a complete humiliation.

No one could have predicted that. So I think without Trump, without this centralized figure, we are going to see things like you were talking about this Wall Street bet stuff, so many more attempts and successful executions of things that are no one saw coming and are going to be hilarious. And that will demonstrate how much of the claim to elite control is completely fraudulent, that these people are not better, that they're not particularly smarter. They're certainly not more moral. And the more that's exposed, the more hopeful people will become from the future. Because it's one thing to say, look, you're going to be ruled by a bunch of thieves. Fine.

Maybe you need that. Maybe you need those thieves in charge to make sure I'd rather have the thieves than the murderers, right? But let's be honest, that you are thieves. That I think would be a good starting point to go forward. I think that's increasingly happening. What's the difference between a Trump administration and a Biden administration? Why does a Biden administration garner more chaos than a Trump one?

I would have thought the Trump one would have been more chaotic. Because with Trump, people who would have disdain for the system, a large part of them felt represented. They felt, okay, we have someone who thinks like I do. We have someone who hates the things I hate. He's speaking for me. I have a voice. Now they feel like, okay, no one's speaking for me. I have no commitment to the system.

I have no investment here. I'm being told I'm a white supremacist, insurrectionist on a daily basis. So, okay, if that's how you regard, if you regard me as a Nazi, if you're going to read me out of the human race, then we can't really go forward having conversation. I don't want to sit down and have a conversation with a Nazi. Well, I did for my book, but not certainly in a collegial kind of way like, oh, you know,

where your kid's going to school, oh, nice seeing you so on and so forth. So, I think it's going to be much more systemic breaking down. I was seeing in Europe. So if you follow European elections, it's becoming harder and harder for different countries to form governing coalitions. Belgium was the great example where there's two halves of Belgium from getting this country right. One was socialist.

The other now, the white nationalists were in charge because they speak different languages. You're not going to be able to sit down and work with each other. We have this in Therinjia and Germany where they had a negative coalition, meaning the far left and the AFD, the nationalists had enough seats that between them no one can make a majority and they didn't know what to do. Now in Italy, what's happening is for a long time, you had a Burlesconi's party, right? He was the center-right party for Zid Italia. You know, they were the right wing ones. And then as it was after he kind of fell

away, you had Mateus Salvini, the league, you guys are Nazis, you guys are Nazis, you guys are Nazis. They got into government. Well, what happened then is now that they're recall the Nazis, they're losing some support, but the neo-fascists are gaining support. So, when you are forcing people to pay the costs of having views that are extreme, at a certain point they're going to be like, you know what, I am going to check these people out because that's what you're calling me. And they're the ones who want to talk to me and you don't. This is a very dangerous game these people are playing. And they are so up their own ass and are so not used to thinking strategically that all they know

how to do is just repeat what they've said before. And all I could do is caution and be like, you are doing a very dangerous thing. And I'm saying this as an anarchist who does not believe in politics. That feels like an element of the thread that we were talking about earlier on that you have such a rapid pace emerge on the bottom and you have such a rapid pace, emerging on the bottom, and you have such a big lumbering galaeath up at the top. Yeah, that's exactly it, and this huge disconnect, and this galaeath is complete. If there's like, I'm a big zoology person, and the thing that brings down giraffes are ticks, because in giraffe, the surface area of a giraffe is enormous.

That means you could have so many ticks on a draining of blood, giving it disease. It's going to be a lot easier for that than for let's suppose a lion where if the giraffe kicks in the head, it wants its dead. So this is, I think they're completely oblivious. They're always tell themselves in these words that they're on the right side of history.

You know, if someone comes up to me with a knife, telling them I'm on the right side of history. You know, if someone comes up to me with a knife, telling them I'm on the right side of history is really going to be a very weak tool. And if it is a war, just saying, I'm the good guys, is really not going to gain you anything. So that's what's happening, emergently, that's what sort of the population is feeling. What about top down, what do you see in terms of administrative changes

or, I guess, top down cultural changes? I'm shocked by how quickly they've come to realize that at wait a minute we didn't win because they thought very sincerely we got rid of Trump everything could go back to normal unity and then it took a couple of weeks and they're like holy crap none of these Trump people or who they described as Trump people like you know they would call Glenn Glenn Green holy crap, none of these Trump people, or who they describe as Trump people, like, you know, they would call Glenn Greenwald Trumperson. None of these people, Mr. Beat, they're not going home, they're not going anywhere, they've become even more radicalized, they've become even more contemptuous of us. What do we do? Well, they're not really , they are just, I think at this point, they're still confused, and they're going to become

a lot more confused, or they're going to start they are just, I think at this point, they're still confused. And they're going to become a lot more confused or they're going to start implementing smart strategies, which I wouldn't bet on if they want, if they know it's good for them. And I don't say that as a threat, I'm saying, I'm saying that someone who's very afraid. Are you seeing this with the amount of executive orders that Biden's put in, for instance,

that it's just a hammer blow, it's using it? I'm seeing here's another example. Like for three years, we heard that the 2016 election was, you know, under mine by Russia. And there was Trump was impeached over this. And Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia. There's a conspiracy and there was collusion with you in Trump and Putin. Within a week of this past election,

every corporate media outlet was saying this has been the most secure election history. It is not possible to make that statement with that quickly. You have an investor, it might be true, but you couldn't in a week, you know, do all the investigations, see all the mistakes, see whatever was fixed. And how was it that President Trump and all these Republican governors oversaw going from Russia to now it's completely secure.

This is a clearly and to dispute this in any way is grounds from getting you removed from social media and to you should be silenced and now you believe in insurrection and civil war and all this other stuff. This is not the approach of an elite that feels secure and in control. This is someone, if you and me are having an argument in your house, I'll say my piece, you'll say your piece, maybe our voices get raised. If I'm shoving you out of the house and locking the door, I don't feel safe. And that's what they are trying to do.

The problem is, they don't really own the house anymore. Like they do not have a monopoly over the mechanisms of conversation. And that when you have an edifice built and deception, being able to speak even critically is an enormous existential threat to it. Oh, we've seen, again, this is another one of those threads that appears to be tying together. Again, this is another one of those threads that appears to be tying together. The same way as executive orders, the same way as restrictions with regards to speech, the same way as the press restricting people's movements, the same way as Robinhood restricting people's trades.

Is this the last vestiges of the old guard trying to hold on to their version of power or how they used to be able to deploy power? And it seems like if they were to go about it in a more smart way. This is the 1984 element of a Brave New World, the fact that there is only so far that you can try to cajole and coerce and tempt people into things until you need to get the hammer out and hit them over the head. And it was seeing a lot more hammers appear. And that, as you said, is when it's really, really obvious that someone's decided, okay,

gloves are off, rules are broken. I need to press the fucking ejector seat button. And it's also very expensive in the sense of if you and I have a fight, whatever, hey, sorry man, I was really upset. No, no, it's cool. If you punch me in the face or I punch you in the face, you can never undo that. That's also shown me several things. One, your person is capable of violence against me or vice versa.

Your someone who can do that again in the future. This is not, it goes very hard to reverse that and to try to have some kind of relationship that's at all based on respect or working together. It's like, all right, you do this to me once. Also, now there's an enormous pressure. I have to make sure I'm not in that position again because I'm sorry, it was a mistake. It's like, you know what, if I get punched a second time at some point, it's going to be part of my fault that I trusted you. So this is when they have to use this cudgel, like you pointed out or this hammer, this is enormously expensive for them

in terms of future relationships, because that is something that can't be unseen or undone, you can't unring that bell. And it's not just necessarily the person who gets the cudgel out. Right. It's everybody else within that domain. And perhaps this is why we was seeing such a proliferation of

telegram and discord and signal. You know, I saw, I can't remember who it is. Let me give you a great example of this. So one of the big things I've been working on this past year was turning people against the police. And I have never seen any population switch its views on a fundamental issue as quickly as in America at least conservatives have turned the police. For a very long time, you could not talk them about it. The police are what keeps us from being in a state of anarchy, ha ha, a state of complete violence, everyone be killing each other. And then all you had to do was a little bit of footage. There was Canada where they broken to someone's house because they were having like Thanksgiving dinner, whatever it was, and

pulled an old man out of the house. And when you see that video, it's like, okay, I can never pretend some people still can that, okay, they're keeping a safe. They're just like you and me, good apples, you look at that, you're like, I don't know. You don't have to know anything about politics to know something somewhere has taken a very drastic turn When old people who are not you know gun runners or drug dealers or running a brothel are being violently pulled out of their Home was by the police. This is not like you're like it's like you're doing accounting and all of a sudden you have like a million dollar deficit It's like okay, somewhere the math went way wrong The trust's getting eroded away quite quickly and it can never be rebuilt and have like a million dollar deficit. It's like, okay, somewhere the math went way wrong.

The trust's getting eroded away quite quickly and it can never be rebuilt and it would appear that that's happening across all different institutions. The legacy media posts something which erodes a little bit of trust in the government and then the government put a policy in that people don't like that means that they're a little bit less sure about when the police come around. You're seeing this with just generally the way that people respond to police talking about mask mandates. Like if you see somewhat that they're angry, but they're not angry at the policemen or even at the police at whole, like they know that it's not their legislation, but they just see the man. They see whoever is person in charge as this top down dictatorship, dictatorial bureaucratic

organization that's trying to get them to do shit. One thing that I've been really interested in over the last year of watching you, you're a passionate New Yorker and you've lived there forever and you never considered living anywhere else. When we first started speaking, has that changed over the last year? Yeah, as you and I have discussed and it's what has the governor and the mayor have done more damage to New York than Al Qaeda has. I say this non-ironically. What I loved about New York, I've lived here since I was two.

I don't need even that need to tell people. People know why New York's great. And I'm sure everyone has a story about when New York sucks, but the things that make New York great, everyone knows what I'm going to say. That's been devastated. Not only that, my social network, all my friends, what keeps me sane, they all moved out. I'm like, I'm like, when the few ones left standing. So, it's not that I'm leaving New York, it's that the New York I love and fell in love with is gone.

It causes me pain physically to see what they've done to this city and all the cool spots I've went to So I don't know where I would go what I'm going to start doing Being fortunate to have the kind of career I do is I'm gonna be spending like a week Every month in a different city and trying it out. I'm hearing good things I can't believe this is something I'd ever consider again a few a year ago, you told me this, I'd be like, okay, whatever there. Like Miami, I'm hearing good things about that. I'm going to be in Austin for a week next week or in a week from next week. LA, of course, to do work, but we shall see.

If Europe opens up, I had a supporter who tossed me a grand who goes, this will be enough to live in Europe for a month. So I'm sure you and I could spend a week at some cool Eastern European place and really have a fun time with it. The Russia stuff is going to be much more emotional and personal and biographical, you know, it's going to be a very different resonance. But, you know, one of these like Balkan places, it's, I think we would just lose our minds and have fun. Do you not agree? Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, travel's such a big part of my life. And it, yeah. I'm able to take a fair bit of discomfort. Like, I pride myself on being able to kind of get my

head down and crack on. It's that purest and work ethic again. But even for me, the last few months have started to really drag on dark night called whether gyms shut, like completely shut and unable to go outside, unable to train, at least over last year when the gyms were shut, we could go out into the garden and just get a workout in with slightly shitter equipment. Whereas now it's like, there's nothing.

So I'm starting my cut today, so I'm going to catch up with you. I heard. I saw online. What are your calories? What are you cutting at? We only drop 500. So it's down to 200 protein. And let me see.

I'm pulling with the document. I have the documents. It's going to be 2,900 calories per day for now. That's still good. Are you going to feel fine at that? Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I have to get to that kind of, we'll see what happens.

It's going to be a process. I've been watching over the last year and trying to get the best tips that I can from you on trolling just passively. I haven't trust you. Yeah, yeah, because... I mean, it's trolling, Russia. For come on.

Don't tell us we can't pronounce trolling. I don't know where that accent supposed to be. I think that's like, it's Jordy mixed with Scottish. Yeah, okay, fine. Anyway, that thing, that thing... You've got some title. That thing that you do when you quote to eat people and you say stuff, I've been. That's not trolling.

I mean, to be pedantic. Okay. Well, why don't you give me your definition of it? And then also what are your principles behind it? How can I become a better troll? I think it'd be very hard for you to become a troll for many, many different reasons. But for me, trolling is using someone's flaws in order to turn them into an unwitting performer for the benefit of a third party.

So here's an example, a great example I have this in my book, and you write Mountain Dew, corporate, they make soda, they're like, hey, what should the next flavor of Mountain Dew be? Like, vote in the poll. And Fort Chan said, okay, we can do this. And they got the number one answer to be Hitler did nothing wrong. Okay. And they're not doing this as Nazis because now Mountain Dew has to either acknowledge it or they have to do something about it. And they pulled the poll, of course, and they go, OK, it looks like the internet won this round. So trolling is like we're talking about the video games earlier.

It's an exploit. It especially works very well when people are low quality people presenting themselves as high quality. So that disconnect between the pretension and the product is an enormous opportunity to get them to make and ask of themselves. Your boyfriend is Morgan,

I think, is really prime for trolling. I think it doesn't ever one in the UK kind of Loki hate him. I think so. Yeah, he can continually trend. So obviously, he's on breakfast TV every single morning and they have a really clever way. and they have a really clever way. ITV have a really smart way where they'll take clips from the show and then distribute them really

quickly on Twitter and such like they trend. They must trend at least once a week or a couple of times a week sometimes. It even felt like just they got some lads on that were a part of a meme the other day and they made that trend and then he does proper stuff where he goes off the rails or he goes on an illegal holiday and stuff like that. So yeah, he's also a bit of a healer and he doesn't even lean into this kind of persona. I think he likes the bad guy persona a little bit, but the weird thing is it's, that's not necessarily what people tune into breakfast TV for at least traditionally it wasn't.

It was you know, fluffy way to enjoy you. Yes, of course. Toast in a coffee on a morning time. You don't want to see Pia's wagul in his finger in someone's face and shouting about it. I grew up on Roger Hardgrave's books, the Mr. Men books. So my impression of British cultures based entirely on those books and my understanding was it's hard-boiled eggs And how soft boiled eggs that you all have for breakfast and you have them the egg holder I don't even know what a soft boiled egg is that what you put Dippy soldiers in

Dippy soldier. I don't know what that is like little strips of toast Yeah, yeah, you got the egg cup. Yeah, right you crack the top and then you get the soft boiled. Yeah, yeah, obviously Miss aligned childhood somehow. Yeah, okay. You crack the top and then you get soft boiled. Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, misaligned childhood somehow. Yeah. Okay. So, so, so, peace, peace, peace is someone that you should go after. But what, like, let's say, because a lot of the time the people that come after you, you don't know them. So, but that's not trolling. It's just me clowning them. Okay. Yeah. So I'm just making an asset of them for everybody's amusement. Okay. Here's a good example of trolling. I'm looking right now at a signed picture from Andy Kaufman, who was like one of the great trolls.

So Andy Kaufman had this character Tony Clifton, who was this like failed lounge singer. And he had this bit where he came, he said, you know, my, I, he's got a very particular voice. I can't do it. He's like, you know, my wife died a few years ago. And whenever I look at my daughter in the eye, I see her. And she's going to come out here. We're going to do it, do it. He's like, you know, my wife died a few years ago. And whenever I look at my daughter in the eye, I see her. And she's going to come out here. We're going to do it together.

And the daughter comes out, you know, teenage girl sits on his lap. They start singing a song. And her voice cracks. And he slaps her across the face hard. And he's like, what are you doing with her fun with an audience? And then they all, they're, they're gobsmacked. I think you guys say they all start. And he goes, stop booing. You're just making her cry more. Now they don't

know what to do. Now this not only wasn't his daughter was an actress who was an adult and this is a whole thing, but the point is it is exploiting their very normal and something he shared, you know, horror at the idea of a child being hit to turn them all into performance for his own amusement. So it's chasing not discomfort in a way. It's the office, the British, the Brickage Your Vases office, and many of his shows, they're not trolling per se, but they very much hit that exact same note of humor where you're playing with someone's extreme discomfort. And even when you watch

the office, you know, these are all actors, you know, they're, there's not, there's no question your mind that this isn't real, but you still at home are just cringing and like want to jump out of a window because there was this one just off top of my head. There was this one episode where they had a fire drill and there's a girl in the wheelchair and they carried her down one stair. Leave her on the laundry. Look, and there's the shot of the wheelchair and they carry her down one stair. That's the lever on the left. And there's the shot of the cameraman staring down at her and she's in the stairwell looking up, sugar and shoulders. And you're just like, oh my god, I want to die. It's so painful and beautiful.

I find that really uncomfortable to watch. That stuff for me is almost unbearable. But I feel like my cringe reflex is hypersensitized. I don't know why. Okay, well that's because you're a decent person maybe. Perhaps, yeah. Final thing, man. You mentioned on Twitter that you learned something from me the other day. What was that? Oh, this is a whole long conversation.

Cool. But basically, we can save it for another time. Yeah, well, I'm going to, I may even talk about it on a certain other show in a few weeks, but I'll we can yeah We'll come back to that. That's a nice old loop for the next one. Talk to me about the book when can people expect that is it gonna be this? Yes, I am half I hope so and halfway done So even if I do just a page a day, it'll be done first draft in three months So I think it's a very realistic. It'll be done first draft in three months. So I think it's very realistic. It'll be out this year, the white pill. It's about the victory of

good over evil. I'm so excited, man. It's great. It is such a pleasure to have you here. I'm excited for Russia. I'm excited to see what you do over the next couple of weeks and then the forthcoming book release, man. Everyone that is listening, if you want to go and check out more of Michael's stuff, it will be linked in the show notes below. Leave a comment and let us know what you think. Dude, thank you. Thank you for being a friend.

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