Red Scare - The Pervert's Guide to Podcasting w/ Slavoj Zizek *UNLOCKED*

Episode Date: November 25, 2020

We're unlocking our Slavoj Zizek episode for Thanksgiving. Video available on YouTube. Description below! *** The ladies chat with philosopher S

We're back. We're back. We're in the studio with Slavoj Žižek, the author of Pandemic 2. Sorry, I butchered that. Pandemic exclamation and Pandemic exclamation too. I'm not going to list off all of your other titles that you've authored. You can go to Wikipedia and look up the bibliography. Okay, I have my first question for you. You're a very prolific guy. Are you a morning or a night person? It's interesting point. It's quite a tragedy. I didn't yet discover a proper formula of my day. What happens regularly is that I sleep long, then I get up earlier than my wife, which means that I have to prepare breakfast around to a store if it's still possible and

so on. Then after that, it's lunch. What I wanted to say is that in this way, almost every day, I find myself at, let's say, 8 p.m. and I didn't do anything productive, reading or writing. So then I try to use that time till midnight, 1 a.m. to work, which means that I never have the time to enjoy myself and so on and so on. I didn't find a good formula. Who I envy is there are a couple of persons, two of them I knew myself and from history of philosophy, Emmanuel Kant, Jacques Derrida, and Frederick Janshon, who I envy them so much. They have a rhythm. You get up around 5 in the morning and you do the work from like half past 5 till 11 or noon. Then you are free on the afternoon

and you go to sleep after the evening news at 9 and so on. But I like this idea that there is noon or 1 p.m. and you are free. I cannot do it. Also, I have a habit, so I get tired very quickly and so on and so on. But my idea would have been this, where I sleep early in the morning and to go to sleep earlier, but I cannot. Yeah, well, I mean, the play balance is tricky for us as well. So you are in Slovenia. You have been in lockdown for a week, you said? No, but we have had another lockdown in late March, early April. But it is a nice proof that when you feel really threatened by COVID, how it is also part of certain ideological

but maybe even more simply psychological mechanisms, I remember Slovenia, a small country, 2 million inhabitants, had, when the first wave was at its worst, had a maximum of 60, 70, like 60, 70 cases per day. And we were already in a panic. Now, a couple of days ago, we had 2,600 on a day, in one day. And people were not in such a panic. So you see, it's all, I don't know what you expect, perception and so on and so on. Only now panic is setting in really. Now it's by far the worst from us. The capital, we and the Czech Republic and Belgium, I think, are the worst in Europe. But maybe, so that I just don't just tell stories. You know what interests me so much? When I say interest me, it means I find it

horrible, of course. Not only you in the United States, here also, all around Europe and here the state is simply silently doing what I call following the Trump line, losing or renouncing even control. The first step was when they publicly declared that they are not able to trace your contacts if you are positive. So what they did is this. First, now to get tested, you have to wait for days, blah, blah. Then, until four or five weeks ago, it was that if you were in a close contact with a person who tested positive, you had to go to a quarantine. Now they renounced this. They said, not enough people in the hospitals and so on. If you are in contact with a person who tested positive, no quarantine, you go on working until you

feel that something is wrong. Now, in many European countries, about a week ago, they went a step further. Even if you test positive or feel the symptoms, you don't go into quarantine, you continue to work. Because they lack so many personnel, nurses, doctors in the hospitals, it's simply that doctors with COVID are going on working. And you, if you test positive as a private person or whatever, they don't do the job for you. You have to try to remember who are you in contact with and inform them and so on and so on. So it's really that the state is renouncing. I find this horrible. My doctor, an old lady who I have good contact told me that it's horrible that now you have departments, yes, in our main hospital where

there are positive doctors and nurses treat positive patients. It's simply positive. That sounds very positive. Sounds very positive. Let me ask you, but on the flip side, there was like a kind of a scandal in New York City, a little bit of a minor scandal, because Cuomo announced that he would develop or either roll out an app that would track your movements and your contacts throughout as you went about your daily life. Are you on board with that? Is that something that you think? Sure, it will be probably a better price for you. The reason I don't care so much about this is that I'm more of a pessimist. From what I know from my private contacts in United States, that's all that I learned from Assange Google in China

or in Israel, I know. But they are de facto already doing it. I spoke with an Israeli guy who told me that they are recording all phone conversations already for 15, 20 years. They are already doing this. As we learned from all these Facebook scandals and so on, I think Julian Assange was right when he said that Google is basically a private version of NSA, National Security Agency. It's just a little bit hypocritical of making such a fast out of this when at a much more brutal level, in all developed or even not so developed countries, they were already doing it. Of course, it's not perfect control because machines are stupid. Because you don't have enough people, of course, then half the population

would have to listen to the other half all the time. You don't get enough people to listen to this conversation. So they have to use computer programs and keywords and blah, blah, blah. But no, you probably don't know the story. A British professor of literature who worked in China told me of a comic complication he had. Especially when there is the Tiananmen massacre anniversary and so on. They control all phone calls, at least foreign ones, international calls. So this guy told me he was flirting with a lady, other professor in England. You know the story about protesting, no? Because they were all like Snowbees, Litra, and so on. He said, I protest my love for you, no? Because in Shakespeare,

the word protest means defiantly, publicly declared, you know? Yes, right. I see where this is going. The control thought protest referenced to Tiananmen. The conversation was immediately cut off. And what I like is this stupidity of control. You see? Well, let's say, sorry for vulgarity, you can erase this. It should be the same. Imagine, I want to screw your brain out of vulgarity. It would have been okay, but because it got the Shakespeare note, it was instantly cut off and so on. So what I'm saying is that, you know, the fear in Europe is more a different one among the majority. That all this control, recording or movement and so on, is not really a difference.

But we are at a loss. Many of my friends, maybe they are secret vegetarians, are telling me, I don't care if they trace my movement. Just where are the results, you know? In spite of all these numbers are still exploding and so on and so on. Surveillance capitalism. I think for me, even doctors, there are so many things we don't know. Sorry, somebody calling. No, no, no. I guess the big question to ask, if you accept the kind of presence of these apps and device surveillance in our lives, then like, is it just another kind of sub-industry to create

meaningless jobs or will there be actual results? I want to change topics a little bit. Yesterday was a very big day for the left. What do you think of Jeremy Corbin being booted from the Labour Party and Glenn Greenwald resigning from the Intercept in the same day? You know, Keir Starmer or how the recent boss of the Labour Party said after hearing that report, that it's reading that report on anti-Semiticism in the Labour Party, that it's a day of shame for the Labour Party. I think it's a day of shame indeed. But because they, how do they call this? It's not yet pure Stalinist first date suspended, Jeremy Corbin. If you ask me, Corbin was right. Namely, you know, I link this to another ominous thing. I wrote a short text, but it didn't get

very popular. I think, you know what happened about a month ago, exactly at the end of September in United Kingdom. The Department of Education gave to all schools, universities, high schools and so on, a horrible text, a clear, unambiguous order that prohibits them to use as part of the curriculum or literature any documents that criticize or are negative towards capitalism. And then they go a step further and say, because those who are anti-capitalism, that anti-capitalism implies, in these terms, limiting of human freedoms, advocacy of violence and anti-Semitism. Now, I find this horrible. I think that, although when I see anti-Semitism, I'm ready to attack it brutally, but at the same time, I've already written about it. I think that anti-Semitism

is today simply used to discredit for the establishment if there is a little bit too radical critique of capitalism. You know what's the irony that the usual leftist sense was anti-Semitism is anti-capitalism of the primitive people. Really, this figure of a Jew who grabs money and so on is a primitive representation of the capitalist. There's a moment of truth in it, but now it's a horrible thing and some friends, new liberals like Bernardo and Rileville, already said this, that know that it's anti-capitalism today, which is a mask of anti-Semitism. So again, the moment you are too anti-capitalist, you are suspected of being anti-Semitic. You know why I find this line of argumentation horrible? Because it itself, this line of argumentation,

mobilizes an old anti-Semitic cliché, which is that Jews are essentially capitalists, you know? I mean, which is incidentally a crazy thing historically, like look at Lenin's Politburo. It was the only case in Christian history where the majority of the leading body, those who really hold power were Jews. So we say that communism is a priority, anti-Semitic is crazy. But what I want to say is that I think that you remember, they use this already against Astonish. They use this against Bernie Sanders at the end when they tried to discredit him. They use now in Europe against the Greek IDM, Yanis Varoufakis, and they only used a year or two ago against Corbyn. I think I even know people, I almost met him. Corbyn is a wonderful, gentle guy.

The problem is that I'm almost tempted to say he is too good for this world, you know? It's absolutely not anti-Semitic. She just follows the line that I tried to formulate once a year ago where I said that for me, the struggle against anti-Semitism and the struggle for Palestinian rights are parts of the same struggle. That's what all my good friends from Israel claim. They said that today to be really faithful to what is the greatest thing in the Jewish legacy is to try to understand Palestinians. So it's a very critical thing. And again, I think this is what explains this throwing out of course. It's really an attempt to burst out of the political space a little bit more radical left. And it's happening all around the

world. This was about another person or rather two, three persons with whom I have great sympathy, Morales and Alvaro Garcia-Linera, the ex-Vice President of Bolivia. And now the guy who even made a comeback. It's incredible. Lucio Arce, because the first were prohibited to participate in the elections. Lucio Arce, who was the mastermind, the Minister of Economy during Morales' rule. And he did a miracle. It's not the usual lastest thing of screwing up things and then blaming imperialists or whatever. Ordinary people in Bolivia, even the capitalists never had it so good as during the 10, 12 years under Morales. And my theory is that that's why there had to be a coup against Morales, Linera and so on. Because those in power in our establishment,

they liked the radical left to take power once every 20 years. And then they successfully screw things up economically so that they can say, you see, if you allow them to rule. But in Bolivia, they succeeded. That's why they had to do it. Now we'll see what will happen. But I think that what happened recently in Bolivia, the return through democratic election to power of the Morales party and in Chile, this Aproebo referendum, only now they will really get rid of the Pinotret dictatorship legacy. Because yes, in 83 on May, Chile did return to democracy, but it was based on a constitution imposed by Pinotret himself, you know, not to protecting the rich and so on, all the stuff. So there are some interesting things going on here

and there. But what do you think is in store for the Labour Party in the UK? It's simply that this Tony Blair, more traditional orientation took over again. And the reason I am not glad about it, it's not only because I have a more radical leftist, but because if I wrote in another text, what worries me a lot recently in the United States, in Europe, is this gap between a representational system of elections and the, how should I call it, the gut feeling, the everyday life experience of many ordinary people. There is a certain level of discontent which simply cannot be transposed properly into electoral results. For example, I often use this example, some 20 more years ago, no, it was maybe a little bit later in the last

years of Tony Blair rule in the United States. I was in England just a week before elections, there was some big TV show asking people, big opinion poll, who is the most hated person in the United Kingdom? Tony Blair won by far. A week later, he won the elections again. So it's very logical how this discontent, obviously there was some kind of discontent with the people. It wasn't possible to politicize this properly. It's the same with the minute, it's the same with France. You remember when did it begin, a year ago, something like the Yellow Vests protests, right? When they tried to politicize themselves, they accepted the dialogue with Macron, it was all watered down. It was protest, it wasn't possible to politicize.

It the same happened, I know I'm friends with many of them, with Odemos, you remember, two years ago and so on in Spain. Once they decided to enter the state politics, they are now part of the government. They became just another, not even very radical, like social democratic, whatever you call it, party. So this gap worries me very much. And I think Trump also functions in this way. That's why against Trump, I don't think it's enough to say he's threatening our democracy, let's return to our democracy. No, that traditional liberal democracy no longer properly yet. I'd like to talk a little bit about Belarus actually, because in pandemic two and the chapter father or worse, you sort of compare the protests in Belarus to the Yellow Vests

and discuss about the way that the real trouble begins once you overthrow your authoritarian ruler, your Batka, like Lukashenko, but then you have to reckon with all of these. What many people I know hated me so much of that text as if I'm pro Lukashenko or whatever. I'm not crazy. She's a nice example of what some of my friends theorists already developed as the new grotesque or obscene master. Trump is also a master in this. No, the old masters, masters in the sense of political, political leader, boss, they played this rule of untouchable dignity. This dignity was there. They were aspirational. They were aspirational. Yeah, because you know, Trump likes to use it. You know, when Trump said,

was quoted saying that the COVID will be over in April, he said, and when he was wrong, he said, no, I just meant it in an aspirational way. No, but what I want to say is that nonetheless, I mean, she should be dealt with. Of course, I absolutely agree. Lukash, again, she's kind of a grotesque obscene figure. And did you get from those old books, guys, the proofs of pandemic too? Yeah, of course. You remember we did our research in the appendix to it. I went into it a little bit. This new figure of obscene master in contrast to the noble, ironically, I mean, of course, epoch of Stalinism, where the leader was totally untouchable. You know, nothing should be publicly said that would diminish, undermine

the figure of the leader. Now with Trump and so on, we have something very strange. We have a leader who already treats the case towards himself in an obscene way, if I may put it like this. That's why don't you agree? That's the problem with all those, the John Skewer, blah, blah, blah, who or Alec Baldwin, who makes fun of Trump. It doesn't quite work because he's funnier than me. He's just funnier. Did you invite her? Many people don't like her. I think nonetheless that how to pronounce it under Angela Nagler in her. Oh, yeah, we've had her on the show before. Yeah, yeah, he detected very nicely this tendency. And I remember it of how when I was young, you know, that I tried to be dignified. We, the last is we're doing all the ugly gestures as you and so

on. Now, sorry, the right is doing this. It's much more efficient. Yeah, let me ask you this. My one minor, like, I guess, now you really want to kill me if you are mad when you begin as a gentle woman in this, my minor reproach or what? My one minor thing that I would say is, I don't know what you should say if you want to be really violent. You said, I don't really agree with you. I will just put some accent in a slightly different way. We have to top from the bottom. We have to be a little passive aggressive. But okay, my one minor contention, I guess, is like you calling this a new thing, because I think there's a model of it in the Soviet Union with like Khrushchev and Yeltsin, right? The obscene leader.

He began with it, I know. And he began already in Stalin's era. The idea is that he survived and became the leader precisely because he always played in Stalin's, I read his magazines, Inner Circle, this role of, you know, drunk, fat clown and so on. So nobody took him quite, quite seriously. But on the other hand, what I found so fascinating in Soviet Union, but okay, you are too young. I remember that era. You know that now, not only many leftists had almost a good memory of Khrushchev, not because of all relative relaxation, but do you know, like, I will do a very simple analysis. Khrushchev period, at least in the late 50s, was the last period of the Soviet Union when Khrushchev and people around him, the ruling narrow circle,

Khrushchev put it, it was sound very naive, still believed in communism, you know, they still seriously thought they will maybe do it. With Brazil, the game is over. It's absolutely clear that from the very beginning he was cynical and so on and so on, you know. But you should tell me if you have still connections in Belarus, you know, but again, not defending him, he became an embarrassment, Lukashenko, but isn't it true that economically, socially, till two, three years ago, till the oil crisis and so on, he wasn't doing it so bad? Okay, he enjoyed popular support for a very long time. He was, I know, a dictator and so on, but I think that that formula no longer works. I meant just in a very, don't you agree, the Netherlands wanted, what do people expect,

look at Ukraine now, where are you going? Exactly, well, that's why it's sad. That's what's horrifying about it is that it's very difficult to imagine a way forward, that yes, Lukashenko should be overthrown, but what do we do after that is... Now, my point was here, another one, that's why I wouldn't fully compare them with yellow vests. On the one hand, and I am ready to be corrected here if I'm factually wrong, on the one hand, some of their representatives sounded to me when I saw the interviews of the opposition, more like what Habermas called nachholender revolution, a ketchup revolution. We just want to become real democracy like the liberal West. But are they aware that democracy itself is in a crisis today? Well, that's another question

that I have for you. We talked a little bit about the Belarus situation, and we talked about the situation in Karabakh as well. And one of the things that strikes me about these conflicts is that the people... Damn, I'm sorry if I will disagree with you, but probably maybe we'll agree. I will show my cards in advance. There, I am for very specific, private, not private, reason of my contacts, more on the side of Armenia. Because I know some of my friends, Slovenia is, as your beloved president, not Lukashenko, but Trump, Slovenia is a foothold of a country, a small country where... And this is where I have a fond memory, even from communist times in the last decade. Too many people, blah, blah, nomenclatura didn't live secluded life. You walk on the street,

you could have encountered the general secretary of the Communist Party, walking alone without a guard on the street, and so on. So my point is everybody knew everybody else. And in the mid-90s or a little bit later, a friend of mine was a minister of science and education, and as part of the Slovenian delegation visited Azerbaijan. Well, they had, I mean, this is a brutal irony, they had the best government imaginable. Didn't they protect this formula? The ex-KGB boss became a national... Was it Aliyev or who? Nightmare, no? And people also told me that you have this downtown wealthy, with all the western stores and extreme social differences. Plastic surgery, Rolls Royces, yes, sure. Yeah, yeah. So I don't know the details,

but are you also a little bit definitely more sympathetic towards Armenia? Well, my family is from Karabakh, so I have to be. She's from Belarus. I'm from Karabakh. We're like from doomed territories. You are precisely from there, from Karabakh. Yeah, on my dad's side, yeah, yeah. And as Armenian. Yes. So I can't be... But you know, these are, yeah, but these are always problems, for example, not that I'm for Putin, but it's true that... How do you pronounce it? Crimea in English, that's true. But it's true that Khrushchev, when he gave it, when, only in the mid-50s, or when, did Khrushchev give Crimea an insula to Ukraine? No? Yeah, it's fairly recent, yeah. It was a slightly meaningless,

stupid decision, like why? Yeah, I mean, but... Is there any justification? Isn't it true that Catherine the Great and Russians, under the quotation mark, civilized Crimea took it? It was never appropriately Ukrainian, no? Or was it? Or am I wrong? Yes, that's correct, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's how Russians view it, but I guess my question to you is that the people in places like Belarus and Armenia, and Azerbaijan, for that matter, are very unironic people. They're not irony poisons, so they take these kind of national conflicts very seriously, and I'm wondering... Yeah, and I'm wondering, like, if there's a place, even for this kind of worldview, in our present kind of global network... Well, till now, that was good about my own country, till now.

Now it's also turning crazy. Slovenia, you know? All my friends, after they visited the United States, they couldn't understand it. They considered this a kind of a psychic madness that, you know, on some American homes, especially in the province, outside big cities, you find a national flag on a private house, you know? Yeah. For us, we are still faithful to the socialist legacy, which means, no, in the ironic sense, which means that national flag is what you put on during holidays because you are ordered by the state to put it. It's considered madness to put the national flag on just like that, you know? Now, unfortunately, they're trying to... But you know what I suspect of this fanatical attitude? As you said, no sense of irony and so on. It's not just that

I distrust it because it's too fanatical. I always had this psychologically grounded, I think, well-grounded suspicion that fanatics are not the ones who really believe in this sense. And that's why they have to be so desperately fanatical. Now, I don't know which, I think, even apropos Israel. I found, is he one of those poets? I don't know, Carlo Ginsberg, I quote this somewhere, who wrote that you only belong to a country. This is the ultimate true love for a country when you are ready when your country does something wrong to be ashamed of your own country. No, and I'm asking this fanatical people, are you ready when your country is wrong to be ashamed of your own country? And that's why

the most beautiful story, I think I quoted even maybe even in pandemic that I know, is that you know that way back 20 years or when, in Israel and the United States, a group of Holocaust survivors who were old enough to be still alive and their son's daughters publish a text claiming now we Holocaust survivors are ashamed of what Israel is doing. I remember that, yeah. Yeah, that is for me true love of your country. And so if you are, cannot be ironic towards your country or make bad jokes about it, you don't really love your country. And that's why maybe this will amuse you. That's why I am sometimes politically incorrect and so on. And you know, I must tell you this, the most beautiful thing that happened to me is

my younger son, when he was going to elementary school more than 10 years ago, had a black boy as his best friend, you know, and I was all the time you can imagine making, I'm from there to repeat them here, you're in trouble, making racist remarks. But this was our game among the two of us, that black boy, we were a go. So once that black friend of my son rang the bell to visit my son. And she entered, I said, okay, because I was in a very bad depression. I said, okay, go in nice to see you. And then he went into play with my son. My son knocked my door like that Marvin Marvin, the name of this black friend, he said, Marvin is worried. Why didn't you insult him? What's wrong with you? Yes, he got it. You know, without,

there is no love without this irony and might say proudly, I only had a couple of them. But in all my love relationships, you know, we established a kind of codified form of this kind of mutual loving humiliation, which I did. The message is not I really mean it. But the message is, our love is so strong that we can even talk like that and know that it will not get fair. You know, like my wife asked me, what should I do? And my standard answer was, so close, jump into the toilet bowl and pull, flush the water after you or whatever. And there are much worse things and so on. But you see, this is again, that's my paradox. This is what worries me about these people sensitive to their national identity and so on and so on. But

true identity by definition incorporates irony, mocking, making fun of yourself and so on and so on. You know, and this is for me, would you agree? But I don't know, you are too young to remember it. As I always repeated, maybe the biggest, greatest cultural legacy of Stalinist times are the best political jokes that I remember. You know, now they mostly disappeared. I mean, you cannot compare the level, they simply disappear, you hear the political jokes, they are on a much lower level and so on. Yeah, like you said, it's because Trump himself in America at least is so funny. It's impossible to make fun of him. Yeah, he's his own best friend. Yeah, but that's why now probably you will not agree with this. But that's why

it's a very risky move, I know. I think that and Bernie Sanders, I don't know him directly, but I know people who know him. Bernie, he knows this and he did something very intelligent. He told a friend of mine who told me that his idea was what about this old notion which was put in circulation, I think by Richard Nixon, conservative, moral majority, ordinary decent people. We should say, we Bernie Sanders really is with them, talks with them. My old idea is that if there is a postmodernist, totally ironic, brutal, tasteless, talking, Trump is a postmodern president in this. I wouldn't disagree with that. Bernie was an old fashioned, wonderful moralist,

you know. That's also why with regard to feminism, I'm radically broad feminist, really, I mean it, but not in the politically correct way. I think and all the women I have contact with, also theorists and so on, they have the same reaction with me as that guy, a friend of my son, Marvin, you know. If I'm not a little bit longer, they start to worry. Yeah, that's a silent majority. They do wrong and so on, you know. If you can't be a little bit of a sojournist. I don't agree with that. Maybe you function in a different way. Maybe in other cultures, it functions in a different way, but in my circles, a small exchange of obscenities is the only way to really break the ice and to let it be known.

Now we are real friends. Well, it's flattering. It's like a, you know how they say imitation is the best form of flattery. It's not exactly imitation. It's a little bit of mockery because it is a fine flattery. My idea is here, of course, I agree with you a step further that only through mockery can you really demonstrate that you belong to what you are mocking, making fun of. I don't trust fanatics, not in the sense they are too fanatical, but deep in them, they really don't believe in what they are. I will give an example where you will find difficult. You know that when I was in Ramallah and some other parts of Palestine. Okay, this is the most bourgeois city life part. I discovered that they have a wonderful sense of humor, making fun of

Christians, of Islam itself, and so on and so on. Probably if I were to repeat in the West, what my Palestinian friends were telling me, if I were to be in France, maybe my throat would be cut now or whatever. So even Islam, even Islam is not as fanatical the majority. For example, I quote them in, I forgot which of my book I think, Puppet and the Wharf, the best Christian jokes, making fun of Christianity. I heard them from Palestinian Christians. There are still five percent among Palestinians who are Christians and so on. You know, for me, and that's for me, you know what's the problem for me with politically correct sense. The problem is that, first, it tries to regulate what cannot really be regulated

because it's a domain of ambiguity, irony and so on. And what they don't get in some of them is that you can appear to follow, you can formally follow all the politically correct rules, but really you can still remain, your message between the lines will remain aggressive, racist, and so on. And on the other hand, you can make statements which may appear to be aggressive, but everybody will immediately see that it's an act of friendship. For example, and this is not yet, I think, in my pandemic two book I've written now, didn't you have now on the East Coast, there where you are a bit scandal with that. How do you pronounce the name of that old painter? Buston Buston. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Philip Buston. You know what shocked me there,

the argumentation that some people, although she definitely was an anti-couple of slave, definitely was against. And everybody knew that she was against, but nonetheless people claim some people may not be ready to understand this message properly and so on. This is political correctness at its worst. Yes, this fear that, and you know that Slovene, at some point they were more famous than now relatively famous, cart military, not even punk rock, like Leibach in Slovenia or Rammstein in Germany, you know, some of my liberal friends expressed this worry. We know it's ment ironically, blah, blah, but what if some people will take their imitation of actually read to us seriously? Well, who are these people? Rammstein are well, one of their

heaps in Germany's links, links, links. Everybody know they're not only social democrats, they're for the linke, for the left party. So this is what is false about, but you know this fear which conceals a deep, a deep arrogance and patronizing attitude. You presuppose some naive ordinary guy who should, maybe he will get it wrong, he should be. So let's take the Gaston or whatever. Do they really claim that there are some people who will mistake this? And what he portrays is not, his paintings, I looked at them, they are not caricatures of black people suffering, they are ridiculizing Koklok slander. And I don't think anyone believes that, I think it's extremely cynical and I don't think anyone really does believe that. But they are cynical, they are cynical,

they're politically correct, they're cynical here. And now you've got that crucial thing. Maybe, now I am going back, maybe the two of you are not so totally stupid because you said the correct thing. Sorry, I always dig my own grave because now you said something wonderful. It's not just that they, those who oppose this are too severe and so on. No, I think there is something deeply cynical as you said in this politically correct radicalism. The problem is this, not that they are too fanatical because you know what shocked me many times when I spoke with Dennis, but you also must experience it because you maybe have the same problem of me. You are not purely American, you are white, but okay, you're not purely American, but you are still white and so on,

not black, Asian. So I noticed how, because you are still considered not the real other, to whom we should behave in a totally respectful way, they, they, politically correct white minority, they are allowed to treat us in a way that if they were to treat like these blacks or Asians, it would be immediately considered racist, you know, like how many times 20 years ago I heard, when I told a simple joke, maybe in your premium, you can talk like this, but not here, like, you know, all of a sudden primitive Balkan and so on and so on. It's, it's so again, whenever I hear a politically correct stance, I ask, look at their own unwritten hidden rules, you know, the first thing you discover is that a friend of mine told me a wonderful story,

you know, she was at Syracuse, University Syracuse. Right, it's in upstate New York, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. It's a cuckoo or male, I think, doesn't matter. He was there and he was part of a committee deciding on a job and then found the rules that a wealthy black guy was basically in advance to get that post. But there was also a very poor immigrant lady from Korea, poor, and she also applied for this job. And my friend said in that committee, wait a minute, okay, we have a black guy, but on the other side, also foreigner, Korean and poor woman, a woman and so on. And you know what he was told, sorry, she's not the right minority. Well, at least you're honest about it. Because usually you are not allowed to,

that's what I've written a lot about. I love rules which hold absolutely, but are not allowed, the rules themselves, which decide what is prohibited are prohibited. You are not allowed to proclaim them publicly. And this is, for example, you must know this story, I use it all the time. This is what I found so crazy about Stalinism. It was prohibited to criticize Stalin, but it was even more prohibited to say publicly, in our country, you are not allowed to criticize Stalin, you are not allowed to criticize Stalin. Absolutely to obey it, you know. I'm sorry, please go on. No, no, no, go ahead. In pandemic two, you made a kind of like, you talk about the how Trump broke the rules when he publicly commented on the fact that First Lady Melania was not ever flatulent

in front of him? Like she never... Not only this, you know what I found? I think I have a paragraph in the book. Trump is always reproach for lying, you know, all these texts immediately. How many lines did he, how many lies, sorry, did he say in his last interview. But what really shocked me is how, and here I think Trump is even more terrifying, how he tells the truth when it's too, it should have been too obscene to tell it. When he began to underfund post, you know, and the interpretation was she wants to get less post votes because more Democrats, so that less Democrats would vote, and they asked him, and he said openly, because I want less Democrats to vote. Yeah, yeah. It's like saying that she's the wrong kind of minority. Trump is here. What do you think,

frankly? Okay, we are a couple of days to the election. I think he still has a chance to win, if you ask me. Yeah, well, we weren't, I was going to avoid talking about the election since... No, let's avoid it. Okay, okay, okay. No, no, no. But if you have something... Yeah, we can talk about it now that you bring it up. I don't have, I know, because I would have learned, I should learn from you here, you know. I don't have any, I just don't get it, why, you know, as if, is there some Trump, Trumpian secret circling Democratic Party, was it their decision to get somebody like Biden as a candidate? You know. Yeah, yeah. Come on, because they want Trump to win, yeah. Yeah, but how is it now with,

you know, okay, let me tell you another totalitarian thing, which is not yet in my book. Okay. You know, when I had in my pandemic one already, this idea of it, a new chance for communism, blah, blah, people last, are you totally crazy? Don't you see the big capital, Jeff Bezos, blah, blah, got even the return and so on. I agree, but my answer was always, wait, the pandemic is not yet over and point to, even if we somehow control, cope with the pandemic, who knows what we'll follow. For example, I follow all these things which are happening, what is happening now on the Arctic Sea, the north of Siberia. With the permafrost, the permafrost. The temperature, this sun was over 30 degrees

Celsius, over 100 Fahrenheit, totally unnatural. Then the metal gases are now coming out. I mean, my idea is, I don't think communism in the sense of a new communist party, but I mean something much more desperate. In Europe, we are clearly approaching it. Listen, I follow here, maybe you read my last text, not in the book Earth. My friend, although I have differences of opinion alone, but you who propose these four features of a radical communist regime, no? But we are approaching them today. One is voluntary. Screw objective economic laws, just impose your will. I don't mean forced to do it today with economy. We simply need respirators and so on. And you cannot fight, okay, maybe with vaccine, with, okay, we will get profits. But basically,

no, you have to break, you have to act in a voluntary state. Otherwise, people will have stopped and so on. Second thing, egalitarian justice, of course, we will treat. But somehow everybody accepts that the vaccine should be a test. It should be available to everybody. It's technically a monstrosity to claim just that strata or part of the population should survive. The third thing now seems to be more problematic, terror. Yeah, we need terror, of course, not in the fascist or Stalinist sense, but in the think of not only control, but wish blowers denouncing and so on and so on. And the last thing, trust in the people. Yes, you have to trust the people. It's clear that the state apparatus cannot do everything. So, of course, those in power

are trying successfully to twist the pandemic in that direction. But I still stick to my analysis that pandemic was a heavy blow, even death blow to capitalism. And that here, I follow my good friend, Yanis Varoufakis, that what is now happening is that, you know, people tell me, you are crazy, no revolution, the same system you call, no, but capitalism is already changing. Do you know what radical changes are happening now to capitalism? Not because of any radical revolutionary movement. Just as Varoufakis told me, if you read about two months ago, when it was announced how unemployment exploded, the economy, the greatest recession after early 1930s and so on, stock markets went up. So financial relations follow their own

path, which are now almost totally disconnected from profitability of actual capital. And so things are changing so radically, a new form of capitalism is already emerging. That's my fear, sorry. Yeah, no, I mean, but what that says to me when financial markets are totally unglued from economic reality is that the vast majority of people are obsolete to the global elites. I mean, I think like you touched on this, I was actually really pleasantly surprised to see you touch on this. But in the book, you say essentially how the antithesis of black lives matter is no lives matter. But you know, ironic, ironic. Yes, yeah, of course. We have the same joke here on the next one. I like this idea of a triad, you know, all lives matter. Black lives matter. No, black

lives matter, all lives matter, and then no, but you know, I elaborated it because I will use it again in a different way. You know, it won't sense. It's a wonderful paradox. Can I go a little bit into not to heavy philosophy? Because the paradox, this is the best way maybe to explain what handle meant by concrete universality. How the universal statement, all lives matter, is really a particular one. You pretend to be universal, all lives matter, but you really privilege white lives in this problem. Why? And here I develop it very simply because in every historical situation, there is one form of racism, which is determining the predominant one. And you shouldn't legalize it like it's absurd to talk in of racism in Nazi Germany without focusing on

Jews, on anti-Semitism. Because this is the forum. And in the same way today in Israel, it's absurd to fight racism without mentioning Palestinians. And in the same way in the United States today, it's absurd to fight racism without mentioning blacks. So yeah, if you are just universal, you are really particular. But if you say black lives matter, not all lives matter, you are really universal. Why? Because anti-black racism is really the model, the structural matrix, whatever you put it, of racism. And next thing, why then, Comrade Stalin has to enter, why no lives matter? Because I disagree here with George Agamben, who said we are becoming just science-controlled survival machines and so on. No, no, no. I think that those who fight

most heroically against the pandemic today, it's very horrible to dismiss them as just obsessed with survival. Sorry, if you fight against COVID, paradoxically as it is, quite many people. I lost some more friends, Dr. Skirin Slovenia. They are ready to risk their life for it, my God. No. Struggle against COVID cannot be, it's also a struggle for dignity. It's also a struggle for justice. It's not just this cheap survivalist, biopolitics, just numbers matter and so on and so on. So it's a much more complex situation. Right, it's about impendemic too. Impendemic too, yeah, you talk about how COVID, ecological disaster and racism are all kind of connected and comprised of the bigger existential problems. And that is crucial because I'm not saying anything original if you say this,

but you must also know how the whole strategy is. Okay, no, I put it like this. I think a couple of days ago, Paul Krugman had a nice commentary in New York Times when he referred to Freud without knowing it. You know that famous joke quoted by Freud that I used so many times, the paradox of the broken cattle, you know, you borrow from a friend a cattle, you return it like you return it to him broken and then your defense says, I never borrowed a cattle from you be when I returned it to you. It was still full, not broken and see it was broken already, but you gave it to me. And that's the argumentation. COVID is exaggerated, it's not a serious problem. Even if it's a serious problem, we are doing the best we can. And see, remember a couple of days

ago, some White House representatives said COVID cannot be controlled, it's just an epidemic, and so on and so forth. You know, it's important how they try to deal with it and what they try to prevent is precisely to see the link between pandemic and other, how pandemic is linked with our global way of life, with ecological problems, with other problems. It's crucial to see this, but I don't know how this in the United States, there are also, even in Europe, the typical conservative reaction is yes, COVID is serious. That's why we should focus on it and forget a little bit about ecology and so on and so on. They use it very manipulatively. Or let's forget about, I don't know, racism about everything else and so on and so on.

And this is the big struggle today to make people, but it cannot be done just by saying this. In practice, people should experience the link. Again, as the one with whom I don't agree often, Bruno Latour, the French philosopher, how he said COVID is just a dress rehearsal for global warming and other ecological catastrophes coming. Yeah, I have a question for you on that note, because in pandemic two, and actually in pandemic one, you make a point that's very well taken, that we need a kind of global disaster communism, global coordination that exists outside of the coordinates of the market, the values of the market. And I was thinking about a point that you made earlier about how we can imagine nearing

the singularity, but we can't imagine an increase in the marginal tax rate. And the example that you specifically in pandemic two is, let me look at it here, Elon Musk's neural link project, which talks about like wiring everyone's brains, but does not in any way address the more obvious urgent material conditions? But I think that's concerning neural link or in general the idea of wired brain, no? What I try to prove there, it's not just that it's utopian, because you know, at a certain primitive level, it's already done. For example, I read from a friend of mine, he emits the news in China, no? In many elementary schools there, it's wonderful.

Children had to wear a kind of a metal ring, which at a very primitive level, this measures their brain activity, so that the teacher is not even obliged to look at students. And let's say you are dreaming, you are not following what I'm saying, immediately show us your diminished brain activity on my soul. But what interests me is another problem, and there I think COVID enters. The secret dream, not so much of Elon Musk, he's the red pill COVID denial, more or less, but others like Bill Gates, one is us. This idea that we should prepare for new social life where there will not be a lot of social contact, physical bodily contact, we should get used to bodily distance. And so the idea is literally

the matrix one. Ideally, you are in your own bubble, like in the matrix, but our minds are directly connected. And I just tried in the book of mine, Hegel in a Wire Brain, to imagine what does this mean? Like what are we, when Musk says it's stupidity, but it's clear where he is aiming at. Ten years from now, we will no longer need language, language will be just an eccentric aesthetic curiosity. But what is he talking about? Doesn't he get it? That not just poetry, but all our interface, all our creativity even explodes in these open moments when cut a long story short, when you say something and you are not even aware what you said, you are as it were surprised by your own statement by saying more than and in a little bit obscene

way I go into that. I even cannot imagine in this directly wired brain what would have happened of sexuality, you know, like all the erotic interplay disappears, our brain is connected. You get each other and we immediately see, would you do it or not? Okay, but it's a terrible flat work. The loss of seduction is what you write. Yeah, but I don't mean seduction in this bail patriarchal way, you know, in this sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because people will again tell me then, oh, you have some masculine dreams and so on. No, no, no. What I mean is just this, that I believe in the power of that everything that you say implies something on said, I'm well aware how racist and so on know how to use this. You are not directly racist, but the

implications are, but there's another idea that came to me, I developed it, it's not yet in pandemic books. Namely, how it's really, how it's simply not true. Those who complain that like George Agambe, that with the pandemic, we are doing social connectivity and so on. No, we are just maybe up to a point losing bodily proximity with others. But socially, we are, as you said at the beginning, we are more connected than ever to digital media and so on. That's the paradox. At some level, body, we are alone. But at the same time, it's because our digital media controlled phones and so on, we are more socialized than ever. So the paradox is that precisely today in the pandemic time, where people spent an enormous amount of time

on the web and so on, it may be more difficult than ever to be really alone. Yeah, I think we've become like more codependent or something. But to that point, I mean, you talk, like if you look at a lot of these kind of utopian proposals, they're almost dystopian in the sense that they kind of reveal an inability or unwillingness to do anything. Like on a mundane level, you see this even on the left with all the calls to like abolish the police, abolish the family, abolish all these institutions. And in pandemic two, you quote, braked as saying, it is the simple thing that's hard to do. And why is the simple thing the hardest thing to do? Because that's the problem. Because now I will sound like, incidentally,

Brecht says this, you know, in which poem? In Praise of Communism. No, it's basically a variation of how we are often not even aware. For me, capitalist ideology is not some ideology developed, deployed in complicated theoretical statements. It's our everyday life. And we simply accept it that certain things cannot be done. And this is for me what fascinates me, this everyday power of ideology. Ideology for me is not, that's why it's not, again, something that you put in textbooks. That's why for me, one of the definitions of ideology is that you claim the ideology is dead. No, the strongest bit of ideology for me was 1990s, the Fukuyama era, where we thought we are... The end of the story.

And that's why I see maybe I'm too madly optimist. As many commentators, I quote them in pandemic two, even in one, I think, noticed how, nonetheless, with the epidemic, things which were unthinkable a year ago are now accepted. For example, just imagine somebody proposing a year or two ago. We need more socialized developed healthcare. We need some form of basic income and so on and so on. Now it's accepted. Of course, those in power try to manipulate it in all possible ways, but they're already reacting to something that it's becoming more and more evident. So I think I wonder what will happen now in Europe when things are really going bad, most of big European and small European states moving back to a quarantine and so on and

so on. Everybody knows that it will be, not to mention health problems, new suffering. It will be also a problem of an economic problem. It will be terrible, but what interests me most and these are my favorite parts of the book there. It is also a kind of existential, almost, I would say, philosophical problem. I don't think all people who protest masks are just crazy Trump nationalists. It's something horrible that is happening. Our basic mode of everyday life, communicating with other socializing and so on and so on, is interrupted. And it is a horrible thing. We will really have to construct a new normality. And this will bring all my psychiatrist friends are telling me tremendous social, sorry, mental health problems. I don't know how it is in the States, in Europe,

they are exploding and I'm talking about real numbers. An Italian scientist told me the high school children in Northern Italy, around 50% of them have serious mental health problems and so on. In the United States as well, yeah. In the United States as well, yeah, the pandemic has had tremendous mental health effects on people. Yeah, I don't know. I think that the special problem of the United States is that almost nowhere in the world is this conflict between, okay, Trump is not a COVID denier, but he is a guy who thinks COVID shouldn't be considered as too important. Some kind of normal life should go on. I think that precisely this attitude of let's save our normal daily life. Unfortunately, in the long term, it will bring

us to a new barbarism. And I think- Yeah, and I think especially if you think of what they're really saying, which is let's save the economy and the kind of push to return to normality, right? Sorry. It's not COVID. If it is COVID, then I have COVID already for 10 years, because if you look at my old recordings, I did this all the time. Now, somebody already mocked at me, but you must have had COVID already for 10 years. Okay, yeah, yeah. That's very important what you said. I read some good economic analysis, some of them you were conservatives, which said that even from the economic standpoint, a quick early lockdown is best again, even for economy. If you postpone it in the long term, it will be worse also for economy. Look how they did it. Horrible example. I don't

know who follow it for us, but China. And so that not just China, so that you will not accuse me of propagating communities there. You know, Chinese don't want to hear this. You know, which country is the true miracle? Taiwan. Okay. Big country, practically no patient, no, no, no COVID. Okay, 30, 40. I don't know. It's incredible. Vietnam. Cuba is not doing so bad. New Zealand, Australia. Australia had an outbreak. They contained it and so on. But again, true. Quick, fast quarantine. Even in Israel, now it worked. They were for three weeks or what? In strict quarantine, it's getting better. But I admit it, this is a real problem. As I'm saying, all again and again, a strong part of what we consider ordinary human dignity, you proudly

display your face, you communicate openly with others, you know, will be lost. Now, does this mean the end of humanity? I think no. You know why not? Because Agamben, I'm friendly with him otherwise, but he follows this line. And he wrote recently a very interesting text. I don't agree with it, but it's very honest. Something like the house is on fire. This idea is that even if we are approaching total catastrophe with COVID, we should behave with dignity. Even if we see that our house is on fire, that our world is disappearing, we should gather the strength to go on as normal, communicate face to face, because then he, Agamben, goes into Levinas, Levinasian territory. The face, the other's face is our only contact

with the abyss of otherness, of personality, not just object. I disagree with it at a theoretical level already. If there is a place where you really go deep into another person, but you don't see his or her or their face, it's psychoanalysis. Freud was very wise here. And in psychoanalytic session, it's not face to face. Face to face is just the so-called preliminary encounters. Once things really start, no, the patient lies on the couch, you, if you are an analyst, sit beside him. Freud saw this very clearly, that face is at the same time, I will put it in the ultimate mask. That's why, not that I agree with, of course not with, I forgot the word, I called it, when Muslim women are covered, you know.

Haja, Nekab? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree with it. But I'm saying that, that, because the problem with Islam I have is, no, if they praise so much, some feminist Islamist that hijab enables you to retain your privacy, blah, blah, blah. Well, my answer is, it would have been good then if all some men were to be ordered to hijab, you know. Like, nonetheless, since it's only women, not men, no, you cannot, we cannot have this idea of, for sure, that the message of hijab is nonetheless, only men fully free being can show their face. But I don't fetishize, I don't fetishize the face. I always, this is an old paradox that I repeat in

all my books. The problem with masks is that, okay, not these faceless masks, but masks that you wear, wrong face, that they can tell more about you than your real face. Do you see that Jim Carrey moving? The mask? Correct piece. This mask can be more you than your stupid face itself, you know. Something that you repress, have repressed, can come out in a mask. When he puts the mask on, he becomes his shadow, his true self. It's one of his best movies, if you ask me, you know. Apart from the utter vulgarity, dumb and dumb, but that's my private seat. I don't want to talk about that. On the question of a psychoanalysis and putting on a mask, I wanted to ask you about kind of like an obscure thing. Somebody a couple of months ago sent me an essay you wrote that was

an introduction to the 1986 Croatian edition of Christopher Lash's culture of narcissism. I don't know if you remember this. It's two orthodox, my reference there is Otto Kermberg wrote the big book. It's traditionally psychoanalytic, although it touches something in me as a person, if I may put it like this. I am a totalitarian, you know. I hate, I became like Goebbels and draw my gun if somebody says I want to express myself. Who the hell do you think you are? I'm not interested in you. This is my personal attitude. For example, if somebody, friend or even worse, not a friend, starts to tell me his or her or their private trauma, sexual experiences. I'm horrified at this. Keep the seat for yourself. I don't like this expressing yourself or whatever.

This is horrible. If we look deep into each other or me and myself, we know what you find. Some dirty horrible masochist egoistic system. In this sense, I believe in dignity as a mask. I think that's the Eastern way. It's the Eastern European way, which Americans find very difficult to deal with. I mean, in American culture, there's this whole kind of emphasis on telling your story that I also find very disgusting and manipulative. Yeah, absolutely. This openness is the ultimate manipulate. Yes, sorry, God. Yes, it is. But I asked you about Lash because he's a personal influence of mine. And I found that as I... Did you meet him literally or just the most? No, no, no. He died when I was like 10 years old. But whenever I talk about him, I notice that there's an unusual

and incredible resonance with our audience of young people who are... Yeah, because he touched something which was incorrect at that time. He saw what is flawed and wrong in all that GP expressionist culture and not only this, even Earth. My friend, an old guy who recently died, I'm not sure what he'd call it, James Harvey, the cinema theorist who wrote the best book on Ernst Lubick. He... As he dwelled without knowing him even, applied Christopher Lash to Hollywood. The greatest catastrophe was the actor studio, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Keith, you know. All that express yourself, you know. His favorite artists are Kerry Grant and so on, who are absolutely not expressive actors, you know. None of this show yourself, identify with and so on and so on,

you know. So I still find some people, you must have met them. They try to dismiss Lash as secretly almost neoconservative, whatever. Oh, Kymia. Yeah, but no, no, no. I'm absolutely on his side here. But my question is, how did you even kind of... Like, how did he come on your radar? How did that project come about? If you remember, if you don't, you can tell me. It's a totally crazy story, extremely superficial. A friend from Croatia told me it was still Yugoslavia, told me that they are translating Lash and I was still very young at that point and I was interested if people invited me and would I be interested to read the book and write an introduction? It's as simple as that. That's how I discovered him. And then I immediately fell for it and I even read some

Save Heaven or whatever, some heaven. Some of his other books and so on, you know. But I think that after narcissism, that he was what, when I was young in the rock music, we called One Sheet Wanderer. He said One Sheet and he never really caught up with it again. Well, he said the same thing over again. Yeah, he was like very repetitious, but it still kind of holds up today. Now I take this personally because I'm doing the same, you know. All my last books are struggling again and again with the same problem, you know. You're playing the hits. That's what people want. You give me hope personally because now I see how it's done. I will make stupid jokes, but as all my vulgar jokes are against myself. If I give you hope, then you must really be in deep

shit here. The answer to a student after some talk in New York who came to me and said, I will need a psychoanalysis, could you be my analyst? You are really mad. No, no, no. I mean, you give me a hope as somebody who wakes up late in the day and often repeats themselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no, no. This is my metabolism, too, and I think that has others of my friends, but still. Like, I'm not sure, no, no. I have the real heavy diabetes, you know, it. Yeah. And so on, which means I need a lot of sleep. So I need like from 1 a.m. till 10 a.m. is the basic nine hours. It's very sad. And then, and then the fourth nap in the afternoon. But let me tell you something. I longed for when I was still a strong Stalinist 20 years ago. I had such

a strength, not physically, but like I was able to skip tonight's working if there was an urgency. No, no, I cannot even skip an afternoon. It's that, you know, but I am naturally a workaholic. You know how I see this. If a day passes when because of other obligations, blah, blah, I do nothing by doing, I mean, reading writing, of course, no, I feel strictly Protestant, theological. I feel guilty. So I am absolutely unconditional. But you know, when I'm happy, not after I finish a book, because this is the worst anxiety. I finish a book. And then I plan the next book and already start to write it. And then I can take a break. But because then it's late for my next work. Once you know what your next project is. I cannot even survive.

Well, let me ask you a personal question. What are you afraid of if you if you don't plan the next one? What will happen? It's interesting. I am not afraid to die. I'm afraid of dying. Okay. I understand the breath. I read the breath. When she knew the death was approaching, he asked not only to be burned, his body, but that immediately after death, a general doctor with a scalpel cuts his heart. He was afraid, you know, often it happens quite often. I discovered doctors don't want to talk about it. If you awaken a little bit, you can awaken. You are not really dead. You know, often this happens that somehow even hours after you officially die. How they know this, it's horrible. It's not a joke. When they move some cemetery, they open

the boxes, you know, the bodies move there and so on. So my fear is fear of dying, slowly dying, drowning and so on. And then the other thing I'm afraid of, for example, let's say that somebody who is really close to me, love, object, my son or whoever, would die, were to die. No problem for me. I would just immediately focus on one question. If both of them instant death or did they suffer long? I would probably have killed myself if they were to suffer long. It's an instant death. I would say, oh, let's go go and move here. But this idea is, this idea is my, my true core. If you ask me. I'm slow suffering death. Sorry, can we maybe slowly, slowly bring it on? I'm getting exhausting. Of course. Yeah, we can wrap it up. Yeah.

But tell me, can I ask you a mystery question? Yes. How do you survive? Is this your money? Do you get publicity? How do you? No, no, here I'm pro-capitalist, you know? I admire people who, like, you found your way. How do you survive? Does this red scare get you some money? Money? Yeah, this is our livelihood. Patreon. We use a website called Patreon where people pay us $5 a month to get an extra episode a week of the pot. Really? That's wonderful. And the Warmola works. You get in other idiots to exploit. How should I put it? Yeah, exactly. We're using you. No, no, that's, that's wonderful. That's, that's wonderful. Yes. Because, you know, here I'm not the stupid old style communists. No, no, there are levels. Don't you agree? Right. There are

levels. There should be a space for people who find their way. You know, who knew this very well, in contrast to Yeltsin's catastrophe. I think Yeltsin opened up the path to Putin, when he screwed it up economically. They can misknew it very well. Don't begin with privatizing banks and profitable oil companies. Begin at everyday level. You know, small initiatives, stores, producing, their capitalism works, my God. I'm not a naive guy, but I'm so glad that, and what did COVID do to you? We made a lot of money. No, no, no. You're not asking a private medical question. No, I understand. Yeah, no. But I mean, financially, was it good for you? It was good for us, yes, because lots of people like to listen to podcasts when they can at their

homes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And how did you overcome, because you're quite well known, I kicked you on Wikipedia and so on. How did you, was it never a problem to say that you are not a real Anglo-Saxon Americans? It was never a problem. It worked well. For us, I think it's kind of our shtick. It worked out for us because we started when the whole Russia gate thing was really exploding. Americans are very interested in, in Russians. Did you see the TV series? I quite liked it up to a point. I don't have time to watch them. Americans of two... I did. You know, which series I now saw and some of my friends, like Alenka Zubant, that the guys maybe really knew of us. Rake, not rape, key, like a rake, a key, an Australian series

about the crazy lawyer. And there are so many references to my Alenka Zubant, to Latin dollar stats, you know, like a guy, a lawyer says, this is not only nothing, this is less than nothing. Then another guy develops a point about Preston's purges. I think Sullivan's travels with comedy, which is as is taken from Alenka Zubant's book and so on. So don't underestimate Australia in the sense that they have good TV series there, you know. That's for me, civilization. I think serious civilization is defined by two things, that you have good detective writers and good TV series. That's why Iceland, Reykjavik and so on. I love them. My favorite place almost in the world. They have now Valhalla murders and so on, excellent TV mini series, you know. I cannot.

I was going to ask you for your recommendations. But you can get them, you know, believe Pirate Bay and so on. I met when I was the last time in Sweden, the guys who was the first who put together Pirate Bay. And he told me a wonderful story, how respect survives. She was put in prison for a couple of months, you know, because of Pirate Bay. And there, not only were the guards very respective towards him, but they asked him for autograph. It still, it still works, you know. Well, it's like you say in pandemic two about the Somali pirates, they had to turn to piracy because their oceans were depleted. I don't sympathize with them, but it's true. People often

think they don't know this, my God. How will your Belarus do now? Because one of the main sources was selling cheap Russian oil. No, no, that time is over. Well, there's a big tech sector. There's a big, there's a lot of tech IT workers in Belarus who are sort of at the forefront of the of the political opposition. They'll transition to a liberal democracy. You know, when I was the last time, some three years ago in Petersburg, but this is prohibited name. I don't know Petersburg. I only know Leningrad. When I was in Leningrad, you know, that opposite my hotel was something called Belarusian, a Belarusian food store. And I didn't

know, you know, what was the point? Belarusians did an ingenious thing, friends, especially, you know, the Crimea occupation, blah, blah, and then boycott of Russia. But Belarus was not under boycott. They opened out in all Russian cities, dozens of store, where you get typical Belarusian products, Stilton and Kamenberg trees, French pates, and so on, you know, and that's the point that it's back into them. And oh my God, that should survive. Look, I think that spirit should survive, I think. No, but sorry, if you are from Nagorno-Karabakh, do you have some latest news? How does it look? Azerbaijan is now again making an attack, no or how? Are you a pessimist there? How will it end? The war? Yeah, I'm a pessimist because

Azerbaijan is aligned with Israel. But you know what, this is the perversity. Azerbaijan is Israel and Turkey. Yes. And I mean, you know, like the there's obviously a historic quarter in Jerusalem of Armenians, the Hitler, the Holocaust based on the Armenian genocide is very perverted. Yeah. But this is, this is, yeah, but where is Putin here? Doesn't Armenia have a special military pact with Russia? No Putin is afraid to. Yes. Yeah. Well, I think this is a big problem. It's sort of like a proxy war of Russia and Turkey, as I understand it, for influence in the region. So I think, I think the fact that Russia, I mean, it gives me no pleasure, but I think that Russia, you know, Russia being on the side of Armenia is the fall work that keeps them from

being annihilated, essentially. So in just some good points, nonetheless, it's because of these that Azerbaijan cannot make a total attack on. I think historically, yeah, because I mean, the thing with Belarus and Armenia or Karabakh is that these are kind of totally forgettable countries that nobody cares about in the West. Yeah, but nonetheless, I like these small countries, even Georgia, Georgia, no? Yeah. It was very popular before COVID as a food tourism destination. Even in my country, Slovenia and so on. Italy and the Caucasus. These are nice countries, but how is Armenia doing very bad, not too bad economically? I think it's doing pretty terribly. There's probably very high. Oh my God, yes. Yeah, there's probably, there also, I think,

I've heard, I haven't been there ever because I'm from Moscow, but I've heard that there's also kind of like this burgeoning tech sector. People are like, young people are throwing themselves a headlong into kind of neoliberalization. Everybody speaks English in Yerevan, this sort of thing. Yeah, but nonetheless, what you mentioned now, you know, how often I mentioned Yerevan, Yerevan, my favorite city in the world, you know, Yerevan, radio Yerevan jokes, you know, they are among, you mentioned Yerevan, no, Yerevan. Isn't this the standard topic of the best Soviet jokes? Listener asks radio Yerevan. I only know the racist one. We can, no, no, no, but I know, like the one that I, all the time goes, you know, about

Rabinovic, you know, I begin even my book with listener asks radio Yerevan, is it true that Rabinovic won a new car on lottery? No? No, what's the answer? In principle, it's true. That's it. It wasn't a new car, but an old bicycle. And we need it was stolen. The formula there is always this one, you know, in principle, it's true, but no, right? But this is probably the mythical Russian Yerevan. No, it's this. We do have a great tradition. How is it in Belarus? Are there jokes about Batka, about Lvovkashenko, or it's too traumatic to make jokes? I don't know. I don't, I have some family there, but I that I'm not very close to, so I don't know what they, well, they call it the Slipper Revolution, because they started calling him

like that a gun, like they're gonna like, like the way you use a slipper to squash a bug. Extremely dirty politically correct question. If you are, I'm not saying you should be not gay, but lesbian, but hetero. Did you ever have sexual dreams? I hope not about Lvovkashenko's son. He's a very handsome boy. He's genuinely popular there. Maybe he was. I don't know. His son? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. But I find Trump's son barren to be also very, very beautiful boy. Yeah, but isn't it something like a little bit restrained? There were even rumors that, okay, we in Slovenia are proud about it because the myth is that Melania is speaking to him in Slovenia also. Because yeah, we've never heard him speak, so he might. I wouldn't be surprised

if Barron Trump spoke a little Slovenian. Yeah, although Melania ignores all Slovenians. They tried to get some statement from her and so on. They secretly hope that she will visit Slovenia, my God. I heard the rumor at Slovenia Embassy in Washington that she's totally under control. Like every public move, Trump people control her and so on and so on. He's heavily surveilled. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's a flattery. I find it nice when Trap says set about Kamala. Did you hear this? That she's not only a socialist, she's much worse. She's a communist. I was hoping he'd say she had a strong and developed upper body or something to that effect. Yeah, yeah. But I think this is not just an exaggeration, a joke. These titles nonetheless

define our reality. This perception, because in Trump's view, there is no liberal center. You are either for him or you are a socialist communist. It's almost like inverted Stalinism. Therefore, Stalinists, if you are against Stalin, you are a neo-fascist or whatever. No, it's horrible. Listen, I have to stop now. I'm sorry. Yes, we'll let you go. Thank you so much. Thanks for a little bit, and I hope that I will bring you some five-dollar idiots, you know. Yeah, I think you will. Can I ask you? You're very mental. You want to be honest. Did you at some point try to raise it to 10 or lower it and then find the optimum? There's a sliding scale. There's a sliding scale, so people can choose. Some people give us more money just for fun. Yeah.

Really? You should definitely support this fun, this type of humor, giving humor money. Okay, I really wish you all the best, all success. We wish you the best. Thank you. Don't make it up. Don't make me appear too nervous and stupid if you can do some benevolent censorship when I am stupid. Thank you very much, and go on, please. Thanks. Let's hope that we will survive this shit, you know. But in New York, we're a little bit better now, no? We are, yes. Yeah, but is it true that still, I mean, that downtown Soho and so on, that it still have that? It's not really alive. Yeah, but that was before COVID. A lot of the storefronts couldn't pay their rent, so it was already pretty kind of crap. It's different, but it does feel a lot.

Just in this COVID year that from Manhattan only almost half a million rich people moved out, you know, by houses in New Hampshire and all that long island area and so on, you know. Listen, all the best to you and survive. Thank you, Slavoj. How do I go out here? Ah, okay, I will learn. Kill it. Bye-bye, thanks. Bye.