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EPISODE LINKS:
Michael's Twitter: https://twitter.com/michaelmalice
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Your Welcome podcast: https://bit.ly/30q8oz1
Books & resources mentioned:
The Anarchist Handbook (book): https://amzn.to/3yUb2f0
The New Right (book): https://amzn.to/34gxLo3
Dear Reader (book): https://amzn.to/2HPPlHS
The Idiot (book): https://amzn.to/3zdHdHH
Six-Word Memoirs (book): https://amzn.to/3zg51uv

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:23 - Truth, goodness, and beauty
10:50 - Save one life
17:41 - Jeffrey Epstein
36:36 - Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Clinton
42:49 - Christmas and New Years for Russians
49:29 - Russian cynicism and suffering
57:07 - Gift exchange
1:10:03 - Michael's move to Austin
1:15:30 - The Anarchist Handbook
1:22:02 - Ghislaine Maxwell
1:26:36 - Jeffrey Epstein
1:28:49 - Lex's move to Austin
1:37:36 - Elon Musk
1:40:46 - Writing The White Pill
1:45:33 - Camus
1:50:32 - Writing The White Pill continued
1:55:49 - New Year's resolutions
2:09:24 - 2024 elections
2:21:53 - National divorce
2:36:31 - Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein vs Sam Harris
2:45:41 - Conversation with CEO of Pfizer
2:59:14 - Anthony Fauci
3:04:44 - Advice for young people
3:14:46 - Wife and kids
3:20:12 - Immortality

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The following is a conversation with Michael Malice, his fifth time on this The Lex Friedman Podcast.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, here's my New Year's Eve 2021 conversation with the 1 and only Mr.

Dostoevsky wrote in The Idiot, my favorite of his books, through the main character Prince Mishkin that beauty will save the world.

These words, seemingly naive, and ultimately, at least to me, profound, what do they mean to you?

Well, Solzhenitsyn actually, for his 1970 Nobel Prize speech, talked about this line a lot.

And he thought for most of his life that was a silly line.

It was just words thrown out there because with all the suffering that's in the world, what has beauty actually ever done?

I- You're talking trash about soul genius.

And this is perfectly sets up this theme.

You know, I said, let's do this episode, start the new year on a positive note, give people hope, give people joy.

You and I both have friends who are models, right?

And it's a silly profession to some extent, of course, but...

But for those people who actually deserve to be models, when you look at someone who is a model and in some of their photos.

Now in real life they're not perfect, they have flaws, they'll be the first to admit it, so on and so forth.

But when you look at beauty, it is almost impossible to maintain a sense of cynicism and hopelessness.

Because if there's even 1 moment when some element of perfection has been actualized, if there's 1 moment where beauty has been realized and captured, you can't say, well, it's never gonna happen again.

I think I hate that cynical idea of like, I appreciate Solzhenitsyn's broader point that a lot of times people, there's something called a deepity, where people throw words together to sound profound and if you take it apart, like this is just complete gibberish.

I don't think this is an example of that.

I think beauty inspires and more importantly, it proves to you this is something that can actually happen on this Earth.

Plato, right, the Platonic theory of forms, like this world is imperfect, but these perfect forms exist in another dimension, and that's where our concepts come from.

You know, he was an early person trying to figure out where our concepts come from, and epistemology and so on and so forth.

But that is something that is real in here.

So I completely disagree with his analysis of that and I don't know if it'll save the world, but it's certainly a prerequisite.

And what's the point of fighting for your values if you don't wanna make the world a more beautiful place?

Well, it's also how you define beauty, because beauty could be just aesthetic beauty, it could be art.

Of course, art could encompass a lot, a lot more than just literature and paintings, it can encompass the full life, the full dance of life.

But then beauty could be something just deeper, like whatever that awe you feel, when you pause and hear the music, just hear and like look up at the stars.

Like for some reason when I see rockets go up, for me it's like science.

The awe that we're able to accomplish that as humans.

You know, that's funny, because there's lots of different schools of thought, like these people versus these people, and maybe vegans versus steakhouse people.

I think in terms of the sciences, and I guess you and I would be on opposite sides here.

You have the astronomy people versus the zoology people.

Like the big question is, would you rather spend 10 minutes on the moon, or would you rather spend 10 minutes in the deep sea?

The zoology that's down there, there's something I would encourage people to look up called Deepstaria, which is a jellyfish.

What's amazing when you watch these deep sea dives on YouTube is that the scientists, they're nature dorks like everybody else.

They went into this field and there's none of this maybe Sojourn Hitchin style cynicism of when they see an amazing animal in its natural environment exhibiting these crazy behaviors, they lose it.

So I'm not a rocket person, but I'm definitely a zoology person.

There's this plant called Areospermum titanopsoides.

I don't know how to pronounce it because they're always in Latin, you never hear them pronounced.

Areospermum, yeah, because it's a woolly seed is the genus.

The leaf, it's just always puts out 1 leaf, but the leaf is covered in little magnifying glasses, lenses, to make it maximize the sunlight.

So it looks like this little crystal seashell, it's tiny, it's like 2 centimeters, but it's just this amazing thing that grows out of the sands in South Africa.

Just to defend Solzhenitsyn for a second, so if I may read a couple

So he said, 1 day, this is how he introduces it, 1 day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark, beauty will save the world.

For a long time I considered it mere words.

When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything?

And then later he goes on to argue with himself in the speech as a older, wiser man now.

But perhaps that ancient trinity of truth, goodness and beauty is not simply an empty faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident materialistic youth.

If the tops of these 3 trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the 2 blatant, 2 direct stems of truth and goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through, then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of beauty will push through and soar to that very same place.

And in so doing, will fulfill the work of all 3.

In that case, the Sieske's remark, beauty will save the world, was not a careless phrase, but a prophecy.

Which of these 3 things are your favorites?

The blatant, too direct stems of truth and goodness, versus the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of beauty, which is how I see your Twitter account.

I don't think, I think there's certain depth

of beauty to be had in my Twitter account, that's for sure.

It's Twitter, there's no truth to be found.

I will of course point out that having this kind of distinction between the 3 things is, I think, kind of synthetic.

If not, I can probably make the argument they're synonymous.

In fact, I do believe that they're largely synonymous.

Goodness, that's such an interesting word, goodness.

I think truth is overrated in the sense that if something is a good story, The story doesn't have to be true or real in order to motivate you and move you.

A lot of times we can delude ourselves about somebody and that might actually serve a purpose to some extent.

If you have someone who's maybe a family member and you kind of ignore bad things that they do, there might be a reason for that.

Of the 3 which is most important, I think I would say probably goodness.

I would say of the 3 the most important is goodness because if you don't appreciate goodness, then beauty is just empty.

Bad people are often seductive or have a beauty about them.

And in terms of action, I think it takes a lot of skill and work to create beauty or to create truth or to express truth or to express beauty.

But I think goodness is a, it's like the easiest default state of being, just being good to others.

Yeah, like, you know, like, there'll be things where, these videos where like 1 dog is drowning and like another dog jumps in and saves it from the pool, like that to me is just really amazing stuff and is very moving.

So just to me, goodness means integrity and it means kindness.

And yeah, I think of the 3, that's what would be the 1 I pick.

I think people also have this idea, which is inculcated to them, especially by corporate America, that as you get older, it's okay to do the wrong things sometimes, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And so I think goodness gets rarer and rarer.

And I think people know better and they tell themselves lies.

But once you allow yourself the chance to just be good,

Like it's not like going to the gym and working out, that's a lot of work and it's great afterwards.

But goodness is easy once you get into the habit of it.

If you make it a habit, you're going to get the rewards of it and it's going to be easy.

The rewards of goodness, I think, are more immediate than the rewards of working out.

If you mentioned this quote on 1 of your live streams, I think, if you save 1 life, you save the world.

I think I remember reading about Paul Farmer.

I think his name is, he's a doctor that really, I mean, doctors in general, they kind of don't care about like what they're doing as a broad policy across hundreds of thousands of millions of people.

They just care about the human in front of them.

They don't care it's gonna cost, like in his case, to save 1 child, it will cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They know very well that their actions cannot be scaled, but they can't help but help the child in front of them.

And that's the way I kind of think when I try to do something positive, is will this help 1 person?

And I just kind of imagine a specific person, depending on the thing, that that would help with.

Like when I'm trying to create something, whether it's a piece of hardware or a video or anything like that, or educational material, lecture, that kind of stuff.

I don't know, what do you think about this quote?

I think it's more profound than it sounds at first.

The example I think of is Michelle Bachman.

She was a former congresswoman from Minnesota.

She clearly had crazy eyes, something weird was going on with her husband, but she adopted like 20 kids.

He's like a either Navy SEAL or Marines, whatever it is, Terry, I apologize, I'm not trying to be funny, and he adopts like elder dogs.

So going back to Bachman, it's like, yeah, you can say she's crazy, you can make fun of her politics all you want, and all that stuff's legitimate, but if you save a kid, give them a home, and you save them from the foster system, and you put a roof over their heads and make them feel loved and appreciated, it's really hard for me to sit here and call you a totally bad person.

I think that kind of thing is, Nick Surcey's another 1.

He adopted a kid and I said, I think you're a hero.

Like if you, there's some, you know, 1 of the things that's very hard for me in writing, as you know, I talk about this endlessly, this book, The White Pill, but writing about when people do hurtful things to children, it really is hard to watch.

And it's hard to, because when you're an author, you have to kind of empathize with the character.

You have to, where's this character coming from?

And that's the 1 that's the hardest for me to wrap my head around.

It's just like, this is something even animals know not to do, do you know what I mean?

Like dogs, when you see them around kids, they're very protective.

If the kid pokes their eyes out, the dog doesn't do anything.

So it's like, if you can't even get to that level, what kind of person are you?

So I think that quote is a profound 1, and it's an important 1.

It also means we're not all called upon to be Superman.

Right, you only have very finite ability to move the needle.

But at the same time, if you have actually saved a life, you can go to meet your maker, you did your part, you left the world a little bit better than you found it, and that's all you could ask anybody.

Also I think from a policy perspective, it seems we just do better when we focus on doing a small thing, helping 1 person.

Because it feels like when you start talking about communism and all those kinds of things, when you start to believe you could do good by a lot of people, that's where your mind somehow stops being able to do good by a lot of people.

That's when you start to think about utopias and somehow utopias goes to, feeds power into the brain to where it deludes you completely and then you start, it's okay to crack a few eggs to make an omelet kind of reasoning and you run into trouble.

It seems like it's much better even when you have the power and the money and so on, to achieve scale, to focus on 1.

Right, so if you have some kind of program, you know, in Austin or Brooklyn or something like that, and you can watch, oh, this is working, this isn't working, then you could port it out to other places.

But top-down helping is, at the very least, it's gonna be inefficient.

And also, I think it's a lot more useful when you're helping people when it's a one-on-one relationship because then it's less, I don't know, embarrassing, but certainly less something to receive help.

And you also feel, it's 1 thing if you get a check from the government, you know, food stamps, it's another thing if someone's like, hey, I'm gonna buy you groceries until you get back on your feet.

You have this kind of motivation, I think, for most people to be like, you know what, this person believed in me, I'm gonna make it worth their while that they believed in me.

Yeah, when I was giving lectures at MIT, there was 1, I was scared shitless.

And I mean, everybody, you know how students are and all that kind of stuff.

And they don't understand that you're human too.

They don't understand you're trying to pass as human.

But there's 1 gentleman in the audience, and he went to all the lectures, older gentleman, he was a faculty at MIT, and he just, without, very kind of nonchalant, just said, after the lectures, he would kind of nod at me and say, you did great.

And before, like 1 time he said, in a non-creepy way, I know this is gonna come off as creepy, he said, you look great today.

Like he said that in a, I don't, in the way, so he's like 60, 70, whatever, like he, in this, I don't know, it's in a wise sage way.

Because I was wearing a suit and tie, like I look like, you know when you dress up like a young kid, you dress them up for something.

So he was just like, all right, You're all dressed up, you look great, you got this.

I don't know, that has a lasting impact, that kind of pat on the back.

But I agree with you, cruelty towards other adults is somehow understandable, Because it's a world full of conflict, but cruelty towards children, it doesn't quite, I can't understand it.

I can't understand how you could act in a way that directly causes suffering to a child in front of you?

Yeah, that is, I don't think I've ever talked to you, this might be a good time to ask you about this.

What do you make, what lessons do you draw about human civilization from Jeffrey Epstein?

From just laying, Everybody thinks about different things.

When you talk to Eric Weinstein, he thinks about intelligence and like who, like Jeffrey Epstein is a front for something else.

I think about the weakness of grown men in the face of charismatic evil, which is like for me directly is MIT.

I didn't know, I actually was, I guess I was at MIT when Jeffrey Epstein was just at the very end, he must have been there.

I didn't know any of this, but it really bothers me that nobody was able to see through this man because he's obviously, what is also obvious to me is that he was very charismatic.

I try to think about human nature from this perspective directly, like we said, help 1 life.

Would I know a Jeffrey Epstein if he was in my life.

thing, I'm sure we'll talk about it, maybe not, it doesn't really matter.

We see things, you and I, Michael, very differently about a lot of things, politically and so on.

The reason I like you a lot, the reason I like the people I do in my life is there's a warmth, there's a kindness, there's a humanity underneath it all.

I don't really care what you believe, I don't care, like, I don't care what your Twitter says, you know, it's easy to mistake your Twitter to indicate that there's not a deeply human love for humanity in there.

I think I would be able to detect that Jeffrey Epstein.

I imagine, I hope I would be able to not detect that Epstein lacks that completely.

Even if he's charismatic and the humor he has, even if he is charismatic in the expression of curiosity for science, which he did, he was curious about not just boring minutiae of science, he was interested about the big questions in science, which I could see that become exciting to scientists.

Like, oh wow, here's a person who's thinking big.

That's always exciting, when somebody goes into a room and thinks about how do we solve intelligence?

How do we travel faster than the speed of light?

That's exciting to people, especially people with money, because it's like, all right, so we might be able to actually do big things here.

But you could see through the bullshit, the deadness in the eyes, I don't know.

So I think about that, because I feel like I have the responsibility for me as an individual to detect evil.

Okay, this is gonna be a whole long, this is gonna be on Lex Clips, but this is a whole long story.

So there was a scene in New York in the 90s called the Club Kids, and they would go out to different nightclubs at night.

They would all dress in really kind of crazy costumes, and the costumes were all like, like goofy and like, just like an angel.

They're all taking, you know, ketamine and ecstasy to all hours, this is kind of, rave culture was coming up in there.

And the head of it, and in fact, there's A clip on YouTube, I think it was the Jane Whitney show of the Club Kids and Gigi Allen.

Gigi Allen is a punk rock performer, hard rock performer who passed away.

And Gigi Allen was very aggressive and a crazy person.

My friend once saw him in a concert and he took a dump on stage, smeared it all over his face, grabbed the girl from the audience, gave her a big kiss, and as she walked by him, she just went like this, like, excuse me, like went to the bathroom.

So the audience is screaming at Gigi Allen because he's very visibly over the top.

Whereas you got a bunch of these kids dressed in these silly costumes, you guys just having fun.

Well, the head of the club kids, Michael Allig, ended up killing someone.

There was a kid called Angel Menendez who hung around with them.

He would always have angel wings and boots.

1 time there at Michael's condo with another drug dealer named Freeze, they got into a fight.

So everyone's going to the bathroom while Angel's body's there.

Michael got, they're like, all right, we got to take care of this.

Michael got extremely high on heroin, had like silk cutlery from Macy's, saw the body in pieces, put it in a box.

The cab driver helped them throw the body into the river.

And then Michael starts walking around Manhattan wearing Angel's boots and would tell people, oh, I killed Angel.

Now, because he was a super effeminate, over-the-top, like he would pee in people's beer kind of guy, everyone's like, oh God, Michael, like you and your stupid pranks.

But it was true and he got caught and he got sentenced to jail.

So I was in a store in Manhattan in Soho and it was 1 of those stores where you have all sorts of things for sale.

And I saw a painting and it said Malice, and I'm like, wait, what?

So my mom bought it for me for my birthday.

He was going to write a memoir called Alligula, which is clever.

I'm like, I want to see what this person's like.

Because on 1 hand, he's king of New York nightlife, this goofy person.

And it's also kind of ironic that Gigi Allen is like, maybe he's gross, he's not killing anybody, he's probably an accountant off the stage.

And Michael Aligatro did kill someone and then bragged about it tongue in cheek.

But meeting him, he passed away last December, on Christmas actually, on Christmas 2020.

Now, a lot of times you'll read these, like you'll take a BuzzFeed quiz, like are you a sociopath?

And it's like, oh, my feelings weren't hurt when I was mean to someone.

It's not a thin line between me and you and him.

Because when you're talking to someone like that, at least in this specific case, he was being very friendly.

And It's not like he was going to kill anyone or is a threat to me, but there's that sense like something's really off here.

And he was talking to me about how after he had killed Angel, he would just talk about it because he felt so much guilt, he just wanted to get caught.

It's like, no, no, no, what he was describing wasn't guilt.

He was describing just, he didn't like the knife over his head, like waiting to get caught.

I'm like, you don't even know what guilt is?

So as for Jeffrey Epstein, but the thing is Michael Alec was in a very low social position.

And the thing is when someone is powerful, very high status, and they do something, we are as kind of hierarchical animals, we kind of defer to their norms.

So if you're at a party with, let's suppose, either of us, and it's like a Jeffrey Epstein party, and everyone at the party is doing some sort of weird drug we've never heard of, we wouldn't really feel comfortable judging them because their norms kind of become the norm for that space.

The lesson for me about Jeffrey Epstein, there's a lot of them, because I think To me, the biggest moment was the Amy Rohrbach situation.

Amy Rohrbach was caught on a hot mic saying that they had all the goods on him, they had all the names, and that Buckingham Palace called them.

They killed the story because they weren't gonna get a Meghan Markle interview out of it.

So that, the willingness of those in power to do the wrong thing for the flimsiest pretext, I think was a big important lesson.

Also the fact that no 1 at ABC had any consequences for this.

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Michael Malice: New Year's Special | Lex Fridman Podcast #253