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EPISODE LINKS:
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Dear Reader (book): https://amzn.to/2HPPlHS
Podcast (Round 1): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIk1zUy8ehU

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
3:25 - Conversation with Alex Jones and Tim Pool
12:10 - Michael's outfit
20:31 - Self-publishing a book
30:19 - The white pill
41:43 - What did the volcano say to his true love?
43:06 - Myth of Sisyphus
46:47 - Journalism failed to stop Stalin and Hitler
54:31 - Good Germans
58:27 - Richard Wolff
1:01:58 - Could United States have stayed out of World War II
1:04:50 - Trump Derangement Syndrome
1:06:36 - Nazism and Antisemitism
1:09:18 - Knock knock
1:15:58 - Putin
1:23:38 - The evil of Kim Jong-il and North Korea
1:32:10 - Dark humor
1:36:56 - Comedy is tragedy plus timing
1:44:12 - Interviewing difficult guests
1:53:44 - Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug)
2:10:02 - Violence under anarchism
2:25:36 - Ayn Rand
2:28:45 - Secession in United States
2:38:24 - Politics over next 4 years
2:45:52 - Mars
2:49:55 - UFOs
2:52:50 - Psychedelics
2:56:46 - What is love?

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System, there's not a deep intellectual discourse what I mean, but if you were to try to be on stage with the Jordan Peterson, to me the brave thing now, like it would be to argue for communism.

I certainly wouldn't be willing to do it.

I don't have enough, I don't, first of all, don't believe it, but second of all, it's just a very difficult argument to make because you would get so much fire, which is why I like Richard Wolff.

He's 1 of the people who is quite rigorously showing that there's some good ideas within the system of communism, specifically saying that attacking more the negative sides of capitalism.

So saying that there is, that capitalism potentially is more dangerous than communism.

I mean, I disagree with that, but I think it's a...

I love how something is like, we've got a body count of 60 million, but this, everything is, and potentially, you know, like water can drown everyone on Earth.

Well, I think nuclear weapons are bad, but nuclear energy is good.

Sure, well, nuclear weapons also can be good.

You can easily make the argument, which I don't know that I subscribe to, that nuclear weapons prevented boots on the ground war.

And it would cause them to be much more contained.

And they're also quite effective at changing the direction of an asteroid that's about to hit Earth, as I've learned from a movie.

And they're actually useful, as Elon Musk has claimed for prior to colonizing Mars, making it more habitable.

But yes, but I guess what I'm saying is there's place for nuance and there's some topics so hot like communism where nuance is very difficult to have.

And I feel like with Nazi Germany, it was a similar thing at the time.

You wanna talk about Jeanette Rankin, who was 1 of my favorite people?

So Jeanette Rankin was the first woman elected to Congress.

She was elected before women's suffrage was passed the constitutional amendment for Montana.

She was 1 of a handful of people to vote against the US going into the great war, which was the right call at the time.

She was a pacifist Republican as well, coincidentally.

She lost her seat, ran again in, was it 1940?

Got the seat again and was the only person to vote against getting into World War II.

Jeanette Rankin was the 1 person, and she said, you can no more win a war than you can win a hurricane.

So she's 1 of these interesting, and talk about bravery.

You're the 1 vote after Pearl Harbor to say, we're not doing this.

And I mean, the pressure she must've been under at the time is, And of course, many people are not interested in hearing her perspective.

She's crazy, she's evil, blah, blah, blah.

It's also funny, someone on my Twitter, when I talked about her goes, maybe she had Hitler sympathies.

Do you think there's an argument to be made that United States should not have gotten involved in World War II?

The argument, there's a, I talk about this in the New Right.

So, on internet circles, there's something called Godwin's Law, which means the longer an internet conversation goes on, the probability someone gets compared to Hitler becomes 1.

In certain new right circles, the longer the conversation goes on, the more likelihood that the argument will become, we should have ended World War II also becomes 1.

And the argument is at the very least, stay back, let Hitler and Stalin kill each other off, and then go in and knock off the weak 1.

And you're going to be saving, destroying 2 nightmare systems.

And I think that's an easy argument to make.

Now it's hard to pull off after Pearl Harbor, but in terms of strategy, I don't think that's a tough sell.

I mean, that's what I was saying, after Pearl Harbor, how are you going to sell it to the people?

The argument is blah, blah, the Holocaust.

The Holocaust, there's no scenario where that doesn't happen really, unless you're going in way earlier.

But even so, Hitler had said, if the Jews launch another war, you know, we're gonna wipe them from the face of the earth.

So the Jews are being held hostage by Hitler as an argument for this.

Another thing he did, which was, you know, diabolical, is in order to make it that people could not accept Jews as refugees, if they were gonna leave Germany, they had to be penniless.

So now you have, it's not like they're coming over with money and they can take care of themselves.

No, no, they're gonna be completely destitute.

Millions of destitute people who don't speak the language, it's a tough sell.

do you make of this condition, Trump derangement syndrome?

And the idea of comparing Trump to Hitler?

And I'll give you an example, something parallel that I think more people should be regarding as despicable.

Earlier in 2020, we were all told that unless we were in Syria immediately, the Kurds were gonna be exterminated.

And if you're not for this, you're basically forcing another Holocaust.

None of the people who used this argument, we didn't go to Syria, the Kurds were not exterminated, they just vanished from the news, had any consequences for using this kind of a comparison.

So I think it's really kind of fatuous, and I think it's amazing that people think Hitler's the only tyrant who ever lived.

Like everyone who's bad is specifically Hitler.

Because you can tweet at him and no 1 comes to your house to kill your family.

Also the difference between Trump and many of his critics is that his grandchildren will be raised as Jews.

So that's also kind of a, and Deborah Lipschitz talks about this a lot.

The New York Times at the time, there's another book called, buried by the Times, which talks about the New York Times in the World War II.

Because the idea that Jews weren't white was a Hitler idea, the New York Times at the time, Salzburger, wanted to be against this idea.

So they specifically downplayed the antisemitism as opposed to the Nazis are being oppressive.

So the argument that you can separate Nazism from antisemitism is a historical debate people have.

And my perspective is, I think it's, I do not find it convincing that you can separate those 2.

I think antisemitism was essential to Nazism.

I think Nazism and Mussolini's fascism have very big differences.

Do you think antisemitism is fundamental to who Hitler was?

Or was it just the, so this is the interesting thing is like, was it a tool that he saw as being effective?

So why do you see those as intricately connected?

Could Hitler have accomplished the same amount or more without the Holocaust?

Yeah, because think about how many resources you had divert at a time where you have Operation Barbarossa with Stalin.

His generals, my understanding, told him this is crazy.

I mean, to draw Russia and her resources into that war, it makes absolutely no sense in retrospect.

There's a book about, I forget what it's called, where it talked about him at that point was just high all the time on amphetamines and that could have affected his thinking.

Yeah, there's a really good book on drugs.

I forget what it's called, but yeah, it's

But it was, I mean, scapegoating is a big part and parcel of the Nazi mythology, and this kind of 1 universal figure explain this kind of skeleton key.

I mean, that could have been the source of the hatred.

So like- But the communists didn't get Germany into World War I, like he said the Jews did.

It seems to me that the atrocity of the Holocaust is the reason we see Hitler

No, the reason we see Hitler as evil is because of World War II propaganda still.

I think that- Why, Like why would you say that?

Because I- The nature of that propaganda.

Because I think a lot of the problem for the certain type of mentality is Hitler didn't mass murder equally.

So as long as you're killing just 1 group, it's a problem.

But if you're murdering everyone equally, all of a sudden it's like, what are you gonna do?

So the fact, like you were saying, the Hall of the Moor is not common knowledge, the fact that Mao's 50 million dead are not common knowledge and Richard Nixon can be raising a glass to him in China, these are things that I think the West has not done a good job reconciling.

And the heart attacks will say, Frank, you for being my friend.

Do you think Hitler could have been stopped?

We kind of talked about it a little bit in terms of how to, what is the brave thing to do in the time of Nazi Germany.

But do you think, I mean, I'm not even gonna ask about Stalin in terms of could Stalin have been stopped?

But on the Hitler side, could Hitler have been stopped?

I think a lot of these things, a lot of luck has to play with it.

If you mean by like the West, it's very hard.

I mean, could, like, if politically speaking, there was a rise to power through the 30s, through the 20s really, I mean, like can whoever, it's not about Hitler, it's about that kind of way of thinking, that totalitarian control that always leads to trouble, and sometimes on a mass scale, could that have been stopped in Germany or maybe in the Soviet Union?

Well, I think this is 1 of the best arguments against radicalization in the States, which is how do you engage when you have like 30% of the population who are members of a party which is dedicated to systemically overthrowing the existing democracy.

Stalin gave orders that the communists who had a pretty sizable population, the Reichstag, that their target shouldn't be the Nazis, but the liberals and the social Democrats.

And they invented the term social fascist for them.

So instead of, they're just like jihadis, instead of taking their sights on Nazism, they set their sights on the moderates because they figured the choice between Hitler and us were gonna win.

And this was a huge gamble and they were all killed or had to flee, and the ones who fled were killed also by Stalin, so that's my understanding.

So this is an easy way where he could have been certainly heavily mitigated.

What about France and England, that it was obvious that Hitler was lying and they wanted peace so bad that they were willing to put up with it even after Czechoslovakia.

Like this is the anti-pacifist argument, which is like they should have threatened military force more.

But then the other anti-anti-pacifist argument is, if you're gonna, remember Barack Obama had that red line, if you cross this red line in Syria, we're gonna go in and Assad or whatever, it's like, yeah, cool.

So if you're a threatening force, there's the great song lyric, don't show your guns unless you intend to fight, right?

So it's very clear with free countries through what's in the press, whether the institutional will is there to follow through on these threats.

So I think it would have been very hard for Chamberlain to rally the British people to take on Hitler just after the great, I mean, the suffering that Britain's took on the Great War, they still, you know, obviously it means so much more to them than it does to us in the West.

Like why was Churchill able to rally the British people?

Why was he, like do you give much credit to Churchill for being 1 of the great forces in stopping Hitler in World War II?

I think he was very much regarded as this kind of the right man at the right time.

The expression peace in our time was Neville Chamberlain when he signed the appeasement with Hitler and he goes, we now have peace in our time, now go home and get a good night's sleep.

Because he's like, all right, he's going to stop here.

And it's not impossible that if you just gave, like if you gave Saddam Hussein Kuwait, it's not impossible that he's not gonna invade Saudi Arabia next or something like that.

But everything I've read, it's like, of course, it's not impossible, but when you're in the room with Hitler, you should be able to see like man to man.

Like to me, a great leader should be able to see past the facade and see like, yes, everything in life is a risk, but it seems like the right risk to take with Hitler.

Like it's surprising to me, I know there's charisma, but it's surprising to me people did not see through this facade.

I really hate the idea of hindsight in everything being 2020.

And I think it's a very good idea generally, not most thinking generally, not in this specific instance, to give our ancestors more credit than we tend to give them.

Because people often, here's a great example from another context, which is lightning rods.

People always talk about religious people being stupid and superstitious, and they weren't.

An example of this is lightning rods, which is every year, whatever town, the church was the tallest building.

And that's the 1 that always got hit by lightning and got caught on fire.

Now, what, it's a coincidence that it's always the church?

Now, they didn't realize, well, it's because it's the tallest and therefore that attracts electricity.

And in fact, when they invented lighting rods, this was a controversy, because it's like, well, how is God going to show his displeasure if now it's striking this lightning rod not burning down the church?

So a lot of times things are a lot more coherent than we give them credit for.

And again, Chamberlain, he's the head of a parliamentary party.

So he does not have the freedom in a sense that a Hitler would to be like, all right, we're doing this again, boys.

We don't know what it's like in the room with Hitler.

But I think you have to think about that, right?

Yeah, I can very easily see him in the room being very calm and charming.

And then you think, okay, the guy with the speeches is the act and he's putting on a show for his people and this is the real 1.

Okay, So let's take somebody as an example.

Let's take our mutual friend, Vladimir Putin.

I don't know why saying his name makes my voice crack.

What's it's a double blind engineering effort where I was not told of who my maker was.

I talk about him quite a bit because I find him fascinating.

Now, there's a really important line that people say, like, why does Lex admire Putin?

I find a lot of figures in history fascinating, both good and bad.

And the figures, just as you said, that are with us today, like Vladimir Putin, like Donald Trump, like Barack Obama, is difficult to place them on the spectrum of good and evil because that's the only really applies to like when you see the consequences of their action in a historical context.

So there's some people who say that Vladimir Putin is evil.

And based on our discussion about Hitler, that's something I think about a lot, which is in the room with Putin, and there's also a lot of historical descriptions of what it's like to be in the room with Hitler in the 1930s.

In the same way, I find Putin to be very charismatic in his own way.

The humor, the wit, the brilliance, there's a simplicity of the way he thinks that really, if taken at face value, looks like a very intelligent, honest man thinking practically about how to build a better Russia, constantly, almost like an executive.

Like he loves, he looks like a man who loves his job in a way that Trump, for example, doesn't.

Meaning like he loves laws and rules and how to-

And he's popular with his people, that's also gonna help enormously.

I'm talking about strictly the man, directly the words coming out of his mouth.

all the videos and interviews I watch, based on that, not the press, not the reporting.

You can just see that here's a man who's able to display a charisma that's not, like I can see, that's why I love Joe Rogan, is like you could tell the guy is genuine and is a good person.

And you could tell immediately that once you meet Joe, that he's going to be offline, also a good person.

You could tell there's signals that we send that are difficult to kind of describe.

In the same way, you could tell Putin is, he genuinely loves his job and wants to build a better Russia.

There's the argument that he is actually an evil man behind that charisma or is able to assassinate people, limit free press, all those kinds of things.

So what do human beings like journalists or what do other leaders when they're in the room with Putin do with those kinds of notions in deciding how to act in this world, in deciding what policy to enact, all those kinds of things.

Just like with Hitler, when Chairman is in the room with Hitler, how does he decide how to act?

Well, let's go back to my wheelhouse, which is North Korea, right?

So when your entire world is based on being against Trump and everything Trump does is buffoonery or kind of productive, the conclusion of your reporting is going to be pretty much given.

I was very hopeful that there would be some positive outlooks or outcomes rather of Trump's meeting with Kim Jong-un.

It looked like there was a space for things to go a bit better.

And Trump was under no illusions about who he was dealing with.

People pretend that, oh, he was kind of naive.

He had 1 of the refugees at his State of the Union, you know, lifting up his crutch.

The first thing he sat down and talked to Xi Jinping about in Mar-a-Lago right after he became inaugurated was North Korea.

Barack Obama said that when he sat down Trump in the White House during the transfer of power, he said North Korea is the biggest issue.

So I think a good leader, whether or not you consider Trump a good leader, has to be aware of, all right, I'm gonna have to have relationships of some kind, even if it's adversarial, with some really evil, evil, horrible people, which Kim Jong-un clearly is.

I don't think there's anybody that has a perspective that North Korean, Kim Jong-un or Il are not evil, right?

But with, in 1930s Germany, isn't it a little bit more nuanced?

Yeah, because Hitler hasn't done anything yet.

And he's just a blowhard and he's an anti-Semite, sure.

What about like before the war breaks out?

Like what about the basic actionable antisemitism when you're like just attacking, hurting?

We're talking about Kristallnacht or we're talking about the night of long knives?

Kristallnacht, so it's the night of the broken glass.

Yeah, yeah, no, long knives is when he assassinated a bunch of his people,

Yeah, so like when you're actually attacking your own citizenry.

Yeah, that was universally condemned, Kristallnacht, and that was very shocking, its level of barbarism to the West.

Because I think we still want to believe, understandably, that things aren't as bad as they seem.

We would rather, this is why the North Korea book I did, Dear Reader, is used in a humorous framework because it's like looking to the Sun.

If you stare at it straight on, it's very hard to do.

So you have to kind of look at it obliquely and then realizing the enormity of the depravity.

And again, pogroms in Russia had been a thing for a very long time, and there's a difference between, okay, we're gonna sack these villages and persecute people, and we're gonna systematically exterminate them.

There's still levels of evil and depravity.

So you did write the book, dear reader, on Kim Jong-il.

Dear reader, the unauthorized autobiography of Kim Jong-il.

So that's the previous leader of North Korea.

Well, no, this is intentional because it's a throwback to the dad.

So there's been only 3 leaders in North Korea.

So we've talked about the history of Hitler and Stalin, men like these.

I think it's important to understand that the history of those kinds of humans, the history of North Korea is not well written about or understood, which is why your book is exceptionally powerful and important.

So maybe in a big, broad way, can you say who was, who is King Jong-il as a man, as a leader, as a historical figure that we should understand and why should we understand them?

So I wrote Dear Reader by going to North Korea and getting all their propaganda, which is translated into several languages because the conceit is everyone on Earth is interested in them and wants to mirror their ideology.

I went there in 2012, I wrote the book, came out in 2014.

So Kim Jong-il is, though not an intellect, North Korea's version of Forrest Gump, in that when they write their history, whenever something happens, he's there.

And by telling his life story, it's in the first person, he's telling the history of North Korea.

So I wanted to write the kind of book where in 1 book, and it's the kind of reading you could do in the beach or the bathroom, you're going to get the entire history and know everything you need to know about North Korea in 1 accessible outlet.

And what people don't appreciate about North Korea is several things.

This was very systemic, what this family did to that country, where piece by piece they did everything in their power to hermetically seal it from the rest of the world, ramp up the oppression, keep any information from coming in.

And they're very creative and innovative in their style of manipulation and control.

So people in the West kind of get it wrong.

They talk about, oh, they talk about when Kim Jong-il played golf for the first time, he gets 17 holes in 1.

There's this 1 story about Kim Jong-il shrinking time.

And this is a story, and it sounds supernatural, but it's not.

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Michael Malice: Freedom, Hope, and Happiness Amidst Chaos | Lex Fridman Podcast #150