Take One Red Pill, Not the Whole Bottle

On New Year's Eve 2020, Michael Malice sat down with Lex Fridman in the inverse of the host's usual uniform: a white suit and a black shirt. Fridman opened with stolen knock-knock jokes and then asked about the ones Malice had actually delivered on air to Alex Jones — not once, Malice corrected, but something like six, with a runner in reserve. The punchline that stuck was the olive joke, which lands as "I love you." Saying that to the man famous for conspiracy rants and volume, Fridman thought, was a jolt you almost never get in a three-hour podcast.

Malice had been on *Infowars* while researching *The New Right*, and he credits Jones with more self-awareness and humor than the man's reputation allows. The jokes, he said, worked on several levels at once: a twist ending after a string of vapid puns, a way to hit Ctrl-Delete when the conversation started to overheat, and a dagger he never quite used. He had a Sandy Hook joke ready and kept it behind his back because Jones was being a good sport.

Tim Pool had called with a "top secret" plan to put Malice on with Jones. Malice said yes before Pool could finish the pitch. He thinks of himself as an agent of chaos, and of Jones as one in his own way, and the point of this new-media lane is that nobody knows what will happen — unlike a conversation with a corporate anchor, whose range you can sketch in advance. "If I'm going to be there, I'm going to put on a show," he said, especially in a year that had been psychologically rough on audiences. The propeller hat he once wore on Pool's show, and the knock-knock jokes, also alienate the people he does not want. If you cannot take ideas seriously because of cotton candy, a puzzle, or a motorized hat, he told Fridman, "you're not someone I want on my team."

Asked whether the trolling is philosophy or just what makes him smile in the morning, Malice said the bigger his audience has gotten, the more odd parental instincts have kicked in. He did not see that coming. For smart, ambitious young men, he said, twenty-four to twenty-seven was a brutal window: peers start marrying and checking out of the race, and if you are still finding your own road, nobody is in a position to guide you.

What he has now are listeners stuck in that window. Instead of watching them stumble, he can tell them it is not them — it is everybody else. He wants them to feel seen, even if the phrase is a cliché, and to believe they are the heroes and the rest is background noise. Being in that position, he said, is both flattering and humbling.

Fridman listed the faces Malice seems to wear: the thoughtful one, the man who wants to burn down power, and the light-hearted troll. Which of those matters most to that demographic? The combination, Malice said, like chicken Kiev, which needs the chicken, the ham, and the butter sauce. Young people need to see someone who has fought the fight and won, because it is very easy to be defeatist. The white suit is part of showing what winning can look like, even if it is not how he dresses on a normal day.

Fridman has been urged to write a book and would rather build products. He worries that writing changes you the way a certain kind of reading does: you start playing with ideas and cannot leave them behind. Malice agreed and reached for a metaphor. Writing a book is like being pregnant. It never escapes your brain. His next book, like *Dear Reader*, would be self-published.

Publishing, he said, is a cartel, and The New York Times is part of it. If you do not publish inside the cartel, it will do what cartels do and pretend you do not exist. The financial gap is ugly enough: a sale through St. Martin's might net the author a dollar; a sale of *Dear Reader* through Amazon nets six, a swing he put at about eighty-seven percent. What bothers him more than the money is the incompetence. He booked himself on Joe Rogan and The Rubin Report, asked whether there was travel money, and was told there was no budget. The only reason people get book deals now, he argued, is that publishers already know the author can market the book without them.

The stories get cartoonish. A friend on CNBC with Nassim Taleb was told Taleb wanted a copy at four on a Friday; the house was closed, so the author walked the book two blocks himself. Two other friends, Malice said, were driven to the edge of suicide watching a huge opportunity treated like a child being beaten in front of them. *Concierge Confidential* still had a typo at the end of chapter one in the paperback. Finish a manuscript in December with a publisher and you might see it a year later; finish it yourself and you could have it in February. He would accept glacial speed if the people involved were up at 2 a.m. because they loved the work. They are not.

People know the red pill and the blue pill from *The Matrix*. For Malice, the red pill is the claim that what corporate press and entertainment present as fact is a constructed narrative meant to keep unpleasant people in power and everyone else under control. His rule is that you take one red pill, not the whole bottle. Past a certain point you decide everything is a lie and lose the capacity to distinguish truth. In that scene he has watched a lot of red-pilled people become disheartened and cynical. He calls that the black pill: it is hopeless, and we are only waiting for the end.

Albert Camus is one of his heroes, and Camus treated cynicism as the worst thing. Malice does not see the world as finished, so he is writing *The White Pill* as a reply — not cheerleading, but a case for why the good guys *can* win. He is not sure they will. If your child were kidnapped and there were a ten percent chance of saving them, he said, you would not walk away from those odds. This is your country, your values, your family. Even a loss can carry the pride of having done everything in your power.

Fridman pressed on the definition of "good guys," noting that Hitler was presumably confident he led some. Malice's standard is simple: you want to leave the world a little better than you found it. Motivation is not enough. It has to correlate with reality, and you need the humility to check yourself before you start interfering in other people's lives. Leaders, like engineers, need steam valves so a local failure does not collapse the system. Joe Biden calling the Iraq War a mistake does not qualify, Malice said, because the staff around him includes the same warmongers who advised the war in the first place. A chef whose customer died would tear the kitchen apart so it could never happen again. A politician who feels no remorse for tens of thousands of dead is not, in this accounting, a good guy.

Fridman still gives Barack Obama credit for opposing the Iraq War before it started, when the political risk was real. Malice's comparison was sharper: in 2020, Tulsi Gabbard was the biggest anti-war candidate in the Democratic field and was marginalized inside her own party while corporate press did everything it could to pretend she did not exist. Twelve years earlier, the Iraq War had produced historic protests and Democratic landslides. Watching anti-war politics vanish from that party, he said, was both shocking and reprehensible.

The book did not stay the book he planned. He had asked his friend Ryan Holiday, who turns Stoic thought into contemporary bestsellers, whether he could do the same with Camus, and he meant to rework *The Myth of Sisyphus*. Rereading it, he realized he did not remember the book at all. The Sisyphus essay is a five-to-seven-page coda. The rest is Camus on the absurd and the absurd man in literature, much of which Malice did not care about. He decided to write the book he had remembered, and then the subject shifted again.

He is always yelling at conservatives, he said, for refusing to talk about their great victory: winning the Cold War without firing a shot. "You can't expect The New York Times to tell the story because the blood is on their hands." Instead of complaining, he would tell it himself — as a picture of the good guys beating the bad guys, and as a reminder of how bad the 1930s actually were, when Stalin's crimes unfolded overseas and people in the West wanted to import the experiment. You do not have to be a Republican to be delighted at the collapse of totalitarianism.

The structure is three acts: the 1930s, then a middle act that asks whether you would have given up if you lived then, then the 1980s. Sisyphus is condemned to roll a rock up a hill for eternity; at the last moment it falls away. Camus's takeaway is that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Malice's reading is that once you accept an absurdist existence and own your reality, it loses its bite. You can live more like a surfer. You will never control the ocean, but you can enjoy the ride. Try to control the waves, he said, and you are done.

Fridman asked what journalists and intellectuals should do when trouble is brewing and seeing it takes bravery. Malice pointed to two books by women historians. Deborah Lipstadt's *Beyond Belief* traces how the Western press covered the rise of Nazi Germany and, unusually, empathizes with those reporters. They had just survived the Great War, a slaughter of people made of meat meeting industrial machines. Plastic surgery, he noted, was a byproduct of the maimed who came home. Western propaganda had already painted the Kaiser as the most evil man alive. Hearing the same register about Hitler, even when it was factual, sounded like last decade's lies.

Information was scarce, Nazi Germany was not an open beat, and Hitler was good at looking like a man who wanted peace. The hot take of the day, Malice said, was that Jews being beaten in the street proved Hitler was *weak*: a statesman who could not control hooligans would not last. Then came Kristallnacht, a nationwide pogrom, and the news agencies were suddenly unanimous that they had gotten it wrong. Lipstadt also, in Malice's telling, dispels the myth that the West did not know about the Holocaust. They knew. By then they were already at war, and it was no longer obvious what else they could do to rescue those Jews.

Anne Applebaum's *Red Famine*, written by someone Malice calls a hard lefty, lays out what Stalin did with receipts. Starvation was enforced: if you did not look hungry, you were hiding food, so they came back at night, broke fingers in doors, or burned houses. "Kulak" quickly meant anyone with a piece of bread. A British journalist who got off the train a town early in Ukraine and walked in to report what he saw was mocked as anti-Russian. In the 1930s this was still, for many, socialism's noble experiment. Sydney Webb's line, as Malice recalled it, was that he had seen the future and it worked.

Eugene Genovese, in an essay Malice admires, asked what people knew and when. Concentration camps, famine, children taught to turn in parents for extra bread: his conclusion was that they knew from the beginning, every bit of it, and did not care because they were more interested in promoting the ideology. Anyone who thinks a Robert E. Lee statue coming down is the worst thing on earth, Malice said, has not looked at a much more limited information world in which Americans were told that the Soviets were the scientific future and markets had caused the Depression. People who insist things are as bad now as they have ever been are, in his view, delusional or ignorant.

One of Malice's favorite Americans is Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, from Montana in 1916, before women's suffrage was a constitutional amendment. She was a pacifist Republican and one of a handful who voted against entering World War I, which he still thinks was the right call. She lost the seat, won it back in 1940, and then became the only member of Congress to vote against World War II. "You can no more win a war than you can win a hurricane," she said. After Pearl Harbor, that lone no invited the usual charges: crazy, evil, maybe even a Hitler sympathizer. Malice's reply on Twitter was sarcasm. Yes, Miss Rankin was a big fan of Hitler. You figured it out.

Is there an argument that the United States should have stayed out of World War II? Easy, he said, at least as strategy: let Hitler and Stalin kill each other, then knock off the weaker one and destroy two nightmare systems. After Pearl Harbor that is a nearly impossible sell. On the Holocaust he was bleaker. There is almost no scenario in which it does not happen unless you go in much earlier, and Hitler had already said that if the Jews launched another war he would wipe them from the earth. He also made departing Jews leave penniless, which made receiving them as refugees harder. Comparing Trump to Hitler, Malice called despicable, and he lumped in the 2020 claim that the Kurds would be exterminated without an immediate Syria intervention: the comparison was made, the intervention did not happen, the predicted genocide did not arrive, and nobody paid a cost for the rhetoric.

Fridman still found it surprising that Chamberlain, in a room with Hitler, did not see through the act. Malice hates the cult of 20/20 hindsight and thinks we should generally give our ancestors more credit. His sidelong example was lightning rods. Churches were the tallest buildings, so they were the ones that burned; that looked like theology until someone noticed height and electricity. When rods were invented, some people worried about how God would show displeasure if the church no longer burned. Chamberlain led a parliamentary party and did not have Hitler's freedom to say "we're doing this again, boys." We do not know what it is like in a room with Hitler. It is easy to imagine a calm, charming man and decide the screaming speeches are the act.

*Dear Reader*, subtitled an unauthorized autobiography of Kim Jong-il, came out of a 2012 trip. Malice gathered the regime's own propaganda, which is translated into several languages on the conceit that everyone on earth wants the ideology. Kim died in 2011; the book appeared in 2014. In that literature Kim is North Korea's Forrest Gump: whenever history happens, he is there. Telling his life in the first person is a way to tell the country's whole history in a book you could read on a beach or in a bathroom. What people miss, Malice said, is that the hermetic seal was not overnight. The family ramped up oppression piece by piece, kept information out, and got very creative about control.

Westerners repeat the golf story — seventeen holes in one on the first round — but Malice prefers the one about shrinking time. Kim is in a meeting, taking notes, working, fielding an aide, while someone speaks. The speaker keeps stopping. Kim asks why. Because you are doing other things. No, he can do them all at once. Shocked officials explain that Kim looks at time not as a plane but as a cube; he can shrink it. A friend asked Malice if they meant multitasking. Yes. Kim Jong-il is the only person in North Korea capable of it. Elevating him required making everyone else incompetent, which has a purpose: if the leader vanishes, the country collapses overnight.

The Juche Tower, in the propaganda, was going to be the world's second-tallest stone obelisk until Kim suggested making it the tallest — an idea the architects had somehow never considered. At an amusement park he insists on riding every attraction himself in a drizzle before any elderly person or child may, while aides cry at his courage. Readers sometimes call the book satire. Malice says he downplayed the material; it is farce. Fridman played devil's advocate: comforting propaganda still slides into abuse because no one mind can run an economy. Malice's point was the missing steam valve. Most people cannot fire themselves. George Washington, allegedly, did. North Korea has no such mechanism, and as a result, he said, they had polio in the 1990s. He reached for H.L. Mencken: the average man does not want to be free. He merely wants to be safe.

Fridman asked about a guest Malice has interviewed twice: Curtis Yarvin, who wrote as Mencius Moldbug on the blog Unqualified Reservations. Malice said Yarvin invented the concept of the red pill. The writing is long, verbose, and bright, and the perspective is heretical. Things liberal democracy takes for granted he regards not only as wrong but as absurd. He does not start from what many people treat as the basis of American public discourse. Guardians of acceptable speech, Malice argued, have to make figures outside that window look as radioactive as possible.

Fridman read Wikipedia's race section aloud: writings interpreted as support for slavery and for genetic IQ differences between whites and blacks; Yarvin denying he is a racist while doubting that all races are equally smart, and calling the idea that high IQ scores make superior human beings "creepy." Fridman has read some of the work, finds Yarvin sincere and thoughtful, and still thinks he is not careful. Malice's criticism was adjacent. Carelessly saying something controversial is not the same as saying it on purpose, as a performer might. His guess at Yarvin's stance is that once you already swim in a forbidden worldview, you will be called a racist anyway, so nuance is wasted effort.

Fridman called that a cynical, black-pill way of seeing the audience. He is himself an example of someone turned off by the carelessness who thinks he should have been a fair target. If you walk with a careless person long enough, he said, you catch the carelessness. Malice did not want to speak for Yarvin, but he understood the "why bother" logic. He also noted that Wikipedia's emphasis on slavery is, in his view, disproportionate to the body of work. On his own show he takes the word "guest" seriously: people should not pay a cost for sitting down with him, which is one reason he will not platform everyone he is asked to platform.

Fridman had spoken with Yaron Brook about Objectivism and the claim that government should hold a monopoly on violence so violence does not get out of hand. Can Malice argue, with a straight face, that under anarchism it would not? One of his lines is that what get presented as the strongest arguments against anarchism are inevitably descriptions of the status quo. Warlords, the strongest taking a neighborhood, police happy to disarm people and then punish them for protecting themselves, cops standing down: we have that now, and you can only have it with a monopoly. If CBS stops broadcasting, you watch another channel. If the only channel goes dark, everyone is stuck.

What amazes him about Objectivists is the move where government is terrible at everything it touches, therefore it must run the most important things. Brook had also said, on Fridman's show, that no government has ever worked the way he proposes. Ayn Rand claimed to deduce from observed reality in the Aristotelian tradition. So the pitch, Malice said, is that all the data contradict the argument, and still we should build an imaginary state that has never existed. Hiring a lawyer already costs more than hiring a surgeon. The supposed knockout — two security companies at your door — is the international system. Countries live in anarchy relative to one another. A Canadian who kills an American in Mexico does not require you and me to invent the wheel; the three states already have a process, the way Sprint and MetroPCS settle a call, or insurers settle a crash, offstage.

Kosher certification is his everyday analogy: competing marks, a stricter U and a looser K, ignored by people who are not looking. Security could be certified the same way, with an app that warns you are leaving coverage, the way a toll road does. Scale does not impress him. El Salvador exists. Kuwait was invaded and larger powers kicked Iraq out because it was in their interest. The real indictment of the current order, he said, is that you are born on a patch of land and forced to have signed a pile of things. Being freer to choose the space of ideas you associate with would be actual anarchism.

Pressed for something kind about Rand, Malice did not hesitate. Her best idea is that your life has meaning, productive work is your highest value, and you should not apologize for wanting to be happy. You do not owe a random stranger a second of your time, including the people on social media who demand a debate. "Ayn Rand does not have all the answers, but she has all the questions." What he will not defend is her use of "selfishness." She claimed people mean "concerned primarily with the self." They do not, he said. They mean a sociopath who will not spend a second on a dying stranger. What she was actually attacking was the person with no self, no goals, a mind filled secondhand from the culture. She meant self-development and achievement. The word is false and needlessly off-putting.

America, Malice said, has been one country with several cultures from the beginning. If you despise Donald Trump or think Joe Biden is a clown, there is no good reason you must be governed by someone you disapprove of. We only treat that as a hypothesis because we have been trained otherwise since kindergarten. Social media, which many people hate, is in his view good at running ideas through an evolutionary process until they become more pure — or, if you dislike the result, more extreme. Different pockets with different worldviews are not really governable together. Masks, for him, were a clean break: not left versus right so much as risk-seeking versus risk-averse, each side convinced the other is insane and deadly.

He rejects the claim that secession can only be violent. Divorce does not have to mean beating your ex. Czechoslovakia split. Brexit was a secession. The American Civil War did not have to be fought; even on slavery, he argued, buying people out and moving them north would have been cheaper, killed fewer people, and perhaps been better for race relations. He has no patience for the conservative myth that the war was about states' rights. The seceding states said, in their own documents, that they were doing it because of slavery.

Trump, in this telling, was not an accident of history. People thought he was the river. He was the dam. His being gone makes things worse, because now the pressure really hits. Malice expected 2021 mayhem: Trump holding the Republican Party accountable to its base for the first time, a 50–50 Senate, a three-seat Democratic House majority, no governing coalition for either side. Fridman worried that division shouts over people who actually build things — Elon Musk, SpaceX, Tesla, the unglamorous work of making life better. What would eliminate the division? Secession, Malice said. Progress, he added, happens despite the people in power, not because of them. Let The New York Times have its country and Georgia have another, and let them compete.

Fridman lit up at humans on Mars. Malice would rather spend a week in the deep sea, among life forms that are, to us, literal aliens. As a thought experiment, though, a Martian government should grow organically: look at who the people are and tailor the organization to them, rather than imposing a template. That, he said, is how America was built. Jamestown tried communism, failed, and the next wave moved toward a freer market. Of course there are alien civilizations; the math makes the alternative implausible. His grandfather, a Soviet air-traffic controller, said they often saw things that did not fly like known vehicles. That is enough for Malice. That governments hold UFO information the public does not is, to him, indisputable: too many pilots, too many professionals, and both the Americans and the Soviets thought it was the other side. Full disclosure, he suspects, would trigger a demand to know what else was hidden, then a demand to see the aliens, then a charge of lying when the craft is all you have.

On psychedelics he is not sure we understand the mechanism. The explanation he has heard is that much of the mind is for blocking information, because too much data arrives at once; psychedelics tear the filter away, so you notice patterns you had trained yourself not to see. Joe Rogan popularized DMT, and even researchers, Malice said, lack a coherent account of why a compound that exists everywhere produces such specific, extreme effects. The CIA experimented with LSD, killed one of its own, and then shut the work down once it hit the mainstream, despite the lack of addiction. Fridman mentioned Matthew Johnson at Johns Hopkins and "heroic" doses of psilocybin, which appear to have no lethal dose and can stun even regular users. Malice said he wants to try.

What is love? When Malice was working on a book with D.L. Hughley, Hughley described a low-key depression: in an airport he noticed a woman in a red dress, thanked her, and realized he had not registered color in weeks. Love, Malice said, is that opening of the eyes — something you have never seen, and you want more of it. People you could talk to for years without running out of conversation are rare. People who will do right by you when you leave the room are rarer. How, in a year on fire, with Malice holding a match and smiling, do you bring more kindness into 2021? Be comfortable saying you want to be happy. If someone gives you attitude, put them at arm's length. Surround yourself with people who also want to be happy.

His friend Chris Williamson sent a photo from a pool in Dubai. It took Malice a week to notice that other people might have read it as a humblebrag. That thought never entered his head. He was glad his friend was having a good time and sharing it. Those are the people to keep: the ones who never default to resentment. What makes Malice happy is being self-actualized — able to be himself all day, with no small talk and no unwanted company — plus being an uncle to two nephews, and finishing a book that might give people hope. He was grateful, at the end, that he could walk into Fridman's studio without watching his words. "I feel safe here." Fridman closed with Emma Goldman: people have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.