Most Things Suck. The Good Ones Change Your Life.

Lex Fridman opens the Thanksgiving pirate special by pointing at a parrot figurine on the desk. Michael Malice, anarchist, author of *Dear Reader*, *The New Right*, *The Anarchist Handbook*, and *The White Pill*, and host of the podcast *YOUR WELCOME*, glances at it and names the species: a scarlet macaw, and not life-sized. Lex asks whether that means the bird is fake. Malice says it means the scale is wrong. They circle a Monty Python bit, then Malice drops a smaller bomb: he does not find Monty Python funny, not at all.

Pressed on what he does find beautiful in nature, he reaches for a phrase a friend coined: God's mistakes. The idea is that some animals look as if they were designed in disgust and dumped on the seafloor on the assumption that nobody would ever see them. His specimen is the peacock mantis shrimp. It has, by his count, eight legs, six arms, two punching or spearing claws depending on the genus, two eyes, two antennae, and a pair of ear flaps whose job he does not know.

Its punch, he says, can be as strong as a bullet. Divers call the spearing type thumb splitters, because a finger held too close gets cut to the bone. He kept one as a pet and listened to it bang on PVC pipe all night. They have, he claims, the best eyesight of any animal, seeing in something like seven different ways, and making eye contact with the thing is "absolutely terrifying." You can also eat them as sushi; people call them sea centipedes.

The shrimp died during a bad molt. He still has a pair of its punching appendages. He never had cats or dogs growing up, and he knows himself well enough not to start a tattoo collection either: the first five would become a hundred. The fascination is older than the pet. Space, he says, is dead. Growing up with books and nature shows, he found the ocean more interesting than galaxies, and keeping an outlier species at home just to watch it behave was the reward.

The Kim Jong-il tattoo bit is only a setup. The real social script, Malice says, starts the moment he answers "What do you do?" with "author" and then names a book on North Korea. Ninety percent of the time, the other person begins telling him everything they know about the country. It is not a quiz, the country is poorly understood, and he does not expect civilians to know anything. Half of what they say is inaccurate anyway, and that would be fine.

How often do they bring up Dennis Rodman? "100 percent." What he cannot stand is the cultural habit underneath the name-drop: now that the topic is on the table, a person feels obliged to dump whatever fragment they have. He hates the rule that everyone must have an opinion on everything. A fully respectable answer, in his view, is to say you know nothing about it and then ask to be told more. There are lots of things he does not know anything about, and he would like that to remain socially legal.

What Malice does find funny is absurdity, and he treats the Eastern European instinct to joke about dark material as a feature. Humor at a grim subject is already inappropriate, which is the joke. He cites Joan Rivers citing Winston Churchill: when you make people laugh, you are giving them a little vacation. That is why he wants his funeral to be a roast. Other people's sadness does not help him. If he brought anyone joy while alive, he wants to keep doing it after. Tell stories, make him the punching bag, pull him out of the coffin and turn him into a piñata. He does not care.

He compares comics to chefs. Bacon is easy. The skill is making obscure, ugly ingredients palatable. If you can take an emotional subject and still get a laugh, that is craft, and the laugh is relief for the room. The same instinct is what broke his heart in North Korea, which he visited in 2012. The people were not drones. They had big personalities and a strong sense of humor, and "there's nothing more human and universal than laughter," which is also free. His guide is still there. Everyone he met is still there. The border has since been electrified.

Lex traces Soviet humor to a deep literary education: you learn cruelty and absurdity from books, as long as the books are not about the current regime. Malice widens the frame. African Americans, Jewish Americans, and gay Americans are all over-represented in comedy, not because of magic, but because standing outside the bell curve gives you a different angle, and because when you have little to lose you can at least make one another laugh. His family ran a version of that ethic at home. He once told his much younger sister that she had been born with one eye larger than the other and needed surgery. Their mother and grandmother both played along. He was impressed: "this is a quality family in this very specific regard."

His litmus-test joke is a Norm Macdonald bit about a man who wished for money, then for women, then for a giant pumpkin head. Some people lose their minds; others stare. Macdonald, he says, feels like a member of the audience winking at you, not like one of the people on stage. His favorite comedian is Neil Hamburger, the tuxedoed, coughing character played by Gregg Turkington, whose act is deliberately terrible jokes. Opening for Tenacious D, Hamburger was booed, bargained the crowd into silence, then told a George Bush joke that two people laughed at and announced an encore. Malice loves him for that.

Asked what he is thankful for, Malice starts with family and says he can back it up. His nephew Lucas, now six, stole his mother's phone, noticed that grandma was listed as "Mom," and called to report that Michael was in the hospital and very sick. Then: prank. Malice took the same child to Mar-a-Lago for the premiere of Dinesh D'Souza's film *Police State*, a movie he liked more than he expected because it was about authoritarianism rather than a simple partisan cartoon.

On the way he told Lucas they were going to the president's house. Lucas asked if that meant the White House. No, a former president. Lucas offered Abe Lincoln. Malice calls that kid logic: the reasoning is sound, the database is small, which is how he thinks about AI. At the event Lucas walked up to women in evening gowns and said they were beautiful, then asked whether they had been born as girls. Another nephew, Zach, is just starting to talk. Training them to love being funny, Malice says, is part of the joy.

He is driven crazy by the opposite instinct, which he calls a WASP thing: refusing to go with the joke, announcing that you do not get it. Soviet culture, Lex notes, runs on dark humor, wordplay, and lines of poetry people carry around as icebreakers. Malice misses that. In Russia you can walk up to a stranger with a short *anekdot* and start a conversation. In America the equivalent is small talk about weather and traffic, which drives him crazy.

Lex's family is proud of him, he says, but the flavor of the pride is Soviet. They argue with him the way you argue with anyone you are close to, and the question is as likely to be why he has not booked a given guest as it is a round of applause. Malice laughs that they want more Michael Malice, "the people's choice." He does not talk to his own father. There was never a "good job," and at a certain point he stopped hunting for approval he was never going to get, from someone for whom it would no longer mean anything.

He still credits that father with a great deal: intelligence, a mixed sense of humor, and a love of learning. The bookshelf at home currently holds 98 books waiting to be read. A friend once ran into a high-school classmate who stopped her on a train and said that because she was no longer in college, she did not need to read books anymore. Malice was horrified. When Lex took heat online for wanting to read the Western classics, Malice called that stretch "the internet at its absolute worst": a simple celebration treated as a plot.

The thing he most wants to fight is cynicism, because it is a form of surrender. Everything sucks, this sucks, that sucks. His concession is the interesting part. Most things do suck. Most stand-up comedians suck, most movies suck, all podcasts suck, especially his. It does not matter. "The stuff that's good is what matters" — the books, people, comedians, shows, and music that change your life. Lex adds that even terrible things have beautiful moments. Malice will only go as far as some, not all.

Another thing he is thankful for is a script that sat in a drawer for twenty years. Harvey Pekar, of *American Splendor*, wrote a 2006 graphic novel about Malice called *Ego and Hubris*. Malice had written a screenplay about the 1980s band Rubber Rodeo after keyboardist Gary Leib introduced him to Pekar. Watching his friend Eric July succeed with comics, he realized he could produce the story as a graphic novel himself. He has an artist. The writing, he says, is some of his best, and rereading it now is ironic: the characters do everything right and go nowhere, which was his fear two decades ago. Paying rent has at least disproven the nightmare.

His definition of making it is not becoming Stephen King. It is not having a boss. The immigrant version of the same feeling is not a joke: he owns Margaret Thatcher's bookcases. As an author, having enough of an audience to write what you want and cover a living is close to the ceiling. Lex's version of career gratitude is more social. The best part, he says, is making friends with people he admires, and not being given up on during low points he has tried to hide.

Malice still remembers the texture of loneliness. In 1997 he interned in Washington, D.C., a city that emptied on weekends. After the third phone call of the day, he knew nobody else would call. "I remember those feelings of loneliness like a lot." Lex still feels that way sometimes. Malice says he does not, not anymore. Moving to Austin reminded him how isolated late New York had become: people left one after another, then the places, and then the isolation was complete. Austin has less to do, but it has a long list of people who have known him for years and will let him be his "awful, awful" self.

A Texas secession sidebar follows. A legislator introduced a referendum bill on a Monday; on Tuesday Malice discussed it with Joe Rogan and gave it national attention. A month or two later the man was voted out after getting an intern drunk. The independence moment went nowhere, though Malice notes it is still in the Texas Republican Party platform. Lex observes that history is full of failed revolutionaries whose names do not survive. They mark this one a failure and move on.

Lex is grateful for historians he can listen to in lonely hours, among them Serhii Plokhy on the Russia-Ukraine war. Malice used Plokhy's work on the Soviet collapse as a source for *The White Pill* and likes the same quality Lex names: bias without virtue-signaling, emotion without abandoning the calm of history. His own list includes Arthur Herman, Victor Sebestyen ("probably my favorite"), David Pietrusza, and Ron Chernow, who wrote the Hamilton biography. When a historian takes data and makes it read like a novel — so you learn who we are and what happened, and the pages still move — "that to me is like the acme of writing." Lex makes him define *acme*. Top. Zenith. Also the company on Wile E. Coyote's bombs.

He did not reread *The Gulag Archipelago* for *The White Pill*, drawing instead on Anne Applebaum, whose Soviet histories he calls superb even as he rejects treating her as a simple contemporary hawk. Comparisons of Putin to Stalin, or of current wars to the Holocaust, strike both men as a way of stealing a brand. Malice got in a fight over whether it was decent to call George Soros a Holocaust survivor in the same breath as Anne Frank. Billionaires who spend fortune on politics, Jewish or not, Elon Musk and Bill Gates included, have to be up for criticism. Protecting them on the basis of identity, he says, is deranged, and Holocaust analogies cheapen a singular event whose useful lesson is how extreme, and how fast, things can get.

Asked whether humans are basically good or evil, Malice always says they are basically animals. Most people, in his view, are almost fundamentally deranged, walking around under a veneer of civilization and decency. When things go bad they do things that would have been unthinkable to themselves five years earlier. He points to the sketch show *I Think You Should Leave* and to *Hoarders*, whose plot he says is always the same: veneer, veneer, a flicker of concern, then full derangement. Lex disagrees. He thinks the deep ocean of the mind longs to be good to others. Malice says he has seen literally no evidence of that.

Lex grants the tribal hunger — Orwell's two minutes of hate, anger easy to aim — but thinks the communal desire for good outweighs it, and that most of life on earth right now is people being decent relative to nature. Malice thinks Lex is wrong about both people and nature. Animals in an aquarium mostly ignore one another. Humans, he says, are essentially civil and amiable, which is not the same as good. Good, they agree, shows up under challenge. Malice will go as far as this: people are capable of goodness so profound it makes you emotional, and he thinks that is more unusual than the norm. Lex sees beauty everywhere. So does Malice. "That doesn't mean it's in every person."

The mystery box on the table is the perfect segue from that argument about beauty. Malice's household rule is simple enough to preach: when you accomplish something worth remembering, buy yourself an object that will still be there on a bad day, because hard stretches make you forget you have done anything. It does not have to be a factory. A first job, a raise, anything. The sculptor Jake Michael Singer followed him on Instagram and asked a question Malice found unanswerable in the wrong direction: what is the point of being an artist if the work never enters the spaces of people you like and admire?

Singer, who lives in Turkey and listens to both of them, made Lex a piece called *Chance Murmur* and shipped it across the world. Malice had not even seen it yet. Unboxed, it stacks references: Nike, the goddess of victory, so it reads like an angel; and Italian Futurism, his favorite early-twentieth-century movement, which tried to trap motion in two or three dimensions. Lex thanks Jake on camera. Malice adds the practical point. When you have something that matters in the house, you can look at it on a bad day and remember the spirit.

He has a rant ready for conservatives who think all contemporary art is ugly, abstract, or literal garbage. Plenty of it is. Plenty of gallery work is also made for ordinary walls, by young artists trying to add beauty, and it is not museum-priced. He reads a list of Instagram galleries he has no relationship with: Outre, Antler, Giant Robot 2, Beinart, Spoke Art, Var in Milwaukee, Corey Helford in Los Angeles, Night, Vertical, Avant, Hive, Haven, Curio. You do not have to stand in front of a painting thinking you do not get it. You look, you know what it is, and you are supporting someone young.

Lex's analogy is open mics. Funny is not the only beautiful thing about stand-up. The leap is the point: three people in the room, two of them drunk, and the comic still going. That, he says, is the human spirit. Roseanne Barr once told Malice about Gilbert Gottfried killing at 3 a.m. for her and three other comics. Lex's gun-to-the-head favorite is Norm Macdonald, then Louis C.K. and Mitch Hedberg. Malice names Austin's Comedy Mothership — Thai Rivera, David Lucas, Dave Landau, Joe Machi — and, more broadly, the artisans on Etsy. You can always look for an excuse not to look for joy, he says, or you can look for an excuse to look for it.

He knows the next gratitude will make people flip out: he is thankful for social media. Weird hobbies can find their people. Friendships that would have died stay alive. Corporate dishonesty can be exposed in public, and he calls Community Notes on Twitter "the greatest thing ever." He grants that the same tools make some people lonelier. For others they are the first proof they are not alone.

Lex asks whether the recent talk of antisemitism is just another brand of hate. Malice says no. Racists, transphobes, homophobes, misogynists, and xenophobes do not, openly or even semi-openly, argue for killing Black Americans, trans people, gay people, women, or immigrants in the way Jew-hatred does. It is not only talked about. It has happened, and not only in the Holocaust: centuries of pogroms. He is not talking about criticism of Israel. He is talking about Jew hatred.

Camille Paglia once recommended a book, *The Satanization of the Jews*, that describes a specific moral calculus: Jews are treated as the only people capable of good or evil, and then counted only on the evil side. In the George W. Bush White House you had Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and a stack of neoconservative advisers. If ten people are in a room and one is Jewish, the bad outcome is his fault and the rest are puppets. If there were no Jews on earth, Malice says, it is crazy to claim John Bolton, Liz Cheney, and Lindsey Graham would stop pushing for war. Bad things get blamed on Jews. Good things do not count, or you are told to wait. Human beings do both. The ledger only updates one way.

How do you fight that, or hate in general? He has thought about the gay American path from the 1980s, when many people with AIDS went to their graves without telling their parents, to pride flags in Times Square. His name for the method is the ambassador program. Once you actually know a person in a group, bigotry gets harder, because the outgroup is no longer somewhere out there. It is a coworker who is kind of a jerk and sees things differently and is not a monster. The only way to fight any form of bigotry, he says, is to be a living counterexample to the stereotype.

Lex reads Marx: religion as the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the opium of the people. Does he have a point? "No, I hate that quote." Malice despises Reddit-style atheist activism because he knows people who found faith and became objectively better: they started living consciously, took morality seriously, and tried, as everyone fails to, to be good. Plenty of religious people use the language to cover bad behavior. That is true. It is not the whole story. He will even steelman Marx: in that century the masses were starved and told not to worry, heaven would pay them later, so they should accept being pushed around. A rotten bargain. It does not, he thinks, describe the Midwest Christians he actually knows.

He names a college classmate, Sean Sherrod. Freshman year, seventeen or eighteen, Malice was walking around with Bible criticisms, verse by verse. Sean put a hand on his shoulder and said, "Michael, there's nothing you're going to tell me that's going to make me lose my faith." The line still strikes him as self-aware and profound. He reaches for recovery the same way. Sneering that alcoholism is a choice, not a disease, skips the part where a life has already been ruined. If telling yourself you have a disease keeps you from drinking and turns you into someone reliable, he does not see the harm. Activist atheism, he says, is cheap.

A fan once told him that the games people play to feel smarter than others are depressing and annoying. Proving someone else is stupid does not make you smart. You can both be stupid. On social media his policy is instant: nobody gets to sneer at him in his space. They can sneer in theirs. He does not know them, and he will not host it. The same allergy to cheap cleverness shows up when Lex runs John Mearsheimer's offensive realism past him — states in anarchy, maximizing military power against uncertainty. Malice disagrees. Looking at Lex's bookshelf, he says the world is a lot closer to *Brave New World* than to *1984*.

China's influence on America, in his account, runs through universities and TikTok, not through a threat to kill. American hegemony, likewise, is more pop culture than bases: exported music, television, and movies make foreigners feel closer, treat you as a friend, and pick up your values. Influence is much cheaper than threats, which is also the dark side of social media. COVID is his example. There was authoritarianism, but the larger fact is that the vast majority bought in through persuasion, and some people are still begging for it back. Lex asks which intelligence agency funds him. "Mossad," Malice says, which Lex files as how you do a great interview.

Asked for a recent object that stands out at home, Malice describes a birthday trip to the Dallas Museum of Art, then a Houston visit with the cake artist Natalie of Sideserf, who is expecting a daughter named Daisy. In the museum he saw a statue of Thoth, the ibis-headed Egyptian god of the moon, knowledge, and, in the lore, writing. A week later an auction offered an actual ibis mummy, still in its bandages. Egyptians killed and mummified ibises and buried them with scribes. The mummy now overlooks his desk. "We all know it's gonna come to life and peck out my eyes" and write with his blood. He also owns an original Patrick Nagel, the rare male figure rather than the usual women, and is waiting on Singer's three-foot *Future Murmur*. Down a childhood rabbit hole he has bought about fifteen trilobite fossils. On eBay they are listed as used, because the form only offers new or used.

Camus's line about living to the point of tears matters more to him than Camus's novels, which he does not like. He dedicated *The White Pill* to his parents for getting him out of the Soviet Union "and all the kids who never could," and he wants people to live harder on his behalf when he is gone. *The Plague*, he thinks, is pointless once you have the synopsis; *Animal Farm* is a methodical transformation. On interviewing, he is not talking to random people. Accomplished people want to feel seen. Meet a guinea-pig breeder at a party and you have two moves: you are weird, goodbye — or sit down and tell me everything. He wants the second group. Hierarchies, he tells left anarchists, will emerge anyway. He calls himself an anarchist without adjectives.

Then the habit he has told only a couple of people, the one that starts amusing and ends with looking for the exit. He used to hate shaving. Wet shaving — brush, canister soap, lather, razor — opened a world of dozens of artisan makers. He has tried a couple of hundred soaps for scent, lather, and closeness of shave. He is not making this up, he says; he is not that creative. The system is a cycle of 67. When a soap is used up, that slot opens for trials until a keeper fills it. He currently runs 67 in rotation and has 86 candidates in the queue.

He names names. The best, in his view, rebranded from Grooming Department to Aion Skincare. Barrister and Mann's Cheshire is the one soap he would tell a beginner to try. Chiseled Face's Midnight Stag smells like a garage and is one of his favorites. Phoenix Shaving makes Aloha SmackDown (Hawaiian Punch), a custom Yule Ham that smells like ham, and Rock and Ramen, plus a twelve-day advent calendar of samples. Catie's Bubbles, vegan, out of New Jersey, has Kneehigh to a Grape, which smells like grape soda. The set does not shrink. It stays 67. Lex's brain, unhelpfully, starts counting how many soaps are left in Malice's life. Malice calls that very dark. A friend named Jackie taught him the makeup term *touching pan*: the day you can see the bottom. The whole rabbit hole, he says, is the fault of his friend Cole Stryker, who handed him a puck of Proraso in Los Angeles. A happy *fuck you, Cole*.

Advice on how to be happy, given a lonely world: drop the ridiculous standard. You do not have to be a great writer. You can be a better writer. You will never be a great podcaster; you can be a better one. Better at the gym, better with time. Attach metrics you control, miles in a week, and, especially for men, a chart that says you are improving. If you have no friends, try things. The worst case is that they blow up in your face, and then you have learned something. As a kid he was terrified of getting hit in the face, metaphorically. Then he noticed that everyone who matters gets hit. The project is not avoidance. It is becoming strong enough to take it.

Lex quotes Bukowski on climbing out of bed sure you will not make it, then laughing inside because you remember every other time you felt that way. Has Malice been depressed? He is more anxious, and he splits low points from depression. Feeling bad when things are bad makes sense. Depression, for him, is feeling bad when things are not, which is almost by definition irrational. Lex describes exhaustion and a self-critical brain. Malice's prescription is magnesium, with a rectal joke attached, then a serious one: take it as a pill. What is he most afraid of? He has to hunt. Rising authoritarianism, more urgent in Canada than in the United States, but that is not personal. Death? No. "If I died tomorrow, I did pretty good with what I had." He moved the needle on things he cares about, was a good friend, saved a couple of lives. The bar, he thinks, is low: leave the world a little better than you found it.

Has he been betrayed? Of course. A Soviet childhood treats everyone as a time bomb. The deliberate move, and he thinks this is important, is not to let that betrayal color future interactions or become the norm. He has even reached a point of feeling bad for the person who did it. They did not need to. Even if you narrate a necessity, you still know you did a bad thing to someone who did not deserve it. Lex still empathizes. Malice draws the dictionary line: empathy is putting yourself in their shoes; sympathy is wishing them well. He can sympathize. He cannot easily empathize, because his own guilt would wreck him for a long time if he did that to someone who trusted him. Pain and desperation, Lex says, might explain it. That, Malice answers, is sympathy, not empathy.

Both men are public enough that they have to be careful whom they let close. Lex hates it, because his default is to trust everybody. Malice calls that crazy and recommends a filter. Lex already has one at the gate; inside it he chooses to see the good, and the rare failures break his heart. Has Malice's heart been broken? Yes. For love? Yes. The sculpture is beautiful on eight levels, Lex says, and he is suddenly relaxed. Malice admits he sometimes feels like Ricky Fitts in *American Beauty*, crying at a plastic bag, a scene many people sneer at and that he thinks is exactly right: seeing beauty where other people see garbage. He would rather be the person who sees beauty. Lex is grateful for the friendship. Malice answers with the name of his show: "You are welcome." Lex closes with André Gide: man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.