Beauty will save the world — Michael Malice's New Year's case for hope

Lex Fridman opens New Year's Eve 2021 with a line from *The Idiot*, his favorite Dostoevsky novel. Through Prince Myshkin, Dostoevsky wrote that beauty will save the world — words that sound naive and, at least to Fridman, turn out to be profound. He asks Malice, on his fifth visit to the show, what they mean. Malice does not flinch. He does not think they seem naive at all.

Fridman cites Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1970 Nobel lecture. For most of his life Solzhenitsyn treated the sentence as empty words: with all the suffering in the world, what has beauty ever actually done? Malice hates that reading. He points to friends who work as models. In some photographs a person looks perfect; in real life they have flaws, and they will be the first to say so. But the moment of perfection was captured. It happened. If it happened once, you cannot say it will never happen again. "I think beauty it means hope," he says. It proves that this is something that can actually happen on earth.

Fridman reads Solzhenitsyn further. The old trinity of truth, goodness, and beauty may not be a faded formula. If the straight trunks of truth and goodness are cut down, perhaps the unpredictable stem of beauty will still push through and do the work of all three. In that case Dostoevsky's remark was not careless. It was a prophecy. The two of them are here, Malice's trolling reputation notwithstanding, to start the year on a positive note: hope, and a little joy.

Fridman asks which of the three Malice would choose. Malice first says the distinction is synthetic: they overlap so heavily he could argue they are synonymous. Pressed for a favorite, he says truth is overrated. A good story does not have to be true in order to move you. People sometimes need to delude themselves about a family member, and that lie can serve a purpose. Beauty, meanwhile, does not choose its audience. Bad people appreciate beauty. Bad people are often seductive, or have a beauty about them.

He picks goodness. Creating beauty or expressing truth takes skill and work; goodness is closer to the easiest default state of being. A video of one dog jumping into a pool to save another is moving because it needs no theory. For him goodness means integrity and kindness. Corporate America, he thinks, inculcates the idea that as you get older it is sometimes okay to do the wrong thing. He does not buy it. People know better, and they tell themselves lies. Once you allow yourself to just be good, the life gets better. It is not like the gym. The rewards of goodness arrive faster.

Fridman recalls a line Malice used on a livestream: if you save one life, you save the world. He thinks of Paul Farmer, the doctor who would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to save one child, knowing the work cannot scale and doing it anyway. Doctors, Fridman says, do not live at the policy layer of millions. They live with the human in front of them. When he tries to make something — hardware, a video, a lecture — he imagines one specific person it might help.

Malice finds the quote more profound than it first sounds. Michele Bachmann, whatever one thinks of her politics, adopted something like twenty children from the foster system. A friend, Terry Schappert, adopts elderly dogs. Nick Szorcsy, another friend, adopted a child; Malice told him he was a hero. Cruelty to children is the hardest thing in *The White Pill* for him to inhabit as a writer, because even dogs know not to harm a kid who pokes their eyes. You are not called to be Superman. You have a finite ability to move the needle. If you actually saved a life, you did your part.

Fridman supplies the political moral. When you start believing you can do good by a lot of people, your mind stops being able to do good by a lot of people. You start thinking about utopias, and then it is okay to crack a few eggs to make an omelet. Better, even with money and power, to focus on one person or one place. Malice agrees: a program in Austin or Brooklyn gives you feedback — this works, this does not — that you can port elsewhere. Top-down help is at least inefficient. A government check is not the same as a neighbor saying they will buy groceries until you are back on your feet. Most people, he thinks, will try to make that belief worth it.

Fridman adds a small story of his own. Lecturing at MIT, terrified, he faced bored students who did not seem to understand he was human too. One older faculty member came to every lecture, nodded, and said he did great. Once, because Fridman was in a suit and tie, the man said he looked great — not creepy, more like a sage looking at a kid dressed for school. That pat on the back lasted. Adult cruelty is somehow intelligible in a world of conflict. Cruelty to a child in front of you is not.

Fridman turns to Jeffrey Epstein. Eric Weinstein, he says, thinks about intelligence agencies and fronts. Fridman thinks about the weakness of grown men in the face of charismatic evil. He was at MIT near the end of Epstein's visits and saw none of it. What bothers him is that so many smart people failed to see through a man who was obviously, in hindsight, wrong. Epstein was charismatic, curious about big scientific questions, the kind of person who makes a funded lab feel that something large might actually get done. The test Fridman sets for himself is personal: would I know a Jeffrey Epstein if he were in my life? Would I know evil sitting across from me?

Malice answers with Michael Alig, king of New York's 1990s Club Kids. They dressed as angels and nurses, took ketamine and ecstasy until dawn. GG Allin, the shock performer who once defecated on stage, looked like the dangerous one; the kids in costumes looked like they were just having fun. Alig killed Angel Melendez, put the body on ice in a bathtub, threw a party, dismembered the corpse with Macy's cutlery, and dumped it in the river with a cab driver's help. Then he walked Manhattan in Angel's boots telling people he had killed Angel. Everyone treated it as another prank. Malice later found a prison painting signed Malice in a SoHo shop; his mother bought it for his birthday. He wrote to Alig, visited him, and met a sociopath for the first time. Online quizzes about whether your feelings get hurt are a thick line away from this. Alig was friendly and not a threat in the room. He talked about "guilt." What he was describing, Malice says, was the knife over his head — the anxiety of waiting to be caught. He did not know what guilt was.

Alig was low status. The Epstein problem is the opposite. Hierarchical animals defer to high-status norms. At a party where everyone is doing a drug you have never heard of, you do not feel comfortable judging them; their norms become the norms for that space. The largest lesson, for Malice, was the Amy Robach hot-mic tape: ABC had the names, Buckingham Palace called, and the story died because of a Meghan Markle interview. Nobody at ABC paid a price. The Eric Garner video, Julian Assange, the same pattern: elites spend enormous power to keep what is done in darkness in darkness. Americans, he says, still imagine evil as kickbacks and collusion. That is barely evil. Real evil is the depravity you would never think of in your own home, done for the thrill of proving the rules do not apply.

Fridman does not think the courageous act is bursting into the party and ruining it. Courage is remaining yourself in the room, calmly not taking the drug, not making a scene. That little act, repeated, is how you resist an Epstein. On Bill Clinton, Malice contrasts a performer who is a lech off-camera with Barack Obama, who seems more the same person behind closed doors. Fridman cannot understand why a president would need Epstein's jet, or a mistress obtained through power, when ordinary infidelity was available. Malice later puts Ghislaine Maxwell in the same family as Rosemary Kennedy's lobotomy: people who know they are untouchable do worse things than the rest of us can picture. A Vanity Fair-class investigation asked where Epstein's money came from, since nobody seemed to trade with him. Blackmail is a coherent hypothesis. Charisma in a room is another. Both can be true.

The holiday talk is not American Christmas. Fridman grew up with Ded Moroz, not Santa: Soviet kids slept on December 31 and woke on January 1 with a present under the pillow. It happened to him once, at 1461 Shore Parkway in Brooklyn, and it blew his mind. What he loves about children, now as an uncle, is kid logic — tiny data, real reasoning, wrong conclusions for right reasons. His bedroom was off the kitchen; they left the light on because he was afraid of the dark, and he lay there calculating the electric bill, not realizing they switched it off five minutes after he slept.

New Year's was the one night kids were allowed to stay up and watch the adult world: arguing, singing, flirtation, Olivier salad, desserts, vodka. In the Soviet Union the unforgettable luxury was Coca-Cola, or Dr Pepper. Americans take the material surplus of capitalism for granted; tasting a new sugar was the whole of happiness. Neighbors came. You complained about life, government, corruption. What Americans do not appreciate, Malice says, is how rare a safe space is in Russia. On January 1 nobody is going to snitch. In a totalitarian country you have a public face and a private one, and on that night the private one comes out.

Fridman has been dropping into Clubhouse rooms to practice Russian. He describes them as a nonlinear dynamical system: any positive topic is perturbed until someone says it is the dumbest thing they have ever heard, and the argument resumes. You can see it as negative, or as the freedom to be emotional and say a hard truth without patting yourself on the back. Those rooms also show him how constrained American speech is. Even Malice is constantly adding nuance; the Russian rooms say crazy things, correct themselves, mock themselves, and reverse a minute later. Malice hates Russian cynicism as exhausting, destructive, anti-creative. Fridman sees waves on the water and beauty in the depths. The cynic's defense is that their job is to supply the force you are supposed to resist. Fridman laughs: he already wanted to be a writer, and now there are fire ants on top.

They argue about whether life is suffering. Fridman will not accept it as a first principle; if life were essentially suffering, happiness could not exist. Hard work is not the same as suffering. Malice uses the word the way a physicist uses gravity: a roller coaster needs a downward pull. For Fridman, "suffering" is often a synonym for the absurd — good things and terrible things arriving without a reason. Malice's six-word memoir, from the book *Six-Word Memoirs*, is "Good things happen to bad people." Then the presents. A card thanks Fridman for paving the path to Austin, with a string of binary and a signature. Cans with springs, a box of wrenches, and finally Scooter, a GoBot from a Toys "R" Us in Caesar's Bay that Malice found as a poor kid who could not afford Transformers. That feeling of finding the exact figure on the shelf is, he says, a symbol of joy. When people look at it they should think: don't be hopeless.

Asked what he is grateful for in 2021, Malice names the first real city change of his adult life. He moved to Austin and does not miss New York. He had forgotten what a huge social network feels like; the New York one thinned out under Mayor de Blasio and the COVID restrictions. Austin is not a particularly big town, but in his circles everyone is a refugee from somewhere else, with a sense of building together. In New York the first question on meeting someone was who they were, why you were talking, whether they were a "normie." Here there is more trust. He has been introducing friends to one another, and they hit it off. The winters of New York, he had not fully registered how much they got into your head.

What New York taught him about civilization is the scene: Paris in the 1920s, Harlem in the 1920s, New York in the 1970s, San Francisco in the late 1960s — not Davos, more like fifty unusual people in a ten-block radius. Those clusters punch above their weight. Could Austin be that? He thinks yes, because it was never all of Paris; it was the Left Bank. The other 2021 landmark is *The Anarchist Handbook*, which sat at the top of Amazon nonfiction for most of the day it dropped. He had told a nine-time UFC world champion he would never be as good at his job as the fighter was at his. That day he took it back. What he is prouder of is pulling Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Wallace Thurman, and Candy Darling out of the dustbin and saying these people mattered.

The audiobook is 23 chapters by 23 authors, so he used his rolodex and let different voices read. Lauren Chen reads Charles Robert Plunkett's essay "Dynamite," which advocates bombs against capitalism and which Goldman, on a lecture tour, hated for making the movement look bad. Malice told Chen to read it like a phone-sex operator. Violence has a siren song; the lazy move is to call terrorists crazy, but most crazy people do not build bombs. You have to understand why a marginalized person might find it a good idea. Fridman agrees: given how much of human history is violence, the pull has to be deep, and revolution plus violence is hard for a genuinely suffering person to resist.

Fridman's own 2021 was the leap. He stopped taking his MIT salary, let the lab go, and walked away from a future that looked like Google, then MIT, then more of the same. San Francisco, when he went to look, was more identity combat than big-future building. Austin was the opposite: Elon Musk talking about making it a capital of AI, Joe Rogan radiating the wish to make it a cultural capital of comedy. People with that fire in their eyes rarely fail, and it is contagious. Rogan, Malice adds, likes it when you bust his chops; a first text of a boomer meme is how you know you have arrived. Conversations with Musk, Fridman says, are first-principles problem-solving: unfinished sentences, abandoned dead ends, no polite transitions. Malice watched Musk on the *Babylon Bee* podcast take "Batman or Iron Man" as a question about species of bats. He sat there thinking: just answer the question.

Malice is on page 40 of the second draft of *The White Pill*. By a tenth book, he says, the first draft is already pretty good. The working origin was almost a Ryan Holiday move: Holiday built a cottage industry on the Stoics, so Malice asked if he could do the same with Camus. Holiday said sure. Then Malice reread Camus and found his memory had lied. *The Myth of Sisyphus* is mostly literary criticism; the title essay is a short piece at the back. Douglas Murray, a guest on Malice's show, had the same letdown. Camus the man remains a hero — the clenched-teeth rage at occupation, the line that man must live to the point of tears, the claim that life's meaninglessness is the opening to create meaning. The book became something else.

People ask why he is so hopeful. He is not hopeful as a mood. He is hopeful because history makes certain good outcomes not implausible, and because empires are expensive. The British Empire was expensive. The Soviet Union was expensive. Occupying the globe is not a movie-villain happy ending; keeping everyone in line is the hard part. He started writing when COVID hit, trying to answer how you stay optimistic in the face of everything. The method is narrative and character-driven, with real people. First drafts are pull-quotes double-spaced from research books, plus stretches of his own storytelling, such as McKinley's assassination, that can be pasted into draft two.

Advice he is willing to give writers: sit down for a page or two a day and do not get up until they exist. Garbage is fine. A 300-page mess is something to edit; editing while you generate is driving and reversing at once. If a great line arrives, put it in the phone and drop it in later. He keeps a file called scraps. Early drafts had contemporary analogies — 1901, then a mention of Obama — which yank the reader out of the past as present, so they all went to scraps. Let the reader stay in that earlier now.

Fridman asks about New Year's resolutions. Malice usually has several projects moving at once; the useful deadline is something like "by the end of 2022." At their level of visibility, much of what happens is luck. The success of *The Anarchist Handbook* was counterintuitive. So he has to learn to be a surfer, not a driver: you are on the board, going along for the ride. What he wants is to finish the book, which he is extremely proud of, and to keep building the overlapping scenes in Austin. Thanksgiving at Blair White's house is the example. A cake artist, Natalie Sideserf, has moved to town. He makes a point of introducing people, and they get along.

Podcasts, for his old-school brain, are ephemeral. *Your Welcome* has grown, made friendships, made his life better, but it is not a book on a shelf, especially when the book matters more than he does. He delayed getting a decent camera because he would rather buy a Pareto autograph than a computer from this century. On the body: a slight bulk, 164.5 pounds, aiming at 165, with help from a friend whose Instagram is Stronger-with-a-five, a kid who does human-flag push-ups while moving sideways. Home workouts are pull-ups and push-ups, *Léon: The Professional* minus the milk. At Gold's Gym in Austin there is one power cage and almost nobody deadlifting. He does not want form advice tapped into his earbud mid-set. That happened. He is still angry.

The political landscape is not, for him, the place victory comes from. Glenn Beck told Fridman that Donald Trump is likely running in 2024; Malice defers to Beck on that fact and does not think the nomination is a given. When he says the good guys will win, he does not mean Trump, and he does not think victory comes from Washington. Anyone in a binary system who is the nominee has a chance; incumbency is mostly the ease of voting for someone you have voted for before. Ron DeSantis is the figure of the moment, as Scott Walker was in 2016 before Iowa. Fridman is disappointed that a hard time did not produce the leaders he hoped for, and worried that rejecting election results will become standard. Malice, as an anarchist, does not regard elections as legitimate in the first place: people love democracy when it gives them the result they want. Glenn Beck's better test is whether you can say one genuine nice thing about everyone, including politicians you hate. Trump's children getting along is Malice's example. Biden's amiability — calling Republican senators, riding the train — is Fridman's.

Malice wrote a piece for the *Observer* in 2016 arguing for a national divorce. Jesse Kelly followed a few months later; another writer, David Boyd, hit Substack; the idea is now mainstream enough that *National Review* feels obliged to answer. America, he says, has had at least two cultures from the beginning. In recent years they have grown antagonistic and have even lost a shared language — the same words meaning different things. So live your life, we will live ours, goodbye and good luck, no ill will.

He steels the other side. The stupidest objection is "that is what China wants"; he will not live by doing the opposite of Beijing. The stronger form is that both successor countries would be weaker, and he grants the short-term hit: transition is costly, and each side starts asking why it is still doing things it only did for the marriage. He does not think America's primary purpose is to be a bulwark against Chinese power, though few people, given his work, have a more informed contempt for that government. The best objection is that the lines do not separate cleanly. The Civil War had a North and a South; now the split is New York City versus upstate, Chicago versus downstate, coastal California versus the interior that looks like Kentucky. You may just replicate the problem, and people would have to move. Other fair worries: smaller bad actors in the world get braver without American pressure, both sides' worst traits get worse, and the myth of America is not nothing to throw away.

He does not need the split to be ideological. Czechoslovakia, Norway and Sweden, those were cultural. Two pieces might be the slogan; five might make more sense, New England and the West Coast already being their own civilizations. In sales there is a difference between convincing someone to buy a car and arguing about the features. If you are arguing about the features, his work is done. He would stay in Texas, a hundred percent, and probably run for office. "I'm gonna be the first president of Texas." Yoram Hazony's case for the virtue of nationalism — tradition, avoid revolution, the nation as a way to group a culture — he can feel, because he loves the country and hates the government. He does not know that he would feel the same in Canada. What he will not forgive is what was done to New York: an assault on small business and creativity with no safety net of the kind banks got in 2008, and no remorse. Fridman still hopes New York returns on a scale of decades, the way Paris remains Paris. Malice's standard of a hub is that the world's eyes are on you. Mid-1960s Britain, the Beatles, the Kinks: that was the place. Digital space, Fridman suggests, lets Cleveland be a hub if ten people, or three, happen to live there.

Fridman asks whether Sam Harris going after Joe Rogan bothered him — the line about brain damage from Rogan's last episode, the sarcastic "here is the antidote." Malice did not like it, and he thinks Harris does not like that version of himself either. Even if Rogan were spreading harm, sarcasm is not persuasive. "He's wrong, here are the facts" is a reasonable sentence; dunking is not. He would never do it to a friend. If there is an issue with Fridman, he is getting him on the phone, because backing someone into a public corner is bad strategy. Bret Weinstein once texted to ask permission before tweeting a criticism; Malice said yes, and was excited. He does not love the word civility, which sounds polite and phony. He wants people to radiate love even when they are rough — the Russian rooms again, yelling with something warm underneath.

They disagree about institutions. Fridman wants reform from inside; Malice's gut is closer to burn it down, then figure it out. Fridman says he can imagine being attacked by his friend in idea-space and would look forward to it. Malice shakes his head. The heartbreak, for Fridman, is Rogan, Harris, and Weinstein: COVID brought out the worst in a lot of people, and a friendship deteriorated that did not have to. Malice's rule is the one he always means: he does not care whether someone agrees with him, he cares how they treat him. Twitter strangers who announce they are on his team are not on his team; he does not know them. He did not know Chris Williamson's politics until a political quiz revealed a Marxist. They chat almost every day. It never came up.

On COVID products and referees, Malice wants the market, not a state monopoly, to certify food and drugs. When anything is developing, scientists will put out speculation and be wrong; insisting on one officially approved outcome is dangerous thinking. Fridman interviewed the Pfizer CEO and danced around conflict of interest — the incentive to make everyone a customer, the revolving door with the FDA. The CEO cited the rule of law. Malice calls himself an anarchist rather than an anarcho-capitalist partly so that, in a room with a major CEO, he still assumes sinister incentives. What bothered Fridman was the lack of worry about the corrupting nature of money and power. If you cannot say "I understand why a rational person might not get vaccinated," you have failed the steel-man test.

Advice for talking to Trump, Biden, or Anthony Fauci is not "yell for the audience." For Trump, Malice wanted to know the look on his face when he tweeted — cracking himself up on the toilet, or the little smirk — because emotion about something a person is passionate about breaks a wall. Biden is a better politician than he gets credit for: he once asked a man to stand for applause, saw the wheelchair, and instantly had the whole room stand instead. Larry King, in 2008, asked Hillary Clinton why so many people hate her, cut off the "tough stances" answer, and asked why those stances made people hate *her*. That is the line: do not let them slide, and do not perform the trial the audience already wants. For Fauci, ask about AIDS, about the early mask guidance, about whether fame got to his head, about whether Ted Cruz telling him he should be imprisoned feels real. Then the same question lands on Malice: when you get fame, money, power, are you aware of how it changed you? He pauses. Is Putin in 2020 the same person as in 2010, or 2000?

Young people in Malice's Locals community want career and life advice. The meta-rule is: do not ask your friends. At that age you are an idiot, they are idiots, and nobody wants to look like one, so they recycle television. Seek out people you want to emulate, and if you cannot reach them, find a way — incentivize them. Strangers on Twitter will often answer a basic life question because the reply can serve a crowd. It is also hard, at that age, to accept that your parents might not be all that bright, and might not be all that good. They love you. That does not mean they understand you. That is okay.

Have some quantifiable daily improvement: a gym, running, jump rope, he does not care. When depression or anxiety is talking, your brain knows exactly how to undermine you. A number moving in the right direction is concrete proof it cannot argue with. He scores high on openness: try cuisines you have not heard of, read popular books you have no interest in, read about the 1892 electoral split or Malcolm X. You become a fuller person faster than you expect. Journaling, for him, has little value, because you will not revisit it. A tweet that forces a meandering thought into a short phrase is a better mental exercise. Do not compare yourself. "All my friends are married, I should have a kid" is the recovery-line problem: stop shooting yourself. The word *should* is the gun.

He surrounds the house with talismans of joy. After Rogan he bought orange socks with black cherries; every time he wears them he remembers that it was a big deal. Joe also gave Fridman a watch, which Fridman ranks with the MIT professor's pat on the back as a 2021 landmark. The biggest item on Malice's list is boundaries. People will feel entitled to your time and will criticize you from a bad place. You get to say you are not interested in talking about this right now — even if they are your parents, especially if they are your parents. You do not owe a hostile question an answer. Be someone people are happy to see, someone they can call when things are bad. Under the weather, he knew that if it got serious he would call Blair, and she would take care of him. You are younger than you think. It is impossible at 26 to believe your 40s are better than your 30s. He promises they are.

Fridman adds his own: take big risks when you are young, and take them often. If you fail, you are sleeping in a suit, not on a futon. Commit hard enough that failure hurts, because the hurt is information — the jiu-jitsu lesson of trying to win rather than just having fun. And be kind. When he was younger there was a temptation, in cynical rooms, to be more negative than he was comfortable being. Malice's warning is sharper. If you love a band, a writer, a podcast, an actor, and people roll their eyes, watch out. Those people are dangerous. Avril Lavigne is one of his favorite musicians. If someone wants to take away the thing that makes you happy, they are not your friends.

Fridman says he wants to get married and have children, not from social pressure but from himself. He is almost sad at the thought of missing long-term love for a person and a child. Malice wants marriage and does not want kids. He worked it out earlier in the year, in a relationship with someone who would have been, in many ways, a perfect mother. He sat friends with children down and asked for the downside. He loves kids; he remembers being a precocious child whom adults ignored, so he makes a point of talking to children. Frank Fleming's youngest, Winchester, who has Down syndrome, is adorable. His sister's line was the real cost: if she had kids, they would be the top priority, not even a question. His work, he says without much apology, is valuable and he is the only one doing it. That would be a major lifestyle rewrite, and he is selfish enough not to want it. It would also have to be the right woman, a commitment, and — in his old-fashioned joke — you have to find a crazy you can handle.

Fridman's fear is the partner, not the child. He has seen wrong relationships eat a writer's productivity and the capacity to be a joy to other people. Malice says that has not been his life: every relationship has been beyond supportive, partners who would rather he take the hour for work. He could not casually date someone who did not believe in what he was doing. Fridman suspects that is because the long erosion has not arrived, and because his own work is menial hours, not two creative hours a day. Does Malice think about this a lot, or just live? He has been blessed long enough that he does not think about it. Miracles happen every day. Stay open.

On death he jokes first — a suitcase nuke, as many people as possible — then gets serious. He thinks about legacy, which is why the books matter. He wants to be remembered as someone who encouraged people to be hopeful and taught them how to be free. His favorite show is *Dallas*, which people confuse with *Dynasty* and dismiss as trashy; he thinks it is Shakespearean, characters driven by different values. One season ends with a character dying in a hospital room, asking the others to be kind to one another, to be a family, while they yell at him not to die. You can see the actors crying because they are losing a castmate. Kindness and tenderness, Malice says, are things this culture wants you to believe will cost you. If you are cynical and sneering, you get a round of applause. If you say something is great, someone calls you a simp. He wants to build a space where being nice does not make you feel stupid. Fridman tells him he is already doing that, in the friendship and for a large number of people. Camus closes the episode: don't walk in front of me, I may not follow; don't walk behind me, I may not lead; walk beside me, just be my friend.