Those Who Need Leaders Are Not Qualified to Choose Them

After the ads, Fridman does not ease in with policy. He starts with love. Both men came to the United States at thirteen, Malice from a Russian-Jewish family, Fridman from Ukraine, and they recognize the same wiring. Malice has not been back since he was two. A filmmaker friend once told him that Russians only look like Americans until you hear how they were raised. The example he picks is small enough to sound like a joke and large enough, he thinks, to explain a country.

A buddy crashing at his apartment heard a knock and opened the door. Malice had gone to the gym. When he came back, the story landed as alien. If he is in someone else’s house and someone knocks, he would not even think to answer. He might eat an apple. The idea of going to the door would not enter his head, because it is not his house. Americans, he says, default to friendliness with strangers. People from his world keep a moat. The close relationships are very deep. Everyone else is other, and trust takes a long time to cross.

Until recently, he ran a scan on every sentence he said to a stranger: if this person turns on you, can they use this against you? Eventually he decided they might, and he was strong enough to take it. Americans do not think that way. At a party he watched two Americans advise a coworker in conflict to sit down and talk it out. For him that is last resort. First you see what you can do without showing your hand or your vulnerability. Only when everything else has failed do you sit down and have it out. His first move is not how do we make this better. It is reinforce my position and see whether I can marginalize them.

Fridman hears a deep distrust of the world. Malice corrects him. Distrust is the wrong word. He almost ignores the rest of the field. He saves love and trust for a small circle. When someone is confrontational, he treats it like a cold wind. It is not a hug and not an opportunity to work out differences. It is also not a threat you live in fear of. A cold wind is not something to be scared of. It just blows past, and you are not required to be receptive.

Fridman asks how to put more love into the world, especially online, and asks for a definition. Off the top of his head, Malice says love is a strong sense of attraction toward another person, entity, or place that causes you to react in a disproportionately positive manner. If someone you love is about to be harmed, you move heaven and earth. If a house is on fire and the book you love is inside, you go through the fire. If it is a book you merely like, you buy another copy. Fridman wants a broader kindness you can send to strangers on the internet. Malice does not reject that. He says the mechanism is to make people feel seen and validated.

A large part of his audience, and he bets Fridman’s too, is isolated because of psychology and intelligence. If he can be the person who makes them feel they are not crazy, that the people around them are merely basic, that is reaffirming, because nobody did that for him at their age. You should be antagonistic toward bad people, he says. You should not be antagonistic toward everyone. The love he means is wanting good things for someone, not romance.

Fridman presses the contradiction. Malice lives by mocking power. Love, Fridman suggests, wants you simple, fragile, and not witty, the opposite of a troll. Malice splits the problem in two. If someone comes after what he loves, he can fight them in a knife fight and get hurt even if he wins, or he can disarm them, drive them off, and keep himself intact. Mockery, he says, is one of the most effective ways to render the powerful powerless. We are closer to *Brave New World* than to *1984*. The people on top are not there because of the gulag. They are there because of social pressure.

He tells a subway story from New York. An Asian man in his early thirties, in ordinary Western clothes, sat without a mask. A man in his fifties stood over him and screamed: go back where you came from, you are disgusting, I am going to get sick. If you truly think the man is a vector of disease, Malice asks, why get in his face? The missing mask gave permission. A lot of social control, he argues, is outsourced to low-quality people because this is their one chance to assert dominance. The best solvent is not a weapon. It is mockery, because the claim to authority collapses. Fridman asks about fighting with love, patience, and kindness. Malice calls that a mismatch. Superman’s job is to help good people. Batman’s job is to hurt bad people. He will always be on the Batman side.

Fridman worries that mockery is a path toward escalation, a kind of guerrilla war you cannot win. Malice says he is winning, and that this is the subject of his next book, *The White Pill*. The most horrible people are being turned into laughing stocks on social media every day, and he finds that glorious. Fridman pushes back on the side effects. It feels like winning, he says, while destroying the chance of a cohesive society. Malice hears in “cohesive” a euphemism for everyone submitting to what the speaker wants. Conflict between two people who still like and respect each other is not a failure of cohesion. He wrote an article four years earlier arguing that it was time to unite the states and then secede.

The country, he says, has been held together with thumbtacks and string for more than twenty years by at least two cultures that feel sincere contempt for each other and do not share values. An unhealthy relationship can end with a wish that the other person find happiness elsewhere. Forcing everyone to stay in the same house is not love. It is a path toward friction. The split is not as simple as blue and red. He and Fridman are allied as Jews, as Russians, as men, as podcasters, and divided because Fridman is an academic and he is not. Every person is a Venn diagram. The first step, as he sees it, is to strip political authority of legitimacy and to humiliate people who appoint themselves to tell you how to live.

He points at the New York lockdowns under Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio. A friend told him the city had gone months with almost no deaths and about a hundred cases a day while everything stayed closed. The numbers checked out. The American dream he cares about is an immigrant family opening a restaurant, a dry cleaner, a fruit stand. Those people do not have much money, and they were the first to lose their companies. Cuomo said gyms could open. De Blasio said there were not enough inspectors, so wait another couple of weeks. Malice has a harder and harder time calling that anything other than criminal. Fridman is just as worried about millions of crushed dreams, and about young people already isolated who now cannot leave home.

Malice cites a psychologist’s book *Ostracism*: a colleague ignored the author for a week as an experiment, and even knowing it was fake, the emotional impact of averted eyes was extreme. Multiply that by suicides among kids, he says, and you see the scale. He predicts that by 2024 the country will have to talk about personal consequences for the officials, because without that they will do it again. Cuomo framed a thousand deaths against a thousand lost businesses as an easy choice. At a certain point you are losing both. Fridman calls it incompetence. Malice says it is competence and malevolence. They are doing their job. He compares the emergency to World War I: it gave evil people useful data about what the country will put up with in wartime, a template later used for things like the New Deal. Neuroscientists, he tells Fridman, understand perfectly well that the lockdown produced valid data on how much people will endure under pressure from the state.

The deeper problem, Malice says, is the existence of the state. Representation by geography is a landline idea in a cellphone world. You can leave a marriage. You cannot leave a government for years at a time. Lysander Spooner pointed out more than a hundred and fifty years ago that the Constitution, if it is a contract at all, binds only the signatories, and they are long dead. “If you don’t like it, move” is not what freedom means. Freedom means you do what you want, not what the other person wants.

Fridman asks him to paint the anarchist utopia. Malice rejects the premise. Only critics call anarchism a utopia. If he had a cure for cancer, the world would not become perfect. Treatment might still be expensive, other diseases would remain, and yet we would all be healthier. Anarchism, in that sense, is a cure for one major life-threatening problem, not a promise of heaven. The problem with democracy, he says, is that those who need leaders are not qualified to choose them. Not everyone needs a leader. He draws a distinction people blur because English uses one word, *authority*, for a policeman who controls you and for a physicist who knows more than you do. He tells parents to raise children bilingual for that reason. Concepts come apart when you have more than one language.

He is happy to offload work to an accountant, a lawyer, a doctor, a chef. He would want someone to provide security and negotiate with foreign powers. That does not mean the job must be given to a mass of people he does not know and, if he knew them, would probably not respect. Ants are a bad metaphor for anarchy, he says, because they have a queen, they are clones, and they kill themselves for the hive. Bees are a slightly better example: they sting once, die, and they are right that the community matters more than the individual. His beautiful example is language. No one is forcing Fridman and Malice to speak English. No one chose this dialect at gunpoint. A lingua franca still emerged. Even in North Korea, fish and animals go by Latin scientific names. Dictionaries came later. The creation of language, he says, is one of humanity’s most miraculous achievements, and it grew in anarchy.

Does that beauty apply in physical space, without laws written on paper? Malice says you can have rules without laws. A law is unchosen. A rule is something you accept, like the sign at the pool: a certain number of people, no peeing in the water. Fridman asks how you enforce that. Malice says peeing in the pool is not the worry. Mass incarceration is. Police can steal more money than burglars. Innocent people can be killed with no consequences. War can be waged with none for the people who wage it. That is the scale he wants to talk about, not whether someone urinates in a swimming pool.

Americans, Malice told Joe Rogan and now tells Fridman, have a naive picture of corruption: I got my brother a job, he is taking money off the table. State corruption is Stalin, Hitler, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, the CIA at Guantánamo borrowing KGB manuals because American interrogators had not thought of those methods. From his forthcoming book he tells a story from 1930s Ukraine. An old-school Soviet official, proud of cruelty, was arrested in the purge. They took him to the Lubyanka and did the works. He did not talk. Then they brought in his teenage daughter and raped her in front of him. He talked. Beria’s line, as Malice recalls it, was find me the man, I will find you the crime.

That, he says, is what you get when there is no ease of exit, when you are forced under a monopoly. In the extreme it produces this. In less extreme cases it still produces nefarious outcomes. If you can leave as a customer, that fact alone limits what a business can get away with. Fridman asks whether evil people will manipulate human nature under any system, and whether a Hitler could rise to the top of Twitter. Take the thought experiment literally, Malice says. Hitler on Twitter, tweets only about how much Jews suck. Fine. All the cool people leave. Could propaganda still spread? Every strong criticism of anarchism, he answers, is a description of the status quo. Your fear is that under anarchism people would be taught the wrong ideas, unlike now.

Fridman says he is not attacking anarchism so much as asking in which system human nature thrives and in which the evils in it are easier to suppress. Malice calls that still a scientific experiment. Democracy has been tried a great deal. Anarchism has not been tried at large scale, and it is not a country you install. It is a relationship. Language is a worldwide anarchic system. He and Fridman already have an anarchist relationship: there are almost no circumstances in which they would call the police on each other. The darker sides of human nature will not go away. Human beings are animals, capable of beauty and of cruelty the corporate press will only describe up to a point. Stalin was sold in the West as Uncle Joe. A decentralized information network, he argues, makes it harder to bury the Holodomor.

What about mobs? Gustave Le Bon’s *The Crowd* influenced Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. In a crowd you lose the sense of self, become the ant, and do things that would make you want to kill yourself in another context. Malice says a mob has *less* power under anarchism, because every individual is fully armed and people form communities on shared values. They would be more collegial than people forced into a polity with nothing in common, which is like a bad roommate. Lock two people in a room long enough, even if they first liked each other, and they start to hate each other.

What should an anarchist do in this society? Thrive, Malice says, and treat politics as the enemy. Anything that lessens the state’s sway and delegitimizes it is good. He once wrote that it is wonderful Trump is regarded as a buffoon, because it is harder to send your kids overseas to make widows and orphans when the commander in chief looks like a clown. Prestige makes war easier. On Tim Pool’s show he wore a motorized propeller beanie for two hours, on purpose. Anyone who takes cues from a hat instead of from the content of ideas is of no use to him as an ally. He would rather abort the conversation than waste breath.

Fridman disagrees at the root. He thinks the person who dismisses you on the surface still has, deep down, a human being who wants to understand. Malice says there is no mind there. He offers a test: go to a drugstore, owe six dollars, hand over a ten and a one, and watch the panic. That is not a mind interested in ideas. Fridman says he is desperate to avoid a long run every day and still capable of it. Malice says compassion for other people’s ideas requires a baseline of intelligence, the ability to see others as different and still of value. Most people, in his view, are neither capable of that nor interested. Anarchy can still be stable, he says, the way a farm is stable with one farmer and fifty cows. You do not ask the cows how to run the farm.

He prefers dogs as the analogy, and Cesar Millan’s work, because humans and dogs coevolved. If you are a dog person, calling someone a dog is a compliment: most dogs are better than most people. Treating the average person as a peer with power over your life is, to him, as silly as asking Lassie to be your accountant. George Carlin’s joke sits underneath it: think how smart the average person is, then remember half of people are dumber than that. Those people deserve respect, safety, and love. The expectation that they should have power over him is what he rejects, and he is happy to sound elitist.

On Twitter, Fridman sees love. Malice sees fun, a game night where you can talk trash, have the crazy uncle over, and still generate a kind of love. He quotes himself daily: we are born knowing life is a magical adventure, and it takes years to train us otherwise, a Willy Wonka, Camus stance. Friends in recovery say not my circus, not my monkeys. He wants to tell damaged people who still want to be well that it will hurt and it is still a magical adventure. He also says, without irony, that he wants to destroy society. The uninvited guest at game night is the person who walks in and dictates the house rule on Free Parking. A friend who ran cuddle parties taught him the line he still uses: people will take as much space as you let them. You have to set the boundary. If they roll their eyes, they are not interested in you as a human being.

Fridman has seen trolling become a game people enjoy for its own sake, aimed at the innocent. Malice says if you are there to hurt innocent people, you are a horrible human being. The original troll, for him, is Andy Kaufman, a performance artist rather than a stand-up, famous from *Taxi*. In the Tony Clifton bit, Clifton tells the crowd his wife died, invites his daughter Sarah, eleven, onto his lap for a duet, then smacks her when her voice cracks and scolds the audience for making her cry more. It was not his daughter. It was not even a child. It was an actress. He was exploiting the audience’s love of children to force them into the show. No one was actually hurt. The exchange was humorous and twisted. Going online to denigrate weak people for being weak is the wrong approach. Malice says he is best on the counterpunch. Billy Idol’s line, as he mangles it, is that he loves it when people are rude, because then he can stop pretending to be nice.

He can see how one practice leads to the other. Low-status people, he says, use sadism as their one mechanism to feel empowered, then hide behind “just joking.” They say the worst thing because they feel powerless, see someone higher status, and get a reaction, so they feel, in a literal sense, that they matter on Earth in a dark way. He wishes that behavior did not share the word trolling with Kaufman or with what he does. Neighboring that darkness, Fridman puts conspiracy theories: nested worlds of powerful pedophiles, self-reinforcing models that then feed attacks on the conventionally powerful. Malice does not think that is mainly a function of conspiracy theories. His own line is take one red pill, not the whole bottle.

The belief that a small cadre runs everything can be reassuring, because then they, often imagined as Jews, will not let it get too bad. The black pill is that they are destroying everything on purpose and you are doomed. Arthur Herman’s *The Idea of Conspiracy in Western History*, one of Malice’s top ten books, walks through how every twenty years a different population is said to run the world, with proofs that are often unfalsifiable. “Conspiracy theory” is also a weaponized dismissal. The Constitutional Convention was a conspiracy. Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby were conspiracies. Eugene Lyons’s *The Red Decade* documents how Stalin’s atrocities were excused in the West. At home on a computer, the pattern can become a cult of one, correlated, Malice guesses, with mild paranoia, until there is no randomness or beauty left in life.

Fridman wants to know how a serious person, someone with a post at a university, looks into Jeffrey Epstein without falling into lizard people. Malice offers a better, smaller oddity: Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican speaker of the House, was a pedophile who went to jail, and Democrats do not throw that in Republican faces every five minutes. He finds that strange. He is a new uncle, his sister just had a second child, and he is alarmed that many people want sexual predation of children to go away as a subject. Part of the reason is that we lack a vocabulary. The idea that this happens to kids, frequently, is so horrible that people would rather not hear it, which does survivors an enormous disservice. He adds that public-school teachers, proportionally, are more often predators than Catholic priests, a fact that sits badly beside the comfort of talking about Stalin instead of the present.

Fridman has listened to Alex Jones while thinking about platforming, and he is more worried about three years of a Russia-collusion story that treated the Trump White House as a Putin stooge, with no consequences for the people who said it. Malice calls Trump the Da Vinci of trolling. His favorite tweet, which fans laser-etched in Lucite for him, is the one where Trump says that every time he speaks of the losers and haters, he does so with great affection; they cannot help the fact that they were born fucked up. Malice reads love in it, even an exclamation point: even when I am going after them, do not take it so seriously. Fridman can see the game. He also knows Trump can be vicious.

The one thing that triggers Fridman is talk of delaying elections. He believes in voting, and he thinks the dictator’s switch flips when the legitimacy of elections is questioned. Malice reminds him that “not my president,” Russia, and impeachment already spent three years on that theme, including a *Newsweek* piece on how Hillary Clinton could still become president. Fridman’s real fear is martial law, a person who stays. Malice wrote a book on North Korea and does not take dictatorship lightly, nor the American appetite for it. His point is that in 2020 Trump had every pathway open: cities burning, tanks he could have sent to applause. Instead he tweeted Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, to call him, said they could solve it in minutes, and sat on his hands until asked. Even if you think Trump is an aspiring dictator, Malice says, that is a sign of some restraint.

Fridman wants to keep that as a moment of hope, and still feels the asymmetry of Russian roulette: one in six is enough when you cannot go back. He notes that Trump taught people you may not have to play by the rules at all. Nancy Pelosi saying Biden should not dignify Trump with a debate, in Fridman’s ear, is the kind of attack on an institution you cannot unring, like saying the word divorce. Malice quotes Chesterton: before you tear down a fence, know why it was put up. He is for tearing it all down, but as a controlled demolition, Indiana Jones sliding something into place before he pulls the idol. He does not know who wins a Biden-Trump debate. Biden handled Paul Ryan and Sarah Palin. Trump is a master counterpuncher. Hillary’s line about the legal system handed him “you’d be in jail.”

On the press, Malice says yellow journalism never became objective. The mask is dropping, not changing. Who died for the claim that Saddam Hussein was about to launch weapons of mass destruction, and who paid a price? No one. Marianne Williamson’s point about a trillion dollars that could have built schools and hospitals at home lands with him. Social media, for all the mobs, lets you see Nicholas Sandmann or Breonna Taylor from several angles without Don Lemon telling you what it means. Doctors on Twitter can be a better coronavirus source than the CDC. Fridman calls that anarchy, with some censorship. Malice says a private company kicking someone off Twitter is not the state. After 9/11, George W. Bush had a 98 percent approval rating and, Malice remembers vividly, could have suspended the Constitution to cheers. He did not. There are still a lot of dominoes before Hitler, and even FDR’s internment of Japanese Americans, which Malice does not take lightly, was not murder in cells.

People know the Holocaust and not the Holodomor, Malice says, and that gap is both a media crime and a lesson in what human beings can do. Fridman’s grandmother survived the 1930s famine in Ukraine as a child, then the German occupation. How much of that was communism as ideology, and how much was Stalin the man? Both, Malice says. Lenin was already building concentration camps and slave labor. Some later variants, Khrushchev and Gorbachev, were milder. He spoils the end of Victor Sebestyen’s *Revolution 1989*: after Poland’s elections, Honecker and Ceaușescu called Gorbachev to send the tanks, as in Hungary and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Gorbachev refused. They told him everything would be finished. They were right. Ceaușescu and his wife were shot against a wall. Countries self-liberated. A friend born in Czechoslovakia had a mother who, pregnant under communism, never imagined her child would be free. People kept waiting for the trick, the mass arrest. It did not come.

Democratic socialism in popular culture still looks, to Malice, like evil if you are on the receiving end. He gives three structural reasons. Morally, no person has the right to tell another how to live economically. Practically, you cannot calculate under socialism: prices are information that tell you to make more of this and less of that, and without prices that can move, you cannot produce efficiently. Third, it turns people against each other by forcing them into relationships, jobs, and a monopoly. Everyone understands what a monopoly does under capitalism; somehow, when the monopolist is the government, those principles are said not to apply. Fridman restates the point as a data problem. Even without corruption you need information. Capitalism, at its cleanest, is real-time information, and manipulation of that information is one of the live problems.

Why are the 2020 candidates so unsatisfactory? Malice is oddly excited, because whoever wins, the election will be hilarious. One theory is that the whole system is optimized for reality-show excitement. Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing showed why quality people would not want the job: the other team has every incentive to humiliate you, and as the two parties lose legitimacy it gets worse. You can run Yahoo or eat corn dogs for eighteen months while your family is destroyed on social media, with no guarantee of the prize. Fridman sees weak competition and wonders why there are not thousands of Andrew Yangs. Malice says Yang did generate excitement, just not a nomination, and you do not have to run for president to push an idea. You can be a podcast host. He is not joking.

Asked whom he wished had lasted, he names Marianne Williamson, Tulsi Gabbard, and Amy Klobuchar, who he thinks got a bad rap. Tulsi was aggressive, had a résumé, and would not stay the establishment course. Williamson seemed to come from genuine compassion. Her book on *A Course in Miracles*, taught in Hollywood during the AIDS crisis, gave him an idea he still uses. Young men were dying, no one cared, and they would not accept a lie that a cure was coming. She asked: what if it is like diabetes, they cut off your foot, you go blind, is that something you can hope for? For a homeless junkie, “you could be a doctor” is a cool story. A studio apartment, a terrible roommate, and a shitty job is not, when you are cooking breakfast in a teaspoon on the street. Small steps become thinkable. Unity 2020, stitching rejects from both parties, he finds incoherent. Centrism is not a mean. Biden’s record is already the centrist product. Trump showed you can be a third-party candidate inside an existing machine, as Bernie Sanders did as an independent. A new party, in that light, makes little sense.

Fridman issues a personal challenge: discuss the Libertarian Party for five minutes without mocking it. Malice takes the constraint. Libertarianism is a great idea, and many of its ideas have gone mainstream. He remembers an early-1990s *New Yorker* or *New York* piece on the Cato Institute that called its antiwar and anti-regulation stance a “wacky consistency,” as if those two could not sit together. Before the internet, you got a two-tribe menu: if you were pro-life you had to hate gay people; if you wanted socialized medicine you had to want free speech. Libertarians said you could eat from a buffet and still have a coherent ideology of peace and non-aggression. The party’s model, like the early progressive and populist parties, is weak at electing people and strong at making the majors adopt the ideas. A late friend, Eric, who was a Liberal Party webmaster, thought the use was education about alternatives, not winning offices.

The mainstreamed items, as he lists them, are war as a last resort instead of a first instinct, drug legalization, and skepticism of police. He sat on a grand jury and heard the question: should a sixteen-year-old selling weed have his life ruined among rapists and murderers? If you say yes, say yes, but admit what you mean. Asset forfeiture, he notes, now steals more from people than burglaries: police can take your car or house on suspicion, and you must sue to prove innocence. Libertarians flagged that as un-American long before left and right noticed. Why, then, are the people at the top of the party so weird? Jonathan Haidt’s research, Malice says, found libertarians the least empathetic and most rationalistic of political groups, thinking in logic rather than feelings. Ron Paul went nowhere as the 1988 Libertarian nominee, then as a Republican in 2008 told Rudy Giuliani onstage that 9/11 happened because “we were over there,” a taboo a few years earlier. Fridman remembers the guts more than the claim. Self-publishing versus a major house is Malice’s analogy: seize an existing party apparatus, as Trump did, rather than carry a third party’s baggage plus your own name, two bridges for most voters.

He owns a first printing of *The Fountainhead*, which should indicate the weight of his affection. “Ayn Rand does not have all the answers, but she has all the questions.” Study her and you are forced through basics with your eyes opened. On *Donahue* she denied being a perfect being and said, resoundingly, that she practiced what she preached. Her essays swerve from art to why the United States should be the only nuclear power, and following a mind make those jumps is, for him, inspiring. Objectivists, like any school, wave away what they dislike as having “no metaphysical significance.” Rand never spayed or neutered her cats, so as not to deny them orgasm; the males sprayed the house. She wrote that a woman should never be president, and when that is too goofy, followers call it personal preference, even though Objectivism was defined as her writings plus the essays in her books. He bets she was on the spectrum, and not as an insult. She saw, before Jon Stewart, how humor is used to pull the great down to the level of nobodies. A girl on MTV, holding Prince’s perfume, joked that it smelled as bad as his recent music without even sniffing it. That, to Malice, is the sin Rand named.

Nathaniel Branden, once her lover and the dedicatee of *Atlas Shrugged*, said no one will state Rand’s view with a straight face: I believe my happiness matters and is worth fighting for, and she is dangerous for saying so. Put that way, Malice thinks it is extremely healthy. People are raised to be apologetic. Say you want to be happy and the culture eye-rolls. The arch-enemy, for him, is cynicism. If a band makes someone happy, it is not for you to sneer. Trolling at its best is not the eye-roll. It is taking down the high rollers. On his podcast with Mikhaila Peterson he opened by noting her father’s struggle with addiction, praised Jordan Peterson’s influence, then said it was so great that he had started taking benzodiazepines recreationally. She said, oh my God, Michael. He had pulled her into sweetness and reversed. Fridman calls that an art form that can become a drug of irreverence. Malice thinks the laugh in a year of hell created love between them, and Fridman agrees, so long as kindness sits around the joke. That surrounding warmth, both men say, is very hard to do in black-and-white text on the internet.

Fridman asks about *The New Right*, Malice’s book on people united mainly by opposition to progressivism, including internet trolls, and about 4chan. Malice says the alt-right’s racial focus was more a blog culture of “racial realism” than a message-board culture, and that 4chan, for all the “tits or get the fuck out” hostility, also lets idiosyncratic people find each other without being dismissed. They tracked down a woman who drowned kittens and got her arrested in a day. Taboos around race and sex, he argues, pull the curious toward the only subculture willing to talk, which is a reason some things should stay somewhat sanctified. Cancel culture, when Fridman turns to it, Malice names in one word: Maoism. Corporate America, he says, has implemented it better than the Communist Party ever could. At Northwestern University Law School, people on a call stood up and said they were racist, a statement you should be legally averse to making even if it were true. Confessing sins before the collective is the ritual. He does not see a mere mob. He sees a systemic, organized movement aimed at dominating a nation.

How to fight it? One of his suggestions is to seize university endowments, the crystallization of privilege, and distribute the money as reparations, turning populations against each other and cutting the universities’ intellectual hegemony. After government and the corporate press, universities are the last leg of the stool, the least prepared to be attacked, and he cannot wait. Fridman, at MIT, experiences a different place: useless administrators, and faculty who spend their days on small trajectories of curiosity in science and engineering, mentoring students, sharing passion, with little of the toxic diversity talk, at least before the pandemic. It felt like a playground for people in their twenties through forties. Destroy that, and you take the playground away. Malice says it will be hard to tell him he is anti-playground. He is against the ones with broken glass on the floor. Fridman hears a flamethrower aimed at the weird kid who got cut, rather than at the people having fun away from the glass. Malice says he is not a watcher mother. He is the guy with the flamethrower now.

Until this year, Fridman says, his scientific conversations never mentioned Trump. The politics lives in the humanities. Malice does not buy the outlier story. At Bucknell he wanted a class on American individualism; one of the required five texts was *The Birth of a Nation*, the film about the Klan. There is no department, he says, without thoroughgoing ideologues, and every university makes students take propaganda electives. Fridman still wants a line between science and engineering and the parts of biology that touch the humanities, and he thinks stuffing world-class research and teaching into the same person’s calendar is part of what is broken. He is defending the quiet engineers, the Elon Musks, while the humanities argue about diversity. Malice, Soviet brother to Soviet brother, says ice water runs in their veins. Mercy is not how he is wired. He grants MIT’s research excellence and denies that it must also be an educational establishment in the current form. Apprenticeship, he suggests, is an alternative, even if it cuts against tradition.

Fridman brings up Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, pushed out of MIT after a leaked mailing list. Undergraduates called Marvin Minsky a rapist because Jeffrey Epstein had sent a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old to proposition him; Minsky, about seventy, with his wife present, said no. The thread described that as rape. Stallman, the debugger, said the word was wrong. It was reported as defending rape. Faculty were afraid to stand up for him. Malice asks whether you should fear someone who wants precision on a charge of violent assault. Stallman also ate skin from his feet in lectures and put “lover of ladies” on his office door, so administrators, Malice suspects, had an excuse to fire him without a lawsuit. The message to everyone else, Fridman says, was that insisting on the meaning of “rape” means you should call everything rape. Malice says the message is submission. Fridman adds Zora Neale Hurston, accused in 1940 of molesting a boy while she was out of the country, an indictment so false she wanted to kill herself, and Juanita Broaddrick’s account of an alleged rape by Bill Clinton that lasted half an hour. Empowering women to speak is a good, he thinks, and also a weapon. Whenever people are given a mechanism of power over others, some will use it.

Fridman asks for a kind of therapy. Being called a fraud hurt, because he wears his heart on his sleeve. Malice, as a New Yorker, compares it to a homeless person yelling on the sidewalk. Your job is physical safety, not a seminar. The person might even be telling the truth. A friend on Smith Street chuckled at a stranger muttering about hipsters and got “what are you laughing at, fatso,” which froze her on her own weight. When someone uses one word to dismiss your entire life without knowing it, you do not have to take that seriously. Ask whether they are in a position to judge, and whether they are backing it with mistakes in your data. Fridman says the wound is psychological, like a teenage girl bullied online, and reason does not help when he is open and fragile. Malice says he does not block people enough. He blocks immediately. Time will help. Podcasting was not Fridman’s training; in that sense the fraud charge has a hook. The same people call Elon Musk a fraud. Malice is willing to be cruel: maybe Musk is not, and you are. He sees internet attackers as animals. When a dog barks, it is agitated. That does not change your life except that you cross the street.

Asked for three books, he names James Burnham’s *The Machiavellians*, from 1941, on how politics works in reality rather than in civics class, a book he and Mencius Moldbug, Curtis Yarvin, recommended independently, now out of print. He agrees with Yarvin that politics should be looked at without emotional loyalty to schools, and disagrees about a military coup and about whether anarchism is stable. Second, *The Fountainhead*. If you read *Atlas Shrugged* first you do yourself an enormous disservice; *The Fountainhead* is the better novel, about psychology and ethics, not primarily her politics. Third, Thaddeus Russell’s *A Renegade History of the United States*, whose thesis is that degenerates, prostitutes, madams, slaves, and immigrants, being low status, got away with freedoms that higher-status people then demanded. He also throws in Jonathan Haidt’s *The Righteous Mind*. The degenerate thesis, he says, has extreme consequences for how you think about liberty.

Does he ponder his own death? A lot, especially now that he is an uncle and mentors younger people. Yesterday at the gym, a song by his friend John Gurgis, who did his podcast theme and the cover of *Dear Reader*, came on the iPod, and he almost texted that one of them will bury the other. He is not afraid. Rand had a line: I will not die, the world will end. He has had enough experiences that everything now is icing on the cake. The Jewish perspective he takes is that you only have to leave the world a little better than you found it, to move the needle a little. With *Dear Reader*, the unauthorized autobiography of Kim Jong Il, he could not liberate North Korea. He could shift the camera from the funny clown to the millions dead, the starving children, the people performing because there is a gun to a kid’s head. “If someone put a gun to your kid’s head, you put on those dancing shoes real quick.” He and others changed the conversation from look at those buffoons to look at those poor people. That does not make him great. It means if he has to go tomorrow, he did a little.

The meaning of life, for a camera, is two types of people in the countryside looking at a blank canvas on an easel. One sees a stupid empty square. The other sees a beautiful space and a chance to paint anything. He is the second type, and he wants others to become it. He and Fridman have both been more successful than they expected, in ways they did not plan. When you are young you are intent on driving the car. After a point you realize you are a surfer. You control a small board. You have no idea where the wave goes. Sometimes you swallow salt water. Then you stop trying to drive and it is freaking awesome. Fridman says the game Malice plays makes the world seem fun in a dark time. Malice says not every day, they came for him hard, but it does make the world seem fun. Fridman closes with a Malice line: conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit.