516. Michael Malice: A Clinical Analysis

Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today to sit down and talk, play really with Michael Mellis.
And that's always fun. Michael's a, he's a genuine delight to have a conversation with.
You never know what direction it's going to go in. Many directions, all of which have a certain coherence.
He's got a great sense of humor and irony and is extremely sharp and unpredictable. So that's ridiculously fun.
And he always has something useful to say.

So what did we talk about today? Well, we talked about the terrible attractiveness of the kind of virtue signaling that other people make sacrifices for. Motivation for deep evil.
Michael has studied totalitarian evil.

He was curious about the more mundane forms of pathology, the sorts of things that motivate not only pedophilia, but extreme sadistic pedophilia, let's say. So that always makes for an enjoyable conversation.
We talked about Michael shifting views with regards to the marginal, let's say, as a creative anarchist by personality and political inclination. Michael is prone to presume that the different against the same or the, what would you say, exceptional against the normal is admirable.
But he's also come to recognize that the center can be dissolved in a manner that's cataclysmic and the diverse and the creative can degenerate into the monstrous and dangerous. And so we talked about that technically, psychologically, sociologically.
We talked about Camille Paglia, who's a hero of Michael's, the brilliant female literary critic, unpredictable and sparkling. And Michael's request to me that I broker an invitation, which I could do, I suppose, with some degree of success probability.
And we surveyed the landscape. Fundamentally, what we did was survey the landscape of counterproductive moralizing and analyzed its effect on psychological and political behavior.
And it was great fun. So join us for that.
I suppose you think this should be a national holiday. Well, kind of.
Don't you? We took down Trudell. That's the spirit of January 6th.
Put her there, man. Right? Thank God.
You know, I watched his resignation speech today. Apparently, the wind blew it away just a couple of minutes before his actual speech, so he had to wing it, and you can tell.
And you know what I really found fascinating about it was, and I think it's perfectly in keeping with his essential narcissism, is the first statements he made were about him. He said something like, well, you all know I'm a leader and that, or I'm a fighter.
You all know I'm a fighter and I don't quit. It's like, well, this isn't about you.
I can't believe that, I can't envision saying something like that about myself.

You know, can you imagine going out in front of a national audience and saying,

I'm a fighter.

I can't imagine anyone calling you a leader, that's true.

Well, yeah, so.

In all seriousness, to your point, I'm sorry to cut you off.

You know better than I do from your work at Shrink,

narcissists think their narrative is the reality.

They literally believe what they say is true, and when you challenge that, they get enraged,

because it's an effect you're lying.

If you're not going you contradict what they say. Yeah, it's self-evident.
Well, there's an interesting corollary to that, you know. Statistical analysis of language, kind of using something approximating early large language models was just factor analysis, but it's analogous, showed that there's no difference between being self-conscious and being miserable.
They're so tightly associated that you can't distinguish them. So the default reality is that if you prioritize yourself, the associated emotion is negative.
So narcissists are in a game that just can't possibly be won. Wait, but isn't it more the case that they can't prioritize their self because there is no self? Well, the self is a funny thing, Michael.
This is something we might as well talk about this. A human being is something that's organized on many levels, right? So if you think about it neurobiologically, for example, I'll give you an example.
If you take a cat, a female, that works better on female cats, partly because their sexual behavior is a little less complex to organize. You can take out almost the whole brain of a female cat, the whole cortex and most of the centers of emotion and leave it only with the hypothalamus, which is just a cap on the top of the spinal cord.
And that cat in a relatively unchanging environment can function. It can eat, it can mate, it can defend itself, it can drink, it can regulate its temperature, like it's functional.
And this is the weirdest thing. It's hyper exploratory.
So think about that. A cat with no brain is hyper exploratory.
Okay. So the hypothalamus regulates basic motivational states like lust and hunger and thirst and temperature regulation, defensive aggression, right and And so it's like a, it's the first place where reflexes transform into something like personalities.
But there's a sets of them, right? Like, you know, a cat that's involved in defensive rage isn't a cat that's in the mood for mating, right? So it swaps between these fundamental motivational states. Well, each of those motivational states has a self.
And Nietzsche pointed this out back in an unrelated investigation, in a sense, but he said every drive philosophizes in its spirit. So, these underlying motivational states, like they're not just drives like reflexes.
They come with perceptions, thoughts, attitudes, political opinions, like they come fully fledged. But imagine if you're really immature, badly socialized, they just operate in sequence.
That's like a toddler. Well, when people talk about their self, usually they talk about something like possession by one of those lower states.
Now, then you could imagine that could be integrated. Right.
And that's what happens when you mature. But then that integration and being social are almost exactly the same thing.
Like, you know, if I was a solitary animal living in the woods, I could just cycle through my underlying motivational states. There'd be no real reason to regulate or integrate them.
But as you mature, you integrate them so that they take the future into account and other people into account. So then the self starts to become, well, reflexes, basic motivational states, integrated personality, but then it's integrated into a relationship and a family and a community and a society.
And it isn't obvious at all which of those takes priority. And one of the things I've been thinking about is that our definitions of mental health are, and this is partly psychologists' fault, are really badly flawed because we think of sanity as a characteristic of the self, but it's probably something like harmony between all these, simultaneous harmony between all these levels.
I wrote a short list of things I want to talk to you about and we're already hitting it. And what I want to talk to you about at length, I want to hear your thoughts at length, is that what you just hit on is the idea of self-actualization.
Yeah. Because I think that's the kind of thing when you're starting out in any career, it's not possible.
Because you're going to have to subordinate yourself to your boss, your superior somewhat, and you can't really be yourself all the time. Well, I think you hit the target dead center by bringing up self-actualization.
Okay, so this idea emerged in the late 1950s and the 1960s, right? first of all, with the existential psychologists and psychoanalysts, and then with the humanists like Maslow and Rogers, and it was kind of a substitute for religious pursuit. Like it'd be the secular substitute for religious pursuit.
There was this idea that there was a self, which is something like the liberal project, I would say the liberal individualistic project, and then that could be actualized. But there's a real problem with that because, look, I had a neighbor say to me once, no mother is any happier than her most unhappy child.
Okay. Right, which strikes me as highly plausible.
So because if you're socialized, you're in a nexus of relationships. Right.
And if those relationships aren't harmonious, voluntary, playful, you're miserable. And that means that the self-actualization isn't self.
It's more like conducting yourself in a manner that enables harmony to exist, like a musical harmony at all these levels simultaneously. So you have to conduct yourself.
If you're going to not be swamped by negative emotion, this goes back to Trudeau. If I only think about my local self now and maximizing that, you might say, well, I get exactly what I want or something in me does.
Why wouldn't I be happy? Well, part of the reason is I'm sacrificing the future because I'm being impulsive. And also, if it's all about me, who the hell's going to want to be around me? I had, please, because again, this is your forte, not mine.
I had always thought of self-actualization, if I had to define it as, I'm myself 24-7. I'm myself when I'm at home.
I'm myself when I'm with my friends. I'm myself in a professional setting where you're always in a position to be yourself.
And I think when you have people around you who like you, respect you, and admire you, you can have that. And it is very harmonious because you don't have to change who you are or how you talk if you're in the morning, evening, night, or no matter the setting.
So Carl Jung talked about something akin to that, and I think that's partly the source of the ideas. So, he believed that there was a core self, but Jung believed that the core self, this is something we can talk about in great detail, but Jung identified the core self.
He thought that Christ was an archetype of the core self. There was a technical reason for that.
And then he thought the self was guarded, in a sense, by persona, which is exactly what you're wearing, right? You've got a mask on. And so, the persona would be the tool that you use to, this is one way of thinking about it, the tool that you use to manipulate the social environment so that you don't cause undue stress and so that you get what you want.
Now, you, like you, apparently, would presume that if you're well-constituted, there's no real division between the persona and the self. Now, it can be a bit more complicated than that because one of the things Jung pointed out was that there are times when you want a persona.
Like you want to put out a shallow version of yourself in a way. So imagine, for example, that you go into a bank and you're just going to do a business transaction with the teller.
You don't want, whether you want the teller's full self there or not is a matter of dispute. Really what you want is a pretty generic transaction.
Right. So there are times when you need to know when you present a generic version of yourself.
My point is that bank teller isn't really in a position to be self-actualized. Because they have to subordinate themselves to Chase or whatever the company is.
You know, okay, so let's, I've been thinking about an idea akin to that in relationship to the Exodus story. Okay.
No, so the Exodus story presents kind of an archetypal landscape of human destiny. And you might say one of the ways of interpreting it is that everybody starts out as a slave.
And that would be, I think, akin to your idea that the bank teller, for example,

isn't in a position to be self-actualized.

Right? Because they're

so constrained by the demands of the

situation that there's no room for

what? Individual creativity

or full individual expression?

I can give you an example that happened to me

when in 2000 I was working at

Goldman Sachs as a help desk, right?

So how it worked is... I can't imagine that.
Why? I was better than everyone else on the team combined because I knew how to be helpful. Because I knew, what I understood was when that person is calling you, they don't want an answer, they want reassurance.
If you're at the point when you call the help desk, you're freaking out. You just want to know someone will take care of it.
I don't care what the answer is. I'm outsourcing my concern.
So I understood the rest of my team didn't because they'd be like, oh, I don't know. I'm like, don't add to their stress.
They're stressed enough. You're there to ameliorate their stress.
Yeah. Well, that's great.
I mean, partly what you want. Let me finish what I said earlier with this bank teller.
And a lot of times they would want overtime and I wouldn't want to do the overtime because I want to go home and work on my writing and so on and so forth. And overtime was time and a half.
I'd rather have that hour than that time and a half. My coworkers, I'm using this term literally, couldn't understand that.
They're like, you're getting paid time and a half and the team needs you. And I'm like, I don't care.
Like, I'd rather have my time. And for these types of people, that self, it makes no sense.
Like, you're there to help the team, the team needs you, QED. Okay, so let's take apart that idea of your time, because the way you phrased that, for example, there's an implicit assumption there that's underlying our discussion that there's a distinction between your time and company time.
Yes. Okay, so I want to hit that from two perspectives.
One would be, well, they're both your time because you decided to go work for the company, right? But so that's a voluntary choice, just like it is to pursue what's your time. So then the question would be why what is it in you that you were serving

when it was your time specifically rather than company time you know what i mean it's like how

do you because you did both of them voluntarily but i didn't do both of them for free right okay

so one of the distinctions would be the the top the thing that you're doing when you spend

your time the time you characterize as my time yeah that's something you would do for free. Right.
Okay, why? What was it about it that made it valuable in the absence of external reward? Because that was what I wanted to be as a person. And I was working my writing and things like that and trying to make it.
Whereas the Goldman Sachs stuff, there was no future in it for me. Future.
Right. Yeah.
Okay. So that's an interesting aspect of that.
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It was easy for you and maybe it's easy for people in general to assume that what they're doing is having their time if what they're doing with that time is investing in their future. I don't think they were thinking about the future.
No, you, when you were doing your writing, was the fact that it was motivationally relevant to you directly associated with the fact that it was an investment in the future? Like, why was your writing, why did your writing take precedent and why did you identify the time you spent writing as serving you? Like, I'm after a definition of you. What do you mean by you? My definition of me as I saw it then.
Though I was in a position to implement it. Is someone who is a writer.
Someone who is a creative person. Someone who is a thinker.
There was no part of me that wanted to be. That corporate helper.
Right okay so then I would say. That's akin to the distinction.
Between slave. And sojourner let's say, in the Exodus story.
So, you know, there's this, one of the elements that underlies the general critique of capitalism is that people are wage slaves. Right, of course.
Right now, you can criticize that in that, well, slaves can't quit. And the critic would say, well, I can quit one job, but if I don't get another one, I'll starve.
So like, I'm in a slavery position, so to speak. Now, I think the most effective way of countering that is likely that if you're not charting your own destiny, then you are a slave.
But I think there's a big difference, and this is why the Exodus metaphor does not apply here. I think a lot of people want the cage.
I think H.L. Mencken is right.
The average man... H.L.
Mencken said the average man doesn't want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.
You don't see that in Exodus. The Jews wanted to escape Egypt.
There were none of them that stayed behind. They go, you know, I got a pretty good here under Pharaoh.
They all want to be free. And that's not accurate but they do like well they're lost in the desert because that's part of what happens on the way to freedom so to speak they do get whiny as hell oh hell yeah they they pine for the days when the tyrant told them what to do they said well at least we have we had like a variety they're getting manna from heaven right they say well we don't have onions and garlic anymore, even though they're getting heavenly food.
So they do revert to that slave, what would you say, that longing for slavery. And I do agree that that is being part of the reason, this is something that I think is really worth discussing with you.
Part of the reason that people are wage slaves, let's say, is because they don't want to take on the responsibility of charting their own course. Now, I think people often also don't know how, like our school systems, for example, were set up to not teach people to do that.
It's the Bismarck model where they wanted to make everyone homogenized to little soldiers. It's's funny how one of the things i love about social media and kind of new media is that it allows people to question things they never thought to even question for their whole life i'll give you a parallel example uh the great leader kim il sung uh who founded north korea he had a big um tumor on the back of his neck it was too close to his spine to operate that was the alien control.
And it got bigger and bigger throughout his life. And he was always photographed from this angle.
And I heard differing accounts about whether North Koreans knew about this. And I met a refugee and I said to her, did you know about this thing? She goes, oh yeah, it was an old war injury.
And I said, why would a war injury get bigger throughout his life? And she just stopped and she's like, holy crap. She never questioned, and she knew on the face it was a lie, but she never questioned that it was a lie.
Let's look about education. Why are we all going to school at the same time and learning everything at the same pace? It makes no sense.
You're probably, me might be better at math. I might be better at, you know, history.
Age-graded group. Yes, it makes, and when you stop and think, especially with technology nowadays, you can have dynamic testing, you know, okay, once a month you test, you stay here, you get extra help, that's fine, you can read ahead, but somehow we all have to start school at the same time, study everything at the same rate, and people who get worse than others, not to any fault their own, are punished.
It makes no sense, but we never question it. And now thanks to podcasting like this, you'd be like, wait a minute, this is kind

of weird, isn't it? Why does everyone have to learn everything at the same rate and at the same time?

Well, you know that it was the school systems were established in accordance with the Prussian

military model. Yes, yes, of course.
And that the goal there was to make obedient soldiers and

really literally to crush out any proclivity towards individual striving. Just one more thing.
There's a book called Illiberal Reformers, which talks about this at length. It's amazing the boner Western leftists have for European ideas.
Like they went over to Prussia, they saw this and because it's foreign, it's like, oh my God, this is amazing. This is next gen.
Same thing happened a couple of generations later with Lenin and the communists. It's like, okay, it's from overseas.
It must be better than our stupid American values is how they perceived it. And the consequences have been absolutely disastrous.
Like if you ask most conservatives in 2019, could COVID have happened in America, the lockdowns and all the submission? They would have laughed in your face.

But they ran the experiment. They have the data.
Their theory was wrong. People are docile.
I was shocked at the degree of, well, my conclusion observing Toronto during the COVID was that 70% of Canadians would have worn a mask for the rest of their life. And I would say 30% of them would have worn that mask happily if they could have continued informing on their neighbors.
Oh, yeah. And the thing that's crazy to that is Canada is not a hospitable country.
It's a nation of frontiersmen. And look at Scotland.
Like, what happened to these peoples? Or Australia. Oh, yeah, right, yeah.
There you go. And now they're castrati.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Well, we did get rid of Schurdo today. Yeah, but I mean, this is kind of, this is ripping, I mean, first of all, I think it's kind of crappy of him to set up his successor and take a major loss, like Kim Campbell had to face, it was in 93.
So, but I mean, I don't, I'm sure there's room for hope with Pierre, but he's a symptom. He's not the cancer.
Don't you think? Yeah. Hey, man, Canadians voted for him.
And I would say that the default Canadian, if presented with his policies, one by one would still agree with with virtually all of them. Yeah.
And that's true of the Conservatives as well. The malaise is very, very deep.
Yeah. Okay.
So back to this, I still want to dig in a little further into this, your dream. So we have this program online called Future Authoring that helps people lay out a plan for the future.
Oh, what a great title. Okay, I love that.
Yeah, well, it has almost a miraculous effect. It's really quite stunning.
And I still find this difficult to believe because psychological interventions usually don't work. And they often, if they work, they don't have the results that you intend, which is partly because if something's kind of working well, it's really hard to improve it.
It's way easier to muck it up in ways you don't understand. Okay, so the future authoring program asks you to, okay, so you make a contract with yourself like a covenant.
So the covenant is something like this. If you could have what you wanted in five years, and so what you wanted would be, you'd be satisfied with that or thrilled with it even, and things would be going well enough for you so that you weren't swamped by misery, which is really what people want, but they want to not be swamped by misery.
They don't want to be happy. Okay.
Right. Yeah, right.

Yeah, yeah.

It's very important to know that.

It's a very good distinction, yes.

It's a very good distinction.

Yes.

So then, can you imagine anything that would satisfy you?

So this is like a pretend game that a kid would play, you know, like it's fantasy.

It's like, okay, you get to have what you want now, but there's a condition here.

You actually have to be taking care of yourself like someone you care for.

Yeah.

Okay, so now you posit yourself as someone you care for.

Now you get to have what you want.

What would satisfy you?

But you have to specify it.

Sure.

Okay, so then we have people write just for 15 minutes with no real self-criticism.

What might that be like?

And then we have them criticize it a bit because you have to make it into a strategy and

then differentiate. It's like, well, what would you want for a relationship? What would you want with regard to your family, your career, your education, your care of yourself, your service to the community, your mental and physical health? And again, same rules apply.
You get to have what you want.

Okay, so now we had young people do this when they came to college on their orientation day. 90 minutes, that's all they wrote.
They either wrote for 90 minutes or they wrote about what they did for the last two weeks for 90 minutes. So it was randomized study.
The kids who did the self-authoring program were 50% less likely to drop out the first year. 50%.
Yeah. Yeah.
And even the college where we did this, it's stunning for a 90-minute intervention. Even the college that we did the intervention in wouldn't implement the program.
We got zero takers on the university

side, which is, you know, very telling as far as I'm concerned. But the reason I brought it up is because the alternative to being a slave, let's say, which would be the alternative to self actualization is charting your own course.
But then this is the question I have for you. Like you were doing that when you had these dreams of writing, but why did you identify writing with yourself and why were you motivated to pursue it? You know, cause that's work too, like working at Goldman Sachs.
So this was my list. I remember the list distinctly and I've checked them all off.
Okay. No alarm clock, never have to talk to someone I don't want to and never have to engage in small talk.
That was all I wanted. So I've done standup for a little bit and that was very frustrating for me because the lack of causality, meaning a joke that kills one night would bomb the next and that threw me for a loop.
Writing, I could do in my underwear, my house, my own time. So to have those things is, to me, self-actualization and a huge, huge blessing.
Right. So that, a blessing.
Yes, I don't take it for granted. The president doesn't have that.
So, you know, when God comes to Abraham, he comes as the voice of adventure. and what he tells Abraham is that if he follows that voice, his life will be a blessing to himself.
Right. There's other aspects of the deal, but that's one of them.
His life will be a blessing to him. You set out the preconditions for what your life would be like if it was a blessing.
Yes. You said, so you're very high in openness.
So you didn't want any small talk. You wanted to get to the heart of the matter.
Yes, yes. Get to the depths right away.
Me and Michaela is your in agreeableness. Yeah.
So I never have to talk to someone I don't want to. Yeah.
And I like my biorhythm. I go to bed at two, I wake up at 11, Monday to Sunday.
Right, right. So you're an evening person.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
That's often associated with openness. Is that true? Yeah, yeah, there's actually,

there are morning people and evening people

and they have different temperaments.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you wanted to,

not to have to engage in pointless small talk, right?

You said you wanted to set your own temporal rhythm.

Right.

Although, is it disciplined or is it erratic?

Or do you just get up at the same time, but later in the day? It's organic. You just get up.
Yeah. And that's okay.
Yes, the best. Yeah.
Okay. Okay.
Yeah, it's better for me psychologically if I get up at a regular time. But that is regular time.
It's 11. Oh, but that's what I asked.
You get up at 11. Yes.
But that, okay, so it's stable but it's your choice. Yes.
Right. I don't have a clock.
My body just wakes up. Right.
So that means it's not, what would you say? It's not undisciplined. Sure.
You know what I mean? I'm very disciplined. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay.
So you wanted not to have to engage in trivial interactions. Right.
You wanted to get up on your rhythm. Right.
What else? Never have to talk to someone I don't want to. Right.
No small talk. Yeah's part of the small talk thing why do you distinguish them then you wanted to not have small talk and you also wanted not to talk to anybody you didn't well not interact so not just talk like if i like if i don't have to go to some event i don't want to or be trapped in a conversation so you really wanted to choose the parameters of your social that's all you wanted that's there are other things that was was it.
I mean, I said, if that was my list, I've made it like in my head. I like being like now there's other ancillary things like don't look at the check at a restaurant.
Don't care. If I want to go on a trip once in a while, I can.
But I think at a certain point, this is what I want to talk to you about is at a certain point, we and I have discussed this off camera. You stop driving the car and you start surfing.
Because I think when you reach a certain level of success, whatever comes next is so often so random and circuitous. Like I've talked about this with Roseanne.
One day the president's complaining about a song she sings. This is not the kind of thing you can plan for and expect, right? So once you reach a certain level of success, things just maintain their momentum.
And I talked about this with Rogan also. He's like, yeah, just wake up.
You're like, okay, Prince charles is complaining about me this is my life okay you have to accept it you have that too you weren't always jordan peterson yes yes well so that's the the there i there's a specific reason i wanted to bring this up so when i was writing we who wrestle with god i was looking at character their characterizations of the divine. That was going to be the subtitle.
We used perceptions instead, but it doesn't matter. What the stories do, as far as I am concerned, or at least one of their functions, is to figure out what principle should be superordinate.
Now, you did that. You had three parameters for your superordinate principle.
And you identified that with yourself. That would satisfy me.
So, the divine in the Abrahamic encounter is the voice of adventure. And so, God's covenant, his contract there, because it's put in contractual form.
If you follow this voice, then the following things will happen. Be a blessing to yourself.
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Again, that's shopify.com slash jbp that is all lowercase head over to shopify.com slash jbp to start selling with shopify today again that's shopify.com slash jbp your name will become known among other people justly yes right so that's a good author that's that's a good offer right because people want social standing and that can be gamed and it

can be falsified, but it can also be genuine. Yes.
Right. Okay.
You'll do something of lasting significance. So that's cool.
That would be probably for you, maybe your work on anti-totalitarianism. Yes.
Right. And then you'll do it in a way that will be a blessing to everyone else.
Yes. It'll multiply the pie instead of, okay, and then the, okay,

then the association of the promised land with that is that if you follow that call, then the world turns into a field of unpredictable opportunity. Yes.
And so that's also an adventure. And it's true.
What's going to happen. I know it is true.
That's the opposite of being a slave. No, but slave no but i'm telling to the audience like when you're young i'm telling you like this is the advice i always give them i say this all the time let's suppose you're an author right it's an easy example go into the bookstore look at those crappy crappy books in the shelves that you're like i can't believe this is a book deal that could be you you could be that shitty author right right they're friends like how did this guy get a book deal and when you put it in terms like that, all of a sudden, what would have seemed impossible because of your schooling, you're not going to be an author.
It's like, oh, wait a minute. I can do this.
Or you could be a band that no one's heard of, but you pay the rent and you create your music and you've got a dedicated fan base. That's heaven on earth.
You don't have to be the Beatles. Right.
Well, you might not even want to be. Exactly.
So, yeah, look at what happened to John Lennon.

Right, right, right.

So, we have this bizarre Pareto distribution in American aspirations where unless you're at the very, very top, you're kind of a failure. And, like, that's ridiculous.
You don't have to be this hugely successful thing to make it. Another way of dealing with the Pareto distribution problem, right, which is just so everybody listening is clear, is that the bulk of the rewards go to a small minority of people in any field.
Now, a small minority of people in every field do the productive work, too, so let's not forget. But one of the ways that a sophisticated society deals with that is just by generating an indefinite number of games.
Right. Here's a cool thing that I've noticed about people.
Imagine that you're kind of out on the Pareto distribution in one dimension. So you've got specialized knowledge.
There's quite a few of you. But if you have specialized knowledge in two areas that are distinct, there's hardly any of you.
And if there's three, it's like you're that person. You're the only person playing that game.
So that's a good thing for everybody who's watching and listening to know. It's like, get really good at something, and then that makes you exceptional, and you're going to be somewhat successful just because of that.
But then if you add another distant skill to that, and you overlap them, it's like you're pretty rare. And three, no one's like you.
you i had a question i had for you and then i was going to put you a little bit on the spot yeah in a fun way yeah who did you model you basically became jordan peterson not overnight but it was pretty quick right to go from just a professor to kind of yeah like yeah right asymptotic who did you model yourself after there had to be someone who's like all right i don't

know what i'm doing here like who do i want to be like who paved the way for you oh that's that's

easy really um they were people that i encountered in books oh like definitely well i would say like

i read a lot and some books had a massive effect on me like my my pattern for reading was i had a

problem i was always trying to solve i was trying to to solve the, I was trying to understand evil. That's been like my motivation since I was like 13.
And then now and then I'd run across an author and I think, oh, this person knows something I don't. Seriously.
And then I just read everything they read, wrote. And then I'd find out who influenced them and I'd read that.
And so, you know, the cardinal people who influenced me were Carl Jung, for sure, Nietzsche. Okay.
Carl Rogers was a pretty big influence. There was some biological psychologists, Jeffrey Gray.
I learned a lot about the brain from Jeffrey Gray. But none of these people were public intellectuals like you are.
No. What I meant is, is there anyone you model yourself after in that regard? No, I wouldn't say so.
That's interesting. The reason it worked for me, likely, is because I had a unique lecturing style.
Yeah, but lots of people have unique lecturing styles. Yeah, but they usually use notes.
Okay. See, I trained myself pretty much from the beginning of my career to speak without notes.
And then when I... So that made my classes were very popular.
The combination of speaking without notes and then dealing with this major existential issue made my classes very popular. And that happened to translate to YouTube.
Okay. And I would say at the time, I experimented with YouTube just as an experiment, basically.
Like, I was doing some outreach on media. A producer came to me 20 years ago for a little television station, kind of like an NPR, Canada's equivalent, TV Ontario, and asked to film one of my classes.

And so we did a 13-part series. And my classes were very popular.
And so I had a taste of popular success as a professor and then sort of a little bit on that TV. Did you watch those clips to see what you could improve, what you did wrong? No.
No, interesting. No, I could tell what I was doing.
Well, if you're really speaking to an audience,

you know this likely as a stand-up and as a speaker if you're really speaking to an audience they tell you yeah yeah yeah that's fair because you have a class you have dynamic instant feedback that's right okay oh yeah it's not just you in front of a camera right oh yeah that's a big difference and the most telling part of the feedback is silence yeah right right because people are riveted or looking each other. Yeah, or shifting their seats.
Yeah, exactly. They're not moving, which means it's so interesting, because what that means neurophysiologically is there's all these competing motivations in someone, right? Yeah, yeah.
And what happens if you decide to do something, the thing you're doing wins a Darwinian competition over all the other things you could be doing and suppresses them and inhibits them. And the more powerful the central motivational state, the more complete the inhibition.
And so what I'm trying to appeal to people in a lecture is like the lecture is a journey. It's a quest.
I'm answering a question. It's a quest.
So I'm taking people on a quest. And if the quest is successful, they're dead silent, right? They're just, they're tangled right into the discussion.
And that's, there isn't anything more fun than that. Like it's ridiculously entertaining to do that.
So I'm going to put you a little bit on the spot. And this is also in teaching people at home how to ask someone for a favor, right? So the key, in my opinion, asking for a favor is give that person the space to say no.
Don't ever say, hey, can you use this for me? Say, would you be comfortable? Are you okay with this? Something that you're in a position to do. Because I've had people make demands, get me on Rogan.
It's like, you're really, it's a big ask, you know, like worded a bit away. So when I was growing up, there was someone I was modeling myself after.
And you know that question people ask if you have dinner with anybody on the TV? There is this person, and this person is a big fan of yours. And I would love it if you feel comfortable telling them, hey, break bread with Michael Malice.
It'll be worth your time. And that person is Camille Paglio.
She was my role model when I started out trying to do this kind of stuff. Well, I like your conceptualization.
It goes along with your stance as an anarchist, right? Well, look, this is one of the principles that we're using to guide the development of this Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. Here's the rule.
Policies that require fear and force are bad policies. Yes, that's right.
Yeah. Right.
Now, it's tricky when it comes to the regulation of criminal behavior right because the really psychopathic anti-social people they don't play a social game and so asking them people don't can't think ahead even that even those who just can't think past the next moment well they don't right i mean psychopaths are notorious for for not learning from but non-psychopaths as well a certain intelligence level they're not thinking in terms of causality yeah yeah yeah well i suspect that you're this is a tough one i was going to ask you when when you were talking about you know your decision to become a writer i mean you're blessed with an extremely high level of verbal intelligence right and that's like that's an a priori gift yes that's fair that's fair yeah but then but but the core there's quite a correlation between intelligence and socioeconomic status it's pretty high it's the best predictor right and the second best predictor is conscientiousness is that right yeah okay it's much weaker it's about one-fifth as powerful okay you know um or on the entrepreneurial space, it's openness, right?

But there's no, there doesn't- Really?

That's interesting,

because so many entrepreneurs I know

are so kind of like basic in their thinking.

Well, the managerial types

tend to be intelligent and conscientious.

The entrepreneurial types

tend to be intelligent and open.

Okay, got it, okay.

So there's a pathway to,

like it's likely that a serial entrepreneur is going to be high in openness. Okay, yeah, yeah, okay.
Right, right. Right, okay, because they're, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, they're switching games. Like an open person is switching games all the time.
Right. Right, whereas like a more managerial person picks a game and gets really good at it.
And that works great if the game is working. Yeah.
But it works terribly when the game stops working, which is why you need some entrepreneurs in your organization. So, yeah, so I was wondering about this adventure issue, you know, intelligence predicts success.
And so then you might say, well, what's your probability for success as an adventure if you're not as intelligent? But my suspicions are that strength of character will do the trick. You know, because one of the pathways to success in a functional society is that people can really rely on you.
That's so, I'm sorry, this is kind of insane that you, that's insane, but it's fortuitous to say this because I've given talks for young people about like what I wish I'd known at their age. And I tell them, don't strive for excellence because you're not gonna be able to do it.
Yeah. Strive for competence.
Yeah. If I can rely on you as someone who's working for me and you say, I'll have this paper on Tuesday and it's ready on Tuesday, you're at the 90th percentile.
Right away. In fact, I'd rather have you say, I'll have it for you on Wednesday and give it Wednesday than say Monday and give it it to me on Tuesday.
Because I know I could schedule it around the Wednesday. A hundred percent.
Well, the other thing too, see, if you're reliable, this is why honesty is the best policy. If you're reliable, and you already pointed this out, you're low entropy.
Right, yeah, yeah, right. It's like, I can reduce you to one pixel.
You will do what you said. Box.
Shelf. I also appreciate the irony of the anarchist advising people to minimize the chaos that they bring.
But that's the best approach. Well, but when we talked to you, when we talked about anarchy before, you stressed the voluntary element of it.
Of course. And that strikes me as, well, that's why we made that a principle for our policy discussion, so to speak, at ARC.
It's like, if you can't offer people an invitational vision, so they say, yeah, yeah, I would do that. I would be enthusiastic about doing that.
Then there's something wrong with your policy. So I think like a cardinal way of identifying tyrants is they use fear and course and compulsion yes right definitionally yeah

yeah yeah and so this is a good also for you people to know who are watching and listening is if you're listening to a politician yeah and they're trying to motivate you fundamentally with fear or they're proposing the use of compulsion you know say in the case of an emergency it's like Yeah, probably you're a tyrant.

Yeah.

Probably you're a tyrant, Even in an emergency, right? Oh, yeah. No, your duty is to- Or the invocation of emergency.
Well, that's exactly the problem is that, well, the emergency is pretty convenient for you if you happen to be a tyrant. And part of the reason the idea of the apocalypse is archetypal is because there's

always an emergency of course right it's like you're gonna die everything's gonna come to an

end so you can conjure up an emergency at a moment's notice so i don't know whether i should

look at the blue eye or the red eye so you taught for peterson academy yes wait wait so will you will you message Camille Paglia for me it's okay if you say no she's tricky I know you know I could I could send her I could send her a note and tell her who you are well tell me exactly what you want I just want to have dinner with her my treat I will go to Philly I will I have Klaus she will know I'll tell you what this, I have Candy Darling's Journal, you won't know what that is, she will. I have Klaus Nomi's Tuxedo, you won't know what that is, she will.
I know who Klaus Nomi is. I have a Tuxedo.
You do, do you? Yes. He's a singer.
Yes. Yes, and with a soprano voice.
Yes. And he's saying, let's see.
I can't believe you know Klaus Nomi. He didn't have any hits.
Yeah, but... Yeah, I know who Klaus Snowy is.
He's got a stunning and striking voice. Yes.
Yeah. So why do you have one of his tuxedos? Well, he has one tuxedo that was his stage outfit.
Uh-huh. And it's this kind of iconic item.
Okay, so what you should do is you should write me a paragraph... Okay.
...about what you have to offer... Okay.
...and about what you want you want. I would also recommend guarantees.
I went and talked to Paglia and it was hard. Really? Well, she was very apprehensive because she's been abused and used by all sorts of people and journalists.
So she's very skeptical. She was extremely hospitable once we got there, my wife and I, and she knew that we were up to no tricks okay she just flipped and she was extremely inviting but she's got a wall and it's a protective wall okay so i think one of the things you'd have to do in the paragraph is reassure her as you need invitation plus reassurance okay done okay and then yes i could i could contact her it would make my My dream for Camille Paglia is to have her talk to Ben Shapiro

because they're both machine guns.

And so I'd love to see that just as a spectacle.

And speed up the tape.

Yeah, I'd love to see that.

I could imagine even better maybe would be Russell Brand,

Ben Shapiro, and Paglia.

Those are the three most verbally fluent people I've ever seen in my life. Wow, that would be quite a troika.
Yeah, it would be. It'd really be something.
So it's a new year, 2025. And you're thinking, how am I going to make this year different? How am I going to build something for myself? I'm dying to be my own boss or see if I can turn that business idea I've been kicking around into a reality, but I don't know how to make it happen.
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Why? Because what I found fascinating about her is she is the kind of person where even if she's dead wrong, I want to hear her say more. And that is very, very rare.
It is very rare when you, like she was, like 10 years ago, she was talking about how great Kamala Harris is. And I'm sitting there, I'm like, Camille, Ms.
Paglia, come on. Like, are you serious? And it did not diminish my respect for her in the slightest.
So when someone has takes, people say this about me, they're like, I don't agree with half the things you say, but I love how your brain works. That to me is like the epitome of a public intellectual or even if they're dead wrong or like I know

enough about a subject where I'm like, this person's way off. I don't care.
Keep talking.

That's probably part of that quest. You know, so one of the things I've learned to do

in lectures is before I go on stage, I have a question. It's like, it's a question that

matters to me, which is also something you should do when you write, by the way. It matters to me

and I don't know enough about it yet. And I'd like to get farther in my thinking.

Thank you. matters to me, which is also something you should do when you write, by the way.
It matters to me, and I don't know enough about it yet, and I'd like to get farther in my thinking. And so then what I'm trying to do on stage is get farther in my thinking, and maybe to come to a conclusion.
If I can do that, then that's like the punchline, right? That's very satisfying. But in some ways, it doesn't matter, because the journey is what matters.
I think what you're pointing out is that there are certain kinds of intellectuals whose thought quality is so rich that the journey is worth the… And so entertaining to listen to. Right.
Like the way she talks, I can do it, I'm not going to. Yeah.
It's just so like unique and idiosyncratic. And you watch clips of her from the 90s.
She was just, I mean, I was like, okay, this… And what I love about her is she is you can't put her in a box yeah she's so i mean she's so all over the map politically in certain i mean she's a hardcore atheist but she goes on and on about the catholic church and the beauty it brings and the venerance that people have for it how valuable it is and her you know she's very big on warhol but at the same time her her veneration of the classics and her insane contempt for how that's being thrown into the garbage can and we're losing thousands of years of creative history simply because it's predominantly white men is to her just complete madness. And she's correct.
So there's so much I would love to talk to her about and just pick her brain and just to thank her. Because I think there's certain people when you you find them at the right age, you know, like Catcher in the Rise, this, the found head for certain people, it really kind of codifies you later in life.
Yeah. Yeah, you know, I've been thinking about the function of religious texts in exactly that manner.
I think partly, so it looks very much like a description of the structure through which we see the world is a story. Yes, yes.
Right? So, there's an infinite number of facts, but they have to be sequenced and prioritized. And the way someone sequences and prioritizes is their story.
Yes. Okay.
Yeah, people don't want truth. People want narratives.
That's because narrative structure our truth yeah they so i think that what a core what core stories do so this would be say the fairy tales would do this or any stories that are shared broadly across a culture is they actually you just pointed to this i think it's true you know how it is you a book has a different effect on you depending on when you read it so and it and it's definitely the case that books you read, let's say, in your mid-adolescence likely, it's like they set the stage. Yeah, yeah.
Right? And I think that's actually true. I think what happens is the story that strikes you provides a framework for memory, and then you slot everything else into that.
And so, it actually becomes the foundation. And I think that part of the problem with moving away from broad knowledge of the biblical stories is that the foundation of our perceptions is no longer unified.
And when that's the case, I mean, some variation is good because you don't want everybody thinking exactly the same thing. But if there's too much variation, you can't even talk to but do you think it's happening now i think it's happened i i yeah i'm surprised one thing i was someone who's very big encouraging political division and you know thomas soul says there's no um solutions only trade-offs yeah i was naive because i didn't realize the trade-off is how dumb political discourse has gotten where people no one's holding them in check so people are free to say just completely stupid things and yeah it's and you and since you're surrounded by this echo chamber and anyone who says hey this is stupid now you sound like the out group it becomes self-validating and it's it's really horrifying so we've been i've been working on trying to conceptualize why that happens, particularly with Jonathan Paggio.
We've been drawing, and John Verveke, we've been drawing a bunch of different sources trying to understand the structure of a concept or a perception. So, I think this is how it works.
This is also the same structure as the tabernacle, by the way, in architectural form. So every concept has a center.
Okay, that's what Moses' staff establishes. That's what a flag establishes when you move to a new territory.
There's a center, okay, and the center is the ideal. That's a good way of thinking about it.
Or the center is the place that looks upward, okay? And then around the center, there are margins. and the farther away you get from the center, the less like the center the phenomena is, and they start to multiply.
So now a concept that's only center is too rigid. And a concept that's only margin is too profuse and diffuse.
And so what we need is a balance between the center and the margin. Your proclivity would be, I think, because you're open, would be to deprioritize the center to favor the margin.
Yeah, that's what open people do. But you just said you realized that if you, the margin's fine.
The margin of the margin, it's like, oh, that's less fun. The other point I made in my book, The New Right, is that when you're in the center, insanity and brilliance are equidistant.
You have no capacity really for distinguishing between the two of them because they both sound completely crazy to you and something you'd never heard before. And I thought, okay, then we got to kind of knock the center out.
But then what's happening is you kind of get these new centers, which kind of crystallize. And a lot of them are just like- Insanity.
Insanity. And also, as you know from a lot of your work, the more insane, the more sticky it gets.
Because people take pride in having insane views because it's like agnostic thing. I've been initiated into these mysteries.
These people just don't get it. Right.
Well, it also mimics creativity. So you can wear that.
So, well, here's a mythological take on that. This is very cool.
So, the center is a phallus, right? It's unitary and solid. So, say that's archetypal masculinity, that ideal center.
Okay, when it collapses, a hydra emerges. Right, right.
And a hydra has an indefinite number of heads. Right, and the odds that they're all going to be positive is very low.
Well, the mere fact that they're multiplicitous is already a problem because it's an entropy problem. Right.
It's like, what am I going to do with all this? Right. You know, you want, you know, if you have a toddler who's, say, three, and he has a closet or she has a closet full of clothes, say, 20, 30 outfits, you open the door and you say, what do you want to wear today? It's like, all you do is make the kid anxious.
You take three outfits and lay them on the bed and you say, well, which one do you want? Then they're happy. And it's because, you know, this has actually been figured out technically.
It was figured out by, uh-oh, I'm going to forget his name, Friston, Carl Friston. He's a neuroscientist.
And he did some work on entropy. And I did some work like this in my lab.
We were trying to tie the idea of anxiety to entropy, to make it physical. Anxiety signifies a multiplicity of pathways, right? And you might say, well, that's diversity, that's creativity, that's what the left thinks.
It's like, yeah, but what if it's too much? Well, then it's, that's what the hydro paralyzes you when you look at it. It's too much entropy.
You don't want to make a hundred decisions. We know this from the consumer literature.
So if you go to a store, imagine there's, try buying a printer. You've run into this right away.
I want to buy the best printer. It's like there's 500 printers.
By the time you go through all 500, most of the models have changed, right? You're never going to optimize. And so what that means is if you have 500 printers and you have to choose the best one, you're going to fail.
So you actually want to go to a store where there are four printers, because like one, that they're making you buy that printer.

Four, so you can see, right?

I mean, it makes perfect sense too, right? You don't want totalitarian centrality,

but you don't want indefinite amorphousness.

This would be, I don't know if that's a critique

of all-out anarchism, is it?

No, but it speaks,

because all-out anarchism would still have leadership. Have you ever seen The Devil Wears Prada? I think so, yeah.
So do you remember the speech that Meryl Streep gives to Anne Hathaway? Elaborate. So Anne Hathaway's, Meryl Streep is Anna Wintour.
She's head of magazines, you know, Romana Clef Romana Clef, however it's pronounced. And Anne Hathaway is her assistant.
And they're putting together a photo shoot and they're trying to say which belt would go with this ballerina skirt. And Meryl Streep's like, it's hard to pick.
Some of the characters are like, they're too similar. And Anne Hathaway laughs.
Everyone in the room looks at her and is like, is something funny? And she goes, I'm sorry still these look belts look the same to me i'm still getting used to this stuff and the venom from meryl streep's character she's like this stuff and she goes oh i see what's going on here like you think you chose that lumpy right i remember this but what happened was five years ago yves saint laurent had that sweater isn't blue or turquoise or it's cerulean because five years ago, Yves Saint Laurent had, that sweater isn't blue or turquoise, it's cerulean. Because five years ago, Yves Saint Laurent had cerulean military jackets.
And then it was in all, cerulean spread out to all designers. Then it was in all the runways.
Yeah. Then it was in the department stores.
Yeah. And then it ended up at some bargain.
Target, where you fished it out. You bought it.
Right. Yeah.
Because you're pretending you don't, what you're trying to say with your outfit is that you don't care about fashion. Yeah.
But what you don't know is that cerulean sweater has been picked for you by the people in this room. Right.
From a pile of stuff. Right.
So that model. You've picked it from the bottom of a 10 hierarchy.
Right. 10 rung social hierarchy that you're at the bottom of and you don't even know it.
And you don't even know it. And you're dismissive of it.
Right. So you thought the choice has been made.
And again, that is an anarchist system. There's no government involvement.
But point being, you need leaders who are going to be winnowing things down so that person at the bottom has that limited choice. Because then they also, you don the best printer I'm sure the 10th best printer what it's not going to print the letter Q they're all going to be fine like this idea that you need the best is also spurious unless you're like well that's the trade-off problem you know you could spend a year finding the best printer but then like you could have spent that year doing a lot of other things like what this printer like what, this printer that's like $50 cheaper is not going to work? Well, there's an economist, Simon, great economist.
He was the guy who had the bet with Paul Ehrlich about whether- Julian Simon. Let me tell you a story about Julian Simon.
Okay. Let me just- Please.
Okay. Simon came up with a concept called satisficing.
Okay. And satisficing is a reflection of exactly what you just described.
It's like you don't, with most decisions, you don't go for the best. You have something like a threshold.
And once you hit that threshold, you say that. That's what people do with their mates.
Oh, well, you know, my friend Ron Messer said, he goes, every woman's crazy. I'm sorry to out Ron.
He goes, every woman's crazy. So you find the woman who's crazy you can handle, and that's the one you marry.
Right. So you're not going to find anyone who...
This very horrible how women are given this kind of Disney idea that you need Prince Charming, you're not finding him, and why is he going for you? Everyone's going to have a problem, and when you find that problem, you can handle men as well as females. You know, that's the one you settle with, but what we just talked talking about- Yeah, one of your problems is to find someone who can stand you.
So yeah, that's a big problem. You were talking about Simon.
You had a story about him. Oh, so I was an intern at the Cato Institute in 1997.
And we had to go out distributing videotapes, whatever. We come back.
He's giving a talk in the auditorium downstairs. Doors are closed, but there's a monitor.
And I'm looking at the monitor and it looked like he had horns. And I was just like, what? And I'm staring at it.
I'm like, is this some kind of glitch? And what had happened was at the beginning of the talk, he said, since the environmentalists think I'm a devil, and he took suction cupped horns and stuck them on his head and gave, it's on C-SPAN. He gave his talk that way.
I got his autograph. He passed away shortly thereafter, but he was a great, great guy.
And what I love love about him and I think it's very important for people in our space is he had a sense of levity and a sense of positivity I think a lot of times and I'm sure you agree nefarious political movements attract people simply because they present joy I mean that is the perfect word for it and people who are agnostic about politics or aren't informed, which is perfectly fine, they're like, I want to go where the fun people are. It's just as simple as that.
And it's very sinister and very tricky, but very effective. You think that sinister people can use joy? I mean, look at Officer Harris.
Did she use it or did she? Fair enough. Fair enough.
But Iicism look at hollywood it's it okay to use joy or to manipulate it well i mean what's the that's well i think kind of the difference maybe is the voluntary element like look i figured out i had this weird kind of obsession when i was teaching in boston because i was teaching about horrible things, terrible things, like the Holocaust and the gulag and like the depths of depravity, right? And I got this voice in my head that kept saying, if you could master this, you'd do that with a light touch. And I thought, really? Like, how the hell am I going to talk about these topics that are...
I'll tell you how I did it. Okay.
Because my book on North Korea, Dear Reader, it's written from Kim Jong-il's perspective, right? Right. Their propaganda is humorous in the sense of absurd.
And I wrote it straight, and I'll give you one example. Right, have something there called the Tower of the Juche idea, which is, this is true, the biggest stone obelisk in the world or concrete obelisk, whatever.
And according to their literature, it was Kim Jong-il's idea. And no one else had ever thought of such a thing, right? For that to be true.
And this is how I lay out the scene. The architects must have sat together and no one even as a brainstorm had this suggestion.
And I imagine one of the architects being like, you know what? Let's make this the second tallest stone obelisk in the world. And then Kim Jong-il comes in and goes, guys.
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Seaside for details. They're like, oh my God, no one's ever thought of this.
But for their propaganda to be true, that is what would have to be the backstory. Another example that they have is there was an amusement park, Funfair, that they built in North Korea.
And Kim Jong-il, the dear leader, wanted to make sure, this is like a South Park episode, that it was safe for everyone. So he gets on all the rides and everyone's like, can we ride it with you? No, no, no, no, no.
I have to make sure that the elderly and children aren't harmed. And he did all the rides by himself and there was a light drizzle, so you know he's very brave.
and everyone stood and clapped. And they present this story with a straight face, and you read this, and you realize how humorous it is that this is what's positive as truth in this country.
Now, my last chapter in the book is where the mass drops, and it gets very, very dark very, very quickly, but I think there is- Right, so you use, that's interesting. You know, did you ever, did you watch the Death of Stalin? That's, I mean, he also did Veep, which is probably the best comedy of all time.
Oh, I haven't seen Veep. He did Veep.
You haven't seen Veep? No, no, no. Julie Louis-Dreyfus, Julie Louis-Dreyfus blocked me because she plays Selina Meyer, who's the titular character.
She was going on about Trump or something. they go, you won several Emmys for demonstrating that all politicians are sociopaths blocked.
That show is a complete masterpiece because as the seasons go on, the mass drops more and more. And the first season, she's this bumbling vice president.
Every episode, there's a running gag. It's like, did the president call? No, no, okay.
And by the end, it's full-blown brazen sociopathy. And she's such a great comedic actress and so charismatic.
There's this one scene where her assistant's in the hospital, right? There's just these little touches, and they come and bring him water. She, of course, takes it.
She goes, can someone get Gary some water? Like, this must be a hospital. Like, it never even ends her head that this water would be for the guy in the bed because she comes first so there's so many moments like this throughout the show it's and the death of stalin same thing there's this one great scene where after stalin dies spoiler alert he dies death of stalin his daughter um is talking to khrushchev and khrushchev says to her i promise nothing bad will happen to you she's like why like, why would you say that? He goes, no, no, no, no, no.
Calm down. She goes, wait, people plotting to kill me? He goes, no, no, no, I'll protect you.
And she's like, protect me from what? But like, this is the reality that these people lived in. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, I've, I was obsessed with the idea of evil clowns for a while because I started to figure out what it meant. The evil clowns of classic horror trope, right? It's weird.
Like Stephen King wrote this strange book called It about this clown who was an alien, so a sky god that lived in the sewer. So in the underworld.
So it's evil clown in the underworld and it's an evil clown of cosmic significance who lives in the underworld. And as soon as I figured out the archetypal understructure, I thought, oh, I get this.
But it's partly because there's this old idea in traditional Christianity that Lucifer, the devil, that Satan can't produce anything original. Everything's a parody.
Everything's a parody, right? And there is this evil clown element to totalitarian states. It was really captured very well in that death of Stalin.
And in North Korea today. Well, and in your book, exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's funny that you say that because when people ask me about where I write the book, I said this, I'm like, look, I've got a very small microphone.
There's only so much I can do about North Korea. What can I do? And I said, what I can do is people will look at that country and they see the Joker, right? They see this evil clown.
And I go, all I want to do is move the clown a little bit, move the camera a little bit. And you see behind that clown, there's a lot of dead bodies.
And all of a sudden you're like, this isn't funny at all. This is horrifying.
And that was my goal with that book. Right.
Yeah. Well, the, the comical element I think comes in the preposterousness of the lies, right? Right.
Because, and this is also partly why the gender thing bothers me so much. I mean, there's many reasons why it bothers me.
The brutal surgery being, you know, not least among them. But I believe that there is no more fundamental perceptual axiom than the capacity to distinguish between male and female i'm thinking about this biologically creatures could distinguish between the sexes for hundreds of millions of years before there were nervous systems right so it's like this is fundamental well and obviously because if you can't distinguish between male and female at some level you don't reproduce well except for the cuttlefish what do they don't what do they hermaphroditic? No, no.
There's a, at least the giant cuttlefish, maybe other species, there's a male that present as female and they wait for the alpha bull males to go away and then they rape or at least impregnate the females. Right.
Well, so they still know, they just pretend. Yeah, they're passing though.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the problem with that, the gender bending foolishness, and I think it's part of this evil clown pathology.
It's more than foolish. Yes, that's for sure.
If you can get people to accept the lie that a man can be a woman, all other lies are trivial in comparison. Right? The lie is then paramount.
There's a weird sub-narrative, sorry, I'm obsessed with biblical references because I've been immersing myself in it for quite a while, but there's a biblical idea that's a strange one, that when the abomination of desolation is raised to the highest place, put on the altar, it's time to head for the hills. And that's what it is.
It's a statement that when the thing that, when the order is perverted 100%, right, when the worst possible thing is elevated to the highest possible position, things have deteriorated to such a point that you better take appropriate steps. But we got a ways to go.
Well, hopefully. Yeah, I don't think we're there yet.
Hopefully. I think these could, I mean, what about going on with with Rotterham those stories yeah you talk about you know trying to understand evil I mean these things where I don't even get into the details people could google it and it's just like it makes no sense you just you try to whenever I'm gonna get a little bit graphic here whenever I hear these stories of like some CNN producer getting arrested for having imagery of children, I always hope, I read the article just to get the details.
I hope it's like they're watching teenage girls, and there's some kind of conversation we could have about how high schoolers are overly sexualized. Then you read it, and it's like infants and children being tied to chairs.
And there's message boards.

So it's not just one guy,

like he's got a community.

And you see this and you're like,

what, you're a shrink, I'm not.

What is the utility to you?

You know, is it just pure?

If you feel-

Do you really want an answer to that question?

I do, because you were talking about understanding evil.

It's like, I can understand evil in the sense of sadism,

but a child is weak.

Like, what do you want here? It's like beating the crap out of in the sense of sadism, but a child is weak. Like,

what do you want here?

It's like beating the crap out of,

it's like,

taking candy from a baby is not an accomplishment.

No,

it's,

it's,

it's,

oh boy.

You really want an answer?

Yes,

I want an answer

because I'm not the only one.

When I talk about

those social media,

people are like,

I can't wrap my head around it.

I can understand assault,

I can understand murder,

I can understand bank robberies,

but you read stories like this, I'm like, this is an alien thought process. Okay.
So, in the story of Cain and Abel, I'm bringing it up because it's the first biblical story about real people. Right, okay.
Right. And it's a murderer and his target.
So, that's, sure. That's the first thing that happens in the profane world.

Right.

Okay, so Cain, he's working away, hypothetically.

And he's not getting anywhere.

Okay, and there's two reasons for that, possibly.

One is that he's doing something wrong.

And the other is the cosmos is constituted improperly.

Sure.

That's, and he decides that the cosmos is constituted improperly. So he's doing what he can and everyone should know it.
And he's working himself to death and it ain't working. And so something's broken.
Whereas his brother, like the sun shines wherever he goes, everyone loves him. So it's Cain's failing, trying hard, failing, making sacrifices, failing.
Abel, no effort at all is just saying through life. That's Cain's position.
So Cain decides he's going to go and have it out with God because it's not his fault, obviously. And so he says to God that Abel, everything's going well for him.
And here I am suffering away. Nothing's working for me.
And I'm bitter and miserable and resentful and no wonder. And God says, well, you got a couple of things wrong with your theory there, buddy.
The first theory is that that's wrong is that your failure is not what's making you miserable. And God says, there's an intermediary figure playing a role here that you don't understand.
He says, sin crouches at your door like a sexually aroused predatory animal and you

invite. There's an intermediary figure playing a role here that you don't understand.
He says, sin crouches at your door like a sexually aroused predatory animal, and you invited it in to have its way with you. So you engaged in a creative dialogue with the figure of evil because you felt you were justified, because you're resentful, because you're failing.
Now, while you were failing, you could have learned. Sure, sure.
You could have decided it was your problem, but no, it's God's fault. And so God tells Cain, I don't think it's my fault.
I think it's your fault. If you did well, you would be accepted.
Yeah. All right.
So Cain listens, but he doesn't hear. And he goes away, and then he invites his brother to go do something with him, like in good faith, and then he kills him with the rock.

Why?

To get revenge against God.

That's the motive.

Right, because Cain is existentially wounded because his sacrifices are being rejected.

So he takes God's ideal and he sullies it.

Right.

That's what they're doing with kids.

You take the most innocent possible creature and you do the worst possible thing to them. Yeah, that's what it is.
Oh, God. Oh, God is right.
You know, I was thinking about in terms of a pornographic aspect, but it's actually literally demonic. It's like core demonic.

Yeah.

Well, that's why, you know.

That's why it's so alien.

Christ says in the gospels that,

Oh God.

You know, that the people who sully children,

he says something like it would be better for them if they, you know, if a heavyweight was wrapped

around their neck and they were thrown into the ocean.

It's the worst sin.

That's why they're doing it.

That's why they're doing it.

It's the ultimate middle finger to reality and being. It's like, you f*** with me, I'm going to f*** with you.
Right? And so, and then there's that perverse delight that's, there's a novelty edge to that too. So, you get sexual gratification for a multitude of reasons.
One reason is just sort of reflexive, like sexual

activity in itself is pleasurable, but you can put a novelty spin on that. And that's partly what

motivates diverse creatures to seek out multiple sexual partners. And you can game that in all

sorts of ways. When people start watching pornography, they start with the sorts of

things that you described, like attractive women, attractive nude pictures of lithe women. But then after 10,000 of those, it's like, well, maybe a little variation.
And then you can chase, that's that inviting that spirit in. You can chase that edge, right? Serial killers do that.
They chase that edge, right, to the logical conclusion. The logical conclusion is a long, long, long way down.
And people don't want to understand this. It's worse even than this, Michael.
It's worse than this because, see, one of the things God tells Cain is that he invited this spirit in to have its way with him. It's very specific wording.
There's a whole sequence of mythological stories around it. For someone to do something like shoot up an elementary school, they fantasized about it for like 5,000 hours.
Like there's a devil in them, so to speak. You might as well call it that because for all intents and purposes, that's what it is.
They've invited it in and it's taken possession of them. And it's fantasizing in that spirit.

What's the worst thing I could do?

But that's not the worst.

That to me, it's a lot easier to wrap my head around.

I hate everyone in the school.

I'm going to put them in their place.

I'm going to show them what's what.

This is an adult killing children.

I was specifically referring to Sandy Hook in that case.

Yeah, yeah.

I would say in terms of level of sin,

I'm annoyed at my classmates. Right, at my classmates.
That's more comprehensible. Easily, yeah.
Yeah, definitely. Although, you know, there's a darkness in that.
Well, we don't even have to say that. That's extraordinarily deep.
No, no, the desolation of the innocent. That's the thrill in and of itself.
Like it's the, it's It's like, because this is why it's Luciferian. So, Lucifer is the usurper, technically speaking, right? So, he's often the intellect, by the way, that wants to put itself in the highest place.
Well, there's nothing more that makes you the commanding officer of the cosmos than to take the most profound moral rule imaginable

and to invert it, right?

That's how much you can get away with.

And these, like, I know what people like this are like.

They also think, I'm so smart, no one will ever catch me.

And I can toy with people too,

because I can hint at this,

because they're so stupid, they won't even notice.

That's often why they get caught. That's what happens to raskolnikov in crime and punishment right they and the prosecutor does a brilliant job of toying with him why there's something else i've been i've been wondering about why do you think it's so i'm scared to ask because you answered that last question in a way that i'm not comfortable with in this oh no no no why do.
People don't want to know anything about this. Why do you think there is such a movement in your opinion, God, I'm scared to ask this, to downplay this in the media? I had this tweet.
I said, if we cared half as much about childhood assaults as we do about global warming, we, I mean, the media. You mean in the UK? In the media.
In the media.'s take the uk just like if we if the media cared a tenth as much about childhood assaults and certain kinds of assaults as they do about global warming things would be a lot better this is something that you could fix right now yeah it's not some hypothetical the environment 100 years and it's this is crazy moral panic mass hysteria why is that happening well part of the reason in the uk is that well the uk is a racial thing partly well it yeah but but but they're covering it up right yeah but well yeah yeah there's the racial thing and there's fear associated with that and people are afraid that they're going to be targeted by the woke mob if they stand up they're going to be called nazis and neo-nazis they are they're not wrong that's all right that's that's one element of it the other element is the elite look you want to elevate your social status now if you're a good person, you do that by being useful.

Okay.

Okay, but you can game the system. Narcissists and psychopaths game the reputational system.
That's their niche. Sure.
And they do that successfully often. Often successfully enough to be attractive, you know, especially if they're men.
Because naive young women are attracted to psychopaths because they game the system so effectively. Okay, but that proclivity to game the reputational system is a very deep temptation.
One of the commandments, I think it's the third, but it might be the fourth, is to not use God's name in vain. And people think that means don't swear.
I don't know, maybe, I can't ever remember the order. It doesn't mean that.
It means do not claim divine inspiration for pursuing your own agenda it's like the worst thing you can do i'm doing something low and terrible yeah yeah for the best possible reasons that's the stalinist situation right right i'm exercising all my sadistic desires like baria and i'm doing this for the benefit of the poor right, so you don't ever want to underestimate the attractiveness of moral posturing,

especially if someone else is paying for it.

So in the UK, it's like, I'm tolerant, I'm cosmopolitan, I'm open to diversity,

we can welcome immigrants of all stripes in,

and if the cost for me displaying my cosmopolitan sophistication is that 10,000 working class women get raped, girls,

I'm going to go tar the whole group. And when you should do that, when you shouldn't is not a simple question.
There's lots of complex reasons, but one of them is there's no limit to the degree that people will elevate their own moral status falsely, especially if someone else pays the price. I hear you.
And that explains the UK, but this is the case in the US as well. Yeah.
They pretend this isn't a thing or that it's not a big deal with some kind of right-wing issue. I don't understand.
Well, part of it too, Michael, I think is just that people don't like, you didn't like my explanation for the child. No, I did not.
Right. Right.
But you're not a naive person. Right.
Okay. so Michael Schellenberger, when he broke the WPATH files, I interviewed him and I asked him, well, we talked about it.
And he said that he first got wind of this butchery because I did an interview with Abigail Schreier. Schreier? Schreier.
She's great. She is great and very, very brave.
And I did that just as I was recovering and it just made me so nervous. Like I was barely functioning and it was such a terrible interview to do.
It was really early in the trans butchery cycle and I knew we'd get pilloried for it. I thought it might sink me and I thought, you know, we're going ahead with this.
And she laid out, as you know, the absolute travesty of this entire

catastrophe. Now, Schellenberger watched that and he said he couldn't believe it.

He couldn't believe it. It wasn't until two years later that he started, you know, it was in his

mind. But I think that's so telling because Schellenberger's not naive now.
He tilted towards

the left. And so he's going to have the kind of temperament that's inclined to think the best of people.
Right. Which is a great inclination.
Except not when you're dealing with psychopaths. Right.
Right. In which case, it's exactly the wrong attitude.
Right. And the problem with the left often is they have no imagination for evil.
And some of that's naivety and some of it's like willful blindness.

It's like, you don't want to know.

You know, you don't want to know.

You don't want to know what sort of snakes are in people's minds.

I studied sociological evil and psychological evil for 40 years, right?

Trying to get to the bottom of it.

I had some pretty bad actors in my clinical practice and saw some things all the way to the, I wouldn't say all the way to the bottom. Hell's a bottomless pit for a reason.
Sure. Right.
Lies get so deep that you literally can't get to the bottom of them. You scrape something away and you think, finally, it's like, no, just another layer of lies.
Well, you know that from studying totalitarianism. But so part of it is, Michael, it's not only that, it's like you read these stories about like someone who's with an underage kid and you think that's the basement and then you hear about England and it's like, oh, this person's a saint.
Oh yeah. Compared to that.
It's just like, holy crap, I thought this was the bottom and there's a trap door and there's another cellar. Well, that's what Dante was trying to show.
Yeah, right, yeah, yeah. You know, and one of the things I've learned too, this is also something that's awful.
So imagine that you say you're married, right? And you hit a sequence of conflicts with your wife and they repeat, okay? So there's a hole there in your relationship. And so usually people just walk around those and they try to like not delve into it, partly because when you start delving into it person's going to accuse you sure and get angry and then they're going to cry and that'll stop 90 of people but if you go past the anger and you go past the tears and you delve in you go down daunting hell and at the bottom you find betrayal and then there's trauma there and then the person has to like really cry and really reconfigure and admit to, God, sometimes it didn't even happen to them.
Sometimes they're carrying the burden of something that happened to their mother. Yeah, yeah.
You know, and you have to go all the way to the bottom to exercise that. And if you do that, it changes your view of human nature.
It's like, like you said, you know, you get these, oh, I don't

know, some guy's attracted to 16-year-old girls, you know, and you think, well, low, within the realm of human comprehension, low. And then you think, you're just, like, you're in the first circle there, buddy.
You're not even approaching the bottom. It's funny, I'm so well-versed in political evil

that this kind of

depravity

because political evil

is easy

to say even approaching the bottom. It's funny.
I'm so well-versed in political evil that this kind of depravity, because political evil is easy to understand in that amoral people who seek power at any cost. Yeah, right.
Okay. Because they're after power.
Yeah, you get it. Oh, yeah.
I know their motivation. It's like a criminal.
You want my Lamborghini? I want my Lamborghini. It's just a matter of difference of approach.
Right. Okay, I get it.
Fine. Understood.
Yeah, yeah. So when I hear these stories, I feel completely naive.
Because until you just said that. I learned what iniquity meant the other day.
What does that mean? Aiming down. What? So imagine that, you know, you make a moral error.
Sure. Like that would be like stealing a car.
Right. Well, you want the car.
You want to go places. It's like, fair enough.
You made this error of stealing it. It's like, no, you steal the car and then you burn it.
That's the Joker in Batman, right? It's like, I didn't want that money. I just wanted to steal it.
And now I'm going to burn it. And he's the guy that terrifies all the criminals.
It's like, because the criminals, it's not iniquity for the typical criminal. It's just a matter of strategy.
They buy the whole capitalist thing. They want the house in the yard.
Maybe they even want education for their kids. Right, so 90% of them, they're like you.
They're aiming up a crooked way. And I'm not trying to rationalize.
It's like, they're not aiming at, well, part of of them is but there are people who are aiming at down so there's a book pans ram you ever read pans ram no oh my god so the book starts out it's this guy who's in prison it's a novel or a real book it's an autobiography okay and he's sitting in the corner he's all beat to hell he's very tough looking guy And a prison psychiatrist goes and gives him a cigarette. And he's sitting in a corner.
He's all beat to hell. He's a very tough-looking guy.
And a prison psychiatrist goes and gives him a cigarette. And Panzram, the guy who wrote the autobiography, said, that's the only nice thing anybody ever did for him in his whole life.
Now, whether or not that's true, that's not the point. But it's close enough to true.
And so the psychiatrist starts to interview this Panzram character who's like, I think he raped 240 men. He killed like 50.
His dying words to the hangman were, hurry up you, who's your bastard? I could kill 12 men in the time it's taken you to knot that rope. Oh my God.
Right, and he meant it. Okay.
And Panzram was brutalized when he was a child, like just beyond belief. And he decided that he was going to aim down for his whole life.
And so he almost started a war between Great Britain and the United States. He wanted to burn everything to the ground, everything.
And that's his autobiography. He even told this, the psychiatrist asked him to write his autobiography.
It's called Panzram, and so that's what he did. He told the psychiatrist never to turn his back on him because he thought, even though he liked the psychiatrist, insofar as Panzram could like anyone, he thought, give me an opportunity, buddy.
Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah.
Well, that's like, well, that is different. There's some overlap with political psychopathology with people like Barry and Stalin as well.
You know, God only knows what those people are up to, especially someone like Barry. I have a death warrant.
I think I told you this last time we talked. I have a death warrant signed by him in my kitchen framed.
And the paper is just real shit. And it's like, it's not even worth a nice piece of paper.
That's how little someone's life was worth then and there. Yeah, right.
Right. Yeah, exactly.
Well, it's funny. Those little details matter.
They didn't worry about the good printer, George. I read Theodore Dalrymple's account of going to North Korea, which is brilliant.
He's such a brilliant essayist. And he went into the big department store there where everyone's an actor and all the artifacts aren't real.
And he bought a pen. He was like the only person who actually bought something in the store because no one buys anything.
And he detailed out the ways the pen didn't work. Like you just have no idea how many ways a pen could not work.
The little pocket clip can come off. The ball doesn't work.
The ink is watery and runs. Like for a pen to work, a hundred things have to be not lies.
In that kind of totalitarian state, absolutely everything is a lie. But I'm going to correct you a little bit.
The pen did work as a status symbol. Yes.
Because if you have this nice pen in your pocket, that's what it works. Right, right, right.
Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah.
So the bottom of things. Yeah, well, it's a very long way down.
And that is part of the problem with the marginal. So, you know, we were talking about the center and the margin.
It's like Jonathan Paggio explained this to me. I didn't know this.
So in sacred architecture, the architecture of cathedrals, there was often monsters on the periphery, right? Like the gargoyles. And the monsters are because as you move farther and farther away from the center you get into the world of monstrous forms now by the definition of the center granted but this is the case for every conceptual scheme or every perception ideal at the center like circles of approximation right drifting out into the marginal and then the monstrous and this is the problem with the part of the problem with the post-modernist ethos it's like center the marginal it's like yeah oh yeah how about the monstrous well they they're just victims it's like wait till there's one under your bed right right because they're marginal they're marginal for a reason oh yeah hopefully hopefully yeah hopefully you know for froucault all the people who were in prison were victims it's like all of them right right really this you saw this since what brought down the scottish government the scottish prime minister remember she put pistons in the women's prison yeah yeah it's like oh they're men they're they're women no she didn't know what to say she was asked that she was stammering right well that's right that's right But that was bad enough, right? It's like, oh, they're men.
They're women. No, she didn't know what to say.
She was asked that she was stammering. Well, that's right.
That's right. But that was bad enough, right? It's like, oh, I see.
So every man who says so is a woman. Everyone.
The thing that I think that you obviously know that I think a lot of people haven't codified is that a big portion of leftist thought is based on the idea that human beings never respond to incentives. And those who do, it's in such small numbers that it doesn't really matter.
And we can talk about in sports where like if someone's a wrestler, they have to make weight, right? So if you kind of lose 15 pounds of fluid and you're 160 on the day of the weigh-in, you can actually be someone who's 180 pounds and you're going to fight someone who's more small than you. And I'm sure, I haven't looked this up, that there was one guy who was like, wait a minute, I can game the system.
I'm 180, but if I'm 160 on that day, if I just have diarrhea and just dehydrate myself, I'm going to have a huge advantage. And now everyone has to do it.
But that's the same thing. If you have this, you're telling me that one person's going to say, okay, wait, if I just say I'm female, I can just run the table in a given sport?

Right.

Even as a joke, why wouldn't that guy do it?

Yeah.

Yeah, well, you remember, there's never an answer.

Who was the comedian that was wrestling women,

Man on the Moon?

Andy Kaufman, my idol.

He knew that was coming, eh?

He knew that there was part of him,

his evil little soul that knew that was coming.

Oh, he wasn't evil at all?

Well, no, not at all.

No, no, he was very intuitive.

This is actually, this wants to,

this is, I want to segue into what I really want

to pick your brain about.

Subtítulos por Jnkoil Oh, he wasn't evil at all? Well, no, not at all. No, no, he was very intuitive.
This is actually, I want to segue into what I really want to pick your brain about. Something that I relate to a lot, and you're probably going to go on for five hours, and I'll love every minute.
The trickster archetype. Why is the trickster archetype so important, and what are your thoughts about it? Positive, negative? Well, the trickster is both.
You're a trickster today. Yes, very much so.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
And you have that about you. Yes.
Well, Jung said the trickster is the precursor to the savior. Oh, okay.
Right, right, right. So that's, well, that's because- He said that really? You bet.
He's a marginal character, but the trickster is a psychopomp. Okay.
So you want to answer this? Yes, I do. Okay, so we'll go right from first principles.

So here's how the world works.

You set a name.

Okay, that means you elevate something.

Yeah.

You prioritize it.

You celebrate it.

You worship it.

Those are all the same thing.

You set it as a name.

Okay, now your perceptual systems are navigation tools.

Okay, so you set the aim.

You see a pathway.

This is actually how the world appears to you.

You see pathways, tools, they move you forward.

Obstacles, they get in your way.

Friends, they're tools in the social world.

Foes, that's the dramatic landscape.

One more. Agents of magical transformation, wizards what do they do they reset the aim a trickster is an agent of magical transformation now is he good or bad you don't know because a trickster's so imagine you're playing game a right but there's someone who's playing game D and they come to visit.
Okay, now they're a trickster because they're not playing by the same rules. They're not in the same world.
And when you interact with them, it's magical because they're emblematic of another way of being. Well, that could be a descent into the abyss or it could be an ascent to a higher game.
You don't know the thing is is that in all likelihood you're going to be afraid so when gandalf for example when gandalf comes to visit the hobbits they're kind of in awe of him but they're also afraid and distrustful and even bilbo is the same like he he knows there's something to this guy, but, and the Strider too,

Aragorn kind of plays the same role.

He's ambivalent.

Well, why?

Because he's a game changer.

Well, your game could fall apart,

in which case the trickster is like,

he's opened the portal to hell,

but your game could be elevated,

in which case he's a harbinger.

He's a psychopomp.

He's someone who lives on the edge.

He's a messenger of the gods, right?

And so tricksters introduce the possibility of a new game, you know? And even comedians do that all the time because what they're doing, a joke is often, here we are in this world. And then, no, it's actually this world.
And everybody laughs, you know? And that's the punchline. And so the comedian is a trickster and he's a world shifter.
And so the tricksters, now the trickster and the fool are similar archetypal creatures. And the fool is also the precursor to the savior because when you play a new game, you're a fool to beginner, right? You're a beginner.
So you have to accept the fool. You have to accept the trickster and the fool to play a new game right right and so certainly comedians play that role all the time and that's partly what what do they do exactly they're jokes well a joke is a joke is something like an introduction to a new it's an introduction to a new way of perceiving so you know it's a micro it's.
So, I don't know. I think part of the way that you distinguish the positive tricksters from the negative tricksters is the positive tricksters use play and humor and invitation.
Right? So it's a game. You want to play a new game.
That's the invitation. That's definitely the right basis for policy.
What about the bad kind of trickster? Make your question more specific. Well, you just said the good kind of trickster uses games, you know, do you want to play a game? What would be the inverse of that? Well, as you said, that could be manipulated.
Sure, sure. So you can get campaigns of false joy.
Well, the Soviets did that all the time. But they were.
We're so enthusiastic for Stalin, right? But you wouldn't call them tricksters, though. There's none of that there, I would argue.
Well, there's the trickster component that we talked about with regards to the black comedy. Yeah, that's right.
That was the only safety valve that they had, or this dark humor. Yeah.
Well, and the... And Stalin would engage in it as well.
Yeah. Like, he used dark humor.
Well, Stalin Stalin Solzhenitsyn did a pretty good job of detailing out Stalin's attitude towards everyone around him he thought he thought everyone around him was contemptible and lied all the time and couldn't be trusted right yeah 100% right yeah yeah right and so you can see the spiral. It's like, right, you start to betray.
People get afraid. They become contemptible.
You're more likely to betray them, and they lie, and it just goes, you know, it just spirals completely out of control. I mean, you can think of Stalin as a rational actor in some ways.
It's like, what would you be like if every single person around you did nothing but suck up and lie to you 100 of the time um what's interesting about this this is a very uh divergent example this roseanne had to do something like this when roseanne had her i talked to her about this yeah when roseanne bart when she had her show she had a whole crew of writers yeah and she had them by number and she saw that the people would laugh at their own jokes because they were trying to sell them yeah so this was kind of it was hard for her to figure out okay is what or she would intentionally say things that aren't that funny to see if people like ah ha ha right like okay you're not laughing because i'm what i'm saying is that funny you're laughing because you want to appease me. Yeah.
And when you get at that level, it's almost inevitable that,

and some people are really good at it

because they have a proximity to power.

They're going to want to pass.

So it gets harder and harder.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

That's definitely the danger of,

I mean, danger of celebrity.

I mean, my impulse throughout my life

was to, especially in professional settings, like at the university, to take people at their face value. And that worked quite well.
But partly the reason it worked is because I was in very rarefied environments. Oh, yeah, right.
I was at McGill when McGill was functional. Then I was at Harvard when Harvard was functional and the University of Toronto.
And so the typical person who came my way was playing, you know, mostly a straight game. Well, as I became more known, let's say, the percentage of bad actors who present themselves increases.
Oh, yeah. And so you become more skeptical that way too.
And so there's more. So, and you can imagine, well, that's one of obviously the dangers of power.

Why is power dangerous?

No one gives you any feedback.

You know, that's funny.

Whenever I meet, and I'm obviously not your level, but whenever I meet someone at an event,

I always throw out a marginally inappropriate comment is the first thing.

Because they're not going to have the skill set to mask their reaction.

So if they laugh or they find it funny, that's good. If they roll their eyes, that's sincere.
But if they kind of give me attitude, I'm like, okay, this is going to be someone I'm going to have difficulty engaging with. Because if they can't handle me at a one, they're not going to be able to handle me at a ten.
Yeah, yeah. Well, people, I think that's not an atypical game for people who are sort of comedically oriented and playful.
It's like when little kids come to a playground, they start interacting with each other in a immature way. Like if they're four, they'll sort of start off at two-year-old level.
And then they ratchet up and see if the other child can play the same game. Now, four-year-olds can play with two-year-olds, but for a play partner, they want someone who's going to push them.
And so they do this. They ratchet up to see if they're at the same level with regards to the game.
This is one of the things that you might think about with regards to small talk, that's partly what people are doing, right?

So when they meet socially to begin with.

Oh, to suss each other out.

Yeah, yeah.

They want to offer their little offerings to get the exchange going.

Now, part of what you're likely objecting to is that people who aren't high in openness won't take the conversation down, right?

Or they won't make it deep. They just won't go there.
Or they can't. Or they can't.
Yeah. Right, right, right.
They're not interested or they can't, right? And that's very frustrating if you're an open person. Yes.
That's all you want to do. Yeah, I always say there's, I use this example all the time.
There's two kinds of people, maybe it's more than two, but whatever. If you're at a party and you meet someone who's like a guinea pig breeder, there's either, well, that's weird.
Okay, psycho. Or sit down and tell me everything.
And I'm, my people, people I like and me, I'm definitely number two. Whatever it is, if you have a passion or some technical knowledge and this means a lot to you, tell me.
That's why I love being a clinical psychologist. Oh yeah.
People, if you get people actually telling you what they're like, they're unbearably interestingbearably interesting yeah yeah this is true even for simple people because there are no simple people the the ones who are less intellectual are less articulate and it's harder to get their stories out of them but well it's the 115s who are the problem aren't they meaning the marginally intelligent who think that they're brilliant and fascinating well then their ideas tend to be dull but that doesn't mean they are okay right you got to get them off their right like yeah there's nothing worse than a dull ideologue right it's like i've heard it all before but if you get if you get people talking about what they know and they're often very hesitant to do that because they don't want to no one's ever listened to them sure and they're afraid like theinea pig breeder, that they'll just be laughed at if they let people know what they're really like. But people are unbelievably interesting if you can get them talking.
All right. We should stop.
We should go to the Daily Wire side. We should talk about the current political situation.
Let's do it. Let's do that on the Daily Wire side.
Yeah. Okay.
Good. Good.
So always a pleasure talking to you and seeing you. And I had no idea what we're going to talk about.
And we didn't talk about any of the things really that I thought we might talk about. But that's entertaining.
Very entertaining. So and hopefully everybody else found that it was so too.
And write me that paragraph. I promise.
Oh, I will. And I will send an introduction and we'll see.
I'd like to go talk to her again too. Oh, God.
The best. Yeah.
Oh, yeah, it was fun talk. She's a blast.
She's a blast. And she's so smart.
I know, Jordan, I know. Sparks everywhere.
I know, I can't wait. Have you talked to Russell Brand? I have not.
Russell Brand is fun. Okay.
He's fun in that way. He's got that...
He's always leaping from place to place. Russell wasn't the guy for me when I was 16.
Yeah, no, no, I get it. It's like that first band you fall in love with.
Maybe 20 years later, you listen to them, you're like, they're not that good. But man, when you were 16, no one's going to tell you any different.
Yeah, well, the thing about Pelleya is she is that good. Right.
I know, I know. Yeah, so that's good.
That's good. All right, sir.
Great pleasure, Jordan. Good to see you, man.
Yeah, And thank you, everybody, for watching and listening and to the film crew here today in Scottsdale for setting up this crazy site. And join us on the Daily Wire side, because I didn't talk to Michael at all about the strange political situation that we happen to be in now.
And I want to get his feelings about, well, about Musk and about the strange group of people who've

aggregated themselves around Trump and about what he thinks is going to happen in the next year and

what he hopes is going to happen. And so join us on the Daily Wire side for that.