https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=L9HqHzA3atQ
Hello, everyone. I’m pleased to have as a guest today, Mr. Michael Mellis, an author, columnist and media personality. He was the subject of the graphic novel Ego and Hubris by the late Harvey Picard of American Splendor fame. He’s the author of Dear Reader, the Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong-il 2014, as well as The New Right 2019, a book that I’ve been reading deeply this week that was reminiscent to me of the new journalism anthropology of Tom Wolfe. He’s the co-author of seven additional books, including Made in America, the New York Times bestselling autobiography of UFC Hall of Famer Matt Hughes, Concierge Confidential with Michael Fazio 2011, which was one of NPR’s top five celebrity books of the year, and most recently 2016, Black Man White House, comedian D.L. Hughley’s satirical look at the Obama years, also an NYT bestseller. He served as a cultural and political commentator on podcasts with Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Tim Poole, my daughter Michaela Peterson twice, and has his own YouTube channel and podcast, You’re Welcome. My producer put a note at the bottom of this autobiography. Michael is a comedian with a harsh and fast sense of humor. He’s a big fan of yours, but be prepared for a little bit of crazy. I got that impression reading your book, but in the best possible way, I would say. So let’s talk about The New Right, if you don’t mind. I’d like to dive right into that. So I said in the intro that it was reminiscent to me of the new journalism of the 1960s. When I first read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which I would recommend to everyone as a brilliant journalistic, anthropological investigation into what became the psychedelic culture in the early 1960s. It’s a brilliant book. And I got the sense that in The New Right, you were doing much of the same thing for whatever it was that was happening from the time of maybe 2013 to 2016, something like that. Something that actually seems like history already, interestingly enough. And you talk about from an insider’s perspective in some sense, because you were an insider and an outsider at the same time in these groups. But you talk a lot about 4chan and memes and all these subcultures that exist online that are major forces and social domains in their own right. But that are, if not ignored completely by the mainstream media, so to speak, consistently misunderstood. And so, but then by the same. So I’d like to ask you about that. We could start with 4chan maybe. And maybe you could walk us through first what it is and then what it was and then what it is now, if it’s anything. Because I did get the sense as well that this happened already. Something else is happening now and I don’t know what it is. But whatever it was you were writing about, that’s five years ago, which is a long time in internet terms. Sure. I think right now, first of all, discussing 4chan publicly in a context like this and some kind of studious or serious context violates the ethos of 4chan. One of the big rules about 4chan is normies get out, re. So by talking about it automatically, I’m kind of positing myself as someone who’s an outsider. I’m not, you know, on 4chan all the time. But 4chan is kind of emblematic of a broader section of the internet, which was driven wasn’t literally only 4chan, but was driven by irreverency, was driven by this idea of that which is presented to us with earnestness should not be taken at face value. That this earnestness is often used as a cudgel and as a mechanism of affecting social control. Certainly you’ve been the subject of many memes. I’m sure you’re familiar with. Yes. But yeah, and the other the point that they figured out there’s an expression that they say meme magic is real. The premise being, you know, the before the new right, the idea was you’d have these organizations putting forth some kind of claim or idea often absurd on its face. And the argument would be like, well, that’s not accurate. That’s not fair. And the new approach was why are we taking this adjit prop at face value instead of mocking it, clowning it and basically rendering the tool impotent. So that was kind of 4chan’s poll board. You had the Donald subreddit on Reddit. So there is this, but you say that it’s misunderstood by the mainstream press. I always use the term corporate press because I don’t really regard it as mainstream, but I don’t know that it’s misunderstood so much as misrepresented. Well, I think it’s probably both because it’s not easy. First of all, there’s an immense divide between people who don’t use the Internet as a social mechanism or as their primary source of information and people who do. There’s an unbelievable divide. And maybe if you’re older than 50, you’re in the world of 1970. And if you’re younger than 40, you’re in the world of 2010. And those are really different worlds. I mean, you talk about the corporate press and I’ve been thinking a lot about the technological impact of YouTube and podcasts. So and this is why I’d like to dig into the misunderstood part first before we go to the misrepresented part. What I see, what I saw popping up in your book continually was two things happening in 4chan. There’s trouble making that in some sense is there for its own sake. And I’d like to talk to you about that. There’s a political movement, but then there’s also this exploration of what is actually a technological revolution. So you think about legacy media. So I’ve noticed that when I’ve gone to TV stations and been interviewed by a journalist, I’ll have a discussion with the journalist in the green room and I’m talking to a person then. But as soon as the cameras go on, I’m not talking to a person anymore. I’m talking to someone who’s an adept mouthpiece for a massive corporate organization. But that was actually a necessity because the bandwidth for television was so expensive that it wasn’t possible to grant any individual untrammeled access to it. And so it was inevitable that a corporation was never going to allow, except in exceptional cases, any journalist to have what would truly be an individual opinion and certainly wasn’t going to let them explore ideas in real time. Too expensive, too risky. But then now we’re in this weird situation and the 4chan guys were playing with this to some degree where it isn’t obvious that the corporate media platforms have any advantage whatsoever over anyone who’s technologically able. I mean, the fact that we can have this discussion, for example. So they have one. Go ahead. I would say they have one very big advantage, which you’ve seen yourself, which is the concept of legitimacy. So your previous book, the New York Times refused to basically acknowledge it as being printed America. So you can’t say it’s in your times bestseller, even though the number it sold is just a huge amount is hugely successful. Right. So the dear reader, the book I did for about North Korea, which I’m sure we’ll talk about later. I did that with Kickstarter as a result of that on Amazon. It looks the same. It’s going to have a page listing like another page listing. But the New York Times, you know, all these other elements, they’re in a position. I got an hour on C Span’s book TV. So that is changing in that regard. But it gives them an opportunity to pretend that this book doesn’t exist. So unless a book is being published by certain outlets that have legitimacy, basically, it’s just like I know if you watched wrestling growing up. I certainly did the WWF when I was a kid. There were rival organizations and they literally acted as if these rival organizations didn’t exist. And if a wrestler came over from the NWA to the WWF, they acted like he was this new discovery that he had no history to him. It was very odd because all you had to do was change the channel and they’re acting in certain other mechanisms. So that is a big advantage because if you go to talk to mom and you say, where did you hear this? I heard this on CBS. Where did you hear this? I heard this on 4chan. It’s very clear which one mom is going to choose. I agree. But part of what the 4chan guys were doing by your own account to some degree was testing these new technological platforms to see how much power they actually had. So these trolling games that you described. So you described trolling as something that’s actually quite specific in its intent when it isn’t just being, say, adolescent foolishness. It’s something like, can we create a narrative and string along legacy media types? And some of that’s a joke, but some of it’s also a test. Is like, does this new technological platform have enough power to bend and twist what has been the standard means of delivering the cultural narrative for decades? And the answer to that frequently was yes. And increasingly, the legacy media outlets are suffering from delegitimization. They lose money. They lose their ability to fact check. And because they don’t have this technological advantage anymore, they have the remnants of their brand. It’s something like that. Yeah. And there’s also something there’s a very big asymmetry between honesty and dishonesty, right? If you and I are good friends and I tell you one major lie, well, that’s one statement out of tens of thousands. That one statement is still going to do much more damage than one honest statement, because I’ve lost. There’s an amount of trust lost. So their brand has been and they say this explicitly. CNN had ads not that long ago saying this is an apple. We only report facts. If you are if I’m coming at you and saying that I am only reporting facts as soon as I’m caught in one misrepresentation, even if it’s innocent, which I don’t think it is in most cases right away. There that just kind of collapses the souffle because I trusted you. I relied on you. And now you’re giving misinformation. But most importantly, and this is where I differ from more mainstream conservatives who have think things have become corrupted. You made mistakes. I’ve made mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes all the time. This is going to be inevitable simply from a lack of knowledge. What steps have you taken once these mistakes have been made to make amends and also put yourself in a position that you won’t make the same mistake again. And if you see with corporate media, oftentimes they’ll do things that are disingenuous. But let’s give them the benefit of doubt. Let’s just say they were sloppy, but no one gets fired. There’s no me a cult. But like, you know what? Like Tylenol is a great counter example. Back in the early 80s, I believe it was Tylenol got some was poisoning Tylenol bottles. People I think were dying or at the very least were getting very sick. So Tylenol had this huge ad campaign that said this is the steps we’ve taken. You know, you got the childproof calf, you got the seal, you got the cotton, whatever it was. This is how you know that we are safe. You can rely on Tylenol. You don’t see that with CNN or Fox or ABC. Whenever they do these egregious things, they just pretend that they never happened all along or say that this is some kind of, you know, you can’t listen to the conspiracy theories on the Internet. So this is why there is this kind of another loss of trust because there seems to be very little effort to maintain and foster that trusting relationship between the channels and the audience and make amends when things have gotten wrong. So, let’s, I want to continue with 4chan for a bit. Can you walk me through exactly, like you said that one of the mistakes that CNN did made, for example, and also Hillary Clinton’s campaign was treating 4chan like it was actually a person and as if there was someone who could represent it and speak. Can you lay out exactly what it is and how it works? And then maybe we can talk about the meme culture that’s associated with it. Sure. So 4chan and there’s others, there’s 8chan, there’s Reddit and other such, they’re message boards. So basically, 4chan, I don’t remember how many boards they have. Some are completely innocuous. So fitness is their fitness and health board. FA is their fashion board. Guys can ask, does this, do these pants look good on me? You know, what kind of hat would look good with my hair? You know, innocuous stuff. Poll, POL is their politics board. So basically, it’s anonymous and it’s not, I believe, after there’s 15 pages and after there’s no updates on a thread, the threads vanish into the netherworld, wherever. You can’t see them anymore. So it’s got an impermanence. Correct. You can identify yourself with the flag if you want when you log in, but there’s no usernames. It’s not like Facebook. So basically, you know, the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2015, 2016, were positing about these sites and like, how is it that this is allowed to happen? But it’s not the kind of thing where it’s like Facebook and you call Mark Zuckerberg and he bans certain users. The users are ephemeral. You don’t know who they are. The posts are ephemeral. You know, they just vanish off the board. So this claim that, you know, the comparison I had, I believe in the book, was kind of the more al-Qaeda. It’s very decentralized. You know, you can’t really take out one person and then the whole thing falls apart other than you having to try to take out the site, which they tried to do earlier this year and in late 2020. But it’s an entirely different model. And I think people who have that bureaucratic mindset, people have that elitist in the sense that you have this managerial elite running things, they can’t even conceive of an organization or a location or a website, which is decentralized and there’s no like, you know, big bad vampire to kill once you take out this vampire. Yeah, well, I mean, but that is part of what I thought was in some sense, you’re documenting something that’s so revolutionary that even the people using it don’t know how revolutionary it is. You know, and so because we have these massive communication technologies now and they all have slightly different rules and just by tweaking the rules a tiny bit, you can create a whole new organization like TikTok, let’s say, which has videos of a certain length and at least to begin with almost no other. It’s all of a sudden that’s a huge social network doing all sorts of things that no one has ever done before. So the rules for 4chan are really crucially important to understanding it. So it’s anonymous, decentralized and evanescent. And that’s something… Yeah, and they have no one, the two rules are no child pornography and if there’s pornography, it has to be stick to the pornography board. But so it’s pretty much the Wild West when it comes to free speech. Right, and the fact that it’s not permanent also. So it’s anonymized and impermanent, which means you’d think at least in part that it would encourage a lot more risk-taking because one of the things that would mitigate risk is the fact that it could be attributed to you, but also that it would be permanent. Yeah, I mean, that’s the comparison of 4chan to let’s say Twitter where someone’s old tweets will be there at the very least, they’re going to be archived somewhere. You’re going to have a consistent username. So even if it’s not Jordan Peterson, if you’re just going to be like JackSmith37, they’ll be able to track JackSmith37’s posts over time. You can’t really do that on a site like 4chan or 8chan. But there’s other sites like this. I mean, what they have figured out is, the corporate press might decide 4chan’s the devil, 4chan’s the devil, 4chan’s the devil. You take down 4chan, well, they’ll just go to Discord or they’ll go to all these other sites. So technology is what allows people, is designed in contemporary terms for people to communicate. So if you’re going to kind of take out one location where they’re gathering and trying to communicate, it’s going to take minutes to find a new location. Now, there’s going to be a cost because you have to get the word out through other means about this is where we all are now. But it’s very, very hard when people are basically effectively teleporting, right? If for me to go from one location to another, physically, I have to get in a plane, a car or train, whatever. But if you go to one website to another, I have to type in a web address. So if you just ban one address, the amount of effort it takes to shift to another one could not be more minimal. So, okay, so you documented, so no one’s in charge of this, but something happens and it’s a communication network and it attracts people who, what? It attracts people who are communicating in a like-minded way across time. Why did it become a place that was dominated, at least by your observations, by the thought that was associated with the new right? Why did it converge on that? Because 4chan historically has been a site for great irreverence. So they had had campaigns to troll. And by trolling, let me say specifically what I mean. Trolling is it’s not just, you know, you have a Twitter account and I say, add Jordan Peterson, you’re a jerk, f off. That’s not trolling. That’s just being obnoxious. Trolling, I regard the first troll as Andy Kaufman, the comedian, where by your performance, you’re turning a third party by exploiting their weaknesses into an unwitting performer on their own. For example, there was a great wrestler to bring back to wrestling called the Honky Tonk Man from the 80s. And his schtick was he was an Elvis impersonator, right? And when they interviewed him, he would say, oh no, Elvis stole my act. Now Elvis had been dead for 15 years at that time. It makes no sense whatsoever, but this would get the audience really enraged and they’d flip out. So when you are calmly causing someone else to have an extreme reaction, and in this case, and in good trolling, he’s exploiting their innocence and naivete. I mean, they’re taking what he’s saying at face value, even though it’s a complete absurdity and what follows suit, you know, on some case can be put in their lap. So they used to what 4chan would go would be known for is, you know, for example, you had a Mountain Dew, right? And they had named the next flavor of Mountain Dew. It’s just a corporate mechanism. I talked about this in the book. It’s a corporate mechanism to sell, you know, your sugary soft drink. What name should we call it? And they basically got enough people together. And this is kind of like rent seeking, right? If you have an organized goal seeking minority as opposed to an indifferent majority, that organized goal seeking minority is going to be able to punch very much above its weight in terms of getting the achievements it wants. How many people are caring about this Mountain Dew poll? Very, very few other than the trolls. So they got the number one result to be Hitler did nothing wrong, right? Now, they’re not Nazis. They’re not. They don’t think the Holocaust is something that is didn’t happen or is bad. They’re putting now this Mountain Dew who’s trying to use this fun to sell you this poisonous sugary garbage. Now the corporation is in position. Are they going to follow through with this poll or are they going to pull it? Whatever they choose, they have been forced into making a choice that they themselves would not have wanted because you have someone in a meeting trying to, hey, this is going to be fun for the kids. And they ended up pulling the poll because they’re like, OK, the Internet won. So to go from that and this kind of extreme distrust, if not contempt for corporate irreverence and corporate humor and corporate fun to have basically can I curse on this? You can do whatever you want. OK. Well, not everything. To have someone who was basically a shit poster on Twitter running for president who was just there in these debates, insulting these politicians to their face and often very below the belt terms. That was that ethos brought to life because no one could have imagined in decades that you would have a presidential contender who’s looking at a sitting senator in the face, who’s doing well in the polls and telling that senator, I’ve never made fun of your looks and there’s plenty of material there. Believe me, that much I can tell you. You know, this is something that was completely unprecedented and new. And we’ve been taught for decades that, you know, politics should be about respect. These are tough choices. These are people lives. That’s all very true. But there’s this very new left from the late 60s perspective idea that these kind of powerful entities use respect and decorum and decency as a mechanism to stifle dissent and to basically make their victory a fait accompli. And if you kind of mess that up and force them to show their hand that these are not kind, caring people who care about your grandma and your neighborhood. These are power hungry sociopaths who will smile at your face and do whatever they need to when the lights are off. That I think was something is very useful in terms of exposing our politics for what they are. So it struck me over the last decade or so that the alignment of comedic satire with right wing philosophy or political philosophy or views was something that was completely also completely unprecedented. I thought, well, all of a sudden the right wing are the jesters or at least among the right wing are these jesters. And I really didn’t know what to make of that. I mean, you seem to regard it in your book, The New Right. You seem to regard it as a kind of right wing anarchic rebellion against. But it’s a strange it’s strange what they’re against, because on the one hand, there’s the corporate voice, let’s say that characterizes the media. And on the other hand, there’s the left wing progressives and you can’t really put them in the same camp all that easily. Well, hopefully we will be putting them in the same camp. But they are in the same camp because one of my quotes is conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit. So much of conservatism. Buckley got his start. William F. Buckley, who’s the I think the big villain of the book, got his start complaining how terrible things are and how mistreated he was at Yale. The New Right perspective isn’t complaining about how things are at Yale. It’s let’s say tanks. Let’s send tanks to Harvard’s Harvard Yard and raise it to the ground. So these are two different approaches and much of conservatism for decades. This besides being inherently humorless, which is a personality thing, which is perfectly fine. If that’s your thing, it has been about a reaction. So the left would have some idea of the moment we need to do this and that the right would just dig in their heels and get dragged along. And it’s a ratchet effect constantly moving us toward a more and more progressive society. The National Review’s slogan was standing athwart history, yelling stop. And then at certain point people realized how about instead of yelling, we actually stop it. How about we actually try to put a wrench into these gears? How about we try to, you know, metaphorically tar and feather some of these people instead of just complaining that it’s not fair. Let’s be aggressive and let’s take the fight to them. Okay, and you see, you clearly see an analog between the tricks that Trump used, let’s say the humorous tricks that he used and the manner in which he appealed to the public and whatever was going on in places like 4chan and on Reddit and with memes as well. And you spend a lot of time in your book talking about Pepe, for example. So what is it that you see as the connection? I mean, look, I saw this t-shirt in Florida last year that I thought was really apropos. It said Trump 2020 because fuck you twice. Yeah. And I thought, yes, there’s something about that that’s really interesting. And I’ve talked to my progressive friends about this a lot. And because I’m trying to figure out exactly what’s going on and being appalled at least to some degree at the shenanigans of the Democrats, among others, especially the identity politics types. Because look, I’ll tell you what I see in relationship to my books, for example. So hypothetically, this is the standard legacy media critique of my books. I would say is that I’m peddling nonsense that if not trite is outright dangerous and which is kind of a strange combination to ne’er do wells who are so far beneath contempt that any attempt to help them is to be met with suspicion. And that’s something that really, really puzzles me because when I meet the people that I’m communicating with, you know, when I walk around or when I go to my lectures, you know, I see individuals because I look at individuals, I see individuals who are trying to get their houses in order, who are often in desperate straits. And they come up to me and tell me, you know, some step they’ve taken towards improvement, sort of shame facedly, but also happy about it. And, you know, I’m very happy that that’s happening and tell them that. And that’s my experience. But then I see in the response to my hypothetical audience, which is a misrepresentation to begin with, nothing, a contempt that’s so deep that the contempt is even there for the attempt to help. And then I think, well, you progressive types, at least in principle, you’re all for the downtrodden. But I don’t know what it is. Maybe if they stay in their place and act like they’re supposed to, there’s this contempt among the helping class, let’s say, for those they’re hypothetically helping that’s so deep that and I think it destroyed Hillary Clinton’s campaign, that contempt, her comments about the basket of deplorables and the Democrat abandonment of the working class. And Trump tapped into that somehow. And you draw connections. And so I’d like you to elaborate on that a little bit, if you would. Sure. And whenever I try to talk about people, I always try to steel man their arguments and present them in the most strong position possible. When the left is at its best, as you mentioned, it is about concerning about marginalized people, people who are forgotten. The far left, you know, historically would care about prisoners’ rights and how bad it is that this prisoner is treated. For most people, it’s kind of like lock them up, throw away the key. And that’s kind of a left-wing idea that like this guy’s been forgotten. Let’s make sure he has food. He’s not being, you know, assaulted on a daily basis, things like that. So they understand also in other contexts that when you have young males who have nothing to lose, who are completely marginalized, who are spat on and called every name in the book in other contexts, whether the Middle East, in inner city, they realize you keep pushing someone at the bottom and keep telling him you’re nothing. You deserve to have nothing. That young male is going to at the very least try to get some kind of modicum of respect, try to get some modicum of status. And this often has literally very violent consequences, because if I have nothing to lose, but I can make a name for myself or I could for five minutes have a sense of power, some people are going to do that arithmetic. And it’s a very, very bad thing. And this is broadly speaking. Oh, everyone will do that arithmetic virtually as unfair inequality multiplies, unfair inequality multiplies. That just becomes more and more likely that response. So to your point is, so in other contexts, they understand this, but now we’re talking about your audience, right? These are young men who aren’t doing so hot. And now they’re being told they don’t have a girlfriend. They desperately want to have a girlfriend. And now they’re told you’re a loser for not having a girlfriend. It’s like, well, I’m trying to get out of that situation. I’m not trying to be some kind of date rapist. I’m not trying to be some sexual predator. I just want to be normal. I just want to have Maslow’s hierarchy of needs met. But because they have been assigned to be you’re supposed to be here at the bottom. You’ve had your turn. You’re the whipping boy of the moment on an individual level. This is going to have very deleterious consequences. And because you are telling them, listen, you don’t have to be even if you’re going to be at the bottom, you could still be a better person tomorrow than you are today. Well, now you’re kind of going to their house and rearranging their furniture and messing up their schemes. Of course, they’re going to react in very aggressive ways towards your teachings, I think. Well, it’s funny, too, because that notion of my audience is a caricature to begin with, you know, but I don’t care about that. In some sense, I’m interested that the caricaturing is occurring. It’s like there’s a reason for it. Why? They’re all male. They’re all angry. They’re all white. It’s like, no, that’s not right. And even if they do skew mail, that’s at least in part a legacy hangover from the fact that most of the people who watch YouTube are male. But anyways, nonetheless, that’s that’s the categorization. But then there’s the emergence of that contempt. And I think, well, that is driving just as you pointed out there that that that insistence upon the despicableness of that status is driving. I could see that in the 4chan right in the writing about 4chan that you were doing that’s that there’s a there’s a testing and a pushing back that’s going on there. And some of it is clowning and some of it is like pointless trouble making as far as I’m concerned. But there’s more going on in there than that. And that’s for sure. So and then it coalesces around these right these more right wing ideas, which I also find somewhat surprising. And so what do you make? What do you make of that? Exactly. Is it because those ideas are the ones that are most specifically forbidden or and the satirical comic rebellious types just glom onto them for that? Or what do you think it is? I think you hit the nail on the head. It’s that if you tell someone who’s got nothing going on and you say, you know, if you push this button right here, it’s going to have some really hilarious consequences for some people who think they’re better than you and have no problem telling you to your face. They’re better than you. A lot of people are going to push that button, especially when the results are often hilarious. So it is going to give them that sense of power. And I don’t know that they’re making the wrong choice. I don’t think it’s very useful to tell someone who’s not really being particularly aggressive that you know, you suck and you’re terrible. And you know what it is like? I don’t make fun of people for being overweight. Like I go after people for a lot of things. I don’t go after people who are going overweight. I had a friend who passed away because he had morbid obesity. I know the friend who had a gastric bypass because when you make fun of someone who’s overweight, you’re making fun of all your friends who are overweight. You know, they’re seeing it as well. And here’s the thing. That person knows they’re overweight. They know they’re going to be treated differently. They know they’re going to be, you know, look down on and all these other things. They’re painfully aware. And it’s the same thing here. If someone is marginalized and you’re calling him a loser, he knows he’s a loser. At that point, it just becomes a bit of cruelty and bullying. And also, anytime you try to tell someone, especially in America or in the West at least, to sit down and shut up, it’s like, why, who are you to tell me to sit down and shut up? Because now you don’t have the power to tell me to sit down and shut up. You have that power in school. You have that power in the office. Maybe you had that power when there were three networks. Now that there’s infinite networks, if you look at the Internet, you can’t silence me. So I am going to talk. And if I see that it’s upsetting you and you hate me, even though you don’t know me, yeah, it’s going to be a value for me to upset you because I do think you’re a bad actor, I think is the mindset. And I don’t think that mindset’s at all irrational. So let’s dig into that a little bit. I mean, I got memed like mad when I first rose to whatever prominence I’ve risen to or notoriety or whatever. There were memes and I think that’s probably still the case. There are memes being generated in the hundreds, like weekly. It was crazy. And I was watching them and I thought, if I behave myself properly, those won’t get unbearably cruel. OK. I thought if I can take a joke, then they’re going to tilt in a manner that’s more positive rather than more negative, because I could see that there was a testing going on there. You know that these jokes were being pushed at me and I suppose to some degree pushed at whoever was listening to me. Right. And had I responded negatively to that in any. I remember when I worked on working class working crews, you know, that one of the things that almost always happened was that when someone new joined a crew, there’d be a test period where, you know, various forms of insults and would be hurled at them. And it was an attempt to see how they responded. And if they responded with good humor and accepted their stupid nickname with some good grace and could laugh about it, maybe could say something funny in return, then, you know, after a week or two, if they did their job, then everybody accepted them in a way they went. But if they got all uptight about it and angry, then it just got meaner and meaner until they were driven off. And I could see that happening with the memes. And, you know, I was compared to Kermit the frog, for example, and that sort of morphed into a peppy thing. And I was watching that and and hopefully was able to take a joke when one emerged. And at least one of the consequences of that seemed to be that it never got truly toxic. And so I’m struggling with the morality of the 4chan approach, you know, because there’s a part of me that thinks, Jesus Christ, don’t you have anything better to do? But there’s also a part of me that thinks, well, wait a second, there’s something really complicated going on here that has to do with the redistribution of power and also the acquisition of a voice by people who are individuals and not part of a corporate group, let’s say, but who have access to tremendous technological power. And they’re serving the function of gestures and they’re serving the function of comedians. And I think comedians in particular are the canaries in the coal mine for a free culture. As soon as the comedians are threatened, you know, some things as soon as the comedians are nervous, you know, something’s up because you should be allowed to make fun. The biggest meme of yours that I use this meme of yours constantly on Twitter is the Kathy Newman meme. And one of those examples is, you know, that famous interview you have for people who don’t know where you were saying things that were pretty straightforward or maybe people disagreed with you. And she would just ask you a question that seemed to be complete non sequitur to what you had just said. And this kept going on for the whole time. The one that comes to mind is a picture of you saying I had bacon and eggs for breakfast. And her reply is, so you’re saying kill all vegans. So oftentimes, if someone if you have something on Twitter and some response with a non sequitur approach, you just reply with a picture of her and people right away know. Oh, so what you’re saying is it has nothing to do with what is you’re actually saying. I think what you’re what you are saying to be the opposite of Kathy Newman in this context is accurate in that a lot of powerful people are there through inertia or they’re through nepotism are there through corporate means because memes because they play the game. If I’m not part of the game, why should I be playing the game? And here’s the other thing where I think these people are heroes is the thing that they’re best at is when it comes to the thing that is the worst, which is war. We are constantly proselytized in corporate media that war is great. We need to have people overseas. We need to have more and more and more troops, more whatever. However, if you have a president who is regarded as contemptible, if you look at Trump versus Barack Obama, it’s a lot harder for that president who isn’t venerated to send young men and women to die. Because if there’s a skepticism about his pedestal that he’s on right away, you really have to make sure you’re selling this war. Otherwise, there’s going to be this it’s just easy to clown you because the arguments used for these wars are often so ridiculous on their face. So what was your what was the conclusion that you’ve drawn? Now, it’s been a couple of years since you wrote the New Right. So and what what what are your later thoughts on and on on board such as 4chan and what’s happening in 4chan now? It doesn’t seem to. Yeah, I think 4chan has to some extent fallen away as a cultural force. I mean, they were I mean, they were trying to mean Trump into the presidency and that happened successfully in 2016. The Donald, which was the board on Reddit, was banned during the election. I think they respond as the Donald.Win and these other you know. And again, with these decentralized things, if you try to figure out where everyone’s going, you know, then you’re going to have subgroups. People define themselves by opposition, not by unity. So anyone who has any kind of ideology will tell you the people they argue with the most are the ones who are basically one degree of separation away from them within that ideology. So I think right now there is kind of what happens next now that there’s a Biden presidency. But the focus has shifted. And I think this is extremely healthy for those of us who value liberty. It has shifted from Washington, and this has always been kind of the background, to corporate media and understanding that Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz will never despise you and will never have as much contempt for you as the editorial board, the New York Times or the people at the New Yorker. It’s they’re much or let alone many academics. So having the trolling and the memes be much more focused on what that just mold like calls to why you think that’s why do you think that’s do you think that’s true and why do you think that’s true because that’s quite a radical statement, I would say. But I think it does speak to this t shirt that I mentioned earlier. Yeah, you know, so your your sense what you just told me was that there is this elite contempt. And to some degree, it was associated with the political class. But on further analysis, it’s not the political class. It’s the chattering literati, the chattering educated literati. And I actually happen to think that that’s the case that that’s actually true. So why do you believe that? Sure, I’ll give you a couple of examples. First of all, the arch villains and I’m not trying to troll you are the university professors. That’s where the poisoning really, really starts. But let me give you an example to demonstrate which is wagging the dog, whether it’s because the used to be the argument was about Washington. Andrew Breitbart, you know, who certainly falls into this new right kind of context, made the quote about politics being downstream of culture. And the idea was, wait a minute, we’re fighting in Washington. By that time, it’s already, you know, fourth down and we’re down. How many points? It’s it’s it’s a consequence of what led up to this. Let’s suppose I was a Democratic congresswoman or congressman and I thought President Trump was a Nazi Klansman, horrible Hitler, every name in the book. At the same time, I did not think that there was any kind of collusion with Russia or any kind of something wrong with that phone call. Maybe he’s a jerk, but I certainly don’t think he should be impeached or move from office. All my constituents have been hearing for months from the televangelist of the left, Don Lemon, Rachel Maddow, Trump, Russia, Trump, Russia, Trump, Russia. How could I, as a Democratic congressman, go back to my constituents and say, guys, I agree with you. This guy is the worst president in history and he’s a despicable human being. But you don’t impeach someone over this. This is, you know, ratcheting up and nonsensical as a congressperson. I would not be in the position to make that claim. And I think that is a good demonstration of who is in charge of whom. There’s a clip online. I’m sure people can find where Don Don Lemon from CNN had John Kasich on former, I think, House Budget Direct Budget Committee chairman, governor of Ohio. He was a major presidential contender in 2016. And he’s yelling at him, John, John, John. And you’re sitting there. It’s like it’s very clear who regards themselves as the authority and who regards them who is regarded as the subject in that relationship. So, OK, so what if I said maybe we should just stop caring about that, too, because the technological playing field for communication has been leveled so drastically that the New York Times and the legacy media types are basically dead in the water. And that’s just going to play out like inevitably over the next three or four years. And I was let me give you just a quick example. I just say, yes, please. They were if they were dead in the water, the lockdowns couldn’t have happened. I don’t I don’t think they’re dead in the water now, but I think the writing is on the wall. I agree. Oh, that’s why I’m going to write a book called The White Pill because I’m so optimistic. I think they’re they’re on borrowed time. OK, so then we can also talk about what happens next. And we can talk about the difference between podcasts and legacy media, too, which I think are I’m trying to think through right now. And because I think the YouTube podcast long form structure is very is revolutionary in all sorts of ways that we are just starting to understand. I was talking to Russell Brand a week ago, you know, and he talked about voiceless people and how we’re increasingly becoming voiceless. And I thought, well, wait a second. That’s true in one sense, perhaps. But it’s very untrue in another sense that might be more important because now everyone’s a TV station if they want to be and everyone’s radio station if they want to be and everyone’s a publishing house if they want to be. It’s right there at their fingertips. And there’s no apart from impediments that get thrown up now and then like YouTube banning people and so on. It’s it’s if you want to have a voice, all you have to do is buy a one hundred dollar microphone and use your laptop and bang. You know, you have whatever audience you can draw in. Yeah. And so and that that that is playing itself out in our culture extraordinarily rapidly. And so maybe maybe that’s just like the 4chan discussion that’s drawn from your book, The New Right. The cultures move past that. That’s already history. It might be the case that they they continue dominance of the main narrative by the legacy media types. That’s already done. We’re just mopping up the ashes. That’s exactly my perspective. And this is why it’s often so frustrating with me on social media, because I think it’s inevitable. I don’t see how if my if I’m the New York Times or five, I ask myself this question fairly often. I said, if I’m CNN, what could I do to regain the trust of this young population? Like, what steps would I take? And they’re really in a bad. It’s like Marlboro. Like one of my quotes is I said, the battle is won when the average American regards a corporate journalist exactly as they regard a tobacco executive. You are never going to have the guy who runs Marlboro be someone that you trust and think is like an unwitting, unmitigated good person. You understand his job. You might say, look, these have to be legal. It’s a horrible habit of and so on and so forth. And I get how he’s getting a paycheck and I get how it could be used in moderation. But regardless, this is there’s better ways to improve humanity than selling tobacco. Well, I look at the BBC, for example, tried to to formulate a channel for young people and they did exactly what you’d expect. Appeal to progressive causes. And the truth is that didn’t work at all. And why didn’t it work? It’s because for young people, broadcast TV is so dead that they don’t even notice the corpse. Yeah. Right. Right. It’s just not there. It’s just not an issue. And no wonder, because the technological advantage of of on demand video, both production and consumption, is so that the advantage of that is so great that those old forms are just they’re terminally dead. And so when I go and have an interview with a TV person, you know, it feels like I’m going back into the 70s and I’m not doing them anymore. And I can get into that in a little while. But what happens is, you know, the person that you’re talking to isn’t a person and whatever it is that you’re having isn’t a conversation. We’re having a conversation when we’re doing this right. You know, I’m sure we bring our flaws to this and our and our arbitrary preconceptions and our biases and all that. But my sense is that when a podcast goes well, I can tell because I’m interested in the conversation. And the reason I’m interested in the conversation isn’t because I’ve got some viewpoints that I’m hammering forward that you have to attend to, but that I’ve got some ideas that I can throw at you. And then I can see what you do with the ideas and take them apart and add what you can to them. And then I can have different ideas. And and and we can do that collaboratively over the course of the dialogue. And we can include all the people that are watching this in the process. And that’s like it’s like this long form allows for the truth being something like an investigation into the truth instead of the truth. And right. Well, we don’t want to underestimate how much of that is purely a consequence of the technological revolution because now there’s time. Right. We can make mistakes and and and and it doesn’t matter because the bandwidth is unlimited. Yeah, if I’m a roulette player player and I mentioned this in the book as well, all my money is on technology being what saves us. I do not I think politics literally only causes problems and it’s not a place for any kind of solution. You cannot look to Washington for solutions. What’s funny is when you listen to corporate media, a lot of times they will acknowledge something’s a problem. But then when that problem is solved exterior to it, they start to panic. We have heard you and I both old enough to remember that there was a lot of hand wringing correctly that we live in a sound bite culture, that it’s not reasonable, that a politician who might have a new innovative way to say solve for poverty, to solve for the environment, to solve for, you know, out of wedlock births. They have some program, but they have to wrap it up in 10 seconds. It’s very hard to make that point. And as a result, this rewards glib people or people who have good one liners. But someone who is inarticulate, who has great ideas, that person is going to be dead in the water. And that’s going to create results that we don’t necessarily like. So then people like, you know what, this is true. Like you have people talking past each other, the Republican versus Democrat, you know broadly what you’re going to say. It’s fun when they get a zinger in, but I’m not going to have the needle moved. I’m rooting for my team. And it’s kind of a sports phenomenon. Podcasts come along. We’re going to have a long conversation where both of us are listening to each other. I might disagree with you. I don’t have a political party behind me. Neither do I. Hopefully you’ll disagree with me. Hopefully, not only will you disagree, but more importantly, that you’ll do it in an interesting way that’s interesting also to me. Because if you disagree with me, there is some possibility that you know something I don’t. And if you disagree, I could learn something from you. The smartest person is ignorant of 99.99% of knowledge. I mean, this is the mistake that these kind of over-educated people think. They think just because I’m smart, I know everything. You’re still going to be profoundly ignorant, just going to be knowledgeable about certain things very specifically. But getting back to the point I was saying earlier, now that we have these long conversations and people can really delve into ideas, then people listening to us might think we’re both full of crap, but now they’re at least challenging their own views and being like, why do I disagree with both of them? You don’t have that space on CNN by nature of its organization. And now what CNN and other outlets had correctly posited as a problem has been resolved, but it’s been resolved at their expense. So now the the human cry is there’s misinformation. People are being told dangerous ideas. Yeah, it’s dangerous to your heterogenomy. It’s dangerous to your prominence. CNN, Brian Stelter had a whole segment. I don’t think he named Tim Pool by name by saying, how is it that these YouTube shows, news shows have orders of magnitude bigger than us? What do we do about this? It’s like this is literally every market. Like I’m a publisher or I make apples. Someone comes along, their apples are people like those apples better. You know, you don’t call in the state, you don’t regard this some kind of, you know, abomination against the natural order of things. You’re like, OK, crap. What are they? What nerve is Tim striking that I can learn from? But they’re never interested in that because they’re not interested in learning. They’re interested in teaching or more specifically, training their audiences what to think and believe. And you see this in social media. I made this joke over the weekend in the same way that Christians regard the Trinity as one God and three person. You have these entire populations, which is one mind in many, many persons, because the people watch John Oliver or they’ll watch, you know, some other show on the right. And the next day, not only will they be repeating these views, but they’re repeating them verbatim. And that is when you realize, oh, there’s no mind there. This we’re trained since we’re kids correctly, that it’s important for us to be informed on current events. So what these shows do very perniciously is they will bring up an issue that the person hadn’t heard about before, which is important for us to understand. Sure. But immediately we’ll train them on how to look at this issue and what the correct emotional response is. And people are hungry for that because they want to present themselves as informed, but they don’t have the time or the capacity to undertake the critical or independent thought to do that. So it comes prepackaged for them. So it’s kind of the TV dinner of the mind. Well, that’s a good metaphor. But the network format, all of it, the whole technological apparatus, including the corporate funding as a consequence of the expense of bandwidth, absolutely demands that. You know, like I never feel more like content than when I go to a TV station and everyone in there is is is in some sense held hostage to the limitations and advantages of that particular technology. And, you know, well, as Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message. You know, a lot of what a lot of what looks like even corporate think or corporate malfeasance is merely a consequence of that strange technological limitation. The the the networks have to assume that everybody watching has no memory and no education and no attention span because the bandwidth requirements demand that. And now that’s all gone. So let me ask you about this. So now all of a sudden, the network, everyone’s a TV station. OK, so now one thing that that that the dominance, let’s say of the three major TV stations from, say, 1950 or thereabouts till 1995, maybe something like that, there was the imposition of something like a coherent national narrative. And now you can object to that and you should, because in some sense it’s imposed. But but, you know, it’s it’s a collaborative imposition between these technologically powerful companies and the government. The journalists couldn’t go to couldn’t be too corrupt if they chased after the politicians, because then they wouldn’t get access. The politicians couldn’t be too corrupt because the media would, you know, disrobe them. But there was this sense of unity. And now you get this immense multiplicity. And so, I mean, you’re more anarchic, Lee oriented, I would say, temperamentally than I am. But I am an anarchist. Yes. Right. Right. But but, you know, there is there is a danger in fragmentation. That’s the I mean, that’s diversity is fragmentation. But but, you know, enough fragmentation, you get nothing but endless conflict as people try to work out how they’re going to cooperate. So I don’t think that’s necessarily true, because I don’t think it’s I think you’re taking it as a given that cooperation is desirable or that this unity of some kind is desirable. I think what’s coming up in certain circles, which I was the first one to posit this in 2015, is in America, at least the idea of a national divorce, recognizing that we’ve had at least two cultures since the very beginning. They’re being held together through, you know, often nefarious means. And if one group regards Donald Trump as literally Hitler and an authoritarian strongman, which you can very easily make the case for that. And the other group regards, you know, Joe Biden is basically someone sitting in his own urine behind the resolution desk. There’s no reason other than some kind of sense of inertia for these two, two or more groups to be under the same polity or both. There’s no reason for you to have the president you don’t want. And increasingly, as conversation becomes a discourse collapses, because I think social media does tend to drive our ideologies to their logical conclusions, which leads to extremism, which could be both a good thing or a bad thing. But it is going to be harder and harder to the point where it’s impossible to have this sort of conversation. And we’re seeing it also in Europe. OK, but there are reasons for the necessity of the unity. I mean, so you talk about Jonathan Haidt in your book, in The New Right. And there’s a lot of psychological investigators, myself included, when I was doing research, who were looking into the temperamental basis of political affiliation. Right. So, you know, roughly speaking on the left end of things, you get the high open people who are creative in their thinking and yes, and who are temperamentally in favour of the free flow of information and tend to be lower in conscientiousness, particularly orderliness. And then you have people who ally on the other side of that, who are higher in orderliness and lower in openness. And I tried to figure out why that was the fundamental political axis, because there’s five temperaments. Yes. And so why only those two as the major determinants of political affiliation? And what it boiled down to me for me is that and I think this this isn’t my discovery precisely, but I think it’s the most significant discovery in political psychology in the last 50 years is that it’s probably that because borders are the fundamental political issue. And I don’t just mean borders between countries. I mean borders between concepts. I mean borders between categories, countries, states, towns, people, the conservative types think you have to hold things together. Yep. Because if they dissolve, they die and the liberal types think, well, wait a second, you bloody well need to maximize information flow. And the truth of the matter is sometimes one of those perspectives is right for that situation and sometimes the other and it’s continued. I mean even with look at the advantages of free trade and then the disadvantage of, you know, a worldwide epidemic. That’s a great example. It’s like, well, are open borders good? Well, they do facilitate the transmission of disease. And it turns out that the probability that infectious disease will be transmitted in a given political locale is actually a very good determinant of political belief within that locale. So wherever there’s more infectious disease, people are much more conservative and it’s a huge effect. So something very fundamental is going on at the bottom of our political thinking. But having said all that, it’s that also means, you know, that both of those types are necessary because sometimes one has the right solution and sometimes the other. But even more importantly is that there’s no way of getting rid of that dichotomy if you have groups of human beings. And so if we can’t have a unity emerge that allows both those types of people to coexist, then what we’re going to have as a consequence is conflict. Like, and who knows how severe that can become. So we have, we don’t have it. We have a choice. It’s like unity, however fragile that might be, or the degeneration into something like conflict. And that’s not preferable to cooperation, all things considered. Oh, I disagree. I think it is comparable and I don’t think the alternatives, excuse me, I don’t think that unity means cooperation. I think unity means oppression. I think sometimes you look, look, I don’t disagree with that in some sense. I’m saying all the time. Unity through politics always means oppression because the political system can only be used to silence people and force them to do what they otherwise would not want to do. Otherwise, they would do it on a voluntary basis. So any of these calls of unity, in my view, are always slight of hand to marginalize or oppress a certain population. Now, sometimes that’s necessary. It sounds like a classic postmodernism, that part of postmodernism, that’s the fundamental claim of the power theorists, the French power theorists. And there’s some, that’s not an insult, by the way. Sure. But, but look, if you take 10 kids and you have them play the same game, all the kids get to play the game, but not all of them get to play the game they wanted to at that moment. But at least they all get to play a game. And so there’s cooperation there and there’s utility in it. Now you can say, well, the tyranny of the game has been imposed. And that’s true. But both of those things are true at the same time. And it doesn’t seem reasonable to equate cooperation with tyranny. It’s reasonable to point out that cooperation could degenerate into tyranny. I think you just kind of drop the mask a little bit because you, in your example, positive, these are children. So by its very nature, all these things that you’re talking about in a positive sense have to force some group to be a second class citizen or at least obedient to some kind of elite. And this is something that I think is the benefits of this, at the very least, are enormously overblown. I think you could freedom means every kid can play the game that they want. There might not be enough other people. That’s the problem. You know, I disagree. So and I use children as an example because I was concentrating on games and because it’s out of games that the polity emerges over the course of its natural development. So it’s not a rational top down imposition. All things considered, it’s the it’s the emergence of a game like structure that incorporates more and more people. And see, if you take two year olds, two year olds play their own game and each of them plays their own game. But by the time they hit three or four, they have to be able to integrate the game they’re playing with with what other children want to play so that they can play. They can play games with other children, which they’re unbelievably motivated to do. And it means that each of them have to subordinate their instincts, so to speak, for the moment. But hypothetically, they gain as a consequence of their mutual subordination to this higher order game. I don’t see it as support. So if my choices are play this game by myself or play this game, I like second with a lot of other people, I would value this. It’s the I’m I’m playing a game in order to have fun. So in that case, the first game, which I which is my most favorite game, if no one wants to play with me, it’s not going to be that fun. So it is rational and not at any sense of subordination to choose my second preferred game because now I’m having fun being able to play it. Well, let’s look. I would say that what we’re doing here is a is a is a game. And I don’t mean that in any, you know, in any what negative sense. You’re allowing by participating in this conversation, you’re allowing for the possibility and the belief, I would say, that whatever we’re doing collaboratively is of more utility at the moment than whatever you could be doing individually at the moment. Correct. Otherwise, you would be doing it. OK. And I would say that we we are cooperating. We’re also competing and we also might be tyrannizing each other to some degree. But there’s something in this mutual interaction that we’re about that we’re we’re engaging in voluntarily that is cooperative and that isn’t being enforced by some external agent. Right. It’s entirely cooperative. This is my whole point. This is why I’m an anarchist, because this is when people are doing things voluntarily, they are going to choose the things that are preferable to them. The problem and when you have conflict is when you have a third actor coming into our conversation and being the state and forcing both of us to do something we would not want to do for their sake. And that when you play that out, that game on a national, international scale, that is the definition of oppression. Instead of you and I having a podcast, why aren’t we in the factory making socks report people? That’s of more utility, says the third party who’s not involved here. And that’s the danger, in my view, and the legitimacy of that kind of third party. It is so the development. I picked up a reasonable number of my ideas about the relationship between games and morality and higher order social structures from the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. And he was interested in the science of ethics, essentially. And his goal was the re reunification of science and religion, actually, and although very few people know that about Piaget. And he pointed out quite clearly that a cooperative game would outcompete a tyrannical game over time because the tyrannical game had to waste resources in enforcement, whereas a cooperative game didn’t because people were voluntarily going to go along with it. So then you say, well, it’s I think you can make a perfectly credible case that if you could choose between two games and one of them involved force and the other didn’t, and they have the same end, let’s say that the cooperative game is to be preferred. And it’s also more sophisticated. But I would say as well, we actually don’t know how to pull that off. It’s some of it’s just just lack of ability. Well, when you integrate so many people like you have 330 million people in the United States, it’s really hard, hard to organize a cooperative game. Well, that’s the role of the corporate press. The corporate press puts forth the agenda of the power class and gets everyone persuaded to do that which they had wanted to do. Mario Cuomo, whose book I got paid. I’m sorry, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, whose book I got paid to read. He said explicitly in his book that if this wasn’t done through voluntary compliance, I wouldn’t be able to pull off half of this. And what is allowed to happen is you have decentralized enforcement of these rules. And we saw this during the lockdowns where every low status person had an opportunity to assert dominance over somebody else by going up to them and yelling at them that they’re not wearing a mask, even they’re going up to them ostensibly is going to put your life in danger. And just to you made a very cogent point about how persuasion is a lot cheaper than force. A lot of people use all these Orwellian 1984 comparisons and I think the comparison to contemporary terms is much closer to brave new world. And it’s through the use of pleasure and the carrot because it’s a lot cheaper to tell people persuade people it’s in their best interest. Go along. You’re going to give up your freedom, but I’m going to give you safety and they’ll be championing it the bit to do that. H.L. Menken, the great cynic of the early 20th century, said that the average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe. And for those of us who are fans of freedom, who regard liberty as a high value, the issue is how do you engage in a polity with people who don’t really want to be free? And people who don’t really find liberty of use and would rather have every minute of their life, whether through their corporate job or what they watch on TV or what they wear, pretty much decided for them. I mean, the speech in the Devil Wears Prada that Miranda Priestly makes about how you’re wearing that blue sweater because the people in this room chose the Cerulean jacket five years ago. And you think it has nothing to do with you, but it was because we had made these decisions and it percolated down to you. And I think that top down approach. I mean, Bernays talked about this. Walter Lippman talked about this in the books, Propaganda and Public Opinion. This was something that they figured out a hundred years ago, specifically during the Woodrow Wilson administration. How do you get over the complete fascist takeover of the United States, of course, under wartime premises and get everyone involved in something that would have been completely alien to American thought just five years prior that we’re going to send all our kids over to Europe to fight a European war. This was a major revolutionary shift in how America regarded its relationship between the state and the population and between America and the rest of the world. Woodrow Wilson was the first president to leave America as president. FDR just went to Panama, but that was like American territory at the time. Sorry, Teddy Roosevelt. So this was that’s what so we’ve been they’ve been at this for a hundred years. So they’re playing the long game and now it’s starting to fall apart, thankfully. Okay, so I got three things I want to ask you now. Sure. I want to know who they is. Okay, so then I want to know in the devil war Prada. Were you on Miranda Priestley’s side or on the side of the naive ingenue who, you know, was hypothetically tyrannized by her. And now I can’t remember the third one. We’ll stick with those two for the time being. So who’s the they exactly. Sure. So it’s a shorthand, right. And it’s a conspiratorial shorthand. So it’s worth it’s worth unpacking. Sure. A conspiracy is just an organization that you don’t approve of. The Constitutional Convention was a conspiracy. The founding fathers got together in Philadelphia to reorganize the Artists Confederation. That was what they had been there assigned to ask that they had sworn to. They get in there, lock the doors. They go, yeah, we’re starting over, right, guys? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they swore themselves to secrecy. Now, we don’t say conspiracy because we don’t like that term, but this was very much a conspiracy. Okay, conspiracies usually involve deception and secretiveness, too. So they swore themselves to secrecy. Fair enough. And there’s a conspiratorial element there for sure. But there’s lots of things that people do behind the scenes, so to speak, that aren’t necessarily conspiratorial because they do them. They’re not hiding them. So but back to the they, you know, basically. So the model is you get the kids at a very young age and you put them in government schools. They are taught many things that are nefarious, such as that your self-esteem should be a function of this mediocre person in front of the room, that everyone should have the same work hours, that you are forced to be in a relationship with violent peers, that in no other situation are you forced to be locked into a relationship with them, with like bullies or just people who are, you know, disruptive. But this it starts with the universities. And this was by design, the American Economics Association, which was started, I think, in the late 1890s by Richard Eli, who was Woodrow Wilson’s mentor there. And they use they always use our well in language country myself. But the idea is we’re training the next generation of elites. So basically, you have an entire population who go to these best universities who are taught the same faith. And this was they had something at the time which is degenerated now called the social gospel. The quote, what would Jesus do, which contemporary Christians say all the time, this was posited by a socialist Christian, because the idea was instead of an individual soul being able to be saved, which was kind of the central idea of Christianity and a big innovation in terms of historical individualism. The premise was a nation has a soul and a nation can be saved. Now, once a nation has a soul and can be saved, there is nothing outside your purview, just like when we’re talking about individual soul, the bedroom, the boardroom, how you are in public. These all tie into your salvation. And Eli and other in the UK was the Fabian Society, whose logo was literally a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The premise of was it’s kind of Gramsci’s March of the institutions. We’re going to train the next generation of leaders. They’re going to self identify as leaders because they have the diplomas and degrees, and they’re going to go out there and basically be in fact and take over the country. And it’s going to be this top down idea. And you see that it’s percolated through this day. So you have it starts the universities. Then you have all the journalists and people working media who are trained at these universities in the same ideas. And then the final consequence is the politicians. Now, for decades, what had happened was you had the Nancy’s Pelosi of the world go on TV and say truthfully and honestly, give me money, reelect me. I’m fighting Mitch McConnell and the wicked Republicans. And the Mitch’s McConnell went on TV and say, give me money. I’m fighting Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats. Meanwhile, while these two are engaging this pantomime, the New York Times, Harvard are lobbing grenades over their shoulders and they’re not taking any fire at all. What has happened now is people are realizing people like Biden McConnell. These are puppets of larger actors. And that’s where the focus needs to be in terms of effecting change and liberating the West. OK, OK. So so let me let me act as defender of the patriarchy momentarily. Sure. And so and and I remember I remember the third question and this relates back to 4chan is what and anti anarchism for that matter is that there’s this. There’s this there’s this critique of the social contract that’s obviously in order and needs to continue and the satirists and so forth are are are right to do what they do. But then there’s the separate issue of what responsibility you owe your polity. And so and maybe none. You could make that case. But but I want to address that. But but in any case, let’s look at the elite institutions in the United States and what’s happened to them over the last 40 years for better or for worse. So I know I know how this worked. So 100 years ago, Harvard, Yale, the Ivy Leagues, they were essentially aristocratic institutions and you were in them as a consequence of birth. OK, by the 1960s, that changed and it changed to IQ based meritocracy. OK, the SAT is an IQ test. Now, people swear up and down it’s not. But that’s because they don’t know anything about IQ tests. So to make an IQ test, all you have to do is draw 20 random questions from a set of abstract questions, sum up the right answers and rank order them across the population. That’s basically all an IQ test is. It’s that powerful. And SAT is an IQ test. Now, increasingly at the elite levels in the universities, IQ is the determining entrance requirement. And the average IQ of people in the Ivy League schools has gone up precipitously since the early 1960s when it wasn’t much higher than average. And now it’s way higher than average. Now you can debate about whether or not that’s a good thing. That’s a separate issue. But that is what’s happened. And the reason there was a bunch of reasons for that, I mean, one was the realization that IQ is actually the best predictor of success in colleges. It’s not that good, but it’s five times as good as the next best predictor. And it’s also relatively fair in that your SAT scores are, they’re a better determinant of your success in university than which school you graduated from. So a very, very bright kid from a very bad school has a reasonable shot at Ivy League admission compared to, say, a very bad student at a very elite school. So there were socialists who were pushing the use of IQ as well as people who are more conservative. But in any case, there’s no conspiracy at work there, precisely. There’s a decision on the part of the institutions as a whole that it would be better for the elite institutions to be based on merit as assessed by IQ. And that overall, that would be better for the general population because, hypothetically, having smarter people make decisions, because they can make decisions using more information, is better for all concerned. So there’s a lot more going on at the upper ends of the elite institutions, let’s say, than the mere conservation of multi-generational power. There’s a positive element that I think is overlooked in a way that looks to me like the shirking of responsibility in revolutionary movements like those even that are spawned off of 4chan or that characterize anarchism. It’s like, well, what responsibility do you have to what it is that’s brought you to the point where, for example, you can have this technology mediated conversation with me? Criticize away, but where’s the emphasis on where’s the positive contribution and perhaps even the gratitude? It’s in the toilet where it belongs. I mean, I reject totally the idea that somehow I owe… We’re on Zoom right now. I’ve got a mic from… I don’t even know what brand. What I owe them is the cost that it paid me to buy their product. And what I owe you is to treat you with, which isn’t much of a cost at all, with courtesy, dignity, and respect. Anytime people start talking about duties and responsibilities and gratitude, that’s them invoking the unearned. Wait, wait. No, no, I don’t think it’s that cut and dried, even in your formulation, because you said, well, you pay for it and fine. I’ll leave that be and say that’s a perfectly acceptable answer. But you did say that you believe that you have a moral obligation to what we’re engaged in right now. I don’t think we have a moral… You said three words, dignity, respect, something else. Courtesy, yeah. Courtesy. So you do recognize that there’s an ethos that should govern our interactions. No, I think you’ve earned all those things. I don’t act that way toward everyone. That’s fine. I have no problem with that. But I’m not trying to undermine your argument either. I’m really curious about this issue of responsibility because I pushed it a lot. You know, and I’ve tried to figure out what response… So look, from my perspective, I would say, well, your thought centers on the tyrannical element of the Great Father. And like, yes, fair enough. Like, that’s a major existential concern. So in terms of problems to focus on, it’s a major problem. It’s not the only problem, but it’s a major problem. You know, you could focus on the evil in your own soul. You could focus on the catastrophes of the natural world. Well, those are valid large scale domains of concern as well. But for me, it’s like, okay, well, there is the tyrannical aspect, but there’s the aspect of culture that, well, that you have enough food to eat and that you have heat and that you have… You’re the beneficiary of the structure that you’re criticizing. And you could say, well, my criticism is making the structure stronger. But there’s this element in your book and in the 4chan culture and so forth that seems to have this like… It’s this random destructiveness that looks to me… It’s not driven by something that’s going to be clearly spoken of. And it’s not driven by something that’s aiming at a good end. I think it’s aiming toward a more honest end because very often we’re told things like this person’s a hero, that person’s a hero, they should be valorized. And even if that conclusion is accurate, you know, who are you to tell me that I need to valorize that person? I mean, one thing, it’s like showing versus telling, like good writing, right? If you tell me this person has this accomplishment, that accomplishment, the natural rational response is this is a quality person. And I would love it if there was a world that had more people like this. But there’s so many outlets, more than you can count. Greta Thunberg is a great example. You have some random high school dropout who won’t go back to school until literally everyone on Earth changes the weather for her. And Time Magazine is calling her person of the year. I think to have that undermining of Time Magazine, and I got to tell you, there’s lots of things you could say positive about her. You know, that’s very easy. She’s made something of herself. But it’s Time Magazine that’s far more of the target than her. It’s these agencies that presume to tell me who I should respect and value. And it’s not on my terms. It’s on their self-serving terms. You don’t need to tell me that Black Lives Matter. I know this. I’m from Brooklyn. And you don’t need to tell me literally every five seconds. And only we decide altogether that they matter this month. And then next week, it’s going to be gay history. So trans lives are going to matter. Then we go back to Black Lives Mattering. It’s like, so what if five? Fine. Fair enough. You know, that’s a that’s a that’s a compelling sequence of statements is like, what is it exactly? I’m not being smart. I mean that I know. No, no, I, I, that’s something I would say when I am being smart. So that’s why I. OK, OK, no, well, but I’m I’m I’m I’m a compelling series of statements that is such a good thing. I’m observing it, you know, because you put the argument you put the argument forward with force. Yeah. And it’s interesting to me to listen. OK, so I know there’s something to it. So I’m trying to figure out exactly what it is. So then I think to myself, well, what exactly is it that you’re objecting to? Like, is it now you said, well, it’s flavor, it’s moral flavor of the month. It’s something like that. And it’s the imposition of the moral flavor of the month. It’s objectionable. And that’s somehow tied to the contempt, the this elitist contempt. And I think that’s fair. But so but it’s the question to say you say they and the they contains the enemy in some sense. And so my question is, well, exactly what is the enemy and who is the enemy and where is it exactly? And Harvard Yard, the New York Times offices and Congress and the White House. And corporations? Oh, absolutely. OK, where isn’t it? It isn’t right here. You and I. OK, why? Why? Why? Why right here and now? Why is it right here and now? I’ll tell you why. Because neither of us are doing anything other than presenting our own perspective. We are letting people agree with us or disagree with us from their own choice. It’s not going to matter to me or to you whether someone agrees or disagree. You’re speaking your truth. I’m speaking mine to use a cliched expression. And at the very least, I hope that people are watching this and being entertained and having their thoughts provoked. I am not in any way regarding and I certainly don’t have the power to impose the idea that if you think I’m a jerk and full of crap, that somehow that makes you a bad person or that you should have some kind of positive social consequences as a result. These different organizations absolutely do. And let me give you one example. And this kind of speaks to cancel culture, which is obviously a very hot topic at the moment. The head of CrossFit, which is this big gay fitness organization, he came out there when we were all caring about specifically Black Lives Matter. He said, look, we’re about deadlifts and burpees. I don’t know. We don’t regard race as anything. We’re about fitness and we were very diverse. What does that do with us? And he got fired as a result of this. So, again, it’s fighting against this. That’s the big difference. Neither of us are in a position to nor would we I can’t speak for you, but I bet you would agree with me ever dream of telling someone. This is my example, North Korea. Right. I did my book on North Korea. Dear reader, it’s an issue that means a lot to me. There’s a lot of Americans who just simply don’t care. I don’t think they’re bad people because I think there’s very little they can do about it. There’s very little I can do. All I tried to do with my book was move the needle and have people perceive the nation and its population differently. But I haven’t liberated North Korea, so it’s perfectly legitimate if they have different concerns or if they’re not interested. But this is not how the cathedral works. OK, OK. So I’ve been sitting. I’ve been spending the last when I give a lecture. I know what I’m doing enough to keep the audience interested, but I also know what I’m doing. Like I can say what I’m doing. I have the practice, but also a theory and they match. And so before I give a lecture, I figure out what problem I’m addressing. I have to have that question in my mind. And then I have like, OK, I’m going to investigate this problem and I’m going to push my thinking more than I’ve already pushed it on my feet. And I’m going to use these eight tools or places or stories as investigative tools. And then I’m going to see what comes out of that. And so that’s and if I sit down and I really think about it, think it through, then the lecture will go well. And what I am doing, as far as I can tell, is thinking on my feet. Sure. People seem to like watching that. OK, now I’ve been thinking, all right, what are we doing in a TV, a standard TV interview? And what are we doing in a podcast? Because now I have this podcast and I’m enjoying it. And it’s such a thrill for me because I can reach out to virtually anyone in the world and say, look, I’d really like to find out what you think. And they’ll say yes. And I can talk to them. And so it’s unbelievably it’s an unbelievably great thing to do. And then I’ve been thinking, well, I can feel when it’s going well and when it isn’t, when it goes flat and when it’s going well, we’re doing what we’re doing. And so I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. Yes, exactly. Yes, exactly. Right. So they’re agendaless in that sense, right? Yes, and sincere in that sense, because you have to have some element of honesty if it’s improv. Yes, exactly. Well, and I also think these new forms really punish people who don’t engage in that. So like now and then I’ll talk to a podcast host who’s a legacy journalist, and they’ll slip into, well, here’s a question. It’s like, yeah, yeah. Is that your question or is that a question? You know, and it’s sort of like a lecturer who reads the PowerPoint slides instead of talking spontaneously about the topic. I completely agree. And I think this also speaks to why this kind of mechanism for conversation is so popular. People very rarely, and even you and I, I mean, have the opportunity to see two intelligent informed people who might disagree about things, have that long conversation with virtually no possibility of it being hostile. If it’s not at a party so you can hear each other, you can listen to it at your own leisure, and you’re going to be learning something or you’re at the very least going to have it’s just fascinating conversational dynamics. Even if you and I were arguing over cake versus pie, and which is better, and obviously the answer is cake because pies are messy. But at the same time, it’s fun because they’re watching minds at work. It’s just like when you’re watching a gymnast, for example. Or a great dancer. It’s just exciting to see an aspect of the human mind, the human anatomy at its finest, or maybe we’re getting a B, I don’t know. But the point is to watch that. Inaction. Yeah. But when you see corporate anything, it’s always unnatural. Is there anything more ironic than the expression reality TV? By its own nature, they admit this is not real. A lot of it’s improv, it’s all staged, it’s all edited. Whereas what we’re doing, we’re not editing and we’re going to say, oh, we’re going to have L’Esprit Descalier, we’re going to cut off the mics. And I’m like, oh, gosh, I wish I would have said that and you’re going to say something else. But that, I think, is what earnestness in a positive sense, people are missing out. And that’s the opposite of corporate America. Corporate America is synthetic, phony earnestness. I had this quote, I say, if you look at Times Square during Gay Pride, only corporate America can make sodomy and perversion seem downright boring. I mean, if you looked at the corporate presentation of people who are gay, you think what that means is hugging each other after brunch and shaking hands. It’s this complete divorce from any kind of reality of any kind of culture. I would say that the attribution of this, the identification of this with corporate America, with the universities, with the legacy media, all of that, it’s like the Marxists criticizing capitalism for inequality of distribution. It’s like inequality of distribution is a way deeper problem than any critique of capitalism will ever formulate properly or solve. And I would say, like, we’re getting at something here that transcends the anarchist critique of structure. At least as it, like, or you could say, or you could say forces it deeper. Look, the ancient Egyptians had two gods, Osiris and Horus. They had enough to, they had a ton of them. Yes, they had two main gods that made up their conception of sovereignty. Sorry, yes. The pharaoh modeled himself, over modeled himself on the interaction of these two gods. There was Osiris, who was the state for all intents and purposes, structure per se. And his sin was willful blindness and, and, and, and, and stultification. And Horus was the attentive eye. And in other formulations, the ability to speak. And so there’s a dynamic there that was recognized a very long time ago that, that, that, that, that centers on this issue that you brought up about sincerity and truth. You know, you’re complaining, and rightly so, when you hear stale repackaged ideas that are being presented for reasons other than the actual reason. It’s something like that, isn’t it? It’s like, I can’t trust what you’re saying because you’re actually using that language to manipulate me to do something that you’re not stating. Correct. And that would be Mountain Dew and the naming. It’s like, isn’t this fun? It’s like, well, maybe it’s fun, but really you want to sell, you know, Mountain Dew. And if you came out and said that, we wouldn’t make fun of you. But if you’re going to pretend we’re going to go after you. And when it gets very pernicious, it’s you’re claiming you’re fighting racism, but what is to promote war and killing of many, many people. So that is where the critique is more than Mountain Dew is what it is. It’s selling it’s Mountain Dew is fun. I enjoy Mountain Dew. I don’t drink it much because I’m in my late eighties, but basically kids like it, the different colors, different flavors. It certainly serves a purpose. You know, you want to get buzz out of your mind on the caffeine more power to you. There’s nothing other than some cavities. There’s nothing really nefarious. There is something very nefarious when Amy Rohrbach is caught on a hot mic saying that they had everything on Prince Philip or Prince Albert. I always get them confused, who was friends with Jeffrey Epstein, that they had everything on the Clintons and they got a call from Buckingham Palace. And because there was a Meghan Markle interview, you know, on the table that they killed this entire story. This is her talking on a hot mic. Meanwhile, if that camera turned off and you said, is it true that you had this international pedophile ring and one of the people in Buckingham Palace was involved and that, you know, they their lawyers called and you killed the story, she would say, are you crazy? That’s a conspiracy theory. Harvey Weinstein is another example of this. There was a conspiracy. We all knew Bill Cosby was another one. He got outed by Hannibal Buress, who was a comedian who just said, look it up. All this stuff was bubbling under all these women. They weren’t all completely silent. So I think that’s the big difference between Mountain Dew and the corporate press. We’re not talking about people who are promoting cavities. We’re talking about people who are promoting war and depravity. So if I said, well, maybe when I was reading your book and thinking about it a lot and thinking about 4chan and all of the things we’ve talked about, I thought, well, have you been on 4chan since? Have you actually looked at it? No, I’m completely ignorant about how 4chan works. It’s just a message board. Right, right. Well, I guess I knew that much. But I would also say I’m not familiar enough with message boards to really, you know, to have a built-in sense of what that means. That’s not an area of social communication that I’ve engaged in. And I’m not saying that with pride. It’s a form of ignorance. You know, I mean, I’ve learned not to despise social media platforms. You’re a fool if you allow your willingness to despise them because you don’t know anything about them to stop you from learning how to use them. Or from taking them seriously. They’re serious, those things. So, oh, yes, they’re revolutionary, those tech. OK, so I read and I think, well, wait a second. You’re you seem to be not segregating the critique of corruption from the critique of structure. And this is also what I think is happening with the postmodernists. They look at hierarchies and they think, well, they’re all based on power. And here’s the evidence of corruption. It’s like, yeah, no kidding. But that doesn’t mean they’re only based on power. And it’s the same with corporations. Like, I know lots of people who work in corporate environments and some of them are really admirable. And the things they do in the corporate environments are also admirable. And I would also say that my experience has taught me that when corporations start to act the way you conceptualize them, there’s their their doom is sealed far more rapidly than people generally realize. They collapse. So so so you’re not objective. So it’s useful to disaggregate the critique of structure from the critique of deceit. You know, I think the deceit’s baked in. I don’t like using the word corruption because that implies these people can be saved and these organizations can be saved. I do not believe that they are. And even if they are, I’m not interested in saving them. Well, I don’t see I don’t see them as this is the they problem. You see, look, part of the reason I think I do you want to talk about Walter Durante? I mean, sorry, you want to talk about Walter Durante? These are these are the same exact actors that have had so much blood on their hands for hands for decades and have never had any accountability. Let me give you one example. We always think that that’s me. Not that I don’t I don’t. Why is that you? You don’t work for the let me give you one example. You can answer if you say this sounds like you. We’re all taught in school about William Randolph Hearst, the Spanish-American war. Remember the main yellow journalism, right? And how the media would gin up these problems, which had literally thousands of deaths, needless deaths as a consequence. Then there’s a record scratch. And all of a sudden, all these outlets have no agenda and are objective and are decent actors. My point is there was never a record scratch. This has always been a problem for a very long time. And especially this is something I would think would be very much up your alley. The amount that these organizations and the equivalents of contemporary actors have their role in putting over and maintaining the Soviet Union and specifically Stalinism, which they have never apologized for, which they’ve had never no accountability for. And now they’re presuming to sit here and lecture the layman about being a decent person and being responsible. That to me is a complete abomination. I agree with all of that, except the attribution of blame. So let me ask you, I’m going to go sideways just for a second, but it’s in service of this particular discussion. You said a little while ago that you were, you know, that one of the rules of engagement for us, as far as you’re concerned right now, is that you are going to treat me with dignity, respect, and there was something else. Courtesy. Courtesy. Okay. Okay. And then I said, well, you know, those are the cooperative rules. And you said to me, no, you earned it. And so I want to ask you like, and then we’ll go back to this other discussion, if that’s okay. What makes you think I’ve earned it? Because I know a lot of people whose lives you have personally made better because you’re my friend’s dad. So that automatically, there’s no situation where I’m going to be mean to my friend or disrespectful to my friend’s dad. Certainly not in public. I think you are in many ways self-made. The fact that you are a successful author, you’re a successful writer, you’re a successful author, and you’re encouraging a lot of people to, you know, get their crap together and you’re not telling them. One of the things I tell and this is something you and I have in common is you’re not, you know, the goal isn’t to be a perfect person, but you could certainly be a better person tomorrow than you are yesterday. And if you have that in your mind and you could say that objectively with a straight face, that goes a long way towards fighting feelings of anxiety or depression or hopelessness, because when that voice in your brain, which we all have, is telling you, you’re never going to find another job. You’re never going to find another girlfriend. Look at you. You’re sitting around playing video games. You go, wait a minute. I went to the gym today and I’ve got the numbers here that shows I lifted more than last week, I’m objectively improved in one capacity. That is enormous. People don’t appreciate- I talked to, you’re absolutely right about that. I was stopped by three separate people this week who said they thanked me. And so whenever that happens- No one likes a show off, Jordan. When that happens, I always ask people what their name is to begin with, because they’re usually- They want to be seen. Well, they don’t know if they should interact with me. They don’t know if they’re being rude. They don’t want to look stupid. You know, it’s complicated, but if I ask them their name and then engage, then they calm down right away and then they’ll talk to me. But what I want to find out always, if someone says, well, you were helpful, I want to find out, okay, well, exactly why. Right? What did I say? What did I do that helped you? Because then I can do it better, hypothetically. So three people told me the same thing this week, which is exactly the point that you just made, which is quite cool, was that they restructured their internal reward system. They stopped comparing themselves with other people. Well, you know, stopped, but started to stop. And they started to learn how to reward themselves for making incremental improvements. So that was really cool. And I do think that you picked up something there that’s absolutely crucial. So, but then I could also say to you, well, look, I’m also the face of the professoriate. Yeah, I know. Right, right. So, but what does that signify to you? Does it signify that I’m an outlier or that? No, it just means you’ll be the last one up against the wall. No, it’s in all seriousness, one of the points I have made recently is that as awful as corporate journalists are and as humorless and self-righteous and pompous, they are still better by all these metrics than university professors. And I’m not speaking about you personally, but you can see if you look at the thing that Twitter did so amazingly is that back in the end, I’m thinking of someone specifically who I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll mention him a second. Back in the day, you would think I’m a Harvard law professor that if I don’t even know who this person is, that’s going to tell me certain information. This is one of the highest quality minds in America. This person knows his industry inside and out. If he tells me something, I can take it to the bank. And that’s actually true because Harvard, the Harvard law faculty is making the law in America far more than Congress, because it’s their interpretation and those people that are trained. Then you look at Lauren’s tribe on Twitter and you look that he is tweeting exactly verbatim, the same kind of miserable anti-Trump things that your spinster aunt is tweeting. And you realize, wait a minute, this emperor has no clothes. This person might be very bright, which it is no question he’s brilliant. There’s no question he knows the law inside and out. But in terms that this person should be an object of venerance and this is like one of the great minds of all time, it’s a ridiculous absurdity when you see them give an opportunity to express themselves in public. Okay, so I would say the emperor has some clothes, you know, because I’ve met, I worked at Harvard for quite a long time and many of the people I met there were genuinely estimable. And I’ve worked in a lot of support. Okay. Okay. No question. Well, it’s the differentiation here that’s of such critical importance, you know, Pinker’s the blank slate is a book everyone should read. I say that without any asterisks. It’s an amazing accomplishment. And you don’t go beyond that and say, well, look at the structure that gave rise to that. And I guess it’s the. Pinker is not a that book is not a function of Harvard. That book is not a function of Harvard. That book is not a function of the world. That book is not a function of the world. And I think that’s the point. I think you’re right. I think you’re right. I think you’re right. I guess it’s not a that book is not a function of Harvard. That book is a function of him and his ideas and his work. And there’s no no, it’s no, it’s also a function of Harvard. But one of the things that I really noticed about Harvard, the psych department, in particular, when I was there, was that it was like this is odd. But one of the things I’ve noticed among many academics is contempt for books. Interestingly, is that right? Yes, it’s far, far more common than you would ever think. But that wasn’t true at Harvard. If you were a professor there in psychology and you wrote books, that was valued, genuinely valued. The people that I associated with there and that was the bulk of the department, like they were by and large as genuine an article as I had come across. And so the and the institution actually did now look, I’m not happy with what’s happened to the universities at all. I’m not. I think it’s it’s appalling. It’s appalling. But when I was there in the 90s. The institution was set up so that people like Pinker could exist and be rewarded. And even more importantly, the institution was set up at that point to actually benefit the undergraduates. So the hierarchy of concern was the undergraduates. Now, you could be cynical and say, well, Harvard treated its 18 year olds like potentially generous baby 40 year old millionaires. I don’t think it was just that. It wasn’t just it wasn’t just that it wasn’t. And after them was the senior professors, the full tenured. So it was an institution that had its ducks in order, as far as I was concerned. And it was really quite a privilege to work there as a consequence and a tremendous amount of academic and intellectual freedom within that structure. And that was built into the whole structure. So it was it was a genuinely respectable and remarkable institution. And it did a great job of finding students who were of incredibly high caliber, you know, like in the typical undergraduate Harvard class. A third of the class would be made of individuals who were as smart as anybody you’d ever meet, you know, and then so this whole conservative idea that people who they don’t like are also dumb is really one of the stupidest concepts in contemporary discourse. It’s a lot easier to train a smart dog than it is to train a dumb one. And many of the people who are putting over some of these extremely malevolent nefarious ideas, they’re very, very bright. There’s no question about it. But my and my respect for they weren’t just bright. They were they were also they were also ethically admirable in a deep sense. And you see that with Pinker, say, and you see that with Jonathan Haidt, who’s a centrist, a modern centrist. But, you know, he’s a tough character. He stands up for what he believes in. He makes coherent and cogent arguments and he’s no pushover. And I praise Haidt very heavily. I know you do. I know. Well, that’s partly why I’m, you know, taking this apart, because, I mean, the the there’s this element of the of the of the anarchy philosophy that that that is, I suppose, evident in 4chan as well. But in your writing, that it seems to me to have the danger of producing a premature cynicism and and I wouldn’t call it cynicism. OK, well, I mean, since I’m a big fan of Camus and Camus, Albert Camus, the French novelist and philosopher, he regarded cynicism as the enemy, I completely agree. I think it’s important to just because an enemy exists, just because malevolent actors exist, even if you don’t want to say it’s the Harvard graduate in class, which I’m not saying that in no way means that human beings are inherently evil or inherently corrupt. It just means that there’s a population that you have to, you know, just like an infection, work your way around. Whereas so I think cynicism is a very, very, very just it’s the cost of cynicism on an individual level cannot be overstated. It really it’s the worst. Yes. And and and one of the things I fought for in this book and I fight for it when I do podcasts and social media is there are so many people who think it’s hopeless and then they give up and then they’re just kind of it becomes their mindset, whereas the point is, if there’s any chance that you’re going to come out ahead, you better stand on your feet and go out swinging. And even if you lose, you’re going to go down, at least knowing I did everything in my power and you’re going to have happiness, pride and self-esteem as a consequence. So I reject all forms of cynicism. And if that is what I am implying, then I’m doing something wrong. Well, I’m look, I’m not saying that my reading of what you wrote or or what you’re doing is canonical, I mean, you’re not the only anarchist in the world after all. And so I’m not going to dump all of this on you. But you know, the reason that I have been concentrating on people’s individual development, I think, well, apart from the fact that I’m a psychologist and and I think there’s also less danger in that in some sense, because the revolution just occurs within, you know, and sure. Yes, people who don’t want your goddamn revolution aren’t aren’t forced into it. I guess. By concentrating, see, you said that you implied that I’m not the corporation and that you’re not the corporation, but you see, I actually don’t believe that’s true. I believe that I am, in fact, the corporation and that I’m even the evil corporation. And I’m so tangled up in that world, like we all are, that we bear responsibility for that fact. And so and so I think, well, what do you do about that? And it seems to me that you try to get your act together on a personal level to to to identify the enemy within, which is the right place to start and then work outward from that. But your critique is basically a social critique, as far as I can tell, that you’re starting with the institutions themselves, even though it’s not the institutions exactly, it’s the corruption of the institutions. Corruption, it makes it seem like this is something that can be salvaged, whereas in my view, these institutions are inherently malevolent. I know that’s your view, but they’re no more inherently malevolent than individuals are. There are plenty of individuals who are inherently malevolent. And that’s they’re they go into politics. Well, not everyone who goes into politics is inherently malevolent. You know, I’ve met with many, many politicians. And I’ll give you an example because that just means they’re good at passing. No, no, it doesn’t just mean that I had a dinner in Washington with a group of Democrats and Republicans. It was part of an attempt to, you know, they never talk to each other. They don’t have time. Like, I would not want the job of an American. No, they don’t. Their time is so stop, stop. No, no, no, they’re not. They’re not. They’re not running an ambulance. They’re not an ER doctor. It’s just not a priority for them. They have time. Give me a break. They just have to just take stuff. Don’t call back your lobbyist and call back. Call. They have to. Are you kidding me? You’re telling people if there’s one thing people in Washington have, it’s time. Things go at a glacial pace. Look, look, you you you’re making an an attribution of of corruption to complex structures. And so I’ll accept that. But I don’t use the word corruption. But go ahead. Well, pick a word that pick a word that’s more suitable, because I’d be happy to use it if it’s more suitable. Malevolent, gravity, malevolent, malevolent. Fine, fine. Power and malevolence. OK, well, when you’re a congressman and you’re tossed into the Congress, yeah, the structure produces such an intense surround for you that it’s extremely difficult not to just go along with it, especially when you’re new and you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. So you end up spending a tremendous amount of your time, for example, a disproportionate amount of your time, even though you hate it in an office that isn’t yours in some warehouse, phoning people for money. And that’s like half your time. And you think, well, you don’t have to do that. It’s like, well, you have to because all the other. You have to write. OK, so in any case, they don’t end up talking across the aisle for for for. And their time is very tightly scheduled. And. We brought them together to have them talk, and I wanted to do a bunch of that, but my health collapsed and couldn’t do any more of it. But in any case, each of them went around the room and said why they went into politics. These were these were mostly younger congresspeople. And if you would have been there, there’s two things that would have impressed you and surprised you. I think one would be how common the stories for motivation were across the participants, regardless of their party affiliation. And the second would be how believably and genuinely sincere they were in that narrative, you wouldn’t have walked away with the with the assumption that those people were any more corrupt than people you admire and respect. That’s what makes them good at being corrupt because they can pass. Well, but I would say the same about all of us. I’m not voting to have people sent overseas to slaughter innocent human beings. Well, I agree with you. I don’t believe in voting. Well, I agree with you. Don’t vote. I agree with you completely that we should be skeptical of people and their motivations. I do not agree that if someone is nice to their family, I have no doubt that all these politicians adore their family, that they have genuine concerns, that I’m sure they said they want to make the world a better place. If you are comfortable using force to send armed men to harm innocent people, I don’t care if you’re nice or have good motivations. You are a bad human being. So I just I just finished a podcast with Jocko Willink. OK, it released today and he did all that. Like, really? And it isn’t obvious to me that he’s a bad person. In fact, Jocko was a Jocko was in politics. How was he? No, he was a soldier and he was a commander. Well, I mean, he made decisions that, you know, he he was a politician in some sense because he had to make strategic decisions about how policies were going to play out on the actual battlefield. So because he was a commander, you know, there’s a political element to his job because it’s nested inside the democracy and he is making decisions. And so, you know, and I, I find it and it is perplexing to some degree. It’s very difficult to walk away from a conversation with Jocko and not think anything other than that’s a really admirable person. And it does tangle us up in this problem that you just described, which is, well, well, what about force? And what about the army and what about the police for that matter? But it isn’t them. You know, it’s us again. It’s the same. I’m not a cop. I’m not a cop. It is them. I’m not a cop. I would never put my hands on a peaceful person and try to force them to come with me in my car. I would never club an old man in the head simply because he’s in a park. I would never force people to be defenseless in their own home by enforcing unlawful gun right laws. But would you stand up for someone who is being beat in public? It depends on the context. Fair enough. Look, are there circumstances under which you could imagine doing that? Oh, I was just going to say, yeah, like, listen, if it’s one guy versus 50 cops, me jumping in is not going to help him. Right. But if there’s absolutely circumstances, I would I would do that. Not even a question. I’ve done it to the circumstances that you would use force. I don’t I don’t know. Well, I don’t because I’m a small guy. You know, I mean, I’m not trying to be glib, but in all seriousness, like, you know, I’m short and I’m small. So if it could be if there’s here’s something that has happened, this is not particular courageous on my part. If you have two guys who are getting into it, getting each other’s face and you know, they’re the posturing thing where they’re about to fight. I have been in between and be like, come on, step away. So in that case, yes. But in terms of having to use a gun or club someone to death, thankfully, I’ve never been in a position where I’ve had to make that decision. And I do not begrudge people having to make that decision either. It’s not an easy choice. There’s no there’s no good answers in that situation. But if you take tax money and as a result of your job, you’re going to be harming innocent people in traumatic ways. I do not agree. You should sleep easy at night. So. You know, people have criticized me, I suppose, for concentrating on individual development, moral development, say, well, there’s all these global social problems that are best addressed at a sociological level and, you know, who the hell cares if you clean up your room when there’s systemic racism and and I think, well, if you’re going to address systemic racism, then you better have a clear head while you do it. And if you can’t get the simplest parts of your life, let’s say, in order. Well, maybe that’s what you should be concentrating on. It’s not like I don’t think that people should go off and solve even more complex problems. I mean. There’s an element, there seems to be an element of externalization in the criticism of power structures that I find psychologically counterproductive, you know, because when look, when I studied the horrors of the 20th century, the Holocaust and the Stalinist horrors, and I always imagined myself as the perpetrator instead of the victim, you know, because the question for me was how it was that we could do this, that we could do this to each other, that we are doing it to each other. And I mean, we and I do also think the reason I’ve got away with my finger shaking, moralizing, let’s say to the degree that I have got away with it is because I do include myself in the target of moral reprobates who could use some improvement and I see the like the emphasis. I don’t see that there’s much of a distinction between the emphasis that you place on a broad scale socialized broad scale social critique, assuming corrupt power is the what fundamental organizing principle that large organizations adopt to organize and the same thing that leads to identity politics on the left. I don’t think every organization is inherently built on corruption. I don’t think Tropicana is built on corruption. OK, so OK, so how all right. So how do you make the distinction? Tropicana doesn’t use force and doesn’t try. Tropicana says, look, my orange juice is the best freshly squeezed. They get it to your store at a cheap price. I’m assuming it’s cheap. I haven’t bought in a long time. You are you’re free to choose it or not as you want. Your Tropicana doesn’t try to make you out to be a bad person if you prefer apple juice or soda or water. Right. These other organizations are playing mind games with people. OK, so it’s for deceit. It’s at least a few of the stories that you’re objecting to. And let me speak to something you said earlier. It’s different for you. I was born in Lvov in Western Ukraine. I was you know, we came here when I was one and a half, but I was raised in a household when we spoke Russian. I’m Jewish. That was one of the reasons I fought so hard when I wrote my North Korean book and why I’ve been talking about North Korea as an issue, because my family was the victim, you know, being Jewish under Stalin, you know, during that period. These are really two big bullets that we dodged. And one of the reasons I went there to write about and why I talk about it so constantly is because they were for the grace of God, I could be a North Korean concentration camp right now. So I think there is I don’t know if there’s a duty, but certainly if I’m in a position to advocate for people who are not in a position to really speak for themselves and these are the people who no one disagrees. Has it the worst? No one disagrees that whether you’re conservative, Trudeau, Trump, Biden, whatever, that we need more liberalism. North Korea, we need more human rights. We need these people treated with a certain modicum of decency. It’s just unconscionable. I’m like, I’m going to do something about it in my very, very little way. So I think it’s different given your and my background, how you’re approaching these horrors of the past, because that was my grandma and my grandparents. Well, I is there a difference? I don’t I guess it isn’t clear to me exactly what the difference is. I mean, you’re you’re I wouldn’t have been a position to seat in power and and violence, though I was I would not have been in a position to have been that Nazi quite literally, I wouldn’t have been a position to be that GPU agent. And one of the reasons I am an anarchist is I do not feel comfortable forcing another person to live as I see fit. I just think, you know, who am I? Yes, well, I think, look, I think that’s an admirable moral principle. It isn’t obvious to me that the logical conclusion of that is anarchy is anarchism, I suppose. That would be my objection. I mean, and I also I do believe that degenerate power structures exist and they use deceit and that that’s reprehensible and should be fought in every possible way. I mean, my sense has been that there isn’t anything more powerful to fight that than than spoken truth. I agree. And humor. Well, because they’re using. Yeah, it’s very rare. Go ahead. Talk about if they’re using manipulative tactics in order to further goal as opposed to rational discourse as you and I having we’re putting our cards on the table. If you’re using things like deceptive editing and characterizing things out of context, I am you’re not owed a rational, fair response, you’re not acting as a decent, fair actor. So humor is very useful in this mechanism because it explodes not only the particular thing you’re saying, but your role as someone who’s worthy of courtesy, respect and decorum. When I interviewed when I was interviewed by Kathy Newman, there was a point where I asked her, I guess, why she felt she had the moral right to offend me during she was questioning me. And it stopped her. The question stopped her. And that was when the person emerged from the corporate shell, let’s say, or the ambitious, the corporate shell slash ambitious persona, because that’s what I was talking to, what wasn’t a person. And she emerged and she was set back, you know. And I had a second or two to think then about how I would respond to the fact that her mask dropped momentarily. And I said, gotcha. And it was a calculated risk. It was supposed to be funny. And I do believe that people responded to it as if it was funny. And I thought, well, is this a time? Is this a place where I can drop a joke? Is this a place where I can say something? And I wasn’t thinking about it strategically, precisely. I was thinking about it more in terms of its hopefully in terms of its ethical appropriateness. You know, and I do believe that humor is an immense. What would you say? An immensely important element of the search for truth, for just as play is. And and and humor is there’s something about it that’s an act of self transcendence, too, if you can laugh at yourself, right? Because you’re simultaneously the thing that needs to be laughed at, which is already behind you if you’re laughing at it. You know, you’re you’re moving ahead to the better you in the mere fact of allowing yourself to satirize yourself. So what you’re saying is you’re going to be a standup comedian. Well, I think I have more affinity with standup comedians in some sense than with any other sort of person. That’s true. Yeah, because you are getting on a stage. You’re putting on performance. There’s going to be moments of unexpected twists and turns in what you’re saying and as a function of that, it’s going to cause hopefully things to put together in their brains. So, yeah, the psychology is actually quite similar. Funny. And when I’m not very healthy, it’s hard to be funny. But it’s a it’s a it’s a loss. I the best lectures that I ever gave have humor in them. And I mean, hooray for that. And, you know, that’s partly why I toured with Dave Rubin, too, to add some levity to what I mean, I learned early on that even if you’re discussing things of incredible seriousness, you know, like genocidal seriousness, that that if you’re if if. Let me give you an example, because that’s the whole premise of my book, Dear Reader, the North Korea book, it’s farcical because it’s Kim Jong Il’s autobiography. I went there, I read all their literature and I took the things that these people are taught and they’re since it’s in his voice, they’re presented at face value. And let me give you one example of this. Kim Jong Il is having and how and how the truth comes in between the lines of, you know, an anecdote. So Kim Jong Il is at this meeting, the dear leader of North Korea and someone’s giving a talk and he’s working on papers. And every so often his assistant is asking him for input. And the speaker stops and Kim Jong Il goes, why are you stopping? He goes, well, you know, dear leader, you’re working on those papers. You’ve got your assistant. He goes, no, no, no, no, I could do all these three things at once. And they said from that point on, people regarded Kim Jong Il as looking at time as not a plane, but a cube, and that he had the ability to shrink time. And my friend said to me, do they mean multitasking? And they did. And according to North Korean propaganda, Kim Jong Il is the only person in North Korea who knows how to multitask. And when you have these anecdotes put forth in this manner, you realize how removed from reality. It’s not that he’s some magical figure. It’s just like something that’s just absolutely banal is being presented as some kind of major historical accomplishment. So humor, you know, is another example. There was an amusement park. And one of the things how North Korea claims that they’re different from other totalitarian states is they have something called field guidance. Whenever you read the newspaper, they have they have. Field guidance. Field guidance. Yes. So whenever you read their newspapers, it’s whoever the current leader is. He’s at the bottle factory. He’s at the munitions plant. He’s at the farm. He’s giving them guidance on how to make these things better. And as a consequence of this, the implication is everyone North Korea is incompetent other than the leader. So you better have him in place. But there was one story that I include in the book where there’s an amusement park and it starts lightly raining and Kim Jong Il insists on riding all the rides twice to make sure they’re safe for the children, the elderly and everyone on the platform, the dignitaries are all crying at his courage. And it’s like the guys take a roller coaster ride. Like you’re regarding him as the kind of like the planting the flag in Iwo Jima. But he’s on this this roller coaster. So this kind of contrast between something that is, you know, fun and for kids and silly, but being presented as this great courageous moment in disguise, a hero. That absurd distance is what drives a lot of the narrative. Did you see the strange death of Stalin? Oh, that book is as close to Dear Reader, the Last Days of Stalin, you mean? The movie? Yeah, yeah. Did I get the title wrong? You said strange death. I think it’s Last Days. I thought it’s Last Days of Stalin. It’s by Anthony Annucci, who made Veep as well. No, it’s the death of Stalin. We’re both wrong. We’re both wrong. And that probably characterizes our whole conversation. I was so glad that book came out after Dear Reader because it’s exactly the same tone as I used to the point where I would be accused of stealing that movie. And that’s just just one moment, just how they use humor to present Stalin’s air of terror. Stalin has a stroke. He’s dying. He’s in his own urine in his room. And the two guards are out there and they hear this noise inside the bedroom. And one of them goes, should we go in there and look? And the other guy goes, should we shut the fuck up? So but that’s the thing is like, be quiet, head down. Stalin at this point obviously would genuinely want your assistance and we want your help. But because it’s a little too late for that. But maybe it wasn’t. They didn’t know that. Right. Right. But because these rules are in place. Yeah. These rules are in place. The focus is always on fear and not speaking out of turn, even if ostensibly could have saved the greatest man in the world. You know, so OK, so when I read your book and when I looked at the memes that these young guys were generating years ago, you know, and at me too, and and then considered the role of satire and all of that, now I’m just remembering what I told my kids when I was raising them, because we we I encouraged my kids to be funny. That was very highly valued in our household to be witty and witty. And funny is really hard because you have to push right to the edge. Yep, yep. And not go over. And the closer you get to the edge and not without going over, the funnier you are, the more daring you are, because in part you you show your sophisticated mastery. You’re so such a sophisticated master of the social dynamic that you can go right to the edge of breaking a rule and not break it or maybe you can break it just enough to show that it should be broken in exactly that manner. Right. And then that’s really witty. That’s really funny. And so there’s no doubt that that ability to be funny, to be satirical, to be witty is a potent manifestation of the truth. But then, you know, with my kids, I was also watching them constantly. You know, you can get sibling rivalries that go completely out of control in a household. And so I’d watch them teasing each other and playing with each other and and would intervene and say, look, you know, that’s not funny anymore. That’s not a game. That’s where it starts to deteriorate and deteriorate, deteriorates into a power game. It’s like stay on the right side of funny. You’re pretending that you’re being funny, but really you’re being mean. OK, we also see this with racist humor. A lot of times a joke, we have a racial element and it’s humorous. But a lot of times someone who’s being a racist is just putting up feelers by saying, OK, you’ve accepted this joke. Can I drop the mask? We could just engage in pure hate. So, yeah, humor is not right, because you’re using something. That really is a tool for the good, let’s say humor, and you’re perverting it so that you’re masking something awful. So that’s analogous in some sense to this corporate malfeasance that you were discussing. And so I guess in the sense I get when looking at the irreverence of these young guys, essentially on 4chan, I think just bloody well make sure you stay on the right side of funny. And there’s always doubt in that. And maybe there has to be. But but but it’s still the right moral imperative. It’s like, go ahead with your humor, man. But like, watch your tongue, like, watch your tongue. It’s also the idea of claptor, where you had all these comedians going after Trump or whoever. And the audience, instead of laughing, which is a visceral reaction, would applaud. And it’s like they’re not they don’t think you’re funny. They’re agreeing with you. It’s kind of like people whose favorite kind of music is like religious music. It’s like you don’t necessarily which a lot of it is very good. A lot of Christian rock is very good. Don’t get me wrong. They’re very talented people. But do you like this song because you like the beat? Do you like how it makes you feel? Or do you like this song because you happen to agree with the person? These are entirely different. Yes. Well, there has to be an element of surprise and humor. Right. Yes. And that and that also accounts for that spontaneous laughter, which is an indication that the arrow hit its mark. Right. That the target is being specified properly and precisely. And it really is a form of art to do that. And so, well, then I think. I always had mixed feelings about the satirists on 4chan for exactly that reason. It’s like, well, are you really watching what you’re saying carefully enough? Like, hooray for your humor, hooray for your courage, all of that. But this is like the Steven Pinkers in any population, you’re going to have a small percentage who rise above, who are quality and that whatever it is at its best. And the vast majority of people bring nothing to the table. And then there’s plenty of people who actually use that mechanism to make things much worse. Right. Well, and that’s interesting as well, because it also like I always think, well, wouldn’t it be great if there were only good restaurants? And then I think, well, wait a second, how many bad restaurants do there have to be in order for there to be one restaurant? And the answer isn’t zero. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely some because people have to practice and they have to make mistakes and they have to learn and well, right. And so you look at 4chan too and you can think, well, how much wretched, humorless, racist noise do you have to tolerate in order to generate something of true value? And the answer to that is, I think, too. One is we don’t know. That’s the first answer. And so beware of clamping down on it too precipitously. But the second is. Maybe that’s also something that each of the people who are involved in that kind of activity should should be attending to within the confines of their own soul, so to speak. I mean, they’re anonymous and it’s evanescent, but that doesn’t mean that you bear no moral responsibility for what you’re saying. Yes, and I think cruelty for the sake of cruelty is really a sign of weakness. It’s the kid pulling the wings off of a bug or like putting tin cans on a cat’s tail. It’s a way for people to just feel some modicum of power over another human being. But that’s a very parasitic way of looking at things and using this other person as a means to an end. And this person might not be a great person, but really, what are you accomplishing? You’re both miserable now. That there needs to be, in my view, a joyousness to what you’re trying to do. And I certainly hope that permeates my work and my output. That’s a good place to stop. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed this. So far, so good. Such an honor. Thank you. Can I ask you what you have to bounce right now? Do you have time for one question? I have time for a question. In your absence, I’ve been kind of taking a lot of young men under my wing and kind of mentoring them. I saved one kid’s life when he reached out to me. He was suicidal and now he’s just kind of has bad days, which that’s all you need. That’s a lot better. Yeah. Like, yeah, that bad days, if you’re not a threat to your life, whatever. What advice would you have to me or to your past self when this started happening for you, because I’m very scared of saying the wrong thing and making things worse? You there’s no way you can pay too much attention. OK, like ignorant attention. Watch the person and you do that when you’re in conversation, you know, paying attention. More attention and you can’t offer advice in some sense. You have to listen. OK, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let them feel hurt. Pay attention. Like if you pay attention, your your good habits will take over and you’ll walk down the right course. OK, humility and attention. That’s good. Humility and attention. And I’m sure you’ve seen it’s amazing how many young people just want someone to listen to them. And it’s just have some that they respect. And once that happens, they feel so validated. Well, they really want to say something that they’re doing that’s good to someone. Yeah. And have it be recognized as good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s super. Thank you so much. It was such an honor, Jordan. OK, take care. Thanks, Michael.