邁克爾·馬利斯：聖誕特別篇

Lex Fridman Podcast #347 – Michael Malice: Christmas Special Machine transcription by Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (MLX, local, Apache-2.0). May contain recognition errors. The following is a conversation with Michael Malis. This is a special holiday episode, and it is made extra special because it's announcing the release of Michael's new book called The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil. Michael and I disagree on a lot of ideas in politics and philosophy, and we have a lot of fun disagreeing. But there is no question that he has a deep love for humanity and puts his heart and soul into his work, especially into this heart-wrenching, deeply personal book. So I ask that you support him by buying it at whitepillbook dot com that should hopefully forward to the Amazon page. As always, we each dressed up in a ridiculous outfit without coordinating for the chaos that makes life so damn interesting. This episode is full of humor, darkness, and love, which is the best way to celebrate the holidays. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got House of Macadamias for delicious macadamia based snacks, Inside Tracker for biological monitoring, NetSuite for business management, and Simply Safe for home security. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make them interesting, but if you must skip, please tell check out the sponsors in the description. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by a new sponsor, a delicious sponsor, House of Macadamias, a company that ships delicious, high quality and healthy macadamia nuts directly to your door. I've gotten a shipment what is it two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, and it brought happiness to my heart. I won't mention which episode, perhaps you might know, but it was a very stressful episode. I was getting attacked a lot online and I was just very stressed and I was feeling lonely. I was feeling you know out of it sometimes. Sometimes your heart, sometimes your mind could take you to some low places. So I was sitting there on the couch and I got this shipment. The doorbell rang and I came outside and it was a mysterious box. And I bought it in like it was the holidays, but it wasn't the holidays yet. And I opened it up and there was like a variety of delicious snacks. They're extremely healthy and extremely delicious, and I partook in the snackage. And it was glorious. I immediately felt better. It's just for many reasons. Obviously, it's delicious, but also brought joy to my heart that there is people out there that really care about crafting. Like a culinary art, essentially crafting out a snack from really good ingredients that you could just tell a lot of love went into it. Nutritionally, there is a lot of nice things that I could say. It's thirty percent less carbs than almonds. Let us not debate how I pronounce almonds or almonds. I think I am horrible with this. I forget which is the right way. It's the only nut rich in omega sevens. This is basically the healthiest nut. I feel like there is a good joke in there. Anyway, go to house of macadamias dot com slash lex to get twenty percent your first order. You will not regret it, my friends. This show is also brought to you by Inside Tracker, a service I use to track biological data. What I want to know is the data that was coming from my heart and mind during the partaking of the macadamia snackage. The great, the glorious, happiness. I wonder how the body communicates happiness. Short term, like moment by moment, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, weeks, years—sort of the progression of human life, the ups and downs. There must be signals in there, and I think that's a really promising direction to take health advice to take medical advice. To collect the full raw set of signals your body provides to help you determine the different turns to take in life, whether that's lifestyle or diet changes, all of that kind of stuff. I think that's obviously the future. That's why I am excited about Inside Tracker. They're taking those early big leaps into that future. You can get special savings for a limited time when you go to insidetracker dot com slash lex. This show is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all in one cloud business management system. They manage everything: your financials, human resources, inventory, e commerce if you are that kind of business and many business related details. They automate the the messy, the difficult, the challenging processes that are required to run a business. For me, the idea of running a business is really exciting—not for all the things I just mentioned, but for the idea generation, for the design, for the engineering. For the mass production, achieving scale for all the challenges of bringing down the cost while bringing up the quality—all of those trade-offs—and all the different people involved getting to work with and getting to be inspired by them, rethinking how things have done in the past, doing things in a totally new way, taking huge risk—all that is super exciting. And ultimately, you do that to help some aspect of the world. In my case, the dream is to add a little bit of love to the world with things that create. And I mean that's super exciting to me. Now there is a bunch of messy things that are required to make all of that happen, and financials and human resources and inventory—all that is extremely important. So you should use the best tools for the job of running a business. Go to netsuite dot com slash lex to access their one of a kind financing program. This show is also brought to you by Simply Safe, a home security company designed to be simple and effective. Thirty minutes setup and you can customize the system for your needs. I think it took me even less than that. It's incredible. It's the first layer of physical protection that I have. Of course, I have other layers. I take my safety and security extremely seriously, but for most of us, the basic low hanging fruit solution should be a good, easy to set up, easy to use security system. Simply Safe is the best of the best for that. Like I said, I have it set up on my place and I love it. Go to simplysafe dot com slash lex to get a free indoor security camera plus twenty percent off your order with interactive monitoring. Part of me wants to have a nearly infinite number of cameras in my house so I can do full three D reconstruction and at some point transfer myself into a virtual world. And not know it like somebody else sets it up so I'll be living in a virtual world with the exact same experience as I have in the physical world and I wouldn't know it and it'd be some fascinating experiment and in that place too there would need to be security and it would be a perfect reconstruction of the Simply Safe system but in a virtual world that would be incredible. Anyway, it's simplysafe dot com slash lex. This is the lex Friedman podcast that supported. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here is Michael Malis. Since this is a Christmas special, a holiday special, have you been a good or a bad boy, Michael this year? Well, that's interesting. One of the people in the book Granville Hicks, his autobiography starts with, "I was a good boy, and he wasn't a very good boy." On a scale one to ten, I am trying to think of what bad things I've done. Oh, okay, there is that. Okay, wait, that's not that was no that was not that that's all right. I would say nine. Nine, yeah, I try to do the right thing. What are you? You are is it going to be one or zero? Yeah, no, I am extremely self critical. I push the zero. Okay, I reach for the zero. Well, mission accomplished. So this this episode is announcing the release of The White Pill, a book you wrote, which is I've gotten the honor, the privilege, the pleasure of being one of the first people to read it. You are the first. So I am really I don't know if nervous is the word, but you are the first person who has read it that I am speaking to about it. My first, my last, my everything. Yes, you say that to all the girls, but all the girl, all the fembots, all the fembots. But yeah, it was a truly incredible book. It's basically a story of evil in the twentieth century, and throughout it, you reveal a thread that gives us hope. And that's the idea of the white pill. So there is the the blue pill and the red pill. There is the black pill, which is a kind of deeply cynical, maybe apathetic, just giving up on the world, given that you see behind the curtain and given that you don't like what you see, given that there is so much suffering in the world, you give up. That's the black pill and the white pill. I suppose is even though you acknowledge that there is evil in the world, you don't give up. Yes, so if you are listening to this and you are a fan of this podcast, you go to whitepillbook dot com it'll go to it. Whitepillbook dot com and if you don't know how to spell, we'll probably have a link that you can click on. So for people who also don't know, Michael Malis is not just a troll, not just a hilarious comedic genius who hosts his own podcast, but he is an incredible brilliant author, dear reader, the unauthorized autobiography Kim Jong Il. So that's a story of North Korea, the new right, a journey to the fringe of American politics. That's the story of the extremes of the United States political movements and then the anarchist handbook that's talking about the ideologies, the different flavors of ideologies of anarchism. But on top of that, you are now going in, going into the darkest aspects of the twentieth century with the Soviet Union and the communism with the white pill. So let me ask you, let's start at the beginning. At the end of the nineteenth century, as you write, the terms socialist, communist, and anarchist were used somewhat loosely and interchangeably because the prophesy Marxist society was one in which the state had famously withered away. There was a great disagreement about what a socialist system would look like in practice, but two things were clear. First, that socialism was both inevitable and scientific—the way of the future—and second, that the capitalist ruling class were not going down without a fight. So what are the key points of disagreement between the socialist, the anarchist, the communist along that at that time at the begin at the end of the nineteenth century at the beginning of the twentieth century. The possibility of the century lay before us that eventually led to the first and the second world war. The idea when the industrial revolution came and Marx was very much a product of industrial revolutionary thinking was okay now that we have technology, now that we have science, we can scientifically manage society. We saw this very much with Woodrow Wilson and this kind of idea of progressivism that you know we could use technology and kind of not capitalism in their view. Unfettered capitalism was wasteful. You are making too much stuff, you have surpluses, you have shortages. If we produce just exactly what we need and you have these people engineers, they're engineering society, then you know everyone will be happy and you won't have to have any suffering or waste. So socialism at that time was used as a broad umbrella. It's not using the term that it means today of necessarily state socialism. It just meant the idea of having society scientifically run. So you had a huge argument. Their different wings, you even had it from the beginning with Marx versus Bakunin because Marx was for obviously state socialism, the absolute state running everything. Although even with Marx and Engels, it was a means to an end. After man is remade in his very nature, then the state withers away and everyone's equal and and you have this kind of heaven on earth situation. Bakunin you know was the opposite. He regarded the state as inherently immoral and wanted to have kind of like workers collectives and things like that and ultra localized control. So the end was always stateless. It's just that some people viewed the state as a convenient, effective intermediate state. Well, I think at least Marx and Bakunin there are plenty of others who just regarded it you know have the work have state owner have the workers you know control the production via the state. By the way, how does my hat look? It looks great, festive. Is this side better than the other side? I think you want it on this side so people can see you. Oh no, no, I want it. You know, like when you have like hair, peekaboo hair. It's called Veronica Lake. I think was her name. And then I just glance flirtatiously toward the camera sometimes. I got a state. Don't go. Sure. No glove, no love. The bad, the bad aspect of white gloves is the blood stains them. So you have to get new ones every time. And now I glance flirtatiously after that. I am sorry. Okay, Bakunin and Marx. Go ahead. So there were there were there were other socialists who did not regard this kind of end times where the state with wither away at all, and there were you know various strains in between where you know you'd have some capitalism and some socialism. You know the concept of a safety net came out of socialist thinking. The Labour Party came out the Fabian Socialists in Great Britain. Their logo was a wolf in sheep's clothing, and then when that was too on the nose, they changed it to a tortoise meaning we're going to get to socialism slowly in the sense of either gradualism or boiling a frog. And also the big part of this thinking at the time this is again the late nineteenth century is the idea that there is going to be a worldwide workers' revolution. It wasn't going to be that you know in one country you know it was going to happen and then all the other country be capitalist. The idea was all right, like the workers in Germany have more in common with the workers in America than the workers in Germany have with the capitalists in Germany. So the idea is all right, like the working class all over the world at one point they're going to be like we're being exploited, it's getting worse and worse for us, we can't feed our families, we're getting injured and so on and so forth, and there is no compensation for this. We're just going to overthrow our chains and we're going to run everything ourselves. We're the ones running it already anyway, and you know this was a doing all the work and we're doing all the work. So why why shouldn't we be getting all the benefit? What's the role of violence in all of this? So this was a big source of contention. So the Fabians, for example, in Britain who were all socialists, they were very heavily of the idea that we can do this through the ballot box. We can advocate and agitate and get the people to be voting for their own self interest and furthering the state at the expense of the capitalist class. Then there were the people who were the hardcore anarchists who were like, if voting changed anything, they wouldn't let us do it. And the only way to have a revolution is to have a revolution to kill, to overthrow, to seize these factories. And this was a big argument, and it also fed into the idea of where does free speech end? Is it legal to be giving speeches advocating for violence and revolution? Is it legal, Johann Most, you know who I discuss in the book and in the anarchist handbook? He published a book in the eighteen hundreds about how to build dynamite and how to build bombs, and this is a big free speech concern at the time because now anyone in their own house can make a bomb and kill lots of people. And this is something that was happening with enormous frequency at the time. And people tend to think you know because we have these kind of prejudices or we only remember what's happening now. But this was a I mean World War Two, excuse me World War One got started with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. There were lots of people McKinley is another one who I discuss in the book his assassination. There was lots of violence happening very regularly, and with the creation of dynamite, it kind of exponentially became more dangerous and threatening. Even now on Wall Street, there was a bomb that went off I think in the nineteen twenties, and the shards of shrapnel are still in the J P Morgan building I believe. Do ever think if you were alive during that time what you would be doing? You think of yourself as an anarchist, right? Would you be where would you be? Would you be a socialist, communist? Which parties would you attend figuratively and literally? Well, the thing that was so interesting back then is there was a woman named Mabel Dodge Luhan and she ended her days in town New Mexico. She found an artist colony and she had an apartment on ninth street and fifth avenue in Manhattan, a shadow salon, and everyone got together and talked and you'd have Emma Goldman who's an anarchist, Margaret Sanger who invented Planned Parenthood and advocated for birth control, and you'd have the people from the Wobbly's, the hardcore labor unions, and everyone kind of Edsel Menken didn't attend but he was friends with them all. So there was this very weird with the birth of modernism in art and and in kind of modernist thinking. There was this idea of like all right, like this was the first time where you could be intellectual as a class where there really was this space for people who are thinkers and they just sat around being like all right, like what are we going to do with ourselves? You know and you had it in modern art, you had it in literature, you had it in politics. So it was a very exciting time where people were like all right, like everything is now on the table. What are we going to do with this? And they very much were aware that this was a break with you know the pre-industrial revolution kind of farmer labor era. Do you see? Do you think for you violence would be compelling? No, first of all, I am too small. But second, I just dynamite doesn't care about your size. Yeah, but I mean retribution does, and I think I don't know, but to me violence is the kind of thing where you think you are running it, but it's running you. Once you you know cross that line, you know violence sings its own song. So whenever I hear even contemporary times where people are advocating for you know violent actions, it's like when you start a fire, you are not like I am just going to burn down this house. You know it's it's it's and there is many cases over and over of people who are building bombs or trying to assassinate someone or things like that and it ended up literally, literally, literally blowing up in their own face. So and violence doesn't really work necessarily because you know if you have an assassination, you are not assassinating the presidency. You know if you take out you know a president, there is another president instantly there. So what have you accomplished? Someone's husband, dad is gone. You replace him with someone who now is in a position to crack down and a retaliate with even more violence. So it it's it the calculus for me isn't there. Would I be advocating it for then? Who knows. Um, but I mean I don't know if I'd be above the space to be. I certainly wouldn't have the space to be a podcaster or like a media personality. That wasn't really a thing. It to some extent it was in the 1920s with the Algonquin roundtable and all the people from the New Yorker magazine. But they were all drunks, you know. It was very much a a weird kind of situation to be a thinker. What would you think you'd do? Work at a carnival? You look good in lipstick, so. Well, thank you. I look in anything. What would I? I don't know. I mean, you're not building robots. I mean, you could have been a Tesla, right? Okay. I didn't mean a car. I meant the person. Like. I understand. Oh, thank you for explaining the witty comments to me. I wasn't witty at all because you wouldn't. John Einstein because your name he was an immigrant. So I wouldn't work with an immigrant. What does that even mean? No, you wouldn't even a Tesla like figure. There's already a Tesla, so you wouldn't literally be Tesla. That's why I said a Tesla. Oh, a Tesla. Okay, so all right. I thank you for the explanation. See, Michael doesn't only make funny things; he also explains them for you. It wasn't funny. Man plays them. It wasn't funny at all. That I agree with. Okay, okay, so yes, when when you achieve. See, this is why Kanye didn't like you. It's this. All right, I'm I'm downgrading you from a nine down to an eight. If you keep talking like this, a five is a real possibility. All right, so vacuum is the kind of vacuum that's created with violence is is usually filled with like a with a harsh with a harsher figure. So, so you don't think violent revolution ultimately leads to positive to positive progress in the short term. Well, sometimes it does. The American Revolution, I think, was a positive example, and overthrowing the czar, which was done peacefully, was a positive example. But again, when violence happens, people get scared and they want the violence stopped immediately, and that's a call for authoritarianism. And you see it time and time again, and and they also want retribution. They were like, "Bring this back to normal," and they don't really worry about things like civil liberties or things like that. It's it's a very and then it also creates this space for invasion from foreign sources or demagogues. You know, like oh, look, they're killing us in the streets. Now you got to support me. It's it's a very deadly game, obviously. I remember somebody told me that I forget where it was, but they they told me that from the very beginning was obvious that communism is an evil system that would or a system that leads to evil. And to me at least, that's not if I had to put put myself in the beginning of the 20th century at the end of the 19th century. That's totally not obvious. They are trying to elevate humanity, the the basic worth of a human being of a hardworking human being of the working class of the people that are doing the work and striving and just really trying to build up society with their own hands. It seems like a beautiful ideal. So I guess the question is, can you see yourself believing in that in in the ideas of socialism and communism? Yeah, let's say if you were living in Russia. Oh, yeah, easily. So first of all, I don't think anything is obvious in politics. It's not obvious that you know humans have rights. It's not obvious that liberty is better or the markets either. Either whether you're for you know a welfare state or you're for more free markets, neither of those is obvious. Both of them involve a enormous amount of thought and background information. So when someone says something is obvious in politics, they really mean something is apparent. Well, it's not apparent on its face that if we all get together and promote a society based on equality and we all chip in, that it's going to really be good for everyone. I mean that to me is the promise of communism. And it was also very appealing to many people because it was new. So the idea was, all right, we've tried it these other ways. There's all these negative consequences. You have all these slums. You have people getting you know fired and then they have no recourse. You have women with ten kids and they can't feed their kids infant mortality. You have don't have sanitation. You don't have food. You know everyone's illiterate and uneducated. And then here saying, look, if we all chip in together, everyone will have clothes, everyone will have food, everyone will be educated, everyone will do their part. It's going to be rough in the short period. That's a very compelling case to be made for communism. It's really easy in many ways when something hasn't been tried to make it sound compelling because you just talk about how great it's going to be and then no one no one. You know people are always arguing about like Venezuela and Sweden. Like oh, you know you want democratic socialism to be like Sweden. You don't want to be like Venezuela. The Venezuelans didn't vote for Venezuela. They voted for Sweden. They ended up with Venezuela. So it's I think. And the thing with communism, especially at that era, it was very much a correlated with people who are too smart for their own good. Because they had the idea that if we are just put in charge instead of these like business for people or these heirs to great estates, if the people who are smart and get it like us, I don't mean you and me like the people at the time who are advocating for it. Once we're in charge, since we're good people and we want what's best for everyone, we're going to make sure everyone's taken care of and you know they always talked about how much they cared about the little guy and so I'm sure some of them meant it a lot and like look if the guy in charge is very much concerned with the little guy, he's not going to slip between the cracks and it's just going to be absolutely great. And we don't have to worry about you know you know the capitalist class just basically exploiting people and having these huge estates while these people can't even feed their own families. Since we have a little bit of momentum, can you steal me on the case for socialism at that time and even today? I don't know if it's I don't know if there's a rhyme and a similarity to those to socialism was implemented at that time and what could possibly be implemented today, but maybe you can dance between the two. The steelman argument for socialism is if you have everything up to private industry, you do not have a guarantee that someone won't fall between the cracks. And the other concern is in any other context if someone is let's suppose mentally ill, right through no fault of their own and they or someone's handicapped, you know they can't feed themselves or mentally disabled or something like that. If you have everything up to charity, some you see this with like endangered species, right? The species that are cute, it's easy to raise money for them and protect them. Some weird kind of frog somewhere that no one cares about, you can't raise money for it. There's people's interests are to what they find interesting. So someone is someone who's like not socially appealing in some way, whatever capacity. They're going to fall between the cracks and they're screwed under socialism. If you have a government taking care of everything, no one is left behind. You are guaranteed that the lowest of the low and the worst of the worst are still going to make sure that they're not starving the street or just left behind. So that is a big moral case to be made for having the state running everything. In terms of economics, it's a lot harder. But the argument there would be it's why it's it's not fair a term which in my view does not actually have a good meaning. But it's not fair that because you were born a Rockefeller and I was born in Poland that you never have to worry about food the rest of your life. Whereas I have to worry about you know paying for a doctor for my kid. Like you just you won this lottery when you're born and now I have to be screwed and have to respect all your property. Why? So that is another strong argument to be made for socialism. And the other argument is if you have a media apparatus that is operated under profit seeking principles, it is going to feed into people's worst qualities, most basic animal like qualities and sensationalist qualities and will be used as a mechanism for capitalist control. Whereas if the government which represents all of us all of us is running things, then everyone will have a right to have their voice heard and won't be manipulated. That's the argument. What about the reaching towards the stateless version? Sort of because you espouse ideas of anarchism, it kind of has the same conclusion, which is reaching towards removal of the state to where we I guess have some distributed reallocation of resources that are quote unquote fair. But the thing is the the Marxist vision of the state withering away and becoming anarchism. It's really kind of like the underpants gnomes because it's like. Tell me more. Well, step one, you have Marx. Tell me slowly. I'm sorry. You have full communism, the state's running everything, including education. Step two, question mark. Step three, anarchism. So their idea was that after enough time, the nature of man himself was going to change, change and then the government would be superfluous because we would all be equal and we would all naturally or socially whatever term they would use want to act the part that we would need to do. And in fact Reagan had a great joke about this where there were two where there were two communists I think in Moscow and one of them they're walking around they're going is this it is this have we done it have we reached full communism. The other goes oh no it's going to get a hell of a lot worse. So you know that's kind of the counter argument to that. Do you think culture society can change the nature of man? No, so no matter you don't think this idea that for example America has been founded on that all men are created equal. That that idea can't permeate the culture and in thereby change how we see each other, how we think of the basic worth of a human being and thereby change our nature. That doesn't change that's epigenetic. I don't I don't think that that changes the nature of man. I think for example if I say someone which I agree with that someone is innocent until proven guilty, they're not literally innocent. They're regarded in a legal context as innocent, but that person is or is not a murderer, thief or so on and so forth. So we can legally and ethically regard everyone as equal. But as Thomas Soul pointed out, a human being isn't equal to himself over the course of a day. Twins who are genetic clones are not equal to one another. So it is a important thing legally and it's a good yardstick. But it's not literally true. But don't you think that law becomes ethics? So we we that like idea of justice starts to like we start to internalize it that we just the way we behave the way we think about the world. No, I I think it's a complete red herring because no one is no you're a red herring. Okay, see what I did there. Because someone is people are still going to always prefer their family to strangers or their in group to out group. So in terms if you're going to have equality, that means it's going to not matter to you whether someone is your mom or someone is you know someone down the street and I don't see how that will ever become the case. Do you think it would be possible if you were an intellectual like you are at the beginning of the 20th century? Would you be able to predict the rest of the 20th century? No, I don't think at all. I think there were so many out of nowhere turns that no one would have seen them coming. For and as an example, Lenin seizing power and making the Bolshevik Revolution a reality was regarded as utopian and insane. The fact that he pulled it off is close to miraculous and it was quite literally unprecedented. The fact that so that's a very big one. Which aspect of it sorry to interrupt? Which aspect was hard to predict that a singular figure with just some ideas would be able to take so much power and and maintain that power and remake that society so drastically so quickly despite such opposition. Also not just a set of temporary protests by hooligans that lead to turmoil in the short term but then stabilizes but literally changes the entirety of the society. Yeah, Lutendorf who was the German general. He's like all right, we got to get the Russians out of World War One. He's the one who's like all right, let's get this lunatic Lenin who already tried and failed to have a revolution in Russia. Let's send him back there and he's just going to cause problems for everybody and it's going to be great because it's going to weaken Russia and then our eastern front isn't going to have to be a problem. And then to his surprise and everyone else is including you know anarchists and communists worldwide. They pulled off this you know October Revolution and then for a while it's like all right. I mean, I mean I think my understanding is even people at the time in St Petersburg and in Moscow were like, what does this even mean? Right, like no one took it seriously. And then very quickly you had the Cheka and and the secret police and all these other kind of implementations of you know the communist state and people like oh they're not messing around, but they're like all right this is this is not going to last for for long and you know the USA the US and day we didn't even recognize the Soviet Union's legitimacy for very long time there were no diplomatic relations after certain point it's like who's the if you don't recognize Lenin and Stalin's government who's the government of this of Russia or the Soviet Union is it the czar like you have to recognize that it's just they're not going anywhere. So that was something that was not I think very predictable. The Great Depression in retrospect there were certain things that were predictable but it was not at all the case that it needed to last as long as it did in the states as FDR made it do. So there's all sorts of things. I mean if they fought Germany's remilitarization near World War World War II could have been prevented if you didn't have the Treaty of Versailles. Would you have the hyperinflation? Would you have Hitler? These are all I think choose your own adventure moments where things could have gone in other directions. I don't I don't believe this kind of idea. This is a very Marxist idea that like history is inevitable and once you start with certain premises the contradictions kind of unfold. I think that's ridiculous. I feel that there's power in the Santa Claus outfit. Yeah, I mean it's a fundamentally communist idea, right? Santa Claus arbitrary redistribution of wealth. It's not redistribution. Well, at least I decide who's good and bad. Only I only I know this, and I mean I am somehow getting funding from someone, right? No. Okay, listen. There's I have so much to teach you. You have a little Michael workshop. Yeah, and how many people do you think are employed in this workshop? They're slaves. Yes, I don't know how many elves are in the workshop. I think the rest of you are going to have to look into it. No, anyway, and the red colors and everything is that the biggest holiday of all time, Christmas like just in terms of the intensity of the festivities. No, I think Christmas is a very recent phenomenon. I think historically it was not a big deal. No, I know historically has not been, but in terms of how much it captivates, how intense it is, I guess from a capitalist perspective, like how much is going on, how visual it is, how intense it is, I think it grabs a whole population. I think it's because the idea of Christmas is probably the one of the most powerful holiday ideas. Easter is probably up there. It's Easter is obviously up there because you have Christ's resurrection, Christ dying, His resurrection. So that's kind of a big one, but but Christmas is the symbol of brotherhood and kindness and magnanimity. You know one of the things I despise about our culture is this glory and something I'm fighting very heavily with this book or at least attempting to is this glorification of cynicism. This kind of like oh you like this song that's cute stupid, whereas Christmas is the one time of year where you could be happy and joyous and kind and people don't get to roll their eyes at you. They get to stop being too cool for school and they get to be like you know I'm I enjoy your friendship your your my sister my brother my dad my mom whatever and it's the you know it was Iran's favorite holiday I adore it especially Christmas in New York and it's just this idea of like even though we're cold and it's dark outside you know it's still this kind of like it's still cozy and you and the next let's hope the next year is because with with with Russians Dzhidrov Santa comes on new years so it's kind of like let's make this next year an even better one. So it's very much the holiday of hope and joy. And like love for family for friendship and kindness and benevolence, yeah and like almost the whole that whole rat race of chasing material possessions and all that gets put on hold for a brief moment and just all goes quiet. But it's also about giving people material possessions like here like I value you this is the thing brings you joy yeah. Yeah, you write in the book which by the way people should go get buy right now if you support this podcast or if you support the ridiculous outfit that Michael's wear wears. The more books you buy, the more outfits he is going to wear. I've got two my next two appearances in the show assuming I don't burn this bridge. I've got some good ones. This bridge has been burning for a long time. We've been we've been going across the road by canoe at this point. Next time we're going to be swimming. How the hell are you going to swim? You're made out of lead. Yeah, true, sink to the bottom, get dragged across by rope. Okay, you write in the book cynics like to lie and call themselves realists, hoping for positive outcomes can thus be dismissed as being naive or utopian. Can you elaborate on this point just like you said right now? I mean, it it seems like a I don