Michael Malice — Anarchist author, podcaster, and provocateur known for books like Dear Reader, The New Right, The Anarchist Handbook, and The White Pill. A frequent Lex Fridman guest making his fifth appearance.
The gist
This New Year's special is a loose, friendly conversation framed around Dostoevsky's line that beauty will save the world. Lex and Michael discuss goodness versus truth and beauty, the nature of evil through Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and a sociopath club-kid killer Malice once met, and the value of helping one person at a time. The back half turns personal and optimistic: Malice's move from New York to Austin, his writing process for The White Pill, his admiration for Camus, and his case for a peaceful national divorce. Along the way they swap stories about Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, fasting, drinking, and David Goggins.
Big reveals
- Malice argues goodness is the most important of truth, goodness, and beauty because it is the easiest default state of being.
- Malice recounts meeting Michael Alig, the club-kid promoter who killed Angel Melendez, calling him the first true sociopath he ever met.
- Malice names the Amy Robach hot-mic moment as the biggest lesson of the Epstein saga about elites killing stories.
- Lex reveals he gave away his MIT salary and let his bank account go to zero before taking the leap to move.
- Malice calls Camus's The Plague unreadable, sparking a sharp disagreement with Lex who defends it.
- Lex describes a wild 40-hour-fasted, whiskey-fueled day with Rogan, Goggins, and Whitney Cummings in Vegas.
- Malice says he does not regard elections as legitimate, viewing the process itself as compromised.
- Both push back on the inability to say one genuinely nice thing about political opponents like Biden or Trump.
Things worth remembering
- Malice would rather spend ten minutes in the deep sea than on the moon, citing the jellyfish Deepstaria.
- Malice says the rewards of goodness are more immediate than the rewards of working out.
- Lex argues the act of science is fun in itself, while Malice admits he would not enjoy writing books no one read.
- Russians did not celebrate Christmas under the Soviet Union; New Year's with Ded Moroz was the one big holiday.
- As a Soviet kid, Lex remembers Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper as the ultimate taste of capitalist happiness.
- Malice notes great creative scenes like 1920s Paris were really just about fifty people in a ten-block radius.
- For The Anarchist Handbook audiobook, Malice had different people voice the 23 chapters by their different authors.
- Malice's writing advice: dump a garbage first draft without editing, because editing a slog beats creating one.
- Malice collects autographs, prizing a Pareto autograph over buying a modern computer.
- Malice suggests a national divorce might make more sense as five regions than two, given distinct cultures.
Recommended in this episode
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The White Pill
Michael Malice
“writing as you know i talk about this endlessly this book the white pill but writing about when people do hurtful things to children” — Michael Malice 00:12:51Find it on Amazon
Dear Reader
Michael Malice
“i know what it's like as an author when i was writing dear reader the north korea book my friends are sick of hearing all these north korean anecdotes” — Michael Malice 00:31:28Find it on Amazon
The Anarchist Handbook
Michael Malice
“when i dropped anarchist handbook in may and it was the top non-fiction book on amazon for like most of the day” — Michael Malice 01:15:17Find it on Amazon
A Hunger Artist
Franz Kafka
“a hunger artist one of my probably favorite short stories is that kind of a short story it's a pretty long short story of kafka's” — Lex Fridman 01:49:32Find it on Amazon
Dallas
Lorimar Productions (inferred)
“my favorite i think the best show of all time was dallas which often gets a it was like an 80s soap opera” — Michael Malice 03:21:02Find it on Amazon