Malice, Michael
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This is an unusually loose, comedic "Thanksgiving special" (framed around a pirate costume and a running gag with Lex's stuffed macaw, "Mr. Parrot") rather than a topic-driven interview, built mostly around bits, callbacks, and a long unboxing of a sculpture ("Chance Murmur") a fan artist made for Lex — but several recurring threads of substance emerge from the banter. Malice repeatedly frames humor itself as a moral practice: citing a (possibly apocryphal) Churchill line via Joan Rivers that laughter is "a little vacation," he argues dark or absurdist humor is a skill akin to a chef making unlikely ingredients palatable, and recalls that even in North Korea — where his guide and everyone he met on a 2012 trip remain trapped behind a since-electrified border — people retained a vivid sense of humor, which he says made leaving them behind harder specifically because it underscored their full humanity rather than making them abstract victims. He extends this to Soviet, African-American, Jewish-American, and gay-American humor traditions, arguing that groups with little to lose and an outsider's vantage point disproportionately produce great comedy, and singles out Norm Macdonald, Neil Hamburger (the deadpan character act of Gregg Turkington), and Roseanne Barr (whom he describes as "pathologically funny" and a close friend) as personal touchstones.
On cynicism, Malice — citing Camus as a hero — argues strongly against it as "a giving up," insisting that even though most movies, comedians, and art are mediocre, this doesn't matter because the good ones are what change people's lives; he applies this directly to contemporary visual art, listing over a dozen small galleries (Outre, Antler, Beinart, Spoke Art, Corey Helford, and others) he follows to make the point that affordable, unpretentious, beauty-driven art is thriving outside elite institutions, and draws a parallel to open-mic stand-up and Etsy artisans as similarly under-appreciated efforts worth celebrating rather than dismissing. He and Lex diverge on human nature: Malice argues humans are fundamentally "animals" with only "a veneer of civilization," citing how quickly and completely ordinary people can be induced into extreme, previously-unthinkable behavior (his central lesson from the Holocaust is "how fast" moral collapse can happen) and how readily humans form and dehumanize outgroups, whereas Lex argues most people are fundamentally good and that civility under normal conditions is itself evidence of an underlying communal desire to do good.
Malice discusses antisemitism at some length, arguing it functions differently from other forms of bigotry because it has historically been paired with actual, organized attempts at extermination, and describing (via a book called The Satanization of the Jews) a specific conspiratorial logic in which Jewish individuals are held collectively and uniquely responsible for the misdeeds of any group they're part of, while never being credited for anything positive; he objects specifically to the rhetorical move of calling Holocaust comparisons (e.g., around George Soros or contemporary Middle East conflict) illegitimate "Holocaust denial," seeing it as a shaming tactic. His prescription for reducing bigotry in general — including homophobia and Islamophobia — is what he calls the "ambassador program": personal proximity and relationships with a stigmatized group's members erode prejudice faster than argument. On religion, he strongly rejects Marx's "opium of the people" framing as a "cheap," "Reddit internet atheist" sneer, arguing he's personally seen religious faith make people demonstrably better and more responsible (drawing an analogy to 12-step recovery programs), while conceding Marx's original point may have applied to a specific historical dynamic of promising heavenly reward for present oppression.
Briefly touching geopolitics, Malice pushes back on a "realist"/anarchic-states framework (referencing Lex's recent conversation with John Mearsheimer), arguing the world today more closely resembles Huxley's Brave New World (soft power, cultural/technological seduction) than Orwell's 1984 (coercive hard power) — citing American cultural export and China's use of platforms like TikTok as primarily persuasive rather than military instruments, and arguing COVID-era compliance illustrated how much authoritarian-feeling outcomes can be achieved through voluntary buy-in rather than force. He also reflects on being an "anarchist without adjectives" (rejecting narrower labels like anarcho-capitalist) who admires left-anarchist figures like Emma Goldman despite disagreeing with their economics, and repeats a formative aphorism from his mentor Cus D'Amato–style figure (in this case simply life experience): that hierarchy is inescapable even in the most niche communities (he jokes about status hierarchies among guinea pig breeders and aquarium hobbyists), which he uses as a standing argument against egalitarian anarchist utopianism.
On personal life, Malice describes his family (a beloved nephew, and a father he no longer speaks to after giving up on ever receiving approval), his path to feeling like he had "made it" (being able to support himself as a writer without a boss, and specifically owning furniture that belonged to Margaret Thatcher, which resonates with him as an immigrant), and a long, self-aware digression on his elaborate hobby of "wet shaving" with a rotating library of 67 artisan shaving soaps. Asked for happiness advice, he recommends replacing "be great" with "be better" as a standard, using measurable self-improvement (e.g., fitness metrics) to build a sense of accomplishment, and reframes fear of failure by noting that everyone consequential "gets hit in the face" eventually, so resilience matters more than avoidance. On depression, he distinguishes ordinary situational low points from what he considers "irrational" depression (feeling bad when things objectively aren't bad). On betrayal, he says he has been betrayed but deliberately refuses to let it generalize into permanent distrust, feels sympathy (though not empathy) for people who betray others because he believes anyone who does so know on some level that they've acted wrongly, and closes by affirming that he isn't afraid of death, feeling he has already "moved the needle" on things that matter to him and been a good friend to those he cares about.
Excerpts
On why dark or taboo humor is valuable, and why he wants his own funeral to be a roast:
“The humor is that you're making fun of something that's dark. So already it's absurd... Joan Rivers said that Winston Churchill said... when you make people laugh, you're giving them a little vacation... I want my funeral to be a roast. It doesn't help me that everyone's sad. If I brought people happiness or joy in life, whatever, I want to keep doing that in death.”
On what he sees as a uniquely dangerous structure to antisemitism, as distinct from other prejudices:
“They have this moral calculus that Jews are the only people who are capable of good or evil, and Jews are exclusively capable of evil... You blame the Jews when bad things happen, but when a Jewish person does something good, it doesn't really matter... It only counts when that Jewish person does the bad thing.”
On rejecting cynicism, inspired by Camus:
“If there's one thing I would want to fight, it's cynicism because it's such a giving up... Most stand up comedians suck. Most movies suck. All podcasts suck. But it doesn't matter... the stuff that's good is what matters. Who cares if 90% of movies are terrible? They're the ones that change your life.”