DEF004 - Mike cernovich Interview Transcription

UNSEALING THE EPSTEIN FILES

Interview date: Friday 27th Sep, 2019
Interview location: Los Angeles

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Mike Cernovich, a writer, filmmaker, and journalist. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email us. You can listen to the original recording here.

In this interview, we discuss his investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, and how he filed a motion to unseal over 2,000 previously sealed documents. We also discuss fake news, Antifa, Bitcoin and the education system.

Interview transcription

Peter McCormack - 00:02:12
Yeah, it's good to get on your radar. Took a year and a half. As you said though, you get a lot of requests.

Mike Cernovich - 00:02:18
Well, I'm definitely a one man band, still. Because I've tried to work with various people, but one thing you'll find on your way up is a lot of people, they don't realise it's work. It's like, "Oh, it'll be cool, I'll work with you." It's like, "Okay, but it's work. It's still work. Everything is a grind." So other than my wife, who keeps my schedule, I just do it all.

Peter McCormack - 00:02:41
I've got one who helps me engineer and publish the show but I do everything else on it. You know what, I get people offering to help for free, and I'm just like, I don't want that because that's another person to manage. I don't have the time, but I'm certainly ... So over the last year, the Twitter following has gone up, so it's like 75,000 just short now. The show's getting a lot of awareness. I get two things, a lot of inbound inquiries, which is hard to manage, and a fuck load of trolling, to be honest. Which I don't always deal with in the right way. Like I go into the battle sometimes and always regret it. Always regret it. But you've probably experienced that.

Mike Cernovich - 00:03:19
Yeah, on both ends. Yeah, I've been the troll and I've been the trolled.

Peter McCormack - 00:03:22
Well, I troll as well, but I tend to think mine is a little bit more ... I try and do it in a way where it's either intellectual or funny, but I get the brutal shit, where it's just personal and fuck you.

Mike Cernovich - 00:03:32
Right. I would do that too. I would say that if you're trolling, there's three ways to troll a man. And only three ways. Every man is insecure about one area, either how much money he has, how much social status he has or who you know, who he's dating or money, right? Money, status, fitness. One of those is always a little get them. And so you just got to kind of guess, calculated.

Peter McCormack - 00:03:55
I think there's a fourth one.

Mike Cernovich - 00:03:56
What's that?

Peter McCormack - 00:03:56
It's when people criticise your actual work, your product. I take that personally because I've worked really fucking hard.

Mike Cernovich - 00:04:02
Oh OK. You need to become more arrogant about work product then too?

Peter McCormack - 00:04:05
Yeah, well just, you know, I know many hours I put in, I've flown 70 times this year. I'm putting in the hours. I'm trying to also be open-minded. You know, I don't really hold myself to a fixed view on too many things and I'm allowing myself to just like water, flow with ideas and so I get told I flip flop or ... but what I'm trying to do is introduce different people and different concepts and talk about different things.

Mike Cernovich - 00:04:29
No, I get that every day, which is "I can't tell if you're pro Trump or not." I'm like, well that's the point doofus, right? I don't want you to know, if you follow me long enough you can kind of figure out what I believe or what I don't believe. But that's not the vibe. The vibe is like, ah you know, every different kind of point of view or something's big and is adverse to whatever your position is. A bit of it’s big and people are talking about, it's kind of my job to get that to people. And then to point out the counter narrative, right? Well they're saying this is big, but their framing in a way that's manipulative or dishonest or not fully forthright.

Mike Cernovich - 00:05:04
An example is the Ross Ulbricht case, right? Guys in prison, double life sentence. And anytime you mention Ross, people go, oh well he tried to get somebody to murder somebody, well OK, that's actually fake news. He didn't. That was a false criminal accusation levied against him by the government in order to ratchet up the charges. And then once his appeals were denied, they dropped it.

Peter McCormack - 00:05:24
Because State of Maryland.

Mike Cernovich - 00:05:25
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it was completely fake. Or people don't know how the agents who went and got him, they stole Bitcoin, right? All these Bitcoins, people went to prison for that. Nobody even knows that that happened. That you saw federal agents walking out with laptops and all these Bitcoins. So you talk about somebody like Ross and immediately there is a narrative about him. And some of it's true, some of it's not true, but that's what happens. People get one construct about a person and then that construct determines who they are and your job is, I believe, as a podcaster or media figure to just share the whole narratives.

Mike Cernovich - 00:06:01
And say, look you might not like Ross, maybe you think he deserves to be in prison for the rest of his life, double life, maybe you think that, okay. But if you think that because he tried to hire a hit man, well you're just wrong. That's just not really what happened. If you think what he did was deserving a double life, at least know what happened and what didn't happen and that's my job and I think everyone's job.

Peter McCormack - 00:06:21
Well, that's how I first became aware of your work. I did the interview with Lyn, about a year and a half ago in Austin and she was like, Oh, you've got to get in touch with Mike. Mike knows about the case, Mike supports us. And then obviously over time I followed you on Twitter and followed a lot of your work, actually. And there's a couple of key things I want to get into. I really want to get into the Epstein stuff because there's just so much I don't know. Just even going down the rabbit hole preparing for this. And I also want to talk about the documentary because that framed a number of things in different ways. So for example, I didn't realise some of your counter trolling was really just reversing the narrative against the liberals, which I thought was super interesting. So I kind of want to get into it all and we'll see how far it goes.

Peter McCormack - 00:07:03
But I definitely want to start with the Epstein thing. Because, first point, I was out in Wyoming and I was talking to a chap there about the fact that the interview was coming up, and he was very excited about it. His point to me was that he felt that you haven't been given the recognition you deserve for that, which you might not care about. But he said without doubt you haven't been given the recognition you deserve. You were dismissed by a lot of mainstream media for pursuing it. And then a lot of the credit ended up going to the Herald, who deserve it as well, but you felt like you had been dismissed.

Mike Cernovich - 00:07:35
Yeah. So what had happened with the Jeffrey Epstein case, in around 2000, I don't know when I got into 2016/2017, you realised, when you read the record, that everything about the case was unbelievable. Oh, there's a guy who was running an international sex trafficking ring, but he pled to state charges for soliciting prostitution. Feds dismissed the case against him and he went to jail, but he didn't actually go to jail, he only did 12 hour days.

Mike Cernovich - 00:08:02
And you're like, okay, yeah, I'm a lawyer, I've done criminal cases, I knew all about this stuff, this can't possibly be true. It's the kind of thing where somebody tells you that, get off the phone, no way. And then you realise, oh no, it is true. He got some deal that was in comprehensible to everyone and it just sounded like such a good deal that you couldn't believe it was real, and it was real. But there was no real way to open those records up. You couldn't go and sue the federal prosecutors and get all the information from them.

Mike Cernovich - 00:08:31
They did respond to a fore request here or there, but you couldn't really get the goods, so to speak. What happened is, because it's your podcast and not mine, I'll use alleged. If it were mine I wouldn't say alleged and I'd be like, go to hell lady, I'll see you in court. But because it's yours, I'll say the Ghislaine Maxwell is alleged to have been kind of his pedophile Madam.

Mike Cernovich - 00:08:51
And the way the system worked was, Epstein's a 50 year old man, 55 year old man. If you're walking around New York trying to hit up 16/17 year old girls, they're not going to be a very amenable to that. So he would send this woman out around high schools and other areas and say, "oh, I know this guy Jeffrey. he's such a nice man. Can you come in and do a little housework or things here or there?" And she would kind of bring them in. I called her like the pedophile Madam. Well one woman, Virginia Roberts, sued Ghislaine Maxwell for defamation because Ghislaine Maxwell said they're lying about me, I never did any of this.

Mike Cernovich - 00:09:26
Now there's a civil lawsuit. There you would get the public records. No, it was completely sealed from public disclosure. So I, being a lawyer and knowing all these little levers, so much in life, you realise is just about knowing the levers to pull, right? And as you learn more different fields, like a lawyer, a lawyer will know what to lever to pull. I filed what's called the Motion to Intervene in a Motion to Unseal the records, first person to do it, to get the full records. And the judge denied the motion and it went up on appeal. So it was a pretty big case.

Peter McCormack - 00:10:01
Quite expensive as well?

Mike Cernovich - 00:10:03
Yeah, quite expensive. These things always are supposed to be less than they are and you're litigating with people. Because when we talk more detail, the case took a lot of really weird turns. And so this Motion to Intervene and Unseal was filed. It's now public record and I'm talking to reporters and I'm like, "Hey, this is a big deal. Like you don't have to talk about me". But the journalistic aspect is there is a public lawsuit happening, but it's being conducted in private in federal court. That's actually not how the federal court systems are going to work. If you want to keep it private, you do mediation, right? There's arbitration, there's all kinds of ways. This is not the way it works. And so much about Epstein is about pounding the table and "this isn't the way it's supposed to work."

Mike Cernovich - 00:10:47
And no reporter, say for kind of a wonky guy at Politico, because he covers sort of offbeat, illegal stuff, Josh, I forget his last name to hand. But there was really no interest in it, or in Epstein at large and there should have been. There wasn't and I was trying to drum up interest and I was getting interest in my own area, my own niche.

Mike Cernovich - 00:11:10
So say, nobody knew about Epstein to, I've got a couple of hundred thousand people to know about it. Well low and behold, the Miami Herald does some groundbreaking reporting in 2018. Oh and by the way, the Miami Herald, before they had done the reporting, they filed their own Motion to Intervene and Unseal and they said "Cernovich is right, he should've won. We should get the records." The trial core federal judge denied their motion as well. So then on appeal, I ended up in an appeal with the Miami Herald, which is kind of a weird bedfellows. I don't think many would people would expect Mike Cernovich and Miami Herald to be in bed together…

Peter McCormack - 00:11:48
But if you're going for the same truth it doesn't really matter.

Mike Cernovich - 00:11:51
Right. You're right. But in terms of, like the movie we'll talk about later, Hoaxed movie, is so much of life is narrative and there's a lot of people in media who hate me or they try to caricature me. And there's a real human interest story in there, which is, how does this cookie guys Cernovich, all the things they call me, he's in a precedent setting Freedom of the Press case with the Miami Herald involving Jeffery Epstein. But no media coverage of that, so when they would write about the Miami Herald's case, you would see all these articles, the Miami Herald appealed just to get these records. It's like, no, no, no, I did first. They're in a case with me and I'm glad they're in it. But you're just watching yourself be written out of story after, after story, after story.

Mike Cernovich - 00:12:29
And that's probably what the person you would talk to in Wyoming was frustrated with is, it's dishonest. I'm here. You don't have to like me. You can call me mean names in the articles, but you're just a fraud and a liar if you're saying, "oh, the Miami Herald did this". No, no, no, I did it. They certainly did more. They amplified, because they and did it from a different angle than I did, at least in the terms of the coverage. But it's objectively true that this was my case as much as it was the Miami Heralds.

Peter McCormack - 00:13:00
Do you think some of it comes down to the Miami Herald is essentially a clean publication, whereas you're a bit fucking wild in.

Mike Cernovich - 00:13:07
Right.

Peter McCormack - 00:13:07
You've been involved in various things. You've got political views, you're quite strong viewed. There's people who are going to get pissed off with you, right?

Mike Cernovich - 00:13:15
Well, and that's a great point there, and there's layers to that. So for example, when I had a clean to the head sexual harassment case against a member of Congress, John Conyers, I knew that if I put it out there it would just get ignored myself. If I just tweeted a doc, it'd just get ignored. So I went to Buzzfeed and I learned that actually from a book I read called Devil's Bargain, it was a book by a Bloomberg reporter on Bannon. And Bannon would say that if you actually get something good and you're perceived as being right wing, don't break it yourself, break it with a left wing outlet. It'll get more exposure because of these bubbles. So when I had the Conyers case, I go, oh, this is a great idea. I reached out to Buzzfeed and they're like, well if it's real we'll publish it.

Mike Cernovich - 00:13:58
And I go, just say that I gave it to you, you don't have to give me any ... there was no conditions or anything like that. They could write the story as they wanted and then you know, they break this big story. And so I learned there's like a lesson there. So me, I'm going at Epstein, nobody cares. Because why? Because this is the world we live in where you keep people contained in their little zone and you treat everybody as if they're one dimensional. And then the Miami Herald, once they got into Epstein, now, because they're left wing, you can talk about it now. So then the Miami Herald starts talking about the sexual harassment angle or the sexual predatory angle. And quite frankly, what they did, and I don't blame this on the reporter Julie Brown, who's incredible. The left wing media loved the Epstein story because they had a hammer on Trump. Because Alexander Acosta, whose the labor secretary was the prop.

Mike Cernovich - 00:14:47
That's the only reason they care. And to me that's why, now Epstein's dead, they don't care anymore. There's no coverage. I'm still, and Julie Brown at the Miami Herald is still covering it, but now it's become local again. So it became this big, huge national story because they could bludgeon Acosta. Then Acosta resigns, and now they're like, Oh well, there's no really way for us to attack Trump, so why do we even care anymore? And then the chatter died down. So me, when I was going for the records, I was going after Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, media doesn't really care. They find the Trump angle and now they care.

Peter McCormack - 00:15:21
Well, the interesting thing is the day after he died, my first tweet, when I heard about it, was when is Ghislaine Maxwell going to be arrested?

Mike Cernovich - 00:15:28
Right.

Peter McCormack - 00:15:29
But there's no interest in that.

Mike Cernovich - 00:15:31
No interest in that, and there's no interest in a very applicable law. So again, this is kind of lawyer inside baseball, but I knew that when the SDNY indicted Epstein that they weren't taking the case seriously, and here's why. They limited it to local conduct. Oh, he payed these girls $300 to rub him or to rub his body or whatever. And I'm a lawyer, the SDNY, they're the smartest lawyers in the country for the most part, the most elite. Every lawyer knows you learn this in law school, criminal law, the Mann Act. The Mann Act prohibits the interstate transportation of women who are under 18 in interstate travel. And in foreign travel there's another one, but it's not called the Mann Act. The Mann Act, actually Trump pardoned a guy who was convicted of the Mann Act because he drove his girlfriend across state lines. And it used to be for any immoral purpose, and immoral purpose used to be miscegenation. So it was actually a crime for a black man to transport a white girl.

Mike Cernovich - 00:16:28
So a lot of people don't know this. If you are, the age of consent in California is 18, in Vegas or in Nevada is 16. If you tell your girl, oh, meet me in Vegas, and she is under age, that's a Mann Act violation. It's actually a federal felony. So Epstein had traveled with women to Paris, to his compound in New Mexico, to the Virgin islands, to New York, to Florida. The prosecutors, if they really wanted to do this aggressively, they would have had simultaneous raids on every property, every property. They didn't. And then they, at the press conference they said, "oh, this only covers this New York behaviour." No, no, no, no. The Mann Act clearly would apply there.

Mike Cernovich - 00:17:07
And then you start reading and pulling back layers and you find out there was this huge vault in Saint James Island, little Jeff Island, as he called it. Nobody knows what happened to that. Because, oh, we can't seize it. Sure you could have, if you'd have filed it as a Mann Act. So the way they charged the case to me is highly, highly suspicious. Because the STNY is known for being quite aggressive. I mean they went after Dinesh D'Souza because he gave a friend 20 grand or something. They charged him under a law that nobody had ever heard of, right? These are very aggressive people, if they want you. If the feds want you it's terrifying. I mean they went after Bitcoin Cash Bro because he sold firecrackers that everybody else sold. But he just happened to get on their radar, I think Ver.

Peter McCormack - 00:17:49
Roger Ver yeah.

Mike Cernovich - 00:17:50
Yeah, Roger Ver, just because they didn't like him. That's the way our federal system is set up. If they don't like you, they'll make you a federal felon overnight.

Mike Cernovich - 00:17:58
Well, with Epstein you had the Mann Act. You had all this stuff and they didn't charge him for any of that and that's why I was like, okay, the conspiracy theories about Epstein being an intelligence asset or something, are almost certainly true because even when they did eventually charge him, and of course footnote, they didn't charge him until what? Until after I won my court case. Right. I win my court case and now everything is going to become public. There's no more hyper speculation. Who knows what happened. Magically, what a coincidence, then he gets charged. But the charge conduct is the minimum that he could have been charged with. They could have done multiple raids on every property, which they didn't do.

Peter McCormack - 00:18:38
Were all the girls over 16?

Mike Cernovich - 00:18:40
There's some question to that. There were some that were speculated to be 14. We do know that the girls would say once you graduate high school, he wasn't into you anymore. So there was, it was not junior high. They weren't 12/13. People try to argue it's not pedophilia, it's hebephilia. There was always these, like to me it's like okay you're a grown man, she's 14 you're a pedo.

Peter McCormack - 00:19:01
Yeah. No of course.

Mike Cernovich - 00:19:02
Yeah. But yeah they were usually in the 15 to 17 year old age range.

Peter McCormack - 00:19:07
Cause I was wondering if there's like, you know say in the UK consent's 16, obviously it varies in the US. You know he's obviously a creepy guy, most likely a pedophile. Was there any kind of self justification that they are over 16?

Mike Cernovich - 00:19:20
Well there's actually been conversations that he had, this all came up because he was funding MIT, where he would tell people, well the age of consent in France is 14, you know? And he would try to have these kind of debates with people and in America you're like 14, come on bro. If you want to say 18 or 17 people can, you know there's always a debate at the margin, like 14 we all agree that that's way too far.

Peter McCormack - 00:19:42
And it's not like the girl is 15 and he's 17.

Mike Cernovich - 00:19:43
Right.

Peter McCormack - 00:19:43
The girl's 15 he's like, 52 or whatever it is. It's weird and it's creepy.

Mike Cernovich - 00:19:49
Because that's the argument they try to make, they'll say well if it's okay for a 15 year old boy and a 14 year old girl to have sex. Like come on, it's a 15 year old boy. They do try to make those kinds of arguments and that was what Epstein would do and it didn't work. So regardless of the morality or where people come on to with the age of consent, there is no question that if she's under 18 you transported her interstate or foreign travel, those are felonies and you can get every property raided.

Mike Cernovich - 00:20:19
So even the New Mexico property, we don't even know if it was raided or it was kind of searched the other day. It was sort of forgotten, off the radar. Unless you've really followed that closely, you didn't know there was a property in New Mexico. There was a vault in Saint James. When I read a lot of legal documents, there were CDs that were labeled, they were redacted, but it would say, mr, you know John DOE one with girl two. And you realise, okay, the working theory, that I think is by far the most plausible, is Epstein made his money by running a blackmail operation. Because core files say now he's worth around $600 million. He claimed to be a hedge fund. Anybody in finance knows if you run a hedge fund, you have things like a prime broker. There's infrastructure, there's a paper trail. Who's his prime broker? Nobody knows. What trades did he make? Nobody knows. Did he even have an operation? Right. It's very Bernie Madoff. And Bernie, go ahead.

Peter McCormack - 00:21:14
Actually I read about something recently, there was kind of one guy, one company, the guy who owns, what is it?

Mike Cernovich - 00:21:20
Wexner is who they say.

Peter McCormack - 00:21:21
Yeah, but is that? What's the one with all the models, the company with all the models?

Mike Cernovich - 00:21:26
Yeah Victoria Secret.

Peter McCormack - 00:21:27
It's like part of that group.

Mike Cernovich - 00:21:28
Yeah. They say that, but there's still no trade records. And then there was a guy, he's in Ohio now, so I think his last name is Wexner. But he claimed, "oh, Epstein stole money from me." And then people are like, why didn't you sue him for stealing your money? Like $10 million, you ain't no fool, right? There's no answer for that. So anytime you kind of look around, it doesn't make sense unless you have a better working theory.

Mike Cernovich - 00:21:52
So my working theory is that Epstein initially had his vices and brought people in who thought they were just going to party with them. He began blackmailing them. But then eventually the intelligence community got word of that and they said, oh, you know, why don't we bring in foreign people like Prince Andrew and flip them and bring in other kinds of high power people. And then Epstein became a federal asset. That's why his case was handled the way it was handled. Otherwise there is no other explanation for him getting away with what he got away with. Them more for what happened, even again, going back to the STNY, even when he was charged, he was charged under the lowest chargeable conduct.

Peter McCormack - 00:22:33
Right, I also heard potentially a Mossad asset?

Mike Cernovich - 00:22:37
Yeah, people say it, but it would be, if he were a Mossad I would say he would also be with US. Because it isn't like the US intelligence community would say, okay, you guys can have him, you know, we're not going to share him, kind of thing. So he would've been a US federal asset as well.

Peter McCormack - 00:22:52
So you believe it goes that deep? That they created an asset and turned a blind eye to all of this because they want to have dirt on a bunch of people?

Mike Cernovich - 00:23:03
Yeah, blackmail material on it. It's kompromat.

Peter McCormack - 00:23:05

So he'd run a blackmail operation on behalf of the US?

Mike Cernovich - 00:23:10
Well it evolved into that.

Peter McCormack - 00:23:11
Ah okay.

Mike Cernovich - 00:23:11
So the way this world would work would be, you're a guy, you're having these parties, people come over and then you start to squeeze them. But if you're blackmailing people, then the intelligence community is going to catch word of that. Either through wiring, either through spying on people or through being told by someone. It's a very ... they're everywhere. And then they say, oh, if you're going to run it anyway, do you have anything on so and so? Or do you have any kind of compromising material on this other person? And then they would use him as a source.

Mike Cernovich - 00:23:45
I've talked to people who, when they went to Epstein's home, there were cameras everywhere. If you know what to look for, the little, in the book, just there were cameras everywhere in all of his homes. Why would everything be wired, right? All these different rooms wired up. And it makes the most sense that he was an intelligence asset. And that would explain why a number of things. One is why he got rid of the first deal he got away with. Secondly, when he was finally charged by SDNY, why they limit it to some chicken shit charges when they could-

Peter McCormack - 00:24:19
Trafficking, right?

Mike Cernovich - 00:24:21
That was uncharged, because they said other people would bring him girls, but they didn't indict any co-conspirator. Right.

Peter McCormack - 00:24:28
Okay.

Mike Cernovich - 00:24:28
Which is Jeffrey Epstein. And when you read the actual complaint it's because he paid the girls hundreds of dollars to give them massages. They didn't go after the whole network. Ghislaine Maxwell, for example, wasn't indicted. Other people would've helped him. None of them were indicted. And I thought, oh, that's really suspicious, right? And then of course he dies, commits suicide, which-

Peter McCormack - 00:24:50
I know, I know, alright. So let's get into that because for obvious reasons, it kind of happened under everyone's noses. Like we're all watching and it happens. And my initial thoughts were he didn't seem like the type of guy who would kill himself. He seemed like the type of guy who thought, I can still get away with this, you know? Oh, I'll get some sentence, but it'll be a compromise. I will get out one day.

Mike Cernovich - 00:25:13
Right. He was a shrewd operator and he had cards to play.

Peter McCormack - 00:25:17
Yep.

Mike Cernovich - 00:25:18
Suicide is what you do when you don't have any cards to play. People who had talked to him said he looked fine. His spirits were fine. I think when you study sociopathy, a sociopath doesn't process emotions the way we do, and they don't feel fear ... the way a sociopath has been shown this is why it's, oh, you're going to threaten a sociopath. They don't process fear the way you do. We're like, Oh God, I'm freaking out.

Peter McCormack - 00:25:39
And they'd like any attention, good or bad.

Mike Cernovich - 00:25:42
Right. So he was a narcissist, sociopath. So he wouldn't have been afraid. He knew he had cards to play. He had money in the bank. He could drag this case out for God knows how long. He could threaten to release things and then suddenly he commits suicide. Right? Well how? Well, there was never a press conference. People forget this. One of the greatest, not to get too meta, but one of the ways that I analyse the world is I pay more attention to, from Sherlock Holmes, the dog that didn't bark, right? There's that famous story where, how did Sherlock Holmes solve the crime? And, I don't feel bad spoiling 150 year old short stories, Sherlock Holmes concluded it was an inside job because the dog didn't bark and the dog would have barked at anyone else.

Mike Cernovich - 00:26:22
So with Epstein, I look at, well there was no press conference. If he committed suicide, used bedsheets, you would just have pictures, right? You would just, say 24 hours later, sorry, I'm falling on my sword here. Here's pictures of him. Here's video, here's everything that happened. We've never got the video. We never even got a press conference.

Mike Cernovich - 00:26:42
What happened to him was leaked to the media. Oh yeah, the New York times are saying, here's what happens as opposed to saying, here's what happened according to sources.

Peter McCormack - 00:26:49
Taken off, suicide watch, guards were asleep.

Mike Cernovich - 00:26:52
We don't know cause we've never, and then they say, oh, the cameras were malfunctioning. We don't really know what had happened. So the way I look at Epstein is, this is why, again, I think the best working theory is that he was intelligence asset, is that ... him committing suicide, nobody believes it. So whatever he had was worse than the loss of trust in institutions his suicide created. Even people like Eric Weinstein, who was kind of a lefty and he goes on Dave Rubin and has done stuff with Peter Thiel and stuff, the last thing he wants anybody to think is he's a conspiracy theorist. He's a very like, what you call a legitimate person. And he's what I call like an, I'm not a conspiracy theorist but, type because they don't even want to be seen that way. Even he wasn't following this through, he's like, come on, go F yourselves. You really expect us to believe this was the suicide.

Peter McCormack - 00:27:42
Well, I can't remember who put out the tweet, but somebody put out a tweet that says something like if this happened whilst we're all watching, they really didn't want him to speak.

Mike Cernovich - 00:27:52
Exactly. And that's why again, the working theory that he would have uncovered all kinds of things shown all kinds of things about British royalty, we're talking sovereign money, right? One way, I can't remember why I was thinking of this, but I think I was at an event and there was a billionaire or something there and I was like, you know, so $1,000 to me is what mathematically $1 million is to him.

Mike Cernovich - 00:28:15
And I'm like, so if you're a millionaire, $1,000 is a million mathematically speaking, but, then I started thinking about Epstein. I'm like, he was against sovereign people. We're talking trillions of dollars, thousand billions. And So if you're a millionaire, a billion to a trillionaire is what $1, 000 is to you. And I wasn't even high. It was just more like a mind blowing thing and you realise if your sovereign wealth, like Qatari, Saudi Arabian, you have somebody like Epstein, would you spend $1,000 to solve a problem? Of course. Would they spend $1 billion to solve a problem. Of course. Right? We're talking trillionaires. We're talking, with Prince Andrew and the British Royal family, they're called billionaires but we all know they don't only have 20 billion or whatever fake number it has. And that's the level it was. And I think those were the kind of players who would have been exposed.

Peter McCormack - 00:29:02
Well, so the Prince Andrew thing's obviously got a different interest to me because I'm British, I'm not a royalist, I'm not a fan of the Royal family. I think it's fucking ridiculous. But he's clearly going to get away with everything cause he has Royal privilege. I'm not here saying and he's guilty, but there's certainly a lot of things pointed out here. I watched the interview with the young girl, I've got it noted down here. Virginia Roberts.

Mike Cernovich - 00:29:25
Virginia Roberts. Yeah.

Peter McCormack - 00:29:26
So I saw the interview with her and I believed her. I just watched it and I thought, you know, it doesn't seem like you're lying. Like what reason have you got to lie? Yet it doesn't feel like he'll ever be investigated.

Mike Cernovich - 00:29:37
No, they all got away with it. This is, there's a term on the internet called like Black pill where you just become nihilistic or whatever. I became Black pilled during the bailouts of Wall Street when I saw John McCain and Barack Obama hold hands to make sure Wall street was taken care of and got to pay off their bonuses and everything like that. That was a very, to me that was a psychologically trying time because I was somebody who probably believed that we had a democracy. I believed in these things. And for me that was my Black pill moment.

Mike Cernovich - 00:30:06
And a lot of people don't want to take that on the Jeffrey Epstein thing. Well, something will come out, like no it's over. He got away with it. All those people got away with it, understand that everybody got away with it, just accept it. And then accept that that is the system that we have and we can either try to reform the system, but we can't be children. Because people would, it's weird, I think they expected me to be the cheerleader and say no, we're still going to get him. And I'm like, no, not he as in Epstein, but whoever was above Epstein, they all got away with it in a very Keyser Soze movement, where we don't even know who Keyser Soze is and that's because Epstein wasn't Keyser Soze.

Peter McCormack - 00:30:45
Yeah. You know what? That's kind of depressing, really. I mean, where do you go with it now? You personally? There's no point pursuing the Epstein story itself too much because there's no measure in it now cause he's dead. But do you focus on Ghislaine Maxwell? Is that worth pursuing?

Mike Cernovich - 00:31:02
Well, the Miami Herald, they're still pulling on threads and everything so I feel that they're in capable hands and they can handle it. But that's why the joke is it's a black pill because it is a dark, depressing thing to just say, you know, they got away with it and there's nothing we can do about it. And even someone like me who, I'm the guy who went after him when nobody else was and put myself in quite a ... I was warned actually by a couple of my own friends and the intelligence community that they'd heard chatter about me and I should probably be careful and dah, dah, dah, dah. And they were credible enough that I was contacted.

Mike Cernovich - 00:31:36
And so it isn't fear. I'm not afraid of these people just, who are they? Again, who's Keyser Soze? How are you going to find the Keyser Soze? Because it wasn't Epstein. And that's where we are. Going forward the solution is, I don't know. I mean that's why I back anti-establishment kind of people. I back the kind of people who, whatever their politics are, they would want to ask those kind of questions. Right? They would want to, because if you're outside of the system, you often ask the "wrong questions" or you do "the wrong things," because you don't know what the mores are, you don't know what the cultural indoctrination is. Those are the kind of people that I'd like to see come in. And you notice even AOC, "Oh, I'm so far up," she hasn't talked about the Epstein thing.

Peter McCormack - 00:32:19
Well, you're independent, so you've got an independent voice. You don't have to really give a fuck about offending anyone. You don't have to follow a narrative. You don't have to worry about the TV ads which appear in between segments. You're independent. You can say what the fuck you want. But I don't know. I mean, just on a personal level, I'm now expanding beyond Bitcoin. This is why we're doing this. I've just been out to Taiwan. I interviewed North Korea's most senior defector, and it is in the back of my mind, I'm starting to think like, if I push the wrong buttons, do I risk personal safety? Is that something that crosses your mind?

Mike Cernovich - 00:32:50
Oh, you 100% do. No, there are countries I won't travel to. Like I did recently a pretty good documentary ... not pretty good, it was a good documentary, very good ... on Qatar, and how the script people have running now in America is that Saudi Arabia has all this power. They actually don't. They got squeezed out with the Qataris. The Qataris are actually funding a lot of terrorist groups. So, would I go to Syria? No.

Peter McCormack - 00:33:15
No.

Mike Cernovich - 00:33:15
Why? Because you can't be there. You know, if you want to get someone, you can always get them, but it's going to be a lot harder to get me in the US in a way that my people would tolerate, what continents. Whereas, if I'm in Turkey or somewhere and just a bus crash, tragic, 18 people die, one of them is Cernovich, then that's the way it. There will be a time if you really go hard where there are just places that you know you wouldn't go because it would be too easy to get you in a bag.

Peter McCormack - 00:33:48
I mean, I'm certainly not going to go to North Korea now after doing this interview.

Mike Cernovich - 00:33:52
Right. And I would like to go to Iran, actually. It's a beautiful country, so I've seen or so I've heard. I'd love to go, but I could become some kind of pawn and some kind of foreign policy game just due to my prominence. It would be wrong to say I'm anti-regime just because I'm not actually fighting the regime, so to speak. But they would be able to conclude that I wasn't pro-regime and then that would be enough to jam me up. But yeah, it does. If you want to run a travel blog, you're going to make different choices.

Peter McCormack - 00:34:20
Yeah. But you can still be a target in your own country. I mean, we've seen it in the UK. We've had Russian agents, as such, coming and poisoning people, and they've got away with it.

Mike Cernovich - 00:34:31
Yeah. Luckily, in America, this is one reason why I'm not fully demoralised, is that it's relatively easy to have someone, if you have root means, to be taken out. And that's just not happening in politics here, at least not yet. Where political adversaries aren't being killed, like say in Columbia or other parts of the world, even Russia. And that's a very nice thing. But yeah, there's people, and that's why I would have been told with the Epstein thing that they'd heard chatter about me and everything. You can become a target.

Mike Cernovich - 00:35:03
People still speculate that Michael Hastings, his car was hacked or something like that. On that, I'm 75/25 it didn't happen, that he wasn't killed, just because I know that stretch of road, and I know if you're a young man and you're on the come up and you're in a Cayenne, a Porsche Cayenne, you're going to see how far you can take it, you know? It's just, so much in life is about being able to see things from another person's point of view. And that, I'm like, well, he's a young man, he's hyped up, he's amped up. A Lot of people in journalism abuse stimulants of various sorts. Adderall or Modafinil is not technically a stimulus.

Mike Cernovich - 00:35:40
You have a deadline and you're cranking. I used to have a Adderall, I wouldn't say problem, but I used to do quite a bit of Adderall, years ago. And so you imagine you got a guy who's on Adderall. He's got the fast car. He's, "I'm in Rolling Stone, getting generals retired. I'm on top of the world, bitches. Vroom, how fast can you get this car?" Spins out. That's why I don't buy the Hastings things, but that said, he did make enemies with the CIA.

Mike Cernovich - 00:36:05
I had made a number of enemies. For example, the former national security advisor, H.R. McMaster, actually held meetings about me in town halls because I was breaking too many stories about national security stuff. And I did back away from that seed for a little bit because they were trying to get a counter espionage investigation into me. But the way they get you here is usually with "lawful processes." In, say, North Korea, they'll just have you killed or taken away or something. In the US, they'll just audit your tax returns and say, "You misfiled that," or something.

Mike Cernovich - 00:36:44
That was why one thing I did when I found out that I was such a ... whatever. It's weird when you're ... because I'm 42. I never really wanted to be "famous." So it's weird when you become sort of a thing. If you never wanted that, it's not really part of your identity. It's like, "Oh, whatever." But once I became a thing, whatever that means, I always refiled all my tax returns and audited all my records and everything. Even now, they went after me ... they were wrong ... but they're going through every tax return of mine. That's the way they go about doing it.

Peter McCormack - 00:37:17
What do you think is going on, though? You're analysing these situations and when you'll get involved in these stories, do you believe it's just bad individuals who have relationships with other bad individuals and people have negotiated and deals or do you believe there's like this weird deep state thing going on? I'm very early in my looking into what's going on with Patrick Byrne, so I don't know too much about it. But what do you believe is going on?

Mike Cernovich - 00:37:43
A number of things. One is that so much from life is about self-selection. So Bitcoin has a culture, and the culture generally tends to be like free-thinking counter establishment. So if somebody goes, "How dare you have Cernovich on your podcast?" you'd be like, "Fuck off, bro. Whatever," and that's just part of the culture. So if people try to come in without that kind of mindset, they're naturally ... pushed out isn't the word, but it's just not going to vibe. And in DC, it's a very transactional, nasty place to be. And unless you're somebody who only cares how you can take advantage of people, how you can exploit people, how you can climb the social ladder and leak on people, betray people ... If you're not that kind of person, then you're not going to make it in the intelligence community, for the most part.

Mike Cernovich - 00:38:29
So what's left in DC and left in the intelligence community ... because you watch Homeland and, "Oh my God, these people are just freedom fighters. Can you believe in ..." No, this is fiction. These are people filing memos for their file. "Oh, so-and-so came to my office, looked high on drugs." Or even how Comey did Trump, where he had his SUV right outside the meeting with Trump and he's writing a memo, and then everybody assumes that memo's true. Why would that necessarily be true, though? Because they know how to play the game. That's the kind of people you're dealing with, these memo to the file people, I call them. Or you email yourself a thing, "Oh, I met this guy and shh ... " That becomes a culture and they all ... If you're not that kind of person, it would just be a very passive aggressive, very oppressive place to be.

Mike Cernovich - 00:39:18
And then of course, through self-selection, you're left with people who just aren't very good people and people who all kind of think alike, have all of the same political points of views. They're all kind of on a side. For example, 90% of the intelligence community is Democrat, but not Tulsi Gabbard Democrat. They all hate Tulsi. They're Democrat in terms of like a unaparty. So they would all like Mitt Romney, too. So Democrat, Republican, 90% of them are what you call unaparty. Are these people going to support our next war? Are they going to support our next regime change? Then we like those people and anyone who doesn't is bad, and we don't like those people.

Peter McCormack - 00:39:54
It's very interesting once you start lifting the lid on these things. I mean, I don't know, prior to ... I'm calling you a journalist, right ... prior to being a journalist, you said you're a lawyer, but I don't know what your life was like. But mine was a very, very standard life. You know, I'd had my kids, I'd go to work, I worked in advertising, I would come home, I'd watch TV, I'd go to bed. You'd hear different conspiracy theories and things. And then I've kind of got into the Bitcoin world and I'm starting to kind of take the lid off certain things, and it's a real fucking deep rabbit hole.

Mike Cernovich - 00:40:22
How old are you?

Peter McCormack - 00:40:23
40.

Mike Cernovich - 00:40:24
40, yes. I'm 42. Yeah, you're living a different ... Again, that's a very ... Like, I found Bitcoin, you're in Bitcoin. People who I think that you live many lives in one sort of end up in these worlds. So I'm 42. As a young man who grew up quite poor, legitimately poor, I was what you'd call sort of a lever in the system. I joined the military and all that stuff. Went to college, got the good grades, went to law school. I really wanted to be a lawyer and I was doing legal scholarship, and then I just became so jaded that I left all of that.

Mike Cernovich - 00:40:58
There was a point in my life where all I cared about was being jacked, like massive. People are like, "Dude, I saw a picture of you. People are Photoshopping pictures of you." I'm like, "No, that was really my body." I was a mass monster, you know? All I cared about was doing MDMA and Kambo and lifting weights and self development. My book, Gorilla Mindset, did quite well, actually. It's done over 100,000 copies sold. I did the travel the world thing, and that was kind of my arc.

Mike Cernovich - 00:41:27
So I had a very serious, very, "I'm a good American boy, good American legal scholar," kind of thing, to, "I'm just a party boy lifting weights and doing mindset," stuff. You know, taking steroids in Thailand or wherever, Chiang Mai. Then I came back and I was still on that kind of mindset kick, but then like everyone else, we're all caught in, I call it the Trump Matrix, where whether you liked the guy or not, you just couldn't avoid him. That happened in about June 2015. So then I go from, I'm in The Matrix, but everything compounds. All your skills compound. Scott Adams calls it talent stack, or people before that would call it a skillset.

Mike Cernovich - 00:42:11
And I just happened to be perfectly aligned for the times. I'm a lawyer, so when people are threatening me, I'm like, "No, fuck off. You can't sue me for that. You're just lying. No, you're a bullshitter." And I'd done the mindset training, so if you tried to rattle me, it was a very, very hard thing to do. It's like, "No, I wrote the book on mindset. I put gorillas on it. You're not going to intimidate me." And I kind of had the look which was new. At the time, all media people were just big fat-faced people with too much makeup on, and I'm this guy with a little bit of a muscular physique and a little bit of swag, talking a lot of shit, which was just perfect for the time. And then I just made friends through that world and then those friends became kind of sources for me and people feeding me information.

Mike Cernovich - 00:42:55
Then I ended up kind of back where I began. Because I would do some legal journalism. I began doing some legal journalism at like a lower level, and then I became a reporter, literally making a member of Congress resign, literally making a national security advisor hold town halls about me. And then I kind of retreated into ... I did a film and other things. Life is, I don't want to say it's what you make of it, because a lot of times life is making you, it has its own sort of idea, but you can live a lot of lives in one life.

Peter McCormack - 00:43:30
I've had a similarish journey, right? I would say as a child, we weren't poor but we weren't rich. Both my parents were working class, so engineer and nurse, but give us the best. I was definitely very, very liberal. Definitely a socialist. I would read books. I would try and read Noam Chomsky and gave up, but I would read like John Pilger books about the war machine and things. That's how I kind of grew up. Then went into adult life. I was working in advertising. Had a massive cocaine problem that got out of hand. I got divorced, everything collapsed, and then found Bitcoin. And then, I like that term "black pilled," because I essentially have been black pilled, right? I think through life, like you say, you can live many lives and you can change careers, but once you lift the lid, it's very hard to go into reverse. You just kind of want to find out more.

Mike Cernovich - 00:44:17
Yeah, yeah. No, that's the problem. There's that scene in The Matrix ... because that's where all these analogies come from ... where the guy agrees with Mr. Smith to go back into the Matrix, but you can't. Once you're out and your eyes are open, you can't. That's why there's a lot of people ... Like me, I gained a bunch of weight. Most journalists-

Peter McCormack - 00:44:38
I'm the same.

Mike Cernovich - 00:44:39
... Yeah. It just rewires you in a way that I haven't fully figured out yet, psychologically. I'll give you an example. There was just a ton of national scrutiny on me after I broke this big story about Susan Rice and this unmasking that had happened in the spying on the Trump campaign. And I remember there's all this media, New York Times, Washington Post, everyone, and I laid down on my bed and I physically felt like somebody was pinning me to the bed. And it was like, what are these psychological forces at work?

Mike Cernovich - 00:45:09
But luckily for me, I had the mindset work to rely on, so I knew what was happening and to realise ... Yeah, it's quite overwhelming, because what happens to us now in "cyber space," is our minds might as well be connected to it. It used to be, the internet's not real life. You'd go on an internet forum and fuck off a little bit and then you'd live your life. Then once you're online all the time, your brain literally becomes rewired. It's like ... You've read the book, Snow Crash?

Peter McCormack - 00:45:36
I've just started it. It's the pizza delivery guy at the start?

Mike Cernovich - 00:45:40
Yeah.

Peter McCormack - 00:45:42
I'm like 20 pages in.

Mike Cernovich - 00:45:43
Well, when you read it, you'll see it was prophetic and you'll go, "Wait, when was this book written? Wait, this was how long ago?" There are scenes in there where they talk about you essentially plug in and you put the goggles on and now you're hanging out in like holographic reality. That's kind of like what we're doing on the internet. You go on Twitter, you might not have goggles on your face, but you're plugging into like holographic reality. Then what's happening there, what you're reading online, is affecting your psychology, your brain, and thus it affects your physiology, because psychology and physiology is a false dichotomy. And so it does change you.

Peter McCormack - 00:46:17
All right. This is going to be a bit of a flip now, because there are other things I want to talk to you about. The documentary, brilliant, loved it. Very interestingly, and I'll get hammered for this by any friends at home, but it's changed my view on Trump for whatever. Not to say I'm more of a supporter, but more making a better attempt to recognise what is the truth and what isn't. But coming over as a British person to the US ... This is like my 60th, 70th time. I come all the time, love the country, love coming here. But when I first started coming over, for me, conservatism was bad, right? If you were a conservative, you were closed-minded, and if you were a liberal, you were open-minded and you had an open mind to sexuality and blah blah blah.

Peter McCormack - 00:47:03
What's happened, the more I come over, this is changing. It's actually reversing. If anything, I would say I'm becoming more conservative and I'm becoming very suspicious of the left wing. That kind of ties into the Bitcoin stuff as well, because I've been learning about the history of socialism/Marxism, the differences. But I spent some time up in Wyoming recently with a conservative Republican, and what I started to realise is that ... again, it's similar to what we were talking about before ... there's this control in the media, which is, I don't know, it's really kind of fucked up. So it was really interesting to follow this, but were there any times where you would consider yourself a liberal or a socialist?

Mike Cernovich - 00:47:43
Yeah, I would have been considered myself a liberal, because socially I was always very much like, why can't two adults get married? You know, this is just dumb. Or conservatism would be very oppressive, because I grew up in a culturally conservative area where you couldn't do anything and everything was weird, creepy. Can't do that. You can't read these books. Even listening to The Grateful Dead was a real act of rebellion. I grew up in the '80s so this isn't like these rock and roll kids. Culturally, the dominant paradigm was just conservative. Footloose, right? There's a famous American movie where dancing is banned. That was kind of conservative. You couldn't do anything. And then the left came in and said, "No, we should be able to do some things."

Mike Cernovich - 00:48:31
And then the left went from, "You should be able to do some things," to, "You can only do these things, and you can't do any of these other things." And conservatives, because it's almost like a psychological orientation as much as an etiology, if you're a conservative you're like, "Oh, okay, everybody gets gay married now, I don't really care," because that's the conservative mindset. Now the left are the authoritarians, where you can't talk to this. You'll hear this when the podcast airs, "How dare you give him a platform?"

Peter McCormack - 00:49:00
Yes. Oh, God, I've heard that so many times. And I always say, "I don't give anyone a platform. I have a conversation." And I always say, "You shouldn't be harmed by having the conversation. You should open your mind up to the knowledge," but it starts to feel very fascist.

Mike Cernovich - 00:49:14
No. Left wing fascism, left wing authoritarianism's on the rise, where not only you can't have a platform, but most of the things people don't like me for are either misunderstood or they're from years and years ago. I always think it's funny where the left is saying in America, if felons should have the right to vote, they should be able to get jobs. Like, okay, I'm not a felon. I actually have no criminal record. But if I've made bad jokes 10 years ago, I should never have a life ever. Again, there's no underlying philosophy of it where they say, "Well, if you commit a crime, you ought to be able to get a job." It's just more like they have that default position, not based on any kind of underlying deep philosophy, but that's just what they've been told to believer as their bundle of beliefs.

Peter McCormack - 00:49:57
Well, who was the comedian that had the Oscars?

Mike Cernovich - 00:50:00
That was Kevin Hart.

Peter McCormack - 00:50:01
Kevin Hart, yeah. I was watching the Dave Chappelle recent Netflix thing, which had a really weird thing around the reviews. I don't know if you followed that, but I was watching that. It was talking about, that was the thing Kevin Hart always wanted, he wanted to present the Oscars. That's all it was about. He finally gets it. Someone digs up an old tweet. Yes, perhaps tasteless. But he then loses his opportunity to host the Oscars. And it's almost like you have to have had this clean, perfect history. I haven't. I know I haven't. I've done fucking terrible things in my life and stupid things. But how are we expected to have this perfect history?

Mike Cernovich - 00:50:35
Yeah. The ultimate societal question is what does a post redemption world look like? And that's what we're becoming, is post redemption. So Kevin Hart, the tweets were from 2011 or '12. If he just deleted the tweets ... That's what I tell people, delete all ... All my tweets auto delete after 300 and, I think, 20 days, because nobody reads their own tweets unless they're trying to dig up APO. So if Kevin Hart just deleted all those old tweets five years ago, nobody would even been mad at him. And this goes back to, they're mad at not who Kevin Hart is today, they're mad at an image that they have Kevin Hart from 10 years ago.

Peter McCormack - 00:51:12
But it's concern trolling, as well, right?

Mike Cernovich - 00:51:14
Some of its concern trolling and some of it is people create caricatures and artifacts of people based on what they read at any given moment. So they'll hate a person because they see that. That becomes who they are in their mind that says, "Oh, I thought I liked Kevin Hart, but then I saw he said this thing and now I hate the guy." No, no, no, you hated Kevin Hart eight years ago and didn't know it. Now you like Kevin Hart because he's changed or whatever. Or even with these jokes, like I watched the comedy special joke, they got him so bad. It was basically like, "If my kid were gay, I would throw them in a trashcan," or something like that, where they were more mad about the homophobia than the child abuse. Whereas me, I was like, well, I don't think child abuse jokes are funny, so to speak. Even though you get the humour of it, you know we actually wouldn't literally do that, but that's where people are.

Mike Cernovich - 00:52:07
They're programmed. Their minds are very programmed. It's very militant. Trying to find a reason not to like someone, and then they find that reason. They want to feel self-assured. And a lot of it too is because there's so much economic uncertainty right now that just the fact that if you're under 30 you got the short end of the draw, you know?

Peter McCormack - 00:52:26
Yeah.

Mike Cernovich - 00:52:27
It just sucks, there are ways around it, but it isn't like their parents' generation where you could kind of get a job and sort of figure it out. You probably have student loan debt. And rather than deal with that economic angst, you want to get all this moral approbation out of you.

Peter McCormack - 00:52:43
But there's some hypocrisy there, because there are certain people who talk about prison reform and we should have redemption for murderers. And at the same time, they will hold Kevin Hart to account for a tweet from 10 years ago. And it's like, I don't like the hypocrisy there.

Mike Cernovich - 00:52:56
That's because in politics and people don't have an underlying philosophy of why they believe what they believe. There's just a bundle of goods. For example, why is it in America ... I always ask people this ... Why is it that in America, if you're pro gun, you're probably pro-life or anti-abortion, right? There's no reason those go together, right? There's no reason. So you pick out all these political things. Or the same thing on the left, why would you be pro-choice but anti-gun? Because if you believe in choice and bodily autonomy, why ought a person not be able to own a weapon?

Peter McCormack - 00:53:30
The one I have is why would you be pro-choice but anti-prostitution?

Mike Cernovich - 00:53:34
Right. So you're pro-choice, anti-prostitution. Or with global warming, it's like anthropomorphic pocentric global warming. It's like, okay, so if you tell me you're pro-gun and pro-life, I know that you're skeptical of climate change. Why? There's no unifying philosophical theme between these issues. It's just that politics is about allying with people on various issues, and your job as a person who wants to be intelligent, as you say ... Yeah, why can't I be pro ... like I like AR-15s and I also think people pro-choice, because I don't think babies should be born into say bad homes or something where they might be harmed or whatever. And I think climate change is ... Why can't you have all three positions? But if you don't, you're going to get attacked for that one position you don't have one side or another and then you have to conform to that side.

Peter McCormack - 00:54:23
I'm at that point now where I'm thinking I'm just stepping out, because there's things I like from the left, there's things I like from the right, and I don't want to just identify with one side. I'm almost becoming apathetic to it. That was why the documentary was really helpful to me. It opened my eyes to a number of different things. For example, the fake news part with regards to ... Say, Donald Trump would say, "All Mexicans are rapists," right? I'd heard that, but I didn't know the truth behind it. And now I'm starting to get really frustrated at the media. So another example would be the impeachment the other day. I wasn't aware of the history of Fox News until I watched The Loudest Voice. Have you watched it?

Mike Cernovich - 00:55:03
No.

Peter McCormack - 00:55:04
It's the series with Russell Crowe playing Roger Ailes. I didn't even know of Roger Ailes. So I watched that and understood that Fox News is conservative. So what I did, it was after the impeachment, I read on Fox News and I read it on MSNBC, and then I just realised, it's like information warfare. There will always be two sides to a story and I don't want to be sucked into that. So it's like, what can I do? The only thing I can do is step out of it, is not watch this and not vote and not become part of it.

Mike Cernovich - 00:55:31
Yeah. Or, or it becomes like me, it's like my full time job, so to speak.

Peter McCormack - 00:55:35
Yeah. Well that's different, because what you're doing is opening other people's minds to it.

Mike Cernovich - 00:55:39
Right. There's one example, and that's why in Hoaxed movie we create more of an infrastructure on how to think about the world and how to think of media, where it's just a narrative. One classic example, people will say, "Well, Trump made fun of the disabled New York Times reporter." You're like, "Well, that sounds pretty bad." And you can show one clip of Trump doing it in reference to a certain lawyer, looks damning. And then you're like, "Oh, wait." So this is where you want to become more of a ...

Mike Cernovich - 00:56:05
Like I was a big, big fan of Robin Hanson, Overcoming Bias, is where what's the baseline rate, though? So you always want to look for the baseline rate. You're like, "No, no, Trump's made that gesture 20 times, 20 different people." So it's realistic within the terms of probability that he's going to happen to make fun of a person who has that gesture. And then you find out, okay, so he wasn't actually making fun of the guy, or at the very least there's reasonable doubt because he had done the gesture many, many other times.

Mike Cernovich - 00:56:33
And you look at how you construct a narrative and this is what you do with the laws. If you're on one side of the case and I'm on one side of the case, all you're doing is creating a narrative about why I'm 100% wrong. There's no room for rationality, because then you look weak, and then all I'm doing is the opposite. It used to be, we would view our media as like an arbiter of truth, so to speak. They're like the judge. The media's job was to say, "Well, hold on a second, here's Trump making that gesture in reference to a New York Times reporter," and then, "Oh, but here's him making it in reference to Ted Cruz, and here's him making it referenced in other times."

Mike Cernovich - 00:57:09
And then a judge might just say, "Is it becoming of a president to do this? You're 70 years old. This is kind of dumb. Maybe grow up a little bit." But no, it's inconclusive. We don't know that he was actually using it to mock a disability or whatever. But no, no, no, no, no. So this is what you would expect. It's like, that's not actually what you're going to get. And it's like that, again, on every story. With the media coverage again of Ross Ulbricht was very much like, "Oh, he was a drug trafficker and they were selling children," is another narrative, and murder for hire thing. The media created all that stuff.

Mike Cernovich - 00:57:42
That's why I think Bitcoin people are a little bit more skeptical of the media, because there's something that's called Gell-Mann amnesia, which is that you're an expert in one area, and you read a newspaper article and you say, "This is just bollocks," and then you turn the page and you forget that it was bollocks, another page. You're like, "Oh, wow, this is completely right." With crypto people, though, I think there's been so much fake news about crypto that you're just like ... It's enough to overcome the Gell-Mann amnesia, because it's like every day there's some kind of new lie about it.

Peter McCormack - 00:58:17
But do you think you can be a journalist without bias or you should just forget that and just be very honest about your bias like you covered in the film?

Mike Cernovich - 00:58:26
There's a number of ways to look at it. One is that I bet you if you asked the 100 journalists about Bayesian probability and updating their priors, maybe one would even know. We tend to think that these are sophisticated thinkers and truth tellers and everything. They're about 110, 115 IQ people. So a lot of them, their biases are unconscious and they don't even realise ... For example, there's confirmation bias, and you'll see a story and you just can't get out of it. You need a high degree of self awareness and also a high enough IQ to realise that.

Mike Cernovich - 00:58:59
Or if you're biased, there is going to be a dopamine response. So if you hate Trump and you get a story about Trump that's good, you're just not going to feel the vibe. You're not going to want to work that up, right? But if you think you got him good, then your dopamine kicks in, your receptors kick in, and now you're creating this self-fulfilling dopamine cascade, and now you're loving it. This are the way biases train. The bigger thing is that people who are intelligent and are able to understand the news is to just think in terms of more of like Bayesians, right? It doesn't have to be 100% one or the other.

Mike Cernovich - 00:59:38
For example, I don't know that Trump was mocking the reporter. I would give it a 10% probability he was, because I've seen enough clips of him doing that gesture that ... but he still might have been. That might have been his intent, but I've seen enough videos that I'm certainly not 100% sure, which ... Half the country is either, he didn't do it, the other half is, he did it. Whereas, if you just look at things more probabilistically, you're like, "Ah, I don't know, 10% maybe if we were going to bet on it." That's another way I like to think about things in terms of betting markets. So if we're going to bet on it, what odds would you get me? Right? That'll also clarify your thinking a little bit.

Peter McCormack - 01:00:17
Do you think we're focused on the wrong things almost, in media now? It's becoming a distraction to the policy work, what people are doing. It's almost become like a personality competition. I say a personality competition, which is controlled by the media, who are led by their sponsors. It's just kind of like this weird world now.

Mike Cernovich - 01:00:34
Yeah. There's a quote, something like, "Television ratings are democratic and that should terrify you about democracy." I think it's less democratic, but yeah, they're chasing what people want. The New York Times has a record number of subscriptions. The people love Fox News, bang in the ratings. Actually, if you were a right-wing talk radio person, you wanted Hillary Clinton to win, because your ratings would be 2x and 3x. Because hate gets more clicks. Drama gets more clicks. Ryan Holiday wrote about that in Trust Me, I'm Lying, and in his own journey you could tell that he becomes jaded. But if there's a headline that says, "Bitcoin guy cheats on his wife," everybody's going to click on that, right?

Peter McCormack - 01:01:15
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Cernovich - 01:01:15
If you click on, "Bitcoin guy has healthy relationship with wife and kids-

Peter McCormack - 01:01:19
Nobody gives a fuck.

Mike Cernovich - 01:01:19
... nobody cares, right? So in a way, we're victims of our own preferences.

Peter McCormack - 01:01:25
So is it just a case of accept it and build up a tolerance to it, or should we be trying to get a better media, and can we get a better media?

Mike Cernovich - 01:01:32
I don't know that we can get a better media, but we can be more sceptical. For example, we were told Assad gassed babies, and people were just like, "Well, I'm not really sure I'm buying it this time. That's a conspiracy theory that he ... the media is like conspiracy theory." People are like, "Look, man. WMDs. We've heard it enough. We know you want to invade Syria." And then when you looked in the story, you actually found out that Assad was just about to get a bunch of money, so like you just won't do it. That goes back to, we have a conflicting view where like, "Assad is a madman." But if you look at him, no, he's actually a rational actor.

Mike Cernovich - 01:02:11
Same with Gaddafi. Gaddafi was a quite ... Somebody can be simultaneously evil and rational, and this bothers people because of the cognitive dissonance. We're taught rationality is seeking truth and platonic, and therefore you're a lovely good person. No, no, no. They're just moving chessboards and they just don't care what happens. So if you understand these dictators that way ... Like Saddam Hussein, that was a lesson for all of Americans, and I think even a lot of British people, is that we might not have liked what he was doing, but what he was doing was rational for his own ends and maybe had been the rational moves to make in that kind of area, that part of the world. So skepticism when they want to get us into a war is definitely on high and we should keep high alert for that, but all the day to day stuff, who cares? Doesn't really matter.

Peter McCormack - 01:03:01
So actually then, both sides of the media benefit from a war zone?

Mike Cernovich - 01:03:05
Oh, yeah, and that's why we-

Peter McCormack - 01:03:06
Whether it's politics or actual war.

Mike Cernovich - 01:03:08
... that was why war was the central ... we covered it a lot in Hoaxed, and that was why war was part of that act, or segment, you'd call it. Here's Fox News, we love it. Bill O'Reilly, "Got to go to war." People on CNN. "Oh, this is like beautiful fireworks display. Why? Because, it's great. It's live. Because we want to watch the bombs, the mother of all bombs. This is what we want. So they're appealing ... Again, in many ways, one of the curses of humanity is being a victim of your own preference. There's a line that might not be politically correct, call it like the gypsy curse, but maybe you get what you wish for, right?

Mike Cernovich - 01:03:45
This is what we want to watch and then we get it, we're like, "No, we don't. There's actually human implications to war. We don't really want it. We want to watch it happening like as a video game, but we don't really want to have it." It's like, that's what you wanted, this is what you wished for, and enjoy it.

Peter McCormack - 01:03:59
You're watching it with that perverse curiosity that draws you in.

Mike Cernovich - 01:04:02
Yeah, there was an old blog, one of the best blogs of all time, called The Last Psychiatrist. And he... hard to explain. It was mind-blowingly deep stuff. One of his lines was, "If you're watching it, it's for you."

Mike Cernovich - 01:04:15
People go, "What's that mean?, Well, I can't believe this show. This is garbage."

Mike Cernovich - 01:04:19
It's like, "Okay, but you're watching it. This is for you. That's why you're watching it." Then you realise you have to take more responsibility for your life.

Mike Cernovich - 01:04:28
When people tell me, "Oh, I watched that and it made me depressed."

Mike Cernovich - 01:04:30
I'm like, "Okay, they knew it would make you depressed. That's why they gave it to you. You must've wanted to watch it."

Mike Cernovich - 01:04:35
"No, I didn't want to watch it."

Mike Cernovich - 01:04:37
Then that even ties into Earl Nightingale. I think it was called the... Either the Strangest Secret In The World or the Saddest Secret In The World, which is that whatever you're doing or wherever you are, is exactly where you want to be. That quite offends people, especially if they're not in a good place in life.

Peter McCormack - 01:04:54
Yeah, I'm just processing that, but yeah. You're right. Yeah.

Mike Cernovich - 01:04:56
Yeah. It's like that's where you want to be and that's why it's called the Strangest, The Saddest Secret is that's your life. That's what you want your life to be.

Mike Cernovich - 01:05:03
”How dare you say that!"

Mike Cernovich - 01:05:04
It's like, "What do you do to change it then?" right.

Peter McCormack - 01:05:06
Yeah. That resonates with me on a number of levels. Okay, I'm here doing this interview now and I love it because I want to be. I think I should probably drink less. But I keep drinking because I want to be, because I make the choice at that time to do it. And you can take that to an extent. I remember I had this friend when I was a youngster, so he used to love watching the beheading videos. Right? You know, fucking horrible things. But you know, I watched a couple with him and they fucked my head up.

Mike Cernovich - 01:05:31
Right.

Peter McCormack - 01:05:32
But I made the choice to be there. I don't know. I've never heard that term.

Mike Cernovich - 01:05:35
Yeah. Then part of that is your own internal struggle where you think, "Well I should quit that." But you brought up wine. I'm the same where I'm like, "I just like wine though." But I've rewired my mind such that I can... I call it... Drinking wine doesn't make you a scumbag, but I call it "Just be comfortable accepting that you're a scumbag." Because if your self image is that, "I'm not a scumbag. I'm this monk like figure," then I can't believe I'm drinking wine again. But if you're like, "Yeah, I'm just as fucking scumbag, you know," drinking wine, then you don't think that you shouldn't.

Mike Cernovich - 01:06:09
I've actually... I quit at least once or twice a year. I just don't drink for a month and see if I get any kind of withdrawals and I never do. I'm like, "Okay," because I know life with wine in my life is better. It just is. I enjoy it, the process, experience, the taste of it. And when I don't drink... And that's weird too, is I don't drink other alcohol. So if we're out of wine, I have some Japanese whiskey maybe for a cigar night or something. I don't tap into the whiskey. But if I tapped into whiskey then maybe I'd be a little nervous.

Peter McCormack - 01:06:37
You're missing some good whiskey. Yeah, I like a good whiskey sour.

Mike Cernovich - 01:06:39
Japanese whiskey.

Peter McCormack - 01:06:40
I like a whiskey sour with a bourbon.

Mike Cernovich - 01:06:42
Oh, then we've got to get you into the Yamazaki and Hibiki and the premium Japanese whiskey.

Peter McCormack - 01:06:48
So where's your worldview at the moment? Because like I say, your life now is probably very different from 10 years ago. You've lifted the lid on a bunch of things. Everything's... like it's a really fucking crazy world right now, we're potentially or supposedly headed into global meltdown in terms of the economy, global meltdown in terms of the environment. Wow. We've got like this crazy politics situation. What do you make of it all?

Mike Cernovich - 01:07:12
Sure. I hold two views simultaneously, which seem contradictory, but they're not. And this is, I think being comfortable with an Eastern way of thinking because the Western mind isn't used to that, which is with paradoxes. Simultaneously, it's the worst time to be alive in the best time to be alive. And people-

Peter McCormack - 01:07:28
Yeah, who've got loads of shit and we're all miserable.

Mike Cernovich - 01:07:30
Yeah or not. You're not miserable. I'm not. But you have to really work at it to not be.

Peter McCormack - 01:07:34
Yeah.

Mike Cernovich - 01:07:34
So it used to be, there's a concept called the cultural guard rails. It used to be like... I was actually reading a book on Paulo Coelho, he wrote the Alchemist, but he wrote sort of a memoir called Hippie about a point in time. And I was reading, there was a French character in there and he said, "Oh yeah. You know, the nice thing about France is if you just show up to work and you kind of do a pretty good job, you can live a nice life." Kind of blew me away because that's certainly not France now.

Mike Cernovich - 01:07:56
But it used to be in America, unless you were black. This is of course too why there's all this conflict with MAGA and it's not something that Trump or Trump's supporters, I think take seriously enough. If you say Make America Great Again, culturally that's going to be filtered through like, "Oh, so like Jim Crow?" Because in Jim Crow, if you were black it was over for you, right?

Peter McCormack - 01:08:18
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Cernovich - 01:08:19
But if you're a white, you'd go to college or you would go to the factory and he'd marry his sweetheart. There was no such thing as like an incel or something like that, right? So if you just sort of, again not to ignore the black experience, which was to use as an example, is if you just kind of showed up and did the job, you'd be all right. You wouldn't live to be a billionaire or whatever, a millionaire, but you'd be fine.

Mike Cernovich - 01:08:41
You're not. You're fucked. It's not going to be fine if you just kind of show up and kind of work, you're fucked. It's over for you. You're going to be an incel. You're going to have no money. You're going to be destitute. You're going to be confused. You're going to be mad at the world because all the signals coming to you from the matrix are actually wrong and counterfactual. But if you do break free from that... There was a... like in 2015, I lived and I just grew up poor digging through trash cans for spare aluminum to sell at the scrap yard.

Mike Cernovich - 01:09:09
I lived off a blog for like four years and I lived quite nice off a blog. That would not have been possible 20 years ago. 20 years ago I just would've had some kind of job, or 30 years ago, some kind of job there. I self publish my books. Why? Because no publisher is going to want to deal with me. You couldn't do that. You want to do a podcast? Well, how are you going to get on the radio? Was Ed Sullivan going to have you on his show?

Peter McCormack - 01:09:31
Nope.

Mike Cernovich - 01:09:31
You're not. But you really have to break free from all the cultural conditioning. So if you do that... I know guys live like Roman emperors, like Nero and Caligula would be. You know, other than the killing people. You know, they would be jealous because it's like, okay, you're able to make some good money online and if you're a single man or even a single dad, kids aren't that expensive. That's one of the things that it's just, if you're not running the rat race is not really that expensive. But if you're a single man, yeah. You learn how to hustle a little bit online. You learn how to be broke. You learn how to be poor. You learn how to make a little bit of money and now you're like 25, 30, 35 traveling the world, doing your thing, and you realise, "World travel is not that expensive once you get there. It's just the plane ticket." So it's amazing. Right? It's never been better.

Peter McCormack - 01:10:17
Never been easier.

Mike Cernovich - 01:10:18
Never been simpler.

Peter McCormack - 01:10:19
Yeah. I mean, I can turn up here with two mics, I can record it. I can publish it. I mean, up until six months ago, the first 12 to 18 months, I did it all myself. I engineered it, I published it, I got sponsors, and now I've got a guy helping me. But you can do this. I mean, Joe Rogan can get the same audience or a bigger audience than mainstream TV.

Mike Cernovich - 01:10:39
Sure. But there's a whole... You have to learn how to talk. You have to read a lot to have something interesting to talk about. You have to maybe get knocked on your ass a few times, you know? So there's all that rolled into it too.

Mike Cernovich - 01:10:50
And again though, it never would have been... You're not handing your resume to the podcast inc, right?

Peter McCormack - 01:10:55
No.

Mike Cernovich - 01:10:55
"Here's my resume. Can I get on air for five minutes?" You can really do it and you can try, and that's why it's amazing. But younger people are not educated that way and they're educated just, "Oh, just go to college and get a job. "That's what they're being told. What does that even mean? What's a job even mean anymore? There's no... You're going to change careers. There's all kinds of different pivots. So this is breaking, to some degrees, breaking free.

Mike Cernovich - 01:11:20
But I would say even today, if you're in America, go to college, get a job, buy a house. Those are the three pillars of Western society. realise we'll go to college now. I mean maybe, maybe not. Are going to take out student loans? Then don't even think about going.

Peter McCormack - 01:11:38
Yeah.

Mike Cernovich - 01:11:38
"What am I going to do instead?" It's like college... I don't know how many... Because a lot of my mental development, self-development people are like, "What if I don't go to college?"

Mike Cernovich - 01:11:46
I'm like, "Is the college going to go away? You can't go in a year?"

Mike Cernovich - 01:11:49
"Well, yeah."

Mike Cernovich - 01:11:50
"Okay, then. It's going to be waiting there for you when you're 19 or 20. So don't go to college with student loans. Get a job."

Mike Cernovich - 01:11:56
"What does that even mean? Get a job?" What if we told people instead-

Peter McCormack - 01:12:00
It means get a cubicle.

Mike Cernovich - 01:12:02
Yeah. If you're lucky, right?

Peter McCormack - 01:12:03
Yeah.

Mike Cernovich - 01:12:04
And so why don't you tell people, "Don't go to college. Instead read books and then start a business. Don't ever buy a house. Live out of Airbnbs." Then if you have kids and you want a permanent place for them to form relationships with locals, that becomes... But that's not even on your radar until you're in your thirties if you're a man. So why are these people 19, 20...

Mike Cernovich - 01:12:24
And then what happens is that, this is why they have so much rage, they're like 28, "Why don't I have all these things I've been told all my life I should have."

Mike Cernovich - 01:12:31
It's like well, first of all, you probably wouldn't want them. You'd probably buy house and you'd probably be bored. The mortgage would stretch out. And you didn't really learn much in college. You probably hate your job. What was the point? But you were told to want all these things, and now people are angry and raging and this is the kind of the mass society zen.

Peter McCormack - 01:12:50
God. Yeah. It's kind of depressing when you think about it, but I also just see opportunity.

Peter McCormack - 01:12:55
Yeah, I don't know.

Peter McCormack - 01:12:56
Right. There's two other things I wanted to cover with you. One, we're kind of going to go back a step. But I did want to ask you about it because it's something I'm learning and about now. I can't get away from not talking about Bitcoin for a little bit because it's my background. But I did want to talk to you about Antifa because I'm learning about them at the moment and it doesn't make any fucking sense to me. It seems like a group of people who just want to have a fight. And also there doesn't seem to be enough condemnation about it from, certainly from the left. I mean the right obviously condemn it, but there doesn't seem to be enough condemnation. What's going on with it?

Mike Cernovich - 01:13:26
Right. So Antifa is a group of soccer hooligans-

Peter McCormack - 01:13:30
Is that what it is?

Mike Cernovich - 01:13:31
Who wraps himself around ideology because of the media will sort of give them a pass. And here's what I mean, I read a wonderful book... I don't know, 10, 15 years ago Among The Thugs about the writer had embedded with all of these different soccer hooligan groups and the fights he'd have with the trains and everything. So there's always a desire in human nature to inflict violence. It's unfortunate but it's part of the nature. What the left, or rather what people who want to inflict violence have learned is that if you want to inflict violence, then you should not be on the right. You should be on the left because the media will give you a pass. They won't report on it when you're violent. Or if they do, they'll say, "Well, you're actually confronting white supremacists. So in a way you're the good guys." Even though a lot of the people are being victimised that didn't have anything to do with it.

Mike Cernovich - 01:14:19
For example, there's a famous case out of Philadelphia where Antifa beat up three Marines and they beat up a Mexican Marine, they called him S-P-I-C, which is a quite loaded slur in America. No coverage of that other than a local press. So could you imagine if three, there's a group in America called Proud Boys. So could you imagine-

Peter McCormack - 01:14:40 Yeah, read about them.

Mike Cernovich - 01:14:41
Yeah. Three Proud Boys, and they've done some hooligan-ish things too. Could you imagine if they had done that to a Hispanic Marine? "Oh, this group is anti-American, can you believe it?" But instead you get one little story in the Philadelphia Inquirer about it, that kind of offbeat paper. Otherwise people would never even know.

Mike Cernovich - 01:14:58
That's why Antifa is becoming more and more violent because there's always going to be soccer hooligans, but usually you take some kind of effort to shut them down or to limit their space or if you have them in a stadium, you have them in their own little area. And if they get particularly too rowdy, that's when the police come in and kind of crack a few skulls and let them know like, "Hey, you know, you guys are going a little too far."

Peter McCormack - 01:15:20
But I think we should be looking at the Proud Boys an Antifa in exactly the same way if they're going around beating people up. It's the same fucking thing.

Mike Cernovich - 01:15:26
Well, and that was the tension is that the Proud Boys would do mutual combat with Antifa who would initiate it. So there was this great video, remember this is a case study-

Peter McCormack - 01:15:36
But that is like soccer hooligans. But they make a phone call and they organise a meet up. So to me it's just a bunch of people who want to fight. They don't stand for anything really.

Mike Cernovich - 01:15:42
No. Well, the Proud Boys, they wanted to fight too, right? That's where my side is a little bit too... One thing I've always said, "Let's just not be children. Let's be adults and then talk about what people really want." So the Proud Boys did form is a sort of protection group because these Antifa people were going to show up regardless to protest Ann Coulter or whatever.

Mike Cernovich - 01:16:03
The original Proud Boys was like a drinking club and it was a few guys. But then as groups grow up, you get the bad actors in there. And they didn't purge the bad actors like they should have like, "Oh no, this guy's actually like bad. You need to not have it." So Antifa, they're going to show up anywhere and they're going to get violent. They're going to get violent on random people and they are hooligans. And the US media though, because it's very left wing biased they'll say, "Oh, they're confronting white supremacists."

Mike Cernovich - 01:16:32
No, that's not actually what happened at this one. Those Marines weren't white supremacists, you know. Do you support the troops? But that's where we are. That's why the media gives... I mean, the media gave Stalin a pass. The media has given Pol... Nobody says, "Oh look at Pol Pot. Pol Pot has a Cambodian genocide." Nobody ever talks about that. This left wing illogical based violence does get a pass.

Peter McCormack - 01:16:56
Yeah. Well I mean I don't see Andy... is it Andy, Andy Ngo? Andy Ngo?

Mike Cernovich - 01:17:00
Andy Ngo, yeah.

Peter McCormack - 01:17:01
I don't know how to pronounce that correctly. I don't see him as a white supremacist.

Mike Cernovich - 01:17:03
Right, exactly. And in a way they went too far on him.

Peter McCormack - 01:17:07
Well they're going to end up killing someone.

Mike Cernovich - 01:17:09
Yeah. Yeah. They bike locked a guy in the head. They don't have a body count yet. So they've cracked quite a few skulls and just by accident, a chance... Like for example, the bike lock professor as they call him, Eric Clanton. He hit a guy with a real, proper bike lock. The guy could have died. Bleeding, stitches. He just got lucky. They just got lucky that you didn't catch a murder rap for that.

Mike Cernovich - 01:17:34
So they will get a death and the problem is that a lot of this could have been avoided if there had been a crackdown.

Peter McCormack - 01:17:40
So what would you do then? Are they terrorist organisation, is it that bad?

Mike Cernovich - 01:17:45
Well, so I have two answers for that. One is the Glen Greenwaldian answer, which was that we call everything terrorism even if it's not, and it just becomes this catchall term. So my answer to that is if we're going to call the Proud Boys an extremist group, then you have, to at the very least, use that same kind of terminology on Antifa. Or if we're going to call whatever movement domestic extremism or domestic terrorism, then we do have to call it that because terrorism is politically motivated violence. You're inflicting violence on people to impact public policy. Then you're like, "Why isn't war terrorism?" Right?

Mike Cernovich - 01:18:22
That brings you to a lot of harder questions but on the micro level, we generally get that if I come up to you and you're walking down the street and I just shove you against a wall because I don't like you, that's not terrorism. But if I shove you against the wall because you're Catholic and I'm Protestant and I'm with the IRA, then you'd classify that as terrorism.

Peter McCormack - 01:18:43
Well, I mean, I'm wondering about it. I understand why some people are liberal. I totally get it. I mean, I've been there myself, right. But I don't understand people who claim to be liberal but don't condemn Antifa. It doesn't make any sense. Actually, didn't you stand up in front of a bunch of journalists and called them out for this?

Mike Cernovich - 01:19:00
Yes. I was in the White House Press Briefing Room.

Peter McCormack - 01:19:02
Nice.

Mike Cernovich - 01:19:04
Reporting from the White House and once the briefing ended, I said, "Why will nobody ask about violence against Trump supporters and Antifa violence?" In the room, people just started laughing and they actually thought it was funny. This was before the Steve Sculish shooting, which again just by luck, just by luck, nobody died. There happened to be an officer there who was able to take action. So Antifa, in terms of not killing people, and it's weird because the people who are surviving you should call lucky, but when there's a dead body, things change really quickly.

Mike Cernovich - 01:19:36
Even too with the, so called in America, they call them the alt-right or whatever became some weird thing that started off as one thing and then it morphed into something else.

Peter McCormack - 01:19:45
Anyone who's conservative or shows any... I'm sure you've been called it, right?

Mike Cernovich - 01:19:48
Yeah, yeah, exactly even though I have a biracial family. But as properly understood, there were a lot of people who are racist, antisemitic in the real term, not as in how that term is tossed around where you just go to their profile that they say they don't like Jews. Like, okay, that's antisemitic. That isn't like, "Oh I can't criticise Israel. So you're calling me an antisemitic because you're saying…

Mike Cernovich - 01:20:10
It's like, "No, no, no. Like they're telling you right now that they don't like Jews, so that's anti-Semite." But they, before the Charlottesville whatever fiasco, before that woman died, they were given a lot more kind of space to operate, at least by the social media companies and tech companies. Where they're like, "Oh, it's just free speech and nobody's died," these people are bad and there was always that sense of like nobody's died.

Mike Cernovich - 01:20:33
And that's where Antifa is. They're like, "Well they're bad, they beat up some people but know have they killed anybody yet?" But the day they do kill somebody, there's going to be quite a counter reaction.

Peter McCormack - 01:20:44
Yeah, I couldn't agree more and it does worry me, and I don't understand why there's no condemnation of it. Where are you on the whole censorship side of things? I did an interview with Andrew Torba, gab.com, like really interesting, really interesting, really enjoyed it. There is clearly censorship on Twitter. I then went and spent some time on gab.com and I just thought it was a bunch of ignorant fucking nonsense. I've discussed this with friends of mine and one of mine said, "Look, words do have consequences."

Peter McCormack - 01:21:11
We have a very different approach to censorship in the UK, we have hate laws. Where are you on with this?

Mike Cernovich - 01:21:18
I believe they should have a right to exist, but I don't post there because I'm not... I don't quite like what I see or how people engage or interact. And when it comes to free speech, the way I look at it is that you've never had the wholesale slaughter of people and society with free speech. Stalin cracked down on it. Hitler. People forget Hitler never won a democratic election, right? People when they read World War II, they like, "Oh, we hate the German people. They voted him to power."

Mike Cernovich - 01:21:47
It's like, "No, no, no. He won small amount of the vote and then the Reich tried to fire, then they just took over. And then you're just kind of stuck where you can resist the government and they'll kill you."

Mike Cernovich - 01:21:56
And of course everybody says, "Well, I would have."

Mike Cernovich - 01:21:57
It's like, "Well, did you resist the government when they were bombing people and there's all this collateral damage?" So it's a different... People contextualise things differently. So with Hitler and the Nazis there was censorship. That's why when people didn't know the Holocaust was happening, a number of Germans didn't. And if they had known, their perception of things would have changed. The same thing too with Stalin and the Gulags. Just the regular people kind of had a sense that something was wrong, something was kind of off but didn't really quite get known. Or like with China, 50 million people starving. Like you get kind of a sense that things are bad, but you don't really... So you need censorship to impose those kind of views on the people.

Mike Cernovich - 01:22:36
You've never had a massacre in a place where people could talk freely because... Although I'm not naive about human nature, I don't think you're going to get 51% of the population to agree to say Stalin's Gulags, right? Or to agree, of the German people to agree to what was done to the Romas, and the Jews, and gays, and all the experiments and everything like that, or even with the Japanese. So if you do have free speech, it is a very important stop gap from mass, mass genocide.

Mike Cernovich - 01:23:09
Now the more challenging issue that I have, and this is because we don't know about it empirically, but... So that website 8chan was shut down. 8chan there had been two people had posted manifestos to the site and one was a copycat, and they were clearly meeting there. So the question that I think is difficult is what if it's empirically proven that if you do sensor a certain category of speech, then lives will be saved and these massacres can be prevented? And then it becomes...

Mike Cernovich - 01:23:38
Because before all this, we just occupied under the assumption that you're always going to get some bad actors but on balance, it's like a net good. And then it's like, "Well what if we can limit this certain kind of speech?" But then we know that that always creeps over to other types of speech.

Mike Cernovich - 01:23:53
So there's a long way of saying, I think it's very complicated. I think that the most of the people who are in tech companies get that. The media doesn't because they're monolithic and not particularly, these aren't the greatest thinkers we have in our world, where you just have to be able to say "Yes, it's very complicated."

Mike Cernovich - 01:24:11
And the tech companies of course have data that other people don't have, so I imagine that they know like, "Oh no, you probably... By censoring these people you're actually not going to stop one thing. Or maybe you'll stop another thing. Or maybe the government's monitoring them." So for example, if you have a terrorist group recruiting on social media, you know that they're probably going to recruit people. But now you also know that you can get feds embedded in there and now you can maybe find out where the headquarters of it are. So it could be like a net good to let them recruit.

Mike Cernovich - 01:24:41
But imagine to hear you say that. Imagine you say, "No, we want ISIS on there because we know they recruit people, but I think that we can stop a few people."

Peter McCormack - 01:24:48
Yeah, you can't say it.

Mike Cernovich - 01:24:51
No, no. That's where these tech companies are, is that they're allowing a lot of these people on the platforms knowing that they're being infiltrated and that... But then something like Christchurch happens or something like the Unite the Right, you know, thing happens with Heather Heyer. Then it becomes a problem.

Mike Cernovich - 01:25:09
The media trains people to focus on discrete examples. So you couldn't say, you would never... You'd be out the next day, the story would. But if you said, "Well, you know, we did the math and we found out by letting these bad actors be online, we're going to get 10 people get killed. But if we ban them, we couldn't stop this other shooting where 50 people were killed. So just on balance, 40 lives were saved."

Mike Cernovich - 01:25:32
Even though that's utilitarian. There's a whole philosophical line, like the trolley problem. These are actually... Ben Shapiro even got that problem where they said, and he's an Orthodox Jew. They said, would you kill baby Hitler? And his answer was he wouldn't because Hitler at the time was a baby and wasn't who was. The whole media were all freaked out. They're like, "No, you learned in this in Ethics 101." You know, who do you kill? What's innocent? What's guilty? Realise they're more complicated than people want to admit, and that's where these tech companies are and that's where I am too on censorship.

Mike Cernovich - 01:26:05
So as it is now, I think it's a net good that you have places where... And then this too is where monopolistic forces kind of come in. So if there were three Twitters and three Facebooks and three YouTubes, then I would be pro censorship as to one or two. There should always be a place that is more censorship resistant. And as long as that exists, then my views would change a little bit. But there has to be some kind of outlet.

Peter McCormack - 01:26:32
All good. Right. Listen, I can't let you go without talking about Bitcoin.

Mike Cernovich - 01:26:35
Yeah.

Peter McCormack - 01:26:36
I've done for the last 18 months, but I don't... Like a know you've been involved, you have an interest, but I don't know much about it. What's your kind of background to this? Where's your interest lie?

Mike Cernovich - 01:26:46
I think interest in Bitcoin in probably 2015-ish.

Peter McCormack - 01:26:49
Okay. Good time.

Mike Cernovich - 01:26:51
Yeah, it was a good time for a number of reasons. Including, it was like $450 or $500 bucks and I remember actually, my funny Bitcoin's story was somebody who I respect just enough to, if they say do this, I do this person said, "Go buy $5,000 worth of Bitcoin."

Mike Cernovich - 01:27:08
I was like, "Okay." So I put it on a Trezor or whatever and I forgot I had it, you know? The $5,000, don't get me wrong, is still quite a lot of money. But then, and I forgot I had it, and then Bitcoin was at like 15,000 I started like panicking, like where is it? Is it going to load? You know, like you're shaking, you know. Don't get me wrong, $5,000 is a lot of money, but you're like, "Oh my God," and you're... I'm upgrading my firmware. "Shit, do I want to upgrade my firmware before I do this."

Mike Cernovich - 01:27:37
And then you're distributing because you'll put maybe 10 Bitcoins on one keep key and you didn't think anything of it and then you're like, now you have 10 keep keys and ten... And it just became like a whole, a whole cluster, you know? So I can't imagine the people who have like millions of dollars in Bitcoin, like how much anxiety they have.

Peter McCormack - 01:27:53
Fuck yeah, I mean like even when you're transferring like $1,000 worth. Like have I got the address correct? Even though you copy and paste and every time you copy and paste it, it should work. Yeah. You do the anxiety, but do you look into Bitcoin just as a monetary item or do you actually look into it a little bit deeper? Like, because you mentioned censorship resistance was like Twitter then. Do you look at it within terms of money? Do you see the benefits?

Mike Cernovich - 01:28:15
Oh no, yeah. I did a whole podcast a while ago on Bitcoin as a philosophy. Just decentralisation as a philosophy and whether or not... And Bitcoin too is being open in full disclosure. So there's an idea floating around out there, I don't know who came up with it or populated it, but there could be enough people with enough Bitcoin that you could hold it in escrow and then negotiate with like a sovereign and say, "Okay, we all want to go to Panama. There's a thousand of us." It's not like money where he can fake how much money you have. It's like, "No, here it is."

Peter McCormack - 01:28:50
Here's the ledger.

Mike Cernovich - 01:28:51
Yes, there it is. And you can negotiate with a sovereign and say, "No, no, no..." Just things are getting... Because one thing with the US, and I don't know if it's like this in the UK, you can tell me if it is, but I don't hear... Everybody who is visionary in the US has the same question. So where's everybody going to go?

Mike Cernovich - 01:29:08
And it's becoming a more intensified conversation. People don't sense that the US is the future anymore. And with Bitcoin, there's the idea that you could negotiate with a sovereign and you could do some kind of smart contract and transfer things over as long as certain things happen under certain conditions. And I like that idea. I like that idea of decentralisation as a way of life, as it isn't the Fed's dictating how much it's worth. It's people outside of sort of the matrix, outside the system buying and selling and negotiating in a way that's off, again, the central authority's power.

Mike Cernovich - 01:29:47
And then of course there is a sense that you can shut down some things, but with Bitcoin you can never fully turn off the radio signal.

Peter McCormack - 01:29:57
Yeah. When we had one of the first big use cases, obviously the Silk Road we've talked about. For me, I was able to buy cannabis oil for my mum when she had cancer. And also we had it with WikiLeaks when they were switched off by Visa or MasterCard. They could accept payments. We've got it now with like North Korea and Venezuela and Iran, they are able to use Bitcoin to bypass sanctions. So it allows you to get, I guess get by the rules.

Mike Cernovich - 01:30:23
Same thing with South Africa too, yeah. That's where a lot of people are putting your wealth. That's again why people have to become comfortable though with every energy has a top side and a downside. And a lot of the times the rules are dictatorships. If you're in Venezuela, you're in a dictatorship. The more challenging thing happens is when you're using the Bitcoin to bypass rules that may be people agree are moral or ethical and that's a different conversation.

Mike Cernovich - 01:30:49
The Bitcoin still though has enough user adoption. You still have to offer it eventually into some kind of currency if you want to spend your money. And that's what the government's afraid of, and all governments are, is once there's widespread adoption, you won't have to have that. And then when you do that, you won't...

Mike Cernovich - 01:31:06
I'll give you the example, right now there are a number of people, I think gab included, who can't get payment processing.

Peter McCormack - 01:31:13
Yep.

Mike Cernovich - 01:31:14
And you would think, "Well, how can that be capitalism? Payment processing, there's hundreds..." The myth of capitalism is that there's a free market competition between all a hundred thousand payment processors. But he can't get one. There's not one that could let him? Well, no, because then you realise it's actually Visa or MasterCard that shuts them off and those those have monopolies. So we live in an era of capitalistic monopolists. With Bitcoin, especially as it becomes more widely adopted, you can make it very hard for a person to to make it. But you can never shut them down fully. And that's why I'm long a Bitcoin is an idea long of as a currency, there's going to be more and more of a demand for that.

Peter McCormack - 01:31:52
I also like it as an opportunity just to reduce tax receipts for the government and as more people use Bitcoin, you essentially, you defund them to a certain extent. They can't keep printing dollars to fund the war machine or to fund more regulation. I like it as a chance to just, I don't know, just reduce the size of the state.

Mike Cernovich - 01:32:10
Right. And that's why Bitcoin and media are analogous in the sense that... You know a lot of people say, "Well, it seems bad because everybody has their own reality on social media, their own little peer groups."

Mike Cernovich - 01:32:22
And I said, "Yeah but social media hasn't managed to start a big war like Iraq yet, which the media did. Or the media even did it with the sinking of the Lusitania and World War I. From the US, you're like why was the... First of all, one of the weird things when you read about wars, why was World War I even involving the UK?

Mike Cernovich - 01:32:40
Well I guess you're on the same continent. I can get it. Why in the world was the US even doing it, right? Then, of course, you learn currency and you become more cynical about life. That was all done with the media. Vietnam war, media. Vietnam war would not happen today because of social media. And Bitcoin's the same way where even though there is some bad actors who can use it in bad ways, you have to always balance. This is a mistake people make. You always have to balance a choice on alternatives. People act like it's either Bitcoin or no Bitcoin. Bitcoin, bad, Bitcoin, good. You're like, "No, no. There's..." We know what decentralised monetary policy is. We know how this works. We know how the bail house works. We know how asset bubbles work. So compared to that, will it be better or worse than that? Well, probably it'll be better.

Peter McCormack - 01:33:31
All right man. Well look, this has been awesome. What's coming up for you now? What are you working on? Give me, you mentioned a book. Any more films?

Mike Cernovich - 01:33:37
Yeah, my next book Audacity: How To Go From Nobody To Somebody talks about mindset, what happens when you make it, the perils and pitfalls. A lot of different ways to be your life and I think you'll quite enjoy it. I'll get you an advanced copy when I have them.

Peter McCormack - 01:33:51
Nice.

Mike Cernovich - 01:33:52
And after that, I don't know. Because I'm at the level now where I'd like to do another film, but I want to do something like really big. I don't want to just show up. Hoaxed I think was really big, so I would want to do a film at the level of Hoaxed or even bigger. And people of course can watch Hoaxed at hoaxedmovie.com.

Peter McCormack - 01:34:10
How complicated was it to do that?

Mike Cernovich - 01:34:12
Oh, it was a lot of work.

Peter McCormack - 01:34:13
Yeah, intense.

Mike Cernovich - 01:34:15
Yeah. Especially for the editors because the directors ended up being the editors too, and it's a lot of work putting together a lot of footage, VFX, but they killed it. I was really impressed with it when I turned it out.

Peter McCormack - 01:34:26
Yeah, it was great. I watched some Vimeo the other day, thought it was... Honestly, I thought it was brilliant. Actually I've have just given a copy to them here for letting us use it.

Mike Cernovich - 01:34:31
Oh, perfect.

Peter McCormack - 01:34:33
Any advice for me ongoing? Early in my journey?

Mike Cernovich - 01:34:36
Well, a lot of, as you rise up and become more famous, you do just have to accept that people are going to believe things about you that aren't true. And be just namaste about it. They're going to believe it. Who cares?

Mike Cernovich - 01:34:49
And also you want to avoid the mistake of, "What if I tried to appeal to more people?" Because the people who love you, you'll lose them and the people you try to appeal to, were never going to want to have you anyways. So always remain loyal to your base followers and listen to, especially too if you ever sell, it becomes very useful is when you have saved 10,000-15,000 people who have bought something from you, you can start to cross reference the hate mail with your customer list. You're like, "Oh, my customers aren't hating me. The hate mail is all coming from people who aren't actually customers."

Mike Cernovich - 01:35:23
So know who you're listening to you and don't just think that because people are talking to you that they have your best interest in mind or even that they want you to change and changing would help them. They might just be people wanting to throw a monkey wrench into your plans.

Peter McCormack - 01:35:37
All right man. Well I appreciate you coming on Mike. Appreciate you coming up here.

Mike Cernovich - 01:35:39
My pleasure.