American Thought Leaders - The Untold Story Behind Reagan’s ‘Tear Down This Wall’ Speech | Producer Mark Joseph

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

Ronald Reagan first visited the Berlin Wall in 1978, during the Carter administration. While there, he reportedly told his aides: “We’ve got to find a way to bring this down,” says Mark Joseph, producer of the 2024 film “Reagan.”“Reagan” is a biographical movie starring Dennis Quaid as Ronald Reagan and Jon Voight as KGB agent Viktor Petrovich.In this episode, Joseph shares why it took nearly 20 years to bring this film to the big screen, and what it was like to film during the height of COVID-era restrictions.Joseph, who’s also the founder of MJM Entertainment, is the author of “Making Reagan: A Memoir From the Producer of the Reagan Film.”The movie is based on Paul Kengor’s book “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.”That book, Joseph said, helped him understand Reagan and his passionate drive to end what he called the “evil empire,” the Soviet Union.“There have been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books written on Ronald Reagan, but Kengor was the only one who went to the church Reagan grew up in and said: ‘Can I see the sermons that young Ronald Reagan would have heard as a child?’ And the current pastor said they’re in the basement, in the box. Nobody has ever asked to see them before.’ So when he opened the box, he found a lot of anti-communist sermons by the preacher,” Joseph said.The film received sharply divided reviews: On “Rotten Tomatoes,” 98 percent of the audience gives a positive rating, but only 18 percent of critics’ reviews are positive.That may be a new record.“We have the greatest gap between critics and film goers of any movie ever made in Hollywood history. ... I’m really proud of that. I don’t make movies for critics. I make movies for the film goers,” Joseph said.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

There is something of an instinct for all people, I think, to flirt with communism and socialism. But ultimately, socialism has to be enforced at the point of a gun at some point. And that's the problem. Today I sit down with film and music producer Mark Joseph, the founder of MJM Entertainment. We discuss his 20-year journey to bring the film Reagan to the big screen and how the film portrays Ronald Reagan's battle against communism. Reagan's work in Hollywood, was he a great actor, no. What did he do?

He opposed the communist information. of Hollywood, came to Washington, D.C. and opposed it. So you could see the arc of his story. Why did it take 20 years? It's a non-cynical movie in a cynical time. The film received sharply divided reviews with a striking gap between audiences who love the film and critics.

At Rotten Tomatoes, the film goers are 98%, critics are 18%. So that 80 points is the biggest. That's the biggest gap ever. The 98 speaks very loudly. Joseph also shares his plan. for future films on American icons, aiming to tell their stories in full. I love to tell American stories. I think we have to tell these stories in their totality,

good, the bad, the ugly. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellick. Mark Joseph, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Great to be with you. Thanks for having me. So it took you 20 odd years. 19, but who's counting? to make the Reagan film. That's a lot of dedication. Is that typical in the industry?

What was driving you here? You know, it can be happening in our industry. And people that are far more successful than I, like Steven Spielberg and others, it's taken them years to make a movie. So it's not uncommon, but it is a long time. I had a lot of few grayer hairs when you started this movie. But I talk about it in the book,

what started everything was, I was driving in the Midwest with my wife and four children in a minivan, just driving, minding my own business, driving down the highway, and I pulled over for speeding. And the officer said, you are 20 miles over the speed limit, and you have to appear in court in person. And I thought, this is crazy. I can't come back here and said, no, you have to appear tomorrow in court. But I looked at the ticket, and it said, you must appear in court in Dixon, Illinois. I knew that was Ronald Reagan's hometown. so I had unknowingly been driving through Ronald Reagan's hometown.

I'm pulled over for speeding, and I have a day to kill in that hometown. And so that's where all this started. Fascinating. And first of all, I love the film for old disclosure. Part of the reason we're doing the interview. And, you know, you captured something in there, which I guess I wanted to believe, which is that it was Reagan's faith and strong anti-communism that really drove him. feel like that comes out in the film, but you've also, the film has also been criticized saying

that's too simplistic. How do you react to that? Reagan was a simple man from a simple place and a simple time. And so I would embrace that and say that's who he was. But at the same time, there was complexities to him as well. The anti-communist part in particular, what really changed the ballgame for me and helped me understand Reagan was to understand where the anti-communist impulses came from. We based the movie on a book called The Crusader, and that author, Paul Kengor, you know, there have been hundreds and hundreds of books written on Ronald Reagan, but he was the only one who went to the church Reagan grew up in and said,

can I see the sermons that young Ronald Reagan would have heard as a child? And the current pastor said they're in the basement in the box. Nobody has ever asked to see them before. So when he opened the box, he found a lot of anti-communist sermons by the preacher. and so now everything made sense to my mind of this child was almost programmed as a young child to have an impulse to want to oppose communism from his preacher and then we learned that an anti-communist activist named B. Kirchman visited Reagan's church when he was 17 years old.

So now all the pieces are fitting together in the puzzle that Reagan's work in Hollywood, what did he do? Was he a great actor? No. What did he do? He opposed the communist infiltration of Hollywood. Hollywood came to Washington, D.C. and opposed it. So I could see the arc of his story when I discovered that. And it made a lot of things make sense about who he was and what his job was. I wonder, maybe it's just, you know, America and frankly everywhere in the world, we seem to have this weird love affair with communism. Like, what I mean is like I was just thinking about Greg Lukianoff was doing a recent commentary about Lenin.

Lenin was a uniquely evil, horrible being. But sometimes we think Lenin was actually, you know, just a little bit bad. And it was really Stalin that was the really bad guy. But Lenin's whole approach was to use terror, right, to drive people into submission. Right. Like he invented it as a method, right, to basically facilitate, you know, this perpetual revolution, so to speak. I wonder if that's the reason that people are, not wanting to believe that it was maybe part of it was really as simple as him understanding

how bad the system was and everything was animated by that. Well, this man, B.E. Kirchman, he was a Soviet refugee who toured America and would give these speeches at different churches and different functions, warning America about this. Yeah, there is a, there is something of an instinct for all people, I think, to flirt with communism and socialism, but ultimately socialism has to be enforced at the point of a gun at some point. And that's the problem. You know, there's a, there are various polls that 40% of American young people think socialism is a great idea. Sounds great. Let's all share. But at some point, you run out of other people's money, as Margaret Thatcher used to say,

and out comes the gun and the bayonet. And that's what they don't realize that. And also, you know, I think it was very interesting, John Voight, you know, who played Victor in our movie. I told John Voigt, this is going to be the greatest acting stretch of your career for Hollywood's biggest right-winger to play a communist. That's acting. But he took it on. But he told me something I've never forgotten. He was in the Soviet Union before when it was the Soviet Union

and afterwards when it was Russia. And he said, I noticed that the people's eyes were dead in the Soviet Union. When I came back later, their eyes were alive. That there's something about the eyes being the window to the soul. When people have freedom, their eyes come alive. that that was fascinating so something like the distinction between like a totalitarian system and while emerging out of one or or or trying to emerge I mean they weren't you know fully successful clearly with doing that but that's what

you're talking about yeah yeah it's just it's a very I understand why young people are attracted to it but they need to hear the testimony of people who live through it If I was in charge of America, I would say that only Cubans and Vietnamese should run for office in America because they understand their parents fled these evil systems. And, you know, my son and I get our haircuts from a Vietnamese barber. And I always say, please tell my son the story of how you got in that rickety boat and crossed the water and risked your life to get out because you wanted freedom

because my son needs to hear that story. What about polls? Poles, well, we'll make a special exception for polls. Well, no, I just, to your point, I just had Robert Kiyosaki on the show, and I somehow didn't know how deeply anti-communist he was, right? I wanted to talk to him about, you know, this rich, basic rich dad, poor dad approach, right? That he's, you know, become very famous. I think he told me he sold 48 million of those books.

Like, that's unbelievable, right? But no, it turns out that, again, because of that experience, right? He was actually in Vietnam during the war. He was deeply anti-communist. I wasn't surprised, right? I wasn't surprised. And that's part of the lesson in the book, too. But I hadn't really conceived of it that way, if that makes sense.

Right. Yeah. Speaking of testimonials, okay? You, I think, interviewed at least 50 people from Reagan's life for this whole. whole process. What was the thing that you learned that, you know, of course, you established that anti-communism was a central tenant. Right.

But what other things did you learn that were perhaps surprising? Yeah, I spent time with about 50, 55 of those that knew him, a Supreme Court justice is like Justice Scalia and Justice Kennedy, Edwin Meese and Judge Clark, and just a while, the surgeon who operated on him after he was shot, who was still alive, by the way. Just fascinating, fascinating stories. And I would kind of steal little lines from each one and put it into the movie. In particular, Judge Clark told me during the Iran-Contra scandal. Reagan came to him and said, what should I do?

And Clark told them, do what you do best? Tell him the truth. Don't lie, don't opt to skate, don't stall, just tell him the truth. So I stole that line and put it in the movie. little bits and pieces of him like that. Also, you know, I talked to one of his age, Peter Hannaford. You know, frankly, everybody loves Reagan. And so everybody says nice things about him.

And I said to Peter, you got to help me out here. I'm trying to make a movie about a human being. And he can't just be perfect. You got to give me something. Not dirt, but something. And he said, well, I said, what would make him upset? So, well, if we over-scheduled him, he would have a flash of temper.

I said, well, tell me what happened. So one day we scheduled him. He came and saw the schedule, and he threw his glasses across the table and said, fellas, I cannot do all this in one day. I said, great. Now we have a human being who gets upset just like the rest of us. So those are the kinds of things that really helped us to grasp the character. By the way, you can see this in the campaign.

You see one or two examples of that little flash of temper in San Diego, the last day of the 1980 campaign. He's being heckled, and he finally turns to the guy and says, ah, shut up. And it's like, okay, that's a human like the rest of us. He's not Mr. Perfect. That's what makes the movie exciting

that he's, you know, he has the same foibles that we all have, but he overcame those. My original director in the film was the director of Rocky, John Avildson. John passed away at 81 years of age before we began. But he used to tell me, don't forget that Rocky is not about boxing.

It just happens to be his job. It's really about the story of a man overcoming the odds. And he said, that's what our movie Reagan has to be about. Not about politics. That's his job. But it's really the story of a man who doesn't reach his destiny until 69 years of age. And he has lots of failures along the way. He's not a great actor.

He's not a great radio broadcaster. But that was all preparation for becoming president. So back to the beginning, why did it take 20 years? I mean, it sounds like you lost an important director. Yeah. And that must have played a huge role. Yeah, we had a lot of setbacks. So just to go through the list, our director passed away at 81.

So we found a new director to take his play. Sean McNamara, we did a terrific job. COVID really slowed us down. Tell me, so let's stop there for a sec. Tell me a bit about the reality of trying to film during COVID. We were the only major motion picture that was. was crazy enough to film during COVID. And my co-producer

John Sullivan came to me and said, I need a decision from you. Should we wait till it's over with or just shoot? And I thought about it for a second. I had friends dying on me. I thought, if I died almost making this movie after 18 years, I'd be pretty pathetic.

So I thought, you know, let's just go. I don't know what that means exactly. It's sort of like driving in a snowstorm and you can only see about two feet in front of you. But I just gave the, go order. And so we began right in the middle of all of it. I asked the government of Oklahoma, will you shut us down? He said, no, I won't shut you down, promise. But the federal government did. We had to operate by CDC guidelines. So twice we had to shut down for 10 days each time.

You know, there are a lot of people to this day. I saw them like this the whole time. I don't know what they look like, really, because we had masks all the time. When I arrived, arrived in the set. I said, can I go to a restaurant? And our medical person said, absolutely not. I said, well, can I go to Walmart? She said, that's the most dangerous place in the entire city. I said, well, how am I going to eat? And she just kind of stared at me. She said, well, we'll deliver groceries to your front door every morning. So it was really, really difficult. But we got through it. But COVID, I would also say the actors strike, shut us down for 108 days.

We also had because, you know, we had people doing special effects overseas. And so when the war broke out between Russia and Ukraine, we had to stop all companies working with those companies. So then we had to start all over again. And then just having investors who would cancel or various setbacks along the way, just made it a very, very tough experience. And but you wouldn't even notice that there's any. COVID restrictions in the film somehow. Somehow you very cunningly avoided that. Yeah, it was very tough. And, you know, we would have people on set whose job was to report back

to officials, hey, are they keeping all the rules or not? And so, you know, if a mask would slip off your nose, you would literally have somebody in your face saying, get that mask over your nose. I mean, it was just really tough. But I have to give Dennis Quaid the credit. He just really worked his heart out. And, you know, he would, he'd be watching videos on YouTube of Reagan just before the scene began. But there was one time, you know, we really wanted to avoid doing an S&L impression of Reagan because there have been a lot of fun comedic versions of Reagan over the years, Johnny Carson and so many others. In fact, Dennis's brother Randy did a Reagan for S&L one time. I remember one time coming up to Dennis between scenes and I said, just be Dennis Quaid.

don't try too hard to be Ronald Reagan. You already have a lot in common with Reagan. And I thought he did, you know, by the way, of those impressions, I keep thinking to Robin Williams live at the Met, there was this. That's right. That's what I remember. But it was also such a lie, actually, right? Because they kind of made him out to be this kind of idiot.

Well, my favorite one was S&L. If you notice that one, I think it was Hartman. he played a Reagan that was very interesting because they would do the silly version and as soon as the kid he'd be taking pictures of the kids and signing autographs as soon as the kids left the room

all of a sudden Reagan would pull down a map of Nicaragua and he would turn into this we're going to invade here and go here and so that was the one that was the exception almost as the opposite that there was a cold warrior behind the facade because it took some time

but but you know I think it was Kiren Skinner who definitively showed that in fact he was the author of a lot of the policy himself yeah one of his age dick allen told me that in 1979 eight or nine they toured the wall uh in west berlin and reagan said to his aides we've got to find a way to bring this down and you know they and we all at the time but wasn't that nice and i would like you know i'd like to ask santa claus for this for christmas and even when he said tear down this wall in eighty-sense

I remember watching him, and I wasn't a critic, but I saw that and said, well, isn't that a nice thought? It's not going to happen in our lifetime. But he believed it. The rest of us all thought maybe he was a crazy old man, but I think he really believed that it could be achieved. Well, you know, there's, I don't know if it's famous, but there's the whole, apparently they tried to remove that line from the speech multiple times, right? We have it in the movie. Exactly. The State Department folks, you know, people like Trump and Reagan with all their statements, they're not.

the folks, they don't like that kind of stuff, the State Department. So they tried to take it out. I remember George Schultz twice, and definitely he was trying to get it out. And he begged President Reagan, please don't say this. This is not helpful to us. But Reagan felt like it was important. And these younger aides kind of egged him on. And so he kept it in the speech.

Of course, it's a central moment in the film and a central moment in history, actually. Yeah, I think in our film Gorbachev is watching that scene and he sort of in real life, I heard from somebody that worked with him that he was sort of, oh, there he goes again, that crazy Reagan, he's sort of making fun of it. But I think it had an impact on the leadership. There was a Russian general who got drunk and told somebody I spoke to as they were drinking in their drunken state. he said, you know, Reagan was the first person who told us what we already knew about ourselves that we were in evil empire. But I think it's a psychological blow that somebody would say that to you because all the diplomatic niceties would keep people from being honest.

And Reagan calling them the evil empire was a psychological blow to their psyches. Fascinating. Well, you know, I'm just going to look up the name. Oh, yeah, Victor Petrovich was the name of the... John Voight character, right? That's right. So let's talk about Victor Petrovich a little bit. This character John Voight plays that is sort of looking at Reagan as this threat and explaining why he's a threat to the Soviet.

Is there any truth to this character? No, that's the character that we created that, but it's a composite based on. We know that agents followed him. We know that the Soviet newspaper is Vestia first covered him in 1947 when he was testifying before Congress. So we kind of took that basic nugget that they had begun following him. And I was inspired by two movies in that sense. One was, if you remember in the Rocky movie, there's a scene where Rocky is challenging the heavyweight champion of the world at the time. And, you know, the champ is worried about business deals,

and he's not taking the boxing seriously. He's making a deal. And there's one guy in his camp who's watching the TV and watching Rocky Balbo train punching a bunch of meat. And he says, champ, you've got to look at this guy. And nobody's paying attention, except for that one guy who sees the threat that Rocky poses to the champ.

And also the movie Blowout by John Travolta. There's also those two, the idea that, one person sees the threat, but the entire group doesn't. And so that was kind of our conceit with Victor, was that he's that character that spotted the danger of Reagan years before. And so when he comes in on Election Day and says, as tells Brezhnev, Reagan's going to be elected, he says, I've been warning you guys about this man for 40 years,

and nobody would listen to me. So that was always the fun character. But the first 10 minutes of the film, I wish I could take credit for it, but I actually had a dream and I dreamed those first 10 minutes. But I don't remember my dreams in the morning. Okay.

So as I was having this odd dream, I said to myself, if I don't wake up, I will never remember this in the morning. So I woke myself up and wrote it all down and went back to sleep. And that became the first 10 minutes with the KGB agent and everything.

Fascinating. So it was fun to see the dream in reality. And this was how many years into making. I had just hired my writer. Okay. So I, I would very apologetically called my writer and I said, listen, I'm so sorry to tell you this, but what do you think of this idea with the KGB agent and the whole? And luckily he said, that's great, I'm going to run with it. So he ran with that. But yeah, we wanted to create that kind of a fun idea that one guy saw the threat. The rest just thought he was a stupid actor. And that all those years, he was kind of warning the group, but didn't pay any attention to him. looking at kind of reviews a little bit. I didn't do it a ton, but I saw this, you know, there's people like me, I'm Polar, so we're kind of like genetically programmed to like Reagan, right? It's like it kind of cannot like not like Reagan.

I'm going to be a little bit glib here. But so I love the film, but I have that predisposition to love anything Reagan. Of course, the film got a lot of criticism and not just from the usual suspects. Like, what's your reaction to this? And you already answered the question. about the complexity, I guess. But in general, the feeling was that

there was this one-sided character. That was the overall thrust of what I heard, right? How do you react to that? That he really was so one-sided or they're just misinterpreting what they saw? Yeah, first of all, I think there's a number of different levels.

One of the criticism is the way we made the movie period, which is most movies, biopics, take two weeks in somebody's life and build on that as the structure. I didn't want that. I always wanted to cover the entire life. So I'm kind of violating one of the rules of filmmaking of covering an entire life from 11 years old to 84. That's fascinating. I didn't realize that, actually. Yeah, the Lincoln movie, I think it should have been called How Abraham Lincoln passed the 14th Amendment, not Lincoln. I just don't think you

can understand a man or a character unless you really know where he came from. So, first of all, I I knew what I was, I knew what I was, the rules I was violating doing that. But second of all, there's just a lot of ideological elements of people that were just predisposed. One reviewer said he left after 20 minutes, didn't even watch the movie and reviewed it anyway. But more fundamentally, you know, we've applied to Guinness World Book of Records because we have the greatest gap between critics and filmgoers of any movie ever made in Hollywood history. at Rotten Tomatoes. The film goers are 98% critics are 18%.

So that 80 points is the biggest. That's the biggest gap ever. Is it official? The previous was 65 points. For a movie called Boondock Saints. So I'm really proud of that. I don't make movies for critics.

I make movies for the film goers. And so, yeah, the 98 speaks very loudly. And the 18, I'm not bothered by it. I just, you know, on my side, like I just accepted the first. that I'm going to like it and I can't help. And quite frankly, I actually did think that Dennis Quaid managed to project Ronald Reagan and I,

which I was surprised me quite frankly. We're in a cynical age and my movie's not cynical. It's it, but I, you know, I'm proud of the actors. We had 25 of the most amazing actors and several of them I collected along the way. You know, I would say to one of them, I think one of them was Jennifer O'Neill.

I said, 15 years ago, I said, Jennifer, I want you to play, Reagan's mother one day. So I put these in my back pocket. And then you called her, then you, then you, then you called your card or yeah, I'd say it's time to, uh, but, but I, and I'm really proud of the fact that we have actors across the ideological spectrum. It wasn't just Reagan fans. And that was important. And so just to have, you know, the kind of depth of Penelope and Miller, who's an amazing actress and Jane Wyman, the actress playing Jane Wyman and so many great actors, Zander Berkeley,

playing George Shultz and Mina Savari playing Jane Wyman, I should say. So again, these are not ideological allies of Reagan, but they just saw the script and the work. So, yeah, I'm proud of the way it came out, and I was a little concerned because the New York Times review was a little

too positive. That made me a little nervous, because if the New York Times likes a movie, I'm not sure I've made it right. But I would just say it's a non-cynical movie in a cynical time. Yeah, I know. that was actually something I liked the most about it. But it wasn't a bit like Reagan.

Reagan was, I mean, I never met him. But to my eye, there wasn't anything cynical about Reagan. It was just straight up. Yeah. And I will say, you know, one thing that is not a fair criticism is that we only showed the good stuff. I mean, I very purposely put an entire minute of protest scenes of Reagan on all kinds of kinds of issues on AIDS, on, you know, medical issues in terms of, you know, the COVID, the vaccines that he passed, anti-nuke protests. So I went to that, we went to the band Genesis and we asked,

we wanted to get rights to the song, Land of Confusion, which is the greatest anti-Ragan song of the era. At first they said no. And then we showed him the scene. We said, look at guys, you wrote this song to oppose Reagan. This is an entire minute of Reagan hatred. Your song is finally achieved its purpose. Plus, we'll give you 200 grand. And they said yes. So I love that scene, but I really wanted the viewer to understand Reagan was not universally loved. It was about a very sizable chunk of Americans that really strongly disliked him. His own daughter joined protest marches against him on the nuclear issue. So let's not pretend that everybody loved Reagan. He always had a very solid 40% against him. Well, and this is what I discovered when I watched

Robin Williams live at the Met, right? Because it wasn't the nicest portrayal at all. Yeah. It was like he's kind of a, it was about him being a robot. They would often burn his, burn him, burn him an effigy in the streets. He was, of course, almost assassinated by John Hinkley. He had one or two other assassination attempts as well. So it's important to not, we're becoming a little rose colored in our looking back.

And oh, he was everybody's favorite grandpa. I had a lot of friends growing up in school who strongly their parents hated him. They hated him. And so I wanted to show that. And as far as there was no dark side of Reagan. He was a pretty simple person, but he had a lot of failure. And so we show him at 50 years of age, washed up, playing Vegas because he has to pay his mortgage payments. And he's got a beer bottle on his hands and throws it against the wall.

And, you know, I asked his friend, Pap Boone, I said, Reagan didn't drink, but can I put a bottle at his lowest moment. He said, absolutely, you know, when you're down and out. So, yeah, that's where the comeback begins. Back to Rocky. Reagan didn't drink. He didn't drink. Fascinating.

He didn't drink. But I gave him a beer bottle at his lowest moment. And that's the Rocky comeback moment where that's his lowest is playing Vegas, doing a ridiculous act with a comedy troupe and throwing the bottle against the wall. And that's where the comeback begins. I love the film. What's next with you? What are you up to these?

days. You know, I was, I'm foreign-born, even though my parents are Americans and I'm an American citizen, but I grew up my first 18 years of my life in Asia, in Japan. And so I always looked at America outside looking in. You know, we love to go to our American military bases and have a cheeseburger when we were kids and get a recess peanut butter cup and a milkshake. So I always loved America. And I still love America. I think it's a unique love. And so I love to tell American stories and we have so many great stories in the American story book.

You know, think about this last century, you know, Babe Ruth and Steve Jobs and Charles Lindberg and Reagan, Obama, you know, Trump, whatever. So many great, interesting characters that are Steve Jobs. So I think we have to tell these stories in their totality.

Good, the bad, the ugly. And so I'd like to tell more stories like that. I've got some other presidents and some of my rock stars. our friends and others that have great stories of redemption and overcoming difficulties. And this is how we remember our heritage of who we are, where we came from, and that we have a lot to be proud of in this country. I know we're in an era where we hate ourselves, and we're always psychoanalyzing

ourselves and second-guessing ourselves. But we have a lot to be proud of in this country. I love the fact, you know, as I tell my kids, you know, we're the country that overcame slavery that have been going on for thousands of years. and following Great Britain's lead. We got rid of it. We fought a Civil War to get rid of it. Wear that as a badge of honor

and all these interesting characters who invented the iPhone and the airplane and all these great things that America's produced. So I love our country, and I want to tell its great stories. Well, I'll be watching. You know, as a Canadian who is, I suppose, a rare American exceptionalist,

I mean, for me, I just, I can't help but be, amazed. I mean, it really is the system that inspired, you know, the other democracies out there in the world right now. And it's, and I think all of them are having trouble. There's also a certain impatience to America. Canada waited patiently, eventually got its independent, sort of. Americans can't wait, right? So there's a difference in our characters. But of course, there's wonderful things about your country too. But there's an impatience that's uniquely American. Absolutely. A final thought is we finish.

Well, I'm thankful for the work that you guys do in reminding people about the importance of freedom. And, you know, may it continue to spread around the world. And at the end of the day, you know, Reagan definitely played a game of psychological warfare against the Soviets and against communism in general. If you remember one time, he was doing a mic check for his show and he said, 1321, 1, 123, we begin bombing the Soviet. Union in five minutes as if it's a joke and of course this horrified the entire world and especially the Soviets who thought this guy may really be crazy but I think it was part of his calculation of doing that and he once said you know if

they want to keep their Mickey Mouse system that's okay with me and so part of it is just telling the truth about these institutions and when he said they are the he said they are the focus of evil in the modern world of course this horrified the diplomats as well. But there is a certain elegance to telling the truth to people that are abusing human rights. And I know you guys will continue to do that. Absolutely. Well, but I appreciate that. And so Mark Joseph, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thanks for having me. Thank you all for joining Mark Joseph and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host,

Janja Kellick.