Modern Wisdom - #575 - Michael Malice - Why You Should Take The White Pill

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

Michael Malice is an author, political commentator & podcaster. The 1900s saw some of the worst atrocities in human history. Evil was abound and the bad guys were on top a lot, with the Soviet Union being one of the most brutal examples. Given this, what reason do we have for any hope in the modern world? Expect to learn just how brutal the Soviet jails and gulags were, the torture methods used to extract confessions, how the Western Press were complicit in covering up Russian crimes, the incredible heroism and ingenuity used by people to get through the Berlin wall, why the bad guys don't have to win, Michael's justification for there always being hope and much more... Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on Cured Nutrition’s CBD at https://curednutrition.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy The White Pill - https://amzn.to/3vAtPfH Follow Michael on Twitter - https://twitter.com/michaelmalice  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Michael Malis, he's an author, political commentator and a podcaster. The 1900s saw some of the worst atrocities in human history. Evil was abound and the bad guys were on top a lot, with the Soviet Union being one of the most brutal examples. Given this, what reason do we have for any hope in the modern world? Expect to learn just how brutal the Soviet jails and gulags were. The torture methods used to extract confessions, how the Western press were complicit in covering

up Russian crimes, the incredible heroism and ingenuity used by people to get through the Berlin Wall, why the bad guys don't have to win. Michael's justification for that always being hope and much more. This is a period of history that I've always felt I should know more about and didn't. And after learning about it, it gives me a very new perspective on the way that the world I was born into came about. It also does, despite being brutal and atrocious and nothing short of pure evil for quite a lot of the examples that Michael uses, actually leave you with a pretty good sense of hope. The bad guys didn't win.

They don't always end up winning. And by taking that lesson going forward, it does give us a reason to actually believe that there is always something better that we can do with the world. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Michael Malice. I'm so nervous. Why? Is it because of all of the cameras in life? Yes. I'll be gentle with you.

I don't want gentle. I've heard that. So you were about to have an argument with me. Are you plans to have a potential argument? No, no, I had an imaginary argument. Okay. So do you ever get an imaginary argument with your friends? Oh, yeah, I fantasize about them all the time. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So this was the imaginary argument. I've been working on this book as long as we've been friends. Uh, two and a half years, as you would say. And you texted me over the weekend about Lewis Ling, right?

And he's chapter two. And I'm like, this fuck, can I curse? Cuss away. This Brit, this bloody Brit. That's the worst word that you could have used. This is what I could have called your Irishman. This bloody Brit has had all this time to read this book. He's not gonna have it done for the interview.

He's just going to talk about it personally when he knows how much I worked on it and how much it meant to me and how much I wanted to hear his perspective as an Englishman because Lady Thatcher is on the cover and she's a main figure in the book. And I was all prepared to come in, Huffin and Puffin and Chris did his homework. I'm afraid that there's nothing for you to Huffin puff about. So that was that was resurfaced by Readwise, which is a highlight. Oh, okay. So it had given it back to me because it's a relatively new recent highlight.

Now, the Lewis link thing, it turns out I actually did miss him because he was on the front cover of a previous book. Yes. So I maybe I have missed him once already. But my head isn't a little bit of a spin, because for all that everybody that's smart seems to talk about the Soviet Union and lessons that come out of communism and stuff. You know, lots of people, the lexas and the Peterson of the world or whatever seem to draw a lot of lessons from this. I frankly didn't know much about it, like if you'd

held a gun to my head and said, tell me when the Berlin Wall fell or tell me who the main characters were in the decline of communism between the UK, America and the Soviet Union, I wouldn't have known. So it has been a little bit like a fast track education through some pretty brutal elements of history. I didn't know it either. When I sat down to write this, I didn't know any of it. I didn't know why it was such a big deal that the Berlin Wall fell and what that meant. I knew in a, I was born in the Soviet Union, but I left when I was like one and a half.

So obviously I don't remember it in any sense. And though, you know, we were raised in my household with kind of Soviet inspired values for lack of better term. I still had no good idea of what it meant when it fell, how bad it was, what are the lessons? None of that. And I still don't have a good answer as to why the Cold War, which was the absolute primary foreign policy concern for over half a century for the West, is like forgotten. I don't know how to reconcile those two things, because starting from, you know, very quickly after the end of World War II up through 91, all foreign policy, whether in Britain, Germany, West Germany, the US, this was the filter.

This was the big concern. Is this person's house, this person can address the Cold War if you're talking about a Prime Minister or a Chancellor or a President? And if you ask people who brazen of is, right, who ran the Soviet Union for close to 20 years, what percent of educated well-read people, not people who are a little older than us will know, know who he is. It's a tiny percentage. And so when writing this, I still don't have an understanding as to why it kind of fell on my shoulders, because this isn't some hipster band that you probably haven't heard of.

This was the Cold War. And yet now, if you talk about it, they're like, oh, yeah, wasn't that like Labrador Rector issue history type thing? Yeah. And it's like, this is millions of people in many countries over decades, suffering things that all of us listening to this and everyone listening to this is in at least a semi-free country would find unimaginable. Just even the one aspect of the idea of knowing that whenever you're on the phone, it's tapped. How that would affect your phone calls.

Now, we have that here in the sense of the NSA, but not to the extent where, like, if I'm texting you and I'm making a joke about Trump or Biden, I have to worry. Not in the middle of the night. Am I gonna get fired? Am I just gonna be sat down by the authorities and be like,

what do this email mean? How do you know Chris? Who else have you talked about these things with Chris? And have no, I can't complain to anyone because if I'm complaining, I'm only going to make it worse. We can't wrap our heads around with that kind of lifestyle as like. And this was the norm for a lot of people. And that's even the easiest part to deal with. You just don't talk politics, but the rest of it, it's just was so pervasive and extensive and for so long and for so many people. And I don't understand how this, the New York Times has the 1619 project, which focuses on things which we can all agree are a major historic concern, you know, the slave trade, you know, is obviously a, you know,

a historical abomination. So the subject matter at least is important, even if there's spin on it, you know, is a certain skew. But this is something that's just not discussed. And I can't, I don't even have a hypothesis as to, I know I do have a hypothesis. The hypothesis is there's not an easy narrative, right? I had to find this narrative. It's not an easy story of, you know, it's, it's okay, they're the bad guys, but then why are we teaming up with them in World War II? And who are the good guys?

Are they Reagan? But is it really Reagan and Vacher? Because, you know, they went entirely to the heroes and the eyes of the press. So when you don't have, like the wars or the Korean wars called the Forgotten War because it was a stalemate, right? So since there's no narrative and you can't make it into Hollywood where it's like good winds over evil, they just stop talking about it. And when you stop talking about it, you're ignoring what happened to untold numbers of

men, women, and children who had to suffer needlessly and who are now being forgotten? And I'm like, I'm going to do something about that. The complexity of the truth is inconvenient for both sides. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, I'm going to try and do my best to summarize what I think is the reason or the message behind the book because a good bit of it is repeatedly being stamped in the face by these very, very uncomfortable brutal

situations that many people across Romania, Ukraine, but largely in the Soviet Union, Russia, especially, is that they're dealing with. But it's a book that's supposed to be about good as well, right? It's about good and evil. And it kind of does take a little while for me to get to the stage where I was like, oh, I kind of understand here. It seems to me that you have an issue with cynicism being used and weaponized as a reason for people to not have hope. What you have done is displayed some of the most egregious transgressions of humanity from

recent history. Very recent, you know, this isn't World War One. This is... Since World War One, almost exclusively since World War One, in 1917, right? Yes. So you've tried to put out front, this is how depraved and awful and disgusting human existence can become. And yet it didn't win. Yes. And yet people said that it would never be defeated. And yet it happened essentially overnight from everything to nothing in the space of no time at all, which means that when we are facing struggles in future, that degree of hope should be something that should be continued forward, given that life right now is not as bad as it was then, so the delta between where we want it to be and where it is isn't

as big to leap. How far am I off? I think you said it better than I could have. I would not change one word of that other than maybe Delta because people won't get that reference. And I'm being only a little glib. I think you articulated it perfectly. In one case, it was literally overnight. it was literally overnight. When Helmut Cole, who was the chancellor of West Germany, he's in Poland with Lech Valessa. And telling this, it's just, this is a very emotional book for me because when you see the photos of these people and their kids, and there are times when the people in charge were ready to start shooting them. And someone else was like, we're not shooting them. And you see these children, it's just like, you know, let's take, hear these stories of like, I think it was Seth McFarlane

who had a ticket on 9-11 and he like missed his flight. And he has, I think, that ticket framed in his house like a plane ticket. It's just like, you know, it's just terrifying when you realize this wasn't hypothetical Tiananmen Square was June 4th, 1989. So that year, 1989, when she'd sitting the fan, you know, East Germany, they're like, we want another Tiananmen Square. And they put the guns in the hands of the military. They gave them the bullets.

They were ready. So you had Helmut Kohl in Poland with Lake Wollessa, who was the head of solidarity and kind of the main figure in liberating Poland from communist rule. And Lake Wollessa says to him, you know, I don't think the Berlin Wall is going to be around much longer. I think it's going to be like a matter of a few months. And Helmut Cole laughs in his face. He laughs in his face.

Like Wollessa was, I believe, 46th Helock call. I think was 60 or something like that. And it goes, look, you're young. You don't understand how these things work. They take a long time. It was like patting him on the head that had a fallen. And it fell the next day, the real and wall, the next day. And like, and Helmock call literally says, there were so many quotes in this that I found that I was just like, I kept,

if this was in a movie, it would be ridiculous writing. And Helmet Cole says, I'm at the wrong party and it gets on a plane and gets his ass out of Poland. And what else is just great with the fall of the Berlin Wall and spoiling to the good parts is no one even bothered to call Gorbachev, right? So, East Germany is heavily backed by the Soviet Union. It was kind of a Soviet satellite state.

It was part of the Warsaw Pact, which was basically the counterweight tenato. All these countries agreed to have mutual defense. And Gorbachev wakes up, you know, in Moscow. And there's people dancing on top of the Berlin Wall and no bother to call him or let him know. And you can only imagine what's going on in his head. You know, it's just seeing that, but it was the same thing it was going on the head of people are over the world because the Berlin Wall for so long was, you know, imprisoning half of a city,

or three quarters of a city, in a sense. People were shot, children were killed in prison for trying to cross it. And then, you know, they're just drunk and blasting their stereos, you know, to have this thing literally overnight go from a symbol of imprisonment, torture, oppression to the biggest party on earth is something that I think even now it's hard for us to wrap our heads around. Going back to the cynicism thing, why do you think it is that it's so prevalent? Because it's something that both of us, I think, rail against. Both of us have a particular distaste for people that are unreasonably cynical.

And it's part of the reason that I ended up moving countries in an attempt to try and be around people who are less cynical. What is it that's so alluring about that cynical mindset? I don't know what I hate more than cynicism. Maybe like literal totalitarianism, but in terms of personality, I don't know what I hate more and what I'm more against, because it's such an absurd premise that's so easily disprovable. Cynicism, as I understand it, not in the Greek philosophical sense, but this idea that like

everything sucks, or don't get your hopes up, it's not going to work out. As long as you have one counter example, the thesis is disproven. And you're telling me that, and like if people like, I agree that most comedians suck. I agree that most movies suck. I agree that most books suck. I agree that most podcasts suck, especially mine.

None of them. Not one. There's no book that you read that you're a better person having read it. There's no movie you've seen where you're like, holy crap. I feel like I'm watching something from heaven. There's no song that you've ever heard that even when you hear it for the 20th time, it shakes your soul. None? And if you're that kind of person, that's on you. That means you are somehow guarded or damaged or something within. And I think there is an enormous amount of pressure.

And from what you and I have talked about, it's I guess more prevalent in British culture than America, but there is a lot of pressure of, you know, kind of just head down, go to the factory, do the work, don't hope for anything better. And it's just like, you don't have to become a king or a president or a CEO to improve, right? Not everyone has to be a fitness model to be in better shape, right? If you're someone who's 400 pounds, you can get down to 250, you're still a big dude,

but think how much healthy you are, you close, mobility, walking up the stairs, quality of life in every way. Is that such an unreasonable goal? But for a cynic, it's like, what's the point, quality of life in every way, is that such an unreasonable goal? But for a cynic, it's like, what's the point? You're still fat. Well, yeah, you are, but come on, these are extremely different qualities of life.

So I think it is a very non-rational, emotional perspective that tries to present itself as it's, as if it's realistic and cool headed. It's like, oh, you're naive. You're a polyanna. And like you pointed out the point, this book is, I'm not being hopeful in the sense of nothing bad happens. I'm not being hopeful in the sense of the bad guys aren't really that bad. The extent of the depravity in, youity, I was on my buddy Dave Smith, he's a very failed comedian,

his podcast, and it goes, if you read 90% of this book, you think it's the black pill. Correct. Because you're reading it and you're like, it's what I mean. I'm like, okay, chapter 10, it was still not here. And you're like, I just one example of the top of my head. I hope I get through it with my voice breaking because I still read it and just, it just, it just haunts me to my core. You know, early in the 1920s,

there are these children who were like homeless in Moscow and they were like, thieves, pick pockets, you know, you're your kid living on the streets, you gotta make do. So the checker come, the secret police round them up and they take them to the cellar of the prison and they start beating them and torturing them, and making them who you're working with, who are your colleagues, whatever the term they used, right, in your gang. They're kids.

They don't, so they take them in the car, and they drive around, they go point out who you're, and at that point, you're like, yeah, yeah, man, man, you know, anyone. And then they took them back, and they kept kept beating them and you hear the other prisoners like the adults Hearing these kids these kids screaming and these adult criminals are like they were losing their minds Just hearing the screens the children as the children realized they were being returned to the seller so When you hear about the so there's no Whitewashing in this book of how bad it gets you know what people have this idea that like there's no whitewashing in this book of how bad it gets.

But people have this idea that like, there's no point in fighting because, it's inevitable that the bad guys are gonna win. But they haven't, you know, like, I'm here if Hitler had his way, I'd be dead. If Hitler had his way, you'd be dead, right? Like, Britain was standing alone against Hitler for quite a while.

Or you'd be a slave, I don't know what you'd be, whatever. Point being, you know, this insistence that villainy always, why is it, you know, this is the line I had, you know, I think about this book, why is it that the bad guys always get what they want? Well, I can't get what I want once. And when you put in those terms, it's like, yeah,

you're right. And even if I can't, what I'm just gonna be like, eh, too bad. So I don't think it's a coherent worldview. I think it's a very emotional response coached in the mask of rationality and realism. And I don't think it's realistic at all. It's able to give people, it's a much more sort of pedestalized position to be in, right? If you say that everything's going to be bad, it feels like a well-research. The critic always feels like the guy that's well researched, right?

As opposed to the person that's hopeful, because the person that's hopeful that things don't happen have, and maybe this is actually reflected in terms of our, at New York chemistry, Andrew Huberman taught me about this thing where if you tell someone that a movie is going to be really, really good, that dopamine release, even if it's as good as they expect it to be as less, and if the movie is less, good, then they expect it to be, then they lose even more. Sure. So what you're doing is by being the cynic,

you're saving yourself from ever being the person that over-prom promises. So maybe reality does deliver the world better than you'd hoped. Well, brilliant. That's a bonus for you. And oh, well, you know, I'm just trying to keep everybody's feet on the ground. That seems like a noble cause, right? So you named each of the different chapters, most of the chapters up until toward the end after this famous, I'm Rand speech, a passage from a speech that she gave. Why, what's the special to you about that particular speech? So there's a, there's a, in Prague, there's a, a museum of communism.

And I visited what there when I was in Prague several years ago. And I remembered the captions on the different exhibits were worded in a very kind of idiosyncratic way. Because in a Western museum, you would have to be kind of scholarly, you know, even the Holocaust Museum, it's going to be kind of... This is what it is. Yeah, very kind of emotionless matter of fact. And I remembered that in this museum of communism, because, you know, the checks were under the boot of the Soviet Union for many decades. It's like according to this ideology, we would all have food, but in reality, and thanks to their Demented, this Demented reality, we were all starving. And there was one caption they talk about how you know how like on the side of a

Paca cigarettes, it says, you know, smoking this will be dangerous to your health. Well, in the same way, living in a communist country will be dangerous to your health. So it was very much like this kind of FU. And I sent my my protege, a tray was in progreso and I go, can you, I guess I'm like, I don't, can you get me photos of the captions and he went through it, took, send them all. And this was, you know, over this past summer. And it was really a gut punch. And this was after the book was largely done, because that was the first moment when I realized to what extent it encompasses every aspect of the people living these countries' lives.

You know, we can't imagine what it's like as Westerners to live in a country where every aspect of your life has to be run through a politically correct filter. Now people here complain about wokeism or they hate Trump, but you can go to the sports game. You can watch some shoot a movie, you know, Jerry Brachheimer movie or something stupid. You can watch how I met your mother. There's nothing political about it. It's just, but, and we can sit here and talk about how much we hate Trump or we hate Wilkis and whatever and there's no consequences. But to live in a country where even your friends are turning and spying on you and you have

to watch what you say. And at work, everything's in this context. Every movie, every song, every TV show, every newspaper, how it encompasses it affects you, we can't wrap our heads around it. So Rand was testifying in 1947 in front of the House on American Activies Committee, and she was the only person testifying the only witness who had lived in what became the Soviet Union. And the Congress people were pushing back at her because they were just like, what she was

saying to them was fantastical to them because they were of this idea that we have it one way, the Russians have it a different way, but people are all pretty much the same all around the world, which is true to that extent. This congressman from Pennsylvania goes like, don't they have like, have picnics and visit their mother-in-law? And, and you could sense the exasperation of her voice. And she says the quote, which is on the back curve of the book, where she goes, look, it's almost impossible to convey to a free people what it's like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship. She's like, I can give you a little, a lot of

details. I can never completely convince you because you're free. And she breaks down like just try to imagine you're in constant terror from morning till night and at night you're waiting for the doorbelter ring where you live in a country where human life means nothing less than nothing and you know it where you don't know who's going to do what to you when because there's no rights or law of any kind. And this sense, which I grew up with to some extent, it was kind of passively fed into me. You've told me about what's that concern that you have? You sometimes worry about giving

people pieces of information because how can you be used against? Yeah, you run the filter in your head. Like the sense of never being entirely safe is something that I don't think Americans thank God can wrap their heads around. Because they think, I think, in so far emotionally, you can kind of get to the point where, you know, you go to school and they're teaching you lies and then use favors of full lies, and then the movies are full of propaganda.

So we can kind of get to that. But in the sense of like there's nowhere else to go, we can't really appreciate what that's like. So that kind of was the theme, you know, trying my best. And again, I also can't, I've been to North Korea, but it's one thing to, beautiful country, when would I live there. It's one thing to visit,

because I knew I could get my ass out, right? It's another thing to be like, this is the entirety of my reality from the damn born to the day I'm going to die. And there's no alternative to this. And, you know, just how pervasive that is. I don't think any of us know what that's like to have a life that is effectively without choice our entire lives. It's the difference between being homeless or going camping. Yeah, yeah, but you know, even with homelessness,

it's what if you're homeless and everyone else is homeless? That, I mean, that's the difference. Because when you're homeless, you used to have a home, you could still have a shelter. There's ways to change your environment. But yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it. Given the atrocities that occurred throughout all of the 1900s under Communism, how the fuck did people not foresee the issues that were going to occur?

Well, is it only obvious in retrospect? I think that's a great question. How did that not foresee? I think a lot of people did foresee it. Michele Bakunin, who was Marx's big rival, he had an essay from 1867, which is in the anarchist handbook, and he just dissects Marxism. And you read it, and you're like, this guy, not only predict the Soviet Union, he predict the problems of the Soviet Union, prophetic, very prophetic. And the quote that if I could sum it up in one sentence, it's his quote

where he says, if the people are being beaten by a stick, they're not much more modified if it's called the people stick. So when you have the and even if you the argument was this is going to be temporary right we're going to have this kind of oppressive dictatorship the proletariat, we're going to purge these evil elements from our society and once that's done and everyone's working for the sake of everybody else, and the parasites are kind of destroyed, everyone's gonna be, my hard work is not gonna be going towards Carnegie and having ath mansion for him. It's gonna be going towards the people. I'm gonna work less.

There is a kind of coherence to it. In the course of time, these methods will be abolished when they've become unnecessary. Yeah. Yeah. And Emma Goldman was on the cover. She sat down with Lenin. And she's like, you know,

because the socialist argument was under capitalism, you're free to starve, right? But under socialism, the individual will be allowed to flourish. So she sits down with him and she goes, people are getting locked up for their political views. There's no free speech like this is not what we're about. And Lenin goes, this is like a like a bourgeois privilege. Like we're in a time revolution. Once this kind of civil-russian civil war settled, then we're going to be being reintroducing freedoms. And it was

a complete lie. Once the Russian civil war, War as she saw personally was stopped. Then they just doubled down even more and even Lenin's erstwhile colleagues from other, like the anarchist, the Mensheviks, they were all locked up. And when Lenin adopted their views, the Mensheviks views and the Mensheviks started pointing out, goes, if you point this out, that is being counter-revolutionary, you're going to go to jail. So even pointing out the hypocrisy became a felony. So, you know, yeah, very quickly it became clear what this means in practice. And God bless her and her partner in crime, literal crime, Alexander Berkman, they fled the Soviet Union very early on. They went to the west. They said, guys, this is a complete nightmare.

These are people are not helping the workers. They're like, we're for violence. We're not like pansies here. I try to kill Frick. We're for bloody revolution. We're for stealing food if you're starving. But this is not what we're about. They're pressing the say exact people we're supposedly for and the Western selectrials

who love have and other people do the dirty work were like, oh, you don't get it, or like, it's fine. So that kind of, to me, was very disturbing and this is something that happens to this day when you have these eyewitnesses, you know, speak their truth and testifies to what they saw and you have someone who went to Harvard be like,

oh, you don't get it. Read a book. Talking about anarchists, especially in the US. What was the story of Lewis Ling? Oh, God. Lewis Ling's story. I love to be such a badass. Lewis Ling was one of seven men.

There was a, I forget the year in the late 1800s, there was a rally in Haymarket Square in Chicago. This is when after the Civil War had ended, they thought there was gonna be a third American Revolution. Yeah, the first one, which over through our aristocracy in Monarchy, the second, which over through slavery, and now you're gonna have one,

which is gonna over through the capitalist. So we're gonna have a revolution here in America and have things like the eight hour day and abolish profit and all that other stuff that they liked. And there was a meeting, public meeting, there was some speeches. It was peaceful, not mostly peaceful, it was entirely peaceful. The mayor came, he's like, right, no problem here. He leaves.

Someone throws a bomb. We still don't know it to this day day who threw that bomb for what purpose. A lot of cops were killed. A lot of cops started shooting. A lot of people were killed. They arrested seven people and they put them on various anarchists, some who weren't even there. Some who had spoken there and advocated peace.

And they put them on trial is basically you preach this ideology and they charged them with murder. Even though there was not even an allegation that they had thrown the bomb or encouraged it or were like, yeah, more, you know, Lewis Ling, they searched his house and they found bombs at his house. And his attorney said, well,

my client has the right to have bombs in his house and which became this kind of meme before memes were a thing where it's like uh uh he's a scribe to have said I couldn't have thrown that bomb I was at all making mobs and they imprison him and someone's we still don't know how snuck a blasting capsule into his jail and rather than me hanged he detonated his jaw and he was if you look at photos of loose link it's it's like a time traveler because he looks like Channing Tatum or something. He looks like he came out of an Abercrombie ad. I think Abercrombie is not doing the studs anymore, but whatever, like when Abercromb

was thinking. And he blows off his jaw, it's hanging. And with his blood, he writes in the wall, hooray for anarchy. And he dies the next day. He's like, they're not gonna get to me. So he was, you know, people, ignorantly romanticized Che Guevara, but he was the first really that's like, young spirit of violent defiance, and I mean, violent in every sense of the word. And he really was a, you know, people, the cop who arrested him wrote a book about it. And he even he talked

about how people came to visit him in jail because they were so impressed by his like magnificent physique and what a study was. So he really was a tall badass. You know, he certainly not a good guy, but certainly in terms of literature, this kind of a very specific archetypical figure. Well, happened to the other six? Oh, they were hanged. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And in fact, one of them, as he went to the gallows, turns and says, can I address the crowd and say a few words? And they just killed him right then and there. So they, and there's a, they got pardoned at posthumously.

There's a monument to their, to them in a cemetery in your Chicago, Emma Goldman's, was repatriated to be buried there as well. The dates on her tombstone are wrong, which is funny. And the quote for Augustus Spees quote is worded several different ways, but one of them, they're all effectively technically the same meaning. Some day the voices, some day our voices will speak louder than those you strangle today. And it's true. How would you describe the vibe of political philosophy at the start of the 20th century, because everything kind of comes out of this, right?

We're talking about anarchism around that sort of a time. We're about to have the First World War. We're about to have the inception of the Soviet Union. We're about to have this sort of onset of communism and then downstream from that everything else happening. What was unique about that period in terms of political philosophy history that enabled this mix of ingredients to start cooking?

I think a big part of it was the rise of the intellectual because you had the industrial revolution happening kind of in that window and as a result of this there was a lot more money going around and there was a lot more opportunity for people to make their living just being intellectuals and intellectuals had a much higher status in that society they became an emerging class. So and also you had these enormous fortunes being generators, a result of industrialization becoming a thing.

Farmers were kind of on the down and instead you had people building factories and these giant kind of conglomerates that were changing the face of the world. And you had reactions to this, you know, progressivism, of course being one of them in America. You know, this kind of classic liberalism was falling by the wayside because the argument was not unreasonably, I think, you had these enormous amounts of immigrants coming to the states from Europe and Eastern Europe and from Ireland and Italy, and they're living in these horrifying conditions. They don't have sanitation.

The people are getting injured at work and there's no hope for them. Children are dying young because there's no birth control and you have a woman who's got no husband and 13 kids. Like what's she gonna do? She has to prostitute herself, right? So, you know, when you have these horrifying conditions at the same time, you have the rise of the kind of, you know, monopolist class. A lot of people were like, all right, something's not adding up here. So like, we got to something's not adding up here. So like, we got to figure out how to square this circle. And there were, you know, different approaches

to what that would look like on the one hand you had. So what people don't appreciate now, socialism at the time was really this kind of blank term about that society has to be managed somehow for the greater good. It didn't mean the government runs everything necessarily. That is kind of the the the strain that went out, but anarchists consider themselves socialists, even though they're opposed to government entirely. So they were kind of, you know, you had in Britain, you had the Fave in society coming out, you had, you know, the webs,

and the Bolsheviks were the ones who won. And I think what ended up happening, and I don't think this particular ambiguous, is all these different branches of intellectual leftism, we're like, all right, we've got a shot here. This is the one country where they're trying it. We have to make it work and give it a shot to see if it does work. And Eugene Lyons, who was a former communist, I'll get to discuss them on the book,

journalist said, yeah, you guys were looking at the Russians like Yankee pigs, and you were perfectly happy to have them just be ground into nothing because this was your noble experiment, and they were the ones paying the price, but you were the ones kind of reaping the benefits. Yeah, that's so interesting, the fact that even if it wasn't particularly your brand of socialism, your brand of progressivism that you wanted, even if they weren't getting it right and the costs that were being, the toll was huge. If at the end of it, you could have pointed at it and said, well, that was a victory that

went well, that would justify your movement going forward. Right. And in all fairness, as different times moved on, there were plenty of socialists and leftists who were like, all right, I'm out. Too much. Yeah. When Hitler and Stalin signed the Rippentrop Act and a treaty of non-aggression and they basically started becoming buddies, overnight, many of these communist front organizations in the West changed their names from advocating

for being against fascism to being for peace, right? And they're, oh, no, no, we gotta stay out of the world or two, but there were lots of progressives, hardcore progressives who were like, you're shaking hands with Hitler? Okay, that's a wrap. Like, this is not ambiguous, this is completely where we're against, I'm out of here. So they still remained, you're shaking hands with Hitler. Okay, that's a wrap. This is not ambiguous. This is completely where we're against.

I'm out of here. They still remained hardcore Democratic socialist or whatever progressives, depending on the individual. In terms of having a love affair for the Soviet Union, that was a big one for them to swallow. Also just other things like the Hungarian Revolution and Prague Spring, Afghanistan. These were big, big problems for lots of leftists, but not so much for people like the New York Times. The SB and Arjakt, is that the same thing that's still in now? Is that the same basis in America for deporting people that have been accused of being foreign agents and stuff like

that? The one that was, I think, was 19 to the 19 17. Is that the same? No, I don't, I'm not sure that it is. So what you're referring to is after Leon Chalgos killed, Chalgos killed a president, McKinley in 1901, and Teddy Roosevelt came in and Taisarov felt said, you know, anarchisms are the worst people ever. They're worse, it's worse than slavery and so on and so forth. And they basically passed the law saying, if you're an anarchist or have certain other ideologies, you can be deported. And there was something called the Red Ark where they rounded up a bunch of anarchists and radicals, including Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and sent them, get your ass back to Russia

with you. If you love it so much, I don't know how, if that is still, I'm sure it's probably still legally enforced because laws don't ever get repealed, but I don't know if that's the basis for if it's been used in contemporary terms. Yeah, you said in 1916, keeping us out of the war was a winning slogan by 1917, it was a crime. Yeah, so Woodrow Wilson very famously campaigned on, he kept us out of war, right? And Woodrow Wilson was the was only the second Democrat to be elected president after the Civil War. McKinley was a non-mechanical student.

Grover Cleveland was elected into two non-consecular terms because the Republican party just basically ran the table. And since Tafed and Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 split the Republican vote, Wilson snuck in, but it was not at all clear that he was going to get reelected because the Republicans regrouped. They had Charles Evans Hughes, who was a former governor of New York, then Supreme Court Justice as the nominee. And it's like, all right, we got this in the bag, you know what I mean? And it was, I think it was like 3,000, 2,000 votes in California, decided that election. And it went for Wilson and he got reelected. But, you know, this

was the big argument. He kept us out of war. And then a few months later, it's like, well, we got to go to fight war in Europe, which was complete violation of the Monroe Doctrine and what America stood for since its inception. And very heavily, Wilson introduced, just like Lenin was saying to Goldman, free speech is kind of this bourgeois contrivance. You can't have it under times of war. He's saying the same thing. So people who were advocating against the draft, people who were advocating things like that were imprisoned, including Eugene V. Debs, who was the socialist candidate for president. He locked him up and it came upon Warren Harding,

who was inaugurated in 1921 to, you know, I don't know if you pardon him or game clemency, to get him out of jail. So they were imprisoning a lot. They were, you know, I don't know if you pardon him or game clemency to get him out of jail. So they were imprisoning a lot. They were, you know, reading the mail. It was very much a total terror and vision. And the ex-plent excuse was, you know, we have to do this because otherwise it's going to be German spies. We have to fight the Kaiser, so on and so forth make the world safe for democracy. But these were just complete brazen violation of all sorts of constitutional principles that are regarded nowadays as sacrosanct. What are the principles that the Soviet Union was founded on then? It's like 1917 anytime. What was the fundamental philosophy or principles that it was?

Well, there's the de facto and de jour, right? So there's what they said it was and then there's what it was in reality. So Lenin campaigned on this concept of all power to the Soviets. So the idea is you have these localized worker councils and the workers, you know, now that they're liberated from the shackles of capitalist control, they're gonna sit down, figure out how to run the factory better for themselves, everyone's gonna share in the wealth,

everyone's gonna put in their two cents from each according to his ability. So you're stronger than I am, so you're gonna do the heavy lifting, maybe I'm better with my little hands, with screws. You know, everyone's gonna work together. It's gonna work out just phenomenally great. So you have this kind of sense of localized control.

But very quickly, it became, you know, Lenin, what Lenin wanted. Entratsky his kind of sidekick. And you had, please, plays like in New York Times saying explicitly, well, Lenin's not a dictator. He's just getting his way because he's smarter than everybody. You know, so like the most pro-Lenin propaganda

that even Lenin kind of maybe shy away from saying with a straight face and so on, because he didn't have some semblance of humility. In the West, it was just like this guy's come to kind of save the world from the bad guys and we all whatever we can to make sure it works. You said that Lenin was widely regarded as a lunatic. Yes.

Why? Well, before this idea that, okay, we're going to come in, we're going to overthrow capitalism, we're going to, because the Marxist idea is much more radical than what the Soviet Union even tried to implement. Because the Soviet Union wasn't theory. It's like putting your ideas to practice, right? So this kind of concept of, everything is going to be done through the state, and we're going to change the very nature of man that human being is infinitely plasticine.

Early on, they're talking about like, okay, what if kids are raised communally? Right? That was wild. That absolutely took. scene, you know, early on they're talking about like, okay, what if kids are raised communally, right? That was wild. That absolutely took. What was this thing about codeon marriage, the family and guardianship, it was seen as bourgeois to prefer your own children over others. Right.

Because, because, so what they did correctly or logically is, you take the idea of equality and then you just extrapolate it everywhere you go. And it's just like, it leads to the concept. So here's an idea. So like, let me give you a counter example that I was doing by North Korea book, your reader, when conservative say, the family is the basic unit of society, right? So they do that North Korea, meaning if you commit a crime Christopher, like the Williamson family's on trial because the next eight generations is three. But it's a unit.

Unit means one, it's not divisible. So if the family's the unit, and someone commits a crime, the family goes on trial. So they are putting that into practice. Now, that's not what conservatives mean, of course, but when you're talking about equality and you mean it, thoroughly, it's just like, why should one child be advantaged by having loving, wealthy, parent,

like, and we have aspect of that here, which I don't know that they're all entirely crazy. The argument is, why should I, who's the heir to like the Kardashian fortune as a kid, have all these advantages? I'm never going to have to work a day in my life. You're born to a mother addicted to heroin in some, you know, gutter. We're not going to start off with the same opportunities. That's not fair.

And I think there's something to that. But if they take it the extreme of, well, why should one kid have more love or a better parent than another, we're just going to take the kids and raise them all together by professionals. The government teachers are going to raise them. They're going to be trained in this. Not like, look, every mom and dad's winging it. That's not fair to those kids. We need to have professionals and experts raising them. And don't worry, the mom after work

can go visit her kid if she chooses. This was the model for their whole country. And some of it, they had a enormous pushback and some of it they implemented. But the whole point is, this is a new scientific society. You guys are old Fadi Datties. You're doing things just because your grandma did a certain way. We're starting from scratch, and we rebuilding it nice and clean

along scientific principles. None of this emotionalism, this kind of bourgeois sentiment, like, oh, I love my kid. No, no, no, no, no. This kid doesn't belong to you. This kid belongs to everyone. So it doesn't, it's really once you put it into practice, you know, in North Korea is another example, like in construction,

like the women have to do the construction also because the women and women are equal. So they're putting into practice and it's just like, okay, good luck with that. Is this a warning for what happens if you take scientism or rationality too far? warning for what happens if you take scientism or rationality too far? I don't think so, because I don't think it's really rational, because I think that... Does it think that it's rational? It does, but I think everything thinks it's rational,

other Nietzsche, right? So this, the issue is thinking you're more informed than you are and not having this kind of... I'm not understanding the limits of the amount of your own. I'm just standing a competence. So this kind of love of a mother for her child isn't just like a custom or tradition. It's my understanding that when a child is born, both the parents have this biochemical reaction to seeing this kids. We even see with the seagulls, right? If seagulls are raised without their mom, they can imprint on like a sock with a seagull face,

and that feeds the kid. But there is this kind of literal brain connection between the two. They did cat scans on dogs, right? And dogs, the parts of the brain light up when they see you, their owners as members of a pack. So there is that thing kind of that's happening in their head. So as we spoke earlier about cynicism, when you have this scientific view that emotions

don't exist or don't matter or that they're like irrational, emotions are more rational than people give them credit for. And at the very basis and apologies to Ben Shapiro, facts do in feelings in many ways do inform facts. There is some reason, I don't know, I can't articulate what it is, why I like this song over that song. Even if the other song is melodically compositionally, yeah, feelings don't care about your facts in that regard.

Right, right. But it's not, I don't like this song because some capitalists told me to, or maybe I am, but I don't think that's entirely, it can be described entirely that. Because then we'd all like the same songs. That's not the case. It would be the mathematically best melodically harmonially best song, yeah.

I mean, I see this, I've been playing around a lot with this in my own sort of personal life, trying to, after this period of, you know, 600 episodes in whatever five years or something that I've done on the podcast, and praying at the altar of cerebral horse power and cognition and all these smart people that I've got to spend time with then trying to reintegrate, I don't know, like some embodied emotional sense of just knowing and wisdom without sounding too ostensite, like a deli-key, right? Not some woo out there, ronda burn the secret shit, just

your burn the secret shit, just your programming and your nature and your intuition is able to aggregate more information than your prefrontal cortex is able to rationalize. The reason that you crossed the street because that person was on that side, why, break it down for me. Tell me what it was about that person specifically that you had an issue with. Well, I don't know. I just do something I go to feeling. Well, yeah, because you're able to out the way that they walked, the way that they looked,

the body, all of that stuff, right? And like I said, from a personal standpoint, now trying to reintegrate those two things. So when you scale it up to the size of an entire nation, I can see why there would be, you know, this conflict within me with this. I can see why there would be conflict when it comes to trying to build a national philosophy office. And also this idea that everything is quantifiable. Like if you ask me to rank all the songs I like, I don't know that, and that's a, you know, very obvious, or easy example, I don't know that there are people do it. And I think it would be extremely dynamic.

There are some days when you want to listen to that ballad, and there are some days when you want to listen to some synths. This idea that you could sit down and just figure it out for even one person is if it's yourself, this kind of absurd. Where did this passion for revolution in the Soviet Union come from? Because it's so... Marks, it came from Marks. It's so fervent. Yeah, so Marks was a... He took the Christian eschatology, this kind of the book of Revelation of St. John, this idea that we're going to have this big revolution and it's going to bring about

the heavenly kingdom here on earth. He didn't use those terms, but he very much fed, and this isn't really disputed, he very much fed into this kind of vision of bringing a new world peace through their state. And Marx very famously and Angles talked about after it all works out, the state's going to wither away because humanity will be all equal and we won't need the government anymore and everything's just gonna kind of work itself out.

But they really thought that, and they're not entirely wrong, that we are going to create, now that the industrial revolution has happened and we have technology and we have electricity. We have the capacity to remake reality into something that the world had never seen before and something that's gonna make things great for everybody.

So they were right in the sense that they now have the capacity to remake society and something the world never seemed before. But there's other examples of this, which is plastic surgery was invented as a result of World War I. Because for the first time, you had these soldiers coming back from the front, and they were all deformed and mangled in ways that hadn't been seen before. And if you look at Googling first photos, the first people who have plastic surgery, it's completely nightmarish. But you have to take those halting steps

to get to the point where it's contemporary Beverly Hills. But this era, this was, you keep in mind, in World War I, you had the king, and then you had a Kaiser, and then you had the head of the Ottoman Empire, and you had Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and you had the Tsar, and then you had,

I think, Italy had a king. So even though it's like 1914 to 1917 and 19, through 1920, in some senses, for us, this is just like another world. I mean, obviously Queen Elizabeth just recently passed away, but she was a symbol. She's not running things, but this was a time where these people really were running things. And this really was a break from that kind of tradition of aristocracy or landed gentry into like, all right, this is going to be the ultimate sense of democratization. What was happening in the Soviet Union before it became the Soviet Union? Why was it primed

in such a way? Well, I don't think that, well, that's the thing it wasn't. So if you read Marxist, you know, orthodoxy, what would prime a country for this kind of workers revolution would be industrialization, right? And severe monopolization and concentration of wealth. So Marx would expect it to happen in like the US or Britain or Germany. Yeah, that was it, not how greaves. What was the name of that factory where everybody kicked off and then they just brought new workers in? Oh, in the steel mills in, like in the term right now, near Pittsburgh. Yes. But no, but they would be nationwide. Like you would nationwide have the workers be completely oppressed and the workers are going to rise

up. And then it's going to be worldwide thing. But you don't go from like this feudal, the tsarist, it was basically feudalism, you know, and in many ways up until the Tsar fell. And you know, people were like working the soil. It was very primitive conditions. The Tsar falls, you have the first revolution, they have their parliament, but people have been under this thumb of Tsarist for hundreds of years. They're not used to representative democracy. The parliament had very little power to do really anything.

And then when Lenin came in and basically seized power in 1917, late 19th, 17, it was like no one really knows what that meant. It's like, okay, the Bolshevik's running things now. And they very quickly realized what it meant that he wasn't messing around. This is a different breed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This isn't like different between like, okay, the Bolsheviks running things now. And they very quickly realized what I meant that he wasn't messing around. This is a different breed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This isn't like the different screen, like the Democratic Party and the Green Party. One thing that I didn't know was that the original inception of this was in the hopes of becoming

the first, the tip of the spear of a worldwide movement, that the Soviet Union would be the test case. They almost saw themselves as the opportunity to prove that this could happen and then from there they would... They did see themselves there, yes. Yes, very expensive. But what you've got, what you mentioned earlier on, that we'll get onto with regards to the press and the way that this was interpreted and responded to in the

US specifically, you had some people in the US that were seeing it as that experiment too. So you had a kind of collusion, like a philosophical collusion that was going on across the Atlantic. Well, it wasn't just a collusion. So this was the big argument between, you know, a lot of times in politics to this day, you'll have there an in religion. You have the punitive argument where it's like, all right, you had the argument to the Gnostics and Orthodox Christianity is Christ co-equal with God the Father or was Christ the born into him. That's, you know, one of the, that's the Aryan Heresy, I believe. And if you, but a lot of times just about power, you just have an excuse to, you know, fight you one another.

So Trotsky, who was, again, Len is right, hand man, he had the vision, which is more in line with orthodox Marxism, that instead of thinking of nations, you think of classes, right? So the workers, workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose with your chains at the great Marxist quote, right? So his idea is the worker, working class in Russia have more in common with the working class, with the working class in America than they do with the bourgeoisie in Russia, right? And that, this, that makes a lot of sense. And this is one of the reasons they were very much against the, the great war.

They're like, why are the workers and the poor losing their lives for the sake of zars and sultans and chisers. Like we're the ones who pay the price for the wealthy. This is absolutely obscene. This is our opportunity to, you know, what they were called imperialist wars or capitalist wars, put a stop to it and have the workers of the world basically unify and create this, maybe not literally a paradise, but certainly the next generation of humanity. You know, when Stalin came in and he saw that wasn't happening, he was like, all right, you could have socialism in one country.

But that was kind of the idea that, all right, it's going to start here. And then it's going, and this was a very real concern because Marxism predicted that capitalism would be destroyed by its own contradictions, right? And then 1929 happens. You know, this is 12 years after Lenin sees his power in what became the Soviet Union. You have the Great Depression. Things are unprecedentedly bad for unprecedented long time. There have been depressions before, but they never went out for that longer, that badly.

People are looking around and all the Marxists are saying with a straight face, we predicted this and now you're seeing our predictions. And people, a lot of people were with a straight face, we predicted this and now you're seeing our predictions. And people, a lot of people were like, all right, these are the death throws of capitalism. And in that sense, FDR, who is reviled by many conservatives, can be seen as the right wing response. Because the alternative to FDR wasn't Calvin Coolidge. The alternative to FDR was very easily could have been a workers revolution and having a communist dictatorship here in the States.

What was that quote about the capitalist who will sell us the rope and will tie the news? Yeah, Lenin is alleged to have said, and apparently he never did, that the capitalist will sell us the rope with which we'll hang them. Yes, that was it. Yeah, that's funny. And then do you think that he was actually true? And he said that once we've reached the utopia that was supposed to, this communist utopia, that we will be able to discard these methods?

No, because the reason communism doesn't work isn't simply due to the human nature being bad Which doesn't even make sense because if you are basing your philosophy on human nature It is the basis for your philosophy. You can't say it's good or bad It's like saying well, I'm gonna build a Airplane and it's gonna let people fly from their own power But the people are bad. Well if you're building around people can't fly It's the problems in your program not in the person or you're you know building around the who can't fly, the problem is in your program, not in the person or you're building around, the problem is calculation.

So without a market to set price, you do not know how much to produce. So a very obvious example is you don't know and have to know anything about comic books at all. But if you go to a comic book store and you see detective comics number 26 is $500 and detective comics 27 is $50,000 and detective comics 28 is 6,000 something about 20 that's number 27 is special. You don't have to

know it's the first experience about man, but you do know have to know is that either supply of this issue is very low or the demand is very high, but even not knowing the facts as to why that price is information about this is something that the market is asking high, but even not knowing the facts as to why that price is information about this is something that the market is asking for more of. But if I am setting a price, if I am as the government saying, detective comics number 27 is going to be sold at $1,000, very quickly, it's going to be a complete sold out everywhere. You're not going to be able to find it because it's way below the market. If you're going to be able to sell it, it's maybe going to be at complete sold out everywhere. You're not going to be able to find it because it's way below the market. If you're going to be able to sell it, it's maybe going to

be at the black market. And that's going to be blank, a blank store shelves. On the other hand, if I say we're going to produce X amount of copies of Detector Comics 27, then you're going to have these massive surplus is because at a certain point, if you don't have the price, you don't know how much to produce. So having, without having a price mechanism, you can't have central planning work because it's not gonna have information about how much you need, because at the same time, even if I tell you the commissar,

listen, my factory needs 100 more nails, I still, those nails are still competing with screws and bolts, but also bread and milk and cars and CDs and computers. Every product is in competition to have the other product and a currency is what kind of adjudicates those disputes between the demands. But if you're just telling me I need 50 nails and he's telling me I need 50 pacemakers, both are in need. How do I figure out which is needed more and that's what price indicates? Is that the fundamental structural issue when it comes to communism?

Well, when it comes central planning, yes, in my opinion, what else, what are the other elements? Well, I think the other elements, it's very, very expensive to try to, in every sense the word, to try to force a population to live according to your ideology. At a certain point, you need a lot of them to buy in or to have it enforce themselves because you can only pay so many police to beat so many people and at a certain point, people like, I don't want to be beating people anymore. Is there an argument to be made that in that case, a capitalist system that applies status

and gives prestige to people who are the most productive. They are allowed to accrue that through the agreement of other people saying that yes, your job title and high-rise office is something that quite rightly should, you should feel proud about. Is there an argument to be made that capitalism is just a more nefarious way of motivating workers to do the exact same thing. Well, I don't think that CEOs are held in the same regard in any capitalist country as like Stalin was. You know, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk is like there was, I think he's, maybe he's number two now,

richest person on earth. The way people shit on Elon Musk, 25, eight on Twitter alone, even before he bought Twitter, there was no shortage of people shit on Elon Musk 258 on Twitter alone even before he bought Twitter was there was no shortage of people condemning Elon Musk or condemning Steve Jobs or condemning Bill Gates George Soros. I don't think successful CEOs other than What's his name who run Apple for many years with the Tarty neck before he died?

Cook own What Steve, what? Steve Jobs. Yes, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs, maybe he's on a pedestal. I'm thinking of Jeff Bezos, sorry, I got this confused. I think very few CEOs are regarded with any sort of reverence in the same way that the kind of leaders in these countries are expected to be revered. You're not hanging up a photo, even if you're a big shit poster of Elon Musk in your house. Would it be right for me to characterize the two prongs, the two sort of most brutal prongs of existence in the Soviet Union, one as being the food and lack of access, so famine on one side. And then on the other side, being the combination of state police and sort of state enforced surveillance from the population on

itself, that those would be, that seems like that gets an awful lot of focus, not a food and too much brutality coming from the state and also like caused by its own population on itself. But I think in the West, we can look at things as discreet issues, right? We can say it's a problem that none of people have access to health care, even in places where they have the NHS, right? We can say that education is an issue, they're teaching kids things that they shouldn't, and they're not teaching kids that they should. Or we can talk about pornography with young men, too many people are consuming pornography,

it's deleterious to the health. But these are looked at in a way as kind of discrete issues. I think the issue with totalitarianism is you don't get to separate out these things, like everything feeds into another. And it's not, and it's kind of like if you remove the secret police, you still have, you know, you're at school all the time, you're learning all this stuff, you see, you're still consuming the media with all the issues. The fact that your job is basically assigned to you, at a certain point being late to work, became a felony, even though it was not at all reliable, the public

transport system in these countries. So I think we could both sit here until we're blue in the face, but until we've lived in these places, we are not gonna know what the worst part of it is. It's kind of like Plato's cave. Just how bad did the famine get? Which one? Well, I mean, pick whichever of your favorites there was. But there hadn't have any favorites.

Most certainly, but if you're talking about the holodomor in the early 1930s, you know, Stalin's war in Ukraine, Red Famine is a book by Ann Applebaum, which I recommend enormously, even though she's got some pretty bad TDS, which doesn't at all take away from the enormous service she's done in her research. They just decided, all right, we are going to liquidate the kulaks. And the kulaks were these kind of wealthy farmers and we're going to kill them or deport them to God knows where with their families.

But very quickly a kulak became anyone who owns like a cow. And a kulak became someone in your village you don't like. You just got to turn them in, accuse them of being a cool lock, and then you're rewarded with a grain for your family. So the incentives were very heavily to turn on your neighbors, and you weren't allowed to leave your village.

And they took as much grain as they could, and they sold it for export. And people, I mean, the levels of starvation were in the millions, look as much grain as they could, and they sold it for export. And people, I mean, the levels of starvation were in the millions, and this was by design. So they came back in the middle of the night, you know, these activists to search houses. And if you, they could look, this is the sick thing that I learned about the hall of the mor, is your own body would betray you. They could take one look at you and see, you're not starving, that means your...

You're less gone to the... You're less gone, that means you're hiding food, whereas the food. And if you don't give me the food, that means I know you're hiding it. So that means I'm entitled to burn down your house and put you out in the winter, in the Ukrainian winter. And good luck with that,

because if you're not handing it to me, you must be hiding it, and therefore you're a Kulak. And what else ended up happening is in the rest of the USSR, they were told you don't have food because the Kulaks are hoarding all the grain. They were created this kind of national outgroup. And then there was this kind of level of hatred, which was later kind of paralleled with Hitler against the Jews to the sense of these people, your suffering because these people are, you know, they're getting wealthy at your expense.

And there was this one very disturbing story of this young woman who made her way to city. She got out of her village, starving on a line begging for food, she had like a crust of bread in her hand, and the storekeeper is like, this is what you filthy colex, this is what you deserve, and God help anyone who helped her. And then she died on the spot, and everyone was basically happy about it, because it's like, we're on this line, there's no bread in the store,

because I heard people like her. I don't think that it was the same famine, but there's a story about babies that were so hungry that they cried for so long that they couldn't even cry anymore. And there's a story about a mother whose baby was crying and then the mother just started beating the baby. Yeah, Dave Smith brought up that. That was the story that got to him the most. That's pretty disturbing. Yeah, like, you know, people started swarming these train stations to try to get out of wherever they were. And there was just this one scene where this mom and she's lost. And

when the human body is starving for that long, the mind starts degenerating and, you know, it's functional insanity. And she's there and the kids crying because there's no milk coming out. And she snaps and she starts beating the crap out of her kid and from everybody and then she kind of reverts to normal and you know that was one of those scenes where it didn't get to me that much because it's so removed from any no reference point I have no reference point for this like I can I can't it's hard for me for any of us to imagine what it's like being that hungry for that long. Right, even that is like, I mean,

I know people who've been on the show survivor, but they know they, any minute they can get to food and they're only there for third day's max and they're in a tropical paradise, you know, so on and so forth. And so that's bad, but you know, they like you get used to it. But that's the closest, you know,

any of us are gonna get to understanding what that's like. And the thing that is really, I would think the darkest aspect is not just the hunger, it's the knowledge that this isn't changing. Like there's no hang on, you know, when war wants this war is over, you know, it's like, no, no, no, this is peace time. And you're not allowed to leave your village.

And if God help you, if you find food, it's going to be taken from you. I can't wrap my head up. And if you don't produce enough food, then we're going to ask you to produce five times the amount of food that you didn't produce. And accuse you of stealing it. Yeah.

Was this organized? Was the famine? So the famine was created by the state? Yes, by Stalin. Why? Because he wanted to break Ukraine. He wanted to break. He wanted to collectivize the countryside.

And in a for a long time, the Ukraine is very famously known as the bread basket of Europe, because they had these fertile lands and so on and so forth. And they were producing all the crops. And he's like, and the Ukrainians, obviously, historically into this day, spoiler alert, have enormous amount of rivalry, if not contempt for the Russian people in vice versa. And he's like, all right, like, you know, Ukraine became part of the USSR. And he's like, we have to break, you know, Ukraine became part of the USSR. And he's like, we have to break Ukraine and, you know, you break the spirits of the people and not have any semblance of resistance to our scheme. And in this, he succeeded, maybe not entirely, but very heavily.

Who is Walter Duranty? Oh, Walter Duranty was, you did his voice for the promo commercial because he was British. He was the New York Times man in Moscow. He won a Pulitzer. He got to interview Stalin, which was an enormous accomplishment for a westerner. And while this starvation was this war in Ukraine, and it wasn't just Ukraine, of course. People were starving all over the Soviet Union, this war was localized, I want to be clear. He was writing in New York times how, you know, people who are saying there's hunger, it's just anti-Soviet propaganda.

This is just, and the quote is, there is no famine nor is there likely to be the Russian people are merely tightening their belts. Now, that's a very unfortunate choice of words. I'm not trying to even be humorous. You only have to tighten your belt when you don't have enough food. It's not a fashion choice. It means your pants are falling off because you're losing weight. And you lose weight in two ways, diet and exercise, which they weren't doing, or lack of caloric intake.

And while this whole thing was happening, he's repeatedly talking about how it's the people who are complaining or just the loud mouths. Everyone else is busy doing the work and putting time in the fields and producing so and so forth. The Russians have tightened their belts before. And when Gareth Jones, who is another, who is a British journalist, figured out what was

happening because he got off his train and stopped early and just walked through the countryside and saw for himself what was happening, the entire Western press corps. Either there's differing accounts, whether this was, they sat down and said, dude, consciously or they just did it, because they knew what their marching orders were, called him a liar and a propagandist and so on and so forth. And Duranty was the one who took charge of this whole campaign to smear him as a complete fraud. There was a second one on another British man Malcolm Ruggouridge, whose parents were members of the Fabian Society, was a hardcore lefty. He got information as well. And then as a result of this, when he kind of leaked the news of this kind of man-made atrocity, he was basically couldn't get work after that. Because whether it was

because he had the wrong politics or whether because he exposed his colleagues as worse than fools, as in league with the devil, you know, he paid the price. Well, that's the question. Walter Duranty wasn't giving an accurate account of what was happening inside the Soviet Union. As he later admitted, yeah. Why? What was his motivation for? I think it's very hard to get into the heads of someone

who is putting his name front and center in terms of denied genocide. I mean, I have all the quotes I'm in the book where he explicitly said, there's no need for anyone to go to these villages for a reporter to tell people you don't need to go check it out for yourself in a country which he would clearly admit is quite secretive is to me unconscionable. I mean, whatever the motivation was, it can't be good. The best I can think of that would make the most sense to me is status, right? He was the dean of the Moscow press corps.

He was, you know, the big shot. And basically, if it's revealed that he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about as it was and as he admitted, it's like, well, then what good are you? So, I, Optin Sinclair has this quote that's described to him. I think he actually did say this one where he said it's almost impossible to convince a man of something when his salary is dependent on him not being convinced of it. So it might be as simple as that. Yeah, I don't know. He seemed like a very...

I couldn't work out his motivations. I couldn't work out whether it was complicity, whether he had political sympathy for what was going on over there, whether it was simply the associated reflected glory and status that he was getting from having this sort of access to people that no Western journalist would or should do. And perhaps a blend of all of them, I suppose. One of the other things that happened obviously downstream from, or maybe there's also a theory that he is being blackmailed to some extent. So that could, that would make some sense that the Russians had some intel on him and they didn't want to reveal to who knows.

That's interesting. One of the other things that happens downstream from there being widespread famine, and so actually going back to the famine for a second, if the use of the famine from Stalin was to beat and erode the Ukrainian spirit, surely they could have considered, we might just kill them all. It might end up as having no people left in the Ukraine to conquer. Well, I mean, they killed a lot of them, but I think it was, I don't, that's a good question. I wonder if that was a concern. I guess.

Because they were given some grain. It's not like they were given literally none, right? They took it all, but they gave some back. Yes. So what happens, downstream from a family, next thing that happens is you have an ever increasing paranoia within the people who are in charge of what's going on among the populace. And this, I mean, there's a story where, is it Stalin who's who gives the police and a quota for each different area, he, I need 10,000 criminals from this region and this region and this region and this region, which kind of like the kids from earlier on, drive around and tell us who your accomplices are, caused the law

enforcement to go around. They were retrofitting the number of criminals to their quota for criminals as opposed to catching people that were doing crime. Yeah, this is something that I think, again, Westerners have a hard time wrapping their heads around. And even I have a hard time wrapping their heads around, and even I have a hard time wrapping my head around. Stalin would sit down and he'd have a piece of paper and he'd be like, all right, in Kazakhstan,

you need to arrest 50,000 people, or whatever the number is, in St. Petersburg or Leningrad, you need to arrest 10,000, in Levyv, you need to arrest this many. And it was the job of the NKVD or the KGB whatever it was at the time to be like, all right, this is how many people we have to find. And his last of the secret police heads, Beria, is most known for his quote, show me the man I'll show you the crime.

And they prided themselves on getting confessions out of people who were perfectly innocent. And the argument is, well, if we arrested you, you must have done something. And if you're saying that we are arresting innocent people, that in and of itself is being counter-revolutionary and criticized in the government. So that in and of self is a crime. So yeah, and my understanding is these lists are still in like the archives

in the Kremlin, like they still have them. This isn't just a hearsay. Like they have the piece of paper where he's got the names of the different places and the numbers. What was some of the tools that they used to extract confessions from people? That was a very hard That was a very hard section to write about because I think people here, we think about like what the police will do to get a confession out of you. It's like, okay, they're going to yell at you, they're going to rough you up, you know, things like that. It's like, all right, that's what we're used to as like police brutality. So at a certain point, they lowered the death penalty for

children. So I think it was 12 or 14. And this became, this was a big problem for a defendant's Soviet Union because this wasn't like hearsay, this was public. And they're like, what are you doing? And one of the reasons what they were doing is if they would arrest people, they would have a death warrant for that person's kid signed on the desk of the interrogator. So, you know, your dad who I got to meet a few weeks ago in Austin, he's coming in, he knows he didn't do anything. Look, I'll just talk to them. It'll be fine. And there's the death warrant for Chris in his view signed. Like it's ready to be delivered. He'll confess to anything. I mean, they were having Jews confessing and working for Hitler. And there was another time when, you know, they brought in someone who was an old Bolshevik.

And the old Bolsheviks were the people who fought the Tsar. They were like the terrorists of their time, like people who were fought with Lenin and they were hardened men, you know. The Bolshevik would arrest them. The Catorga system, which per seed the gulags and they'd send them Siberia, you know, middle of nowhere and these men did that time for their political views and they brought in one of them and they called his, I think it was his mom, or his mother-in-law, and she's watching his kids right there. And it's like, oh, are your kids okay?

And they're like, yeah. And so they just turned them, and he's like, look, I'll sell it if you want. You know, so when you, again, there's something that is hard for us to understand the West. You know, we are all used to these movies where like, you know, someone's brought in, Tom Cruz is tied to a chair and they're beating the crap out of him.

He's like, spitting blood at them, he's just glaring at them. You bring in, it's like, we have your kids. The calculus is, and you know they're not bluffing. It's not like we have them, but we don't really want to do anything, but they don't care. And you know they don't care. And you know, they don't care. And when that happens, I don't think any of us can understand what our thought processes would be like. What was the conveyor? Oh, so the conveyor, yeah, there were so many different techniques that they used. The conveyor, it was called a conveyor because, you know, they'd wake you up in the middle of the

night and someone would be yelling at you for four hours to confess and they'd make you write down your whole life story and they'd rip it up and write it again. And then every element goes, oh, so in this habit, and then when the guy who's interviewing gets tired, they just bring somebody else at conveyor belt and you're up for days at a time and as soon as there's indiscrepancy and was the movie you and I went to see, was it Amalia, was it the Southern movie? Oh, why were you lying about what movie you saw with Chris? And then it's like, okay, so now they have 10, this is 10 times you lied to us. Look at you're not to trust, it's very easy when someone hasn't slept, when every little slide details being examined

and the guy's just a fresh one through the door. And the thing is, the interrogators often knew this guy hasn't done anything. It was just like, he's got a job to do to get you to sign that piece of paper. And the quicker we could do this, the quicker we could get on with our lives. There's a study that was done on TSA agents in airports. What they wanted to see was, if given a outcome, will people retrofit reality in order to be able to achieve it? So the original study was actually faces that were either angry or happy, and there was a hundred images, and you had to pick between them angry, happy, happy, angry, angry. But after the first 50 images, it was only angry images.

But people still kept on picking happiness out of anger, even though it was quite obviously angry images, because they had a predetermined idea that this is something that I should be searching for. And it was used to extrapolate up to a question around TSA agents, which is that everybody has gone through the scenario of there being nothing in their bag. And the security guy saying, we're going to have to open this up because something's come up and you open it up and you're like, well, there's nothing in here.

I don't know what could have come up. And you don't know if it appeared on the screen in a strange way or whatever. But there would be a question to be asked, if every single person arrived at the airport with their bags perfectly packed and no contraband or any of the other stuff in it, the TSA agents are still likely to pick out issues within that because that is what they're optimizing for. That's the function that they're optimizing for. And it's kind of the same with regards to this. Oh, yeah. And then it's even worse because if, think about it this way, what if that TSA agent is told, 10%, like 1% of the populace or the people coming through our potential terrorists. Like we know through our research in our studies,

it's 1%, or 0.5% whenever a small number. And then you're as the TSA agent is putting everyone through, well, if you put everyone through, you're either grossly incompetent or maybe you're a potential terrorist because they would love to work for the TSA and now how you disprove that you're a potential terrorist when the proof is you're letting through, you're letting through literally every potential terrorist, right?

You haven't clad one single person. So this must be by design. One or two we can allow that's negligent whatever every single potential terroristros you left through. What's going on here Mr. TSA agent? And that was part of the knife that was pointed to that was hanging over their heads. Yeah, those sort of donically is of pretty much everybody. What was the scalping thing? Yeah, so they were very creative with their tortures. One of them was they would tie a rope Yeah, so they were very creative with their tortures. One of them was they would tie a rope around someone's head. I don't think this was done very commonly.

And then they would have like a stick attached to it and they would turn it until just basically the skin off top of their head popped off. To me, honestly, the psychological tortures were much more horrific because we can all wrap our heads thanks to Hollywood about like people just being beaten fingernails put off and someone dislocates your shoulder. We've seen those movies where the actor is just getting the crap kicked out of them and job broken and whatever. You don't dare show even in like a science of the lambs context, a movie where someone

is brought in and their kid, if that kid is being shown hostage in a movie, he's going to get saved, right? They're not going to show that you sign the confession and they shoot the kid anywhere. Well, what was that general secretary Stanislaus Kosier? Well, that was the hardest scene. That was the worst scene in the book. I think Peter Fector might be the worst, but this was the one where,

because he's also a very evil person, right? Stanislav Kosia, and he was head of Ukraine. They styled and brought him to Moscow and made him like a second in command or gave him a major position like in January, I think, of 38, and by May he's arrested. And we don't know exactly what the tortures were done to him, but he was a good Bolshevik, strong. Stalin means man of steel.

They pride themselves in their ruthlessness. And this is something the interrogators had to do. It's like, you're not going to feel sentimental, because this enemy of the people is being tortured. What kind of person are you, right? You're a strong Soviet. And they kind of kept him up all night. They could have thrown cold water.

Who knows what they pulled? There was one Russian military guy where they pulled out all his teeth. And then when he was pardoned, they gave him steel teeth and he was instrumental in fighting the Nazis during World War II and Stalin was like, oops, sorry buddy. And the thing with that scene is, you know, they did something to him which was not done to many other people as far as my research indicates. And the question is, when the torturers reach this kind of apex of torture, is it something that they always had in the back of their minds?

We don't want to go there, but we know we can do it. Or is it that this guy is a major name? We have to break him and we have to go into uncharted territory. Were they letting him think he's going out with them or were they like, was he actually doing it? Was he like going for, you know, like what's his name in Gitmo? Khalid, he was like waterboard like 20 times, with some crazy number, which no one had ever done before. They're like, this guy is just like a beast, right? So at a certain point, they brought in his teenage daughter and raped her in

front of him. And then he broke. And when you read, you know, even though the guy's a monster, he was complicit in the genocide of the Ukrainians and, you know, just many torches in his name, just to kind of try to get into his head to be like, I don't care what these people are going to do to me. I'm innocent. Let me talk to Stalin. You know to be like, I don't care what these people are gonna do to me. I'm innocent. Let me talk to Stalin. You know, I know how this works. I'm a proud Bolshevik.

I'd never be afraid of the people like spitting his blood in their faces. And then she comes in. It's like what's she doing here? And he's like, oh, you're innocent, huh? Okay. And then he just saw, and the thing is she killed herself.

He outlived her. She threw herself in front of a train. And that's the kind of thing where when people think of oppression in the West, we think solitary confinement cops not letting you sleep. They're being the crap out of you, they're breaking your limbs. I think all of that is something that would be excruciating, no question for us, but when

you're watching someone assault your kids and know they're not going to have any consequences for it, and like that's a wrap for you. And it's just like, we don't know. None of us in the West, I think, except under maybe ridiculous circumstances, can appreciate that sense of powerlessness. Like even if someone is solitary confinement, shout out to Ross Albrecht, can still write letters to people, receive information, you know, read a book or something. There is a little bit of sovereignty.

And that, which is just so obscene in almost a spiritual sense, is... And the thing is our heads would never go there. We don't think in terms of this. And the Soviets were very, very conniving and crafty in their machinations. Why was this extreme paranoia overbearing police and secret service involvement? Heavy use of cold sellers and hot sellers learning about that as well. I was pretty fucking awful. Sixteen men locked in a room where it was so small that you couldn't even touch the ground and the only thing worse than that was the cold seller, which was

basically where you were left of freeze and this super cold Siberian. Yeah, they put you in a no, they put you in a pit, like basically like a basement and they thrice water on you, naked. Not good. Yeah. Why? Why? You do the cold plunges. That's true. That's true. Maybe I would have loved it. There are cool. Yeah. Maybe I would have loved it. Now, it's cool. Yeah. Just without the psychedelics and the Academy. Um, why is all of this happening? Why is it? Why are the quotas for how many criminals need to be found? Is this an inevitable byproduct of trying to search for revolution? Is this because of internal corruption?

Is this cultural within the political elite? Like what's driving this type of... There's several things. And to be clear, not every decade as Soviet Union was as bad as this. This was the great Stalin's great terror in the late 30s. Part of it is if you look at an axis between collectivism and individualism, right,

a big part of collectivism is to make sure that no individual has too much power. And we can understand that thing, like a lot of people would be uncomfortable with like Trump or Soros or Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos being like, all right, this guy is accountable to no one, you know, he's untouchable, you know, this, I can understand can understand that kind of argument. But when you extrapolate that nationwide and you make it so that no individual has any power, everyone is only a function of society. What that means in practice is, again, things like this, where you were just completely powerless and helpless,

and that's by design, that's number one. Number two is Stalin's goal was to have it as public, greater good for society as possible. So anything private was a threat to his vision. But what that means is if me me and you are friends or your parents, these are private bonds as opposed to public bonds for everyone. And right away, that is the first step toward a conspiracy. Because if your loyalty is to your dad as opposed to society, well, I can't have that because everyone has to be working for everybody else.

And especially someone like him, Stalin, who was personally very paranoid, any kind of organization, whether it's a classroom factory, neighborhood, if they're working together, that's a private society as opposed to the public society. So he did everything in his power to atomize Soviet society as much as possible and to have people look at each other, to have this be a as low trust the society as possible that you don't know who is going to turn you in for what and to have enormous incentives for people to turn in their neighbors colleagues family members co-workers and so on and so forth to maintain their status just to maintain their homes. There were jokes, you know, Russians had these things called anigdote where you could use humor

to say things that were otherwise unspeakable where, you know, people had to live in apartments together with other families, right? And all it would take is a phone call to the secret police and be like, he's a kulak or, you know, he's hoarding gold. And the joke was like, oh my gosh, we turned in Masha, but Dasha has a better room. You know, it's, it's, it's, it, but all it would take is a phone call. They vanish. And now you've got their space. And so the incentives are there, especially if not everyone's a good roommate.

It seems like a lot of this story was either perpetuated, created or driven by Stalin. Yes. What is he as a man? Is he evil? Is he captured by an ideology? He was nowhere near as much of an idealog as Lenin. So that is real. And he was a thug. He came up as a bank robber, a hooligan. He was not some kind of, like, Trotsky is very much the intellectual vision of the communist. And despite, you know, people

making excuse for Trotsky, as we saw it, with I talk about the Kronstadt rebellion, he had no problem putting people up against the wall who got in his way. So the reason he didn't kill as many people Stalinists because he got deposed and deported. So when he's in the depths of Mexico, ploughing free to Kalo, he's not a position to really be ordering, you know, rapes and executions. So that was very heavily influenced by Stalin. But again, everything that he did, there's in the West, you know, when all this stuff became kind of verified, especially by Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 56, where he's like, yeah, all this stuff that Stalin's true. And when you hear coming from the guy who's exceeded

Stalin as opposed to like Western capitalist propaganda, you're like, oh, crap, we got to look at this square in the face instead of sweeping on the rug. It's kind of like all the things that Stalin did, Lenin had implemented. And you know, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, made that clear at the time before, you know, Stalin was even in power. Also, something that happened. Wait, no, they did it after Stalin was in power. Sorry. 89 was when the Berlin Wall fell. So, it's a year after I was born. For me, I didn't know what it meant.

I didn't know where it ran. I didn't know why it happened. I didn't realize that there was actually four quadrants to Germany. It had been split up between, was it the French, Russians, British. Who's the other one? Americans. And the Americans, right? Whatever. I didn't know. You got a bit of Germany. I don't remember.

I read a very big book in not very much time, okay? Like give me a break. You talk about the absurdity of splitting us not only a country, but a city. Yeah. In half. Did you look at what the process of that occurring was like, the creation of a wall, the building of a wall where me that lives on this street and you that lives two streets in that direction are now completely apart? Yeah, that was one of the things I was interested in when I was writing that chapter, and how I framed it is, it would have been considered unthinkable because no one had ever thought of it before. How do you disintegrate a city?

The whole point of a city, or one of the big points is, I can get easily, from point A to point B, everyone's physically close. Here's the government sector, here's the business sector, here's the cultural center, and they're all, you know, in proximity to one another, you don't need to car in most cities or certain cities, and everything's just integrated. So it's like, what if you want it to kind of Manhattan, you know, take time square, but now time

square is a separate country. It's like, like, we would have to sit down and really do the math here. It's like, okay, you can get there through the subway. You've got the streets. You've got these tall buildings. Some of the buildings are interconnected with these skywalks. How would you separate this out? They basically did this in East Germany. They're like, all these people, because West Berlin, excuse me, is wholly contained within East Germany.

I had a lot of, I had thought as a kid, and I think a lot of Americans still think that Berlin is right in the center of Germany. And when Germany is split into East Germany, West Germany, it just got split in half, and you got, you got a wall right down the middle. It wasn't. The entire city of Berlin is in East Germany and closer to Poland than it is to West Germany. So they're like, all right, if you go from East to West, West Berlin, once you step foot in West Berlin, you're in West Germany and you're basically free and all the people kept

crossing that border and they're like, we're losing people by the thousands and not just people. We're losing our like the brain drain. We're losing the engineers. We're losing the engineers. We're losing the doctors. We're losing the people who, you know, kind of are punching above their weight in terms of production. And they're like, all right, we're going to separate out this city into two halves.

And you have to worry about the sewers. People are going to sneak in through the sewers. You have to worry about the streets. You have to worry about, you know, water pipes. Like every aspect that integrates a city, they had to figure out how are we going to disintegrate this subway lines. And they did it. And the thing is, when they did it like overnight, the first elements, even in America, you know,

President Kennedy didn't really know what to make of it because they never entered their head that someone would try to do something like this because it's not like Berlin is small. So to encompass a city within a wall, like imagine someone even encompassing Austin in a wall, it's like, what? Like, this wall would be just gigantic and it would take forever and they did it. And people started losing their lives trying to cross very, very quickly. And the stories, I love that chapter a lot because there's a lot of just very dark moments

where people just want to cross the street so they could celebrate their birthday with their sister and they get shot. But there's also moments where people are like, I'm going to do something about this and escaping and just using their ingenuity to kind of give a... You know, my favorite story is the one with the sports car. I love that story. Hans Mextar thinks it's a name. Yeah.

So, before that, what was the Citizen's Escape Tunnel? Were you meeting with the college kids? It was elderly people. Oh, the senior citizen tunnel. Senior citizen's escape. Yeah, so the senior citizen's tunnel, Andrew Heaton told me this story. I'm very grateful to him. Basically there was a chicken coop in East, I always cry when I always lose it when I

tell this story. And I, you tell it so many times you think you're going to be able to tell it calmly and you never can, or at least I can't, because they were a bunch of senior citizens, old people, and they dug this tunnel from East Berlin to West Berlin, and they dug it six feet tall, and which is going to take a lot longer than something across space. And they asked this old guy why you guys built this tunnel so tall, and he said, my wife's done crawling. So it's just this beautiful thing if they all got out.

Isn't that great? Fucking amazing. What about the sports car? What about? God, it's a great story. Unbelievable. So I think his name's Hans Meixner. Please let me double check it on this. He fell in love. He was one of the people who was commuting between East and West Berlin because you still had thanks to the post-World War II laws, you were allowed to cross the border of your certain type of citizen. And he fell in love with an East German girl. And he's like, all right, I gotta get her asked to West Germany.

So he goes to checkpoint Charlie, and that's the most famous... So the exchange isn't shit happened, does it? Yeah, it's like it was the big border crossing. And he looks at that bar, you know, even nowadays, you have a parking garage, you pay the ticket and the bar goes up and allows the car to go through. And as the guys, you know, he's making his crossing, he very carefully measures it. And he's like, all right, this is how tall it is.

So he's like, I know what to do. I got to find a car that would fit under this bar and I could just drive under it. So he finds I think was an astrid Martin. It was a British car. I remember he rents it. He puts the girlfriend in the back seat. And it's like, well, if I'm going to flee with her, I got to bring mom along. He brings the mother-in-law. Then he packs a ton of bricks. He puts her in the trunk with bricks in case they start shooting her, right? And so there were two points where you have to check. He gets passed through the first guard, the guard waves into the second point,

and instead of going the second point, because he had taken out the windshield also, and he took out some air from the tires. He floors it, drives under the bar, and makes his way to freedom. And as I put in the book, you would think that the guards would just stand and shake in their fists, they weren't,

because they didn't know what the hell just happened. And they got married. And it's just this beautiful, uh, that's the other thing about the white pill. There are so many moments where even in this kind of nightmare countries, there are these few just random everyday citizens who are just like, I'm going to find my happy ending and they do it over and over and over again. And I just love and they actually recreated. There's a photo, a aerial photo of them recreating that picture where he's in the wheel, she's in the backseat mother and laws in the trunk with the bricks. And the, there's a sequel to the story because another guy did that same thing.

Did take the windscreen off. But he read to the same car. I love it. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Okay, we've spoken about a lot of the brutality. There's been some small glimmers of hope. What are the big glimmers of hope? What do you mean?

Well, you've got this essentially overnight, full of death throws of this culture, philosophy, institution that's going on forever. And it is brought about by two conservatives in the US and the UK and a Russian. Yeah. And it would have been almost unthinkable. It was unthinkable the day before. Your man said it was unthinkable the day before. But then it evidently wasn't. Yeah. If you look at Star Trek, what's the name check off? Yeah.

The idea is, you know, you had the Korean War, which was a draw. You had the Vietnam War, which was a complete disaster for the West, and it was certainly not a victory for the West. In the 70s, the argument was like, all right, look, so the English is not going anywhere. They're not, they're not doing great, but they're certainly not, this is, this is the reality. If you want to be realistic, instead of thinking they're going anywhere, we have to realize we're going to be in a world with two superpowers. We have to make nice with one another and understand one another, because

otherwise the costs are going to be nuclear war and world destruction. Neither party wants that. So instead of saber rattling, we need to sit down and work things out because this is going to be the status quo at least for another hundred years. Even if we have warp speed. Even if we have warps, right, even with the federation, this is just the nature of a reality. And before he became president, Ronald Reagan sat down with one of his advisors. And it goes, my policy for the Cold War is simple and somewhat even say simplistic. We win they lose.

And that kind of approach of this is not, I'm not going to live on this earth where this sort of thing is going to be normalized. But the thing is that you're in Reagan really weren't interested in bringing down the Soviet Union as their primary goal. Reagan especially, his big interest was ending the threat of nuclear war. And there's this couple of scenes that I uncovered in the research because, you know, they're playing poker, you know, the US and the USSR, right? They both have to act one way in public, another way in private. Neither wants to kill each other. Neither wants to be killed. Like, you know, this is, you're

playing Bringsmanship. And they bring Reagan down to show him the how you retaliate if there's a nuclear strike. And his aides thought they're like, he's not going to do it. And he talked about this in the sense of like, wait a minute. So if I retaliate, then within minutes, literally millions, if not tens of millions of Russians, who are innocent people, who's only crime was being born on the far side of the Iron Curtain, which they can't leave. And when I retaliate, I'm going to be killing all of them. And he's like, I'm the president, I'm the most powerful man in the world.

And I'm the good guy, I'm killing in minutes, tens of most powerful man in the world, and I'm the good guy. I'm killing in minutes, tens of millions of people. It made no sense to him. But the beautiful part is Gorbachev is taken down into the bunker, and he's thrown the rehearsal, and they go, came to the general secretary, you know, if this happens, this the button you press, and he goes, I'm not pressing that button, even for practice purposes. And he's like, if they strike us too bad, and when neither knew the other had this position,

and what's fascinating is thatcher, who was PM at the time, Prime Minister Great Britain, she gets a lot of heat very correctly for being a scold. She, the first time she met Gorbachev, he came to checkers before he was out of the Soviet Union. She wanted to meet him, which was, it's the prime minister's like summer house, whatever they call it,

it's something the equivalent of Camp David here. And they're coming to breakfast and she's yelling at him about their economics and she's yelling at him about their foreign policy and she's yelling at him at their foreign rights and then she's human rights and then she's yelling at him that he hasn't touched his breakfast

and Gorbachev just stops and he goes, I wasn't sent here to convert you to communism. Like, I have my own views. So let's just take it down a notch and she just bursts out laughing. But what she doesn't get credit for was her sense of diplomacy, because she, and she boasted about this constantly and fairly. She was the one who spotted him.

She said she made him. Well, she took credit for it. She went on the BBC and said, I could do business with Mr. Gorbachev. And because both of them, Reagan and Thatcher were on the right wing of the right wing parties in each country, that gave them the space to be diplomatic. I mean, when you think of Thatcher,

you think of the opposite of diplomacy. She never had a fight. She didn't like. She was always throwing hands at at Prime Minister's questions. She was always going after members of her own cabinets. She called them a wets, which in contemporary terms is like calling someone a soy boy. These are her own, because it's like he's all wet, right? Doesn't that mean a Britain? Yeah. Like, she called them that and, you know, she said, she did not suffer fools gladly, but they both independently sat down with Gorbachev and they're like, all right, like this status quo rather than

being perpetual is intolerable. We cannot live in this world. Reagan and Gorbachev thought this very strongly where we have, Lord knows, even we don't know how many nuclear missiles are pointed at one another and that God forbid, you knows, even we don't know how many nuclear missiles are pointed at one another and that God forbid someone gets angry or something happens and within 20 seconds all life on earth is destroyed, this can't happen. And together, they sat down and gave Gorbachev the space to demilitarize. And the thing is, when you have these kind of regimes, and I think Gorbachev really

ends up being the hero of the book, because there were so many times when people were on the phone with him from other countries, other communist countries, and saying, General Secretary, it's all going to shit. You need to send the tanks. And he goes, no, I'm not doing it. And to me, you know, people often talk about like what's beauty and beauty could be like a beautiful woman. It could be like a sunset. It could be a song that's just a heart. To me, beauty that really kind of gets me really in a very primal emotional way is when these extremely powerful people choose to take their hand off the trigger and are like,

I'm not going to be killing people. I don't care if it's going to cost me personally. It's just the wrong thing to do. I'm not going to be on the side of the executioners. There are so many moments in this book, Lithuania being a major example, where they're begging him to use force and they're telling him correctly. If you do not, Mr. Gorotrov, if you do not send in the tanks, like this system that you grew up in, that makes the Soviet Union rival to the United States is all going

to fall apart. And he's like, too bad, like it's going to go peacefully. And there's a great scene in East Germany, where Hanukkah, you know, whose dictator he's Germany is watching the footage of these marches. And he's like, all right, we gotta to do something. We know the Tiananmen Square and the head of the military who is no dove, no soy boy. I mean, this guy has a lot of blood in his hands, a lot of aggression. He goes, he basically, can I curse? He basically says, fuck you. We're not doing anything. This is going to resolve peacefully. And Hanukkah was out of office the next day. So that's the other like white pill moment.

Like it's not that there are lots of times when genuinely evil people, when people who have a lot of blood on their hands have done a lot of atrocities. For one reason or another, maybe not voluntarily, because the chips are not in their favor, where they're like, okay, I'm out.

This is my limit. And I'm not going to make things worse, even if it's just from personal census of self-preservation. Where it's like, if I pull this trigger, my bullets in my head next, so I'm going to back away. If that's their motivation, I'm fine with it. But the thing is with Gorbachev, it wasn't his motivation. He generally was like, all right, he spent enough time with the West as opposed to the other people who became leadership roles in Soviet Union, where he's like, he went to, in 68, there was a kind of a softening of communism in Czechoslovakia. There's something called the Prague Spring, Dubček, who was head of Czechoslovakia, wanted to implement

socialism with the human face. When Gorbachev went to visit Czechoslovakia, not long after that, and the Russians sent the tanks and took him out of office, he went to a factory, and the factory workers literally turned their backs on him to just give him a show of like you were evil. And to see that, when you're like, I'm just here to help you run your factory, I'm like this nobody middle-apparachic,

and to see like we were told in our newspapers that you were happy that we were liberating or saving the revolution of the Valkyrie, and then I see the workers, you know, and any of these workers would pull it bullet in me. If they had their druthers, that was a very eye-opening moment for him. And he's like, I don't want to be that guy. And he had the, what does power mean if not the ability to say, you know what, I'm not going to use this power?

What could you imagine if instead of getting a garbage off, you got another Stalin? Well, they had that. I mean, Brezhnev wasn't another Stalin, but the fact that he sent in a tank since 68 in Prague, the fact that the Hungarian rebellion in, I think, was 56, was 13 days where the Hungarians were like, all right, we're leading the Warsaw Pact and Khrushchev's like, that's cute. And they hung in Rhinaghi, who was the prime minister. So yeah, you don't need, that's the other scary thing.

When you have systems like this, you don't need another, like everyone, it's going to be very hard to get into Stalin's seat without being another Stalin, because you're going to have to get through all these kind of filters. I've had two conversations in the last month, one with Schultz and one with Goggins, seat without being another Stalin. Because you're going to have to get through all these kind of filters. I've had two conversations in the last month, one with shorts and one with goggins, and I asked both of them. I find it interesting asking people similar questions. I like to get the different response to the same prompt, and both of them have had long

relationships going on Joe's show, and asked them both about what to like being friends with Rogan and sort of observing what's been going on and so on and so forth. And both of them has said basically the same thing, which is kind of this very odd situation where somebody that has the most power is the person that's the most benevolent with it. The person who is giving and is prepared to use their platform to be able to raise others up, so on and so forth. And yeah, it seems to me like,

I were both good friends with Michaela. Michaela, for the people that don't know, is named after Gorbachev. Yes. That's why Jordan called her Michaela. I'm not kidding when I said, when I thought to myself, why, why name your daughter after this male Russian dude? I didn't know up until I read this book, any difference between Stalin and Barrier and

Gorbachev. I did just, all Russian guys that ran the country, maybe they did some bad things, maybe they did some good things, I don't know. It kind of makes sense. I didn't know either. So when I had this weird western look at the end of the Cold War, and I thought Reagan and Thatcher were going to be the heroes,

and as I was writing it, when you write a book, some of them, the characters write themselves, it's very clear he's the hero of the three of them. Not that they didn't do heroic things, but in terms of the person who sacrificed the most, who was most committed to peace, who had the most opportunity to turn things in a very bad direction. He's not an angel, let me be clear. But in terms of the amount of good things and choices he made in the area of peace, it's just off the charts. So I can very easily see now having written the book why he did this. And I had no idea why

having previously to written this book, he would have done it. So you say it is possible that those of us who fight for the dignity of mankind will lose our fight. It is not possible that we must lose our fight. That is the white pill. Well, thanks for spoiling the book, Chris. Sorry, the final line. And you revealed that it was Michael Mallis all along.

Yeah. Yeah. What's that mean? It means that hope doesn't mean that nothing bad happens. Hope doesn't mean, you know, someone who once yelled at me like, how can you, you're talking about the white pill, but you moved from New York, you had to, you were joined from New York to go to Austin. I'm like, yeah, I'm not saying nothing bad ever happens. I'm saying that the idea that the good guys are these

omnipotent deities and you're completely powerless against them and they're all knowing and all powerful and they're always going to win. It's like, but that's not true. First of all, no matter how evil you think they are, as I demonstrate this book, they're much worse. Like I didn't realize just how evil the Soviet Union was until I read this book. And again, this is the North Korea guy. Like it's so much bigger and worse than I had realized. And I have all the receipts in it. But also the fact that you don't, if you as the reader don't always get what you want,

why are you seeding to them this view that they always get what they want? You know what I mean? Like if I'm just using absurd example, if I'm Stalin and I want a dinosaur, like a living dinosaur, I can't get that right because dinosaurs extinct, that's just one extreme example.

But I can't just defy laws of economics. I can't just snap my fingers and say, okay, everyone's gonna be fed. I also can't snap my fingers and say, everyone who dislikes me is gonna be identified by me. I'm not gonna be able to do that either. So this claim that they can always win just because they've got the,

let's first of all, the person who's got the most numbers always wins. What about George Washington? George Washington's entire career was retreating from the British. He won. Vietnam. Vietnam. Afghanistan.

Number one. Number two is just this kind of premise that just because some organization has been added for a long time, like if you starting out on third base, right? That's a huge advantage. Does everyone who is on third base make it home? No. And you wouldn't say that. And anyone said that would be absurd. So the fact that there are, again, so many examples of things that could have gone so much worse, but they didn't. And it's not because these were angels. It's not like, like you said, it wasn't like one year it's Brezhnev, then Mother Teresa comes in, right? It's not like Reagan was an angel, it's not like that, it was an angel hardly. It's not like the people in West Berlin

were all these kind of saints or the people in East Berlin were all saints or vice versa. These were human beings and human beings, as we talked earlier, are finite. There's limits to our knowledge, there's limits to our abilities. And at a certain point, the costs outweigh the benefits. Look at the Confederacy, right? When Lee surrendered, there were lots of people in the former Confederacy who were like, we're just going to keep fighting forever. But at a certain point, you have to look at it and be like, all right, I can't win this fight.

So just out of a sense of self preservation, I'm just going to be like, all right, it's a rap this fight. So just out of a sense of preservation, I'm just going to be like, all right, it's a wrap. And that's what happened in many of these countries. And that is what a thing's going to happen at a certain point with malevolent elements in the West that the costs are just going to be too much for them to bear. And they're just going to fold to claim that the foes of human decency are uniquely brave and valorous to me as another just blatant one of their lies. What do you think most people misunderstand about evil? I think there's two things. One is I think Americans in the political sense, think an evil person has a weird mustache

and is banging the desk, right? They really think, I talk about this in the book where I think I was, I forget who wrote the poem, was Leonard Cohen about one of these Nazis, height normal, eyes normal, hair normal, like what do you expect things? Like people really, even though, even religious people who understand

that the devil is seductive, still expect the devil to be walking with hooves and horns. That's not how you look at who is that the serial killer in Florida who was played by that. Jeffrey Donald? No, the one in Florida who killed all those women who just looked like trust me, I'm both going to feel stupid later. Anyway, people are screaming it. Yes, they are. And he was played by that actor with the Zach Efron. Ted Bundy, Ted Bundy, Ted Bundy, you couldn't pick him out of it.

If anything is good looking, right? You think he's like a normal guy. Yeah. So, so people understand that intellectually, but they don't really understand it emotionally. So that's one thing. Second is, I don't think people appreciate how sophisticated evil can get

when it comes systematized. So again, when we think of political evil, we think of like, again, the government brutality, like the cops are beating you up in your cell or you're putting the solitary. They are not thinking of the evil when it comes not to those who have been identified as criminals, but to those who are not criminals,

not even accused of criminals, and the oppression that can happen in that regard. And I don't think they appreciate how comfortable evil is in taking hostages. So you think, you know, Christopher, there's nothing you could do, I'm gonna stand up, but when this family comes along, you'd fold in two seconds,

and you turn me in, and I wouldn't blame you. And I think the other thing that was turned up, turned up in that chapter on the stasi is people in this country, and I thought this as well, were of the belief that those who were in formance to the secret police who snitched on their friends, their co-workers, their neighbors, had a gun to their head themselves.

So they bring in Chris, they're like, all right, Chris, I need 10 names, and you're like, or we're gonna kill you and your family. It's like, all right, Michael, Zach, you know, blah blah. What we don't realize here in the West is a lot of these people were volunteered. They were more than happy. And one of the Stasi recruiters pointed out

we didn't even pay in that much. It's like they just wanted to feel important or they were bored or they just felt they were doing the right thing. And that to me is an element of evil that Americans are, I would say almost entirely, but decreasingly oblivious to. Well, how would you categorize that? That less? What's the, what's the Han-A-Rent calls the banality of evil? Right. Maybe she's not

using the term in the same way, but that's kind of like how come, come in place, it is. There's this, there's this one very disturbing scene in this, which I got from Anna Funder. No, no, I got it from Timothy Galt Nash, whose book is called The File. And both are great. Anna Funder's book is called Stasi Land. I forget which is which. After East Germany fell, they opened up the Stasi files. So you could go in and you could see what information they had on you and who turned you in. And this was a big moment for every East German to be like, do I wanna know? Or do I wanna just look the other way

and just pretend it never happened? Do I wanna know? What would you do? It depends on how, if I went to, so that's the thing, right? Some people had gone to jail. Some people hadn't gone to jail, maybe it's just a curiosity thing.

I think I would probably, I don't know. I don't know. We, anyone listening to this who says they would know, it's, it's, think about it for a second, because would you want to know that your brother-in-law turned you in? On the one hand, you could say yes. On the other hand, you could say no, right? It's, it's not that simple. And the story in the book, there's a woman who's job there, um, frau trumpleman, I think her name is, and the line the author has is, how do you work with poison every day and not become poisoned yourself? Her job when the people come in, it's to sit them down and be, and basically walk them through. It's, it's kind of like how they used to have,

if you take an eight test, you have to physically go to the doctor to get the results. So he can be there to kind of walk you through if it's positive. So you're not by yourself at home, like with a gun to your head. And this woman came in and she had been in jail for, I think, four or five years because she had wanted to leave East Germany. And she found out, the reading her file, that it was the guy she's still living with.

That's just lost it. And that morning, you told her, have a nice day, how do you go home to that? And this is an entire country of people like this. So it's, you know, those of us who say they'd rather know, maybe I can see the case for both sides very easily. Like would you want to know, ask yourself, if you're one of your parents passed away and you learned that they were being unfaithful to your other parent their entire lives, is that something you'd want to

know? Or is that something we were like? They're dead. I'd rather remember them as my dad or my mom than as someone who couldn't keep in their pants. As opposed to a turn of resentment for no reason. Yeah. You have a quote where you say you should take one red pill

and not the whole bottle. Yeah. What's the appropriate dosage of white pills? It's one book at whitepillbook.com. That's good enough for me. Dude, I can credit you with opening up an awful lot of my understanding around this sort of middle 1900 Daps of human depravity Heights of human hope

complicity of journalists and state enforcement in hiding awful and in hiding, awful, and disgusting actions, both within their own country and outside of it, I have had a serious historical education from reading this. And also, you write beautifully. Like it's so, the pacing, the way that you use your sentences,

it's the same way that you speak, a really, really genuinely, genuinely enjoyed it. There was a bunch of things like the, just the little passage about Lenin, it was widely regarded as a lunatic, like just the way that it's done. It's the same way that you would speak it. And I very, very much enjoyed it, especially given that I had no background to it. So, dude, congratulations. You know, I talked to you, we were close friends

throughout the whole process of writing this book, and I talked to you a lot about how it was really getting to me, and how intense and emotional. Can't see why. These stories were both in negative sense, and the positive sense, like the Hans-Mikesner, who drove the speedster under the thing, just so much darkness and so much beauty.

And I'm glad that you can see what I was going through for the last couple of years. And I think to me, this was almost more like an exorcism because there were just so many like souls just and now to have the idea that they would just be forgotten and for stories swept in the rug. And I'm like, I'm going to do something about this. These people need to be valorized and be remembered just so many, just innocent, you know,

victims who just happen to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time or looked at somebody the wrong place at the wrong time or looked at somebody the wrong way. So I'm just so glad that I was, I'm in an opportunity to keep their memory alive. You did a commendable job, Manami. If it was, I think that they would all be incredibly grateful what you've done. How many references are there in this book? I didn't actually, in fact, I can get it up. Was it 500? I can get it up. Was it 500? I can get it up right now and find out

because you do, you've done it in Roman numerals, right? In the way that the reference is. Oh, in the, in the, in the Kindle, I think it's Roman numerals, in the, in the hardcovered space, it's numbers. Okay, so I haven't ever seen Roman numerals go up this high. Ha, ha, ha. I didn't know that.

What's this? So what page am I on here? This is page 341. Yeah. LDEXXVIL. LDL isn't L500? Fuck knows, I don't know. But if I go all the way to the very, very end,

oh, and it doesn't even tell me, it's still in... Rubber numerals? It's still in fucking Roman numerals all the way to the end. I don't know. Lots though. At my point being that you've done a shit ton of research.

It's incredibly impressive. You know, looking at the stuff that you've got this from, like where it's come from, shit from the 1800s, random back catalog, oh, dude, it's very, very, very impressive, especially given that I'm starting my journey of writing at the moment and observing somebody that is, you know, I mean, this is mastery, I think. But I mean, this is, I'm not saying this to be glib. This isn't my first rodeo.

And I can't believe I pulled it off. It took me over two years. And if this was my first book, I don't know that I'd be able to do it, like at all, because to try to do your first bench session with 600 pounds. Well, I think it's honestly, it's like trying to do a bench in a squad at the same time. No, no, I'll tell you why. No, no, I'll tell you what, it's a good metaphor. Because first of all, to even condense this much history into a book is just almost impossible. Because it kept growing, right?

Right. And so it's under four in a page, so to keep it to numbers is right. But then also to have it just the writing alone, to have history being written in a conversational tone is almost impossible. Most history books are dry as hell, and I wanted to make sure this is something that is readable, and also on a personal level. You know, when I, I've mentioned

this when I was on Dave Smith, when I was co-authoring books with celebrities, it's kind of like method acting, right? You want to get into their head as much as possible, and that's something that I've taken with me whenever I write my own books. But when I'm getting into the head of, with me whenever I write my own books, but when I'm getting into the head of, you know, these people who are being brutalized, or just that woman, you know, even that was, that section was just copy and paste, but just thinking about what that's like to go in and find out that you're roommate or boyfriend, it's not really clear, turned you in, and you're still living with this person. I mean, it does a number on you. And it would do a number on anybody. Are you glad that you're done?

I am, I'm right now in a very surreal space in a positive way, because it's, so there were some issues with the publication when it came out. There's no hard copies available at the moment. Is that right? It just takes like two weeks, but they're available. There was an issue with the pricing on the first day and I was like, uh, and if it had gone through mainstream publisher, that would have just been that was a wash.

So it took a while for people to get their copies of the book. And so I have the launch. I do. I did Lex Friedman's show and then it's kind of like radio silence, right, because I'd been working ever so long. And I was like, holy crap, it's DOA. And I had to talk to our buddy Blair, Blair White, God bless her. And she's like, you've been so trained by social media to have instant feedback that if you're not getting results like that first day,

like you think it's done. And she's like, this is people have to go in their copies. How are they gonna be responding to it? And that kind of clicked, but that kind of worked for a bit, but now that these responses are coming in, there was a book that was published about how Reagan won the Cold War by Dutton, which is a mainstream publisher. I just found this out this morning, Wall Street Journal called it on the books of the year,

Amazon had as a staff pick. I'm not selling him like three to one. It's just, and doing, I haven't even started my podcast rollout. So the fact that it's selling so well, so quickly and getting responses from so many names, because this, I know this always sounds like humble bragging, but I really, this is such an important story to me, and because this is my heritage, you know, you were just certain age, you kind of look back where you came from, the fact that I'm in my own best I can doing justice

to so many people in so many countries for so long and making sure, you know, there's that line in the Iron Lady, you know, where it's the young Margaret Roberts is just yelling at Dennis. One's life must matter, but like, you know, to be able to sit there and be like, this is being forgotten. And I'm to be able to do something about it and seeing that what I wanted to do about it is getting done. It's almost like being in a dream, like to be able to change reality to have that

power. It's just I'm very, very blessed. Unreal man, I'm proud of you. Thank you so much. That means a lot. Thank you for being here. Uh, whitepoolbook.com, Michael M. Unreal, man. I'm proud of you. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here. Whitepoolbook.com, Michael Malice on Twitter. I apologize for my Twitter. Apologies in advance. That's it, man. Thank you.

Thank you. of that