The Eric Metaxas Show - Mark Helprin - Part 2 (Encore)

Episode Date: January 30, 2021

Eric continues his conversation with Mark Helprin, author of many works of popular fiction, such as "Ellis Island" and "Winter's Tale." (Encore Presentation) 

hour on the Eric Metaxas show, a special edition. Socrates in the city with Mark Helprin. This is the second part of my interview with him. I've been criticized so often these days, they say, he uses such big words, you know, and I don't. I mainly keep to Anglo-Saxon, an Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, but they say, the sentences are too long, the descriptions are too, there's too much description. People have been trained to, to, to, you inhale nihilism. There's a form of nihilism. Like the minimalist.

Like the what? The minimalists. Like Gray Carver. They don't like richness of language. They don't like metaphor. They don't like occult meter. But there's a reason for that, right? In other words, when you talk about minimalists and nihilism,

they are in some ways at war with a past, right? In other words, when you think of a past where all the typefaces had seraphs and all the buildings had moldings and whatever, they hate that because it somehow bespeaks a patriarchal Christian Western order that inescapably points to God. And they are trying to carve their own minimalist path out of that. So any hint toward morality or good or evil, it's disturbing. And that's why I'm, you know, you must be a great writer just to have snuck so much of this past these watchful dragons. Well, it's quite easy to fool a publisher at lunch. Because they drink so much. And also, it is, it does.

pay to have a business sense. You know, publisher is very slow to pick up on things, and they're not always the brightest bulbs. Why don't we just say that they're stupid? They're stupid, yeah. The interest of time. You're not going to be a lawyer. You're not going to be a doctor. You're not going to be a physicist. You're not going to be

an engineer. You're not going to be a businessman where you have to take risks and actually see what's going to happen in the future and do all kinds of finance stuff. And so what do you do? You go into publishing. That used to be there. I'm horrified. Many publishing friends are here. Don't leave, friends. Don't leave. I'll defend you in five minutes as soon as we...

But this is... You're being serious, right? You're saying that you... You were aware of this going into writing fiction, that you're bringing something into it that you have to disguise? Well, no, I wasn't aware in the beginning, because

I'm old enough so that I started when the terms were different. I started in 1964. I went to Harper and Roe and met a woman there named Joan Kahn, who was a great fiction editor, and

started to submit to her, and they would get back to me. You were, what, 17? Yeah. Okay, why? Well, I'll tell you, because my parents didn't read to me. That's why I said earlier that I hadn't read Charlotte's Webb. I hadn't read many children's books.

Charlotte's Webb? Yeah. Yeah. And I was completely, I was, I had a room on Central Park West that had a black linoleum floor. There were no toys in it and no books. And that's where I stayed most of the time. Sounds like a skinner box. Well, it was solitary confinement. Because they were gone. My father lived in England for six months of the year. My mother was an actress. She was always on the road. And I was kept in that room. And that's where I learned to be, to, For instance, when I go to Europe, I can sit and watch a fountain for eight hours. 17 hours.

I can do that. I don't mind. I like it. But anyway, I was, oh, yes, when I got to first grade, and it was at the Birch-Waithen School, which in those days was on the west side, I was the only kid who didn't know how to read. They all had been pushed by their parents who were all Jews in the movie business. And they wanted the, it's like the kids now who are tutored to get into fancy kindergartens so they can go to Harvard eventually.

And they were pushed by their parents. And they came in limousines, et cetera. And I didn't know the alphabet. So I remember I walked in, Mrs. Smith was my teacher. And she said, go to the desk with your name on it. And I said, I can't read. And she said, okay, well, what is your name? I told her at my name.

She said, find the M. And I said, what's an M? and all the kids laughed at me. Ha-ha, right? So I was really pissed by that. You made a monkey out of those kids, huh? That's exactly. I was really pissed.

And by second grade, I was reading beyond 12th grade level. Out of sheer spite. Out of sheer spite. And in third grade, I began dictating stories to my third grade teacher who would write them in the long hand. And then Simon and Schuster, offered me a two-book contract in third grade to write a biography of Abraham Lincoln. Wouldn't you love to know what a third-grader's biography of Abraham? I'd pay for that.

Yeah. Well, they thought it was going to be in golden books. And a children's story about a mouse, which would have been essentially copped from Stuart Little. Right, right. My father said, no, because my mother had been a child star, and he said, look what it did to her. so I'm not going to let you do this. Look what it did to her. Yeah.

Oh, it did to her, believe me. But so I, what was the question? What's capital of North Dakota? Bismar. Okay. All right. Well, that it tells us it. But wait a minute.

So you were, you're leading up actually to a question I want to ask, but you were talking about how you were raised in a room with black linoleum. and how you really were not, you were left to yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And do you now, you seem very cheerful, it doesn't strike me that you're thinking of this as neglect or something that you,

or maybe it was neglect, but you simply aren't bitter about it. But it sounds like neglect, no? No, it wasn't neglect. What was it? It was neglect. Yeah, in the best sense of neglect. But my parents, I love my parents, and in fact, I was crazy because

I spent most of my life while my father was alive, I can see why they did this because they probably knew what was coming. I spent most of my life telling my father asking him questions about his life. So I feel, and really I do, as if I were born in 194, because I have spent tens of thousands of hours listening to every detail of his life. And he had a photographic memory. He was famous for it. Someone could say to him, for example,

when was the last time you were on 26th Street between 3rd and 4th Avenue? And he would say, this would be in 1950s, he would say it was December 17, 1936. And they would say, describe it. And he could tell you everything that was in the store windows, the cracks in the site, everything. He had a complete photographic memory. So I trailed him, beginning when I was very little,

asking him questions about starting from his earliest memories. And he lived a very adventurous, interesting life. So essentially, that's why probably they put me in the room with the linoleum because they knew that I'd be pestering them. Right. And he needed to catch a break, and that was the only way he could get away from you. Well, it's interesting. brings up another quality

in your fiction. You don't write, thank the Lord like most contemporary writers. And I think it's like reading someone from a different generation than you are. Yeah, and in the Soldier of the Great War,

which is about a 74-year-old man, strangely enough so is Paris. He's also 74. I wrote a Soldier of the Great War beginning in 1980 when I was, let's see, 33. And I've always felt like

an much older person because I've sort of absorbed my father's age. And I also, I started in a different time. And I'm a throwback to a different time. And I never succumbed to the pressure

to conform to this time. And you shouldn't ever do anything that you would lose sleep over or that you'd feel bad about it. Let me ask you, You know, when you, you obviously came of age in the 60s. You graduated Harvard in 69?

69. Okay. Well, it graduated me. Who cares? The, from Harvard. The question is, you know, you ought to be, you're the classic boomer. You're supposed to fit into that mold, and you obviously don't. you don't strike people as somebody who would have been a hippie at that time or that kind of a person.

And not only that, but then you joined the Israeli – is it Air Force? Army infantry and then Air Force. I was seconded to the Air Force as an infantryman. It's secunded how they say it in the West Indies? No, so they say – yeah, I guess so. Okay. Well, so my question is. is why did you do that? Because that seems like exactly the kind of thing pot smoke and draft Dodgers of your generation would not do, right? It's really very countercultural and strikingly.

Well, I was swimming in the Harvard Sea, which, and by the way, when I was 17, I was going through Greece, and I met a guy whose name was Alpert, who was a Harvard assistant, maybe as a graduate student then, but I think he was an assistant professor, the lowest rank of a professor. And he and I walked across the Peloponnesus and we slept in barns,

and we ate in people's houses, goats milk, and that kind of stuff. How old were you? 17. And he turned out to be Robert Alpert, who otherwise known as Baba Ramdas, or Ramdas, as I call him. Okay, for those

who don't know who that is, this is one of the leading gurus of the new age movement, practically invented New Age in America. And when he was an associate of Timothy Leary, and they developed LSD. So when I was a freshman, I was put in a place called Penny Packer, which was a sort of a modern building.

It wasn't in the yard. It was sort of exiled. That was the worst possible place you could be. And Alpert lived on Harvard Street, which is where Penny Packer was, just a couple of blocks. up. So I ran into him and then I went to see him as a department

and he said, you want to smoke a joint? I didn't know what it was. I mean, I've never tasted coffee in my life. I don't like things like that. And I said, no, what is it? He said, oh, it's great. No, I don't want it. He said, you want some LSD?

And I said, what is LSD? And he said, well, it's this new thing. You put it on the sugar, we invented it, whatever, whatever. And I hated the idea of drugs. So I, from that, even then, even as a freshman, I was different, but I did swim in the political sea.

I was very much against the Vietnam War. I gave a speech at West Point to the Corps of Cadets apologizing for not taking my place because although I was against the war, I don't think that I was my own legislature and I should have fulfilled my duties as a citizen. So that speech is in the congressional record. It's been printed all over the place.

The reason that happened was I was sitting on the grave of William and Henry James in the Mount Auburn Cemetery. It faces south so that it's sheltered from the northern wind and also the sun shines in the south. I was writing the first story that I published in New Yorker, actually the first one that was actually published was called because of the waters of the flood. but the first story that I wrote that they bought was called Leaving the Church.

And Henry James was there, William James was there, I was sitting on Henry's grave, leaning against the family bedstead grave marker. And a funeral in Cambridge Cemetery, which adjoins Mount Auburn, which is where Mary Baker Eddy is buried in a lot of famous people. But the Cambridge Cemetery is for the proletarians. And a funeral came and they buried somebody. And then they left, and I went to see who was buried. And it was a boy my age who had been killed in Vietnam.

And that really, really struck me. And from that point on, I decided that I wanted to do something of that nature. I had already been 4F, but it was fake. When I took an EEG, I can make electrical pulses in my body that make the needles go you can do that? I can do that. Can you teach others how to do that? Maybe, but you don't have to worry, you're too old for the draft. And I can also, now my wife will have to verify this because no one will believe it. Say what I do about horses. He makes horses rear if he wants to when he was living in mind. And he can turn lights out. Okay, so that's what she says. She's crazy.

So anyway, I had made myself four. 4F, and I felt very bad about that. So then I went to Israel and joined the area. We were fighting Russians, and we were fighting my cousin. Wait, why did you do that? In other words, you're obviously ethnically Jewish, but you were not raised in a home that was religiously Jewish. What prompted you at that time to go to Israel and fight?

Two words, never again. The Holocaust. In 1967, which is when I went. first, the state was threatened with annihilation. And I just didn't want that to happen, so I wanted to do my peace. And I did. But anyway, I tried to join the Marines, too, but I already have been 4F. They wouldn't let me do it.

Gosh. I want to ask you about, do you think there's something inherent? in Jewishness. And that's, gosh, it's so sloppy even to talk that way. But I guess the moral quality of your fiction, even before I knew that you'd fought in the Israeli army, struck me as coming out of being a Jew. Because being a Jew, obviously, comes with certain experiences. And you often have characters who are, I guess they remind you.

me. I'm always sure that they're autobiographical. And they're very romantic. There's a lot of love. It's beautiful love. It's not sexual. That itself is rare. But it struck me that

somehow it feels to me like something that I've noticed in other Jewish stories, usually movies. Woody Allen in some of his best films has this. It's interesting. He doesn't come out where you do. But it's interesting to me that you're very much of a romantic.

Has that been something that you've thought much about is who you are as a Jew? I mean, you just said never again. So this was something that meant a lot to you. Yeah. I mean, my father's family came from a little village near Minsk called Koednev. And when we lived in upstate New York, we had a farm in Kinderhuk, New York. huge farm and it was 32

on September 1st when we took the kids to school for the first time there was snow on the ground September 1st and that winter it was 32 below the pool fence was covered by the early October

and we didn't see it again until May I mean it was a hell of a winter but anyway at the edge of our farm far away was a auto repair shop and in the auto repair shop shop, which was really miserable, freezing cold and dirty with oil, et cetera, et cetera.

They had people working on cars, but it was sort of like a very primitive type thing. And I went down there once to talk about our car, and I was wearing boots and gray pants and a gray 60-40, and I had a gray Stetson, and I had my pistol on, and I had a giant dog who was a Bernie mountain dog named Constance. And I walked into this place and one of the mechanics reared back, he almost threw himself against the wall because he was terrified because he thought

I was a state cop and he was frightened of cops. Why, he was a Russian. He didn't have teeth. And his name was Igor. And it turns out he was a Jew from the area. And I said to him, my family came from

Kojnev. Do you know it? He said, oh, he said, it's just a stone. I said, the stone? And he meant, you know, like a gravestone. And it turns out that the Einzatz grew up in the special group, the Germans, they would get trucks, put people in the trucks, and then put the exhaust back into the trucks, drive to a pit where they would just throw all the dead people. And they killed every single person in the village. And these were all my relatives. We were lucky. My family escaped. We came here in 1870. And that doesn't leave you. In the Second World War, we had 32 people who served, one of whom my cousin Robert died in his fighter plane. And my father volunteered at age. He went into the OSS stuff when he was 36.

He was past draft age. And so I felt the same way. And I feel the same way about America, too. I mean, if America were threatened now, I would volunteer. Oh, 71, they're not going to take me. But I do serve actually now in an armed capacity. I'll be retiring in two years. Just yesterday morning, they let me know you were gone.

Susan, the plans they made put an end to you. I walked out this morning and I wrote down this song. I just can't remember. when you're having fun, so we don't have a lot of time left. I wanted to ask you to tell a story of meeting, hanging out with John Cheever as a kid. You have such a storied life that it makes your fiction seem almost dull, and your fiction is not even close to dull. But you really do have, and you're aware of that,

having an outrageously storied life and of having met the kind of people when you were already a kid that most people don't get to meet in their lifetime. Winston Church. You met Churchill? Yeah, when I was very little at Lake Anisee in, I think it was 1951 or whatever. My father, who had worked for him in the war, we were in Anisee, too, and my father was taking something to him from Alexander Corte, who was my father's business partner.

And I rode on my father's leg, and we waited in an ante room with a stone floor, with a lot of other men, most of whom were British, in suits. and then the doors opened and Winston Churchill came out and I was still riding in my father's standing on his shoes and holding onto his leg. But you want about Cheever? I can tell you about Cheever. Yeah, quickly because I want to ask you about Winter's Tale.

This is ridiculous. Go ahead. Actually, it turns out that Theodore Roosevelt invented this thing called straightlining. At Sagamore Hill, he would have his kids go in a straight line no matter what, you know, climb over a wall, crawl through a swamp or whatever. I didn't know this, but I invented it for myself when I lived in Eagle Bay, which was honestly about 1,000, 2,000 acres of more or less forest. And I had the idea, just independently, that I would go in a straight line.

So one day... You know you're nuts, right? Yeah, yeah. I was walking to school. I used to walk five miles to school and five miles back. And later, I had actually... Isn't that weird? that it was five miles there

and five miles better. What are the odds of that? It's amazing. Sometimes it wasn't. Okay, all right. Because I would take a different route. But what I meant was that I would not only walk to school, but also back.

Right. And one day I was running a little late, and John Cheever came by in his Nash Rambler, the color of peptobismal. And he opened the door and said, Marco, because my name was Marco then. He said, what are you doing? And I said, well, I'm walking to school. He said, well, you'll be late.

And he said, would you like a ride? So I said, okay. So I got in the car and we rode to school. Because he lived in the garage above the garage on the school grounds with his family. Now, did you know at the time that he was a famous writer? Yeah, we all knew. His kids went to the same school, and people knew he was deathly poor at the time. And my parents knew. They were friends with him. So I got in the car and he said, why do you walk?

And I was telling him, and I told him about straight lining. The next thing I know, there was this story called The Swimmer about Bert Lancaster who did a straight line. But that's okay. I mean, people borrow. So in all seriousness, your conversation with Cheever influenced him to write the swimmer. Yes, for sure. Hold it right there. That's amazing.

That's one of the greatest short stories of the 20th century, and the fact that you may have had something to do with it, apart from writing, is really something. I bet if Susie and Benji knew about this, they would probably attack me and say, oh, it's not true, but it is true. Well, in the story, and I remember Cheever better than I remember your fiction, he talks about taking a dog leg at some point.

Oh, I never read the story. So you're a liar. No, but it's... I've never read any of them. There's another story about when he talks. He wrote a book about my family called Bullet Park. We lived in Brayton Park. And when Martin Luther King was killed, there were riots in Austining,

and they were burning down the stores and stuff, and attacking people's houses. So my father and I went and we bought ammunition. And then Mary and John Cheever and Howard, the guy who played Benjamin Franklin in 1776 Howard De Silva came to brunch

and they said you know this was the time when the riots going on and we said yeah we bought ammunition and the cheever said you what?

And we said we bought ammunition and said why in case people come to try to burn our house down and you would shoot people who would be going to kill you and the answer was yeah And at that, and Howard DeSilver, who was an old communist, my mother was a communist in the 30s, too.

So she knew a lot of communists. That's why he was there. He was just horrified that we would defend ourselves. So were the achievers. Hey, folks, if you've been listening to the news, reading the papers, it is no secret. There's a food crisis in Central America. It generates headlines every day. I am now partnering on this program with Food for the Poor to help save the lives of displaced children.

and their families from Venezuela, who, by the way, are now trapped in Colombia with nothing to eat. You can't imagine, folks. They need our help. We want to rush life-saving food and emergency relief to these kids. I just want to say go to metaxis talk.com. Please do something. Anything you do, we always say this. Just go to metaxis talk.com.

Click on the banner and give. Here's the phone number. You can call it right now. Please call it 844-863. Hope. You'll feel better if you do something good. matter what it is, do something good. You'll feel better, and it's the right thing to do. These folks need our help. 844-863. Hope, 844-863, hope. I got to get to the red meat, okay?

Uh-huh. And that is that when I published my first book, which is called The Dove of the East, it was published by Knaf, and a lot of stories from the New Yorker in it. I was quite young, and I came home from New York after having... an editorial conference with Rachel McKenzie who was one great New Yorker editor and I was on the train and I was reading Carlos Baker's biography of Hemingway. I thought

that would be my life. See, it wasn't the old days. I thought things were going to be different. And I got home and I took off my suit. I think it was this one. And I saw John Cheever out by the pool because they didn't

have a pool. And this had to be 1978. No, it It was 1974. It was 1974. And he was sitting by the pool. So I figured, well, hey, I have the same publisher. He knows I published it The New Yorker. If he reviews it, it'll go on the front page of the New York Times book review of my first book.

So I went down to him. And I said, hi, John. And I mixed this up with when I went down, and he had written the Faulkner. Faulkner, which he pronounced as Faulkner. I called it Falconer, being a pro. And he said, hi, Mark. And I said, hi. And he said, right off the bat, he said, you know, Faulkner was so-and-so and so-and-so.

Saying something good. Won the National Book Award. National Book Award. No, you told him that Faulkner. No, no, no, no. No, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I remember.

He said something about it. And then I said, big deal. Faulkner won the Nobel Prize. Oh, that's right. Yeah, that's right. Because I thought he was saying Faulkner. He's saying Falconer. We have to slow this down because people may be missing.

This is very funny. John Cheever, who spoke with this plummy north shore, south shore, sorry, South Shore, Boston accent, pronounced his book Falconer as Faulkner. Faulkner. So when he said that, you thought he was talking about William Faulkner. And he said, Faulkner was made the,

Faulkner won the something special. And you said big deal. He said big deal. It won the Nobel Prize. And he went like this for a second. You know, it was summer. It was before. it was before Nobel Prize season,

but he still went like that to thinking, oh, it did? And that was later in the 70s. Yeah, that was, I guess I came out at right. Yeah, I confused them. But, but, but and people, Clay, Clague, Craig Claiborne said to me once at dinner at his house, he said, Maul, he spoke like this, he said, do you, do you, do, is John Chival gay? And I said, oh no, no, no, no, no. He said, because he understands about homosexual love.

And I said, well, I've known him since I was a child. He's not gay. See, the show is what I knew. I didn't even know what gay was until I was after college. So anyway, I go down to the, in a different time, and I say, you know, I have a book out. Could you review it for the times, thinking, you know, this is going to be it? And he said, well, Moak, he said, actually. Saul and I are coming out with books this fall, and we've pledged not to review any other books.

And I felt at that moment both A, really angry that he wasn't going to do this for me, and I had known him all my life, and I'd given him the idea for the swimmer, which was his big thing. And also ashamed that I wanted to be in that system of backscratching that I was angry about, And I decided right then, at that moment, I would never write a blurb for anybody. I would never ask anybody for a blurb. I would never serve on a prize jury. I would never go to Yado or anything like that. I would never have anything to do with any writers whatsoever.

That is for fiction. I do sometimes review nonfiction books. But for fiction, which is what I do. And I've kept that promise. You'll never see a blurb from me. Out of sheer spite. No, out of shame for wanting to be in that unfair system where you know somebody or whatever.

And by the way, I was riding in the elevator at Knopf when Tony Morrison got in the elevator with the director of publicity. And this is what before Song of Solomon came out. And I had Refiners Fire coming out in the same list. And the director of publicity didn't know me from anything. you know, nothing. She didn't recognize me. And she said to Tony Morrison,

who was an editor at Random House at the time, she said, I want you to know, shh, shh, I want you to know that we just had the editorial meeting in Bob, meaning Bob Gottlie, has decided that we're going to concentrate everything on your book. Your book is going to be. So I'm sitting there,

my book is going to be in the same list. And I said, okay, all right, that's life. And once we had dinner at Japanese restaurants, in Nyack. We were sitting near Tony Morrison, and she didn't recognize me just like it's in the elevator, but I knew who she was, and she was just bitching, bitching, bitch. She has about 300 honorary degrees, Nobel Prize, et cetera, et cetera.

And I was saying she doesn't have much to complain about. Well, I always know I didn't like Bob Gottlieb, so thank you for giving me evidence. I didn't like Bob Gottlieb either. I wanted to end on a sour note, and I think we've achieved that. Mark, really, it's so much fun to talk to you. I knew that it would be an outrage to have to limit it to an hour. So we're going to find a way to haul you back up here. Maybe next time you won't have to drive.

There's so much more I want to talk to you about. And maybe we can do it another time. But it has been a magnificent joy and honor for me to do this. So Socrates in the city crowd, maybe once again, you can thank our special guest. Mark Helperin. Thank you. Thank you.

Hey there, folks. Oh, we got to remind you. Albin, Chris, we got to remind people. If you want to participate, February 2nd, the evening of February 2nd, we're doing a Facebook live thing where I'm going to be answering 20 questions from 20 people who have signed up to ask me a question. This is going to be a blast. It makes no difference what the question is.

It could be the dumbest question you've ever heard. It could be true or false, multiple choice, geography, or it could have something to do with my life. and it can have something to do with my book that I'm trying to launch called Fish at a Water, a search for the meaning of life. But the launch date is Tuesday, February 2nd. This is going to be on the evening. If you want to be one of the people asking the question, you have to respond to my newsletter.

You can get that at Eric Mattaxas.com. Sign up for that or on Twitter or at our website, Metaxistalkis talk.com. There's going to be a link where you pay money to be one of those 20 people asking the questions. I think we still have slots available. hope we do. But it was $199. We've reduced it to $99. You get like a signed book and you get to participate and all this different stuff. But I had to mention that because it's just a few days left and we want everybody to participate. And if you do not participate by paying, we would love you to watch anyway on Facebook Live or wherever it's going to be. Maybe it's on YouTube

but we'll figure it out and we'll tell you and we'll get it out via my newsletter. Have I mentioned the newsletter? Yes, you have to sign up at Ericmataxis.com. If you can't get in, just email us. where it says contact. Give us your email. Give us the email of your whole family and friends, your neighborhood. We would love to send emails to everybody. Okay. Also, Albin, Mike Lindell. Yes, sir, yes, sir. I just want to say that this cancel cultural we're living in is evil. This is Marxist. This is un-American. If you don't understand that, read my book. If you can keep it, read my book Bonhofer. Bonhofer really tells the story of what it is to be in a cancel culture, what that feels like when you can't say this and you can't say that. And if you say this,

you get in trouble or you could get in trouble or you could lose your business or you could lose your job. That's what happened in the 30s in Germany. So if it happens in America, you know, whoopsie, we're not on a good path. Mike Lindell has taken more grief for his heroic stand on any number of things that he is trying to be they're trying to cancel him who well a lot of these corporate cowards there's something how shall we say i'm looking for the right word horish about the way they conduct their businesses they seem to have no values they don't care if they throw an american patriot under the bus as long as it kind of you know gets them away from trouble or potential trouble or getting them canceled, getting canceled themselves. That's despicable. And any

corporation that behaves that way, to the extent that we're able to send them a message, if you don't send them a message, you become part of the problem. So I just want to say H.E.B. Stores, Mayfair stores, Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and coals are the two huge ones that have said they're doing this. There's nothing lower. This is not communist China. This is not national social Germany. This is America. And when somebody does something like that, it's to anybody, much less to someone that I love and think is a hero in many ways. He's created this amazing company. Talk about Rags for Riches. If you get his book, you can't believe what he has been through all kinds of addictions and horrible things. And he's come out of it to create this

beautiful company. He gives away millions of dollars to causes that most of us would be so thrilled and yet he's being vilified because, oh, he has mentioned that maybe things aren't on the up and up with the past election. Well, I've mentioned the same thing, too. If you get canceled for that, why are they trying to cancel you? Can they not face the truth? So I'm asking you to support him by going to my pillow.com or my store.com. You can get all my books at my store.com practically and use the code, Eric, tell your friends. If you use the code you get on TV, you're supporting whatever network that is, and I'm assuming you might not want to. If you want to help this program, use the code.

Eric, tell your friends. Mike Lindell needs our help and our support, and all those stores deserve the back of our hands. But we'll just not shop there until they say they're sorry, which I hope they will.