Why You Should Take The White Pill - Michael Malice

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 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 #michaelmalice #sovietunion #america - 00:00 Intro 02:13 Do the Public Know Anything About the Cold War? 07:20 Michael’s Message of Hope 12:35 Why is Cynicism So Prevalent in Society? 19:02 Why Ayn Rand’s Speech is Important 24:39 The Inability to Foresee Consequences of Communism 32:12 Political Philosophy at the Start of the 20th Century 39:53 Fundamental Philosophy of the Soviet Union 52:40 Marxism’s Goal of Global Communism 1:00:57 The Most Brutal Aspects of the Soviet Union 1:08:46 Who Was Walter Duranty? 1:13:07 Soviet Tactics to Arrest Innocent People 1:22:03 Soviet Methods of Torture 1:33:10 The Importance of the Berlin Wall 1:40:42 Reasons for Hope 1:53:09 Our Present Fight Against Evil 2:02:47 Michael’s Experience of Writing the Book - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Michael Malice?

  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. People here complain about wokeism or they hate Trump. And we can sit here and talk about how much we hate Trump or we hate wokeism, 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, and every movie, every song, every TV show, every newspaper, how it encompasses and affects you, we can't wrap our heads around it.

• 0:34Chris Williamson?

  Michael Malice, welcome to the show.

• 0:35Michael Malice?

  I'm so nervous.

• 0:36Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 0:37Michael Malice?

  Kidding, you idiot.

• 0:38Chris Williamson?

  Is it because of all of the cameras and lights?

• 0:41Michael Malice?

  Yeah, yes.

• 0:42Chris Williamson?

  I'll be gentle with you.

• 0:43Michael Malice?

  I don't want gentle.

• 0:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I've heard that. So you were about to have an argument with me. Are you plans to have a potential argument with me?

• 0:51Michael Malice?

  No, no, I had an imaginary argument.

• 0:53Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 0:54Michael Malice?

  So, do you ever get imaginary arguments with your friends?

• 0:56Chris Williamson?

  Oh yeah, I fantasize about them all the time.

• 0:58Michael Malice?

  Right.

• 0:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00Michael Malice?

  So, this was the imaginary argument. I've been working on this book as long as we've been friends, 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.

• 1:14Chris Williamson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:15Michael Malice?

  And I'm like, this fu-- can I curse?

• 1:17Chris Williamson?

  Curse away.

• 1:18Michael Malice?

  This Brit, this bloody Brit--

• 1:21Chris Williamson?

  That's the worst word that you could have used.

• 1:23Michael Malice?

  This, well, I could have called you an Irishman.

• 1:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:25Michael Malice?

  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 gonna talk about it cursorily 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's on the cover and she's a main figure in the book. And I was all prepared to come in huffing and puffing and Chris did his homework.

• 1:50Chris Williamson?

  I'm afraid that there's nothing for you to huff and puff about.

• 1:52Michael Malice?

  That's not true.

• 1:53Chris Williamson?

  So that was, that was resurfaced by Readwise, which is a highlighting app.

• 1:56Michael Malice?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:57Chris Williamson?

  So it had given it back to me because it's a relatively new recent highlight. Now, the Lewis Ling thing, it turns out, I actually did miss him because he was on the front cover of a previous book of yours.

• 2:06Michael Malice?

  Yes.

• 2:07Chris Williamson?

  So maybe I have missed him once already. But my head is in 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 Lexes and the Petersons 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, I don't know, like a fast track education through

• 2:52Chris Williamson?

  some pretty brutal elements of history.

• 2:55Michael Malice?

  I didn't know it either. You know, 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, you know, 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 a 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,

• 3:33Michael Malice?

  which was the absolute primary foreign policy concern for over half a century for the West, is like forgotten. I don't, 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, how is this person going to address the Cold War? If you're talking about a prime minister, a chancellor or a president. And if you ask people who Brezhnev is, right? Who ran the Soviet Union for close to 20 years? What percent of educated, well-read people, now people who are a little older than us

• 4:18Michael Malice?

  will know, know who he is. It's, it's a tiny percentage and.

• 4:24Michael Malice?

  So when writing this, I still don't have an understanding as to why it kind of fell on my shoulders. Cause 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 on like Labrador Records?

• 4:45Chris Williamson?

  Kitchy history type thing.

• 4:47Michael Malice?

  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 the, 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. Knowing, now, you know, 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-

• 5:23Chris Williamson?

  The knock at the door.

• 5:24Michael Malice?

  In the middle of the night, or am I gonna get fired? Am I just gonna get sat, be sat down by, you know, the authorities and be like, what did 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 gonna make it worse. We can't wrap our heads around what that kind of lifestyle is like. And this was the norm for a lot of people. Uh, and that's even the, like, the easiest part to deal with. You know, you just don't talk politics. But the rest of it, you know, it, it's just, was so pervasive and extensive and for so long and for so many people. And I, I don't understand how this, you know, the New York Times has the 1619 Project,

• 6:08Michael Malice?

  which focuses on things which we can all agree are a major historical concern. You know, the slave trade, you know, is obviously a, you know, a historical abomination. Uh, so the, 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, I, I can't, I don't even have a hypothesis as to, I, no, 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 Thatcher? Because, you know, they weren't entirely the heroes in the eyes of the press, so- When you don't have, like, the Vietnam War is another, or the Korean War is called

• 6:53Michael Malice?

  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 wins 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 gonna do something about that.

• 7:16Chris Williamson?

  The complexity of the truth is inconvenient for both sides.

• 7:19Michael Malice?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 7:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 7:22Michael Malice?

  Yeah.

• 7:23Chris Williamson?

  So I'm gonna 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, it took a while for me to get to the stage where I was like, oh, I kind of understand here.

• 8:04Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 8:22Michael Malice?

  Very recent history. You know, this isn't World War I. This is...

• 8:27Chris Williamson?

  Since World War I, almost exclusively since World War I.

• 8:30Michael Malice?

  Yes.

• 8:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, 1917, right?

• 8:32Michael Malice?

  Yes.

• 8:33Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 8:45Michael Malice?

  Yes.

• 8:45Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 9:12Michael Malice?

  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. When Helmut Kohl, who was the chancellor of West Germany, he's in Poland with Lech Walesa. And you know, 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 you know, there were times when the people in charge were ready to start shooting them. And someone else was like,

• 9:54Michael Malice?

  we're not shooting them. And you see these children, it's just like, you know, it's like, hear these stories of like, I think it was Seth MacFarlane who had a ticket on nine 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 shit's hitting 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 Lech Walesa, who was the head of solidarity and kind of the main figure in liberating Poland from communist rule. And Lech Walesa says to him, you know, I don't think the Berlin Wall is going to be around much longer.

• 10:38Michael Malice?

  I think it's going to be like a matter of a few months. And Helmut Kohl laughs in his face. He laughs in his face, like Walesa was, I believe, 46. Helmut Kohl, I think, was 60 or something like that. And he 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, the head of Poland. And it fell the next day, the Berlin Wall, the next day. And like, and Helmut Kohl literally says, there were so many quotes in this that I found that I was just like, I like, I kept, if this isn't a movie, it would be ridiculous writing. And Helmut Kohl says, I'm at the wrong party. And he gets on a plane and gets his ass out of Poland. And what else is just great with the fall of the Berlin Wall, I know we're spoiling

• 11:23Michael Malice?

  to the good parts, is no one even bothered to call Gorbachev, right? So, you know, 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 to NATO. 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 one bothered to call him or let him know. And you can only imagine what's going on in his head, you know, just seeing that. But it was the same thing that was going on the head of people all over the world. Because the Berlin Wall, for so long, was, you know, imprisoning half of a city, or three, or, you know, three quarters of a city, in a sense.

• 12:08Michael Malice?

  And 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.

• 12:35Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 12:59Michael Malice?

  I don't, I don't know what I hate more than cynicism. You know, maybe like, you know, 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, you know, Greek philosophical sense, but this idea that like, everything sucks. Or, you know, 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 like, and like, if people are like, um, uh, you know,

• 13:41Michael Malice?

  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.

• 14:23Michael Malice?

  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.

• 15:00Michael Malice?

  You can get down to 250, you're still a big dude. But think how much healthier you are, your clothes, 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? 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 if it's realistic and cool-headed. It's like, oh, you're naive, you're a Pollyanna. And like you pointed out, the point this book is, I'm not being hopeful in the sense of nothing bad happens.

• 15:45Michael Malice?

  I'm not being hopeful in the sense of the bad guys aren't really that bad. The extent of the depravity, you know, I was on my buddy, Dave Smith, he's a very failed comedian, his podcast, and he goes, if you read 90% of this book, you think it's the black pill.

• 15:59Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 15:59Michael Malice?

  Because you're reading it and you're like...

• 16:01Chris Williamson?

  That's what I mean. I was like, okay, chapter 10, it was still not here.

• 16:05Michael Malice?

  And you're like, I just one, you know, example off the top of my head. I hope I get through without my voice breaking because I still read it and 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, pickpockets, you know, you're a kid living on the streets. You gotta make do. So the Cheka 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 are you working with? Who are your colleagues, whatever the term they used, right? In your gang? They don't, 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, him, him, him, you know, anyone. And then they took them back and they kept beating them.

• 16:50Michael Malice?

  And you hear the other prisoners, like the adults, hearing these kids screaming. And these adult criminals are like, they were losing their minds just hearing the screams of the children as the children realized they were being returned to the cellar. So when you hear about the... So there's no whitewashing in this book of how bad it gets. You know, but people have this idea that like, there's no point in fighting because, you know, it's inevitable that the bad guys are gonna win. 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, you know, 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.

• 17:31Michael Malice?

  Point being, you know, this insistence that villainy always, why is it? You know, this is the line I had, you know, when thinking 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.

• 18:05Chris Williamson?

  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's, it feels like a well researched. The critic always feels like the guy that's well researched.

• 18:17Michael Malice?

  Yeah, right.

• 18:18Chris Williamson?

  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 neurochemistry. Andrew Huberman taught me about this thing where if you tell someone that a movie is going to be really, really good, their dopamine release, even if it's as good as they expect it to be, is less. And if the movie is less good than they expected it to be, then they lose even more.

• 18:42Michael Malice?

  Sure.

• 18:42Chris Williamson?

  So what you're doing is by being the cynic, you're saving yourself from ever being the person that over promises. So maybe reality does deliver the world better than you'd hoped. Well, brilliant, that's a, 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 chapter, most of the chapters up until toward the end, after this famous Ayn Rand speech or passage from a speech that she gave. Why, what's so special to you about that particular speech?

• 19:19Michael Malice?

  So there's a, there's a, in Prague, there's a museum of communism. And I visited 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 it be kind of scholarly, you know, even the Holocaust museum, it's going to be kind of-

• 19:42Chris Williamson?

  This is what it is.

• 19:43Michael Malice?

  Yeah, yeah, very kind of emotionless, matter of fact. And I remembered that in this museum of communism, because, you know, the Czechs were under the boot of the Soviet Union for many decades. It's like, according to, you know, this ideology, we would all have food, but in real, 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 pack of cigarettes, it says, you know, smoking this will be dangerous to your health? Well, in the same way, living in communist country would be dangerous to your health. So it was very much like this kind of F you. And I sent my, my protege Trey was in Prague recently, I go, can you, I guess I'm like, I don't, can you get, take me photos of the captions? And he went through, sent them all. And this was, you know, over this past summer.

• 20:26Michael Malice?

  And it was really a gut punch. And this is 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 in these countries' lives. You know, think, 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 'em up movie, you know, Jerry Bruckheimer movie or something stupid. You can watch How I Met Your Mother, there's nothing political about it, it's just, but,

• 21:10Michael Malice?

  and we can sit here and talk about how much we hate Trump, or we hate wokeism, whatever, and there's no consequences. But to live in a country where even your friends are, they are turning and spying on you, and you have to watch what you say. And at work, everything's in this context, and every movie, every song, every TV show, every newspaper, how it encompasses and affects you, it's, we can't wrap our heads around it. And, you know, so Rand was testifying in 1947 in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and she was the only-

• 21:44Michael Malice?

  Person testifying, the only witness who had lived in the Soviet, in what became the Soviet Union. And the congresspeople were pushing back at her. Cause they're, cause they were just like, cause what she was saying to them was fantastical to them. Because they were of this idea that like, you know, we have it one way. You know, the Russians have it a different way, but people are all pretty much the same all around the world, which is true. You know, to, in, to that extent. And this congressman from Pennsylvania goes like, don't they like have picnics and visit their mother in law? And, and you could sense the exasperation in her voice. And she says the quote, which is on the back cover 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.

• 22:28Michael Malice?

  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 doorbell to 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 gonna do what to you, when, because there's no rights or law of any kind. And this sense, uh, which I grew up with to some extent, it was kind of passively fed into me.

• 22:57Chris Williamson?

  You've told me about, uh, what's that concern that you have? You sometimes worry about giving people pieces of information because how can it be used against you?

• 23:04Michael Malice?

  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. Cause they think, I think insofar emotionally, you can kind of get to the point where, you know, you go to school and they're teaching you lies and the newspapers are full of lies. And then the movies are full of propaganda. So we could 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, wouldn't want to live there.

• 23:49Michael Malice?

  It's, uh, 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 day I'm born till the day I'm gonna 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.

• 24:15Chris Williamson?

  It's the difference between being homeless or going camping.

• 24:18Michael Malice?

  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 had you used to have a home. You could still have a shelter. You know, there's ways to change your environment. But yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it.

• 24:38Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 24:54Michael Malice?

  Well.

• 24:54Chris Williamson?

  Is it only obvious in retrospect?

• 24:57Michael Malice?

  I I I think. That's a great question. How did they not foresee? I think a lot of people did foresee it. Mikhail 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 predicted the Soviet Union. He predicted the problems of the Soviet Union.

• 25:18Chris Williamson?

  Prophetic.

• 25:19Michael Malice?

  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 mollified if it's called the people's 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. You know, everyone's going, you're not going to be like my hard work is not going to be going towards. You know, Carnegie and having an eighth mansion for him. It's going to be going towards the people.

• 26:04Michael Malice?

  I'm going to work less.

• 26:07Michael Malice?

  There is a kind of coherence to it.

• 26:09Chris Williamson?

  In the course of time, these methods will be abolished when they've become unnecessary.

• 26:13Michael Malice?

  Yeah. Yeah, and you know, Emma Goldman, who's 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 bourgeois privilege. Like, we're in a time of revolution. Once this kind of civil, Russian civil war is settled, then we're going to be introducing freedoms." And it was a complete lie. Once the Russian civil war, as she saw personally, was stopped, then they just doubled down even more. And even Lenin's erstwhile colleagues from other, like, the anarchists,

• 26:57Michael Malice?

  the Mensheviks, they were all locked up. And when Lenin adopted their views, the Menshevik 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.

• 27:40Michael Malice?

  We're for stealing food if you're starving. You're not, but this is not what we're about." They're oppressing the exact people we're supposedly for. And the Western intellectuals, who love having 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 testify as to what they saw, and you have someone who went to Harvard be like, "Oh, you don't get it. Read a book."

• 28:15Chris Williamson?

  Talking about anarchists, especially in the US, what was the story of Lewis Ling?

• 28:19Michael Malice?

  Oh god, Lewis Ling's story, I love him, he's such a badass. Um, Lewis Ling was one of seven men, there was a, um, yeah, in, um, I forget the year, in the late 1800s, there was a rally in Haymarket Square in Chicago. This is when they were, after the Civil War had ended, they thought there was gonna be a third American Revolution. You had the first one, which overthrew aristocracy and monarchy, the second one, which overthrew slavery, and now you're gonna have one which is gonna overthrow the capitalists, and we're gonna have, you know, a revolution here in America, and have things like the eight-hour day, and, you know, abolish profit and all that other stuff that they liked. And there was a, um, a, uh, meeting, a public meeting, there were some speeches, very, it was peaceful, not mostly peaceful, it was entirely peaceful.

• 29:04Michael Malice?

  The mayor came, he's like, alright, no problem here, he leaves. Someone throws a bomb, we still don't know to this day who threw that bomb and for what purpose. A lot of cops were killed, a lot of cops started shooting, a lot of people were killed. Uh, they arrested seven people, and they put them on, various anarchists, some who weren't even there. Um, some who had spoken there and advocated peace. And they put them on trial, it's basically like, you preach this ideology, and they charged them with murder, uh, 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, uh, my client has the right to have bombs in his house",

• 29:46Michael Malice?

  and, which became this kind of meme, before memes were a thing, where it's like, uh, he's ascribed to have said, "I couldn't have thrown that bomb, I was at home making bombs." And they imprison him, and someone's, we still don't know how, snuck a blasting capsule into his jail, and rather than be hanged, he detonated his jaw. Uh, he was, if you look at photos of Lewis Ling, it's, it's like a time traveler, 'cause he looks like Channing Tatum or something, he, he looks like- He came out at Abercrombie, I think Abercrombie's not doing like the studs anymore, but whatever, like when Abercrombie was thing. 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."

• 30:28Michael Malice?

  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 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 stud he was. So, he really was a total badass. You know, he's certainly not a good guy, but certainly in terms of literature, this kind of very specific archetypical figure.

• 31:10Chris Williamson?

  What happened to the other six?

• 31:11Michael Malice?

  Oh, they were hanged. One, no, no, no.

• 31:13Chris Williamson?

  What, didn't one apologize?

• 31:14Michael Malice?

  Sorry. They were told, "If you write for clemency, the governor will lessen the charges." And some of them are like, "I'm not, I didn't do anything. I didn't kill, I didn't kill anyone. I'm not for murder. I'm not asking for clemency." And they're like, "All right." 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, they got pardoned posthumously. There is a monument to their, to them in a cemetery near Chicago. Emma Goldman was repatriated to be buried there as well. The dates on her tombstone are wrong, which is funny. And the quote, Auguste Spies' quote, is worded several different ways, but one of them,

• 31:59Michael Malice?

  they're all effectively, technically the same meaning. "Someday the voices, someday our voice, someday our voices will speak louder than those you strangle today." And it's true.

• 32:11Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 32:44Michael Malice?

  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 emergent class. And also you had these enormous fortunes being generated as a result of industrialization becoming a thing. Farmers, you know, were kind of on the down. 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.

• 33:27Michael Malice?

  You know, this kind of classical 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. You know, 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.

• 34:10Michael Malice?

  So like, we gotta 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 is socialism at the time was really this kind of blanket 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 strain that won 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 Fabian Society coming up, 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 is particularly ambiguous,

• 34:52Michael Malice?

  is all these different branches of intellectual leftism were 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, you know, who was a former communist, I discuss him on the book, journalist said, yeah, you, you guys were looking at the Russians like guinea 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.

• 35:25Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 35:48Michael Malice?

  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.

• 35:59Chris Williamson?

  Too much.

• 36:00Michael Malice?

  Yeah. When, when Hitler and Stalin signed the Rip and Trop Pact and, you know, Treaty of Nonaggression and they basically started becoming buddies, you know, 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 got to stay out of the world or two. But there were lots of progressives, hardcore progressives who were like, you're shaking, like, they're like, you're shaking hands with Hitler? Okay, that's a wrap. Like, this is not ambiguous. This is completely what we're against. I'm out of here. So they still remained, you know, hardcore democratic socialists or whatever progressives, depending on the individual. But in terms of having a love affair for the Soviet Union, that was a big one for them to swallow.

• 36:45Michael Malice?

  And 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.

• 36:55Chris Williamson?

  The Espionage Act was, 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 it was 1960, 1917. Is that the same?

• 37:13Michael Malice?

  No, I don't, I'm not sure that it is. So what you're referring to is after Leon Chalgash killed, Chalgash killed President McKinley in 1901, and Teddy Roosevelt came in and Ted Roosevelt said, you know, anarchists are the worst people ever, they're worse, it's worse than slavery and so on and so forth. And they basically passed a law saying if you're an anarchist or have certain other ideologies, you could 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, which 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 being used in contemporary terms.

• 37:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you said in 1916, keeping us out of the war was a winning slogan. By 1917, it was a crime.

• 38:01Michael Malice?

  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, not McKinley, excuse me, Grover Cleveland was elected in two, not consecutive terms, because the Republican Party just basically ran the table. And since Taft 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, is, 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.

• 38:46Michael Malice?

  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, You know, 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, you know, Wilson introduced, just like Lenin was saying to Goldman, you know, 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 he pardoned him or gave him clemency to get him out of jail.

• 39:31Michael Malice?

  So they were imprisoning a lot. They were, you know, reading the mail. It was very much a totalitarian vision. And the 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.

• 39:53Chris Williamson?

  What are the principles that the Soviet Union was founded on then? It's like 1917, any time. What was the fundamental philosophy or principles that it was?

• 40:03Michael Malice?

  Well, there's the de facto 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 going to sit down, figure out how to run the factory better for themselves. Everyone's going to share in the wealth. Everyone's going to put in their two cents from each according to his ability. So you're stronger than I am. So you're going to do the heavy lifting. Maybe I'm better with my little hands with screws. You know, everyone's going to work together. It's going to 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. And Trotsky, his kind of sidekick.

• 40:46Michael Malice?

  And you had plays like The New York Times saying explicitly, oh, 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 would maybe shy away from saying with a straight face in the Soviet Union because he did 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.

• 41:14Chris Williamson?

  You said that Lenin was widely regarded as a lunatic.

• 41:17Michael Malice?

  Yes.

• 41:17Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 41:18Michael Malice?

  Well, before nineteen, this idea that, okay, we're gonna come in, we're gonna overthrow capitalism, we're gonna, because, you know, the Marxist idea is much more radical than what the Soviet Union even tried to implement, because the Soviet Union was in theory, it's like putting, putting your ideas to practice, right? So this kind of concept of, you know, everything is gonna be done through the state, and we're gonna change the very nature of man, that human being is infinitely plasticine. You know, early on, they were talking about like, okay, what if kids are raised communally, right?

• 41:50Chris Williamson?

  That was wild. That absolutely took, what was the thing about, um, uh, code on marriage, the family and guardianship, it was seen as bourgeois to prefer your own children over others.

• 42:00Michael Malice?

  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 consequence. So here's an idea, so like, let me give you a counter, a counter example that I, was in my North Korea book to your reader, when conservatives say, the family is the basic unit of society, right? So, they do that in North Korea, meaning if you commit a crime, Christopher, like the Williamson family's on trial, because it's

• 42:28Chris Williamson?

  The next eight generations.

• 42:30Michael Malice?

  Well, three, but it's, 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 aspects 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 gonna have to work a day in my life, you're born to a mother addicted to heroin in some, you know, gutter, you, we're not gonna 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,

• 43:13Michael Malice?

  well, why should one kid have more love or a better parent than another, we're just gonna take the kids and raise them all together by professionals, the government teachers are gonna raise them, they're gonna 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, the model for their whole country, and some of it, they had enormous pushback, and some of it they implemented, but the whole point is, This is a new scientific society. You guys are old fuddy duddies. You're doing things just because your grandma did it a certain way.

• 43:54Michael Malice?

  We're starting from scratch and we're rebuilding it nice and clean along scientific principles. None of this emotionalism, this kind of bourgeois sentimental 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's, it doesn't, it's really, once you put it into practice. Uh, you know, in North Korea is another example, like in construction, like the women have to do the construction also because women are equal. So they're putting it to practice and it's just like, okay, good luck with that.

• 44:25Chris Williamson?

  Is this a warning for what happens if you take scientism or rationality too far?

• 44:30Michael Malice?

  Um, I don't think so because I don't think it's really rational. Because I, I think that-

• 44:37Chris Williamson?

  Does it think that it's rational though?

• 44:39Michael Malice?

  It does, but I think everything thinks it's rational, right? Other than Nietzsche, right? So this, I, the issue is thinking you're more informed than you are and not having this kind of-

• 44:50Chris Williamson?

  Not understanding the limits or the bounds of your own-

• 44:52Michael Malice?

  A skepticism.

• 44:53Chris Williamson?

  Understanding your competence.

• 44:53Michael Malice?

  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 towards seeing these kids. We even see with like 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. Uh, they did CAT scans on dogs, right? And dogs, the parts of the brain light up when they see you, their owners, as other, as members of a pack. Uh, so there is that thing, it kind of that's happening in their head.

• 45:33Michael Malice?

  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.

• 46:07Chris Williamson?

  Even if the other song is melodically, compositionally, yeah, feelings don't care about your facts in that regard.

• 46:13Michael Malice?

  Right, right, but it's not, I'm not liking this song because some capitalist told me to, or because of my, or maybe I am, but I don't think that's entirely, it can be ascribed entirely that. Because then we'd all like the same songs, that's not the case.

• 46:28Chris Williamson?

  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 then praying at the altar of cerebral horsepower 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 Austin psychedelic, right? Not some woo out there, Rhonda Byrne, the secret shit, just your programming and your nature and your intuition

• 47:13Chris Williamson?

  is able to aggregate more information than your prefrontal cortex is able to rationalize.

• 47:18Michael Malice?

  Yes.

• 47:19Chris Williamson?

  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. Why? I don't know, I just, it was something, I got a feeling. Well, yeah, because you're able to, the way that they walked, the way that they looked, the body make, all of that stuff, right? And like I say, from a personal standpoint, now trying to reintegrate those two things, so when you scale it up to the size of an entire. Uh, nation. I, 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 of this.

• 47:58Michael Malice?

  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, very easy example. I know that any people do it and I think it would be extremely dynamic. You know, there's some days when you want to listen to that ballad and there's some days when you want to listen to some synths. So this idea that you could kind of sit down and just figure it out for even one person is kind of, and if, even if it's yourself is kind of absurd. So.

• 48:27Chris Williamson?

  Where did this passion for revolution in the Soviet Union come from? Because it's so.

• 48:32Michael Malice?

  Marx, it came from Marx.

• 48:33Chris Williamson?

  It's so fervent.

• 48:35Michael Malice?

  Yeah. So Marx 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, you know, big revolution and it's going to bring about, you know, 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 the state. And, you know, Marx very famously and Engels talked about, you know, after it all works out, the state's going to wither away because human man, you'll be all equal and we won't need the government anymore and everything's just going to kind of work itself out.

• 49:17Michael Malice?

  But they really thought that, and they're not entirely wrong, that we are going to create, now that we, 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 going to 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 seen before. But there, there's other examples of this, which is plastic surgery was invented as a result of World War One. The first time you had these soldiers coming back from, you know, the front.

• 50:01Michael Malice?

  And they were all deformed and mangled in ways that, you know, hadn't been seen before. And if you look at Googling, you know, first photos, the first people who had plastic surgery. It's it's completely nightmarish, you know, but you have to take those halting steps. To get to the point where it's, you know, contemporary Beverly Hills. But this, you know, this era, this was, you keep in mind in World War One. You had the king and then you had a Kaiser and then you had the head of the Ottoman Empire. And you had, you know, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and you had the Tsar. And then you had, I think Italy had a king. So even though it's like nineteen fourteen to nineteen seventeen and nineteen through nineteen twenty. In some senses, for us, this is just like another world like.

• 50:43Michael Malice?

  I mean, obviously Queen Elizabeth just recently passed away, but she was a symbol, you know, 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.

• 51:02Chris Williamson?

  What was happening in the Soviet Union before it became the Soviet Union? Why was it primed in such a way?

• 51:09Michael Malice?

  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.

• 51:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that was it, not Hargreaves. What was the name of that factory where everybody kicked off and then they just brought new workers in?

• 51:36Michael Malice?

  Oh, in the steel mills in, I'm liking the term right now, near Pittsburgh.

• 51:41Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 51:42Michael Malice?

  But no, but they, it would be nationwide, like you would nationwide have the workers be completely oppressed. And the workers are going to rise up and it's going to be a worldwide thing. But you don't go from like this feudal, the Tsarist, it was basically feudalism, you know, in many ways up until the Tsar fell. And your 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 had been under this thumb of czars 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 1917, it was like, no one really knew what that meant. It's like, okay, the Bolsheviks running things now.

• 52:28Michael Malice?

  And they very quickly realized what it meant that he wasn't messing around.

• 52:31Chris Williamson?

  This is a different breed.

• 52:32Michael Malice?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This isn't like the difference between like the Democratic Party and the Green Party.

• 52:39Chris Williamson?

  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-

• 53:01Michael Malice?

  They did see themselves that, yes.

• 53:02Chris Williamson?

  Yes. And then they, but what you've got, what you mentioned earlier on, we'll get on to 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.

• 53:24Michael Malice?

  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, and in religion, you have the putative argument where it's like, all right, you had the argument between agnostics and orthodox Christianity. Is Christ co-equal with God the Father or is Christ subordinate to 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 one another. So Trotsky, who was, again, Lenin's 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 but your chains, that's the great Marxist quote, right? So his idea is-

• 54:10Michael Malice?

  The worker, working class in Russia, 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 czars and sultans and kaisers? 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 would call imperialist wars, 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.

• 54:54Michael Malice?

  But that was kind of the idea that, all right, it's gonna start here and then it's, 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 seizes power in, in, in what became the Soviet Union. You have the Great Depression. Things are unprecedentedly bad for unprecedented long time. There'd been depressions before, but they never went on for that long or 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 like, all right, there's this, these are the death throes of capitalism.

• 55:38Michael Malice?

  And in that sense, FDR, you know, who is, you know, 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, a workers' revolution and having a communist dictatorship here in the States.

• 55:58Chris Williamson?

  What was that quote about, uh, "The capitalists will sell us the rope and we'll tie the noose"?

• 56:02Michael Malice?

  Yeah, Lenin is alleged to have said, and apparently he never did, that "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we'll hang them."

• 56:09Chris Williamson?

  Yes, that was it.

• 56:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's funny. And then, do you think that he was actually true when 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?

• 56:26Michael Malice?

  No, because the reason communism doesn't work isn't simply due to like, human nature being bad, which doesn't even make sense, because if you're 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 who can't fly, the problem is in your program, not in the person or you're, you know, building it around. The problem is calculation. So without a market to set price, you do not know how much to produce. So, you know, a very obvious example is you don't 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,

• 57:10Michael Malice?

  and Detective Comics 27 is $50,000, and Detective Comics 28 is 6,000, something about number 27 is special. You don't have to know it's the first appearance of Batman, but you do have to know is that either the 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 for more of. But if I am setting a price, if I am, as the government's saying, Detective Comics number 27 is going to be sold at $1,000, very quickly, it's gonna be a complete, sold out everywhere. You're not gonna be able to find it because it's way below the market. If you're gonna be able to sell it, it's maybe

• 57:51Michael Malice?

  gonna be at the black market, and that's going to be blank store shelves. On the other hand, if I say, we're gonna produce X amount of copies of Detective Comics 27, then you're gonna have these massive surpluses, because at a certain point, if you don't have the price, you don't know how much to produce. So, 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, 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 with every other product.

• 58:33Michael Malice?

  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 a need. How do I figure out which is needed more? And that's what price indicates.

• 58:49Chris Williamson?

  Is that the fundamental structural issue when it comes to communism?

• 58:53Michael Malice?

  Well, when it comes to central planning, yes, in my opinion.

• 58:56Chris Williamson?

  What else? What are the other elements?

• 58:58Michael Malice?

  Well, I think the other elements, it's very, very expensive to try to, in every sense of 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 enforced themselves because you can only pay so many police to beat so many people. And at a certain point, people are like, I don't want to be beating people anymore.

• 59:21Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 59:48Michael Malice?

  Well, I don't think that CEOs are held in the same regard in any capitalist country as like Stalin was, you know? 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 258 on Twitter alone, even before he bought Twitter, 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 ran Apple for many years with the turtleneck before he died.

• 1:00:30Chris Williamson?

  Tim Cook? Oh, what? Steve Jobs?

• 1:00:32Michael Malice?

  Yeah, 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.

• 1:00:57Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:01:10Michael Malice?

  Well, yeah.

• 1:01:10Chris Williamson?

  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 it seems like that gets an awful lot of focus. Not enough food and too much brutality coming from the state and also caused by its own population on itself.

• 1:01:35Michael Malice?

  But I think, I think in the West, we can look at things as discrete issues, right? We can say it's a problem that not enough people have access to healthcare, 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 detrimental to 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.

• 1:02:15Michael Malice?

  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, you know, 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 don't, I don't, I mean, 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 going to know what the worst part of it is. It's kind of like, we're, it's kind of like Plato's cave.

• 1:02:58Chris Williamson?

  Just how bad did the famine get?

• 1:03:01Michael Malice?

  Which one?

• 1:03:03Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, pick whichever of your favorites there was.

• 1:03:05Michael Malice?

  Well, I didn't have any favorites.

• 1:03:07Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:03:07Michael Malice?

  Most certainly, but if you're talking about the Holodomor in the nineteen, early nineteen thirties, you know, Stalin's war in Ukraine. Red Famine is a book by Anne 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're going to liquidate the kulaks. And the kulaks were these kind of wealthy farmers and very, 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.

• 1:03:51Michael Malice?

  You just got to turn them in, accuse them of being kulak, and then you're rewarded with 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. 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 Holodomor is your own body would betray you. They could take one look at you and see you're not starving. That means you're hiding.

• 1:04:32Chris Williamson?

  You're less gaunt than.

• 1:04:33Michael Malice?

  You're less gaunt. That means you're hiding food. Where's 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 don't, 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 out group. 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, you're suffering because these people are,

• 1:05:17Michael Malice?

  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 the 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 kulaks, 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 of her and people like her.

• 1:05:47Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:06:02Michael Malice?

  Yeah, Dave Smith brought up that that was the story that got to him the most.

• 1:06:06Chris Williamson?

  That's pretty disturbing.

• 1:06:07Michael Malice?

  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 kid's crying because there's no milk coming out. And she snaps and she starts beating the crap out of her kid in front of 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.

• 1:06:46Chris Williamson?

  No reference point.

• 1:06:47Michael Malice?

  I have no reference point for this. Like, I can, I can't, it's hard for me to, for any of us, to imagine what it's like being that hungry for that long, right? Even that is like, I, I mean, I know people who've been on the show Survivor, but they know that at any minute they can get to food and, and they're only there for third days max. And, you know, they're in a tropical paradise, you know, so on and so forth. And even, 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, and the, the thing that is really, um, the, I, I would think the darkest aspect is not just the hunger, it's the knowledge that this isn't changing. Like this, there's no, hang on, you know, we're in war.

• 1:07:32Michael Malice?

  Once this war is over, you know, it's like, no, no, no, this is peacetime. 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, I, I, I can't wrap my head around it.

• 1:07:44Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:07:49Michael Malice?

  And accuse you of stealing it.

• 1:07:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Was this organized? Was the famine, so the famine was created by the state?

• 1:07:58Michael Malice?

  Yes, by Stalin.

• 1:07:59Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:08:00Michael Malice?

  Because he wanted to break Ukraine. He wanted to break, he wanted to collectivize the countryside. And in, for a long time, the Ukraine is very famously known as the breadbasket of Europe because they had these fertile lands and so on and so forth. And they, they were producing all the crops. And he's like, and the Ukrainians, obviously historically and to this day, spoiler alert, have enormous amount of rivalry, if not contempt, for the Russian people and 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 Ukraine and, and, you know, yeah, 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.

• 1:08:45Chris Williamson?

  Who is Walter Duranty?

• 1:08:48Michael Malice?

  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, this war in Ukraine, and it wasn't just Ukraine, of course. People were starving all over the Soviet Union, this was localized, I want to be clear. He was writing in the 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.

• 1:09:32Michael Malice?

  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, you know, he's repeatedly talking about how it's the people who are complaining are 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 was another, who was a British journalist, figured out what was happening because he got off his train to stop early and just walked through the

• 1:10:15Michael Malice?

  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, another Britishman, Malcolm Ruggers, 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

• 1:11:00Michael Malice?

  his colleagues as worse than fools, as in league with the devil, you know, he paid the price.

• 1:11:08Chris Williamson?

  But that's the question. Walter Duranty wasn't giving an accurate account of what was happening inside the Soviet Union.

• 1:11:14Michael Malice?

  As he later admitted, yeah.

• 1:11:16Chris Williamson?

  Why? What was, what was his motivation for?

• 1:11:20Michael Malice?

  I, I, 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 from him 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, 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,

• 1:12:02Michael Malice?

  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 Upton Sinclair has this quote that's ascribed 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's dependent on him not being convinced of it. So it might be as simple as that.

• 1:12:25Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah, it, I don't know. He seemed like a very, um, I, 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-

• 1:12:57Michael Malice?

  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 it revealed. Who knows?

• 1:13:05Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:13:36Michael Malice?

  Well, I, I mean, they killed, they sure killed a lot of them. But I think it was, I don't, that's a good question.

• 1:13:45Michael Malice?

  I wonder if that was a concern.

• 1:13:48Chris Williamson?

  I guess.

• 1:13:49Michael Malice?

  Because they were given some grain. It's not like they were given literally none, right?

• 1:13:52Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:13:52Michael Malice?

  They took it all, but they gave some back.

• 1:13:53Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:13:56Chris Williamson?

  So what happens downstream from a famine, next thing that happens is you have

• 1:14:01Chris Williamson?

  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 gives the 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.

• 1:14:44Michael Malice?

  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 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, you know, in St. Petersburg or Leningrad, you need to arrest 10,000. In Lviv, 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

• 1:15:27Michael Malice?

  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're arresting innocent people, that in and of itself is being counter-revolutionary and criticizing the government. So that in itself is a crime. So, yeah, and I, 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.

• 1:16:01Chris Williamson?

  What was some of the tools that they used to extract confessions from people?

• 1:16:06Michael Malice?

  That was a very hard.

• 1:16:09Michael Malice?

  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 gonna yell at you, they're gonna rough you up, you know, things like that. It's like, all right, I, that's what we're used to as like, police brutality. So at a certain point, they lowered the death penalty for children, um, so I think it was 12 or 14. 12. 12. And this became, this was a big problem for defenders of the Soviet Union, because this wasn't like hearsay, this was public. And they're like, what are you, what

• 1:16:50Michael Malice?

  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 come 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, it's ready to be delivered. He'll confess to anything. I mean, they, they were having Jews confessing to working for Hitler. Um, 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 czar. They were like the terrorists of their time, like people who fought with Lenin. And they were

• 1:17:33Michael Malice?

  hardened men, you know, the Bolshevik would arrest them. They had the Kotorga system, which presaged the, um, the Gulags, they'd send them to 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, uh, or his mother-in-law, and check, because 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 to him, he's like, okay, I'll sign whatever you want, you know? So the, 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 Cruise is tied to a chair and they're beating the crap out of him. He's like, you know, spitting blood at them, just glaring at them.

• 1:18:18Michael Malice?

  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 like, you know, we don't really want to do anything. Like, 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.

• 1:18:39Chris Williamson?

  What was the conveyor?

• 1:18:41Michael Malice?

  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's go, oh, so when this happened, and then when the guy who's interviewing gets tired, they just bring somebody else, like conveyor belt. And you're up for days at a time. And as soon as there's any discrepancy and was the movie you and I went to see, was it Amelie or 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, now they have 10, this is 10 times you lied to us. Look at, you're not a trust. It's very easy when someone hasn't slept, when every little slight detail is being examined

• 1:19:26Michael Malice?

  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.

• 1:19:42Chris Williamson?

  There's a study that was done on TSA agents in airports. And 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 100 images and you had to pick between them, angry, happy, 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 out to a question around TSA agents,

• 1:20:26Chris Williamson?

  which is that everybody has gone through the scenario of there being nothing in their bag. And the security guy saying, we're gonna have to open this up because something's come up. And you open it up and you say, 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.

• 1:21:03Michael Malice?

  Oh, yeah. And then it's even worse because if, think about it this way. What if that TSA agent is told 10%, of the populace or the people coming through are potential terrorists? Like, we know through our research and our studies, it's 1% or 0.5%, whatever, small number. And then you, 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 do 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 clogged one single person. So this must be by design.

• 1:21:46Michael Malice?

  One or two we can allow, that's negligent, whatever. Every single potential terrorist you let 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.

• 1:21:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there was this sort of Damocles over pretty much everybody. What was the scalping thing?

• 1:22:05Michael Malice?

  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 the top of their head popped off.

• 1:22:22Michael Malice?

  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, you know, where the actors just getting the crap kicked out of them and jaw broken and whatever.

• 1:22:46Michael Malice?

  You don't dare show, even in like a Silence 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 gonna get saved, right? They're not gonna show that you sign the confession and they shoot the kid anyway.

• 1:23:05Chris Williamson?

  Well, what was that General Secretary Stanislav Kozia?

• 1:23:08Michael Malice?

  Well, that was the hardest, the hardest scene.

• 1:23:11Chris Williamson?

  That was the worst scene in the book?

• 1:23:15Michael Malice?

  I think Peter Fekter might be the worst, but this was the one where, because he's also a very evil person, right? Stanislav Kozia. And he was head of Ukraine.

• 1:23:28Michael Malice?

  Stalin brought him to Moscow and made him like 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, you know, 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 gonna feel sentimental because this enemy of the people is being tortured. What kind of person are you, right? Like, you're a strong Soviet. And, you know, they could have 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.

• 1:24:12Michael Malice?

  And Stalin was like, oops, sorry, buddy.

• 1:24:16Michael Malice?

  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 reached 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 gonna out with them? Or were they like, was he actually doing it? Was he like going, you know, like, what's his name?

• 1:24:57Michael Malice?

  In Gitmo, Khalid, he was waterboarded like 20 times or 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 tortures under his name, just to kind of try to get into his head 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, you know, I know how this works. I'm a proud Bolshevik. I would never betray the people, like spitting his blood in their faces. And then she comes in, it's like, what's she doing here?

• 1:25:42Michael Malice?

  And he's like, oh, you're innocent, huh? Okay. And then he just saw, and the thing is, she killed herself. He got, he outlived her. She threw herself in front of a train.

• 1:25:52Michael Malice?

  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 beating 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 rap for you. And it's just like, we don't know, none of us in the West, I think, under, except under maybe ridiculous circumstances, can appreciate that sense of powerlessness.

• 1:26:37Michael Malice?

  Like, even if someone is solitary confinement, shout out to Ross Ulbricht, can still write letters to people, receive information, you know, read a book or something. There's a little bit of

• 1:26:52Chris Williamson?

  Sovereignty.

• 1:26:52Michael Malice?

  Sovereignty. And that, which is just so obscene in like, almost a spiritual sense, is, and the thing is, our heads would never go there. Like, we don't think in terms like this. And they were just very, the Soviets were very, very conniving and crafty in their machinations.

• 1:27:17Chris Williamson?

  Why was this extreme paranoia, overbearing police and Secret Service involvement, heavy use of cold cellars and hot cellars, learning about that as well 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 cellar, which was basically where you were left to freeze in this super cold Siberian winter.

• 1:27:45Michael Malice?

  They put you in a, no, they put you in a, like, basically like a basement and they threw ice water on you, naked.

• 1:27:51Chris Williamson?

  Not good.

• 1:27:51Michael Malice?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:52Chris Williamson?

  Why? Why?

• 1:27:53Michael Malice?

  You do the cold plunges.

• 1:27:54Chris Williamson?

  That's true, that's true. Maybe I would have loved it.

• 1:27:56Michael Malice?

  They're a kuya.

• 1:27:57Chris Williamson?

  Maybe I would have loved it now, it's kuya, just without the psychedelics and the ketamine. Why is all of this happening? Why is it, why are there quotas for how many criminals need to be found? Is this?

• 1:28:12Chris Williamson?

  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 strategy?

• 1:28:28Michael Malice?

  There's several, several things. And to be clear, not every decade of Soviet Union was as bad as this. This was 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, alright, this guy's accountable to no one. You know, he's untouchable. You know, I can understand that kind of argument.

• 1:29:10Michael Malice?

  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 are 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 and you are friends, or your parents,

• 1:29:51Michael Malice?

  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 is personally very paranoid, any kind of organization, whether it's a classroom...

• 1:30:18Michael Malice?

  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 as low trust a 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, coworkers, 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 anecdote, where you could

• 1:31:01Michael Malice?

  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, 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.

• 1:31:32Chris Williamson?

  It seems like a lot of the, a lot of this story was either perpetuated, created, or driven by Stalin.

• 1:31:38Michael Malice?

  Yes.

• 1:31:41Chris Williamson?

  What is he as a man? Is he evil? Is he captured by an ideology?

• 1:31:48Michael Malice?

  He was nowhere near as much of an ideologue as Lenin. So that is real, and he was a, he was a thug. He came up as a bank robber, like a hooligan. He was not some kind of, like Trotsky is very much the intellectual vision of the communist. Despite, you know, people making excuses for Trotsky, as we saw with, I talk about the Konsthat 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 as Stalin is because he got deposed and deported. So when he's in the depths of Mexico, plowing Frida Kahlo, he's not in a position to really be ordering, you know, rapes and executions. So that, it was very heavily.

• 1:32:32Michael Malice?

  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 fifty six, where he's like, yeah, all this stuff about Stalin is true. And when you hear it coming from the guy who's exceeded Stalin as opposed to like Western capitalist propaganda, you're like, oh crap, we gotta 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.

• 1:33:05Chris Williamson?

  Also, something that happened.

• 1:33:07Michael Malice?

  Wait, no, they did it after Stalin was in power. Sorry.

• 1:33:09Chris Williamson?

  Eighty nine was when the Berlin Wall fell, right?

• 1:33:11Michael Malice?

  Yes.

• 1:33:11Chris Williamson?

  So that's a year after I was born. So 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.

• 1:33:22Michael Malice?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:22Chris Williamson?

  It had been split up between, was it the French, Russians, British, who's the other one?

• 1:33:27Michael Malice?

  Americans.

• 1:33:28Chris Williamson?

  And the Americans, right, whatever. I don't know. You got a bit of Germany. I can't remember it. Read a very big book in not very much time. Okay. Like, give me, give me a break. You talk about the absurdity of splitting not only a country, but a city.

• 1:33:42Michael Malice?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:43Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 1:34:01Michael Malice?

  Yeah. You know, that was one of the things that was interesting when I was writing that chapter, you know, and how I framed it is, it would have been considered unthinkable because no one had ever thought to, 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 a car in most cities or certain cities. And everything's just integrated. So it's like, what if you wanted to kind of, if Manhattan? You know, take Times Square, but now Times Square is a separate country.

• 1:34:45Michael Malice?

  It's it's like, like, we would have to sit down and really do the math here. It's like, OK, you can get there through the subway. You've got the streets. You've got these tall buildings, like some of the buildings are interconnected with these skywalks. Like, how would you separate this out? And they basically did this in East Germany. They're like, all right, all these people, uh, cause West Germany, 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. You got, you had a wall right down the middle. It wasn't.

• 1:35:25Michael Malice?

  The entire city of Berlin is in the, um, 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 German, 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 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 gonna separate out this city into two halves. And you have to worry about the sewers. People are gonna sneak in through the sewers. You have to worry about the streets.

• 1:36:07Michael Malice?

  You have to worry about, you know, uh, um, water pipes, like every aspect that integrates a city. They had to figure out how are we going to disintegrate this subway lines? Uh, 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 it 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 like 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, you know, very, very quickly.

• 1:36:51Michael Malice?

  And the stories that I love that chapter a lot. Because there's a lot of just very dark moments where people just wanna 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 gonna do something about this, you know, and escaping and just using their ingenuity to kind of give a

• 1:37:13Chris Williamson?

  You know, my favorite story is the one with the sports car.

• 1:37:16Michael Malice?

  I love that story. Hans Meckstner, I think's the name.

• 1:37:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So before that, what was the citizens' escape tunnel?

• 1:37:24Michael Malice?

  You mean with the college kids?

• 1:37:26Chris Williamson?

  It was elderly people, wasn't it?

• 1:37:27Michael Malice?

  Oh, the senior citizens tunnel.

• 1:37:28Chris Williamson?

  Senior citizens' escape tunnel.

• 1:37:29Michael Malice?

  Yeah, so the senior citizens' tunnel, Andrew Heaton told me this story. I'm very grateful to him. Basically, there was a chicken coop in East, I always cry, I always lose it when I tell this story. And you tell it so many times, you think you're gonna be able to tell it calmly, and you never can, or at least I can't, because there 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 gonna take a lot longer than something at crawl 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, and they all got out. Isn't that great?

• 1:38:15Chris Williamson?

  Fucking amazing. What about the sports car? What about?

• 1:38:18Michael Malice?

  Oh, God, isn't that a great story?

• 1:38:19Chris Williamson?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:38:20Michael Malice?

  So I think his name's Hans Meckstner, please 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 if you're a certain type of citizen. And he fell in love with an East German girl. And he's like, all right, I gotta get her ass to West Germany. So he goes to Checkpoint Charlie, and you know, that's the big one, that was the most famous.

• 1:38:47Chris Williamson?

  It's where the exchanges and shit happened, isn't it?

• 1:38:49Michael Malice?

  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 guy's, 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 gotta find a car that would fit under this bar, and I could just drive under it. So he finds, I think it was an Astrid Martin, it was a British car, I remember, he rents it. He puts the girlfriend in the backseat and he's like, well, if I'm gonna flee with her, I gotta bring mom along. He brings the mother-in-law.

• 1:39:23Chris Williamson?

  And then he packs a ton of bricks.

• 1:39:24Michael Malice?

  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 to second point, because he had taken out the windshield also, he just, 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 there shaking their fists. They weren't because they didn't know what the hell had just happened. And they got married and it's just this beautiful. 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,

• 1:40:09Michael Malice?

  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, an aerial photo of them recreating that picture where he's in the wheel, she's in the backseat, mother-in-law's in the trunk with the bricks. And there's a sequel to the story because another guy did that same thing.

• 1:40:31Chris Williamson?

  Didn't take the windscreen off.

• 1:40:32Michael Malice?

  But he rented the same car. I love it.

• 1:40:41Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 1:40:54Michael Malice?

  What do you, what do you mean?

• 1:40:56Chris Williamson?

  Well, you've got this essentially overnight fall of death throes of this.

• 1:41:07Chris Williamson?

  Culture, philosophy, institution that's been going on forever. And it is brought about by two conservatives in the US and the UK. And a Russian.

• 1:41:18Michael Malice?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:19Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:41:28Michael Malice?

  Yeah, if you look at Star Trek, what's the name, Chekhov?

• 1:41:31Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:41:32Michael Malice?

  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 for the West. In the seventies, the argument was like, all right. Look, Soviet Union 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.

• 1:42:16Michael Malice?

  Because this is going to be the status quo, at least for another hundred years.

• 1:42:19Chris Williamson?

  Even if we have warp speed.

• 1:42:20Michael Malice?

  Even if we have warp speed, right. Even with the Federation, this is just the nature of our reality. And in before he became president, Ronald Reagan sat down with one of his advisors. And he goes, um, my policy for the Cold War is simple. And some would even say simplistic. We win, they lose. And that kind of approach of, um, 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 Thatcher and Reagan really weren't. Interested in bringing down the Soviet Union as their primary goal.

• 1:43:04Michael Malice?

  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 of them wants to kill each other, neither of them wants to be killed. Like, you know, this is, you're playing brinksmanship. 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.

• 1:43:44Michael Malice?

  So if I retaliate, then within minutes, literally millions, if not tens of millions of Russians are, who are innocent people, who, whose 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, and I'm killing in minutes, tens of millions of people? Like, it made no sense to him. And the, but the beautiful part is Gorbachev is taken down into the bunker, and he's driven, throwing the rehearsal, and they go, okay, Mr. General Secretary, you know, if this happens, this is the button you press. And he goes, I'm not pressing that button even for practice purposes.

• 1:44:29Michael Malice?

  And he's like, if they strike us, too bad. And, but neither of them knew the other had this position. And what's fascinating is Thatcher, who was PM at the time, Prime Minister of Great Britain, she gets a lot of heat, very correctly, for being a scold. She, you know, the first time she met Gorbachev, he came to Czechers before he was head of the Soviet Union, you know, she wanted to meet him, which was, it's the prime minister's like, summer house, whatever they call it, 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 about 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, You know, I wasn't sent here to convert you to communism.

• 1:45:14Michael Malice?

  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, you know, never had a fight she didn't like. She was always throwing hands at Prime Minister's questions. She was always going after members of her own cabinets. She called them "wets",

• 1:45:58Michael Malice?

  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, does that mean in 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, alright, 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 know, someone gets angry or something happens, and within 20 seconds, all life on Earth is destroyed. This can't happen.

• 1:46:39Michael Malice?

  And together, you know, 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...

• 1:47:01Michael Malice?

  General Secretary, it's all going to shit. You need to send in the tanks. And he goes, no, I'm not doing it. And to me, you know, people often talk about like what what's beauty? And beauty could be like a beautiful woman. It could be like a sunset. It could be, you know, a song that shows your 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. And there were 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,

• 1:47:46Michael Malice?

  if you do not, Mr. Gorbachev, if you do not send in the tanks, like this, this system that you grew up in, that makes the Soviet Union, the 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 Honecker, you know, who's the dictator of East Germany, is watching the footage of these marches. And he's like, all right, we got to do something. We need to 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, can I curse? He basically says, fuck you. We're not doing anything. This is going to resolve peacefully.

• 1:48:27Michael Malice?

  And Honecker 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 and have done a lot of atrocities, for one reason or another, maybe not voluntarily, but 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 just from personal sense 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. The most important, but the thing is with Gorbachev, it wasn't his motivation. He genuinely was like, all right.

• 1:49:08Michael Malice?

  He spent enough time with the West as opposed to other people who became in 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. Dubcek, who was head of Czechoslovakia, wanted to implement socialism with a 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 like 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 apparatchik, and to see like, we were told in our newspapers that you were happy that we were liberating or saving the revolution Czechoslovakia, and

• 1:49:53Michael Malice?

  then I see the workers, and any of these workers would pull a 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?

• 1:50:09Chris Williamson?

  Could you imagine if, instead of getting a Gorbachev, you got another Stalin?

• 1:50:15Michael Malice?

  Well, they had that. I mean, Brezhnev wasn't another Stalin, but the fact that he's sending the tanks in 68 in Prague, the fact that the Hungarian rebellion in, I think it was 56, was 13 days where the Hungarians were like, all right, we're leaving the Warsaw Pact, and Khrushchev's like, that's cute. And they hung Imran Agi, 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.

• 1:50:51Chris Williamson?

  I've had two conversations in the last month, one with Schultz and one with Goggins, and I asked both of them, I find it interesting asking people similar questions. I like to get a different response to the same prompt, and both of them have had long... Relationships going on Joe's show and asked them both about, I would, what's it like, you know, being friends with Rogan and sort of observing what's been going on, so on and so forth. And both of them have 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

• 1:51:34Chris Williamson?

  to raise others up, so on and so forth. And, um, yeah, it, it, it seems to me like I, we're both good friends with Michaela. Michaela, for the people that don't know, is named after Gorbachev.

• 1:51:46Michael Malice?

  Yes.

• 1:51:46Chris Williamson?

  That's why Jordan called her Michaela.

• 1:51:50Chris Williamson?

  I'm not kidding when I said, what 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 Beria and Gorbachev. I did just, they're all Russian guys that ran the country. Maybe they did some bad things, maybe they did some good things. I don't know.

• 1:52:17Chris Williamson?

  It kind of makes sense.

• 1:52:18Michael Malice?

  I didn't know either. So when I, 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

• 1:53:00Michael Malice?

  the book, why he did this. And I had no idea why, having previously to written this book, he would have done it.

• 1:53:08Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:53:17Michael Malice?

  Well, thanks for spoiling the book, Chris.

• 1:53:19Chris Williamson?

  Sorry, the final line and you revealed that it was it was Michael Malice all along. Yeah.

• 1:53:25Michael Malice?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:26Chris Williamson?

  What's that mean?

• 1:53:27Michael Malice?

  It means that hope doesn't mean that nothing bad happens. Hope doesn't mean, you know, someone 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 driven 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, 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 in this book, they're much worse.

• 1:54:11Michael Malice?

  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 to use an absurd example, if I'm Stalin and I want a dinosaur, like a living dinosaur, I can't get that right. Cause 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 going to be fed.

• 1:54:54Michael Malice?

  I also can't snap my fingers and say, everyone who dislikes me is going to be identified by me. I'm not going to be able to do that either. So this claim that they can always win just because they've got the, the, let's, first of all, the person who's got the most numbers always wins. What about the George Washington? George Washington's entire career was retreating from the British, he, we won.

• 1:55:14Chris Williamson?

  Vietnam.

• 1:55:14Michael Malice?

  Vietnam, right, Afghanistan, number, number one. Number two is just this kind of premise that just because some organization has been at it for a long time. Like if you're starting out on third base, right? That's a huge advantage. Does everyone who's on third base make it home? No, like, and you wouldn't say, and anyone said that would be absurd. So the fact that there are, again, so many examples.

• 1:55:42Michael Malice?

  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 Thatcher 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.

• 1:56:24Michael Malice?

  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 wrap. And that's what happened in many of these countries. And that is what I think is 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 is another just blatant one of their lies.

• 1:56:55Chris Williamson?

  What do you think most people misunderstand about evil?

• 1:57:02Michael Malice?

  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, they really think it, you know, I talk about this in the book where there's this, I think it was, I forget who wrote the poem, it was Leonard Cohen, about, you know, one of these Nazis, height, normal, eyes, normal, hair, normal. It's like, what do you expect, fangs? 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. Like that, that's not how, you look at, who was that, the serial killer in Florida? Who was played by that?

• 1:57:41Chris Williamson?

  Jeffrey Dahmer?

• 1:57:42Michael Malice?

  No, the one in Florida who killed all those women, who just looked like a...

• 1:57:49Michael Malice?

  We're both, trust me, we're both gonna feel stupid later. Anyway.

• 1:57:51Chris Williamson?

  People are screaming it into their iPods at the moment.

• 1:57:53Michael Malice?

  And he was played by that actor with, Zac Efron played him.

• 1:57:55Chris Williamson?

  Ted Bundy?

• 1:57:56Michael Malice?

  Ted Bundy. Ted Bundy, you couldn't pick him out of, if anything, he's good looking, right? You just think he's like a normal guy.

• 1:58:02Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:58:02Michael Malice?

  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 like political evil, we think of like, again, the government brutality, like the cops are beating you up in your cell or you're, put in 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

• 1:58:42Michael Malice?

  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 his family comes along, you're, you'd fold in two seconds and, and you, you turn me in and I wouldn't blame you. And I think the other thing that was turned out, 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 informants to the secret police, who snitched on their friends, their coworkers, their neighbors, had a gun to their head themselves. So they bring in Chris, they're like, alright, Chris, I need 10 names. And you're like, or we're gonna kill you and your family. It's like,

• 1:59:25Michael Malice?

  alright, 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 them 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.

• 1:59:52Michael Malice?

  I would say almost entirely, but decreasingly oblivious to. Well, how would you categorize that? That last. What's what Hannah Arendt calls the banality of evil? Right. Maybe she's not using the term in the same way, but that's kind of like how commonplace 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 was called The File. And both are great. Anna Funder's book's 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 want to know? Or do I want to just look the other way and just pretend it never happened?

• 2:00:37Michael Malice?

  Do I want to know? What would you do? It depends on how, if I went to, so that's the thing, right? Some people have 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, and 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 whose job there, Frau Trumplmann, 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, is to sit them down and be, and basically walk them through. It's, it's kind of like how they used to have.

• 2:01:21Michael Malice?

  If you take an AIDS 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 like leave East Germany. And she found out through reading her file, that it was the guy she's still living with. And she's lost it. And he, that morning, he told her, have a nice day. How do you go home to that? And this is an entire country of people like this, you know? So it's, it's, you know, with those of us who say they'd rather know. I, I, maybe I can see the case for both sides very easily.

• 2:02:06Michael Malice?

  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 where you're like, they're dead? I don't, I'd rather remember them as my dad or my mom than as someone who couldn't keep in their pants.

• 2:02:25Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to a ton of resentment for no reason?

• 2:02:27Michael Malice?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:28Chris Williamson?

  You have a quote where you say, you should take one red pill and not the whole bottle.

• 2:02:34Michael Malice?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:35Chris Williamson?

  What's the appropriate dosage of white pills?

• 2:02:41Michael Malice?

  It's [email protected].

• 2:02:46Chris Williamson?

  That's good enough for me. Dude, I am, I can credit you with opening up an awful lot of my understanding around this sort of middle 1900, depths of human depravity, heights of human hope, complicity of journalists and state enforcement 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.

• 2:03:29Chris Williamson?

  I really, really, genuinely, genuinely enjoyed it. There was a bunch of things, like the, just a little passage about Lenin, who 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, I very, very much enjoyed it, especially given that I had no background to it. So, dude, congratulations.

• 2:03:49Michael Malice?

  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.

• 2:04:00Chris Williamson?

  Can't see why.

• 2:04:01Michael Malice?

  These stories were both in negative sense and the positive sense, like, like the Hans Meissner 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, and I think, to me, this was almost more like an exorcism, because there were just so many.

• 2:04:25Michael Malice?

  Like souls, just, and now to have the idea that they would just be forgotten and stories swept under the rug. And I'm like, I'm gonna do something about this. These people need to be valorized and be remembered. Just so many just innocent, you know, victims who just happened to be wrong, be born in 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.

• 2:04:57Chris Williamson?

  You've done a commendable job, man. I mean, if it was, I think that they would all be incredibly grateful for what you've done. How many references are there in this book? I didn't actually, in fact, I can get it up.

• 2:05:09Michael Malice?

  Was it 500?

• 2:05:10Chris Williamson?

  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 references.

• 2:05:16Michael Malice?

  Oh, in the Kindle, I think it's Roman numerals. In the hardcover, it's numbers.

• 2:05:20Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so I haven't ever seen Roman numerals go up this high. I didn't know that, what's this? So what page am I on here? This is page 341?

• 2:05:32Michael Malice?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:33Chris Williamson?

  L D E X X V I L.

• 2:05:39Michael Malice?

  L D L, isn't L 500?

• 2:05:42Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 2:05:48Michael Malice?

  Roman numerals?

• 2:05:49Chris Williamson?

  It's still in fucking Roman numerals all the way to the end. So I don't know. Lots, though. 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.

• 2:06:18Michael Malice?

  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.

• 2:06:32Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh.

• 2:06:32Michael Malice?

  Like at all. Because to

• 2:06:34Chris Williamson?

  Like trying to do your first bench session with 600 pounds?

• 2:06:37Michael Malice?

  Well, it's, I think it's honestly, it's like trying to do a bench and a squat at the same time. No, no, and I'll tell you why. No, no, I'll tell you why. It's a good metaphor. Cause first of all, to even condense this much history into a book is just almost impossible.

• 2:06:52Chris Williamson?

  Cause it kept growing, right?

• 2:06:53Michael Malice?

  Right. And so it's under 40 pages. So to keep it to numbers is, is, 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 there's something that is readable. And also on a personal level, you know, when I, I, I've mentioned this when I was on, 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, you know, these people who are being brutalized. Yeah. Or just that woman, you know, even that was, that section was just copy and paste.

• 2:07:37Michael Malice?

  But just thinking about what that's like to go in and find out that your roommate or boyfriend, it's not really clear, turned you in and you're still living with this person. I, I mean, it does a number on you. And it would do a number on anybody.

• 2:07:52Chris Williamson?

  Are you glad that you done?

• 2:07:54Michael Malice?

  I am.

• 2:07:59Michael Malice?

  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, uh, in the first

• 2:08:12Chris Williamson?

  There's no hard copies available at the moment. Is that right?

• 2:08:14Michael Malice?

  It just takes like two weeks, but they're, 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 a wash. So it took a while for people to get their copies of the book. And so I have the launch, I did Lex Friedman's show. And then it's kind of like radio silence, right? Cause I'd been working for 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.

• 2:08:58Michael Malice?

  And she's like, this is, people have gotten their copies. How are they going to 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 one of 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.

• 2:09:43Michael Malice?

  And because this is my heritage, you know, you reach a 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 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.

• 2:10:27Chris Williamson?

  Unreal, man. I'm proud of you.

• 2:10:28Michael Malice?

  Thank you so much. That means a lot.

• 2:10:30Chris Williamson?

  Thank you for being here. WhitePillBook.com, Michael Malice on Twitter.

• 2:10:35Michael Malice?

  I apologize for my Twitter.

• 2:10:36Chris Williamson?

  Apologies in advance. That's it, man. Thank you.

• 2:10:39Michael Malice?

  Thank you.

• 2:10:40Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 2:10:51Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 2:10:57Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 2:11:01Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 2:11:04Speaker 02

  I'm not the first then.

• 2:11:06Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.