Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - The White Pill w/ Michael Malice
Aired: 2023-01-05
Duration: 01:19:49


=== Roll Back The State (14:51) ===

[00:00:00]  Fill her up.
[00:00:02]  You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:08]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:00:10]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:00:12]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:00:16]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:00:22]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:00:26]  You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:30]  Tears your host, James Medic.
[00:00:33]  What's up?
[00:00:34]  What's up, everybody?
[00:00:35]  Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem, the first episode of 2023.
[00:00:41]  And this is the episode I wanted to do for the first one of the year.
[00:00:44]  Of course, we are welcoming onto the show my favorite person to talk to, podcaster, personality, very failed author, the great Michael Malice.
[00:00:55]  How are you, sir?
[00:00:56]  Couldn't even get a book deal.
[00:00:58]  Couldn't even get a book deal.
[00:01:00]  He just writes them himself on Loose Leaf and sells them for five bucks in a parking lot.
[00:01:06]  But they're quality.
[00:01:08]  If you read them, they're really not bad.
[00:01:11]  Yeah.
[00:01:11]  So I was watching because we're obviously going to talk about your new book.
[00:01:15]  And so I was like, I went, I had seen a few of the clips, but I went earlier today to watch your podcast with Lex that you did just a few weeks ago.
[00:01:25]  And you got an insulted me within 15 minutes of the podcast.
[00:01:30]  And it wasn't even you because Lex Friedman calls me a very failed comedian.
[00:01:34]  That's now, you've like made that a thing that people just know.
[00:01:37]  No, that's not cool.
[00:01:39]  You've made that a thing.
[00:01:42]  Not cool, Lex.
[00:01:43]  I take it from Michael Malas.
[00:01:45]  You got to at least have me on your show, Lex Friedman.
[00:01:47]  That's not cool.
[00:01:47]  You can't be calling me that unless you have me on your show.
[00:01:50]  If you have me on your show, then it's cool.
[00:01:51]  It's not a problem.
[00:01:52]  But other than that.
[00:01:53]  If he has you on your show, it won't be cool.
[00:01:57]  Cool, maybe that isn't the exact word.
[00:01:59]  I don't know.
[00:02:00]  So beneficial for me?
[00:02:03]  Maybe that's the way to describe it.
[00:02:05]  Maybe that's what I'm looking for.
[00:02:06]  That's more important than cool.
[00:02:08]  All right.
[00:02:08]  So look, the book that...
[00:02:10]  I'm just imagining, you know what I mean?
[00:02:11]  I got to interrupt you.
[00:02:14]  Dave, can you just imagine Lewis on Lex's show?
[00:02:19]  Dude, that, we have to make that happen.
[00:02:22]  We have to make that happen, yo, doggy.
[00:02:25]  Like, just I don't know, doggy.
[00:02:27]  Coding's pretty gay.
[00:02:29]  I don't know.
[00:02:30]  The more I think about it, it just seems lame.
[00:02:33]  Ones and zeros, beep, boop, beep, boop.
[00:02:35]  I don't know.
[00:02:36]  Not for me.
[00:02:39]  All right.
[00:02:39]  So, Michael Malis, you just put out a new book.
[00:02:43]  It was just released.
[00:02:44]  It is The White Pill.
[00:02:46]  Very cool artwork.
[00:02:48]  I haven't even gotten my copies yet.
[00:02:50]  Really?
[00:02:51]  Yeah, this is the author copy.
[00:02:53]  Well, I just finished it very recently.
[00:02:58]  I really got to say, dude, and I know I am a little bit biased because I'm a fan of Michael Malis, but I loved the book.
[00:03:05]  I did not like it.
[00:03:06]  I loved it.
[00:03:07]  I've enjoyed reading every book that you've written.
[00:03:10]  I thought this was your masterpiece.
[00:03:12]  I think this is the best work you've had to date.
[00:03:14]  So congratulations on it.
[00:03:15]  It's really just incredible.
[00:03:17]  I can't recommend it highly enough for people listening.
[00:03:19]  Go order the white pill.
[00:03:21]  It's really worth reading.
[00:03:23]  I knew you would like it, obviously, because we share the same ideology.
[00:03:26]  I was just curious because you're the first after Lex is the first person I've talked to who's read it.
[00:03:32]  And I was very, Tom couldn't be bothered yet.
[00:03:34]  So he'll get around to it.
[00:03:36]  But, you know, he's got a lot on his plate, apparently.
[00:03:39]  I'm very curious.
[00:03:41]  He's got a lot on his plate.
[00:03:42]  Personally, I assume.
[00:03:43]  Not professionally.
[00:03:44]  It couldn't possibly be professionally.
[00:03:46]  As Burr Rothmart said about the homeless, who cares?
[00:03:51]  I'm curious to know what specifically you enjoyed about it.
[00:03:56]  Because here's, let me explain why.
[00:03:58]  Because as the author, there's scenes I like, there's lines I like, and I never have any good idea of what people are going to respond to.
[00:04:06]  And a lot of times, like I was talking to someone and they battled off this great quote about cynicism.
[00:04:11]  And I said to her, tweet this out so I can retweet it and give you credit.
[00:04:14]  She's like, it's from your book.
[00:04:15]  Like, oh.
[00:04:18]  Well, well, let me just say, I'll say, just for the audience, if people aren't familiar, the book is about the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.
[00:04:29]  But it's really kind of a story of tragedy and hope.
[00:04:35]  If Carol Quigley hadn't taken that title, that title could have been the title for this book.
[00:04:40]  And it's really the white pill in the best sense of what people mean by that term, the white pill.
[00:04:47]  It's not like the white pill is not the blue pill.
[00:04:50]  It's not saying like, oh, things aren't as bad as you think they are.
[00:04:54]  And then history always kind of leads toward the progressive better outcome.
[00:04:59]  And so, you know, be optimistic for the future.
[00:05:02]  It's kind of the white pill is kind of swallowing the black pill, you know, taking all of that in.
[00:05:08]  Like, yes, it really is that bad.
[00:05:09]  It's as bad as you think.
[00:05:11]  It's actually, it might even be worse than you think.
[00:05:14]  And then at the end of it, spitting out, but there's still a case for some optimism.
[00:05:20]  And so this book is, I mean, if you, let's say if you read 90% of the book and don't read the last 10% of it, it's the black pill.
[00:05:30]  Oh, yeah.
[00:05:31]  There's no white pill in it until like the very zero.
[00:05:34]  It's like you can't.
[00:05:35]  And so it's just, you know, what I loved about it, number one, what I like out of out of reading a book is enjoying the process of reading it.
[00:05:44]  I like learning things from it.
[00:05:48]  And there were several things that I learned in this book that I just didn't know, like little historical events that I didn't know.
[00:05:53]  Like, I don't know.
[00:05:54]  I don't spoil too much, but like, I didn't know that Gorbachev caught Boris Yeldson after he like evidently tried to kill himself or something.
[00:06:04]  Like I've never heard that before, you know, like, so really, and there were a bunch of like little things like that.
[00:06:08]  And then it was the other thing.
[00:06:11]  So they'd be the three things I look for usually in a book that I really love is I enjoy reading it.
[00:06:15]  I learn things and it makes me really think.
[00:06:19]  And the book really made me think about a lot of like the lessons of history that you could learn from the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and how that's applicable to what we're going through today, how we should think about how, you know, like what the last three years, what the last 20 years, with the last 100 years of this country mean.
[00:06:38]  And this, this book gave me all of those.
[00:06:41]  So it was, I mean, we could get more into specific things, but generally speaking, that's really what I loved about it.
[00:06:47]  Yeah.
[00:06:48]  I, you know, until you said it, I didn't even realize that's what happened about the one of the reasons I am white-pilled, by which I mean optimistic and hopeful, is not at all.
[00:07:01]  I hate this idea that like, oh, you're white-pilled.
[00:07:04]  So you don't think anything bad's ever going to happen?
[00:07:05]  Or like, you think human beings are basically kind.
[00:07:07]  It's just like, I never said that or implied it.
[00:07:11]  The one of the reasons I hate people who are black pill, by which I mean hope, hopeless, feeling hopeless about the future, like it's, it's, it's all a wrap.
[00:07:18]  We pack it up.
[00:07:19]  Let's go home is their idea that like people who are evil, they're never going to give up, you know, and they're going to use everything in their power to get what they want.
[00:07:28]  And it's like, I don't care what they want.
[00:07:30]  I care about what I want.
[00:07:31]  Like, why the hell do bad people in your ideology or your view of the world always get what they want?
[00:07:39]  That's not the, that's, first of all, that's just, if you say that with like a straight face, like the bad people always get what they want, that's not true.
[00:07:46]  And second of all, even if that had been true historically, which it hasn't, that doesn't mean they're always going to get what they want in perpetuity.
[00:07:52]  Like, what are you talking about?
[00:07:53]  Like, so this was a good example, like you said, until I didn't even click until you said it that like, yes, these are not moderates.
[00:08:02]  These are not kind of bad people, you know, who are like, oh, they're a little racist or they put too many people in jail.
[00:08:09]  This is pure evil.
[00:08:10]  So I'm not, there's none of this attempt to be like, oh, it wasn't as bad as it seemed.
[00:08:15]  You're right.
[00:08:15]  But they still fucking lost.
[00:08:17]  No, in fact, in the book, if anything, you're, you're not saying, oh, these people weren't as evil as you might imagine.
[00:08:24]  You're saying you do not understand the depths of how evil they were.
[00:08:29]  And in fact, that point explicitly is made with the round quote and a whole chapter devoted to this, that you actually can't possibly understand the depths of how evil this regime was and what people living under it went through.
[00:08:44]  And that's something that I, you know, I think is while none of us can understand this, and me and you both have kind of like you, you have obviously family history who grew up under this evil Soviet regime.
[00:08:57]  You yourself were born there, although you left very young.
[00:09:00]  My family, you know, on my grandfather's side lived under the Nazis.
[00:09:06]  And both of us, I think, kind of, even though you were born there, I think we both kind of understand that we will probably never completely understand what it is to live under those regimes, but it's still kind of incumbent on us to attempt to, you know, to kind of like try to imagine what it must be like in those.
[00:09:24]  I know that, you know, you on a previous episode of Lex Friedman, you were talking about, you know, you had, you got into some stories about your grandmother and really got very emotional talking about it.
[00:09:36]  I really related to that because I similar things with my grandfather that really, you know, like just these awful, powerful stories about what it's like.
[00:09:46]  And I remember talking to you, this was maybe like around a year ago, maybe 10 months ago or something like that, where you were in the, it still working on the book and you were talking about how difficult it was and how hard it was.
[00:10:00]  I'd imagine this must have been pretty hard to write a book going into kind of the depths of how fucked this situation was.
[00:10:09]  And I think people like, even though people kind of know on a surface level, oh, yeah, we know the Soviet Union was messed up, but there's, there's gory details in the book about how fucked up the situation was.
[00:10:21]  And it was extremely hard, like easily the hardest thing I've ever done.
[00:10:25]  And it kept getting hard in different ways.
[00:10:27]  And, you know, just a couple of months ago, as I was wrapping up in the editing stage, my protege tried to Prague.
[00:10:34]  And in Prague, there's a museum of communism, which I recommend everyone check out.
[00:10:38]  And, you know, Czechoslovakia, you know, tried to escape the Soviet Union's orbit in 68.
[00:10:43]  They got put down.
[00:10:44]  They sat in the tanks.
[00:10:45]  And in this museum, which is really great because it's not like an American museum, it's literally like, you know, according to Marxism, such and such would happen, but in reality, under this demented system, so it's really like all the exhibits are just written with this like big fuck you, like this is bullshit and evil.
[00:11:04]  And so there's an exhibit about the tortures, the secret police.
[00:11:08]  There's one about the schools.
[00:11:10]  There's one about food.
[00:11:11]  There's one about healthcare.
[00:11:13]  And as he's sending me all these pictures, I just started losing it because that was the first time I realized what it meant for my family and all the other families.
[00:11:23]  There's nowhere else to go.
[00:11:26]  Like this is their reality from the time they wake up to the time we go to bed.
[00:11:30]  Let's suppose you hate Trump.
[00:11:31]  You think Trump's the worst, blah, blah, blah, right?
[00:11:33]  You can go to a movie and watch like the notebook.
[00:11:37]  You can watch Friends, Seinfeld, some old TV show, right?
[00:11:40]  Go to a concert.
[00:11:42]  Or if you hate woke stuff, yes, they're trying to put woke stuff in like Netflix and everything.
[00:11:46]  There's lots of places you could go just have a bar and have a conversation and you're not talking about politics or woke stuff at all.
[00:11:53]  But under these countries, it's literally everywhere.
[00:11:58]  Because at the very least, if I'm talking to you, even if I've known you my entire life, I have to wonder, if I say the wrong thing, are you going to turn on me?
[00:12:10]  And even if you don't want to turn on me, if they get your wife and they set you down, they go, we need some names to free your wife, you drop my name in two seconds and I wouldn't blame you.
[00:12:20]  So that was something where it just kind of clicked that it's like, this was, and, you know, everything on television is through this filter.
[00:12:28]  Your clothes are through this filter.
[00:12:29]  The books you read are through this filter.
[00:12:31]  You know, your schooling, everything everywhere is always about this ideology.
[00:12:36]  You can't escape it.
[00:12:37]  You can't breathe.
[00:12:38]  And that really only hit me a few months ago.
[00:12:42]  And it was just like a gut punch where I was like, I can't even, we not, none of us, or I mean, you and I or much of the audience cannot imagine what that's like to have something like this take the entirety of your environment for your entire life.
[00:12:59]  Yeah.
[00:13:00]  Yeah.
[00:13:00]  There's something about the famine stuff.
[00:13:05]  I mean, there's, there's several different layers of it, but the idea of really like being super hungry and malnourished and having no food and just what that does to you.
[00:13:19]  There's the part in there in the book where they mentioned the, I forget who has the quote about the woman smacking her baby and like freaking out on the baby.
[00:13:30]  And it's just like everybody, the baby's breastfeeding, but the woman's malnourished.
[00:13:34]  So she, the, the breast milk isn't like satisfying the baby.
[00:13:37]  And then the mother's like flipping out and smacks the baby.
[00:13:40]  And like, it's just like, it's, it's just so hard to even like try to imagine what that situation must be like.
[00:13:48]  Like I said before, I think it's kind of incumbent on us to try, to try to imagine it, but also knowing that we never could, you know, actually understand what it's like to live like that.
[00:13:58]  Yeah.
[00:13:58]  Yeah.
[00:13:59]  That was the, so I kind of, when you, cause, you know, my background is, as a lot of people watching this know, was like co-authoring books for celebrities, right?
[00:14:07]  So whenever I was doing those books, I would try insofar as I was able to put myself in their shoes and to imagine what it's like to be them.
[00:14:15]  And the good thing is I could ask them specific questions, be like, how would you react in the situation?
[00:14:19]  How'd this make you feel?
[00:14:20]  So it's kind of like being like a method actor.
[00:14:22]  So I try to do the same thing with this.
[00:14:25]  And when you're putting yourself in a situation where like, what's it like when there is no food and you know there's not going to be food.
[00:14:34]  It's one thing if it's like war or like, you know, you're in a desert island maybe or survivor, you know what I mean?
[00:14:40]  Where you're like, all right, like this situation sucks, but we're all in together.
[00:14:43]  We got to suck it out.
[00:14:45]  Like there's no food and no one's coming to help you.
[00:14:48]  And you have to watch the people around you starve.
[00:14:51]  And it's like, what do you do?

=== Authoritarianism In Our Society (03:44) ===

[00:14:52]  Right.
[00:14:52]  And if someone did come to help you, that person would be shot.
[00:14:55]  You know, like there's, there's forces working against anyone who might help you.
[00:14:59]  And then you have to be like, if in prison, at the very least, you could be like, okay, I will do or say whatever you want me to do or say, just give me food.
[00:15:06]  Right.
[00:15:06]  Like that's the bargaining.
[00:15:07]  There's no one to bargain with.
[00:15:09]  There's nothing you can offer.
[00:15:10]  And I don't think any of us can imagine what that situation is like at all.
[00:15:18]  Yeah.
[00:15:18]  And particularly, I think for people in our space who, you know, are in general anti-authoritarian, which is pretty much, you know, what our audiences are.
[00:15:31]  Although maybe, you know, some of them are a little bit authoritarian, but for we certainly are that way.
[00:15:37]  And I would at least say I think probably close to 100% of our audience are against the authoritarianism of the current regime.
[00:15:49]  Yeah.
[00:15:49]  And it is just worth thinking about and understanding that even as bad as like, you know, government authoritarianism during the COVID days has been, even as authoritarian as the lockdowns were or the worst thing you could think of, which I want to be fair, certainly for the people who are the most victimized by those government policies, it's probably no different.
[00:16:15]  Like, you know, if you, if you were the victim of a SWAT raid where like your kid was killed or something like that, you lived under totalitarianism.
[00:16:23]  It's no different for you.
[00:16:24]  But for the vast majority of us to still just recognize how much deeper the rabbit hole goes of of totalitarianism and how many people could live under a situation that we still, even after these last few years, just can't even fathom.
[00:16:42]  But also how comfortable those who are in power are with taking us in that direction.
[00:16:49]  So that's the thing that I think Americans often don't appreciate.
[00:16:53]  They think, oh, you know, the guys in power would never let it get to this point.
[00:16:57]  And it's just like, why not?
[00:17:00]  Like they don't have the same principles and values that you do at all.
[00:17:06]  And in many cases, it's the system itself that is going to be pushing them in a direction they would not personally like.
[00:17:13]  You know, I talked about this a bit when I was discussing my North Korean book, Dear Reader, because I pointed out, goes, look, if one of these leaders liberalizes, if you look at like Qaddafi or if you look at Sloboda, you know, some of these other or Romania, spoiler alert, someone puts a bullet in the leader and with good reason.
[00:17:30]  Like if I free, let's suppose I'm a dictator and I've got like 2% of the population in jail, right?
[00:17:36]  And then I just free them, which would be the right thing to do.
[00:17:39]  I have hundreds of thousands of people and their families who would do nothing, would love nothing better than to kill me.
[00:17:45]  And they'd be right to do it, you know?
[00:17:47]  So even the people at the top, in a sense, have their hands tied to kind of make things better.
[00:17:53]  So it's really kind of this kind of Chinese finger trap where everyone's kind of locked into with everyone else.
[00:17:58]  It's, it's, it's something, again, unimaginable.
[00:18:02]  Yeah, I was thinking about that toward the end of the book.
[00:18:05]  You have these things, these situations where particularly with Gorbachev and other people who are kind of on the good side, who they're saying things as the Soviet Union unwinds that you're like, well, actually, they're wrong.
[00:18:19]  You know, like he's going like, oh, taking down the Berlin Wall won't really hurt the Soviet Union.
[00:18:23]  It'll actually help us.
[00:18:24]  It's like, no, it won't, dude.
[00:18:27]  So from the perspective of we have to keep the Soviet Union going, you'd kind of be right to try to put a bullet in Gorbachev's head as he's doing that.

=== CrowdHealth Open Enrollment (03:15) ===

[00:18:36]  Oh, for sure.
[00:18:37]  And that's the, yeah.
[00:18:38]  Like, so, you know, there was one time where Hunniker, who was the head of East Germany and Teachescu's head of Romania, who were the two worst ones probably, or I think pretty unambiguously, like things are falling apart and they're on the phone with Moscow.
[00:18:52]  And they're like, dude, you got to send in the tanks.
[00:18:54]  And, you know, me and Scott Horton talked about this.
[00:18:56]  Like we both agreed that Gorbachev's like one of the greatest people ever lived.
[00:18:59]  And he's like, no.
[00:19:01]  And they're like, if you do not send in the tanks, this is all going to collapse and go to shit.
[00:19:06]  And he's like, too bad.
[00:19:07]  And it's like, they were right.
[00:19:09]  Like they were absolutely right.
[00:19:10]  This was a system that was kept in place at gunpoint.
[00:19:14]  And as soon as you take the gunpoint away, people are like, yeah, fuck you.
[00:19:17]  We're not doing this.
[00:19:18]  Yeah, there was a, it was in the green room of my comedy show in Austin and you and Scott got locked in a conversation because you were like, you had, I think, just wrapped up or were just close to wrapping up the book.
[00:19:29]  And Scott is in the process.
[00:19:32]  He's writing a book, which is about the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
[00:19:36]  So it kind of starts off at the collapse of the Soviet Union and then goes forward from there.
[00:19:41]  So it's kind of interesting.
[00:19:42]  Your book kind of starts with the rise of the Soviet Union and ends at the collapse and his is kind of picking up from there and going forward with what led to the Russia-Ukraine war right now.
[00:19:51]  But that was real interesting.
[00:19:52]  And I was like, guys, guys, I have dick jokes to tell.
[00:19:54]  So, you know, it's just keep the conversation down to a light whisper.
[00:19:57]  All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is CrowdHealth.
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[00:21:20]  So sign up today before it's too late.
[00:21:23]  Joincrowdhealth.com slash P-O-T-P.
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[00:21:34]  Let's get back into the show.
[00:21:35]  It is interesting.
[00:21:36]  You know, it, I, it, it, one of the things that it reminds me of.
[00:21:40]  So Curtis Yarvin, who I know you've, you've podcasted with a bunch of.
[00:21:44]  Oh, by the way, do you want to have him on?
[00:21:45]  Cause someone just super chatted that you should have him on.
[00:21:47]  Yeah.
[00:21:48]  I'm, here's my thing.
[00:21:49]  I'm down to have Curtis on the show.

=== Why We Need Systems Now (11:36) ===

[00:21:52]  I'd be happy to, but I almost like, I, I, I've said this before.
[00:21:57]  I'd almost rather if someone set up like a debate or something like that with us.
[00:22:02]  Okay.
[00:22:03]  And not, not that I want to like argue with him.
[00:22:05]  My thing is I don't want to ask three word questions and then listen to him deliver a fucking like seven.
[00:22:13]  You guys will debate anarchism on my show.
[00:22:15]  Yeah, I'd be down.
[00:22:16]  I'd be totally down to do that.
[00:22:18]  That one hundred percent.
[00:22:19]  Um, or even just libertarianism, or, you know, if he doesn't, if he's going to give me shit about like the full anarchist picture or something like that.
[00:22:27]  But I just, you know, I find him to be a very interesting guy.
[00:22:30]  But here's one thing that it oh, can I just say one thing what Kurt just mentioned?
[00:22:34]  I had him on my show not that long ago and I asked him one question about Ukraine-Russia and he started talking and talking.
[00:22:41]  And I'm like, is he going to go the full hour?
[00:22:43]  And I like after like a 20-minute mark, you're like, there's no way.
[00:22:47]  And then like at 40, I'm like, now you're kind of rooting for him.
[00:22:50]  And then later we edited that I got up and left.
[00:22:53]  And we edited that footage as if I just left for like 10 minutes and people were so mad.
[00:22:58]  They're like, I can't believe you just left.
[00:22:59]  And how did he not notice?
[00:23:00]  You're so rude.
[00:23:01]  And I'm just like, well, it's just, I mean, look, I do, I find him to be very like interesting.
[00:23:08]  And he's a very, you know, very smart person and he's well read and all of that stuff.
[00:23:14]  And I, I, but I, and as someone who loves the sound of my own voice, I completely, you know, can relate to it.
[00:23:20]  But I, uh, I just like, I, I find like he's been on a lot of the like libertarians shows before.
[00:23:26]  And I feel like they're just kind of listening to him the whole time.
[00:23:29]  And I'd want to like actually discuss some of the ideas and push back.
[00:23:33]  So literally, the reason I brought this up, because I, and this is one of the things I was thinking of reading like the end, the ending of the book is that, so he's made this kind of like, you can't really call it an argument.
[00:23:45]  I guess it's kind of an analogy or something about why he's not a libertarian anymore.
[00:23:51]  And if you, and it's, it's something like the, the telephone poll.
[00:23:56]  And he goes, he's like, well, you know, if you have a telephone pole and it's straight up and you're right up at the top of it, all you need is a very slight little bit of pressure to keep it standing up.
[00:24:05]  But when the telephone pole is all the way here and you're at the bottom of it, you need a tremendous amount of force to move it back up.
[00:24:12]  And I guess that's his argument against whatever.
[00:24:14]  That's why we can't have liberty or something like that.
[00:24:18]  But maybe I'm mischaracterizing this, but the point I'm making is that what's really interesting about the collapse of the Soviet Union, and I think this is true about a lot of the problems that we have in our society today too, is that what you realize is that if this is a telephone pole and it's like bent like this, you realize there's actually a tremendous amount of force keeping it down like this.
[00:24:40]  And as soon as that force is released, it like instantly springs back up.
[00:24:45]  And the truth is that the Soviet Union was like, as you were just saying, the whole thing was completely run off like violent suppression.
[00:24:55]  And as soon as they eased up on that violent suppression, it was over.
[00:25:00]  It was in the cards that like, you're not going to be able to keep this thing.
[00:25:03]  There's no organic way to allow this to stay the way it is.
[00:25:09]  Yeah.
[00:25:10]  And it was just also funny having all those receipts throughout the book where all these experts and like really informed, powerful people were like, look, this isn't going anywhere.
[00:25:22]  You have to be realistic.
[00:25:23]  Like you're having these utopian fantasies that this is going to be, they weren't even having, it wasn't even a utopian fantasy the Soviet Union is going to go away, going to go away.
[00:25:31]  It was a utopian fantasy that it was going to change in any fundamental way at all.
[00:25:35]  Like that was really kind of the craziest part where like Gorbachev was in many ways different.
[00:25:41]  People came before.
[00:25:41]  He was the first Russian leader to be born after the revolution.
[00:25:45]  He was young.
[00:25:45]  He was a, you know, he was a reformer.
[00:25:49]  And when it's an extremely centralized system, right?
[00:25:52]  So you really have a lot of power in that seat.
[00:25:55]  And they were still insisting that like, no, he doesn't mean it or he can't do shit.
[00:26:00]  And it's just like, can't?
[00:26:02]  Like, really?
[00:26:03]  So it's really kind of when you, and the thing is, I think this kind of speaks to like the intellectual mindset.
[00:26:11]  If you've been studying, you know, like, let's suppose a TV show for like Saturday night live, right?
[00:26:16]  And you're a Saturn Live expert, like in your head, Saturn Live is going to be on the air for 200 years.
[00:26:22]  Like, just like you know it so well.
[00:26:25]  And this has been your status quo, your reality.
[00:26:28]  Like you, you don't even think about what it would look like to go away.
[00:26:31]  We'll cause it to go away or what even cause it like Saturn Live to go on Tuesday nights at like one o'clock.
[00:26:37]  Like Saturday Night Live.
[00:26:38]  It can't go on day nights.
[00:26:39]  Even though for us sitting here, it's like we can easily imagine a situation where Saturn Live gets rebranded and now it's Tuesdays at eight o'clock.
[00:26:46]  Like that's not wouldn't be that hard to imagine at all.
[00:26:48]  But if you're in that kind of tunnel, and the same thing, if you're a Sovietologist, and obviously during the Cold War, you had a lot of people in the West who that's their bread and butter to study it as much as they can.
[00:26:57]  It's in very ways an alien system and country to Western ones.
[00:27:01]  Like they just didn't see any way out.
[00:27:04]  And they were just saying this for decades constantly.
[00:27:08]  And there were reasons for them to say it.
[00:27:09]  Look, we tried the Vietnam War.
[00:27:11]  Prague tried.
[00:27:12]  Hungary tried in the 50s.
[00:27:14]  You know, so on and so forth.
[00:27:16]  Like the best we can do is kind of make nice with them.
[00:27:20]  And, you know, there are a couple of people who are like, yeah, screw that.
[00:27:22]  Yeah.
[00:27:22]  I mean, you think about like, what's, I think it's been about, what is the Soviet Union lasted 70 years or just 1917 to 1991.
[00:27:33]  Right.
[00:27:33]  So it's about the age of Israel, you know?
[00:27:38]  And imagine, imagine thinking the idea of thinking that Israel doesn't exist is just like kind of insane to you.
[00:27:44]  You'd be like, well, of course, and that's just like a little tiny Manhattan-sized state in the middle of the Middle East.
[00:27:50]  But you'd go, what do you mean?
[00:27:51]  They don't exist.
[00:27:52]  Of course they're going to exist.
[00:27:54]  But, you know, it's just very hard to kind of imagine it's part of a part of kind of the human condition is taking things that are and accepting them as like, of course, they've got to be this way.
[00:28:06]  One of the things I thought about during while I was reading this book, which I guess is a little bit maybe runs counter to our anarchist, you know, views is that,
[00:28:20]  or at least runs counter to our flavor of anarchism, is that, you know, we, there is truth to the points that we've made all these years about how the Constitution of the United States of America was a coup against the Articles of Confederation and, you know, the Lysander Spooner, it was either, you know, it either gave us this government or was powerless to stop it, either way, yada, yada.
[00:28:46]  And like, this is all, there's validity to that argument, but there is something to say for the fact that we really do benefit from the fact that at least our government is organized, organized around the pretense of there are some type of rights for the individual and there are some restraints on government.
[00:29:08]  And Canada Constitution, too, and it had the same stuff.
[00:29:12]  Yeah, but did it really have the same stuff?
[00:29:15]  Oh, yeah.
[00:29:15]  Freedom of religion, freedom of speech.
[00:29:18]  Yeah.
[00:29:19]  But the thing is, if you try to like invoke the Constitution, now you're a counterrevolutionary.
[00:29:24]  You're going to jail with your family.
[00:29:25]  Yeah, but it does seem, it seems to me that the Bolshevik revolution, after it was successful, was like the promise, as you lay out in the book, was that like all property is now owned by the government.
[00:29:39]  All education is now run by the government.
[00:29:42]  We're probably working to abolish the family.
[00:29:45]  I mean, things that are very different from the American Revolution.
[00:29:50]  And as bad as things may be, as much as like, okay, you know, as again, you talk about some of this in the book because there's some American history in there as well that, okay, there's the Second Amendment says a well-regulated militia or whatever cannot be infringed on.
[00:30:04]  And then here's the Americans infringing on that.
[00:30:06]  But at least we have somewhat of a system in America where even like, you know, as you pointed out, there are leaders in power who would want to do all these things to us.
[00:30:15]  A lot of it was stopped by courts and by people who did appeal at least to the law.
[00:30:22]  I'm not saying that any of that is, I'm not saying I'm not an anarchist anymore or I don't believe in any of those views, but I do appreciate that at least our founding like kind of structure is not that.
[00:30:34]  It's not that there's no more property.
[00:30:37]  Right.
[00:30:37]  But I completely agree that if you're asking to choose between America and the American system, between the Soviet Union and the Soviet system, it's not even a question.
[00:30:46]  And I remember, by the way, I'm old enough.
[00:30:49]  I don't know if you are.
[00:30:50]  I'm not saying that sarcastically.
[00:30:51]  When I was in junior high, we sat down in my public school and they taught us the plus and minuses of communism and capitalism.
[00:30:59]  And they try to make it out that like, there's, look, they've got good things.
[00:31:02]  They don't have like, they don't like create waste.
[00:31:05]  And it's like, yeah, if no one has food, you're not wasting food.
[00:31:08]  You win.
[00:31:08]  You got this one.
[00:31:09]  That's brilliant.
[00:31:11]  But the point being, you know, they have, if you go to North Korea right now, North Korea claims to have freedom of religion.
[00:31:16]  And a lot of tour groups, if they go, they take them to a fake church where people are supposedly worshiping Christ and they have Bibles and so on and so forth.
[00:31:25]  Meanwhile, in reality, North Korea, if you're caught with the Bible, your family's like executed.
[00:31:28]  Like it's like the worst thing ever.
[00:31:30]  So Stalin introduced the new constitution.
[00:31:34]  Everyone who worked on it was executed as traitors.
[00:31:36]  But then you had people in the West, you know, the Western influencers talking about, look, they've got the same freedoms we do.
[00:31:44]  Look at their constitution.
[00:31:45]  They don't have censorship.
[00:31:46]  It says in the Constitution freedom of speech.
[00:31:48]  They have freedom of religion.
[00:31:50]  So I agree with you that these freedoms are wonderful, but I think the Constitution only works insofar as it's kind of supplemental to the broader culture.
[00:32:03]  And we see this because the First Amendment now, it hasn't always been this way, is regarded as almost sacrosanct compared to the Second Amendment, which is regarded as something very easy to regulate, right?
[00:32:16]  It's just a given that it should be hard for some people to get guns, but it's also given that everyone should have the right to freedom of speech.
[00:32:22]  But there were many times in American history where like even discussing birth control was a felony and doctors lost their licenses and because it was called pornographic.
[00:32:32]  How you reconcile that with the First Amendment, I don't know.
[00:32:35]  But the point is the Constitution is the principles.
[00:32:39]  And I think conservatives agree with this as well.
[00:32:41]  The principles of the Constitution are much better than the Constitution itself.
[00:32:45]  Yeah.
[00:32:45]  Yeah.
[00:32:46]  No, I agree with that.
[00:32:46]  And even as you mentioned in the book, an example of like Eugene Depps or something like that, who's a socialist who was, you know, put in jail and I think still got 6% of the vote or something like that from jail.
[00:32:57]  Yeah, I think I, yeah, that's a good point.
[00:32:59]  By the way, as you, as you say that, I think I may have told you this before, but I've one of my memories that I think is my one of my earliest almost like that is still why I have the political views that I have today is I believe it was sixth or seventh grade, my history teacher was going off about the virtues of Marx and telling me about teaching us what communism was.

=== The Fall Of The Berlin Wall (06:46) ===

[00:33:28]  And she said, what used to be the standard thing to say about communism.
[00:33:33]  And she goes, it was the, she goes, well, if you really cared about poor people and you really just wanted to find a way that everyone could live more harmoniously or whatever.
[00:33:41]  And she said, you know, communism worked really well on paper, but it didn't work well in practice.
[00:33:47]  And I remember my little self at sixth grade or seventh grade or whatever it was, I just thought to myself, I went, that's bullshit.
[00:33:56]  What?
[00:33:56]  That's bullshit.
[00:33:57]  The idea that something works on paper, but doesn't work in practice is bullshit.
[00:34:02]  And I argued with her and she eventually ended up just kind of like shouting me down.
[00:34:07]  And that was that.
[00:34:08]  But I remember just like very like deep in my soul, feeling like, no, that's wrong.
[00:34:14]  Like if something works on paper, then it works in practice.
[00:34:18]  That's what works on paper means.
[00:34:20]  Right.
[00:34:21]  What does work that it works?
[00:34:22]  Everything works on paper.
[00:34:23]  But like, what does that even mean?
[00:34:25]  Right.
[00:34:25]  Like if I draw an airplane, it works on paper.
[00:34:27]  What of what relevance is that?
[00:34:29]  Right.
[00:34:29]  But I like, but my thing was like works on paper means that the plan is good.
[00:34:34]  Then it doesn't work on paper.
[00:34:36]  It's like if you drew like a, you know, like a blueprint for a building and you went, well, this works on paper, but every time we build it, it collapses.
[00:34:43]  You'd be like, well, then it doesn't work out.
[00:34:45]  Something's wrong on the paper then.
[00:34:46]  Like, man, like, come on.
[00:34:48]  Also, I do remember this literally just popped into my mind.
[00:34:52]  I didn't even think about this until we were just having this conversation, but I remember I must have been very young for this.
[00:34:58]  So I was born in 83 and the Berlin Wall came down in 89.
[00:35:03]  So I was six years old.
[00:35:05]  But I remember being at my grandfather's house, who was, you know, as I said, was a Jew who grew up in Nazi Germany and escaped in 1938.
[00:35:18]  The rest of his family all died.
[00:35:20]  And they were watching the news as the Berlin Wall fell down.
[00:35:25]  And I remember just coming into the living room and, you know, I was six year old or whatever, just being loud.
[00:35:32]  And my grandfather snapped at me and was like, quiet because they were watching this and it was very serious to them.
[00:35:40]  I remember being like, kind of like, oh, okay.
[00:35:42]  And then like just watching for a little bit.
[00:35:43]  And it was them, you know, pulling the bricks down.
[00:35:46]  They were watching like ABC or something like that.
[00:35:48]  But I remember him just having like a sense of like how serious this was.
[00:35:53]  You know, and like, don't talk through this right now.
[00:35:55]  This is serious.
[00:35:56]  And I don't think my grandfather, I don't think hated the commies.
[00:36:01]  I think he kind of had a little bit of reverence for them.
[00:36:04]  He hated all of the people who were against him in World War II.
[00:36:08]  I think he kind of liked, had a little bit of respect for the communists because in his eyes, he was like, they really, you know, defeated the Nazis and freed some of the camps and stuff like that.
[00:36:19]  But he was like, so serious about it.
[00:36:21]  And so that's my earliest memory of this stuff.
[00:36:25]  You know, until I was writing this book, I didn't realize why the fall of the Berlin Wall was such a big deal.
[00:36:33]  Like I knew like I fell and it was a big party and everyone was all excited, but like it didn't even make sense to me at my advanced age who's familiar with this kind of system why it was such a huge deal and why it was such an obscenity against basic human decency and learning about how it was built,
[00:36:56]  what it did to the people of East Berlin and West Berlin and all the like heroic little stories of people defying the Berlin Wall really, you know, make it very emotional for me.
[00:37:13]  And like one of my favorite stories in the book, I just to me, like, it's, this is like my version of the notebook.
[00:37:21]  This is like the anarchist version of the notebook.
[00:37:23]  There's this guy, Hans Mexner, I think his name is something like that.
[00:37:26]  But basically, you know, he was commuting from east to west or west to west, east to west or west east Berlin, whatever it was.
[00:37:32]  So he could go back and forth between the Democratic part and the communist part.
[00:37:36]  And he fell in love with a girl who lived in East Berlin and he wanted to marry her.
[00:37:41]  And he knew, I got to get her the hell out of here.
[00:37:44]  And he's like, how do I get her out of here?
[00:37:45]  And he's like, if I got to get her, I got to get her mom too, like my future mother-in-law.
[00:37:50]  So he goes to where that divider is, you know, which that had that bar where cars pass because you have to show us your passport, your papers, please, whatever.
[00:37:59]  And he figured out how high it is.
[00:38:01]  And he gets like a British car.
[00:38:03]  I think it was like an Aspen Martin or whatever.
[00:38:05]  And he's like, he measures how high it is.
[00:38:07]  He goes, this will go right under.
[00:38:09]  So he like takes off the windshield.
[00:38:11]  He lets some of the air out of the tires.
[00:38:13]  He puts her in the back seat.
[00:38:15]  Mom is in the trunk and they put bricks around her in case they start shooting.
[00:38:20]  And how it goes is you got to show your papers to one person, then you got to go to another station.
[00:38:24]  So he goes there as the guy's looking, he floors it.
[00:38:28]  And it's basically like the Matrix.
[00:38:30]  You know, in the Matrix, the bullets are coming, Kiana's like this.
[00:38:32]  Like his car is under the bar and he just gets away with it.
[00:38:37]  And they fall in love and they get married.
[00:38:39]  But like, like, what a like that story of someone who's like, fuck you.
[00:38:44]  I love this girl and I'm going to figure out a way to get her the hell out of this nightmare is such a like emotionally resonant story for me.
[00:38:54]  And I think for everyone just hearing this, there's even a photo where they reenacted the car.
[00:38:58]  You could see from the top view the mother-in-law in the trunk.
[00:39:02]  But there's lots of little stories like this of, you know, I mentioned Andrew Heaton is the one who told me about this.
[00:39:07]  There was something called the Senior Citizens Tunnel.
[00:39:09]  And whenever I told, I think I told a story on Lexa, I got very emotional there because it was a bunch of senior citizens and they dug a tunnel from like a chicken coop in East Berlin to West Berlin and they dug it like six feet tall.
[00:39:21]  And people were like, why did you dig it so tall?
[00:39:24]  It's going to take you twice as long.
[00:39:25]  And the guy's like, my wife's done crawling.
[00:39:28]  We're going to walk to freedom.
[00:39:29]  So like you hear these, if it's like in a movie, it would just be like, you know, like, oh, please, it's so over the top, but this really happened.
[00:39:37]  So the fact that there's so many moments of heroism in these little ways to me really was inspiring.
[00:39:46]  And just the last Berlin Wall anecdote was when Helmut Kohl, who's either prime minister chancellor of West Germany, I always forget.
[00:39:53]  And he's with Lech Valesa in Warsaw.
[00:39:56]  And Lech Valesa is like, oh, this is a spoiler, but, you know, the wall comes down, guys.
[00:40:01]  And Lech Valessa is like, you know, Helmut, I don't think this Berlin Wall is going to be around for like another, like, like another couple of years.
[00:40:08]  And Helmut Cole laughs in his face, laughs, and it goes, look, you're young.

=== Moments Of Heroism (08:58) ===

[00:40:14]  You don't understand how these things work.
[00:40:17]  It's going to be a very prolonged process.
[00:40:20]  And it fell the next day and Helmut Cole says, I'm at the wrong party and gets on a plane from Warsaw to Germany.
[00:40:31]  Like it's just so crazy.
[00:40:33]  But the thing is, if you sat someone down that day and said, here's what's going to happen tomorrow, they'd be like, okay, crazy person, but they'd be wrong.
[00:40:43]  Yeah.
[00:40:44]  But that's something.
[00:40:44]  And that's really like, I think the beautiful message of this book.
[00:40:48]  It's, it's in a way that, look, a house of cards takes a very long time to build.
[00:40:57]  And it might seem like this really big structure, but when it falls, it falls very quickly.
[00:41:04]  A mutual friend of ours, Gene Epstein, always said to me, and I loved this, that he always said, I think he said this was, he didn't use the term the white pill, but he always said the case for optimism or the case for radical optimism.
[00:41:20]  And the two examples he used was he was like, look, if in 1849 you were sitting around with a friend of yours and you'd said, you know, I think in the next 15 years, slavery is going to be completely abolished in the West.
[00:41:37]  They'd have been like, what are you fucking nuts?
[00:41:39]  Like, we're at the height of slavery right now.
[00:41:42]  Like, there's just no chance that could possibly happen.
[00:41:44]  Why would the Confederates ever give up their slaves?
[00:41:47]  You're crazy.
[00:41:48]  And even not even using the American example, there were lots of other countries where there weren't wars fought, weren't like bloody wars where they just peacefully bought the slaves or came to an agreement.
[00:41:59]  The British Empire did a better job of ending slavery than America without 700,000 dead people or whatever in the war.
[00:42:07]  And then and the same thing with communism and or the Soviet Union.
[00:42:10]  It's, you know, there are these things that it would sound crazy to think that they were going to end the way they are.
[00:42:18]  And especially with communism, largely peacefully, you know, like without like major bloodshed.
[00:42:26]  And that's something to always keep in mind, that no matter how powerful or inevitable some corrupt system seems, you don't know.
[00:42:34]  You don't know what's coming up in the future.
[00:42:36]  And that's, that's at least reason enough to keep fighting.
[00:42:39]  And it's also great because it's not as if the people at the top wanted to give up power or want it to happen peacefully.
[00:42:49]  There were so many anecdotes because this, again, this is the year of Tiananmen Square.
[00:42:54]  Like they sent in those tanks in China and they killed everybody, everybody.
[00:42:59]  And in East Germany, when there are these protests, Hunaker is in East Germany on TV, they were showing Tiananmen Square.
[00:43:07]  They were shaking the hands of the Chinese government officials.
[00:43:10]  They were talking about how great it was that they were putting down this anti-revolutionary rebellion, wherever the head that their euphemism was.
[00:43:17]  And when there's protests in Leipzig and other places in East Germany, Hunnicker, who's the head of East Germany, was like, all right, we got to send in the tanks.
[00:43:27]  And they had the army and they gave the army guys their weapons and their soldiers.
[00:43:32]  They're like, all right, tonight it's going down.
[00:43:34]  And these soldiers started crying.
[00:43:38]  These soldiers started crying.
[00:43:40]  It gets me emotional because, you know, putting yourself in their shoes, it's like they're like, wait a minute, this is like my mom who's marching and my girlfriend or my grandma or my dad.
[00:43:49]  And if I'm not, if I can stop it from killing my mom, it's this guy's mom.
[00:43:53]  You know what I mean?
[00:43:54]  These are our neighbors.
[00:43:55]  And they had to be ready to go shoot.
[00:43:57]  And they were ready to, you know, send them in.
[00:43:59]  And the head of the Stasi, who had the military, looks Hunaker in the face and says, we're not doing anything.
[00:44:07]  This is going to happen peacefully.
[00:44:08]  And just says, fuck you.
[00:44:10]  So there are so many chances.
[00:44:12]  It was the same thing with the storming of the of the coup in Moscow.
[00:44:16]  There were so many chances where there were people who were like, that's it.
[00:44:21]  It's going to be a bloodbath.
[00:44:22]  Kill everyone.
[00:44:23]  And someone else in power was like, no, this is my, this is my line.
[00:44:28]  We're not doing it.
[00:44:29]  Fuck you.
[00:44:30]  And it's like, okay.
[00:44:31]  And that was that.
[00:44:32]  It was just, it was just all it took was that one person in these places.
[00:44:36]  And it's not like these people were anarchists or, you know, or any kind of classical liberals or anything like that.
[00:44:41]  These were hardcore authoritarians.
[00:44:42]  They're like, no, this is my line.
[00:44:44]  I'm not doing it.
[00:44:45]  Yeah.
[00:44:46]  Yeah.
[00:44:46]  No, it reminds it reminds me of, and I know it doesn't happen as much as we'd like it to happen, but I remember, you know, seeing there were like in 2020, when there were like the height of the lockdowns, there were like a few, if you remember this, there were a few sheriffs like around the country who were just like, I'm not enforcing this.
[00:45:07]  I'm not doing this.
[00:45:09]  Like I swore an oath to the Constitution and, you know, blah, blah, blah.
[00:45:13]  I'm not doing this.
[00:45:14]  We will not be enforcing, you know, like stay at home orders or shelter in place orders.
[00:45:19]  And it's really, it is, it's, it's amazing to see that.
[00:45:24]  And I think that one of the things that this book also does for, you know, it's like, it's interesting that this is your follow-up to the anarchist handbook.
[00:45:34]  And one of the problems that I think anarchists and libertarian anarchists have sometimes, as we've talked about many times before, is this kind of like binary thinking that I think all groups fall into.
[00:45:46]  And I think our camp is no less guilty of falling into that, where, you know, people are either good guys or bad guys.
[00:45:54]  And the truth is that in this book, in the white pill, the heroes, all of the heroes of this book are all very flawed people.
[00:46:04]  They're not like, oh, they were perfect anarchists.
[00:46:06]  They were voluntarists who did everything right.
[00:46:09]  It's like, no, a lot of them were really bad people who did a lot of very bad things.
[00:46:14]  I mean, heroes in the book are Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev.
[00:46:21]  And obviously we could all go on.
[00:46:23]  We could do five podcasts in a row of how awful some of the things Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev did.
[00:46:30]  Right.
[00:46:31]  But at the same time, that could all be true.
[00:46:34]  And then also in this one really important moment, they could do the right thing.
[00:46:38]  And that could make such a huge difference in millions of people's lives.
[00:46:44]  Yeah.
[00:46:44]  Like, I mean, we could sit here and talk for hours.
[00:46:47]  I don't have an answer about whether Khrushchev is a good guy because Khrushchev has a lot of blood on his hands, like a lot.
[00:46:54]  Like he killed a lot of people.
[00:46:57]  I don't even think it's going to be hard for you to make the argument that, well, he had no choice.
[00:47:01]  Like he really was a butcher, but he was also the one who in, I think it was 56, stood there in Stalin's seat and said, all the accusations against Stalin were true.
[00:47:13]  All these people who were accused did so from torture.
[00:47:16]  This is what our system did.
[00:47:18]  And he said it to the Communist Party members and this blew up the entire second world where they were like, holy, they couldn't say, oh, this is just Western capitalist propaganda.
[00:47:28]  This is Khrushchev Stalin's successor talking.
[00:47:31]  And you got to give the guy a lot.
[00:47:34]  Now, you could say he did to save his own skin.
[00:47:35]  He did to save his own system.
[00:47:37]  I'm comfortable ascribing the worst possible motivations to him.
[00:47:41]  The point being, he really at that moment was like, yeah, all this bullshit's true.
[00:47:47]  Like all of it.
[00:47:49]  And it's really, really bad.
[00:47:51]  And the people who we tortured, who admitted to all these crimes were completely innocent.
[00:47:56]  And not only were they innocent, they were tortured in ways that should not be happening in any country.
[00:48:01]  And it's just, there's lots of moments like this where it's just like, holy crap.
[00:48:06]  And if someone's forced to do the right thing or they do it volitionally, that kind of is a secondary concern.
[00:48:12]  But the point being, even people who are evil, and I think it's easy to make the argument that he's evil as well, often do things that are the right movement.
[00:48:21]  Just as I just said earlier, the guy who was the head of the military in East Germany, who told Hunker, we're not sending in the tanks.
[00:48:27]  He's not a good guy.
[00:48:29]  Yeah.
[00:48:30]  Yeah.
[00:48:30]  No, clearly not.
[00:48:31]  Right.
[00:48:32]  But it, but even people who are evil could be not as evil as others and maybe could have a moment where they're pushed to something.
[00:48:42]  So just in the example like I used before, like that sheriff or whoever, you know, who was saying we will not enforce this, you know, mandate for whatever reason.
[00:48:52]  I'm sure they've enforced lots of things that me and you would consider just pure evil, you know, and just had their cops out there on the street who have, you know, arrested people and held them for nonviolent, victimless crimes and horrible things.
[00:49:07]  Like life is just a lot more complex than you're either on the side of good or on the side of evil.

=== Professional Counseling Online (02:44) ===

[00:49:13]  And it's, it's important to kind of appreciate that.
[00:49:16]  So one, another.
[00:49:18]  That's really kind of funny you said that because this is the first time I'm making this public.
[00:49:23]  For a long time, I've toyed with having the subtitle be instead of a tale of good and evil, a tale of bad and evil.
[00:49:30]  Because there are people who are bad and there are people who are evil.
[00:49:34]  Yeah.
[00:49:35]  Yeah.
[00:49:35]  Right.
[00:49:36]  That no, it's a, it's an important distinction to make.
[00:49:40]  So one of the things that I was thinking about toward the end of the book, which I was thinking about.
[00:49:46]  So you really, there's, I think it's only the last like few paragraphs of the book where you kind of apply what this means to everybody, right?
[00:49:58]  Like what this, the, the collapse of the Soviet Union means and the lessons you can take from it.
[00:50:03]  All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is BetterHelp.
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[00:51:52]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:51:54]  I was thinking about a piece that Murray Rothbard wrote.

=== Terrified Neighbors And Hope (07:38) ===

[00:51:57]  I don't know if you've ever, have you read Nations by Consent?
[00:52:01]  No.
[00:52:01]  By Murray Rothbard.
[00:52:02]  It's a great piece.
[00:52:03]  I really recommend you read it.
[00:52:04]  It's not that long.
[00:52:05]  You'll get through it real quick.
[00:52:07]  So he wrote this piece after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
[00:52:10]  It was maybe 92 or 93 or something like that.
[00:52:13]  And he said, like it was kind of about what he was rethinking since the Soviet Union collapsed.
[00:52:21]  And it was, it was the first piece where he wrote about how he was rethinking his immigration position.
[00:52:27]  He used to be an open borders guy and he was kind of like, well, let's rethink that.
[00:52:32]  And he was really rethinking nationalism and the idea that, you know, he said that for so long we've conflated the nation with the nation state.
[00:52:44]  And that actually, like, you know, even from the anarchist libertarian point of view, you know, there's like, okay, yes, we're against the nation state, but the idea of a group of people having like a common set of like values and tradition and language and customs and all of this is not, you know, we're not against that.
[00:53:01]  And it's interesting to see that, like what a role kind of nationalism and religion and all of these things played in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
[00:53:14]  And it just makes me wonder what you think, you know, what might be the thing that plays a role in taking down the regime that we're not so fond of right here today.
[00:53:28]  And probably it's not just going to be guys like me and you podcasting or about anarchism.
[00:53:35]  You know, probably it's going to be some forces that really pull at a large mass of people.
[00:53:43]  So I don't know.
[00:53:43]  Do you have any thoughts about that?
[00:53:45]  Well, I'm going to be on the Babylon B in April.
[00:53:47]  So I'm going to be, and I'm making them read it first.
[00:53:50]  So I'm very curious because they're obviously hardcore Christians, what their perspective is going to be.
[00:53:54]  I double check with Tom because about Pope John Paul, because what really kicks off the happy part of the book was Pope John Paul's visit to Poland in, was it 78 or 79?
[00:54:10]  And it was really kind of like heroic of him because his predecessor, I forget who it was, John VI or something like that, wanted to visit Poland on like the 500th anniversary of Christianity being in Poland.
[00:54:24]  And he was told you can't come, right?
[00:54:26]  Things liberalized a little bit.
[00:54:28]  Pope John Paul, it's kind of like Trump.
[00:54:30]  He's, I'm going to come.
[00:54:31]  Like Rezhnev, who was head of the Soviet Union, said, look, John Paul's a smart guy.
[00:54:37]  Tell people he's sick and he can't come.
[00:54:40]  And Pope John Paul's like, yeah, I'm feeling great.
[00:54:42]  I'm getting on that fucking plane.
[00:54:44]  And he goes to Poland and he's having these masses, you know, throughout the country.
[00:54:50]  And, you know, Poland's a very religious country, very Catholic.
[00:54:53]  And thousands and thousands of people are coming out to see the Pope, the first non-Italian pope in like five, some like centuries and from Poland, you know, from the far side of the Iron Curtain.
[00:55:04]  And he's praying for like this land, you know, like, please, God, just, you know, redeem this country.
[00:55:10]  And you can imagine these, I can't even imagine, honestly.
[00:55:14]  Like, I can try to imagine what it's like growing up in this country.
[00:55:18]  You know, first of all, Poland, my God, like, you know, you're either getting it, you're getting it from.
[00:55:22]  It's not getting rape from both ends.
[00:55:23]  You're getting it from the Russians and the Germans and the Russians, the Germans.
[00:55:27]  It's just, you know, your heart breaks for the Polish people, no question.
[00:55:32]  And for him to be like, you were not forgotten, like, you know, like have faith.
[00:55:37]  And what that must have meant to these people dealing with this oppression.
[00:55:42]  And as a result of this, you have this labor movement called Solidarity.
[00:55:46]  Here's the other thing.
[00:55:46]  Solidarity was a labor movement.
[00:55:48]  These weren't classic liberals.
[00:55:49]  These are, I'm sure they're all social democrats that they'd be like Jimmy Dore or, you know, at best, if not more like Kamala Harry.
[00:55:56]  You know what I mean?
[00:55:57]  Like more like Hillary Corps.
[00:55:58]  We're hoping for Jimmy Dore.
[00:55:59]  We're hoping for Jimmy Dore, right?
[00:56:00]  But the point is they were just like, we're for the workers.
[00:56:03]  We want better wages.
[00:56:04]  We want better living classes, all the other thing.
[00:56:05]  They were put in jail.
[00:56:06]  You had martial law.
[00:56:08]  But he kind of gave them that hope that like, you know, there's something more than this.
[00:56:13]  This is, this is not like there's still that light, you know, flickering here in this dark cave.
[00:56:20]  So, you know, I give him his due very much in this book, or maybe as not as much as I should.
[00:56:25]  But, you know, so that absolutely is the kind of thing.
[00:56:29]  But that's the other thing that's like, you know, one of the things for decades conservatives attacked godless communism, godless communism.
[00:56:38]  People here don't appreciate how godless it was.
[00:56:42]  I ordered a book called Godless Utopia, which is all about the propaganda, but they would encourage priests to denounce God from the pulpit as propaganda.
[00:56:52]  They pressure these people.
[00:56:53]  And you imagine you're sitting in church under communism, this dictatorial system, and your priest gets up and tells you religion's a lie.
[00:57:01]  Like how traumatic that must be.
[00:57:03]  What are you supposed to do?
[00:57:05]  So I think, you know, that really does motivate a lot of people.
[00:57:11]  And I don't think it motivates them in a bad way at all.
[00:57:15]  Yeah.
[00:57:16]  And I think what you, I think one of the best things about religion is the idea that there's something more than whoever's in charge right now here on earth.
[00:57:24]  Like if you're going to, if your idea that the highest authority on earth is Joe Biden, like something's not adding up.
[00:57:32]  Right.
[00:57:32]  Right.
[00:57:32]  Or Donald Trump.
[00:57:34]  Right.
[00:57:34]  And even, and even something else, like, you know, your college professor or whatever the latest ideology is that's floating around as somehow like the top, you know, thing.
[00:57:45]  There's, there's something kind of that can be positive.
[00:57:49]  Obviously, it can be negative too, but that can be positive about believing that there is no, there's a God who is moral and good, who's above all of this.
[00:57:57]  Like, like it, it, and this is almost like, I think the flaw in Randian thinking is that there can't, like, she wants to ascribe to the absolute top level of what you should be thinking about that the like morals and ethics are way up here.
[00:58:13]  But at least if somebody believes that there is a God who is moral and ethical, they're kind of more likely to think that morals and ethics are the absolute top thing.
[00:58:24]  But that I think there's also something about the Pope visiting Poland that it was the huge crowds in the streets that I think like you kind of cover this dynamic in like the early part of the book of how terrified people are of even their neighbors.
[00:58:41]  You know, so you can't trust anyone because anyone could be a spy.
[00:58:45]  Anyone could be ready to rat you out.
[00:58:47]  But then when you go out there to see the Pope and you see that it's not just you going out to see the Pope, that it's there's 100,000 people with you.
[00:58:54]  You go, oh, I'm not alone.
[00:58:57]  I didn't feel comfortable to talk about this with everyone, but now I see all these people are here.
[00:59:01]  And there's something that's akin to that in what social media has produced over the last few years, where it's not just that you see someone tweeting like Hillary Clinton's a murderous cunt.
[00:59:15]  It's that you see there's a hundred thousand likes on it and you go, oh, I'm not the only one who enjoys this.
[00:59:22]  There's a whole lot of people who enjoy this too.
[00:59:25]  And there's something about that that's like, oh, once the dam starts to break, you go, oh, yes, we have the numbers.
[00:59:33]  We greatly outnumber them.
[00:59:34]  And that's very powerful.

=== Finding Community Together (08:12) ===

[00:59:36]  Yeah.
[00:59:37]  And it also kind of speaks to the courage that Rand and Rothbard and Mises had, where they're the only ones saying these things.
[00:59:46]  And they got to kind of try to make alliances with like Leonard Reed or whoever.
[00:59:50]  And like in a world where Milton Friedman is as close, you know what I mean?
[00:59:55]  It's just like what, like, and they're realizing this is all crazy.
[00:59:58]  People are like, oh, well, I don't know.
[00:59:59]  It's not so bad.
[01:00:00]  They're like, you're all a bunch of socialists.
[01:00:03]  So, you know, and even in our lifetime to go from like, you know, you're the one kid in your school who thinks this way to being like, oh, I'm a member of this subculture where there's a one kid in every school.
[01:00:15]  So now instead of just me talking to my mirror, I can talk to my internet buddies, but there's literally tens of thousands of us all around the world.
[01:00:22]  It's a very different dynamic.
[01:00:24]  Yeah.
[01:00:25]  Yeah.
[01:00:25]  There's something really powerful about that.
[01:00:27]  And right, like you said, like the fact that we can go and kind of like be in this, I don't know, in this community of people who all feel this way.
[01:00:36]  There's something very powerful about that.
[01:00:38]  So what do you think?
[01:00:43]  Thinking about the last few paragraphs of the book when you when you really get into the white pill.
[01:00:51]  This is something I also loved about the book was it almost it almost waits till the very end before it is the white pill.
[01:00:58]  Can we get into the technicalities of that?
[01:00:59]  Because I want to bring sure please.
[01:01:01]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, please.
[01:01:02]  And this is something I had to fight with my editor about with the new right.
[01:01:06]  So in corporate publishing, and this is something I absolutely despise, it's pretty much a, I don't know about a given, but like an unspoken rule or no, it's a spoken rule that after you write like a book, the last chapter should be like your thoughts on the summary and like your advice.
[01:01:22]  Right.
[01:01:23]  And this drives me absolutely crazy because if I'm like an amazing oncologist and I can diagnose your cancer from here, whatever, that doesn't mean I have any clue about what to do about it, right?
[01:01:35]  Like, or that there is anything to do about it.
[01:01:37]  So I just because for, or it's another example, if someone's like a superb food critic, right?
[01:01:43]  They go to this restaurant, they go, this was wrong, the decor is wrong, this was overcooked, this is where the table's wrong, blah, blah, blah.
[01:01:50]  That does not mean or imply at all that I have any idea how to fix it.
[01:01:54]  Just, and that doesn't, and if I don't know how to fix it, that doesn't mean my criticism is wrong.
[01:01:59]  It just means I have this scale diagnosis.
[01:02:02]  You know, an x-ray machine doesn't tell you how to stop the lung cancer, but it does really well at pointing out mats in these lungs, right?
[01:02:10]  So I hate that because you'll read like 90% of the book and be, or like a history book, you know, and like, oh, this, I'm learning a lot.
[01:02:18]  This is a history lesson, so on and so forth.
[01:02:20]  And the last chapter goes, well, therefore, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[01:02:23]  It's like, I don't think this is at all.
[01:02:24]  Like, this doesn't follow.
[01:02:25]  This is just your stupid ideas.
[01:02:27]  And that really undermines the whole book.
[01:02:29]  It's like, wait a minute.
[01:02:30]  If this guy's a putz with this last chapter, maybe the rest of this book is not as valid because you want to leave on a high note.
[01:02:37]  You want to leave respect and go.
[01:02:38]  You're not like, you had me for 90% and now you're closer.
[01:02:41]  It's just stupid.
[01:02:43]  So I really fought against that in the new right.
[01:02:46]  And same thing here.
[01:02:47]  I really think that the content should speak for itself as much as possible.
[01:02:56]  Okay.
[01:02:56]  All right.
[01:02:57]  Fair enough.
[01:02:58]  So I won't ask you for your diagnosis.
[01:03:01]  I'm saying that's why I kept it to like a few paragraphs.
[01:03:03]  No, no, I know I and I agree with you on that.
[01:03:06]  And there is something about that that's almost like this forced formulaic thing pushed into a lot of books.
[01:03:12]  But how do you think that this story, because obviously it's the, you know, the book is the white pill.
[01:03:21]  So how does this story of something that really happen, how, how, you know, does that relate to our current situation?
[01:03:31]  Or how does that make you feel?
[01:03:32]  You know what I mean?
[01:03:33]  Like, what's the message that you take from that and apply to our current situation?
[01:03:39]  I think the best application, and I say this constantly, and I don't see how it's even debatable, is this idea that the regime or the members of the regime are these omnipotent, all-knowing gods who are always going to win and always going to get what they want makes no sense.
[01:03:57]  These are not the Justice League.
[01:03:59]  If anything, they're the Injustice League.
[01:04:01]  They're not these amazingly impressive people, even if they do have an enormous apparatus behind them they've built for over a century.
[01:04:09]  And that's not something to sneeze at.
[01:04:12]  But the claim that like, well, you know, some the Roman Empire fell, like the claim that if something exists and has existed for a long time, therefore it's going to exist in perpetuity is demonstrably false.
[01:04:24]  There's no shortage of examples of things, the British Empire.
[01:04:28]  Okay, that's not even political.
[01:04:30]  You know what I mean?
[01:04:30]  It's like that was supposed to be around forever.
[01:04:33]  And I have that line.
[01:04:34]  How I didn't even realize this in the 70s, Great Britain didn't have electricity.
[01:04:38]  It went from the sun never sets in the British Empire because literally the empire stretched across the world to they had to have, you could only use electricity three days a week.
[01:04:46]  They were having blackouts all the time because they couldn't afford electricity, right?
[01:04:50]  So they went from the sun never sets in the British Empire to they couldn't even keep the lights on at home.
[01:04:55]  But then it went back in the other direction.
[01:04:57]  So this, this, there is, it's the best way to win a war, maybe not best, I'm not a military strategist, but a great way to win a war is to convince your opponents that they can't possibly win, right?
[01:05:12]  If I persuade you that I'm Mike Tyson, you're not getting in the ring with me because I'm going to kick your ass.
[01:05:19]  I'll knock you out.
[01:05:20]  I'll humiliate you.
[01:05:21]  You're not even going to try.
[01:05:22]  But if I tell you that like, it's not Mike Tyson, it's Lewis.
[01:05:26]  It's like, all right, Lewis is a big dude.
[01:05:28]  He trains, but you're saying no one can beat Lewis?
[01:05:31]  Lewis wouldn't say Lewis would say that.
[01:05:33]  But it makes it, it's an absurdity.
[01:05:35]  So what?
[01:05:36]  No one can beat Joe Biden?
[01:05:38]  No one can eat Connell Harris or the ATF?
[01:05:41]  What?
[01:05:42]  So, and again, my point being, this isn't just me being like cheerleading or being like, come on, guys, we got this.
[01:05:50]  It's like, here's examples, as you put it, of people who are pure evil, who stopped at absolutely nothing, who are perfectly happy to torture and murder children and who lost no sleep about it.
[01:06:02]  So they had every tool at their disposal.
[01:06:06]  They had no morals.
[01:06:08]  They had no qualms.
[01:06:09]  If they wanted to get to you, they'd go to your wife or your kids.
[01:06:12]  They would not even listen eye.
[01:06:14]  It's like, all right, just, it's just like filling out a form for them.
[01:06:17]  And they still lost in our lifetime.
[01:06:19]  Yeah.
[01:06:20]  Yeah.
[01:06:21]  And it's also not a story.
[01:06:23]  It's not a fantasy.
[01:06:24]  The story isn't therefore we ushered in utopia or therefore we ushered in even anarcho-capitalism or anything like that.
[01:06:33]  It's just that, you know, today Poland is a lot better than Poland under the Soviet Union.
[01:06:40]  And you know what?
[01:06:41]  The most important thing is you can leave Poland.
[01:06:44]  Right.
[01:06:44]  Right.
[01:06:45]  Like that's the big one.
[01:06:46]  It's like, you know, like it's really if things go really bad in Poland, you can leave Poland.
[01:06:51]  Yeah.
[01:06:52]  Or you could call your friend in America from Poland and not have to worry that like, okay, am I going to get rounded up for calling my friend in America?
[01:06:59]  Right.
[01:07:00]  But the thing is, there's people who won't take a win.
[01:07:02]  They will think, well, look, since this isn't pure, like, it's not Gulf's Gulch.
[01:07:07]  It's nothing really changed.
[01:07:08]  It still sucks.
[01:07:09]  Yet having a broken hand and having like full-blown AIDS both suck.
[01:07:15]  But to say that they suck, you know, it's the same situation to me is an absurdity.
[01:07:19]  Yeah.
[01:07:19]  It's one of the things that drives me crazy about the binary thinking of our camp.
[01:07:25]  And I know there's binary thinkings in every camp, but my camp, it drives me crazy the most, but where there's almost like, well, it's either anarchy or it's tyranny or something like that.
[01:07:36]  You know, it's either.
[01:07:36]  And you're like, okay, well, would you rather go live like the ordinary person in Sweden or North Korea tomorrow?
[01:07:44]  No, and then don't imagine this is a hypothetical.
[01:07:47]  This is a real thing that's going to happen to you.

=== Avoiding Totalitarian Collapse (11:03) ===

[01:07:49]  Which one?
[01:07:49]  Which one do you think?
[01:07:51]  Don't act like you don't care.
[01:07:53]  You know, you'd be dropping to your knees, begging the gods that you get to Sweden.
[01:07:59]  And I'll even buy the argument that you could say there's some things that North Korea has better than Sweden.
[01:08:03]  I don't know what they are at the top of my head.
[01:08:04]  Yeah, sure.
[01:08:05]  The point being, do the math.
[01:08:08]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:08:09]  You'd still rather, you know, right, a broken hand or a broken neck, you know, you'd still, you'd still go like, well, my bones are my property.
[01:08:18]  And therefore, anyone breaking them is very, yeah, no, I know.
[01:08:21]  I know.
[01:08:22]  We all know.
[01:08:23]  We know.
[01:08:24]  But still, you'd still prefer one.
[01:08:26]  All right, dude.
[01:08:27]  Anything else?
[01:08:28]  Anything that I missed that's important that we should mention about the book?
[01:08:33]  I just had one question.
[01:08:34]  Was there, what was the, is there anything?
[01:08:37]  I'm sure there must have been a few things, but what was the thing that was the most emotional, emotionally impactful part for you?
[01:08:44]  I literally thought you were going to ask me what my favorite thing about you was.
[01:08:47]  And I was going to be like, are you really going to, well, I did kind of mention it before, but it was the quote about the mother smacking her baby.
[01:08:57]  Really?
[01:08:57]  Flipping out about it.
[01:08:58]  Yeah.
[01:08:58]  There's something about that that it's the, you know, I, I have two very young children.
[01:09:08]  And I also know, you know, I've like seen my wife with my babies and seen other mothers with their baby.
[01:09:16]  And the like how instinctual it is for a mother to like care for and love and protect her baby and what level you'd have to be pushed to.
[01:09:29]  Oh, yeah.
[01:09:29]  You know, and like I've seen like my, my wife's like just an incredible mother.
[01:09:34]  And I've even like, I, you know, I've seen her at points where she's gotten frustrated, you know, like points where, you know, say like, you know, the baby is being very fussy.
[01:09:45]  And then my daughter is also like, you know, she's gabbing and talking a mile a minute.
[01:09:49]  And she'll kind of be like, okay, okay, okay, everybody calm down, you know?
[01:09:53]  And like, that's her moment of being frustrated.
[01:09:57]  But the moment of being like, it just like kind of took me there of the moment of being frustrated of where you're starving and now you're breastfeeding your baby, which by the way, I just know this because I've, you know, been around my wife.
[01:10:10]  She's been breastfeeding.
[01:10:11]  You get when you're breastfeeding, you get like incredibly hungry because all the nutrients are being sucked out of your body.
[01:10:17]  So you're like, you're basically the baby's getting everything first.
[01:10:21]  And then you have to kind of replenish after that.
[01:10:23]  Like my wife would, like, when she was breastfeeding, she'd eat like probably twice as much as she normally eats and not gain weight or anything.
[01:10:32]  It's just like, that's like the baby's taking the nutrients.
[01:10:35]  And it just kind of like put me there of like this of what it would be like for this mother who's already frustrated and hungry.
[01:10:42]  And then she's feeding her baby who's sucking the nutrients out of her.
[01:10:46]  And then she's frustrated because the baby won't stop crying.
[01:10:49]  And then just actually having like a mental break and snapping.
[01:10:52]  And then like the worst thing in the world you can imagine, like hitting your baby.
[01:10:57]  And then the way it was described in the quote.
[01:11:00]  I can't remember who the quote is in the book, but who describes it and then goes back to normal.
[01:11:05]  Like it's just like, I don't know, there was something about that that was just so just to, because that speaks to, you know, what inspired a lot of this was Rand's testimony from the House of American Activities Committee.
[01:11:17]  And the congresspeople just don't get what this is like.
[01:11:21]  And she's getting kind of frustrated trying to break it down to them.
[01:11:23]  But that one line about how they try to live a human life, but you understand it's totally inhuman.
[01:11:30]  So you and I could talk about, oh, what's it mean to live an inhuman life?
[01:11:34]  And we think, oh, maybe someone's dressed like guar.
[01:11:36]  You know what I mean?
[01:11:38]  They have like piercings everywhere and they're covered in fake blood, whatever.
[01:11:42]  This is what inhumanity means.
[01:11:44]  And if you and I sat down and tried to figure out what's like inhuman mean, you would think we would never get to this point.
[01:11:52]  But this isn't sci-fi.
[01:11:55]  This isn't like some saw movie.
[01:11:58]  This was this planet not that long ago and not that far away.
[01:12:04]  And this was being done to many, many innocent people for no reason at all.
[01:12:12]  And just one more point, then I'll let you go.
[01:12:16]  It just, the one that was really like the fact that there's this logic to everything that happened, because that's something I learned when I was doing my research about North Korea is that there was a logic to their system.
[01:12:26]  They're not crazy.
[01:12:27]  It's just demented and follows from principles is that how it became a crime to be married to an enemy of the people, right?
[01:12:35]  So, and what you can't plead innocent, right?
[01:12:37]  So the husband killed or goes to Siberia.
[01:12:40]  The wife's arrested and killed or goes to Siberia because she's married to any of the people.
[01:12:44]  She's guilty.
[01:12:45]  Now the kid's an orphan overnight.
[01:12:47]  And not only is the kid an orphan, but no one else can take that kid in because why are you hanging out with this child of the enemy of the people?
[01:12:55]  Right.
[01:12:55]  This happened to Gorbachev when he was a kid.
[01:12:57]  He talked about how his house became like a plague house.
[01:12:59]  No one would play with him or talk to him because his dad or his grandfather was arrested.
[01:13:04]  And then in the Kremlin, they're all, you know, having an issue because all these kids are killing themselves, understandably.
[01:13:14]  And it's just like, again, if we sat down and thought inhumanity, we would think, okay, people get arrested and sent to concentration camps.
[01:13:23]  But that's not where it stops.
[01:13:25]  It's dominoes.
[01:13:26]  And when you see that this happened, and also what really just drove me crazy about this book is like, why the fuck is it on me to talk about this?
[01:13:36]  This should be something discussed all the time, constantly.
[01:13:41]  Like the fact that this fell on my shoulders is something I find to be just almost obscene that it's not common knowledge and discussed, you know, on a regular basis like so many of the other atrocities of the past.
[01:13:55]  Yeah, yeah, it's really something.
[01:13:56]  And there is something about the contrast between the way, say, like the Nazis are discussed in modern American society and the way the communists are discussed.
[01:14:09]  And, you know, I think that's changing and improving a lot with like the internet and, you know, alternative kind of voices and stuff like that.
[01:14:19]  But it really is kind of incredible that like, look, you can make a real argument that the Nazis were the most evil regime of the 20th century.
[01:14:28]  I think I would probably agree with that ultimately.
[01:14:32]  The damage they did in the years that they were around was really kind of unmatched.
[01:14:38]  Of course, you could make an argument that Mao Zedong was the worst, you know, regime, pure numbers, the worst.
[01:14:44]  But man, I mean, the Soviet Union lasted for nearly 70 years.
[01:14:49]  It wasn't the Nazis.
[01:14:51]  You know what I mean?
[01:14:51]  It wasn't like a quick thing.
[01:14:53]  Do you know what Curtis' quote about this is?
[01:14:55]  What's that?
[01:14:56]  He said, which genocidal ideology should I be worried about?
[01:14:59]  The one that lost or the one that won.
[01:15:01]  Yeah.
[01:15:02]  Yeah.
[01:15:02]  Well, I think that's a good way to frame it.
[01:15:05]  And also just at right.
[01:15:07]  And not just one in the actual war, but one in the sense that like, I don't know, there's like a Lenin statue in the East Village.
[01:15:18]  Yeah.
[01:15:19]  You know, like, and it's not even a thing.
[01:15:21]  It doesn't even fucking come up.
[01:15:23]  Like, it's just that's, yeah, whatever, these goofy kids.
[01:15:26]  There's Shea Guevara t-shirts on every college campus in, you know, the world and, and, or in the country.
[01:15:33]  And that's, that's kind of the difference that, like, okay, you can certainly argue that like the Nazi shit should be as radioactive as it is.
[01:15:41]  I, I think it should.
[01:15:42]  And I think it's, you know, I don't, I don't like even when people are doing it kind of seemingly for attention or to troll or like the Kanye West type thing where there doesn't seem to be a lot of thought in it.
[01:15:54]  Like, I don't think Kanye West has actually like read the founding fascist documents and really agrees with their political program.
[01:16:02]  I think it's a thing to just like get the most shock value that he's kind of saying.
[01:16:07]  But okay, I understand that being radioactive.
[01:16:09]  It should be.
[01:16:11]  But Jesus Christ, like we, you know, we got communists in every single university in every city and every state across this country.
[01:16:22]  There's someone who's like a self-proclaimed communist.
[01:16:25]  And that's like insane.
[01:16:27]  And McCarthy is more radioactive than they are.
[01:16:30]  Yeah.
[01:16:30]  Yeah.
[01:16:32]  That's the crazy part.
[01:16:33]  Yeah.
[01:16:34]  You know, there was a the Libertarian Party at a tweet a few months ago about how I think they retweeted something that James Lindsay said.
[01:16:45]  And it was something like McCarthy underestimated the problem.
[01:16:49]  Or like McCarthy's, McCarthy's biggest flaw was that he underestimated the problem.
[01:16:53]  And I will say, I didn't love that they tweeted it.
[01:16:56]  I was like, you know, I don't know.
[01:16:59]  I think there should have been something added on to it to make it more clear what our position was.
[01:17:03]  And people gave them a lot of shit because they were like, well, so you endorse McCarthyism and you endorse all the tactics that he used or something like that, which, you know, we could get into the history of wasn't exactly what is portrayed.
[01:17:18]  But the truth is that, yeah, like, yeah, McCarthy probably was wrong in a lot of his tactics because the real, I think, the anarchist position is that the problem is that you need to abolish these institutions so they're not taken over by communists.
[01:17:38]  You know, like that's, that's the problem with having these powerful institutions inherently is that they're taken over.
[01:17:43]  That's part of the problem.
[01:17:44]  Yes.
[01:17:45]  Is that they, well, that they can.
[01:17:47]  They can be, you know, infiltrated by someone, whether it's communists or right-wing authoritarians or whatever.
[01:17:53]  But yeah, the idea that we had, I mean, we really had real deal sympathizers of Stalin, Mao, Castro, all the worst of these people all throughout this country.
[01:18:07]  And I've got receipts.
[01:18:08]  And that's not as toxic.
[01:18:10]  That's not considered as toxic as the right-wingers who fought against them.
[01:18:15]  You know, like even not even in using the most brutal authoritarian tactics, using somewhat authoritarian tactics, like blacklisting or something like that.
[01:18:26]  They're the villains and not these people who were supporting, you know, the, you know, genocidal maniacs.
[01:18:34]  Well, I mean, and again, there's that one chapter in there about how close we came to having a Stalinist president, not someone who's like sympathetic to communists, someone who's like, Stalin's our guy and like, this shit's great.
[01:18:47]  And who said, you know, there's no two countries more alike than the United States and the Soviet Union.

=== Dodged A Bullet (00:57) ===

[01:18:52]  Like this was, I mean, talk about dodging a bullet.
[01:18:54]  So that's the other aspect of White Pill, which is it could have gotten really bad at many points in America.
[01:19:03]  And we dodged.
[01:19:04]  bullets repeatedly.
[01:19:06]  Yeah, it got pretty bad, but it didn't get as bad as it could have gotten.
[01:19:09]  That's for sure.
[01:19:10]  All right.
[01:19:11]  All right.
[01:19:11]  Look, we got to, we got to wrap there.
[01:19:13]  I really, I can't express how much I love this book.
[01:19:16]  Highest possible recommendation.
[01:19:18]  Please go grab it.
[01:19:19]  The white pill, where can people get it?
[01:19:22]  Whitepillbook.com.
[01:19:23]  And the audio book's going to be done within a matter of days.
[01:19:26]  Okay.
[01:19:26]  Whitepillbook.com.
[01:19:27]  And if you guys prefer audiobooks, wait a couple of days and you'll get that one.
[01:19:31]  Michael Malis, thank you so much, brother.
[01:19:33]  I appreciate it.
[01:19:34]  Happy new year.
[01:19:35]  And I look forward to see what you're going to do in 2023.
[01:19:40]  I'm sure it will be hilarious and mischievous and trolling.
[01:19:46]  I love you, brother.
[01:19:47]  Good talking with you.
[01:19:48]  Thank you so much.