Ep 173 | America Is More Divided Than Ever. That's GOOD! | Michael Malice | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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Internet slang has a habit of becoming political.

A great example is Red Pill, as in, my buddy watched Ron Paul's compilation on YouTube, and now he's red pilled.

It's a reference to the Matrix.

You know, the scene, Morpheus offers Neo a blue pill and a red pill, pick one.

If Neo, you know, picks the blue pill, he goes back into the fake world, never finds the truth.

But if he takes the red pill, he jumps into reality and he sees how far the rabbit hole actually goes.

The red pill is the tougher option, but it's it's the one that leads to freedom.

Perfect metaphor for what many of us go through politically.

It'd be easier to believe the media in Hollywood and academia and the World Economic Forum and just go along.

It'd be a lot easier if you were on that side of things.

But if you want true freedom and truth, you got to take the red pill, which means rejecting the bogus narratives that you're force-fed by the elites, and that may even violate the things that you believe.

And you'd be like, oh, crap, now I really, I got to change that too.

It means we're all capable of independent thought and willing to be provocative, to step out of line.

Well, here's where it gets tricky.

Once you take the red pill, there are two directions you can go from there.

You can take the black pill or the white pill.

The black pill is bitterness.

It means the world is ruined.

There's no point in saving it.

You know, everything is just miserable.

It's nihilism, hopelessness, destruction, and doom.

And quite honestly, a lot of people have taken the black pill.

Some would include anarchy on that list, but today's guest is an anarchist.

Don't worry, he's not the Antifa kind.

He's the keep the state away from my freedom and my business, capitalism kind.

He also has a very, very dark sense of humor and a habit of saying and doing unexpected things.

So it makes sense that he would be a black pill guy, but he's not.

He chose the white pill.

He chooses hope.

He hates cynicism.

And over the last few years, he's seen more and more of people taking the black pill.

And he credits his efforts, and we're going to talk about today, actually from an experience that he had here at the Blaze.

He felt there were people that he met that had taken the black pill.

The white pill is his book, a tale of good and evil.

It documents the rise and the fall of the Soviet Union with the heroes and villains that made it happen.

He told me he was

inspired to write it because of his visit here, and he needed to make sure everybody could have the white pill.

It is a fascinating book available online, but also audio.

Please welcome its author and my friend, Michael Malis.

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So, Michael,

I don't read books about pills.

Okay.

And

then these three, these four hot babes.

I mean, sure, Margaret Thatcher, she's quite a babe.

So what's your FMK with them?

My FMK?

I don't know what that is.

I'm too old.

Oh, I can't really say it out loud.

Do you know what that do you not know what that?

It's a game you play.

You give people three choices and you do FMK.

No,

Mary Kill.

Yeah, okay.

All right.

Yeah.

Okay.

Mary.

Well, not really.

Maybe Margaret Thatcher.

Maybe Margaret Thatcher.

Anyway,

explain for people who don't know what a white pill is.

There's the red pill, which is wake up from Matrix, right?

Yes.

Blue pill, go back to sleep and you'll forget all of this.

The black pill is, oh my God, we're all doomed.

Yes.

The white pill is.

The white pill is hope.

Now, there's way too much black pill at this network and in conservatism in general.

Well, I mean, I'm serious because this book was partly inspired by The Blaze.

I was here last time I was on your podcast.

And when I first started writing this book, it was very different because it was about the thought of Albert Camus, who's a philosopher who's an enormous influence on me.

And I was going off to see Stu, and I think he was in the middle of stabbing someone or something, as he's wont to do.

I don't remember at the time.

Blood everywhere, everywhere.

They were going on about how, you know, Biden's a communist, something like that.

And I was thinking to myself, do you guys know, and America's going to hell in a handbasket, which I don't disagree with per se.

But what I had an issue with was this idea of, do you guys know how bad it can get, right?

Before, like, when you say it's a wrap.

And then I thought to myself, you know, I don't know how bad things can get.

Like, how bad can societies get?

Let me just make one more point.

And the other issue I had is, and I remember thinking this very specifically in this studio.

The Cold War was the primary

foreign policy issue issue for decades in this country, for decades.

Like literally, I don't even know what number two.

The Middle East is probably number two.

But everything was filtered through the view of America versus the Soviet Union.

Every president, presidential race, Senate races, this was the big.

And in my childhood, it was known as evil versus good.

Yeah, it wasn't ambiguous.

And this was won in part due to the actions of President Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

And the Pope.

And the Pope, who

features in that book, in my book, that book, my book.

And conservatives don't talk about it.

And I'm sitting there, I'm thinking, like, we talk about the Civil War, we talk about World War II.

This was in our lifetime.

You can't expect the New York Times to tell this story.

Why aren't you guys telling the story every five minutes?

And then one day, a couple months later, I'm like, hey, jackass, that's how I refer to myself.

You tell stories.

Why don't you tell that story?

So that was part of the story.

This was my message to conservatives about like, guys, this was your big accomplishment.

So take your bows.

So here's the thing that I think, because I saw your interview with Dave Rubin and you said, you know, conservatives don't get it and blah, blah, blah.

And I think there's a, I'd like to get your perspective on this, because I think there's a couple of things.

First of all,

the left has whitewashed communism like crazy, like crazy.

We know everything about Hitler and what he did and the ovens and all of it.

But nobody's really, on the left, nobody's ever really taken and looked a deep dive like your book does, deep dive into communism.

I have the black book of communism.

Right.

Okay.

That you want to know what communism is?

Read that one.

Okay.

Read yours.

Okay.

Most people, when you say, oh, he's a Nazi, somebody will say, no, he's not.

I know, I know, I know, I know.

We're not there.

But this is the kind of philosophy.

When they say, you're a communist, I don't think nobody ever says, well, he's not really a communist

because

communism is in this book and the black book of communism, but it's where it starts.

It's where it starts.

And I have felt

I know the white pill in your book.

I know the sentiment.

And

I know it's true.

Here's the thing that I think concerns a lot of people, at least me.

I'm a Jew in 1939.

And you come to me and say, by 1947, Israel's re-established.

Okay?

Israel is back.

And I look at you and go, okay, that's good.

But

how do I get from 1939

to even 1945?

You know what I mean?

And your book really talks about this.

This was a long struggle because they dismantled it all the way down to the children.

Oh, yeah.

You know, and really did unspeakable things to children.

So I want to get to the white pill, but keep in mind as you're telling these stories, I'm trying to find the white pill.

that doesn't take a generation.

Okay, well, here it is.

You're not a Jew in 1939, Germany.

You're in America.

And I get your analogy, but the point being that there's such a profound difference.

You're not even a Canadian.

I mean,

I'm quite serious, though.

If you want to compare, like

as a starting point, even living in Canada in 2023 isn't analogous to being a Jewish person in 1939.

So, right.

Okay.

Let me say, I think we are in the 30s.

I don't think we're at 1939.

Okay.

Nobody's building gas chambers.

Nobody's seriously talking about exterminating any.

There's no serious force out there for that.

But we are on the road to either the darkest stuff of communism, the darkest stuff of fascism.

When you have people saying the model is China.

And you have AI being introduced, and they've already perfected, that's the dream of Stalin and

Hitler.

When you have those directions,

I'm looking at how do we stop from going there?

You're not saying that we're just never going to go there.

I don't think we're ever going to go there, as Americans.

I do not think we're ever going to end.

Because we're going to do something?

Yeah, hold on.

Just a couple of things.

First of all, I do not at all think, I agree with Ronald Reagan, who I quote in this book, in 1964, when he gave his speech endorsing Senator Goldwater for for the presidency and

huge landslide.

And he said, if we lose freedom here, there's nowhere else to go.

Correct.

This is the last stand on earth.

And that's one of the chapter names is the last stand.

So I am not at all saying that

if we lose freedom here, well, we can go to Canada.

I'm not saying that at all.

My point being, something that why we're not in the 1930s is there's a GIF online which shows state-by-state gun rights.

And it went from various states in the 80s, not that long ago,

including the South, where you weren't allowed to get a gun, and now constitutional carry is the law in, I think, a majority of the states.

So that is one enormous major difference

that will stop us from becoming Nazi Germany or communist

China.

Here's another big difference, and this is something I think maybe you and I disagree with.

America is more divided than ever.

That's good.

You can't have a dictatorship unless everyone's united.

In fact, having cultural homogeneity and having everyone thinking with one thought is the goal of every totalitarian dictator, as I know very well.

Hold on, with my work on North Korea.

And the fact that school choice is state by state now

becoming the law of the land.

But it's not just a sign.

How do you persuade a population to all have one worldview when they're learning different things in different schools?

This is why there's such a a panic about not about having school choice, because if you're not controlling all the different minds in a generation, the jig is up.

Correct.

So

but the other thing I would disagree with you about is we've been on this path toward dictatorship since 1912.

And it happened in the 30s.

FDR was effectively a dictator.

He was setting prices.

He was saying whether you can fire people.

He was putting people in internment camps.

Right.

So, and we survived that.

And in fact, it's almost some of his atrocities are almost like a historical asterisk.

So I think that perspective, I'm not at all, at all.

I mean, the first two-thirds of this book is about how evil things can get.

So I'm not saying people are basically nice.

I'm not saying that the people in power don't want the worst things imaginable.

The point being, they don't always get what they want.

So I agree with you.

I want to know from you what makes

what is the difference

between

you

in

today

as opposed to somebody in 1933 that was saying it's one-third of the people.

They're losing, they're losing power.

They're actually losing seats.

They're never, I mean, evil has a way of,

you know,

working around.

And it wasn't until...

Wait, do you mean 1933 America or 1933 Germany?

Germany.

Okay.

They didn't have the heart and mind of people until 33, 34.

Then he starts chugging.

You know what I mean?

Sure.

And then by 1939,

it's gone.

But

you're not saying that there's no reason to sit up and pay attention because these things

just couldn't never never happen.

But what I'm saying is Hitler wasn't a god, right?

These people who are malevolent, who are again the subject of the book, the people who built the Soviet Union, they were not all-knowing.

They were all powerful in a certain context.

But what they pulled off in the 30s, in my view, they couldn't pull off today for several reasons.

The first reason, in my view, is how easy it is to share information.

If I am building a country based on complete lies, in fact, North Korea, which is my bailiwick, there's a song they sing that says, The whole world envies us.

And they're of the belief that people in other countries are living in total crime-ridden lands and they're all starving, and it's a disaster.

And as soon as they leave, it's like, wait a minute, I've been lied to.

You can do that in a small physical nation where you have complete control over all methods of communication.

But even that has now changed because thanks to things like DVDs and word of mouth with people smuggling from China, the North Koreans understand that they're not doing so hot and they've had to change the propaganda accordingly.

And now they say, okay, we're poor, but we're maintaining our racial

idiot and racial purity.

But that is an ex and North Korea is, of course, the extreme.

The point is, there are so many lies that have been put forward by the corporate press and government officials in this country over the decades, but we can freely sit and discuss them.

And in fact, even right now on Twitter, someone puts out one of their crap, and immediately under it, they will have a

label that says, this is misinformation, this is taking things out of context.

So the fact that I know that there's freedom of speech is in certain contexts under attack in this country, but the fact that there's an increasing number of Americans who understand that news organizations are corporations with an agenda, and that agenda is often malevolent, that is having that skepticism towards those who would command public opinion is in of itself an enormous

preventative toward the worst things possible happening.

If we had the press that we had, even in the 1960s,

and it was all centered with a group of people,

we wouldn't have this chance.

I've been shocked at

ESG and how the World Economic Forum has

really had to respond.

You know, I write a book, nobody really knows what it is.

Russell Brand gets on, he's talking about it.

And all of a sudden, it's a movement and it moved the titans, the banks and everybody.

Now, I'm not saying that it's a one fight, but it does make your point that

If you wake up to the situation and you move together, you can change everything.

And the other point I made on Rubin is this country was founded by a group of white trash who had no shoes, who constantly had to retreat under General Washington against the greatest empire on earth, where everyone's dressed in red coats in their finery, and they were picking them off one at a time, and we won.

So Americans...

Heritage is victory over impossible odds.

And I have to tell you, one of the other points of the book is

I find it unconscionable that people would look at the biden administration and the people behind biden of course and think well it's a wrap there's no way we can beat these people kamala harris is an unstoppable photo that's psychotic to me

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All right, so let's go into

the history of the Soviet Union.

Can I just say one more thing to build in your point?

One of the things I talk about a lot in this book is how malevolent the reporters have been for a century.

There is this complete lie we are told in high school, which is there was yellow journalism, William Randolph Hearst, they got us into the Spanish-American War.

Record scratch, then the journalists are objective and good, and now they can be trusted.

It was a continuous line from William Randolph Hearst till today.

And one of the things I talk about in the book is how in the 1930s, as Stalin was starving the Ukrainians, millions of people were starved in extremely cruel ways.

They came to people's houses and they came back at night because if you weren't showing hunger on your face, your body would betray you.

They knew you were hoarding food and they would

ransack your house and they put you out in the street naked because now you have food.

You're a rich person.

You're a kulak.

And this was a near genocide.

And the New York Times.

Oh, I think it was attempted genocide.

Genocide.

Well, it's successful.

The New York Times covered it and said there is no famine, nor is there likely to be.

Walter Duranti got a Pulitzer not for this, but for his reporting with Stalin.

And they also obscured the Holocaust.

There's a whole book about that called Buried by the Times.

This is, I mean, conservatives really have this.

This drives me crazy, and I'm not saying you, but this idea that, like, when I was a kid, reporters were honest.

No, when you were a kid, you were naive.

Yes.

And, you know, and you didn't have access to the information.

Right.

I mean, Matt Drudge changed a lot of that.

That blue dress.

Well, that would have been, we would have still thought today that was a smear against him, and it would have been conspiracy.

It was the access to go outside of journalism and say, no, look, here's this.

We have changed.

Those journalists,

good-intentioned, ill-intentioned, a lot of it ill-intentioned, it was a club and nobody could break that club.

You couldn't have, we used to have to mimeograph things, and you see people come out and they'd be like, you want to know the truth?

And you're not taking it from them.

You and I are old enough to remember that before Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story, the narrative, which was universal across corporate media, was that this 21-year-old girl was stalking the president.

That was the word they used, that she's a crazy stalker.

How someone can stalk a president who's 21, who has secrets, but you laugh.

No, I know, I know.

Smart, respectable people said this with a straight face, and we were supposed to feel bad for Bill Clinton, the victim, because he had this kid who was stalking him, and she's a crazy person.

And but for that dress, that would have been the narrative to today.

And you're right, they did obscure it, and Drudge is the one who broke it.

And Drudge was just one.

Now, everyone with a social media account can be that match.

Look at what the FBI has done with Hunter Biden.

Yes.

I mean, and all of the stuff about China, it eventually, the truth, this is a white pill, the truth eventually comes out.

The truth and

right

or light will always win, always in the end.

It's just the time horizon.

But the time horizon, I think, now thanks to technology is much faster.

That's good.

So because, for example, when you and I were kids, our lifetime, if there was some obscure book that we wanted, good luck finding it, right?

You have to check used bookstores, you know, you have to for catalogs.

Now, if you go to archive.org, every book that was published before, I think, 1940 is there for free at the speed of light at

your desktop so you could find any kind of information so even that just in terms of technically being able to find information that's been taken away one of the things I learned when I was writing this book is Boris Yeltsin who became head of Russia after the Soviet Union fell apart he's high up you know he was a big shot in the USSR he came here to Houston to visit NASA and while he was there

He went on a trip to just, let me check out a supermarket.

And I'm sure you probably remember this story.

Maybe they could throw up a photo.

And he's walking around the supermarket.

And it's not like this is a supermarket for earls and dukes, you know, with monocles.

It's just like school teachers and guys.

HGBs.

I think it was a Ralph's now.

And he's looking around and he's like, I've never seen like onions this big.

And on his way back to Russia, he stopped.

He had a layover, he was going to Miami first.

He's on the plane and his head is in his hands.

And he says, they had to lie to us because if people knew how much food there was over there, they wouldn't put up with it.

But that realization that it's not that people are misinformed or it's a spin or it's a bias, that there is systemic deceit is something that Yeltsin saw for himself in the 90s.

But now I think increasing numbers of people understand it completely, that all corporate media is peddled by a narrative and an agenda.

And my quote that I always say is, the battle is won when the average American regards a corporate journalist exactly as they regard a tobacco executive.

They are selling a product, they have a job to do, and a lot of people are very smart and well-dressed, but they're still providing poison.

See, I was very disappointed when Michael told me that his book, The White Pill, was not about pharmaceuticals.

The American Society of Healthcare Pharmacists is a group that tracks the production of medications around the world, and they have declared that there is a shortage of antibiotics, specifically one you've probably never heard of, amoxicillin.

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I think that's happening around the world.

Yes.

Because this time it's a global movement.

I mean, Russia was a global movement,

and so was fascism, but

it's the same kind of evil that permeates.

So can we, let's go in and let's talk about one of the biggest victims that we really don't ever hear about,

the children.

Oh, yeah.

That was very hard for me to read writing this book.

So like I co-authored several books with celebrities, right?

And when I write those books, you try to get into that person's shoes as much as possible.

So I'm writing this.

I try to get into the mindset of the people who are the characters in the book.

So the things that they did, the thing is,

what Americans don't appreciate is how clever evil is.

People in this country think evil is like dumb and buffoonish.

They think it's like Hogan's heroes.

And it's like, God willing, that would be the extent of Nazis, these buffoons.

I mean, you have to know, the Nazi uniform was designed by Hugo Boss.

It wasn't a scary uniform.

It was a snappy number.

Yeah, yeah.

And

one of the things that Lenin and Stalin wanted to do is they wanted to have everything for the public good.

Well, what you and I like and everyone listening to this likes is civil society, which which means families looking out for each other, neighbors looking after each other, having these thriving communities which exist independently of the state.

Well, that's bourgeois.

That's exactly the bourgeoisie, and that's what the Soviet Unions were against.

So for him, any kind of bond between two people is the beginning of a conspiracy and a threat to his power.

So

kids were told the story of Pavlik Morozov, who's this little boy, a myth that they made up, right?

He existed, but the story's a myth.

And the dad was like hoarding grain or keeping grain.

Dad's a kulak.

Pavlik turns him into the cops and is killed by his dad.

And this was the lesson kids were taught in school.

You should be like this kid.

So even if it costs you your life, if you see your parents doing something wrong, you make sure to call the cops on them.

So from the beginning, they're turning children against their parents.

But even worse,

you and I like to think, maybe, maybe you do, maybe I don't, that we're kind of tough people.

And people listening to this, I'm sure a lot of the ex-military are very tough people listening to the show.

Let's see how tough you are when they bring you into interrogation.

Because Stalin lowered the death penalty, I think, to age 12 or 14.

And this is a big international uproar.

Why are you doing this?

Because when people were brought in to be interrogated, that law was on the interrogator's desk.

So you see how tough you are when you see that your kid's death warrant is sitting there in front of you.

He had Jews confessing to working with Hitler.

He had people confessing to working for countries that didn't even exist.

Because if the child was lying, then the child's at head.

No, meaning because if I have your kid's death sentence right here.

So if you don't cooperate we're getting your kids yeah okay yeah and you could be as tough as you want they knew that they would take those kids and here's what here's how how the ripple effect so glenn gets arrested goes to jail your wife is now arrested because being married to an enemy of the people is a crime right so she should have turned you in or she should have known overnight your kids are all orphans but now no one wants to talk to these kids because why are you fraternizing with these children who are children of enemies of the people So these kids were completely helpless.

They were criminals without being charged criminals.

Right, but they're also pariahs.

This happened to Gorbachev when he was a kid.

He said his house became like a plague house.

No one wanted to come near him.

And there was much hand-wringing in the Kremlin at the time because

what are we going to do while these kids were killing themselves?

Because logically, they had no life to look forward to.

It's just horrific.

But there wasn't a thing like, maybe we went too far.

It's like this is making us look bad.

So the book starts with Ayn Rand testifying in front of the House on American Activities Committee.

She's like,

talking to like a Republican congressman in Pennsylvania, she's like, you don't understand as an American what it's like to live in a country where human life means nothing, less than nothing, and you know it.

So this separation of, and also these kids were then encouraged to get in school and to denounce their own families.

And sometimes the parents would encourage them to do it.

It's like, look, save yourself.

So to have this kind of, again, when we think of evil or dictators, they think, you know, Glenn's locked in a room, he's beaten, you know, they break his thumb, his fingernail, you know, put stuff under his nails, they torture you physically.

No, no, no.

It's about turning families against one another publicly.

They would torture priests and get them to denounce God from the pulpit to traumatize the congregants.

This was a big victory for them because that's how much they hated religion because, again, that was a threat to the state.

So Michael, again,

I'm not saying we're there.

Nobody's doing this to children.

But isn't this the beginning?

Oh, there's some things being done to children in this country.

Yeah, this is the beginning.

They're turning, they are intentionally stated goal.

Turn and tear the family apart and turn the kids against the parents.

And I mean, we're in the beginning stages of that.

Are you certain they're going to get their way?

No, certain?

No.

Great.

That's my point.

The point, the white pill is not optimism.

The white pill is hope.

It is the recognition that those who we are against are defeatable, they are not particularly impressive, and they have lost on a small scale and a large scale many times in the past.

And as long as there is hope, it is our duty, in my view, as especially as Americans, to make sure that these people don't get their way.

Why should they always get their way?

I want to get my way.

Right.

I'm trying to, I'm sorry to keep pushing you on this, but I

uh

think

you can be perceived by some.

This is some lawyer language.

Let's look at how no.

Because I wrestle with this.

I wrestle with this too at times, but not like I've heard other people wrestle.

That you are just like

you've you've taken a whole bottle of white pills and you're just like high on, it's all going to work out.

I'm hopeful, not optimistic.

It's not the the same.

It's not all gonna just gonna work out.

The point is you have to acknowledge what we're facing.

So let me ask you

I may have the same attitude with some people coming back at me because my faith is so strong in God.

I have no idea how it's gonna end out.

I just know he wins in the end.

Good wins in the end.

And if I'm here for it, great.

If I'm not, okay.

But I'll do everything I can to lead do the next right thing and i'll say that to people i'll say you know

we know god is we know and they interpret that as

yeah yeah i got it i got it yeah jesus saves but what are we going to do and i'm like well you got to have that first you have to have faith you're saying you got to have hope it's

they're intertwined okay

but you still have to do the things to stand guard to warn and to thwart, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well,

I think I understand that.

And that's a big part of this book is to show, is to tell, and I'm sorry to use this word, but I think Americans are naive.

You know, when you say all bottles of white pills, that I get it, as an anarchist, I get accused, oh, you think human beings are basically good.

Read this book because

it's not about human beings are basically good at all.

It's just about how when you have a nation where there's no law or rights of any kind, as Rand put it, the levels of depravity that they reach are things that if you and I sat down and tried to figure out ways to torture people, we wouldn't be that creative because our minds don't work in these directions.

And in fact, when you had the secret police, there was an enormous evolutionary pressure on them to become more sadistic.

Because here's the thing, a lot of times these guys who were torturing people who were prisoners, they knew they were innocent.

They just had to get to that confession.

So they had to get increasing.

And if they don't get the confession, oh, you're being soft on the other people.

Now they're next on the line, right?

So there was this insane pressure from every direction, and they got very, very creative.

But the point is, over time, they lost their power.

And then they lost everything entirely.

In fact, during the 80s, and you and I both remember the 80s very well, we were of the belief, and we were told this constantly by people like Henry Kissinger, that the Soviet Union is not going anywhere.

We tried the Korean War, that was a draw.

We tried the Vietnam War, we got our asses handed to us.

You have to be realistic.

And realistic means there's going to be two superpowers forever.

That's why Chekhov is on Star Trek, because even in whatever year that takes place, it's going to be the Americans and the Russians.

And you're naive if you think this is going to go away.

And Ronald Reagan, before he was the president, sat down with one of his aides and he says, you know, you want to hear my strategy for the Cold War?

It's simple, but some people might say simplistic.

Here's what it is.

We win, they lose.

And he was regarded as a lunatic, including by many in the Republican Party.

He was told, and all the press was saying this as well: if you are this aggressive with them, you are pushing us closer toward nuclear war.

They have, between us, we have mutual assured destruction, and we can destroy all life on Earth.

And as a result of his actions, the threat of nuclear war receded enormously.

And both the U.S.

and the USSR, and later Russia, de-escalated their nuclear tensions to a great degree.

But I think his strategy,

I mean, you know, we win, they lose, also was,

I'm just going to call evil by its name.

That's evil.

That's why it's going to lose, because that's evil.

Good wins.

So he had, and that's one of the things that they had a problem with.

Don't, no, no, no.

Don't say that about them.

Don't say that about them.

But I remember growing up, we thought all Russians were bad.

Soon as that wall came down, we realized, oh my gosh, there's millions of people that were slaves to this that didn't want to blow us up.

You know what I mean?

It was the leadership that wanted to blow it up.

And I think that's what Reagan knew.

And that's

one thing I really don't like when people, and me, I've done this for years.

But in self-examination, when you say the Democrats or the Republicans, That's kind of like saying

the Soviets want to kill us.

And you just assume that everybody in that blood, they didn't.

They didn't.

It was leadership that knew what was going on.

You know what I mean?

And you have to be able to separate

who's what and what real motivations are.

You know, there's a lot of debate over the centuries over what beauty means, the meaning of beauty, right?

So we can say like, you know, a horse running through a meadow is beautiful.

A model is certainly beautiful, but also like a mom who's a mess doing the dishes with her kid.

That's also very beautiful because it's pure, right?

To me, one of the most beautiful things on earth, and this happened throughout the book, is when men who have great power choose to do the right thing, even at cost to themselves, and choose the course of peace.

And there's this,

when I learned this when I writing the book, it just blew my mind.

Reagan was brought down to the bunker.

to go through a simulated nuclear attack from the Soviet Union.

And he's sitting there and they're telling him, you've got all these nukes, you know, flying at you.

And he's like, wait, wait, so if I retaliate like in minutes, let's suppose 20 minutes.

I don't know how long it was because these missiles are going very fast.

18 minutes.

Okay, 18 minutes.

I'm killing like 30 million, like some huge number of people.

And they're like, yeah.

And he's like, this is your solution.

Your solution to us getting nuked is for me personally to kill like orders of magnitude more than Hitler in

under half an hour.

And he's like, okay, this is, I'm going to put a stop to this.

And his aides believed, and i think they're right that he wouldn't have done he wouldn't have retaliated unbeknownst to him unbeknownst to him gorbachev

got taken down to a bunker and walked through the simulation and he said explicitly reagen kept these cards to his chest i'm not pressing this button even in a simulation we're not retaliating so now both of these guys are going to reyevic and this is a great moment in conservative history regan and reykyevic both of them have all these missiles pointing at each other right both have to believe that if you cross me i'm going to fire and And both of them are like, you know what?

I'm a dove.

You can nuke me.

We're not going to do anything about it.

And because Reagan was regarded as, or portrayed as this crazy cowboy, that allowed him to be to the left of the hippies.

Because he came to Reykjavik.

He's like, let's try to eliminate all nuclear weapons.

And Thatcher was like,

She was blowing a gasket because she goes, you can't uninvent nukes.

And she says, how do we know Gorbachev won't cheat?

I would cheat.

You know, she kind of dropped the mask mask a little bit.

But that kind of exchange is such an important moment in terms of moving peace worldwide forward.

And yet that's something else that's not discussed.

We build so many monuments to World War II correctly because so many people lost their lives courageously.

But to win a war peacefully, to me, is also a moment of enormous glory and should be discussed frequently.

And again, this is in our lifetime.

This isn't, you know, Normandy in the 30s, whatever the landing was, 41.

This is the 80s.

So

let me go back to the book.

Would Stalin have killed 30 million people?

Oh, yes.

Yeah.

He killed.

I mean, with one person.

Oh, yeah, it's not my question.

There was this.

Roy Medvedev was a Soviet historian, and he went through all the people that Stalin killed.

And Eugene Genovese later looked at his work and was like, was Roy Medvedev drinking?

Because according to him, Stalin

killed more communists than the fascists, the capitalists, the imperialists combined.

And he goes, Communism, isn't it?

Yeah.

And he goes, wait a minute.

He did the math.

He goes, you don't have to be good at math to do this kind of math.

And it was orders of magnitude.

So the number of people that he killed of his own, what he would do, and again, you know, you know, we discuss how people are naive about the nature of evil.

he would give his henchmen lists, right?

And he'd be like St.

Petersburg, 10,000, Moscow, 5,000, Lvov, 5,000.

They had to find 5,000 people and arrest.

So he would just give him a number, a quota.

And then, and then Beria, who is his last of his torturers, last of the secret police, is very famous for his quote, show me the man, I'll find you the crime.

They knew they had to create X amount of criminals to please Stalin, and they were very good at their job.

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Tell me things that, I mean, because you were born in the Soviet Union.

Yeah.

So tell me the things that when you

did your research on the darker side that you didn't know and because I know

when you wrote this, there were several times that you just wrote it through tears.

Because there's also the happy stuff that's like when they're the one that really got me recently is in Prague, there's something called the Museum of Communism.

And what's really great about this Museum of Communism is it's not written in scholarly.

tones.

Like the captions are things like, you know, you know how on cigarette packets it says like this will hurt your lifespan?

Yeah, that's what it was like living in a communist country.

So

I sent my protege Trey to there because he was in Prague.

He took photos, all the captions for me.

And then it really hit me like a gut punch.

We call it totalitarianism.

There was nowhere, and this was my family's experience.

You know, I left when I was two, but there was nowhere for them to go.

Correct.

All of your books.

are through this lens.

All of your music is through this lens.

Everything on TV is through this lens.

You have to worry who you're talking to if they turn on you.

And I grew up with this kind of this little filter, wondering like if I say the wrong thing to the wrong person, what's going to happen?

I kind of grew out of that, but we don't know what that's like.

Because let's suppose

beginning to feel it.

Let's suppose someone hates Trump, like they really hate Trump.

It's really easy for you to get away from Trump.

Go watch sports.

Go read Anna Green Gables.

Go watch different strokes reruns.

There's a million.

They didn't have that.

It's everything and everywhere from the time you're born until the time you're in.

It's the opposite way.

You are trying to get out of a society with CRT and wokeness.

Sure.

I mean, it's almost everywhere.

It's not almost everywhere because I can sit here and watch the blaze 24-7, right?

My point is, everywhere, Glenn, it's not in the restaurants.

It's not at Red Lobster.

It's not, it's in, it's, they're trying.

I'm not denying that that's their goal.

Okay.

But the point that we exist and that there's places to go to escape it, there's a big difference between being homeless and having a crappy apartment, right?

It's like night and day.

Oh, yeah.

So we can't wrap our heads around what it's like.

We're literally

everything

we do is through the filter of politics.

And I'm not trying to compare the two.

I'm trying to...

find out if you believe that these are the seeds.

Oh, yes.

Oh, yes.

Of course they're the seeds.

Again, I'm not saying

we're up against pure evil.

Pure evil is not going to get its way.

Okay.

If I have anything to do about it, and I think I do as an American.

I love your attitude.

But it's true.

These people are not impressive.

How can you look at John Fetterman and be like, well, that's a rap.

He can raise my kids however he wants.

Like, what are you talking about?

That is in there.

Right.

Tell me about, tell me about

Henry Wallace.

Oh, God, I love that story.

So Henry Wallace was,

so what people may not realize this, and you're a history buff, I'm a history buff.

FDR's first vice president, Cactus Jack Garner, who was, I believe, Speaker of the House, he was from Texas, he was a conservative.

And he and FDR butted heads.

He was really against the court packing scheme that FDR tried to pull.

And he threw in his hat for the 1940 presidential race because it wasn't clear that FDR was going to seek a third term, an unprecedented third term.

Well, he wasn't going to be on the ticket.

So

FDR pulls Henry Wallace,

Associate Secretary of Agriculture, out of obscurity.

Wallace had been, and so that's something people don't realize is that the Democratic, the parties did not align ideologically like they do now.

You had very conservative pro-business Democrats and hardcore leftists, and then you had very liberal Republicans, the Teddy Roosevelt Republicans, the Lafoyette Republicans, and also very conservative Republicans.

So

you had had this kind of ideological balance on tickets.

Henry, in 1940, FDR, for the first time, as the nominee, decides to pick his own vice president, because historically it had been the convention picks the VP, and you have these kind of weird mixed matches, like Warren Harding, who's basically a debauched

drunkard, and Calvin Coolidge, who's as kind of prim and proper as you get, things like this.

And McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt's another great example of this.

So he picks this Henry Wallace guy.

This guy was kind of this new age freak.

He had these letters to, I forget the guy's name, some theosophist, these dear guru letters.

And

he

went to the USSR.

They took him to a gulag.

And the prisoners literally put on a song and dance for him.

Of course, everyone who spoke English was vanished.

The prisoners were happy because while he was there, they were sat in a room and watched movies all day because he wasn't allowed to see any of them.

And the Russians took him around.

And the thing is, because he had a great background in agriculture, they like took him to a pig farm.

Well, the people running the farm were Apparachiks, they didn't know anything about pig farming.

So he was asking questions about pig husbandry.

And they're like, oh, but the translators covered for them.

And he writes back and he talks about this is like the Wild West.

He says, there's no two countries more alike than the U.S.

and the USSR.

And there's so many people moving to Siberia.

It's just,

you laugh, but this was the vice, this was the former vice president, and this is what a lot of people believed at the time.

They didn't have alternative access to information.

The New York Times would be telling them things like this.

And they're like, look at this population.

It grew so much.

And there are these gold mines, and it's just wonderful.

And it was all a lie.

It was a concentration camp, a labor camp.

And there were prisoners who were at that camp.

One, Eleanor Lipper is one of them.

She later escaped because she was a foreign national.

And she's like, I was on the other side of that fence.

This was not some nice thing.

And we were treated, you know, the atrocities are in the book and they're horrible.

And FDR, the head of the DNC kicks Henry Wallace off the ticket.

There was a lot of pressure.

Truman is the nominee, vice president's nominee in 1944.

FDR dies, I think, like 100 days into his fourth term.

And the head of the Democratic Committee said, I wanted to say on my tombstone, I kept Henry Wallace from being president.

And it didn't say that it just has his dates, but the point is, we were this close to having a president who was taking direct orders or close to it from Stalin.

This isn't some theoretical, I like communism.

This is someone who thinks one of the worst butchers in history was a good guy and someone we should work well with.

You also, and I love you for this, and thank you for this.

Woodrow Wilson, I mean, you point out that guy, I mean, he

really thought,

we are brothers.

Their revolution is our revolution.

I mean, it's blue skies.

There's no two countries that should be more bigger friends.

But here's another kind of white pill moment.

Because in 1916, when Woodrow Wilson was campaigning for re-election and he wanted the first Democrat to be re-elected since the Civil War, he won it by, I think, like 3,000 votes in California.

It was that, that close.

And his campaign was, he kept us out of war.

Right.

A few few months later, we parted the Great War.

And fighting the draft became a felony.

Eugene V.

Debs, who had been the socialist candidate, was imprisoned.

And it took, and even after the war ended, he was still imprisoned.

And it took President Harding to commute or pardon his sentence to get him out of jail.

Point being, being against the Great War went from being a winning campaign strategy to being a felony in the matter of months.

I don't think nowadays there would be the capacity to have this nationwide draft.

And let's suppose they wanted to make it a felony to oppose the draft.

Thanks to the internet, anyone on earth could have this information or hide their IP and be like, this guy's a tyrant.

This is ridiculous.

You can't silence the entire earth, no matter how much they would want to do it.

Let me talk a little bit

about

when I was at

Warsaw.

Oh, yeah.

And

I met with the chief rabbi

of Poland.

Oh, Jesus.

Wow.

That's got to be intense.

It was.

But it was white pill.

I had just gone from Auschwitz.

I had seen and I'd walked the ghettos and everything else all over Poland.

I was doing a documentary.

And I met with him.

And I said, and I was just

broken inside.

You've been there.

I know.

I couldn't handle it.

Oh my gosh.

You know, what my understanding is the most disturbing part is like, there's like grass and like birds chirping, like that kind of irony.

It's just like, this just looks like

inside the wall, right behind the wall where they were executing people, and that building was where the windows were open and

Mengele was doing experiments on live people awake, you know,

during surgery.

Right at the bottom of that building, about eight feet in, is a pool where all of the guards would just take their girlfriends and they would just swim in the pool.

And it's mind-blowing.

Do you know what Mengele did?

If you read the book, his biography of Mengele, he was trying to inject dye into people's eyes to turn them blue, which contradicts, I would think, the racial purity because if you're making it, you want the real blue, not the dye.

And one of his assistants came into his office once and he had...

the eyes cut, they were irises, and he had them pinned on the wall like butterflies.

And she said, I thought I had had died and gone to hell.

So again, when we talk about the nature of evil and people being naive, we can wrap our heads around like medical experiments on people.

Like that little detail about like slicing eyes and having him hang on your wall and just looking at it like nothing happened.

That is something I think few people can wrap their heads around.

You want to talk about White Pill.

You want to talk about why

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So I had just gone there.

And so I go and meet with him.

And

the first thing I say to him,

and it wasn't a question, it wasn't something I had planned.

It just came spilling out.

And I said,

I just spent some time with, you know, one of the righteous among the nations.

And there was, I can't remember what it is, 3,000, 5,000 righteous of the nations in Poland, people that were not Jewish, but tried to do everything they could to save Jewish people.

And that was a country of millions.

And

I said,

how come there were so few?

And he looked at me me and he just looked at me shocked.

And he said,

so few.

Yeah.

He said,

it's a miracle there were that many.

And

he, you know, explained how difficult it was death, death, instant for you, your family, everything.

Yeah, torture, horrible.

And

it really spun me around because

you do understand, it's not like anything we've ever experienced in America.

There's nothing like that in our experience.

Yeah.

And what I like about your book is you do hit those people who stood

and

those are my favorite kinds of stories, the people who have everything to lose.

I think I'm going to be able to tell this story now without crying.

This is the first time because I've told this several times and I think I get through it.

There was something something called the Senior Citizens Tunnel, which Andrew Heaton, who used to work at the Blaze, told me about.

And there were a bunch of senior citizens on the far side of the Berlin Wall.

They were in East Berlin.

They wanted to get to West Berlin.

Inside a chicken coop, they dug this tunnel to West Berlin, because as soon as you step foot in West Berlin as a German person, you have citizenship there.

And they dug it six feet tall.

And they asked, I'm getting through the story, they asked the guy, why did you build this tunnel so tall?

And he goes, my wife's not crawling to freedom.

I'm done crawling.

And the fact that it was taken, like, who loans how much extra time?

But stories like this about the human defiance

is just another form to me of enormous, enormous beauty.

There's another story, which I just love, of Heinz Meisner.

He was a guy who was commuting between East and West Germany, as some foreign nationals could do at the time, East and West Berlin, excuse me.

And he fell in love with a girl from East Berlin.

And he's like, I got to get her out of here.

So he goes to Checkpoint Charlie, and they have that thing that allows cars to get through.

And he measures how tall it is and he gets a British car, I think it was an Astrid Martin, and he takes up the windshield and he takes some air out of the tires, puts her in the back seat.

Well, I got to get her mom too, right?

So mother-in-law to be is in the trunk, put bricks around her in case they start firing.

He takes it to Checkpoint Charlie.

They're about to wave him on to the next

guard, and he just floors it and goes under the gate and drives to freedom.

In fact, there's a photo of them, which maybe we can show, of what the orientation was like.

But and some here's the great thing.

Someone else did it again later with the same car.

But stories like this, like, I love this girl.

I'm going to do something about this.

And that he did.

Could you imagine sitting him down and being like, look, she's in East Berlin.

There's lots of girls in West Berlin.

You're putting your life at risk.

But again, when I talk about hope and the fact that these people can be beaten, it's moments like this.

If they had their way, she'd be vanished, mother-in-law would be vanished too, and he would never be allowed to step foot in East Berlin ever again.

But that's not what happened.

So there are so many cases, many such cases to quote the former president, where people of their own volition, like you saw in Poland, were like, I'm going to do something about this.

And I have to tell you, I think that spirit is more pervasive in America than in any other country on earth.

This idea of like, it's on my shoulders to do right.

The one thing that I think you and I will both agree on is

we have started to see more and more of that, but we haven't even scratched the surface of that.

When things became truly oppressive, I mean,

where everybody was clear, oh my, what is happening?

Everyone will never be clear.

No, never.

Yeah, you're right.

You're right.

But I mean, a lot of people like that.

Okay.

You would have that American, there is something

about us in our DNA that I hope is still there.

I think it is.

That we are,

you know, I think Churchill referenced this.

It takes us a while, but once we wake up, we change the world.

We can change the world because we have that in our DNA that it is the one individual.

It's not the state or the king or anything else.

It's the individual goes, screw it.

I'm going.

Yeah, one of the other things I fight against on like social media is a lot of people have this idea of like, oh, we're never going to have a majority.

The majority is always going to be sheep.

I'm like, you don't need a majority or even a large.

5%.

Right.

Let's suppose 5%.

5% of people in this country went communist.

Let's just look at it from the other groups.

Like 5% of this country became violently armed communists.

It would be a night, it would be the purge.

One out of 20 with weapons and messing things.

It would make what happened in 2022 look like an absolute joke, right?

So it takes a very small percentage of the population to be radicalized to that point.

And that's not what I'm advocating for, but the point being, you never need a majority.

If you have a hardcore minority, they become ungovernable.

And then all sorts of things got on the table.

The Revolutionary War was less than 20 years.

That's with 20% of the American population in its corner.

Right.

And even them, many of of them were just vaguely in the corner.

They're not doing anything about it.

They're like, I support you, but I'm just going to like your tweets.

But if I'm asked,

I don't know you at all.

Can you talk about Upton Sinclair a bit?

Oh, God.

Good.

Happily.

Yes, okay.

So

I'm sick of only people or predominantly people on the right getting canceled.

So this was my chance to cancel Upton Sinclair.

And I had the receipts.

There was this book I found called Terror in Russia, Question Mark.

And it was a debate between Upton Sinclair and Eugene Lyons, who was a communist reporter who later turned hardcore anti-communist.

And Upton Sinclair is still widely read in high schools.

His book, The Jungle.

He is a, he's known as a hero against yellow journalism.

He is the guy.

Yeah, right.

He, right.

Mr.

Honesty, like integrity.

Because of his book, The Jungle, we have the FDA to this day.

And people are of the belief that if it wasn't for the FDA, all your food would be poisoned.

And if you go to a bar, you're going to be searched strychnine.

For whatever reason, I don't know why this would be advantageous to the bartender, but whatever.

He was a hardcore progressive.

He was not a communist, by his own words.

He was the Democratic Party nominee for governor of California in 1934.

And he had a plan called EPIC, End Poverty in California.

And his idea was to take all these vacant lots and have everyone guaranteed a job.

And the reporters asked, understandably, this is the, we're at the height of of the depression.

If you have California guaranteeing jobs, won't everyone come here?

And he basically had some glib answer about like, well, we have to worry about them somewhere.

He was this close to becoming the nominee.

And he lost the election.

And because of losing the election, he said some of his supporters killed themselves.

Who knows if that's true?

Point being, he became a big apologist for Stalin.

And first of all, he said with the holodomore, the starvation of the Ukrainians, he goes, oh, you say it's 5 million.

I think the number is closer to 1 million.

And it's like, based on what?

Right.

Because one sounds better than 5.

But then he goes, yeah, but you have to look at it this way.

At least they solve the problem of famine forever, which is not true.

But for him, when I found this book, and he's in black and white being like, yeah, we starve millions of people, but look at the long term.

It's just like, holy crap.

And then when Eugene Lyons...

There's a lot of people that still kind of think that way.

And when Eugene Lyons told him he's pretty close to Hitler,

Upton Sinclair is like, okay, when Stalin and Hitler stop having their animosity, then I'll admit that Stalin has sold out the workers.

The next year was the Molotov-Ripentrop Pact, when Stalin and Hitler had their non-aggression pact, and Upton Sinclair never did admit that Stalin had, in fact, sold out the workers.

And the hand-waving of

this happen, this was the thing that disturbed me the most it wasn't necessarily what was done in the soviet union as much as how many american influencers and they harvard yale princeton the new yorker the new york times the atlantic the nation were just telling americans you're stupid

they have freedom of speech they can read any book they want from aristotle to lenin um they don't have racism there you're just backwards you just have anti-communist prejudices and they put this in writing.

They were signed with Lillian Hellman and Ernest Hemingway.

So to see how they were browbeating the people in this country to talk about, and it wasn't at all in the context of, look, it's World War II.

We're up against Hitler.

England's by herself.

We got to take any allies we get.

Like, that wasn't the argument.

The argument was we should be closer to his approach of government because they're the future and they figured it out.

So to have those receipts in writing, which I discovered doing my research, was something I was stunned and glad to kind of bring back from the market.

And it's amazing to me how he, George Bernard Shaw, who basically kind of came up with the gas chamber,

how they're just revered still today and given a pass.

And we're told that America is horrible by the same people who are giving a pass to

all of these people.

You're not given a pass for a mean tweet.

Right.

But you are given a pass for literally saying this genocide was worth it.

That's, to me, is completely crazy.

So thankfully, I hope people will take away from this book undying hatred for Upton Sinclair.

So I want to talk to you about one last thing.

Sure.

Your model

of optimism.

Comes from a guy you mentioned early on,

Camus.

Camus.

Camus.

Yeah.

Okay.

Never heard of him.

Don't know who he is.

The stranger?

You never heard the stranger?

No.

Oh, okay.

He wasn't, he won Nobel Prize for Literature.

I'm sorry.

Okay, no, he's a stranger.

When did he live?

He died, I think, in 40.

He died in a car accident, I think, in 1943.

Okay.

Tell me about him and tell me.

Oh, no, it's after 43.

I'm sorry, because he was part of the French Resistance.

So tell me about him and tell me

what anchors you?

What has he given you that anchors you

in

white pill?

So Camus was, I mean, this book was started as an analysis of his thought.

He was an absurdist.

He's often called,

he's often aligned with Sartre, which they were opposing angles in terms of politics.

He was very big on the, he has a quote which is ascribed to him, which I don't think he ever actually said, by Howard Zinn, where he says, it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

And

his book, The Plague, which was a metaphor for the Nazi occupation, is, you know, and was kind of popular during COVID.

I guess people thought there would be some parallels there.

And he had a very famous essay called Reflections on the Guillotine, where he's against the death penalty.

His point being, as cruel as it is to kill someone, and he's not dismissing that at all, it's not any less cruel to have someone locked in a room for 20 years and threatening with death at the end of that.

So we're better than that.

But he is very much a philosopher of conscience.

He was part of the resistance in occupied France.

And I don't, I don't have the quote, I don't want to mangle his quote that I have the quote, the introduction, if you can get the exact quote.

I have, nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous.

Oh, no, that's that's no, no, that's not the, that's actually, he never actually said that.

I think that's the one.

There's a lot of, here's the thing with Camus, because I had to learn this.

There's a lot of Camus quotes on the internet that he never actually said.

And I think that one you said about expecting me to

go.

Do not wait for the last judgment.

It takes place every day.

There is always philosophy for the lack of courage what does that one mean there's always a philosophy for someone will always find an excuse for you to do the wrong thing right so this is the quote that introduced the book and i'll i'll sum up in seconds all i maintain is that on this earth there are plagues and there are victims and it's up to us so far as possible not to join forces with the plagues meaning evil is real evil exists but it's not a hard choice fight evil and the way i could sum up camus philosophy he wrote a book called the myth of sisyphus and his conclusion is that Sisyphus, who's pushing the rock up a hill for eternity, is happy.

This is how I would sum up Camus' philosophy.

Imagine if you walk into some kind of wilderness, right?

And there's a river and a mountainside and there's an easel there, right?

So Kazmus felt that life was inherently meaningless, but he regarded this as not a bad thing.

You see this easel, and I know you're a painter.

There's two kinds of approaches.

Why is there this easel in the middle of the wilderness?

This is a waste and this is stupid.

Or what a great opportunity.

I can paint that mountain.

I could paint that river.

I could paint myself.

I could paint something abstract.

I could paint something concrete.

I could do anything I want with this great opportunity.

And that's his view in my interpretation of life.

We are giving something that, in his view, is inherently meaningless, but that means we can imbue meaning to it.

And it is incumbent upon us for that meaning to be full of.

He has this quote about: man should live to the point of tears, that you should live with integrity and intensity.

And he very much spoke to those people in Poland who were like, this is my chance to, when I meet my maker, he was an atheist, but the metaphor stands, when I'm on my deathbed, can I look back and be like, you know what?

Nine out of 10, I left the world a better place than I found it.

And this is one of the reasons I wrote this book is it's like, I'm from this country.

It is unconscionable to me that all these lives, all these decades of misery is just going to be forgotten.

And I'm like, you know what?

I'm going to do something about it.

And so I did.

As I get older, I've been thinking this a lot lately.

If I had to live my life all over again,

the only thing I would change,

there'd be two things.

I would stop being so worried about outcomes.

Can I interrupt you?

Because my friend Jackie was just talking to someone who's 90, and she goes, What would you tell yourself?

She goes, I'd stop worrying so much.

There's this rabbinical quote where it says, Imagine you go back 10 years in time, right?

And you see yourself 10 years ago, and you tell yourself, Some of the bad things will happen, but you're here.

Like, stop freaking out.

So you could tell yourself that now.

Imagine yourself 10 years from now going back in time.

And you'll sit yourself down and be like, there'll be bad stuff.

You can handle this.

Yeah.

So stop worrying so much.

And the other one kind of stems from that, but I would just have risked more.

I would have just said,

you're going to jump out of an airplane?

Yeah, what the hell?

You have a whirl.

You know, you just, there's so many opportunities that because of time,

because of, you know, what you're working on, what you're thinking, what you're afraid of, you just don't do.

And those things that you don't do

could have unlocked so many other doors that would have led to a much richer experience.

If you just,

if you live life without fear.

Can I ask you another one?

Yeah.

I would tell myself, and I want to know if you agree, to be hard on yourself, but be kind to yourself.

Yes.

Yes.

Because, yeah, don't be lazy.

You're going to make excuses, but at the same time, you're going to screw up.

Yeah.

And when you make those amends or you go back and fix it to the best of your ability, it's okay.

You're a person.

That's why alcoholism helped helped me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, the 12th step is all 12 steps is all about that.

Yeah.

You suck.

You suck a lot sometimes.

That's okay.

Who doesn't?

Let's fix what we can and leave the rest and throw it out.

And so you start giving yourself a break really early in life.

And I think

so many of us do this.

You don't have to be an alcoholic to

start thinking this way, that

you are not more than a collection of your mistakes but and your mistakes are so meaningless if you apply the lessons you learned from them that's great but also every single person listening to this has it in their power to make the world a marginally better place yes you can go talk to an elderly person who's lonely you can foster an animal you can mentor some kids there's so many opportunities to just make the world a better place and you're not going to like some of them and that's that's okay, but you are going to find some that you do like.

You can just say,

How are you?

Yeah, yeah.

And mean it.

Yeah, yeah.

And mean it.

Well, I couldn't because I mean, I'm not a nice person, but some people, a blazed audience member, certainly could.

Yes.

Michael, I love you.

I love you too, Glenn.

Thank you so much.

Just a reminder: I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.

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