WBD612 Audio Transcription

The Rise & Fall of the Russian Empire with Michael Malice

Release date: Monday 30th January

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Michael Malice. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

Michael Malice is an anarchist, author, and podcaster. In this interview, we discuss his latest book, The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil. It charts the rise and fall of Russia, its insidious evilness, how western intellectuals supported and justified the communist state from afar, and why it is impossible for those in the west to comprehend how pervasive a totalitarian regime can be.

“Many of these organisations that were carrying the water for this nightmare regime are still in place today…the New York Times, which did everything in its power to obscure Stalin’s starvation of millions of Ukrainians, is still the paper of record. It’s the Atlantic, it’s the New Republic; this isn’t metaphors or analogies, it’s literally the same organisations.”

— Michael Malice

Interview Transcription

Michael Malice: Whole Foods Zero Calorie Cola is the cola that will cause your children to have Leukaemia, and taste like it too.  This is horrific and I am a big fan of all the zero sodas.  I drink a two-litre of Dr Pepper Cherry Zero every day and this is just really, really -- and Whole Foods started here in Austin.

Peter McCormack: Did it?

Michael Malice: Yeah, the first Whole Foods is here.  "Keep Austin Weird", by which they mean stuff white people like!

Peter McCormack: I wanted one yesterday and he came in with it and I didn't properly look at it.  I just saw in the distance a bit of black, a bit of red, I was like, "Oh, he's got the Coke Zero".  Then Jeremy went and poured it with a glass of ice and I tasted it and thought, "This doesn't seem nice", but I thought it was the ice, I thought the ice had fucked it.  Then I went and got another can and I was like, "No, this isn't --"

Michael Malice: And that's the other thing.  Sometimes it's fun, like when you go to H-E-B, instead of Dr Pepper they have Mr Lightning, and you're like, "All right, let me try this!"  But this is a problem.

Peter McCormack: Whole Foods is expensive.  Holy shit, we went this morning, what was it…?

Danny Knowles: About $90 or something, and we just got stuff for breakfast.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we got a little plastic plate of ham that was $19; it was like $10 for 12 eggs.  It was way, way more than we pay in the UK.

Michael Malice: Were they chicken eggs?

Peter McCormack: I hope so.

Michael Malice: Because they've got all kinds of weird eggs over there.

Peter McCormack: What do you mean?

Michael Malice: They sell like emu eggs and ostrich eggs and quail eggs and probably lizard, who knows.

Danny Knowles: I'm pretty sure ours were chicken eggs.

Peter McCormack: I fucking hope so!  No, I've got to have a coffee.  I don't even like black coffee.  Danny makes me drink it.

Michael Malice: Okay!

Peter McCormack: How are you doing, Michael.

Michael Malice: I've been phenomenal.

Peter McCormack: It's the third time I've got to talk to you, which is great, and I always confess to you I'm not an anarchist, I'm a bitcoiner, but it's very hard --

Michael Malice: But a lot of the bitcoiners are anarchists, as you know.

Peter McCormack: They are.  Some are libertarians.  I always struggle to fully separate their opinions and what they stand for.  But the more I do this show and the more the world goes completely fucking mad, it gets really hard to keep justifying this broken democratic system we have in the UK.

Michael Malice: Yes, it's even worse there than here.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because we don't have optionality.

Michael Malice: Correct.  And I think the British culture is a lot worse than the American culture in many ways.

Peter McCormack: What, in that we're just subservient and accept it?

Michael Malice: Yeah, and I think there's this sense, which is not incorrect, that Britain's best days are behind her; whereas, I don't think Americans have this view, even if it were true.

Peter McCormack: I don't think we believe that, but I think people externally can see that.  So, I do.  I mean, we're just a tiny little island now.  We're lucky to have a seat at the Security Council table, and that's way out of our league, but I don't think we stand for anything any more that anyone really gives a shit about.

Michael Malice: Yeah, if you think about how much of our intellectual history is due to the components of the United Kingdom, worldwide, it's just extraordinary, just crazy.  Talk about punching above your weight, I don't even mean imperialism, I just mean the minds that came out of what was later the UK was just extraordinary.  And now, it's not that way at all.  I don't think Britain is disproportionately this intellectual seat of power, although there are certainly a lot of heavyweights coming out of Great Britain.

Peter McCormack: Also, the way our politics is set up is slightly different in that you have two very divided lines, where in the UK, while we have divided lines, they really have come to the centre and they're way more politically correct.  So, no politician really stands for anything meaningful, no one is really willing to challenge anything that seems nonsense, so we just have these two sides battling over very minor things.  It's like, who's going to spend the money the best at the next election, rather than the meaningful things.

Michael Malice: Right.  I mean, I know enough about British politics that it's unimaginable that anyone would even say the words, and please correct me if I'm wrong, "NHS reform", to have any kind of meaningful change to the NHS, other than increasing it dramatically.  Wouldn't they be dead on arrival?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's a real problem now.  We've talked about that a lot on this show, because the NHS is fucked, it's completely fucked, we've got massive issues with wait times, massive issues with ambulances, massive issues with funding, waiting.  The whole thing is an absolute mess.  It's very clear it's not working, but I don't think you have to have massive reforms, you could have incremental reforms, and just very minor ones.

I've stopped going to the NHS doctor, I go to a private doctor now.  It's £50 for an appointment.  I get seen usually, if I turn up on the same day, because they know me they'll find a gap; and if I phone up, it's usually the same day or the next day, and you're seeing a doctor who knows you because it's a small practice.  He knows everything about you, it's a personal relationship.  Whereas, if I try to get into local NHS, sometimes it's three weeks, unless you've got some massive emergency and they'll try and get someone to call you.  But these places will see you for £50.  I talked to my dad about this, he's in Ireland.  It's £50 for everyone within their health system.  And just a minor difference like that would stop, remove a huge amount of waste, but they won't even do that.

I'll put it in perspective for you.  We had a guy on the show recently.  The receipts for the government at the moment, tax receipts, was it £1.1 trillion?

Danny Knowles: Yes, I think so.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, £1.1 trillion.  Would you have a guess of how much of that goes to the NHS?

Michael Malice: I haven't a clue.

Peter McCormack: £200 billion.

Michael Malice: Wow, okay.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so about 20% for a shit service.

Michael Malice: Which everyone loves though, in principle; they love the idea of the NHS.

Peter McCormack: They love the idea.  I think that even that is starting to fracture.

Michael Malice: Oh, really?  Okay.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think that's starting to fracture, but no political party is going to turn around and say -- yeah, here we go.  This is the public spending in the UK.

Michael Malice: Wow, so it's 50% more than on social security, it's almost double -- oh, it is double education, twice as much on healthcare as on education.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So, the thing I found most interest though, debt interest is higher than education.

Michael Malice: Oh, wow, that's bad, that's very bad.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so they're spending more on their own stupid borrowing and spending than they are on education.

Michael Malice: Wow!  Well, I guess Britain doesn't really need that much money for defence particularly.

Peter McCormack: Well, we've got you guys, we just do as we're told and you protect us.  Yeah, so the problem with the NHS, it's a bit like here.  Can you imagine Biden saying, "No Infrastructure Bill, we're going to raise taxes, we're going to cut spending"?

Michael Malice: I'm going to disagree with you, because if you look at Canada, Trudeau's dad, Pierre Trudeau, when you have the leftist party, they're the ones who are in a position to have all these austerity measures and get away with it because there's no one really to their left to criticise them; in the same way that when Reagan jacked up spending in the 1980s, you couldn't really criticise him, because he's on the right wing of the right-wing party. 

In many of these countries, in Europe as well, you have these parliaments, it's the lefties who have the political space to do something about it.  That said, I do not think there's any possibility of Joe Biden saying what you had just said.

Peter McCormack: Well, the only austerity we've had recently was under a Conservative Government and they were seen as evil, greedy, rich.

Michael Malice: And it wasn't barely anything.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean there were some really weird policies they did.  They did this bedroom tax whereby if you had a council property and you had two bedrooms, they did these weird taxes that you couldn't get away from.  But the reason I was bringing this up, more of a setup for what we're going to talk about today, is we did this interview and this guy said, "The problem with governments now is they're insurance companies".  He was explaining that to fund the war, say World War II, they would get into massive debt.  But after the war, they would be able to pay off the debt by raising taxes knowing productivity would increase and also the spending on military would have to stop. 

But because there's been no war, governments have gradually spent more and more money, and if you bring that back up, Danny?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: If you look, I mean the NHS is essentially a health insurance, we all contribute in to that health insurance.  He's a good follow on Twitter actually!  Public pensions are essentially an old-age insurance, social security is an insurance.  I would say education is slightly different, that's more of a public service; defence is an insurance; state protection is an insurance; transport, I mean it's more infrastructure.  But he said the majority of government spending is kind of insurances for what people can't do themselves.

He was explaining that you just trend to a more and more unproductive society, therefore your debt increases and this is how you unwind the currency.  I think this is what is drawing me more into at least the libertarian world of smaller government and more responsible spending, which is why it's good to come and talk to you again.

Michael Malice: Yeah.  To me, the horrors of socialised medicine aren't three-week wait times, which if that's the worst you can say about a system, it's not the end of the world.  But it's things like when you have politicians prioritising whose lives matter over other people's lives, and this happened to my friend Lauren Chen during the COVID situation.  She's a popular podcaster, you might now her.  Her dad had been diagnosed with cancer, I don't know the exact details, but he either couldn't get treatment or a check-up because all the priority was for COVID.  And they have a monopoly there, so you couldn't really pay someone else or sub your own private oncologist. 

She's sitting there and said to herself, "Why am I funding my own oppression?" and the powerlessness to feel that I know my father has cancer and I know every day that passes, it's not like I have cancer Tuesday and on Wednesday it's going to go in a good direction, it only goes in a worse direction, you just don't know how fast and how much time you have left.  So, those kinds of horror stories.

Speaking to what you said earlier, if those regular visits get outside the realm of the average person and you encourage people, or you incentivise them in whatever way, to have this kind of emergency-room medical care which we have here, you can't legally turn someone away from an emergency room, I think is how the law's written; the point being, if I have a broken leg or swallowed some poison and you just got shot, you're all being treated the same, and it's really not every emergency is an emergency in the same sense.

If I have the flu, it's an emergency in that I can't go on like this for another two weeks, but there's no possibility really I'm dying the next day, I just feel like complete crap.  But if you're bleeding out, that is a, "We have to take care of this right now".  Obviously, they have different ways of sorting this thing out.  But what ends up happening is you're going to the emergency room and you think, "I'm going to see someone quickly", you're sitting there for hours.  If you have something to the point where you're going to the emergency room, maybe it's not, "I'm shot and I'm bleeding out", but it certainly takes a lot I think for most people to be like, "All right, I need to go not to the doctor, to the hospital right now".

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I actually had to go to hospital when I was in, where were me, Miami?

Danny Knowles: Miami.

Peter McCormack: I have a weird heart thing where I get these things called SVTs.  It feels like a heart attack but it's completely harmless; it's just electrical signals.  But when it happens, you have to go to hospital just in case you're having a heart attack.

Michael Malice: That happened to my friend now, and this is the great thing about aging.  They told her, "These are the beginning stages of menopause", and she's had to go to the hospital twice, because she thought -- they're like, "No, no, you're just getting old!"  She's a month older than me, and I'm so glad I'm a dude.  I don't have to have Mother Nature tell me, "It's a wrap"!

Peter McCormack: Well, I'm not in my menopause, it's not that stage for me.

Michael Malice: You don't have that?!

Peter McCormack: Well, actually, these started for me a decade ago when I used to take drugs; it was drug-induced and I haven't done drugs in years, but they still come occasionally, very occasionally, and I have to go to hospital just in case because if it is a heart attack, I have to be treated.  So anyway, we went to the local hospital in Miami. 

Michael Malice: Oh, my God.

Peter McCormack: It's happened like six times in a decade.

Michael Malice: It's still terrifying, sorry to interrupt you.  I was choking on a piece of food once and I remember my brain thinking, "There's a non-zero chance you're going to die.  You have to take care of this, you're almost certainly going to be fine, but there's a non-zero chance this is a wrap".  So, for you it's the same thing, "I know this is the situation but I'm not 100% sure".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, the first one, I thought I was.  So, the first one was horrendous.  Basically, I had this feeling in the centre of my stomach, it was like a heat, and I was like, "This feels really weird", and my hands were clammy.  I looked it up and it was like, "Symptoms of a heart --", then everything came in.  Then my heart started racing, I went up to 200 beats per minute, I started to feel faint, every single symptom.  Then the ambulance came.

Michael Malice: Isn't it the best way to get a heart attack?!  You go online and you're like, "All right!"  Now you're going to give yourself one!

Peter McCormack: Well, yeah, I obviously escalated from that.  Anyway, they calmed me down in the hospital and that was a trigger to never do drugs again.  And each time, you're right.  I mean, I was slightly panicked in Miami, wasn't I?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Michael Malice: Of course you should be.

Peter McCormack: My lips went cold.

Michael Malice: You're also having your brain throwing the adrenaline, so it's telling you, "Fight or flight", so you're going to have the panic just at a physiological level.

Danny Knowles: And you went so pale.

Peter McCormack: Really pale; my lips, I felt like they'd gone blue.  So anyway, we went to the emergency room and the experience, there were two things that are the same, two things that are very different.  The things that are the same was same length of wait.

Michael Malice: Oh, okay.

Peter McCormack: Exactly the same length of wait, four-ish hours to be seen, which obviously if I was having a heart attack, I would have been dead, so that was that.  And in terms of the staff, I thought the staff were brilliant.  You could tell in both places that they really care.  The main difference for me actually, obviously you have to pay in America; but the second one was the amount of things they checked.  So, in the UK, they do a quick blood test, they check your pulse and that was it.  I had about eight different tests and they gave me aspirin, and they do a lot more.

I asked what the difference was and they said, "In the US, they're worried about being sued".  So, the treatment was different, but that was based on the incentives of the system.  But the majority of the treatment was exactly the same.  My problem is, I don't know what the right answer is with this, because I know, say in the UK with a socialised healthcare system, our cancer care is quite poor compared to the US.  If you've got a kid who's got quite serious cancer, they often raise money to come here to get treated.  But if you have a full free market for healthcare, God knows what they're going to be trying to convince us we need, what pill we need to be taking.

Michael Malice: You mean like now?

Peter McCormack: Well, exactly like now, but how much worse could it be?

Michael Malice: I think it would be a lot better because I think people are much more suspicious of corporate propaganda than they are of government propaganda.  Like, if you have Pepsi telling you, "Drink Pepsi, it will make sure you don't have heart palpitations", you would laugh about it, right.  But if you have Fauci telling you, your neighbour will tell you, "You need to be drinking your Pepsi", don't you think?

Peter McCormack: I think there's a slight difference between the UK and the US for this.

Michael Malice: Okay.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I do.  I don't know, what do you think?

Danny Knowles: I mean, we have less of a problem with prescription drugs anyway.

Michael Malice: Yeah, but you're all alcoholics.

Danny Knowles: That's true.

Michael Malice: The amount of self-medicating in Britain with alcohol is -- I've only visited London once, I did not enjoy it, but you guys start at like 5.00pm.  Work's done, it's like, "All right, let's get plastered".  It's so bizarre to me as an American.

Peter McCormack: Well, it's even more than that.  If you go to an airport, it's "all rules are off", it doesn't matter what time you get there.

Michael Malice: Is that right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's just airport rules. 

Michael Malice: Okay, it's 5.00pm somewhere.

Peter McCormack: It's 5.00pm somewhere.  I mean, I've been 12 days without drinking, by the way.

Michael Malice: Good for you.

Peter McCormack: I'm thinking I might do the whole year, maybe.

Michael Malice: You're not going to do the whole year.

Peter McCormack: I might do.

Michael Malice: No, you're not going to last.

Danny Knowles: I mean, I'm with you, I don't think he's going to last.

Michael Malice: If it's 12 days and you're proud of 12 days, you're not doing 365, it's not happening.

Danny Knowles: The only way it will happen is if we say it won't.

Michael Malice: No, the only way it will happen is if you start taking some other drug, pivot to some other drug of choice.

Peter McCormack: Like black coffee.

Michael Malice: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I think I can do it.  All right, give me a year, Michael Malice.

Michael Malice: Would you like to make a bet right now?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, what's the bet?

Michael Malice: Okay, what's the bet going to be?

Peter McCormack: All right, if I do, I come on your show.

Michael Malice: Well, you come on my show anyway.

Danny Knowles: 1 Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: That's a big bet, that's a lot of money!

Michael Malice: That would be interesting.

Peter McCormack: That's a big bet.

Danny Knowles: Would you take it if it was that?

Peter McCormack: I'd do the bet.

Michael Malice: But how will I know he's telling the truth?

Peter McCormack: Well, Danny will be honest.  Just promise Danny 10%.  I think the problem with that is, Bitcoin could be $100,000 in a year.  I mean, how do you feel about that?

Michael Malice: Well, Bitcoin's a Bitcoin; the Bitcoin's a standard value, not the dollar amount.  So, I'm a long-term Bitcoin person.

Peter McCormack: Oh, you've got a stack, all right, okay.

Michael Malice: I don't have a stack, but it's --

Peter McCormack: It's enough.

Michael Malice: I'd rather have my funds in Bitcoin than in fiat currency.

Peter McCormack: I mean, I would make that bet if you want to make that bet.

Michael Malice: I don't know if I know you well enough, is the problem, so I don't know what my odds are here.

Peter McCormack: All right, let's make it easier.  First time we're in Austin in the year, take me for the best steak.

Michael Malice: Oh, that's a great bet.  I will take you to an amazing dinner, perfect.

Peter McCormack: Because, no one's going to lie over a dinner.

Michael Malice: Yeah, absolutely.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, okay, we've got that.  Fuck it, a whole year.

Michael Malice: And we could find a cool restaurant to film that and make it an episode.

Danny Knowles: Michael, there was no chance he was ever going to go for a year!

Michael Malice: Oh, I know. 

Peter McCormack: Do you know I own a football team, a soccer team?

Michael Malice: Oh, no, I didn't know that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so I vape and my manager vapes, and we both said we're going to give up for the New Year and we made a bet and we agreed it would be from midnight.  I broke at two minutes past midnight!

Michael Malice: It's like Kramer on that Seinfeld episode where they agree not to jerk off, and then five minutes later he just slams the money on the table!

Peter McCormack: That was it!  He turned up for the game and I was like -- we had a game three days later and I didn't tell him, because I didn't want him to stop.  But when he turned up, I was straightaway, "Here's £50, I lost that bet!"  But anyway…

Michael Malice: Let's put this on our calendar.  I'm going to put on my calendar right now to check a year from now.

Peter McCormack: Well, 1 January.

Michael Malice: Yeah.

Danny Knowles: I'll do a calendar invite and invite you both.

Michael Malice: Yeah, do that.

Peter McCormack: You do that.

Michael Malice: So, someone's picking up a nice tab.

Peter McCormack: Do a six-month check-in.

Michael Malice: Yeah, that's a great idea.  It's my birthday in six months.

Peter McCormack: The problem is, if I've kept to it, I might not want to drink at the dinner.

Michael Malice: Well, that's fine.

Peter McCormack: Whereas if I lose, we will drink a fuck load.

Michael Malice: Well, I don't drink.

Peter McCormack: Oh, you don't drink?

Michael Malice: No, it makes me meaner.

Peter McCormack: How long have you not drunk?

Michael Malice: I don't remember the last time I had a drink.

Peter McCormack: Oh, so years.

Michael Malice: Yeah, I mean I'm not an AAA, I've had a sip.  Like, if someone has a cool cocktail I'm like, "Let me try it", but I haven't had a drink in I don't know how long.

Peter McCormack: Well, I'm saying 2023 because I kind of think I just want to stop.

Michael Malice: Well, you should.  I had a poll recently on Twitter and I said, "Which of these four drugs do you think have done the most damage", and it was cocaine, marijuana, alcohol or cigarettes.  Alcohol just ran with the numbers.

Peter McCormack: What order?  I'd go alcohol, cigarettes, cocaine, marijuana.

Michael Malice: Yeah, same here, because the number of people using cocaine is quite small.

Peter McCormack: I mean, I've had sessions where I've done them all!

Michael Malice: The other problem is, alcohol has upsides, tobacco is all downside basically.  Alcohol, yeah you have a drink with dinner, wine culture, there's something to be said for that, there's benefits.  Cigarettes, I had a friend who worked for something called The American Council on Science and Health, and they were debunking health fears in the media like, "If you eat too many eggs, you're going to get fat", and they were like, "No.  Tobacco, cigarettes, that's the one where it's as bad as people think, it's as addictive, it just destroys people's lives", and you see all these stories, people get older and they're like, "What was I thinking?  What do I have to show for this?  Disgusting yellow teeth, everything I smell; whenever I eat, I'm fixated on, 'Let me finish this meal so I can smoke'".  It's just an awful, awful habit.

Peter McCormack: So, my dad smokes, he's smoked his whole life, but he's never really drunk.  He has the occasional drink, one or two here.  After my mum died, he didn't drink for nearly four years.  He's 74.  He came over recently and he looks great.

Michael Malice: Aren't you concerned about his health, his lungs?

Peter McCormack: I mean, he's not going to stop now at 74 years old.  My whole life, we tried to get him to stop.  He will not stop smoking.

Michael Malice: All right, you didn't answer my question.

Peter McCormack: Am I concerned about his health?  Yeah, of course.

Michael Malice: Yeah.  Does he have like a smoker's cough?

Peter McCormack: Sometimes.  When it comes, like when he gets ill, it's really bad and then it goes.  But it's his vice, that's the one.  We've tried, he won't stop.  I tried to even get him onto a vape, because at least that would be better.

Michael Malice: Or those snus.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, a lot of people have got those these days.

Michael Malice: So, this is the thing that I hate about some of this American culture, is it's much easier to have halfway quit than to quite entirely, and snus are these little pouches of tobacco that you put in your cheek and they're not great, but it's so much better than cigarettes, that if you had to have these two bad choices, you'd much rather have this one and you'd be fine.  And because it sounds like you're promoting the use of tobacco, people aren't happy with it.  It's like, I'd rather someone had a cold than full-blown AIDS, but the way they look at it, it's like, "Well, you're promoting having colds?"  Well, yeah, compared to the other thing, yes.

Peter McCormack: Is that the thing you had the other day?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, well Eric Yakes bought one to England and we went to watch the football and I tried it, and it was like rocket fuel.  I nearly fell over.

Michael Malice: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: People have caffeine ones as well, don't they?

Michael Malice: Yeah, it's called something with a Z.

Danny Knowles: Oh, ZYN, that's what his was, it was a ZYN.

Peter McCormack: You felt like you got high off it, didn't you?

Michael Malice: Yeah, you will get high.  But that's something separate, those ZYNs.

Peter McCormack: All right, I'll have another word with dad when I get back.  Anyway, back to what I was saying --

Michael Malice: Well, this is your dad, so it's something very serious.  When's the last time he got his lungs X-rayed?

Peter McCormack: He probably has never had them X-rayed.

Michael Malice: That's the thing.  You're his dumb son, "I don't care what you say, Peter", etc; you show someone their jet-black lungs, that might be what it takes, especially someone in their 70s, to be like, "Wait a minute, I don't have that much time left anyway and is this really worth it?" you never know.

Peter McCormack: I mean, I would love to get him to stop, but I would bet you a Bitcoin he doesn't.

Michael Malice: No, I believe you, I'm just saying…

Peter McCormack: No, it's hard.

Michael Malice: It's got to be scary to watch.

Peter McCormack: It was worse as a kid.  I'll tell you why it was worse as a kid, because people smoked everywhere.  We would get on the planes and do you remember people smoking on the planes, in that horrible smoking department that stunk and it was gross?

Michael Malice: Yes, of course.

Peter McCormack: And so, you were more exposed to it.  But his three kids, there's three of us who've tried.  My mum tried, it's just you're pushing against an immovable force.  I'll give it another go though, why not?

Michael Malice: Yeah, it's like saying, well, we've tried to have a currency that's not based on government and it hasn't worked, so what, you're going to give up?

Peter McCormack: Touché, all right, I'm going to be on that.  As I was saying, getting back to the ideas of whether it's the libertarians or anarchists, this kind of small or end state, the thing I've always struggled with, Michael, which is why again I want to talk to you and I've asked you this before, what can we do?

Michael Malice: Who's the we?

Peter McCormack: Someone like me, like you, like Danny.

Michael Malice: Well, Danny's a lost cause, hopeless!  Not even from Manchester, near Manchester.  Good luck!

Peter McCormack: He's from fucking Macclesfield.

Michael Malice: What's it called?

Peter McCormack: Macclesfield.

Michael Malice: That sounds like an American city; Macclesfield.  Shouldn't it be called Rockinghamshire, or something?!

Peter McCormack: It's Macclesfield in…

Danny Knowles: Cheshire.

Michael Malice: Oh, Cheshire, okay.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Cheshire.  Macclesfield's a weird place, it is.

Michael Malice: All those little cities, that's the thing that Americans never appreciate.  Americans think everyone in Britain's like, "Oh, rather", with the pinkie up.  You have all these weird little towns and it's really Fd up in these places, and I can't even wrap my head around them.

Peter McCormack: Why didn't you like London, by the way?

Michael Malice: The first time I was on Rogan, I said two things that got me in a lot of shit.  One was climate change, and the second was pointing out how ugly the people are in Great Britain, and they came after me like, "Well, you're ugly yourself", "Well then, I would know, wouldn't I?"  And then I actually went online and there was an article that said the most googled thing in either Europe or the UK is, "Why are British people so ugly?"

I had interviewed Ari Up, who was the lead singer of the punk reggae band, the Slits.  She was Johnny Rotten's stepdaughter and I told her the same thing, I'm such an Anglophile, my favourite author's E Nesbit, I have all the Roger Hargreaves Mr. Men books, but I hate it and she goes, "Yeah, we all hated it, we all couldn't wait to get the fuck out of there.  So, if you like what we like, you're going to hate it too!"

As Americans, you are raised with this idea that British people are an order of magnitude smarter than we are.  That's not true.  As a New Yorker, I don't think British people are particularly brilliant.  And if you ask any British person, sure they'll be defensive and say, "Hold on, Americans are pretty dumb".  That's true, but they will admit that British people are also not particularly -- there's plenty of dumb people.  I thought the city itself didn't have that much to offer, coming as a New Yorker, because you guys didn't even have skyscrapers.  So, London isn't as compact as New York City; the food wasn't what I would expect from a city of that kind of calibre; we just didn't -- it was fine, but being an Anglophile, I had such high hopes that I'm like, "This isn't some magical fairyland".

Peter McCormack: I think maybe because you're a New Yorker.

Michael Malice: Yes.

Peter McCormack: You're used to a massive, interesting city with great food, cosmopolitan, interesting people.  You can live within that small radius and get everything you need.  I liked New York the first time I went because it was grander than London, but I wasn't blown away.  But maybe if you're coming from maybe Austin and going to London --

Michael Malice: 100%, yes, of course.

Peter McCormack: -- it's a bit more romantic, you go to Buckingham Palace and all that stuff.  What did you do there?

Michael Malice: And of course, New York, you shouldn't go there now, just let's be clear.  New York's dead and they're raping the corpse.  We went to, I mean the British Museum's absolutely amazing.  It might be the best museum on Earth, maybe outside of the Hermitage in St Petersburg, which I haven't been to, but in terms of reputation.  My friend saw a couple of shows, I wasn't interested in that.  This was 2001, so I don't have a very good memory.

Peter McCormack: You should come back.

Michael Malice: I probably will at some point.  We'll host you, take you to Bedford where I'm from.

Danny Knowles: Now that, you'll be disappointed in!

Michael Malice: I want to go to Kent.

Peter McCormack: That's where my sister lives.  There's nothing really going on in Kent.

Michael Malice: Oh, because E Nesbit's from Kent, so I always wanted to -- it's nothing?  Okay.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  If you were going to get outside of London, I would say go to Oxford.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, the Cotswolds.

Peter McCormack: The Cotswolds, Cambridge.  Actually, Manchester, where he's from, is great.

Michael Malice: Manchester's a party town, isn't it; 24-hour party people, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and the people are the friendliest in the UK.  Or go up to Edinburgh.  Or even better, just fuck it off and go to Ireland.  That's where my dad's from; my family's Irish, half of it.  Ireland's hard to hate, because there's not much there but the people are brilliant.  And they love Americans.

Michael Malice: Do they?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, they love Americans.

Michael Malice: Okay, that's rare.

Peter McCormack: I mean, you get a lot travelling over to play golf where my dad's a member, and they absolutely love Americans.

Michael Malice: Okay.  I've always been more partial to Scotland than to Ireland, just based on what bands I like.

Peter McCormack: Like who?

Michael Malice: Altered Images, they've just dropped a new album for the first time since 1984.  The lead singer's Clare Grogan.  She was also the lead in that movie, Gregory's Girl, from I think 1980.

Peter McCormack: I don't even know what music this is.

Michael Malice: It's like new wave.  But the funny thing about the movie is their Scottish accent is so thick, they had to dub it into British English for the British audiences.

Peter McCormack: Well, didn't they have to do that in the subtitles for, was it Trainspotting?

Danny Knowles: I don't know.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, they have to have subtitles because it's Scottish!  Oh, no, they did that with the Geordies as well, didn't they?  Was it Sunderland 'Til I Die?

Michael Malice: Geordie Shore, or something?

Peter McCormack: No, I think it was Sunderland 'Til I Die.

Danny Knowles: Oh, yes, you're right.

Peter McCormack: So, the Newcastle accent --

Michael Malice: Yeah, it's crazy!

Peter McCormack: No, that was it.  You know Ryan Reynolds has bought this football team, Wrexham?

Michael Malice: Yeah, okay.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so there's a series called This is Wrexham, and even their accents, the Welsh accents, even when they're speaking English, they've got subtitles for the Americans so they can understand it.

Michael Malice: It's crazy, yeah.

Peter McCormack: We have the craziest accents.  But I think if you come over, they're the places to go.  But I always say to people, "Get out of London".  There's so much more to see outside London.  Back on New York, you know we travel around with the show, because the first interview we did was in New York, and we're here, Miami, New York, LA, Vegas, San Fran, Nashville.  We've kind of stopped going to New York.

Michael Malice: Yeah, it's horrible.  I was just there this past summer, because Tim Pool put up a billboard of me in Times Square, so I'm like, "I've got to see this with my own eyes", you know, bucket list, and I was livid that I had been gone for a year and things hadn't improved.

Peter McCormack: You are somebody who lived there, are from there.  What did you hate about the change, what is it?  Because, we come in as tourists.  For me as a tourist, or firstly as a podcaster, it was hard because there's less and less people to interview because they've all left; there's a lot of places closed down, like Irish bars we used to go to; the whole city smells of weed.  I don't mind weed, but it just smells of weed, and then there were people openly trying to sell us cocaine in Times Square.  Again, I've got no issue with people doing drugs, but it was a signal to me.  And then everything, it almost felt like it was becoming --

Michael Malice: Why would you buy cocaine on the street, especially in this fentanyl age?  Like, of all the things to do, if you're going to spend your money, buy your cocaine from a reputable source.  Forget your dad and the cigarettes, this is the one where you don't want to get it from the guy in the street in Times Square.  Kids, if you're going to use cocaine, make sure it's from Whole Foods!

Peter McCormack: It feels like it's going a little bit Gotham City.

Michael Malice: It's gone a lot Gotham City.  So, first of all, the thing is, there were so many cool spots.  My little travel hack, which I'm comfortable sharing with everyone is, my friends who I travel with this sometimes annoys them, but who cares; I'm the blue check and they're not.  Whenever I go to a different city, I always go to the weird ice cream place, right, because that's also in the cool neighbourhood.  I've been to a lot of cities, been to a lot of weird ice cream places, the best one happened to be the one in New York, Ice & Vice; it didn't survive COVID. 

All the little establishments that were only in New York that you couldn't find in other places anywhere on Earth that were really special and magical, none of them, or virtually none of them managed to survive the COVID regime.  So, what have you got left?  If I need to go to Target, I need to get on a plane to go to Target; that's number one.  The fact that it is getting more and more unsafe and people are like, "Oh, that's New York, it's always been like this"; bullshit.  There's a big difference between I kind of feel unsafe and I'm witnessing violence breaking out on a regular basis.

Peter McCormack: Or murders.

Michael Malice: Yes, it's absolutely crazy.  That subway station that got shot up was my subway station from 2005 to 2016; I was half a block from that train station.  You could see the police tape outside my old apartment building in the photos, and this isn't the sort of thing where, "Oh, that's just New York", where you have wanton mass shootings and terror, and also the knowledge that there's absolute certainty that it's not going to improve.

The very first day in his new job, Mayor Adams, the new mayor, witnessed a mugging and called it in.  It's just like, "This is crazy!"  When I came back in August, I told this story, people gave me crap about it, within an hour I was in a restaurant with my friend and we were having a nice wrap, the food, not the song, and there was a guy peeing on a truck in the street, not on the sidewalk.  He was in the street where the cars go and I'm like, "Yeah, New York was dirty in the past, but not this level of you're peeing in the street".  You'd always be up against a building or in the subway station or something like that.  Even that's obviously not ideal.

Maybe I'm spoilt because I'm here in Austin now, there was no sense of hope.  There was no sense of, "You know what, we're struggling but we're going to make things better and punch above our weight", like you might find in maybe a city like Akron, or something, one of these little second- or third-tier cities.  It just felt like, "Why am I here?"  And if you sat someone down and said why would you go to New York now, all the answers would have been historic because of New York's reputation.  I can't think of a single thing positive that has happened in New York, other than me leaving, in the last three years, and I don't think anyone else can either.

Peter McCormack: Did we even leave Brooklyn last time?

Danny Knowles: No, we stayed in Brooklyn, I don't think we left.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so we booked Brooklyn and we didn't leave Brooklyn, we didn't even bother going into the city because the time previous was so shit.  And by the way, it's somehow still got more expensive.

Michael Malice: Yes, that's the other thing, the cost of living is going through the roof, so that's just horrifying.

Peter McCormack: So, do you think it's done, or do you think it's just a cycle?

Michael Malice: I mean, I think on a long enough timeline, everything's a cycle, unless you buy into the argument, which I'm amenable to, that cities are an outdated mechanism of social organisation.  I don't see any possibility of New York turning around in the next decade, I don't see how.

Peter McCormack: And do you have any reason to go now, or are you just so settled here?

Michael Malice: I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure I don't step foot there.  The fact that I, as a lifelong New Yorker, can sit here and honestly say that I had a better time in Los Angeles than in New York is something that I have to admit, honestly, but it cuts to the core of my being.  There's always been this rivalry and I would be able to easily tell you why New York's better than LA, and I can no longer make that argument.  And let me assure you, LA's no paradise.  It's still in its own way very much a shithole.  But I was just in both and it's night and day that LA is running the table now on New York.

Peter McCormack: Well, I've always done this show in person as much as I can from when I launched it five years ago, and the places I went to most was either New York or LA; that's where I could get the highest density of interviews.  It's now Austin and Nashville.  I mean, we started in Nashville on this trip and came here.  Nashville, have you spent time there?

Michael Malice: I have never been, I'm going to be there in a couple of weeks for Michael Knowles.

Peter McCormack: So, it's like Austin, just smaller.  It's got its own quirks, but it has a very similar kind of feel.  We like both of those, and as we become more concentrated in locations, it's going to be here or Nashville that we spend most of our time.  Occasionally we'll go to LA.

Danny Knowles: Miami a lot as well.

Peter McCormack: Miami sometimes, yeah.  Miami's okay, but there's become no reason to go to New York and limited for LA.

Michael Malice: Even if there is a reason to go to New York, I'm sure you're having a much better time here and in Nashville than you are in New York.

Peter McCormack: Well, like I say, that last time in Brooklyn, we booked the place in Brooklyn, we didn't leave Brooklyn.  I think we went out for one meal around the corner.  I mean, we're out to dinner tonight, we're off to III Forks, and we went to our friend's place the other night.  In Nashville, we're out two nights.  There's a reason to go out.  Do you know what, it's more homely, it feels more homely.

Michael Malice: For sure.

Peter McCormack: Whereas, sometimes these big cities feel like a fucking hassle.

Michael Malice: Yeah, and the thing is, it used to be okay.  The New Yorker will tell you the cool spots to go; there are none, at least I don't know where they are any more.

Peter McCormack: I mean, I'm sure some have come back.

Michael Malice: Sure, but when I was there in August, I would say a good 25% of storefronts were unoccupied.  I mean, for New York, that's just an obscenity.

Peter McCormack: I mean, we went into a restaurant one time when we were there and it was 5.00pm, 6.00pm, a steak restaurant around Times Square.  I mean, there were five people in there.

Michael Malice: Yeah, and the rent must be crazy.

Peter McCormack: There's no chance of surviving there.

Michael Malice: Yes.

Peter McCormack: London hasn't suffered that problem like New York had.  It seems to have rode it out okay.  I think my experience of going back there, it's still vibrant and bubbly, but we don't have optionality.  London is our major city, you're not going to go to Manchester instead; whereas, you had that option to come here or you could have gone to LA if you wanted.  We don't want that, so maybe that's why we survived it.

Michael Malice: That makes sense, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  All right, forget that, let's talk about your book, The White Pill.  I'm going to read this, because I think this will be a good setup for everyone.

"The Russian Revolution was as red as blood.  The Bolsheviks promised that they were building a new society, a workers' paradise that would change the nature of mankind itself.  What they ended up constructing was the largest prison that the world had ever seen, a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that spanned half the globe.  It was a country where people's lives meant nothing, less than nothing, and they knew it.  But no matter what atrocity that the Soviets committed, the secret police, the torture chambers, the show trials, the labour camps and the mass starvation, there was always someone in the West rushing to justify their bloodshed.  For decades it seemed perfectly obvious that the USSR wasn’t going anywhere, until it vanished from the face of the earth, gradually and then suddenly.  This is the story of the rise and fall of that evil empire, and why it is so important for the good to never give up hope.  This is the white pill".

Michael Malice: I'm going to interrupt you, because this is the first time I've heard someone read that out loud.  That's the blurb on the back cover of the book and I wrote it in one sitting.  And when you write it out, you don't ever think about it again, and that's the first time hearing it from somebody else's mouth.  And let me actually do a little digression, because this is really, really funny. 

I wrote an article on this years ago.  I had a friend who had a girlfriend, and she was terrible for him and that's fine.  But at a certain point, they were talking about getting married and having kids, and she just declared that the kids were going to be raised vegan because that was a big part of her identity.  Now I had a big problem, because it's not just the veganism per se, but it's also like if you're planned wife is going to unilaterally make decisions for you like this, that is an issue because you have to have the ability to both have your input, and so on and so forth.

What I did is, he had sent me some DMs that they were going back and forth, and there was a website at the time, called extranormal.com, or .org, or whatever.  And when you put text in there, it would animate it and you would have these two characters read the text.  So, I had these two bears read, the boy bear and the girl bear, they're having the argument.  And when he heard the words being said by these characters as opposed to him and her in writing, and you could hear, "Oh, this is someone talking to a crazy person", they broke up and he's now happily married to this woman, Jane, who's absolutely terrific.

So, it's very moving to me to hear it said by somebody else, because I think I stuck that landing.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well so I'll tell you what's interesting about this is, it isn't possible for me to read every book of everyone I interview because there's too many people, there's too many books.  But when we started the planning, Danny read it out to me and I was like, "Well, I need that".  That's why I bought it straightaway.  I was like, "Okay, I actually need to read this".  I don't have a strong enough understanding of the history of Russia, so I almost want you to talk me through this, explain to me the main parts about the history of Russia, and also give me a lens into -- because my assumption with this, and there's kind of a hint in there, I think there's hinting where you say, "There was always someone in the West rushing to justify their bloodshed".  There is a lens into what's happening in the world currently.

Michael Malice: Yeah, I will leave that to the reader to do their extrapolations.  I really hate this kind of idea that everything in the past is necessarily replicated -- I'll give you a good example.  When Mayor Bloomberg, who was Mayor of New York after Giuliani, he was having a ban on large sodas at 7-Eleven, you couldn't buy a super-sized soda.  And Mike Huckabee, who was Governor at the time I believe of Arkansas was like, "This is just like North Korea", and I'm like, "Shut the fuck up".  You don't have soda in North Korea.  They can have their small sodas with some calories, so calm down!

So, I'm very wary of when people are like -- part of the reason I wrote this is I was on a conservative podcast and they were going on about how Biden's a communist and I'm like, "Do you even know what communism is?  You're using this word.  Do you know what life is like under these regimes?  It's not some senile old coot on TV wagging his finger at you, or having CRT in the classrooms".  And the thing I realised is, I don't even know what it's like.  I mean, I was born there and came here when I was 2, but I didn't have any sort of understanding of just how horrific it was.

But to your point, the one takeaway that is spot on is, many of these organisations that were carrying the water for this nightmare regime are still in place today.  So, it's a valid comparison to say -- The New York Times, which did everything in its power to obscure Stalin's starvation of millions of Ukrainians, is still the paper of record.  It's The Atlantic, it's The New Republic, this isn't metaphors or analogies; it's literally the same organisations.  So, insofar as I don't even know if you find it a parallel, it's literally the same place or the same outlet that was in place then and is in place now.

Peter McCormack: Because, when we read it through, I was like, "Okay, this sounds like something I need to understand more about, I want to understand the history and I'll read the book for the history".  But that line stood out, "There was always someone in the West rushing to justify their bloodshed".  And we were questioning ourselves, what does that mean?  I didn't know you meant The Atlantic, I didn't know you meant The New York Times, I haven't read the book yet.  We were trying to say, is that us buying an iPhone from China when the Uyghurs are being enslaved?  Are we, ourselves, are we complicit?

Michael Malice: No, that's not what I meant at all about the average person being complicit.  What I meant is, there was a letter that was signed by 500 leading Americans, influencers, and there's someone from every university, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, so on and so forth, you had a bunch of people who worked for The New Yorker, you had a bunch of prominent writers, and they were just making these claims.  So, this was before the internet, this was before television, this was the 1930s.  So, you are looking to these people to be the intellectual class.  They're the ones who understand things, they're the ones who spell out, "What does this mean?" the Chris Cuomo of their time, so to speak, in some ways; or more accurately, Samantha Bee, because there were many that were humorous. 

They were saying explicitly in writing was that, "What you're hearing about the Soviet Union is wrong, they do have freedom of speech, they can read any of the great books you want from Aristotle to Lenin", and you see this in writing and you're like, "This is insane!"  And this is at a time when in these countries, if you had a book that was banned, you're going to a labour camp and possibly your whole family.  So, it wasn't some kind of opinion thing where they have freedom of speech in their own way, but sure they ban hate speech; they were lying to people in the West about everything that was being done.  And the things that were being done were not ambiguous.  The New York Times headline, front and centre said, "There is no starvation in the Soviet Union.  The Russians are merely tightening their belts".

So, it's not some sort of left versus right, Republican/Democrat, you know, is Boris Johnson a loudmouth, is Trump an arsehole; they were lying about what was being done to millions of people over decades, and it's many of the same organisations that are still in place today and they have never been held accountable.  And the fact that even I, as someone who was born in the Soviet Union, had very little idea of just what was going on there over the decades, also speaks to the lack of interest in many western media circles about basic human rights violations if the narrative doesn't suit their purposes.

Peter McCormack: What were their incentives to lie about it?

Michael Malice: So, Eugene Lyons was a communist and a reporter and he got sent to the Soviet Union to be their man in Moscow, because they knew he'd have an in there and he did.  And when he saw what was going on there, he completely turned and he was just like, "This is horrific", and I quote him in the book.  He described it as, "The guineapig model", because they had this, I don't know if "fantasy" is the word, but this vision of what a society could look like.  And the Soviet Union was promised to be a scientific society, it was scientific socialism.

In the West, you have these plutocrats, these capitalists, these monopolists.  Why is it right that Elon Musk gets to own Twitter; who's this arsehole, right?  Their version is, "All right, if you have the government managing everything for everyone, it's going to work out and you're not going to have this one random rich person having all this power over people's lives", and there's something to that.  There's an internal logic to it. 

His point was, they didn't care what was done to the people in Russia, because you have to experiment on someone.  So, let's see if this new society, and it was a new society, there hadn't been a nation like it anywhere previously, so you could make the argument with a straight face, this is the society of the future, because it is unprecedented in many ways, "Let's try it.  We're socialists".  There's different kinds of socialism, democratic socialism, communist socialism, and so on and so forth, and this is variant of socialism that won.  It's the first country where it identifies a socialism, tries to implement it; let's give it every chance we have in our power to see if this system works out.  It costs us nothing.

Sure, the Russian people squeal and just like the guineapig squeals when you experiment on it, but that was their kind of model.  They're the elites and this was their opportunity to put their ideas in practice without having to bear any of the costs, and basically having all the benefits because then they could say, "Look, we told you so, we're the smart ones".

Peter McCormack: Was any part of that politically influenced because it was seen that this socialist project would weaken the Russians?

Michael Malice: The argument was, socialism's going to be wealthier for everyone.

Peter McCormack: The argument would be, yeah.

Michael Malice: Yes, because if you don't have that surplus value being taken by Rockefeller and Carnegie and Bill Gates, if he's not taking all the profits for himself and everyone's working for the sake of society, you're going to produce more; every individual's going to keep more of their own money, so they're going to be wealthier; you're going to have advanced technology, so you're going to have to work less, it's going to be less labour-intensive; and once we industrialise, because Marxism is very much an industrial revolution ideology, and we have factories everywhere, everyone's going to be wealthier and happier and better off.

That prophecy had a lot of support for itself when the Great Depression hit because this was the long -- "Look, we told you for decades, capitalism is going to implode under the weight of its own contradictions", the stock market collapses, you have unemployment at something like 23%, it was crazy here; it's systemic, it's not changing for a decade, and they can say, "Look, we told you so.  So, since we predicted that capitalism is unsustainable, it's going to collapse of its own weight, therefore what we're telling you as the alternative is going to work.  We just have to give it a chance and industrialise Russia, and look how much progress we're making". 

They had their five-year plans, another five-year plan then a five-year plan.  And, what's fascinating to me writing the course of this book is, you know how you play poker and at different stages you're like, "I'm out".  You have a bunch of people round the table, "I'm out, I'm out", there were different steps when people who were committed communists or committed leftists were like, "All right, okay".  The thing is, they also didn't want to say, "I'm out", and turn because then they're siding with the right and the conservatives, who they knew were bad people from their perspective, who they knew were like, "Okay, I'm not for this, and these people are the worst elements of society, so I have to be opposite to them in some capacity". 

But then, a big one was when Stalin makes a pact with Hitler.  And that was a big wakeup call for people on the left when they had the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, when they were like, "Well, okay.  We can carry a lot of your water, but if you're [not literally] shaking hands with Hitler, this is exactly what we're against", and that was the big turning point for many, many people.  Of course, a few years later, FDR's shaking hands with Stalin and it's kind of fine again, and I talk about in the book different points where people were like, "Oh, okay, even though the critics are despicable and I hate them, they were right".

Peter McCormack: We have the benefit of hindsight that we know this model completely doesn't work, we know it doesn't work, it's been shown time and time again.  But was it created in good faith, that actually this can work; or, was this a model that was created purely out of an ideology of a small group of people who knew they would maintain themselves as the elite?

Michael Malice: Again, Lenin was obviously the big figure here.  And one of the people I discuss, or two people I discuss heavily, are in the book, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, who were hardcore communist anarchists, they were deported from the United States.  Berkman tried to assassinate Frick, who was Carnegie's right-hand man.  Someone who was a fan of Goldman killed President McKinley here, so they were no strangers to political violence and advocating for political violence.

When they get sent to Russia, early on Lenin had to consolidate power, so it wasn't just the Bolsheviks.  So, he had to work with the Mensheviks, he had to work with the Left SRs, he had to work with the anarchists and basically form this coalition.  And they were all like, "All right, the Bolsheviks basically have the megaphone, let's all work together and make this work".  But once that Russian Civil War was won and the forces of the Tsar, the Whites, were defeated, overnight Lenin started rounding up all these other ideologies.  So, simply being formerly a Menshevik or an anarchist, you'll go to jail.

Goldman and Berkman saw this and they were like -- Berkman was in prison when the Russian Revolution happened, and he had said, "This was the happiest day of my life.  This was something I'd been working for for years to see socialism cease power", he couldn't believe it.  And he says, when he got deported there and landed in the Soviet Union, he wanted to kiss the ground, and he was like, "This must have been what my ancestors felt like when they encountered the Holy of Holies in the temple.

Then, he gave them every opportunity and then when he fled he was just like, "This is a bigger nightmare than the worst kind of capitalist system".  Goldman says it herself, she was like, "I'm no opponent of violence.  But in a revolution, in terms of creating a society for the workers, you're using the violence against the workers.  These are the people we're supposed to be for.  You guys are monsters, and everything that Hitler and Mussolini did, you guys set the stage for them", so they were very, very -- her memoire of these years was called My Disillusionment in Russia.  So, they were the ones who very much had their eyes open.

But the fascinating thing is, when they left, Emma Goldman spoke in London, I believe it was in the late 1920s, and Red Emma, she had as much left-wing clout as anybody, she always put her ass on the line.  And she gives a talk and it opens with a standing ovation; and when she was done, you could hear a pin drop, because as she's denouncing the Soviet Union to these leftie Brits, they didn't want to hear it and they just felt very betrayed by her and like, "How can you be saying these things?" and this is, "I've been to the future and it works", and this sort of situation.  It was almost literally, "You don't know what you're talking about", even though she had been there and they'd never left the confines of their posh homes.

That is a theme, I think, with many intellectuals, where they feel comfortable opining about places they've never been in without having done their homework.  Now obviously, I haven't been in the Soviet Union, but you do a lot of work, you see both sides.  They were only interested in hearing their perspective which is, "This is going to work and it has to work".

Peter McCormack: Did any part of it work when they first started; were there any successes; or was it just a complete abject failure?

Michael Malice: I don't know.  I mean, it worked in the sense that it became more industrialised; it worked in the sense that you had increased literacy.  But for example, Sputnik happened, you know, the first satellite; but the question always is, "At what cost?"  So, you could say that you solved the problem of famine by starving everyone and if you starve everyone, no one's hungry, right, so it works.  So, I don't know what "works" means in this context, but the costs of what was done to these people, including many children, is something I had not been aware of at all and while learning about these atrocities, was extraordinarily disturbed by.

Peter McCormack: How horrific are we talking?

Michael Malice: I think it's much more horrific than anything I've known.  I'll give you just one example, this is under Lenin.  So, a lot of these kids became homeless, the parents died or were arrested, they were abandoned, a bunch of street kids in Moscow, they were pickpockets, little thieves, whatever, teenagers.  So, the secret police rounded them up, took them to the cell or the prison, and would beat the crap out of them, asking them, "Who are your literal partners in crime?".  Then they'd take the kids in the car, drive them round Moscow and make the kids point people out.  The kids weren't members of some kind of Yakuza, they were poor street children stealing to get food.  And if they didn't point people out, they were going to get the shit kicked out of them.  So, they would just start pointing out people at random.

But the line that really disturbed me was hearing that it was the hardened prisoners, the adults, who couldn't bear hearing the sounds of the kids screaming as the kids realised they were being returned to the jail.  So, when you hear things like this, it's the sort of thing, I think, that's almost unimaginable.  I'll give you another example where these thinks make logical sense, but once they're applied with their scientific logic, it becomes something so inhuman, it's almost impossible to appreciate.

So, they would have collective punishments.  So, being married to an enemy of the people was in itself a felony.  So, if you're arrested, your wife's going to get arrested.  And what's she going to plead; not guilty?  She was married to you.  So overnight, your kids become orphans, okay.  At the same time, any family that was friends with your kids now have to shun them because, "Why are you friends; why are you talking to Peter's kids?  Were you in cahoots with Peter?  Is your dad an enemy of the people?" 

There's one story where this girl overnight becomes an orphan, her family friend, she had someone her own age, they tried to take her in.  They go to talk to some big shot in the government, they're like, "What do we do?"  They're like, "You should put her on the street.  You're putting your life --" and these kids that go out on the street, you can imagine what happens to them.  And there's hand-wringing in the Kremlin about, "What are we going to do about all these kids who are killing themselves now?"  But they're killing themselves with good reason.  If overnight my parents are gone and no one will look at me, even in school, or talk to me, and it's on my record that I'm a child of the enemy of the people, what am I supposed to do?

When you hear things like this, which make perfect sense given the premises of the system, it does a number on you, and I think for most people.  The thing is, that happened to Gorbachev.  When he was a kid, his grandfather got arrested for supposedly being a Trotskyite or something, and he talks about how, "My house became a plague house", those were his words, meaning that everyone in the village just avoided it like it was radioactive.  And he was a kid, what was he, 5, 6, 7, 8?  Now no one wants to talk to you; for what?  And we don't even have that here.

Imagine if you were a murderer and you deservedly go to jail, your kids wouldn't be -- it wouldn't reflect on your children.  Their friends in school would maybe be weird like, "Your dad's a murderer", but it's not like, "I can't talk to Peter's kids any more, because maybe I'm putting my life in danger"; that wouldn't be the concern.

Peter McCormack: So, was it just all about maintaining control then?

Michael Malice: It's hard to get inside the heads of the people at the top.  But at the same time, they themselves were often prisoners, because if I'm an interrogator and I'm interrogating Peter and I need to break him to get a confession, if I'm in any way showing mercy to you, then my boss will be like, "Oh, you're colluding with him?  Maybe we should check you out".  So, now the incentives are, "Even though I know you're innocent, or I know you didn't do anything, I have to break you, because it's my skin and my family.  And if it's the choice between you, Peter, and my family, it's not going to be a hard choice".

Peter McCormack: Were there any attempts to overthrow him?

Michael Malice: What Stalin did especially was he wanted to atomise society as much as possible.  So, right away, if something happens to you, your spouse is in danger and your kids are in danger.  So, any kind of private relationship was a threat to the public sphere.  So, he did everything in his power to make sure there were none of these private links, what we call "civil society", which make up the basis of a thriving country, where if there's a crime, instead of necessarily worrying about the cops getting there in time, you had the neighbourhood watch.  You had neighbours looking after you, "Have you seen my daughter?"  "This is where I saw them", that kind of thing.

Now, any kind of link is dangerous, it's inverted, because now if I'm arrested and I'm told, "Okay, we know for a fact you're a traitor, you're an enemy of the people, you're a Trotskyite, who are the ten people you were colluding with?"  Well, I talked to you today for an hour and a half, so your name's going to be first on that list, because I need to give them ten names.  The better names I give them are people I had long conversations with.  So, the incentives became completely perverted under the Soviet Union and the allied countries.

Peter McCormack: I've watched that film, The Lives of Others, so like that?

Michael Malice: Oh, yes.  The Stasi were in many ways very different, and in some ways more pernicious than the Soviet Union.

Peter McCormack: So, what drove Stalin; was it pure ideologies?

Michael Malice: I don't think he was a particular ideologue.  There's no question that Lenin, and especially Trotsky, were these kind of cerebral, philosophical types.  He was a bank robber, he was a thug.  In his youth, he was never this kind of great ideological intellect.  It's very hard for us to -- I mean, he had members of his own family arrested, so this wasn't some kind of complete hypocrisy. 

He is not as fully fleshed-out a character in this book as some of the other people because it's almost impossible, I think, to get inside his head.  Even with Hitler it's like, "Okay, you're driven by hatred of the Jews, you have this vision of Germany conquering the world", that's not a very complicated mindset to get into.  Him, a lot of it makes a lot less sense, just in terms of internal logic.

Peter McCormack: How are Lenin and Stalin both considered in modern Russia?

Michael Malice: My understanding is that Stalin is having a bit of a renaissance, because he is this vision of when Russia was this -- I mean, Russians complain, and I think fairly, that they don't get enough credit for beating Hitler, because if you look at the cost of lives that the Russians gave versus the Americans, I think it's like 100:1, it's some crazy different metric.  They got to the bunker first, they were raising the Hammer and Sickle over the bunker, it wasn't the Stars and Stripes.

Now, a lot of these lives were lost because Stalin fucked it up really badly and he was called to task for this after he died.  He was sending soldiers into a battle without even bullets, so they were just getting mowed down.  Your life was just worth even a bullet from the Germans.  So, there were some really crazy things going on.  And when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded Russia, Stalin couldn't believe he was betrayed, and they lost days just doing nothing because he was just shocked and just sat on his hands.  So, that is a big, I think, historical something that they view as an injustice that, "We're not getting the credit for this, we're the ones that won World War II against the Nazis".

Lenin, I think there is still controversy.  He's mollified in Red Square in his tomb there.  Should we finally bury the guy after 100 years?  It's actually over 100 years now -- oh no, 1924 he died, I believe, but you'd have to ask them.  I think there's much more of a fondness not necessarily for them as individuals, but for when the USSR was a rival superpower to the US and the entire world was -- "We were one of the two big guys".

Part of the reason I wrote the book, and I have a hypothesis, I don't have a great one, is this for the West was the unquestioned number one foreign policy concern for 50 years.  Everything that was done in foreign policy in western circles and western politics was, "All right, what does this mean in terms of our rivalry or animosity with the Soviet Union?"  Military build-up, "Are we going to this country?  What are their interests; what are ours?  How are we going to fight them?"  And now it's like this never ever happened, and it's very bizarre.  We'll talk more about the Civil War or World War II than about this Cold War, because the narrative isn't easy.  In many ways, the bad guys, like I said earlier, are the organisations that are still in place today and that's part of the reason why I wrote this book, so people can understand.  This was the entire world for decades and it's just being completely forgotten, which is something out of 1984; they could just vanish decades of history.

Peter McCormack: Well, you can't help but -- everybody knows the horrors of World War II under Nazi Germany and countless films have been made, you learn it at school, it's still talked about today, even to the point where I know German people are still embarrassed about it today to people who weren't even alive during World War II.  I mean, I had an understanding that life under the USSR was tough, but the first I heard about this was you telling me you were writing the book.

Michael Malice: Yeah.  And again, as someone who's from there, the fact that I didn't know any of this is something that's like, "How is that the case?"  When I started writing this book, I didn't know why it was such a deal that the Berlin Wall fell.  We knew, okay, there was this wall and it divided East and West Berlin and okay, it was cool it fell.  What that meant and why this was one of the biggest deals, and why when I was writing that chapter I was crying, until I was writing it I was like, "This is just this amazingly, miraculous, beautiful story of the victory of peace over oppression", and it's just like, "Oh, yeah, there's this wall, then it fell".  It's almost like some kind of construction site and you had this wall and they knocked it down and you can watch a gif of it.  It's very bizarre.

Peter McCormack: I mean, that might be an age thing as well, because I remember when the Wall came down, I was probably 12 or 13 or something, I wasn't particularly old, I didn't understand why this wall was there.

Michael Malice: Yeah, but you weren't in Auschwitz.

Peter McCormack: No, but what I mean is I wasn't educated as to why there was an East and West Berlin.  I didn't understand why Berlin had been split after World War II and who controlled -- I just didn't know any of it.

Michael Malice: But that's the whole point.  This was in our lifetime; I didn't know that either really, the extent.  But we know why we fought Hitler, right?

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Michael Malice: We knew why we teamed up with Stalin to fight Hitler.  Why the Berlin Wall was built is not something that's common knowledge, which is crazy to me.

Peter McCormack: Do you believe it's to do therefore, as Stalin supported the West, it was kind of ignored; and do you believe that there was as much reason to perhaps send troops into Russia as there was to send them into Nazi Germany?

Michael Malice: World War II is obviously an extremely complicated, tricky situation.  My buddy, Curtis Yarvin, has this quip about, "Which genocidal ideology should I be more concerned about; the won that won or the won that lost?"  And there's Duquesne, I think, wrote a book arguing that if we stayed out of World War II, we should have just let them kill each other off and then just pick off the one who was left.  I'm not a strategist, and part of the reason I wrote this is, the atrocities of the Nazis are taken for granted.  It's just a given that this is just an abomination.

What this complements is, this guy that we were teaming up with during World War II, he's no angel, and I think there's an understanding he's a brutal dictator, but we kind of think a brutal dictator's like, you know, you had to have long hours at the factory and you're hungry and you can't really criticise him in the media.  It's so much more pervasive and insidious than that.  The tagline for the book is, "It's almost impossible to explain to free people what it's like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship", and it really is.  And I tried my best to replicate what that feeling is like, where literally every aspect of everything you do has to be viewed through the lens of politics, "Who am I talking to?  How much can I trust them?  What am I saying?"

You know how sometimes you leave a job interview, or this happens to everyone I know who's done Rogan, they leave Rogan and they think, "Fuck, what did I say?" because it's three hours and you know something's going to be pulled like, "Did I just fuck up my career?"  Imagine if that's the case with literally everyone you talk to.  Every person you meet has the power to call in the Secret Police, and you have to worry that night, "Are they going to come and take me away and I'm going to have no resources to fight the situation?" and what that does to you.  It's something I don't think any of us in the West are able to emotionally wrap our heads around.

Peter McCormack: Well, you have no ability to have your own identity.

Michael Malice: Right, because the whole point of collectivism is to minimise the power of the individual.  You might say that's a good thing.  You don't want Elon Musk or Bill Gates or George Soros or Donald Trump being able to snap his fingers at people live or die, and you could understand that.  But then it's like, wait, if you're saying the powerlessness of the individual, everyone listening to this, think about what that would mean if you were powerless, if you don't have choice over where you work, what you read, what music you listen to, who you talk to, where you live, and what that would mean to you and how that would affect your day-to-day existence.

Peter McCormack: And constant fear that you might end up being arrested, tortured, sent to prison for something, for an opinion.

Michael Malice: But it doesn't even have to be that bad.  It could be that if I'm at work and my boss is a dick and I just raise my voice to him, tomorrow I'm working in a mine.  It doesn't have to be a prison.  It could be like, I have a nice job, today you're a podcaster and tomorrow you have to be working in a fast-food restaurant.  Now, it's not the end of the world.  Oh, they didn't have fast-food restaurants, but you know what I mean, you're washing dishes.  But to have that sense of everything I have, the very little I have can be taken away at any time for any reason, and I will have nothing I could do about it.

Peter McCormack: And did you speak to many people in researching the book who'd actually lived through this?

Michael Malice: No.  I mean, I had plenty of background from my work with North Korea and having visited North Korea, which is the closest analogue you're going to have on the Earth today to living there in these times.

Peter McCormack: When did you go to North Korea?

Michael Malice: 2012.  Have you never been?

Peter McCormack: No.  I fancied it.  Do you know, there was a time I used to run a lot --

Michael Malice: Oh, they have the Marathon, the Pyongyang Marathon.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I used to run a lot and I got inspired by this podcaster called Rich Roll, who's an ultra-athlete, and I was like, "Right, I'm going to run the ten most dangerous marathons in the world", in my head that's what I was going to do.  I was going to do Afghanistan, I was going to do North Korea.

Michael Malice: Why is North Korea dangerous?

Peter McCormack: Well, just the thing in people's minds of these dangerous countries.

Michael Malice: Oh, yeah.

Peter McCormack: I was going to do Sudan, and then I put my back out and I had to stop running.  That was years ago.  But I did fancy going.  There's actually a guy, a crypto guy, got arrested over there for going to teach how to use cryptocurrency.

Michael Malice: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Did you enjoy it?

Michael Malice: Oh, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Because it was so weird and different?

Michael Malice: Well, it was the closest I could have of an experience of seeing what my family went through back in the day.  Also, the thing that does a number on you is how normal the people are.  When you see that these are just regular human beings, that's the scary part, and they're in this gigantic prison.  It would be better, because there's this kind of low-key racism in the West, "Asians are weird", like Japan.  I want to go to Japan but I know the culture's going to be like going to another planet, so you're like, "Okay, they're different from us".  And then when you go there and they're cracking jokes, your guys are cracking jokes, you're like, "Holy shit, they're so much more even banal than you expected", and that just makes the nightmare that much worse.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I guess the closest I would ever have been, I went to Venezuela a few years ago.  At least they have the freedom to leave across the border.  I went to Cúcuta, at the border in Columbia, where people were coming in and out to try and get certain goods.  But I also got to go in and experience, and just little things.  When you get out of East Caracas, which is kind of the cosmopolitan part of the city, we stumbled across a huge government march, there were Chávez murals and Maduro murals everywhere.  Everybody is supported by a food basket from the state. 

That's the closest I got to it, but I think the horrors there are more the difficulty people have in earning wages, but they become resourceful.  I don't think it's anywhere near as horrific as what you wrote about.

Michael Malice: It's also, I'm sure they have internet there, right?

Peter McCormack: They do.

Michael Malice: Yeah, so they don't have internet, they don't have access to the outside world.  So, that kind of complete control of information is something that is really very much surreal.  When The Pravda Newspaper, which is called Truth in English, is telling you one thing and then as soon as you have information about the rest of the world, it's like, "Wait a minute, something's not adding up here", and that was very key to bringing down these regimes.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, my friend, Alex Gladstein, works at the Human Rights Foundation.

Michael Malice: Oh, that's wonderful.

Peter McCormack: Do you know Alex?

Michael Malice: No.

Peter McCormack: I think you'd really enjoy interviewing him, he's amazing.  They did a project called Flash Cards for Freedom, and what they would do is get memory sticks with western films, western culture, and they would have these distributed in North Korea, and this was a way to get people so they could actually see what life is like outside of North Korea, because a lot of people have no idea, I guess.  That's what would drive people to at least try and escape, those horrific stories of people trying to escape.

Michael Malice: Yes.  And there's this supermarket in Houston, which is still there.  I think it was a Key Food, now it's a Marshalls, or something like that, or Randalls, excuse me, it was a Randalls, or whatever.  Boris Yeltsin, who was kind of Gorbachev's rival towards the end, he went to NASA and while he was there he was like, "Let me go to the supermarket", and there's photos of him there and he's looking around, and he's seeing the amounts of items on the shelves as something he'd never seen in his life.  And he's seeing that the people there are just school teachers, cab drivers, truckers.  These aren't some kind of dignitaries. 

I think one of the people describing it said, "They seemed particularly shocked at the size of the radishes", or something like that!  And you see these pictures and he's just walking around, and the thing that was really kind of jarring is, he went from there to Miami, I guess, back to the USSR and on the plane, he's holding his head in his hands and he's like, "They had to lie to us, because they knew if we saw what was going on here that it would all go to shit".  Oh, yeah, that's the photo.  I'm going to go to that supermarket, I'm just going to start bawling, because he's there. 

But the thing is, imagine what that's like, Peter.  I think he was the equivalent of Mayor of Moscow at the time, you're on that flight and you realise, "Everything I've been told is a lie", and you know it's a lie.  It's not like bare shelves versus this, there's kind of a grey area.  They were told that they had more food than us, and then you go look at this and you're like, "I've never seen this much food in my life", and this is one Randall's supermarket in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere, bubble-fuck nowhere, excuse me for my French!  So, he's just sitting there and he's like, "Holy shit!"  It just completely scrambled his brain.

Peter McCormack: How did that impact Yeltsin?  Did that make him want to have closer ties to the West?

Michael Malice: It made him much more hostile.  And Yeltsin was a big mess, let's be clear, there's a question there.  But it made him realise, "Hold on, this isn't some kind of difference of opinion", like with the NHS, shall we have more spending, deregulation, or something like that; this is like, "Okay, I am part of a system that is built on brazen lies, that is also keeping all the people in my country hungry for no fucking reason".  And this is towards the end, right.  It's very hard to have people at the top who are comfortable with, you know what, so the kids -- when you see kids are hungry, you want to feed them.  It doesn't matter where on Earth they are.  This is why a lot of these charities have photos of these hungry kids.  It warms your heart, you're like, "Let me help; what can I do?"

So, when you see this, it's like, "Okay, this isn't about tweaking.  Something is systemically wrong just at a base level".

Peter McCormack: Are the in modern Russia, and you might not know this, but are there are any remnants of this in modern Russia?

Michael Malice: In what sense?

Peter McCormack: I'm thinking specifically with, let's talk about the Ukraine/Russia War, and I don't want to get into too much detail on that, but my friend's married to a Russian, and when she gets phone calls from her mother to talk about it, he said it's crazy the shit she tells him, her explanation of why they're at war.  He said it's unbelievable.  His wife now knows that she was being lied to in modern Russia.  She knew if she was there, the reasons she would have been given for the war and how successful it would be, would be complete lies.  And she was trying to explain to her mum.  Although saying that, I also believe we're being lied to!

Michael Malice: Yeah, I mean the idea that a population is going to be lied to about war is nothing exclusive to Russia, as any American can tell you.  I'm thinking about when we were told that if we don't bomb Syria, the Kurds were going to be all exterminated, you remember?  Everyone was on TV saying this, "We have to go into Syria, they're going to kill all the Kurds".  We didn't go into Syria, we didn't bomb Syria, and they just stopped talking about the Kurds, it just stopped being a topic of conversation.

Peter McCormack: And we were lied to about Iraq.

Michael Malice: Well, that's an obvious one.  And even including the first Iraq War, when they were told that the Iraqi soldiers were going to hospitals, pulling babies out of incubators and all this other stuff, these sort of World War I German atrocities that they supposedly did.  So, yeah, I am delighted to what extent people are savvy to the amount of war propaganda that exists in the West, and I know very many people, quite understandably are supportive of Ukraine in that conflict, and view them as the victims of a foreign aggressor.

But I think there's also a lot of people asking very fairly, "Hold on a minute, where's all this money going?  I want peace, I don't want any civilians, including Russian civilians, to be killed or drafted or put into harms way, but we're just sending money?"  If me and you are at war, I can't just throw briefcases of money at you, Peter, and then it's like, "All right, we're at peace now"!  I think it's a situation, I think we're in a much better place than we were in the 1990s.

Peter McCormack: You are empathetic though to the Ukrainian cause?

Michael Malice: Well, I'm empathetic to the Ukrainian citizenry.  I did a little live stream, I raised money because my dad was just there on business and he was next to a kid on a train and the kid was crying that they're going to get his dad, etc.  And he got out of Ukraine and there are all these refugees who have been getting food.  That to me is the main priority, making sure everyone who's a civilian is taken care of and is healthy and happy.  But I don't know where this conflict is going, and I'm not at all informed on the subject, despite my biography.

Peter McCormack: Do you think there's ever a chance that Russia would have free and fair elections?

Michael Malice: I don't know what that word means, I don't think free and fair elections exist.

Peter McCormack: I think freer and fairer than what they have.  I would say the elections we have in the UK are freer and fairer than Russian elections.

Michael Malice: I think Americans underestimate, and it's necessary for the narrative, how genuinely popular Putin, maybe until recently, is with the Russian people.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Michael Malice: There's this idea that if someone's a thug and a crook that he's basically cheating at the ballot box and the real people are freedom lovers, etc.  I don't think that's the case at all in many of these countries, and I would hazard a bet that at least as of 2021, that his approval rating was sincerely very high with the Russian people.

Peter McCormack: Why is that; is it because he holds these strong Russian values, this kind of independent, fuck the West, we can do our own thing?

Michael Malice: Yeah.  And if you're a Russian and you went from the Soviet Union, who's one of the two rival superpowers, and now you're poor and no one's talking about you, they're talking to Germany or they're talking to China, the guy who's like, "I'm going to make --", I'm only saying this half joking; the guy who's like, "I'm going to make Russia great again", you can see how as a Russian, especially someone who's older, you would respond to that, to those glory days of having world-class power.

Peter McCormack: Do you think though now that the reputation of Russia has been damaged with this war, within Russia?

Michael Malice: I don't know how aware of that they are and I think, here's the thing.  With North Korea, I can speak on that with some expertise, they revel in -- they call themselves a Shrimp among Whales.  So, they revel in the fact that China or Russia, the US or Japan will yell at them and they're like, "No, what are you going to do about it?"  So, there is this sense of punching about your weight in defiance that countries like this do enjoy.

Peter McCormack: When you say "they" though, is that the elite political --

Michael Malice: It's not just the elite, it's the North Koreans as well, and you can't blame them.  They're the size of Pennsylvania and, listen, you know how in Hollywood, if you and I had a restaurant, who's going to whose table; who's the bigshot who's going to kiss the ring?  The President got his ass to go over there, Bill Clinton got his ass to North Korea after he was President to get two people they had hostage out.  They're going to his house, he's not going to their house, so he can say with a straight face, "Look, I am the guy who can make American Presidents come here and kiss my ass", and there's something to that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean I struggle to understand North Korean pride within the citizenry, because they appear to have zero freedom.  So, I would struggle to --

Michael Malice: When's the last time you talked about Laos?

Peter McCormack: Last time when I went to Chiang Mai probably.

Michael Malice: Okay, but you see everyone in America has an opinion on North Korea.  I don't think any American, they can't find North Korea on a map either, but they don't know what Laos is, right.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  That is fair, but I also think, at what cost.

Michael Malice: Sure, but I mean for them, the costs are enormous, I'm not advocating the North Korean system, let me be clear; but what I'm saying is, the pride that they feel in being a player on the world stage, despite their extremely limited resources and their extremely small size, that has an element of truth to it.

Peter McCormack: All right, so if people want to read this book, it's out, tell them.

Michael Malice: Whitepillbook.com.

Peter McCormack: And, do you want to share your other books while you're here?

Michael Malice: The Anarchist Handbook is to gangbusters.  It's a collection of historical essays advocating for anarchism from different perspectives.  And Dear Reader is my North Korean book, and The New Right as well.

Peter McCormack: Right.  Before we close out, there is one other thing I just wanted to get your opinion on.  Twitter, how are things going?

Michael Malice: Oh, I love it.

Peter McCormack: Because it's more towards anarchism?

Michael Malice: Well, Twitter's a private company.

Peter McCormack: I know, but it's kind of opened up.

Michael Malice: What I like about it, I'm not looking at it from an anarchist perspective; what I like about Twitter, there's one thing I could point out, which I think everyone listening to this, or for the most part, will agree with, increasingly people who are spewing their propaganda, from whatever political persuasion they are, now they have this thing where people provide context. 

So, you'll have some apparatchik from the Republicans or Democrats just making some ridiculous claim.  And then readers will be like, "In reality --"  I think there was some photo of a kid who was a victim of the Ukrainian War, and the context was, "This photo's from 2003"!  So, things like this where you have these photos that are used to play on people's heartstrings, that are used in very cynical ways, that in and of itself is a wonderful thing. 

The fact that corporate journalists, who are the enemy of the people, who are some of the worst human beings on Earth, then and now, are not being a protected class on Twitter, is an extremely healthy phenomenon, that they are ratioed constantly, that they are not given reverence, but are given a small fraction of the overwhelming contempt they deserve, that's something I admire a lot on Twitter.

I also think it's wonderful, and this is something that is being politicised and shouldn't be, you can think Elon Musk is the devil, and that's fine, there's a lot of things he does that are wrong, whatever.  The fact that child abuse is being talked about and discussed, I know there's articles about how he's not doing it successfully; the fact that he is making a priority to remove this kind of imagery from Twitter is something that I don't think should be a political football.  It's something that I think everyone should be more aware of and more supportive of.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, me and Danny were talking about this yesterday, that there's this weird kind of underground part of Twitter that is right there for anyone to find if they want it.  There's this whole section of porn on Twitter that I didn't even know existed but it's just there, one click away that anyone can find.  It was a bit mind-blowing.  Just on that point on the mainstream journalists, do you think we're seeing --

Michael Malice: I don't use the term "mainstream", because they're so radical and so --

Peter McCormack: What shall we use; cunty journalists?!

Michael Malice: I say corporate journalists, because to call them mainstream excuses their malfeasance and depravity.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what, I'm going to change my language.  These corporate journalists, do you think --

Michael Malice: I'm not being sarcastic.  Do you think that someone who works at The New York Times has a mainstream ideology?

Peter McCormack: No, they don't.  Actually, no, they don't.  I think it's just historical context I've just used that term.  But do you think we're seeing a fracturing and breaking down of corporate journalism?

Michael Malice: Yes, I think unquestionably.  I think trust is asymmetrical.  So, if I am your friend and I tell you 100 truths and 1 lie, you don't regard me as truthful; that lie carries much more weight than those 100 truthful statements.  So, when you see these outlets are engaged in brazen -- I always say that corporate truth is factual but not truthful.  They'll take things out of context just to try to skew things one way or another.  Once you spot their tactics, you realise they're corporations, they have an agenda, which is fine, everyone has an agenda; once you realise what they are and what they're up to, they lose a lot of their gravitas. 

I think, by all accounts, they're losing their clout and they're losing their ability to define the issues of the day and what one's perspective should be on those issues of the day.

Peter McCormack: Well, look, you know our industry's the Bitcoin industry and we have to routinely bat against the lies about --

Michael Malice: Well, didn't you hear the article?  Bitcoin's done, right?!  Every time Bitcoin crashes -- I saw some tweet, and I'm sure you've seen literally probably 100 of them, people putting together all the articles at different times that Bitcoin goes down, "Bitcoin's over, it's a Ponzi scheme" or it's racist!  Ones and zeros are racist.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's an alt-right currency, or it's boiling polar bears.

Michael Malice: I love the idea that someone in the KKK doesn't use American currency.  What are they using; clan money?!  You laugh, but this is what I speak about them being factual but not truthful.  They can say it's true.  It is true that Nazis and white supremacists use Bitcoin.  They also use every other currency!  Money is used by everyone, so to say it's largely or exclusively the domain of Klansmen is so disingenuous and that's why so many people increasingly condemn and despise them, "them" being corporate journalists.

Peter McCormack: You know someone's going to set up KlanCoin now on Ethereum, aren't they?!

Danny Knowles: It probably already exists!

Peter McCormack: It probably already exists, I bet it fucking does already exist!  Final question on that.  You said, if someone told 100 truths and 1 lie; I am not part of the corporate media, I am just an independent person making content.  I make mistakes.  What would you say someone like I should deal with that?  I made some fucking catastrophic points during COVID.  I got things I read wrong, got totally wrong, my complete interpretation. 

Michael Malice: I get things wrong a lot.

Peter McCormack: So, what do you deal with that; is it a lie or is it a mistake?

Michael Malice: Well, this is what I do, I try to be as transparent as possible.  So, I'll come back to it and I'll say, "This is why I came to that conclusion, this is the information it was based on, this is why I was wrong".  So, they might still think you're a lie, you know how it works.  When you get successful enough, you become a grifter; and then when you get even more successful, you become controlled opposition; and then after that, you become a sell-out.  So, that's the gradation of success in terms of being influential or a podcaster.

Peter McCormack: Are you a sell-out?

Michael Malice: I'm controlled opposition now.  I just made it, so I'm really excited!

Peter McCormack: Where am I?  I'm grifter still.

Michael Malice: You're still grifter!  I think everyone in Bitcoin's a grifter.  I think Bitcoin hasn't become normalised enough for anyone to be controlled opposition.  Once you have Bitcoin being used by Whole Foods, or places like that, then you become controlled opposition and Bitcoin itself is going to be the controlled opposition currency; you know this is coming!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I do!

Michael Malice: So, I think in those cases, transparency.  And also acknowledging, "I understand why someone would think, looking at this, why I'm full of shit", because you can understand their perspective.  And I always tell people, "You shouldn't trust me.  Whatever I say in this book, there's I think 600 footnotes, doublecheck it for yourself.  Don't take something at face value just because I or anyone else is saying it".

Peter McCormack: Well, listen, Michael Malice, this is a Bitcoin show and we haven't talked about Bitcoin.  I'm trying to do more stuff that isn't Bitcoin, push myself out of my comfort zone.  It's always a pleasure to talk to you.  I'm a bit out of my depth and I will go and read the book, but I appreciate you coming on again and giving me the time.  I've enjoyed every interview we've done.

Michael Malice: And I'll see you in six months when hopefully you haven't had another drink.

Peter McCormack: Six months, why; are we going to do a six-month test?

Danny Knowles: We're going to do a check-in.

Peter McCormack: We'll do a six-month check-in, yeah, we'll see how we're doing about that.  Thank you, Michael.  Yeah, go and check out The White Pill.  I'm going to be reading it this week.

Michael Malice: Awesome, great pleasure.

Peter McCormack: Thank you.