Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio. I'm not big on New Year's resolutions. I don't think anyone keeps to them, and that makes them largely pointless. But in twenty sixteen I came up with a fairly easily achievable one to take more pictures of myself by myself. At the time, there was a lot of conversation around women feeling this self loathing, especially women who have had babies, and staying out of photographs. That wasn't really my problem.
I might not always love the way I look, but I never shied away from pictures, especially with my kids, and nights out with my husband can certainly include some selfies. But in all of twenty fifteen, a year in which I took several thousand pictures of my kids, I realized I had a total of five pictures of just me alone. Now, why do I need pictures of myself? Well, why do we need pictures at all? It's nice to look back and feel nostalgia and reminisce about a time worth photographing.
And why does every picture of me have to include other people? It's not narcissism, it's individualism. I'm a mother and a wife, sure, but I'm someone without them too. I love looking back at photographs from years ago, Like there I am at age five on my first day of school, I spoke no English and had a note pinned to my dress that had all of my information on it. Or at sixteen, all dressed up ready to
go out with friends. There's the picture of me under my jam Morrison poster in the horrible basement apartment I lived in in my sophomore year of college. Or the one of me on the Scottish border the first time I ever traveled alone. There were other people there, and I have pictures I treasure with them too, but the ones of me by myself really tell my story. So in twenty sixteen, my New Year's resolution was to take more pictures of myself and continue to tell that story.
Some people make resolutions to eat better or work out. Mine was to have some memories of myself as a person without kids attached to my head. Did it work? Not exactly. For one thing, it was awkward, of course, to be in your late thirties and snapping selfies of yourself, or worse, handing your phone to someone else and saying, take a picture of me by myself. I wasn't looking to become one of those girls on Instagram with dozens of pictures of themselves each week, often posed in front
of walls with a hand on their hip. I just wanted some photographic evidence that I exist apart from other people. Also, remember this, you're never as young as you are in pictures. But now it's years later and I'm more worried about the story of my life through pictures, being all very posed. My husband took this really great picture of me and
my friend Lisa Booth recently. We were getting ready to pose for a picture together, you know, one of those pictures where we look at the camp with the exact look we perfected, and smile the exact smile we do in all the photographs, and Lisa said something funny and we both started laughing. It's not a great picture, but I love it so much because it's real and it's amazing. If you love looking back at your photographs, you need to make sure to take some candid shots, not just
your perfect angles. Take some candid pictures of your friends and have them take some of you too. Maybe when you're laughing too hard, and your face is all scrunged up when you're imperfect and awkward. Life isn't all great lighting and perfect angles. In thirty years when we look back at our lives right now, we'll appreciate remembering those days as they actually were. Imperfections and all more candid shots. In twenty twenty four, Happy New Year. Coming up next
in interview with Michael Malice. Join us after the break, Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on Iheartraate Video. My guest today is Michael Malice. Michael is the host of Your Welcome podcast and the author of several books, most recently The White Pill, A Tale of Good and Evil. Thanks so much for being on, Michael.
I like how you're checking your notes to read the intro as if we're not friends.
I don't want to. I don't want to mess up the name of your book, Oh White Pill, the Red Pill. Who knows, I don't even know all the pills have read it. It was really good?
Yes, okay, all.
Right, I'm not you know, I'm not quite as experience as you. Well, thank you so much for being on. Happy New Year, SNOD and any New Year's resolutions.
I think about this a lot.
And I think news resolutions are things that you should look back in your previous year that you did right and kind of be like, let's stick with this because that's working right. So I think that because that's the kind of resolution you could stick with. So I what has worked for me really well in the past year was being completely vicious to people who deserve it on social media. And I resolved, and I've been very successful with it, and I resolved to be even more ruthless and merciless.
You know, most people choose to be nicer.
But that's that's why you have work for you, really, and that's why you had to write the book.
You have to write because people are nice.
That's true too. So we have kind of similar origin stories. Both born in the former Soviet Union. Both grew up in Brooklyn. You moved to Texas shortly before I moved to Florida. How's that been going.
Oh, it's just epic.
I'm really happy that I'm here, you know, I was just this is going to be the most like Brooklyn Jew conversation ever. But I have a buddy of mine. He's trapped in Los Angeles. Said he's in a bad situation, And I was just looking at real estate and you could get a nice two bedroom here to buy for like I think it was like two hundred thousand or two fifty. And it's just like so crazy to me that you know, in Brooklyn price is what's that going
to be? Like seven hundred thousand minimum. So like the fact that Austin, even though it is exploding, yeah, yeah, the fact that Austin, even though it is exploding, is still affordable. The fact that everyone's coming here, everyone comes. I'm surprised you haven't come through here yet, to be honest, Like it's become such a waystation for so many pe I've.
Went to Dallas a few times, but not Austin.
Yeah, I'm surprised, So you'll be here at Have you.
Made friends, like not like internet? Have you made friends not like internet friends, but like situational friends, neighbors and that kind of thing?
Oh no, no, no, no, no no, no no no no.
So like I am very opposed to a Yeah, I like the idea of being again we're born in the Soviet Union. The idea of being friends with my neighbors is something that I'm extremely opposed too. I remember once and It was a Russian neighbor my first apartment back from college, and they were upstairs from me, and like I saw them in the hall.
They're like, we don't hear you, we don't see you.
You call this a neighbor, And I'm like, that's the ideal when I don't hear you and I don't see you.
Especially in Brooklyn.
That's like the problem with the neighbors is that you hear them too much, right, Like they're playing the music, they're partying, they're knocking things around. So I don't want to know my neighbors. And no, I think all my friends are like they're not Internet friends in that we're only friends on the Internet, but they're friends, and that
they all have like some kind of platform that's there. Yeah, what's exciting about Austin is there's a lot of cross pollination here because you have the bitcoin people, you have the comedians, you have the podcasters, you have the biohackers, you've got the like white people, stuff like cold plunges, and everyone cross pollinates and that makes it really exciting.
Do you wish you got out of New York earlier? No?
Because I think if you are committed to something that means a lot to you, like a marriage, right, you should really make sure before you leave that I tried everything I could. Otherwise you'd be like, you know what, you know, I quit too early. I could have done this, I could have done that. You'd have some kind of regrets.
Yeah, I guess that's right. But like New York was falling apart for a while, do you feel like you know what pushed you out? Ultimately?
I think first there were several It was several.
It had to be several things, right, because that one thing is going to be like I'm out of here. So first of all that it was like a murder mystery because my friends got picked off one by one they moved away, and I didn't realize until I left how lonely it had gotten the fact that all my favorite establishments were like destroyed one at a time, so there was no place for me to go. And then a buddy of mine just she had this quote, she goes,
why am I funding my own oppression? And it's like, oh, yeah, what am I thinking here? So when I saw what I could afford here, I have like like a huge house like which I could never afford. Like Carol, you appreciate this as a Brooklyn night. To have stairs in my house is like a miracle, you know what I mean. It's just like, oh my god. You know I have stared at my house so like that. To have that, it's a big deal.
Yeah.
Do you live like a public life? Do you get recognized a lot? Yeah?
Fair amount.
But everyone's very very cool. I've never had an annoying experience. They're really because I have a reputation of being I can't say the word on the show, but I have a reputation.
So people are often scared to talk to you say the word. Well, it's insufferable tat so I'm.
Scared to talk to you right now.
But it's so it's a good thing because then people don't get too uh like like chummy, which I really don't like. So they're very everyone's very very nice. I talk to people in the gym all the time, or you know, if I runs down the street, and it's really fun.
Do you feel like more of an immigrant there? I just feel like once you leave New York, you know, the immigrantness that maybe faded into the background becomes more forward.
I think that less of an immigrant here than New York because whenever I'm here, whoever I surround myself with, I never have to bite my tongue, Whereas in New York, especially like media circles, you never know who you're talking to, and you don't know if tomorrow they're going to go on their tumbler or on their sub stack and write some kind of visionism of the experience we just had the night before, which has happened.
To me and a lot of people in New York.
Circles, especially the circles you and I travel in, are literally like quite mentally ill, and they can pass as normal.
But then you don't know who you're dealing with.
So it's a lot easier here in that context in Austin, when.
You're writing your books, like, do you find them? I found The White Pillar very hard to read, and I don't know, I mean, I found I liked all of your books. I love your writing, you know, I'm a big fan, and I wish i'd read more like I wish you wrote more often. I wish you were like a regular columns because I really really do enjoy your work. But do you find it difficult like to write about you know, murder, torture, all the things that you cover in your books.
Yeah, I just taught an eight hour course for Peterson Academy Jordan Peterson about the rise and fall the Soviet Union.
And there's this one particular.
Story of Peter Fector who was shot trying to cross the Berlin Wall when he was eighteen years old by the East Germans, and they he took him an hour to die.
He was bleeding out and.
They later said he was a fascist, you know, like it was just this really, and we have his picture and we have the video of them carrying his body. And I think it was like ten minutes for me to get through this story, and I kept breaking down and I was like, I don't know what I'm going
to do. It was almost like the opposite, like sometimes when you get the giggles and you're like, holy crap, I can't stop, and then you're like now I'm laughing that I'm laughing, and it's like like how do I get out of this?
And I just I don't know how I did it. It was horrible.
And I even told the class, I'm like, you know, you write something because you want it to be powerful, and then you're like lecturing from it and it is powerful and like, now you're a prisoner of your own accomplishment. So it was it was I don't know how I got through that course. It was a nightmare.
Did you find White Pill like tougher because it was more personal or was it just as hard as like your book on North Korea?
It was much harder because it was much longer in terms of the carnage, the amount, and the degrees and the types, and the fact that all of it was being defended in the West, and the fact that it was personal and there was much more of what they did to children than in the North Korea stuff, where the children almost kind of like secondary whereas here they were targeted.
And when you have the quotes from.
Westerners being like this is great, and some of these people, these organizations are still in power.
So yeah, it was a lot, lot tougher.
Because it's so many more countries for so much, you know what I mean, for such a longer period.
In ways, it was even more brutal.
What do you think is our largest cultural societal problem in the US. I feel like it's related to a lot of things you cover in the book, But you know, I'd love your take. What do you think is our big issue.
The universities, hands down, no question.
You solve that problem, everything else will be Domino's. I have been calling for this for a very long time.
I'm hardly unique in that regard.
Just this morning, Ben Shapiro was tweeting out that you know, they're not salvageable.
It's not just gonna be a little bit of chink around the edges.
The fact that right people are targeting the universities now, people who I agree with, the good kind of people, is happening faster than I'd hoped for, and that makes me very optimistic. And I think what I'm also optimistic about is if you look at politicians right, anyone who's running for office, they're going to have to have a thick skin because.
They know they're going to be attacked and what's coming for them.
They maybe they won't know what else going to look like. They people are going to go after you, and you're gonna have to smile a nod. And also people agree with you are crazy. You're going to come up to you in the campaign trail and be like, oh, you know why you're talking about bigfoot and you have to be like yeah, yeah, right, like that's the thing.
Like, as a politician you have to be a bit of a pony.
And journalists are going to be a good conversationalists, quick on their tongue often, you know, they're going to be able to be articulate and defend themselves to some extent. They're going to have their peers, you know, who you could commiserate with. But the professors are the lowest to the low and they're the weakest, the most vulnerable because they're completely cocooned. No one is there to take shots of them. They have tenure, so they're in a sense
isolated and defenseless. So the fact that when they are currently and hopefully vastly increasingly escalated targeted, they're really not going to know what's hitting them and them watching them squeal for mercy is going to be absolutely delicious. And it started happening in social media. It's just like my pornography.
Okay, we're going to take a quick break and be right back on the Carol Marcowitch Show. A lot of people in the White Pillar do end up changing their minds about the Soviet Union, even though they you know, it takes them a while, and a lot of people don't change their minds. A lot of people, you know, stay committed to the end that this nothing bad is
going on. But you know, I'm encouraged by the fact that there are a lot of people in your book who you document having their minds changed, And do you feel like that's what's happening now in the US.
I am very skeptical of these like Wittiker Chambers types who you know, are on the side of pure evil and then see the light and then kind of like become a snitch.
Like they have their purpose.
But I will always be a little suspicious of them because when things are so demonic and you kind of don't don't like you're you know, like how human beings have evolved that when we were on sociopaths, like the hair in the back of our neck like stands up a bit like that we have some kind of Spidey sense. So if you're if you're at that level when you are like on the side of evil and you're like, oh,
they're even more evil than I thought. It's like I don't have much use for you, or like I have used for you, but it's gonna be very arm's length.
What I'm most excited about is.
You know, I always say that we don't need a majority, we need an alternative. And I would just encourage people listening to this to imagine if Elon had bought Twitter before COVID, and how different the COVID regime would is, assuming he survived the pressures. How different the role I would have been. If you had one site, one prominent site where there was some element of discussion and debate allowed,
it would have been a very very different story. Now it may have played out the same in that they would have won, but point being, it would not have been the same dance throughout. So that is the kind of thing where I'm hopeful for nor am I thinking, by the way, that Elon might is an angel, but you know there's problems with Twitter. You know, I don't agree with him and everything, But the point is there
is still a space now, you know. The one of my greatest accomplishments of twenty twenty three was getting Roseanne bar back on Twitter. And that was just very important morally because it's one thing for them to take an l it's another thing to have one of their wins reversed because then when you start losing ground, it gets scary and demoralizing.
So you sound downright hopeful. Actually, like you sound more hopeful than I expected.
I am very hopeful because if you have Denche Desuza, who is like King of the Boomers, talking about like false flags and you know, FBI radicalizing people and that they're the bad guys, and Dan Bongino, who was a cop, if you have him talking about the police, the fact that it's become completely normalized to understand that our government, the United States government, engages in completely depraved actions on a regular basis.
This was not part of the Overton window five years ago.
And so like you think it has moved the Overton window in the last five years to this. Do you feel like something really shifted in the last year, I mean kind of. I don't know. I feel like people are reactive. I'm not sure that they've changed overall. I think that there's a lot going on in the last you know, maybe year or two that I think that they're reacting to. But I don't know. I guess I'm
not quite as hopeful as you that. For example, if Elon had Twitter during COVID, yeah, it would have been you know, definitely better. But pandemic two right now happens. I don't know that we take a wildly different path.
There are certain states that would absolutely even if it was literally like let's oppost pandemic to COVID was actually as deadly as it was supposed to have been, there are certain people and states that were like, I don't care, it's not real. Like the fact that this growing irrationalism has its pluses and its minuses, right.
So some of the minuses I think as people don't believe anything at all about, you know, anything they're told, even when it's it's reliably true. I guess that kind of stuff worries me. I feel like you're less worried about that.
It's not that I'm less worried, it's that I regard it as inevitable. So it's kind of like, listen, if you're going to have a horse ranch, you're not prepared to deal with animals that are how much a horseway a ton? Like you're the one with the problem, Like this is the situation. You've got a lot of horses. They need a lot of food, they lead a lot of space, okay, and they're going to they're going to poop a lot like if you can't wrap your head.
Around, like get it, get out of the ranch.
So if you are prepared to have this kind of wacky enlightenment idea that if we all sit down and put all the facts forward, people are going to come to the truth.
I'm sorry, I think you're a crazy person.
So do you personally feel like you've made it? You're saying, you know, you think that the world has gotten maybe the country's gotten better in the last few years. Do you think Michael Malice has made it?
I know that the country's gotten better so much as the population in certain segments of them have gotten exponentially better. I think the country has gotten much much worse in many ways.
But I do know that I've made it. And you'll appreciate this as a fellow immigrant.
Clarification, that's right, Yeah, you'll appreciate this as a fellow immigrant.
Because I own Margaret Thatcher's bookcases, so when I put them in my living room, I'm like, all right, Like as an immigrant, you know, to own her furniture, which is kind of caitchy whatever it's old lady for bookcases.
But yeah, like I've made it, and I.
Also think this is something important I think people listen to. My definition of making it is really really low. My definition of making it is if you have a job that you enjoy, right, and you can pay your rent. You could go on trips once in a while. If you go out to a restaurant, you don't have to think twice, and you could take your ubers and not be like cra this is an issue. That's it, and you don't have to be Jerry Seinfeldt made it as
a comedian. You could just be someone with a nice one bedroom apartment, right and you have your dinners and you don't have a day job.
That's to me. Yeah, you've made it.
I mean, I you know, you're one of my favorite people. So I'd love to see a missus malice, Like where are we on that?
I don't ever meet humans like I don't leave the house.
That's why you should be friends with your neighbors.
God, could you imagine dating your neighbors? Like, my god, Yeah, I guess that's like what that's like some kind of that's like what friends is. They didn't date, you know, they date each other chand learned people do it, you know, Yeah, yeah that's true. Yeah, but I don't know there is a lot of like, yeah, like, my biggest turn off is basic and I think there's a lot of that here in Austin.
I mean, you could expand beyond Austin. I think those the apps let you, you know, put in a mile range.
Well yeah, no, I have my app to twenty five miles. But it's still annoying. It's it's not fun, all right.
Well, still, I'm rooting for twenty twenty four, the year of missus Malice. You know, I hope we make it happen. And here with your best tip for my listeners to improve their lives.
I'm going to preface this by saying I hate giving people advice because I don't think most people are in a position to receive it. You know, they want validation and they're not really there to hear it. But one piece of advice I do feel comfortable giving to everyone is know what your boundaries are and be comfortable enforcing them, because too many people feel comfortable letting other people walk all over them. They feel uncomfortable saying, no, what if
this person hates me? What if this is problem with my boss? And it's better at the problems with your boss than with you, because when you get older, when you meet your maker and you look back on your life, are you going to be like, you know what, like if I lost that job, is that such a big deal?
What kind of person do you want to be?
Do you want to be a person who you don't have to pitch a fit at the office, you don't have to be annoying with your friends. But at certain point it's like, you know what, this doesn't make me comfortable and if they don't like it, that's their problem.
Quite literally, is their problem.
You have a right to your views, you have a right to your life, and you have a right to tell people know and you know you don't even know them an explanation. You know, if Carol, if you had said, you know what, is there an issue we don't want to talk about and I said no, and you said why, I'm like, I don't want to get into it, you would be like, Okay, I respect that, and that's fine. And if people don't respect that, this is not someone who is. You're having a good relationship with Andrews.
I love it. Thank you so much for being on Michael. You are the best. I can't wait to read anything you write. Please come again soon. Thanks so much for joining us on the Carol Marcowitz Show. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.