Michael Trapani: A Call to Arms

E464 Michael Trapani is a master storyteller, historian, playwright, voice and stage actor, podcaster (How to Start a War) and author of the Audible exclusive, “How to Start a War,” a gripping blend of narrative storytelling and dramatized scenes and characters, it feels like a Golden Age radio drama. Far from a dry history lesson, […]

Episode Transcript

(00:08):
Hey, humans. How's it going? Susan Ruth here.
Thanks for listening to another episode
of Hey Human podcast.
This is episode 464,
and my guest is Michael Trapani.
I learned about Michael from his fascinating
TikTok
that discusses World War two.
He has his own podcast, How to Start

(00:28):
a War, which was
a precursor to his book of the same
name. It's only on Audible. I highly recommend
it. It is not like a usual audiobook
in that he uses narrative storytelling
and
drama to bring history to life. He uses
really cool music, and he uses actual
speeches from the time period, and he weaves

(00:49):
it all together. It's really, really good. I've
recommended it to
so many friends. Everybody loves it. They recommend
it to their friends.
I get no kickbacks
to say this. It's really an excellent book,
How to Start a War. What struck me
most about it was
how much
about Hitler's so it's about World War two.

(01:10):
It's about Hitler's rise to power.
So what struck me the most about it
was that he covers so much about
the,
I would say, more minutia stuff that
I never learned in school. I was never
taught. You know, there's so much about World
War two, rightfully so, that focuses on the
Holocaust and the the basics of Hitler's rise

(01:31):
to power. But in this case,
I would say
Michael really goes into the step by step
from way, way, way back,
way, way, way back. It's all the things
that sort of fed into a system
that would allow
somebody like a Hitler to
do the things that he did. I'm gonna
quote just the Audible's quote on it.

(01:53):
It, quote, describes Germany's first gambles on the
world stage and the resulting international fallout. It
pinpoints the very moment that the world realized
it could not trust Hitler. A gripping blend
of narrative storytelling and dramatized scenes and characters,
How to Start a War feels like a
golden age radio drama.
Far from a dry history lesson, How to

(02:13):
Start a War is a resonant and compelling
story
about what happens when good people do nothing
to stop the worst evils while they still
can.
I'm telling you, even if you're really not
a history person, it's it's just so good,
and
I think it's such an important listen as
well.
Again, he has a podcast under the same

(02:34):
name,
and
the book covers more
information.
So
I know some people are like, Audible is
not a book. And I, again, don't get
any kickbacks from Audible. It's just the only
place to find it. So it's I looked
on Libby. It's not there. So hopefully in
the future, it will be. But for now,
that's that's where to get it. So if
you have Audible

(02:54):
or if you can do, like, the free
Audible for a month or something, definitely check
it out. Although I don't know if that
is helpful for Michael, but it's really good.
I want people to listen to it. So
in summation,
Michael is a historian, author, playwright, master storyteller,
voice and stage actor,
podcaster,
and
all around really interesting interesting dude. Excited for

(03:16):
you to hear this episode.
Alright. General stuff. In December,
my friend Rachel Kais, who's a multidisciplinary
artist like myself, she and I will be
doing an online event on Zoom at 6PM
Pacific Standard Time talking about creativity,
creative blocks, and how to tap into our
creative subconscious.
More details will be coming. We'll be doing

(03:38):
some short Instagram lives on November 16, 7PM
PST,
and November 21 at 4PM PST to chat
about
the event. Please go to www.introversecreative,intraverse,introversecreative.
And you have to do the w w
w. I'm not sure why. In other news,

(03:59):
check out heyhumanpodcast.com
for links and to learn more about my
guests and the show. Check out susanruth.com
to learn more about me and my other
artistic endeavors,
and follow susan ruthism on social media. Find
my music on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music,
wherever you get your music. Rate, review, and
subscribe to Hey Human Podcast on iTunes,

(04:19):
Spotify,
Amazon. I mean, it's all over the place.
So wherever you get your podcasts, thank you
for listening. Be well.
Be kind. Be love.
And here we go.
Michael Treplani, welcome to Hey Human.
Hi. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. It's my
pleasure. I learned about you
while doomscrolling TikTok.

(04:42):
And came across all do. Yes. And came
across your
really
fantastic
feed
and the history lessons that you're giving.
And so I had to reach out to
you, so I appreciate that you're here. Thank
you for being.
Yeah. Excited to be here. Looking forward to
the conversation.
I wish we were meeting under, better circumstances,

(05:03):
but, but that this doomscrolling will do. Doomscrolling
it is. Yeah. Let's start at the very
beginning of you. Tell me where you grew
up
and what shaped you
more specifically, what shaped you into the trajectory
of
the historian that you are today?
Yeah. I started so I grew up in

(05:23):
the
New York Suburbs, moved into the city when
I was a teenager.
So New York area in general, I still
live in the New York City area. I'd
say the early
parts of my childhood that contributed the most
to
some of the work that I do today
is a combination of the

(05:44):
historical aspect, the interest that I've had,
and then, and the studies that have, that
I've taken on, but then also
the performance of it that I do in
specific ways that come out in some of
the work that I produce. So,
I'll start with the history part. I've always
been fascinated with transitional moments in human history.

(06:04):
I think
that there is a tendency for most of
us to
think about
the world we live in as the way
it's always been, the way it always will
be, just because
the human lifespan is only so long, our
memories are only so, you know, go back
only so far,
and it's really easy to just think about

(06:24):
the world today as, you know, the way
it always has been or to see any
changes in the world today as,
entirely new or, you know, a rupture to
a system that we understand.
And when you zoom out,
I always like to say that context over
a long enough period of time is history
because when you zoom out,

(06:45):
far enough, you can see that while certain
things might have happened, may never have happened
in our lifetimes, they have happened many times
before
From pandemics
to
financial crises to global wars to all sorts
of crazy,
sometimes really wonderful things
that they have happened. And while they don't

(07:06):
happen exactly the same way every time, there's
often a lot of
lessons you can take away from those moments
and apply them to the world today. So
that's always been an interest of mine. And
then my study
on the history side took place at Fordham
University.
I studied under
Professor
Hamlin,
who is a European historian,

(07:27):
and
my thesis was
based on the idea that
the French Revolution to the end of World
War II was a single one hundred and
fifty year conflict with breaks in between because
the connections between all of those conflicts were
significant. And so that's the history part. The
other part is around the

(07:48):
the sort of audio
radio drama, Golden Age radio drama style, that
I produce some of my work. And that's,
I have to give credit to my grandmother,
who, when I was a young kid, while
a lot of kids got, you know, bedtime
stories,
I received audio cassettes of Golden Age radio
dramas,
and I would fall asleep listening to the
likes of The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

(08:11):
and
a great show, which is like a precursor
to The Twilight Zone called Suspense,
some of the old westerns, some of the
comedies,
and they are a master class on audio
drama,
from sound effects to music to
voices,
just an incredible,
right, and then obviously the big famous ones

(08:33):
like Mercury Theatre on the Air, War of
the Worlds,
so just wonderful
stories. So good, it scared the crap out
of
Exactly. Who thought it was real.
Exactly. Yeah, that's how good it was. It's
funny you mentioned that, just because,
it was so real, right? People thought it
was real, and they were, I learned later
that they were getting a bunch of wind

(08:54):
that it was causing panic, in real time
while they were doing the show, and they
had to apologize at the end,
because it happened also on Halloween, that episode
was aired, and so there was just stuff
going on outside weird anyway. It's a bit
of a sidetrack, but yeah, so the radio
dramas played a big part in my performance
aspect, and that was
thing something that I that I wanted to

(09:14):
bring to life. Yeah. When I heard that
in your introduction, it reminded me of when
I was little
on the weekends,
my parents and my brother and I would
listen to radio drama. And usually, it was
Agatha Christie or some sort of something,
and that would be our sort of Sunday
evening
deal. And I I have such fond memories

(09:35):
of being on the floor and looking up
at my dad in his big chair, and
everyone's sitting around. They're drinking coffee, and we're
just like, oh, it's so cool. It's so,
it's so much fun. Yeah, there's, you know,
it's, it's a lot like reading a book
where you sort of play the images in
your head, but you have the benefit of
some dramatization
and performance that, is sort of a lost

(09:55):
art. I mean, when you think about
all I mean, this is pre television, pre
film, so imagine all of the
world's entertainment
talent and budget going into a medium like
radio,
into a single channel and
imagining those performances. They're they're real most of
them are still up on YouTube, so they're

(10:16):
worth listening to if you Oh, yeah. By
chance. They're fantastic. Also, I mean, I think
the reason why
Audible was such a phenomenon
is because it hearkens back to when we
were little and our parents read to us,
and
there's nothing better than that. There's nothing better
than falling asleep to someone reading to you.
That's exactly right. And it's funny because now,

(10:38):
you know, the younger generation, I have two
young kids, and
they have in a sort of effort to
move away from screens,
they now have
toys that basically
act as audio players.
Like a Teddy Rux then?
Yeah. Yeah. Like, it's like,
I forgot the name of it. Yoto, I
think is what they're called, but it's basically

(11:00):
like they have these cards of stories that
you can put in and take out and
they kinda work like an old Game Boy
or something where you just throw the card
in. And it it'll have, like, the stories
with the movies they like or the shows
they like, but it's just audio. There's no
screen, and they can fall asleep to it.
And, you know, it's it's a cool next
generation version of it. It gives me hope
because I feel like

(11:21):
we're so lost into our screens and disconnected
that maybe
and also as a creative myself, I worry
about the AI taking over the creativity and
that kids growing up now will rely so
heavily on this artificial intelligence that they'll lose
their own. And so that that excites me
to think that maybe that will inspire

(11:42):
story in their minds.
I think so. I think there's hope.
Fingers crossed.
Yeah. You do you do seem hopeful. I've
gotta say too. The other thing about when
I was watching your TikToks is there even
though you're talking about really heavy subjects and
clearly sort of giving a wink, although I
don't know if people pick up on that.
I'm sure many do. But you seem

(12:04):
hopeful that that it's it's not all is
lost. Obviously, you stay in a particular time
frame, at least the ones that I've seen
of World War two. But
I don't know. There's I don't know if
there's just an impish quality to you or
if there is this idea that
that don't give up hope that this happened.
It can be stopped from happening again.

(12:28):
You you're exactly right. I
I would say that I'm
more hopeful
than the average
person who compares today's moments to some of
the worst events in human history, which I
do. There's a lot about
that I talk about around the rise of
authoritarianism,

(12:48):
the rise of extremism,
and the fall of democracy. That's the subject
of of a lot of my work, but
I think the main message I'm trying to
deliver
in a lot of my work is that
while
things
can be bad,

(13:09):
especially in the modern era that people find
themselves living in today,
they can get a lot worse.
And while on the surface that might sound
pessimistic,
to me what it says is
that there's still a lot of time,

(13:30):
and we are in the moment
when we are the most powerful
right now.
And the average person who would have every
reason to think that
the system will work with or without them,
and we're just cogs in a machine and
decisions are made above our heads,
I think it's important to realize that there

(13:53):
has never been a system
of control
that has been powerful enough
to keep an informed and engaged
citizenry
contained forever.
And that only happens when folks understand their
power
and realize just how many more of us

(14:15):
than there are of the people who try
to
control the average person.
And
as bad as things might seem,
there's no better time than right now
to do something to make the world better.
And it has happened, even the,
that sort of overcoming of the bad has

(14:36):
also happened just as often as the bad
sort of winning,
in the in that moment.
At the top of our conversation, you spoke
of the cyclical nature of
these sorts of events.
And I don't I'm sure many of my
listeners, you may have also seen the guy
at the the whiteboard that's circling the eighty

(14:57):
year trajectory that just keeps repeating over and
over again in twenty year clumps.
And I don't know, as you said, is
it memory?
Is it that we aren't even really given
true history? The history that even from listening
to your
audio, How to Start a War, which was
fantastic.

(15:18):
Even
in that, I there was so much that
when I was in school, which was a
million years ago anyway, but when I was
in school,
I didn't learn any of that stuff. It
was quite focused,
obviously, on the Holocaust, don't let this atrocity
happen again, but
not the actual implementation

(15:39):
of how we got to that point. And
I think that's
it's it strikes me as I'm listening to
it.
I I was thinking, god. How how was
this not taught?
How is this left out? It's the most
of it. I mean, horror horrifying. 10,000,000 people
murdered, horrifying.
But how we got there, it seems to

(15:59):
me
that should have been the focus. A 100%.
Yeah. It's it is. I mean,
if you consider,
which I do,
World War two and the Holocaust combined
as being
the greatest tragedy in human history, and I
I put that
the the the metric that I use to

(16:22):
determine that is
the
death toll, which is the largest of any
conflict that we've ever had. Human beings
just eliminated entire generations, wifes off the face
of the earth, just a just a horrible
ride on every continent,
in the land, sea, in the air, in
death camps, but also on the street.

(16:43):
And so, if you consider it the worst
thing that ever happened,
to me, the next question is, How did
it happen? How did we let it get
this
bad?
And I agree with you that
the
how should be taught just as much
as the what.
Mhmm. And, and the how is something that

(17:04):
is a lot
I think how
helps you answer the question,
you know, I think it gives you the
context,
for for right. So I guess a better
way of saying this is when you're taught
about what happened in school,
as matter of factly,
this war happened, these countries fought each other,

(17:27):
these people died,
these groups of people were
killed
and persecuted,
it's taught,
know, when you hear it in that way,
I think it sounds more like
a inevitability,
right? Like this happened. But
to me, the thing that matters most is,

(17:47):
you know, how did it happen? Why did
it happen? And what
could have been done
at several moments in this trajectory
that could have prevented it from happening? Because
we all know what happened,
but it didn't need to happen this way.
And so the story is sort of written
as

(18:08):
a tragedy.
You're sort of following
you're in the room as the bad guys
are doing their bad stuff, and you're kind
of watching all of it happen.
But what I also point out in every
chapter is
a moment in which a decision
was made by good people

(18:28):
that could have stopped these bad people,
and how that decision was either
overcome by the bad people or
perhaps not made or wrongly made by the
good people, when it just as easily could
have gone the other way and prevented the
worst. And so I'm trying to give people
this sense that none of these bad things
are inevitabilities.

(18:49):
There's no version of the world that is
bad,
that needs to necessarily happen.
We have a ton of power to change
those things, and understanding the specifics of how
we got there
gives us that knowledge, which gives us that
power.
Mhmm.
When you were growing up, was was this
information

(19:10):
a big part of the family, or was
this something that you started picking up on
your own? And also, in your studies as
a kid, as you're going through your history
lessons,
did you had you been doing your own
studying on the side because it was something
that fascinated you? And did you see a
disconnect
of what was being taught versus what you
were
consuming yourself?

(19:32):
Yeah, I think early college, like for a
lot of late teenagers,
can be
illuminating,
when you take that first, you know,
sociology
class or, you know, whatever. I grew up
going to Catholic school. My family was not
particularly religious, but grew up going to religious
schools,
and I was never particularly religious myself. But

(19:54):
I remember the first,
the first month,
that I started going to
university that was not religiously
affiliated
and not just being surrounded by it all
the time, I took a course called Power
in Society,
which talked about
the collaboration
between,
you know, elite institutions in societies

(20:16):
that work to maintain their power infrastructure
at the expense of
the vast majority of people.
It's it's never close. It's always like
ninetyten
in the best cases,
where, you know, institutions
like religions, like governments, like

(20:36):
militaries,
like media, you know, conglomerates
can
back each other up,
even though it sometimes seems they're adversarial.
And I think that that's something that
folks should be, aware of. And I think
that that was, like, an eye opening
education for me early on. And I think
that kind of put me down the rabbit

(20:57):
hole of the the subjects that I was
more interested in from a,
you know, educational standpoint. Do you think if
the Treaty of Versailles hadn't happened that World
War two might not have happened? Do you
think that that just absolute economic
takedown
of Germany?
I mean, they were already pretty hurting. But,

(21:17):
do you think that
Yeah. What what fits me in history, and
even in now,
that in the present day,
is that
as you were speaking to, like, the sort
of the power structure of the 9010,
that
when a populist is hurting financially, economically
in the toilet,

(21:39):
the
irony
of looking to the people that actually have
the most
and are hell bent on keeping it that
way,
it's like it's that classic sort of gaslight,
look into your abuser to save you.
Yeah.
To answer your question directly, I think,

(22:00):
it may not have if the Treaty of
Versailles didn't happen, I think
there's a chance World War two still happens
because
of the Great Depression.
So there were really, like, two
cataclysms
in the German economy following the Great War,
not including the war itself, which was a
cataclysm

(22:21):
in itself. Right? A the Kaiser who was
in charge of the German economy
did not
do any financial planning
for paying for the war.
Usually when a country goes to war, they
raise taxes,
and they, you know, maybe borrow some money.
Or they have Cheney. Right,

(22:42):
right, and they
do things to pay for the war, right?
Wars are the most expensive things that countries
can do.
The Kaiser did none of those things, and
he funded the entire war on borrowing,
So, and he was counting on winning the
war so that when he won,
he would just
get reparations from all of the countries that
he destroyed,

(23:02):
like France and England.
But since France and England were the ones
who won, they were the ones who instituted
reparations
on
Germany
in the Treaty of Versailles,
and some territorial losses and basically taking full
blame for the war,
beginning that Germany had to do. So that
was a cataclysm
and a sort of,

(23:23):
you know, national
pride destruction.
A lot of rumors
and,
to use a modern term, fake news would
spread around that, you know, Germany was actually
about to win the war, but
these people who were in charge kind of
stabbed us in the back
and pulled the rug out from our military.

(23:44):
Alright, so there was this
this cataclysm
of the Treaty of Versailles and sort of
burden
that was put on the
average
German worker,
but the borrowing
is what led to hyperinflation,
which turned a, you know,

(24:04):
a loaf of bread from, like,
I think something like 80 marks
to, like,
a 100,000,000,000
in a period of, like, three months. So
if you can imagine your entire life savings,
the value of your home, I believe literally
everything is just gone. All that happened, but
then it was sort of brought under control

(24:25):
by, some economists that were brought in to
fix the economy, to stabilize
the German mark. And it felt for a
while that the
right wing extremism that was sprouting up and
left wing extremism
at the time, at least
for German standards Communism.
Was a monarchy. Yeah. Yeah. Large socialist movement.

(24:45):
So there was sort of a sense that
maybe the political extremism that was coming out
as a result of the economic conditions,
extremism that was coming out as a result
of the economic conditions would have
subsided after the country was stabilized,
and then the Great Depression happened.
And
that was a bomb that went off in
Germany,
almost,
actually probably worse than it was in The

(25:07):
United States, which was the epicenter
of the Great Depression,
because a lot of the stabilization
of the economy that Germany got
when
they sort of stabilized
was based on loans coming in from The
United States, and those stopped instantly
when the UNUS economy,
went into free fall, and so did the

(25:29):
German economy again.
So it's possible that World War two still
happens
without the Treaty of Versailles, but it's hard
to tell because that Great Depression, I think,
was gonna happen
one way or another, and it was gonna
affect the German economy too.
If only Hitler had gotten into art school,
maybe?
That's actually really interesting.

(25:52):
Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. I think movie, actually. Have
you ever seen Max?
John Cusack? No. It's it's not many people
have seen it. It's really
it's fascinating. And Mac in it, John Kozak
plays Max, a art dealer, who comes across
a young Adolf Hitler and who is a
struggling artist.
And it's this
idea of what could happen. And yet the

(26:15):
inevitable also.
It's a it's a fascinating take.
Yeah. That's interesting. I think about that sometimes.
Yeah. He sort of just, in his, like,
art
days, sort of just,
walked around like a, like a vagabond. He
was getting money from somewhere. We don't really
know

(26:35):
where his money was coming from. It might
have come from the estate that his parents
left behind. They weren't, like, rich, but
he had some
means to live
in Vienna by himself
without a job
and just paint.
So, yeah, it's it's hard to tell if
he had gotten in. Yeah, maybe. I mean,
he was always kind of crazy

(26:57):
as a as a guy.
The the the madness and the self loathing,
I think, was always there. And we see
that a lot in with people in power,
that their madness and their self loathing creates
a perfect storm, then everyone suffers.
We see that a lot in history, I
mean, and in present day.

(27:18):
Absolutely.
You know, he was always a racist. He
was always
an antisemite.
He wrote about
all of this stuff
in his book, in his
journals that we have.
These were all things that he had
while he was sitting in a prison cell
before he had any power whatsoever,

(27:40):
and he wasn't the only one, by the
way. There was a ton of
antisemitism
and racism,
extreme racism, like even for the time,
happening in Central Europe, in most of Europe,
but he was even more extreme than the
average racist
of the time.

(28:01):
Berlin, Berlin seemed like it had a little
conclave of just artist weirdos who everybody loved
everyone. Everyone was gay and black and interesting
and
Yeah. Well, it's funny because he didn't grow
up in Germany. He grew up in
Austria. So he's so Hitler's Austrian,
not German.
And you're right, Berlin,

(28:23):
during the
Weimar Republic period, the democracy that ran Germany
in between World War I and World War
II, or Hitler's rise to power,
had a huge counterculture
that was largely influenced by
the overthrow of
a monarchy which had ruled Germany for,
I mean, a long time.

(28:43):
It had been unified not that long ago.
People consider Germany this like ancient country, and
Germany as a region
has been around, but Germany unified in 1871.
World War I happened like
thirty to forty years later,
so
it hadn't been a unified state for that
long, but it was a repressive

(29:04):
monarchy. It didn't really have representation.
It had a sort of pseudo
parliament, but it didn't have any sort of
pull like the British constitutional monarchy had.
It was more of just a fake one,
to appease people. I think that there's something
to be said about
that sort of counterculture

(29:24):
that Hitler very much saw as an abomination.
Mhmm.
Although he had his own vices that
that are pretty interesting to understand too.
I mean, that's the thing. Right? That these
I would throw the word closeted. The, you
know, the people who are closeted in their
desires, whatever
they may be,

(29:45):
they tend to aggressively
attack people in those
conclaves.
Right? Because they don't wanna they don't want
the mirror.
Yeah. Bad that they can't be out in
their in their proclivities, so they
take down anyone who is.
That's right. Hitler, by the end of the

(30:05):
war, was probably,
would be indistinguishable
from
a
hyper
drug
user. Oh, meth head. Total meth head. Huge
meth head. He took narcotics.
He took cocaine

(30:26):
through eye drops. He took about 27 injections
a day of
drugs,
that would be today considered
class one
narcotics. He had a quack doctor
that,
you know, gave him all of this medication,
followed him around everywhere with a briefcase full
of drugs,

(30:47):
and, and he took them,
but he saw the drug use
of
Weimar Germany
as,
you know,
just an abomination
and something that represented all of the things
that were wrong with society.
But, of course, he took his drugs for
medicinal purposes,

(31:07):
not for recreation, even though
he was absolutely blitzed,
a 100% of the day.
As for his soldiers, I mean, that was
yeah. You mentioned a little bit in the
in in your book about how the soldiers
were hyped out to there's a video
from
the Olympics. Yeah. It's a great one. Hitler

(31:28):
just tweaking.
Just tweaking out. Yep.
Yeah. He's,
so,
there was a drug in Germany called Perviden,
which was made by
the,
the Bayer company,
Aspirin.

(31:51):
And they Perviden
was a was, I think, marketed as like
an alternative to cigarettes and coffee for stimulant,
stimulation. And
what we would
you know, if you opened up Pervitin and
looked at the chemical makeup of it,
we would describe Pervitin as crystal meth.

(32:14):
It was a pill that you just swallowed,
and
it's what, you know, people say the blitzkrieg,
oh my god, like the German army was
moving so quickly,
and, you know, you had tank drivers
riding without sleep for seven straight days, like,
how could they move so fast? It blew
everything up. It's because everybody was
methed out.
It was in the daily ration of every

(32:36):
German soldier. And so, yeah, the German soldiers
were absolutely
messed up. And, like, if we're gonna hold
up the mirror,
US soldiers had stimulants
in their rations as well, not quite crystal
meth stimulants, but
it is interesting how
we treat our, you know, the people that

(32:56):
we ask
to serve
our country, we sort of get them addicted,
to
pretty terrible stuff.
So it's it's,
but it was, it was at the extreme
on in the Third Reich, for sure.
Mhmm.
Let's talk about propaganda.
I had an interview with a guy that

(33:17):
grew up. He's, like, 90,
and he grew up during all of this
obviously going on.
And
he talked about the propaganda
then, and I said, can you imagine if
Hitler had the Internet? And he got very
quiet and
said, he does.
And I thought, oh god. That's

(33:38):
that's
chilling. But, oh, of course. Of course. Yes.
But what really struck me and, again,
not something that was taught from in my
classes at least, in high school and junior
high,
that
Hitler really was on a wing and a
prayer. He was lied about everything.

(33:58):
Nothing he was threatening was going he didn't
have any of that ability, and yet he
just kept lying.
And then the thing that really struck me,
of course, it's not like I didn't know
this as an adult, but, you know, again,
didn't talk about it in history classes,
that they would
dress up like
the, quote, unquote, enemy and stage,

(34:20):
you know, insurrections,
basically, in order to
have a legitimacy
to attack
the next day and wipe everyone out.
And
I was like, wow. Sounds pretty familiar.
You know? And all of that, of course,
has been
going on now
where there's

(34:41):
this nebulous
Antifa.
And
Yeah. Yeah. Just yesterday, I was watching,
something, and they're like, oh, they
some of the masked guys that were Antifa
showed up to the Portland and they were
doing this and that. And and then we
got the mask off of one of them

(35:01):
and he was,
one of the super alt right, not a
proud boy, but, like, American
national blah blah blah leader guy. And I
thought, yeah. That's how it fucking fits. You
know?
So let's go back now. Yeah.
Today, let's go back to then and how
a masterful plan. I mean, I'm not gonna

(35:22):
lie. It's a brilliant strategy.
Yeah. Yeah. So,
you're absolutely right. I think propaganda
was an essential component of
Hitler's rise to power
is an essential component of most
political movements,
but with the amount of control that,
the Third Reich had over

(35:45):
all of the media outlets and
ecosystems,
but their mastery of it, right? So in
particular, we talked about Josef Goebbels.
He was a
failed
playwright
and an author,
and so another failed artist

(36:05):
Of course. Of course, who
was originally more aligned with
a lot of the socialist movements of the
time.
His journals are remarkably well preserved and detailed.
Most of them are available for free online,
but there are, like, book versions you can
just,
get on Amazon or something and read.

(36:26):
And, boy, that dude is an emotional
roller coaster. I mean, he
he's like crying into his diary for for
decades, and it's all there, from his childhood
to
the war to, I mean, everything.
But he writes a lot of the details
of,
of what he's done. I can say, if

(36:47):
I go and look up the journals, I'll
get a call from Larry Ellison, like
Yeah. Yeah, hey, what's going on there? What's
going on over there? What's happening?
It's funny because, you know, as I was
doing all the research for the book, I'm
like, I really need to be careful. I'm
definitely on a list. Yeah. I'm sure. I'm
sure I am. I know I'm on lists.
You're definitely on a list. Yeah.

(37:08):
Yeah. Yeah.
But, yeah, I mean, there's there's archives of
this stuff that's available.
But, yeah, so, like, you know, just to
use a couple of examples of propaganda that
were used leading up to
the acquisition of power,
one of the examples I use is of
Horst Wessel,
who was
a young

(37:31):
Nazi
who joined the
street fighting
paramilitary
that Hitler controlled
before he was in power called the SA.
They were like
stormtroopers.
Most of them were veterans from the war
who didn't have work,
who were frustrated and angry with the fact

(37:52):
that all of their
pensions that they got for fighting a brutal
war were eliminated,
and
now they couldn't get work or feed their
families, and so this was an opportunity
to have work, but importantly,
to stop the people who they were told
are responsible for all the problems in their

(38:13):
country, the communists,
the, you know, the undesirables,
the bankers, and I put air quotes around
that because that's a shorthand that a lot
of people like to use for Jewish people.
Internationalists
is another
one. There is a
a young sort of
Nazi that joins the street brawling SA

(38:35):
fighting communists in the street, and these are
real street wars. I mean, they're not like
people shoving each other,
you know, in a protest or in, like,
a counter protest march. These are like I
mean, the closest thing I could compare it
to is if anyone's ever seen gangs of
New York where they're literally, like, murdering each
other in battles on a large scale in
the street. That's what's happening in Germany in

(38:57):
the '19 late nineteen twenties and early nineteen
thirties.
This one of those
street brawlers in the Nazi SA
is named Horse Wessel. He's
murdered in one of these
brawls,
and he wrote a song before he died.
He was like an aspiring songwriter,
and he wrote a song that

(39:17):
Joseph Goebbels
uncovered,
who was in charge of the propaganda
wing of,
of the Nazi party. Just funny that, like,
you called it propaganda at the time. It's
like, wouldn't you, like isn't that suspicious that,
like, yeah, I'm in charge of propaganda? But
that, at the time, was a word that
was used for, like,
comms or communications or marketing, right? Like they

(39:40):
they sort of use the word propaganda.
Anyway, he was in charge of of that,
and he decided to use this tragedy
of one of their own being killed
and use the song that
this person wrote
and
made it the anthem of the Nazi party.
And what that allowed them to do is
every time it was sung, it sort of

(40:03):
brought to memory
the violence and the threat from the other
side.
So, it was just an example of of
propaganda, and there's all sorts of examples like
that, but I think the false flag incidents
you talk about are some of the most
fascinating, like the war World War II started,
with a false flag incident

(40:24):
orchestrated by the Nazis,
on the border of Poland to make it
seem like Poland was attacking them. But in
reality, it was staged
by,
the SS,
which was more of, like, the secret police,
more more advanced, more sophisticated than the SA
was. This is what boggles my mind. It's
like, wait a minute. Now you know

(40:46):
that these things happened
in the past.
Why is there such a disconnect
in the present
of what that is? I think that's that
is a frustration that I've had for a
long time. And to to maybe,
to tie it a little bit to the
present day because that's you
you know, it was an impetus to

(41:07):
to me writing this was, I remember in
2015 and 2016,
I had very close people in my life
who
were not necessarily
supporters
of
some of the things that,
you
know, Trump and others were saying,
but they were more, like, indifferent to it.

(41:28):
You know, sort of like the arc of
justice is, or the arc of history has
long been towards justice kind of mentality,
not understanding that
people bend
the arc
of history, right? It's bent towards justice because
people bend it,
not because things just work out. And so
I was seeing a lot of what I

(41:52):
saw in the world.
And even before Trump, I remember seeing
the invasion
of Crimea
by Putin
in 2014,
which was carried out in a sort of
commando style,
unmarked uniforms
way.
What happened was the Russian government

(42:14):
invaded
a part of a sovereign country, Ukraine,
with unmarked
uniforms
and told a story that said
there is an insurrection happening, a sort of
revolt from within,
and,
you know, we're going to vote on being
part

(42:34):
of Russia instead of Ukraine,
and we did it, and people want to
be part of Russia, and it's great. And
it was just reported as fact that way
by really reputable
institutions. Right? I remember I think I read
it in, like, the New York Times, like,
reporting it as unmarked
combatants. I think it was talked about in
that way. And I'm like, guys, this is
Russia. Like, what are we doing here? And

(42:55):
I remember seeing that and saying, like, oh,
this is, like, exactly what happened
in, you know, the false flag incident in
in the the what was called the Glibinsk
incident where
Nazi
unmarked,
you know, commandos
attacked a German radio station in Germany on
the border with Poland, killed Germans.

(43:15):
Had a patsy.
Had a patsy,
found one,
who was an activist against the German government,
and
used it as justification
to start a war.
And,
was really frustrating that nobody kind of could
tie these things together, and then it occurred
to me that maybe people don't

(43:37):
know these specifics of what happened, and it
was my mission to make something really approachable
that the person who doesn't even like history
or care or doesn't read history
could engage with and understand and even enjoy,
and so that was kind of the mission
that made me try to pursue this work.
Yeah. Let's talk about it for a second.
How how to Start a War? It's on

(43:58):
Audible. I looked for it on Libby. I
didn't see it there, so I guess it's
not there yet.
But, it's you did not do it in
print form. You did it in
storytelling
form.
It's got,
I finished it. It's fantastic.
It's very hard to put down.
It's hard to listen to in some places,
not because it's it's beautifully done, but it's

(44:21):
just
heavy in places. So that's but I want
everyone to to listen to it.
And the way you did do it in
a theatrical way in places, I thought was
really cool
and that this you had you interwove
the speeches from the time frame, and
I really enjoyed that aspect of it, hearkening

(44:42):
back to when I was young and listening
to radio theater. So well done on that.
And, you know, I thought about it this
morning as I was making my coffee and
eating my oatmeal. I thought, you know,
if this sort
of way of learning had been around
when I was younger, you know,
I feel like

(45:04):
so much more would have been absorbed
because everyone learns in a different way. Some
people learn very well-being
talked to by a teacher.
I think this would have worked much better
for me. My brain was staring out the
window and
drawing in books and whatever. But, yeah, it's
really good. It's really, really, really good.
Yeah.

(45:25):
Thank you. Yeah. I mean, we learn through
stories. Stories is we're we're wired to learn
through stories. Even before we could write
down things as human beings, we were told
stories to learn things. And so I'm a
big
fan of storytelling, and I think if you
can tell a story that has a lot
of lessons in it, it's a great way

(45:45):
for people to absorb those lessons.
This
period in time had
a really
interesting
advantage
to telling the story in this way, because
in some cases,
we had actual scripts of what was said.
So,
to use an example,

(46:09):
the conquest of Austria,
which a lot of people sort of overlook
in the history of the lead up to
World War II.
Germany
wanted
Austria,
and
the first, they were the first country that
they targeted for expansion
before the war began,
and
Germany had this large military buildup

(46:31):
that they sort of did illegally
following the war. Austria didn't really do that.
For people that don't know, according to the
treaty, Germany was not allowed to
warmonger or have
a military as such? That's right. That's right.
They,
the largest land army on the planet Earth,
which was the German Armed Forces

(46:53):
during World War one, was reduced to the
size of the army of Greece.
It was,
it was
after the Treaty of Versailles when the war
ended. Germany was no longer allowed to have
an army larger than 100,000 infantry,
no tanks, no airplanes,
no ships, no submarines,
right, all of the things that someone would

(47:15):
use to fight a modern war, and all
of the
the combatants who, you know, lost the war
had that stipulation
attached to their surrender.
Germany, once Hitler came to power after a
couple of years,
publicly
defied that.
He secretly defied it for a couple of
years before,

(47:36):
but then when he felt like he would
have been ready
to defend himself,
he announced it
publicly. The first target that they wanted to
basically threaten into submission was Austria,
because Austria didn't really do that military buildup.
There was always this dream of a unified
Germany and Austria that Hitler had, who was

(47:57):
an Austrian, who was, by the way, banned
from Austria, wasn't allowed to be there, so
he couldn't even be in Austria without conquering
it. Part of the impetus, probably, I'm sure.
Absolutely. Before Austria, just running around singing in
the mountains, making clothes out of curtains.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, and so
to do this conquest, basically,

(48:19):
Hitler summoned
the
chancellor of Austria, like the prime minister of
Austria, the president of Austria, if you will,
to
Germany
to negotiate
something small, right, not the sovereignty of its
nation.
And in that meeting, Hitler said, we're going
to invade you. It's gonna happen in four

(48:42):
weeks.
It's up to you to decide how much
how many Austrians are gonna die, but we're
doing it like the machine's already moving. So
let me know,
and
we'll, we'll make a decision in four weeks.
Have a great trip back. The chancellor of
Austria, obviously,
is scared to death,
goes back to the president

(49:03):
of,
they had a system similar to Germany where
you had a president who was like, think
of them as like the king or the
queen of ceremonial president, and then the chancellor
who kind of ran the country,
like a prime minister does.
And, he talked to the president, president was
like, we're not we're not doing that, like,
that's crazy.

(49:23):
We're gonna
resist. And so the chancellor tries and
basically what happens
is Germany,
the Nazis insert a Nazi sympathizer
into the Austrian cabinet
and communicate with him
over the course of four weeks to orchestrate
a coup,
which ends up taking place.

(49:46):
And that orchestration,
all of that work that's done, and they're
like
frantic
work that's done to orchestrate that coup is
all done over the phone.
And what's wild about that is
Hermann Goring, who is the number two man
in the Third Reich, the sort of chief
operating officer of the Third

(50:09):
Reich, his entire office
transcribed
every phone call that went in and out
of the office.
So the conquest of Austria
done by telephone
is word for word
copied down, and it was translated into English
for the Nuremberg trials after the war ended.
And so this whole

(50:29):
these scenes,
these frantic phone calls,
the misunderstandings,
the miscommunications
are all available for us to read, and
they read like
drama. I mean, it's it's incredible.
And so the words that I use in
the book, or I think it's chapter four
or five,
is literally just those phone calls.

(50:50):
And so you're hearing
the back and forth between Berlin and Vienna.
The the they give the wrong information, and
then they freak out, and it causes delay.
It's it's an incredible advantage to this kind
of storytelling.
Yeah. Absolutely.
Absolutely. And it really makes you in it.
Yeah.

(51:11):
Yeah. You're, you're you're certainly in the room,
and
there's other types of transcripts you hear that
in the room that that I think are
even worse. For example,
after the Night of Broken Glass, which was
sort of the first moment
that is considered the beginning of the Holocaust.

(51:32):
And a great example of the propaganda because
they went and destroyed all these Jewish property
and homes and then turned around and blamed
it on the Jews and said that they
were rioting.
That's right. That's right. What's crazy about that
is,
and this kind of goes back to the
actual words that were spoken,
all of the Jewish businesses

(51:54):
that were destroyed
by
the German government,
the SA and SS troops who were dressed
in plain clothes to made to look like
the average German just freaking out and rioting,
at Jews,
because what had happened is
a German diplomat
in France had been assassinated

(52:15):
by a Jewish,
assassin
whose family had just been deported
to Poland and left to kind of starve.
You know, 12,000 Jews had just been deported
in this
dramatic
arrest.
So that had happened, and it was used
as a moment to say, We're going to
put the hammer down,

(52:36):
and we're going to destroy all these Jewish
businesses. And so they orchestrate this
this arson,
you know, moment
in a single night.
But it turns out
that all of those Jewish businesses, while those
businesses might have been owned by Jewish business
owners,
the buildings

(52:57):
in which those Jewish businesses ran
were actually owned by Germans.
Germans who were now filing
insurance claims
on all of the broken glass, the windows
that were smashed, the furniture that was just
broken,
and the German insurance industry
was about to go bankrupt because they could

(53:19):
not, they had done
years and years and years' worth of damage
in a single night,
and
now
the German insurance companies were screwed. They actually
had to get bailed out by the German
government,
because if they had
defaulted
on that, it would be a black eye
on the German insurance industry. So there is

(53:40):
this meeting that took place after the Night
of Broken Glass
with Hermann Goring, the same guy who conquered
Austria over the telephone,
who's also in charge of the economy.
And he said,
couldn't you have just killed more Jews instead
of destroying so many valuables?
Right? He says this in a conference room,

(54:00):
with with insurance,
CEOs,
and
Goebbels is there too,
And they're they
the the biggest crisis in the German,
in Germany at that time was not
how it was on the brink of
persecuting an entire population,

(54:22):
but all of the broken glass and destruction
that they caused, and that meeting was also
transcribed, and so you can hear the word,
you know, over lunch,
they're discussing all of the ways that they
can punish,
further punish
everybody,
all the Jewish Germans
who, they see as responsible.
Part of the thing that really got me

(54:44):
while listening to your book was
how it did feel like at any step
of the way
Hitler could have been stopped
in the beginning.
And as to your point of this idea
that if you just sit there and do
nothing, nothing will happen.
And I started thinking about Chamberlain, and I
thought, well, you know,

(55:06):
what if it had been
what part of all of this story was
an inevitability
if it had been Churchill instead of Chamberlain?
How would that have changed things? If it
had
but you at the end,
spoiler, genocides happen all over the world all
the time.
You you you make that great point. It's

(55:26):
it's like this stuff is constantly
happening
all over the world
all the time.
And is it
it isn't necessarily that great men do nothing,
but more that regular people do nothing?
It's both.
It's both.
I think that,

(55:48):
and, and I use examples of this throughout
the story,
there are moments when
the traditional
great man
could have done something, like
Chamberlain, like could Neville Chamberlain
have stood up to Hitler at the Munich
conference? This was
the moment when
Czechoslovakia
was abandoned

(56:09):
and and allowed to be invaded by Germany
by the Western democracies,
Britain and France. France, who, by the way,
was allies
with Czechoslovakia, and they were like, look, we
gotta we gotta give Hitler a pound of
flesh, or he's gonna start a war.
We all just went through World War one.
We don't wanna deal with that again. Right?
And so, you know, that was a moment

(56:30):
when Hitler could have been stopped.
But way before then,
Hitler could have been stopped by the average
person.
One example is
when Hitler was appointed chancellor, when he was
put in the position
that basically sealed the deal
of his
trajectory, that he got enough reins over power

(56:51):
that he could kind
of do the rest on his own.
The Nazi party
never held a majority
in
the Congress
and never even came close.
And the rules of
the Weimar Republic
work a lot like they do in

(57:12):
Great Britain, or The United States where
the majority party
gets to pick who's
gonna run the country,
the people with the most votes, the party
with the most votes,
and they need a majority in order to
have a chancellor running the show.
But a majority

(57:32):
could not be formed
in
the German congress, which is called the Reichstag.
And so
that happened, the the no single party having
a majority happened because they had a multi
party system,
and both the certainly, the the opposition to
the right wing extremists
could not get their stuff together

(57:55):
and
and ally and stand up against a common
threat, which was this
extreme right wing authoritarian,
group,
there were too many sort of ideological
purity tests
that were put in place by a lot
of the the groups on the left at

(58:16):
the time,
and
it caused
ruptures to the point where they couldn't unify
to stand up against a common threat. So
that has to do with the average voter,
and, and it's, you know, it's it's sad
because
more could have been done, certainly.
Yeah. The grand irony is the worst case
scenario

(58:37):
happened because they didn't stand up, because they
in their minds, they thought, oh god. We
don't want another war, but the war
inevitably
was gonna transpire if they didn't stop him.
So they were in this weird catch 22.
That seems to be the fear of
the fear of what might happen.
This this specter of what might happen seem

(58:59):
to stop people in their tracks.
And,
I mean, the truth is that look what
happened. That's what happens. What might happen? That
will happen. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I think it's it's hard to
put ourselves
in
the shoes of really anybody who is alive

(59:20):
in Europe
in the nineteen thirties. They were starving. Yeah.
And and they had all just lived through
the worst
event, like mass casualty of energy in history
in World War I.
And it wasn't that much further out. It
was like twenty years in between wars.

(59:42):
And so everybody who was a
senior
statesperson
was a young person
during the Great War,
and
it was a thing that
that people saw as the worst case scenario
and would try to prevent,
by any means necessary. So it is sort

(01:00:03):
of hard to put ourselves in those shoes,
but I think, to your point, that fear
can blind you to the reality of what's
in front of you,
because what came as a result of that
capitulation
was worse
than what they had all just gone through.
It is wild to think that it went
World War one to World War two, then

(01:00:25):
we had you know, there was Korea, there
was Vietnam. It's just I got and then
all the skirmishes in between and all the
other places.
Humans are
our level for fuckery is so high.
Yeah. It's pretty high. I mean, we could
talk all about sort of the world orders
that were put in place after World War

(01:00:46):
II, but,
but yeah, I mean, it's it's it's,
it's fascinating, and,
you know, sometimes it's it's a little sad,
but I I think that
we learn through tragedy in the same way
people learn through failure,
better than
Yeah.
We
learn I would say

(01:01:07):
we learn through tragedy more than we learn
through maybe victory or success.
If we had to pick one or the
other,
that's not to say that we always learn
or even learn the majority of the time,
but
sort of getting your medicine can sometimes be
a lesson in that you take to heart

(01:01:28):
more, and so
that's kind of the framing of the story
is like, you know,
this, you know how it ends, but it
didn't need to end this way, and here
are all the times it could have been
better. I I think that your book is
certainly a call to arms, which I appreciate,
certainly, your TikTok, which,
tell people how to find you. Also, are
are you a teacher? Do you teach?

(01:01:49):
No. I don't. But you can follow on
on all the social medias,
How to Start a War
and on, on TikTok and How to Start
a War book on Instagram.
And then there's the book How to Start
a War,
and the website howtostartawar.com.
I like to use the social channels as
more of a

(01:02:09):
modern
comparison,
more explicitly
than
the book does. The book is sort of
a parallel, but I don't beat readers over
the head with it.
The social channels, the videos
are a lot more connected to the modern
day and and really kind of the news
of the week. The podcast, it it mirrors

(01:02:31):
the book?
Yeah. So the so the book actually started
off as a podcast,
and that's how it was discovered and and
published by Blackstone. So it started off as
a as a serialized
miniseries
released over podcast, so people can listen to
that for free, actually.
There is a
sort of expanded

(01:02:52):
and and,
you know, new edition of it that was
released on Audible,
which I think is the best version of
of the story, the most complete version of
it,
as what I originally intended. So,
so, yeah, it's, it's it's
I think it's a a call to arms,

(01:03:12):
in a way that that just lets people
know and reminds them of what they're all
capable of. And that while some of these
things might seem inevitable,
they never ever are.
And it's on us to be aware of
those things
and to take advantage of the power that
we have while we still have it.
Because
as powerful as we are right now,

(01:03:35):
there are times when it becomes too late.
Mhmm.
And it's on us to be aware of
these moments and the power that we have
so that we can
make the world better in the way that
we want to to be the good we
wanna see in the world. Mhmm. Amen to
that.
My fear, of course, is that
there's now a really good playbook

(01:03:56):
by which to go by.
So
Yeah. Yeah.
There's always been good playbooks, honestly. Yeah. You
know, there are new
there's new technology
that that makes some of those playbooks
different or or easier
to execute.
While I don't think that,

(01:04:16):
you know, maybe the you know, we're we're
sort of in weird situations now where
the person
at the apex of power in The United
States is less of an ideologue,
because usually, it's the ideologue at the top
of the power structure.
But there are ideologues
that surround
that person with a lot of power, who

(01:04:39):
know these playbooks
really, really well, who have studied them. Stephen
Miller comes to mind. Yeah. Stephen Miller
absolutely comes to mind.
Certainly yeah. He certainly does.
I I imagine he is extremely well versed
in a lot of these tactics. Yeah. It's

(01:04:59):
pretty obvious, actually.
It's not subtle. It's not subtle. No one
accused them of ever being subtle. No.
Yeah. Ugh. Here here's my fear too is
that when people are so entrenched
in the worshiping
of a political figure, the worshiping of anyone,

(01:05:20):
celebrity,
a politician,
someone in the family,
any of that hero worship stuff.
Dangerous,
dangerous stuff because it then
removes your ability to see
what's
it's a glimmer. It's,
emperor's new clothes. It's, it removes the ability
to see what's actually there because suddenly your

(01:05:42):
emotional
your ego, your sense of self is so
tied up into
worshiping of this thing. And, oh, God, that's
so dangerous, and it's so easy to manipulate
you when you're in that state. History does
that too. There is a tendency for history
to focus on
the most powerful figures
as the main characters of the story

(01:06:05):
when they make up such a small portion
of the population.
I mean, the
next story that I'm working on
is about,
the Russian Revolution.
And
all of the history that we've read about
the Russian Revolution is, you know, Lenin and
Stalin and Trotsky
and Nicholas
II, the czar of Russia,

(01:06:27):
and that's it,
whereas
80%
of the Russian population
at the time of the Revolution
were rural
peasants who lived below the poverty line.
Could you imagine if 80%
of The United States
lived below the poverty line and

(01:06:47):
then had a revolution,
and the part that we focused on
were
two to three figures that did not belong
to the
class of 80% of the population who it
most dramatically affected.
It's crazy to me that

(01:07:07):
we focus on these sort of great figures,
these powerful figures, when while they, yeah, they
had power, they are empowered by
the average person.
They don't get that power without the consent
of the average person,
and,
and most people don't see that, and that's
something that I there's great books there's great

(01:07:28):
examples of books that try to do that
in the American system.
People's History of The United States comes to
mind by Howard Zinn,
a wonderful telling of
the story of American history, but through the
lens of
the average person on the receiving end of
the power,
and that's sort of a really good formative

(01:07:49):
work
to check out. Excellent, excellent read. Yeah, It's
dense. Audible version of that is wonderful too.
However you need to take in this sort
of stuff, do it.
I'm I am on the camp of
of an audible is reading or a Libby
is reading. Oh, yeah. Same.

(01:08:09):
A 100%. I mean, it's it's long form
media,
information, entertainment.
Yeah. I'm I'm a big advocate of,
I I mean, also, you can just do
it more, especially if you have
errands or kids or obligations
and commutes.
Right? You can take in a lot more
information
through audio than you would if you just

(01:08:31):
had to restrict yourself to reading a book.
What I find fascinating is that in
in a way in documentaries do this, but
really in
the mythology
of, say, the Marvel or
any of those sort of stories,
it's the underdogs that are focused on and
the the the fighting against tyranny and the

(01:08:52):
winning against tyranny, and that's the thing. But
weirdly, as you say,
historically
speaking in the education
of history, it's always about to the victors
go to spoils. It's
it's focusing on
more the bad actors and and almost in
an almost celebratory

(01:09:13):
way
that they will for sure live in infamy.
But
it's such a disconnect to me. Like, how
can we root for the underdog
so much,
and then you believe it when the
the tyrant is somehow the underdog? It's it
boggles the mind. I mean, there's a lot
of interesting

(01:09:33):
political theory around the idea of
tolerable
opposition
in the sense that
there
can be opposition that speaks out against a
system,
but within the bounds
of
of some some, you know, guidelines

(01:09:56):
that do not
themselves threaten the system as a whole.
A Marvel movie
that is produced and distributed
for profit
by one of the world's largest media companies
can create a story about an underdog

(01:10:16):
that people can pay to see
and consume because they like the story.
But if
a person
were to go out and
be sort of a
vigilante justice,
you know, warrior fighting against the system, they'd
probably get arrested.

(01:10:38):
And so I think there's like
a there's
like containment
fields
for
opposition
that allow for those urges and thoughts
to exist and in some ways, like,
exhaust themselves or or, you know, as like

(01:10:59):
a release valve
to alleviate pressure in in someone's
thoughts and and mind,
but acting on
those things yourself
would not be acceptable.
So it's like an outlet
for those for those urges, I think,

(01:11:20):
is is why that dichotomy happens. Yeah. It's
a really good point. I was just thinking
of sitting in a room and cheering for
everyone of Wakanda and then
sort of looking the other way when
black people are being
treated
the way they're treated. Yeah. Yeah. It's like,
wait. What's going on here?
Yeah. Yeah.

(01:11:41):
We are in such a bizarre
time, and,
and then I keep thinking like, okay. And
then there's some giant thing hurdling in space
toward this.
If this is the end,
god bless a reset. You know?
You have little kids, so you probably don't
have that sensibility. But I'm just like, nope.
I get it. Yeah.

(01:12:03):
Yeah. I mean, you know, it's
I I I get that too. I do.
Right? It's it's, it's clean,
very Thanos esque of you as on the
subject of of Marvel, but, you know, I
think,
I think
what we will sometimes overlook, even in those
clean, quote, you know, moments,

(01:12:24):
is, just how much
suffering would have to take place
in order for that to happen.
And, you know, you talk about, you know,
having kids. To me, right,
I know there's a whole school of thought
of like, Why would I bring kids into
this world?
And my Right, there's so much bad. Like,
I wouldn't wanna give them or put them

(01:12:46):
or feel responsible for putting them into a
climate that's
changing to a system of government that's moving
towards authoritarianism
to,
you know, maybe
that feel like they're powerless and education and
all this stuff that's going poorly.
My response to that is

(01:13:06):
we need more
soldiers
on our side,
and if you can be,
if you're a good person,
that means you can raise good people, and
we need more good people.
And so,
so I, you know, I look at my
two sons,
who are three and four year three and

(01:13:29):
two years old,
and, I look at them as sort of
our best shot to make this world better.
And I'll do everything I can to to
pave that way for them,
give them the opportunities that they can have,
and then it's gonna be passing the baton
to them and me stepping aside and saying,
you know,

(01:13:50):
we we need your help, man. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate that optimism, certainly.
And,
I mean, yeah, let's let's get these new
generations.
Somewhere in there are the people that will
save us all.
That's a hell of a burden Yeah. To
put on someone,
but,
I mean Yeah. The generation feels that way.

(01:14:13):
Yeah. I think,
I wouldn't say I'm optimistic,
to be honest, right? It sounds it might
sound like what I'm saying is optimistic,
but I think optimism requires
a sense that things
are going to work out on the trajectory
that they're currently on. Hope not. And I

(01:14:35):
don't
think the trajectory we're currently on
is something to be optimistic about.
I think
that enough good people
can
bend the arc
towards justice,
but it has to be actively done.
So
to your point about

(01:14:55):
my work being a call to arms, it
very much is because it's necessary.
Good things don't happen because things just work
out. They happen because people make them happen.
And if we get enough good people
who know
of the the power that they have,
then they can make it happen. Yeah. Thank
you, Michael. Thank you for your time and

(01:15:17):
your intellect and your
inspiration in How to Start a War, which
is on Audible.
Go check it out.
Everyone
Thank you so much. It was great to
be here. I really enjoyed the conversation and,
yeah, this was great. Yeah. I really enjoyed
it too. And anytime you write something new,
come back and talk about it. I'll read

(01:15:37):
it and we'll chat it up. And thank
you for listening everybody.
Bye.
Bye.
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