Max Boot
speaker
527 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Max Boot’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Thanks for having me.
I'm really, really glad you liked the book.
It had a huge impact.
I mean, like all of us, our personality, I mean, to some extent, it's DNA, but to some extent, it's also our upbringing, our childhood.
And in Reagan's case, he had what we would today call a very difficult, traumatic childhood, although he always looked at it with rose-colored glasses and always tried to look on the bright side.
In fact, that was one of the big takeaways from his childhood because his father was this
itinerant shoe salesman, had a major drinking problem, kept losing one job after another.
And so the Reagan family kept moving from one tiny little town and small town in Illinois to another in the early years of the 20th century.
And often his father would go off on these multi-day vendors and come back and
Dutch Reagan, as he was then called, and his brother Moon could hear these loud arguments through the thin walls of their rented houses between their mother and their father.
So it was not an easy upbringing by any stretch of the imagination, but he was very influenced by his mother, who was a very devout member
of the disciples of Christ's church.
And, you know, you might say she had a Pollyannish outlook, except it was kind of Pollyannish on steroids.
She always told them to look on the bright side of life and to basically refract everything through this
very optimistic prism.
And that's exactly what he did.
And so he tended to describe his childhood as this Huck Finn idol and so forth.
And so, but that was, you know, it was really from his childhood that he learned how to take very unpleasant reality and to reshape it more to his liking, which would be one of his superpowers as a politician.
I mean, the other thing I think that he took away from his childhood was his
He became a fairly introverted, distant person with almost no friends, which probably surprises a lot of people when I say that, because if they're only familiar with Ronald Reagan, the guy on TV, the president, the actor, he seemed like a very nice, warm person that everybody liked.
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