Michael Malice

That's the whole thing.

I don't remember when I realized he wasn't real, but that story, I did think it was real.

I was like, oh my God.

I remember, I love telling this story, how old I was and I must've been five or six.

And it was just that age where you distinguish between what's real and what's not.

So like Vikings and Knights and ninjas are real and dragons.

and mermaids and elves are fake.

And I was on the corner of Shore Parkway right before the park in Bensonhurst in Brooklyn.

And around the corner wearing a denim vest was a little person, a dwarf.

And I saw him and I was like, all right, back to the drawing board.

Like, I don't know what's real or not anymore because I just saw a dwarf.

So I don't know what's going on.

Yeah.

Well, there's always been, and obviously very much to this day, an enormous amount of enmity, for lack of a better term, hatred between Ukraine and Russia.

I mean, this is centuries in the making, if not more.

And the Ukraine, or Ukraine now, but at the time, I'm speaking of the region,

is and still is the breadbasket of europe it was very fertile lands this is where the food comes from and this was a issue also for lenin as i discussed in the book because when you had famines there you know you have famines throughout uh what later became the soviet union and the problem is this happened in north korea as well in the 90s when they don't have food if you let in foreigners and feed your people all of a sudden you as the government are either superfluous or downright

you know deleterious to their well-being and that's a threat to your power uh so lenin led in an american organization the early 20s which was actually headed by herbert hoover of all people and after a while hoover left because he found that the bolsheviks were just taking the grain that the americans were giving to feed the people and selling it for export while the people suffered and one of the people who grew up in these

starvation times was a young Mikhail Gorbachev where he had, you know, I think it was like a quarter or a third of his village starved to death during one of these periodic famines.

Stalin's idea, this was a good mechanism for him to break