The Hello everyone I have the pleasure today of sitting and talking with Michael

Melis and we start by talking about his book, The White Pill, and his book is a walk through the

catastrophes of the Soviet era, the dire hell that emerged in the aftermath of the formulation of the hypothetical workers paradise

and a description of how that dreadful system, how and why that dreadful system came to

an end. But we also talk about something, I suppose, more fundamental, if there

is something more fundamental than that, which is a conceptualization of what appropriate social and psychological relations

might look like in alternative to dogmatic and structured government.

I shout with Michael, the precise reason

that his tension has been attracted

by the claims of

of anarchism per se. I'm always curious about dissociating

anarchism say from a kind of impulsive hedonism. We drag

Ein Rand into the mix to sort that out and come to conclusions that I think are, well,

they're interesting and likely appropriate, concentrating particularly on voluntary

association as the antithesis to power, right, power and compulsion.

The power and compulsion that inevitably leads to tyranny in hell.

So that's the conversation.

So I was reading your book this morning, The White Pill.

And I've read a fair bit of Russian history in the 20th century and some before that.

And every time I re-encounter it, it never really stopped stunning me, the brutality that was associated with that regime.

I mean, it's obviously the case that the same can be said

about what happened in Nazi Germany and perhaps even to a greater extent what happened in Maoist China, although that's a competition between pretty deep hells, but it never

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