Speaker 1: Welcome back to Carol mark Wood Show on iHeartRadio. My
Speaker 1: guest today, Eli Lake, repressed columnist and the host of
Speaker 1: the Breaking History podcast.
Speaker 2: Hi Eli, it's so nice to have you on.
Speaker 3: It's great to be here, Carol, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: So I've read you for years and years, and I
Speaker 1: don't know your background or how you got into this
Speaker 1: thing of ours.
Speaker 2: I'd love to hear more about that.
Speaker 3: Sure, Well, I grew up in Philadelphia. I wrote kind
Speaker 3: of always.
Speaker 1: Sorry Dallas Cowboys fans, I have to boom whenever we
Speaker 1: mentioned Philly, you know, fair enough.
Speaker 3: I actually have an uncle who moved to Dallas, and
Speaker 3: it was a funny thing in my family. But I guess,
Speaker 3: you know, I was always interested in writing. I grew
Speaker 3: up my parents, you know, had a lot of kind
Speaker 3: of intellectual friends, so there was an emphasis on learning
Speaker 3: and and so forth. And at the same time, I
Speaker 3: didn't really feel like I had the personality to do
Speaker 3: years of grad school like my wife, so I wanted to.
Speaker 3: I like learning, but I'm and I like kind of
Speaker 3: being a dilettante. So I think journalism is the ultimate
Speaker 3: profession for somebody who is a quick study. And but also,
Speaker 3: you know, doesn't want to kind of go into years
Speaker 3: of their of their twenties, and you know, in the
Speaker 3: politics of graduate school, which is kind of almost like
Speaker 3: one of the last bastions of feudalism in our society,
Speaker 3: and that you know, you're basically kind of an intellectual
Speaker 3: slave until you get your tenure track position and there's okay,
Speaker 3: you know, anyway going to that. So I sort of
Speaker 3: decided that like that wasn't for me. And you know,
Speaker 3: I had like a year where like I did all
Speaker 3: kinds of jobs, like at one point I was doing
Speaker 3: like opposition research, and then I finally got a job
Speaker 3: working in Washington for a newsletter that covered the Environmental
Speaker 3: Protection Agency, and it was a great I found it.
Speaker 3: I really liked it, which is that some people like
Speaker 3: deadlines or can handle deadlines. Nobody really likes deadlines.
Speaker 2: I need deadlines. If I don't have a deadline, I'm
Speaker 2: never I'm never doing.
Speaker 3: It me too, So it's like there, so they're very
Speaker 3: smart people who kind of wash out in their first
Speaker 3: job in journalism because there's an enormous amount of pressure
Speaker 3: to just kind of get it on the page and
Speaker 3: get it, get it up, and some of us kind
Speaker 3: of thrive in that environment. For sure, I've thrived on it,
Speaker 3: and it kind of, you know, went from there, and
Speaker 3: you know it kind of you know, you sort of
Speaker 3: realize that you sort of have a talent for it,
Speaker 3: and obviously there's a lot to learn. I feel that
Speaker 3: writing is one of those skills that you're it's it's
Speaker 3: you're constantly kind of getting better at it. You should
Speaker 3: always try to get better at it. So I look
Speaker 3: at it like that, and then, like you know, over time,
Speaker 3: I guess I kind of got my first break out
Speaker 3: of what's known as the trade publications by getting a
Speaker 3: job with someone called the New York Sun. Sorry, now
Speaker 3: that was before.
Speaker 2: The time the New York Sun. Yeah, I was.
Speaker 3: I was one of the OG's from the New York Sign.
Speaker 3: But I actually before that, I was at the Forward,
Speaker 3: which is the oldest Jewish newspaper in New York. And
Speaker 3: that was when Seth Lipsky was still the editor, and
Speaker 3: Seth became a mentor, and so I had that job.
Speaker 3: And then the workman circle booted Seth Lipsky and he
Speaker 3: started the New York Sun. And then I in that
Speaker 3: kind of interregnum, I was the State Department correspondent for UPI,
Speaker 3: which is an old wire service. It's maybe still around,
Speaker 3: but it used to be like the rival of the AP.
Speaker 3: So that was an amazing opportunity for me as a
Speaker 3: young journalist to travel with the Secretary of State to
Speaker 3: go to all these different countries and kind of my
Speaker 3: introduction into kind of big time journalism. And then I
Speaker 3: started writing for The New Republic and the Weekly Standard
Speaker 3: and a little bit for the National Review. And I
Speaker 3: was at the New York Sun. So you just sort
Speaker 3: of that's a career path, and I guess my next
Speaker 3: break after that. I went to the New York Sun
Speaker 3: ended its print run and had to lay off a
Speaker 3: lot of people. In two thousand and eight, right around
Speaker 3: the financial crisis, I went to the Washington Times. I
Speaker 3: did very well there under John Solomon, who was the
Speaker 3: editor at the time. He was picked up by Tina
Speaker 3: Brown's Daily Beast when right when they were acquiring Newsweek.
Speaker 3: So I got hired at Daily Beast News. I remember that, yeah,
Speaker 3: And that was another kind of big break for me.
Speaker 3: And I did that for a while and then Bloomberg
Speaker 3: made me a columnist and that was that was a
Speaker 3: wonderful gig and then that you know, eventually, you know,
Speaker 3: we parted ways and I started a podcast originally called
Speaker 3: The re Education and now it's called Breaking History. And
Speaker 3: once Barry Wise started the Free Press, I wasn't in
Speaker 3: the first wave of hires, but I was writing for
Speaker 3: it a lot. And then I started at the Free
Speaker 3: Press January twenty twenty four, and I had to say,
Speaker 3: it's it's it reminds me a lot of being you know,
Speaker 3: at the Young Daily Beast Daily Beasts not great now,
Speaker 3: but yeah, when I was there, it was a really
Speaker 3: exciting place. You know, it was like, right, there's a
Speaker 3: lot of energy, and that's that's kind of like what
Speaker 3: the free press feels like. So it's nice to have
Speaker 3: to be part of like a growing, thriving publication.
Speaker 1: If the free press is killing it, I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't know any publication that's, you know, anything that's come
Speaker 1: out in the last you know, decade that's doing anything
Speaker 1: near what they're doing.
Speaker 2: It's it's amazing to.
Speaker 3: In some ways it's like easy for us, right, I mean,
Speaker 3: because the big the big outlets which have more resources,
Speaker 3: still won't like touch certain stories, like you think they'd
Speaker 3: learn the lesson, you know, so are like we have.
Speaker 2: The New York Post of course.
Speaker 3: Well no, no, the New York Post. I'm saying, like
Speaker 3: the Time in the Washington Post, it's like they still
Speaker 3: are kind of giving you the same slanted I mean,
Speaker 3: I don't know that Time story on like BB trying
Speaker 3: to prolong the war.
Speaker 1: I mean I've seen that story in exactly Israeli outlets,
Speaker 1: Like that is not a news story. It's just they
Speaker 1: thought it was new and they repackaged it for.
Speaker 3: Cal and like that's just one example. But I'm saying,
Speaker 3: is that, Okay, fine, I expect that in the Nation
Speaker 3: or drop Site or already in or something like that.
Speaker 3: Those are those are ideological outlets. The Times, though it's
Speaker 3: still kind of pretending to be like all the news
Speaker 3: that's fit to print, right, you know, and it's not
Speaker 3: that's a that's an opinion piece kind of masquerading as
Speaker 3: front page. Is Also we have a I think there's
Speaker 3: a built an advantage for I don't want to say alternative,
Speaker 3: but like just normy publications.
Speaker 2: Normally Normany is a great word for it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like the other podcast is called normally and that's
Speaker 1: the that's the idea that Mary News, you know, with
Speaker 1: Mary Katherine Ham.
Speaker 3: That's wow. I love I love that podcast and I
Speaker 3: loved you two together. Yeah, Mary, Catherine is so great, So.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much.
Speaker 3: Great Twitter.
Speaker 1: You refer to yourself as a dilettante, but I don't
Speaker 1: see you like that at all. I see you as
Speaker 1: a very serious foreign policy guy who is not just
Speaker 1: dabbling and not just learning topics overnight. And you know
Speaker 1: the way we all become experts on X on any
Speaker 1: any new topic, like you seem you seem kind of
Speaker 1: the real thing.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you. When I say dilettant, what I mean
Speaker 3: is I have a lot of interests that I want
Speaker 3: to write, and you know, I've been doing it for
Speaker 3: a long time now. So the I compared to somebody
Speaker 3: who I don't know studied at Princeton University Turkish and
Speaker 3: Arabic and I don't I can't compare to that to
Speaker 3: writing about the Middle East, but I know a lot
Speaker 3: of I don't even rate that anyway. So that's kind
Speaker 3: of what I meant in that respect. But dileton is
Speaker 3: not a bad thing. It means you're no, It's not
Speaker 3: it's you're curious, it's it's I don't want you shouldn't
Speaker 3: be an irresponsible dilaton. You shouldn't like allow chat ept
Speaker 3: to be your researcher. You should read books. That's very important,
Speaker 3: reading books like as opposed to But so I do that.
Speaker 3: But at the same time, my my role models for
Speaker 3: people like Christopher Hitchens or the kind of essaysts intellectual journalists.
Speaker 3: That's what I aspire in some ways to be. And
Speaker 3: that's kind of how I look at what I'm trying
Speaker 3: to do. And nobody would say there's a difference between
Speaker 3: reading I don't know, like there's a difference between reading
Speaker 3: Robert Conquest, who kind of wrote the definitive history of
Speaker 3: the Soviet Union before the collapse the SVIT versus somebody
Speaker 3: who's going to write like really like a journalist is
Speaker 3: going to write really well about it. There's different things
Speaker 3: like historians. I have too much respect for what good
Speaker 3: historians do. It's a lot of very bad historians right now.
Speaker 3: But I of.
Speaker 4: Course historians, well there are I'm like, sadly like academic
Speaker 4: historians like I'm But so that's that's kind of what
Speaker 4: I mean by it.
Speaker 3: But thank you for saying that. I do try to.
Speaker 3: I mean, like, you know, first of all, you've been writing.
Speaker 3: If you write about this stuff for a long time,
Speaker 3: you really kind of get to know it. It does help.
Speaker 3: I have people out of these places I've even you know,
Speaker 3: I used to say up into all the access of
Speaker 3: evil countries as a throwback reference.
Speaker 5: Now but I have Yeah, we're going to take a
Speaker 5: quick break and be right back on the Carol Marcowitch Show.
Speaker 1: So any other paths that you would have chosen, Like,
Speaker 1: were you always going to be a writer?
Speaker 2: Was there a plan B in case that didn't work out?
Speaker 3: I don't know if there was a plan B. I
Speaker 3: love music and I played piano, and I've played music
Speaker 3: since I was six, maybe before then. My parents want
Speaker 3: a piano in our house, and it was, you know great,
Speaker 3: So in that respect, I played. You know, if I
Speaker 3: would have like stuck with it, I could see myself
Speaker 3: as being a musician. And I think about that now
Speaker 3: because I love making AI songs on studio and it's
Speaker 3: like one of my favorite activities. So in my podcast,
Speaker 3: I every every podcast has at least one original AI song. Wow,
Speaker 3: that's about that's cool topic. Yeah, So I could see
Speaker 3: myself of maybe being a musician. The problem is that
Speaker 3: it's such a risky kind of proposition.
Speaker 1: That's less of a plan B than it is like
Speaker 1: a subplan A.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I mean, but I love I love music.
Speaker 1: Plan b's are usually like I would be an accountant.
Speaker 3: Right, sure something. At one point I really wanted me
Speaker 3: to go to law school, and I didn't do that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: in part, like I just didn't do it because I
Speaker 3: just know I don't have the kind of personality. There's
Speaker 3: a certain kind of personality that you have to have. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And I again, I have friends who are lawyers. I
Speaker 3: respect what lawyers do. I'm not gonna get lawyer jokes
Speaker 3: for me. I like being a journalist because we get
Speaker 3: to like kind of criticize at least our generation. I
Speaker 3: should say, the journalists that have come up in recent years,
Speaker 3: not all of them, but a lot of them are
Speaker 3: not in my view, they're like kind of they're not
Speaker 3: really journalists. How do I put it? Like the journalistic
Speaker 3: instinct is is that if there's a if there's an
Speaker 3: interest group or a pressure group that says you shouldn't
Speaker 3: talk about X, the journalists can talk about it, like, well,
Speaker 3: let's find out why not not to criticize other journalists
Speaker 3: to talk about X because of the pressure group and
Speaker 3: by the way, the entire trans debate. That can sort
Speaker 3: of sum it up, right, There were a series of
Speaker 3: pieces that were done basically saying, look at these people,
Speaker 3: who are you know, questioning youth, gentermdicine or whatever. I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's our freaking job, and or like there. I don't know,
Speaker 3: this is now kind of an old thing, but like
Speaker 3: a few I don't know, six seven, six years ago,
Speaker 3: when the social media companies were completely out of control,
Speaker 3: there was like a unit of NBC News that would
Speaker 3: just like report on average citizens, right and say like,
Speaker 3: why haven't you banned this account? And that's not journals
Speaker 3: and that's snitching. So for me, like I.
Speaker 1: Just the NBC News, I could think of like New
Speaker 1: York Times articles about average citizens who might have done
Speaker 1: something wrong in their lives.
Speaker 2: I remember a girl who used the N word.
Speaker 1: With an A at the end to you know, to
Speaker 1: be exuberant, and the New York Times wrote a whole
Speaker 1: piece about her, including you know, a guy who held
Speaker 1: onto that recording to specifically ruin her life. She was
Speaker 1: a nobody, I don't even know her name. She lost
Speaker 1: her college acceptance and you know, just it.
Speaker 3: Was normal or The Washington posted that piece about these
Speaker 3: two people who went to a party and they had.
Speaker 2: A kind of Halloween party, right Halloween.
Speaker 3: Party with an inappropriate costume, and then like seven years
Speaker 3: later they're like, you know, they were going to ruin
Speaker 3: your life. And to me, that's like, Okay, that's right,
Speaker 3: that's stossy journalism. That's like, that's like yeah, communist block journal.
Speaker 2: It get into line journalism exactly.
Speaker 3: So I'm not interested in that. And I understand because
Speaker 3: that was I mean, I think we're hopefully turning a corner.
Speaker 3: I understand why journalism has a bad reputation among Americans
Speaker 3: because they're associated with that kind of thing. But for me,
Speaker 3: the spirit of journalism is robust, passionate debate. Newsrooms should
Speaker 3: be places where, you know, occasionally people will like throw
Speaker 3: things at each other and scream at the top of
Speaker 3: their ones at a story meeting because they completely disagree
Speaker 3: with him. That to me is great. I like that, yeah,
Speaker 3: And that's why you know, I don't have a to
Speaker 3: me like, right now, I'm concerned, as I think you
Speaker 3: might be, about the turn on the right to embrace
Speaker 3: the anti Israel anti let's call it anti Semitism in
Speaker 3: some cases of the left, like that's that kind of
Speaker 3: horseshoe is disturbing to me. But I also want to
Speaker 3: always kind of keep in mind, like I don't think
Speaker 3: just because I happen to be pro Israel that there
Speaker 3: shouldn't be certain topics that are off limits. Like yeah, sure,
Speaker 3: let's let's float in to you how much food was
Speaker 3: allowed into Gaza during various points of the war. That's fine.
Speaker 3: Like I'm sure the israeiling, I'm sure the ideaf makes mistakes.
Speaker 3: I'm sure there have been.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean sure, I would say I criticize Israel
Speaker 1: from the other side, like.
Speaker 3: Why are sometimes you know, I don't know, I just
Speaker 3: don't want to see like kind of our side of it,
Speaker 3: so to speak, adopting the same kind of things, and
Speaker 3: like this is like constantly, of.
Speaker 1: Course you should question, of course, but it becomes like,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, my audience knows that I record
Speaker 1: these foreign advance but we're recording this during the time
Speaker 1: where Masad is allegedly, you know, bribing everyone in the country,
Speaker 1: and Donald Trump is probably suspect also because of the
Speaker 1: whole Epstein thing.
Speaker 2: And it's like there is literally zero evidence for this.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about this. I'm with you there, yeah, but
Speaker 3: but let's let's be totally let's put all of our
Speaker 3: cards on the table here.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: When Pam Bondi comes into office as the Attorney General
Speaker 3: and says, the first thing we're going to do is
Speaker 3: release I have the Epstein right here. Yeah, Okay, I'm sorry,
Speaker 3: stop playing with my emotions. Okay. And second of all,
Speaker 3: I am not a hater of Cash Betel by any stretch.
Speaker 3: I think he did Yeoman's work on Russiagate. I think
Speaker 3: some of his post Reussigate media stuff. I don't agree
Speaker 3: with it. Maybe it's like hyperbolic, over the top, but like,
Speaker 3: I'm not here to like crap on Cash Ptel. But
Speaker 3: Cash Hotel is somebody who, when he was out of
Speaker 3: government was like very much believing that there was a
Speaker 3: cover up on Epstein, and he has to do more
Speaker 3: than just do a one eighty Plaine. I went in
Speaker 3: and I agreed with you. Yes, I finally got the
Speaker 3: keys to the kingdom and I saw everything was wrong.
Speaker 3: It turns out I was wrong, and that just goes
Speaker 3: to show you, and so I apologize for being wrong.
Speaker 3: I went ahead over my skis and let me walk
Speaker 3: you through and really meet these people, because I think
Speaker 3: Cash Hotel and Dan Bongino have a lot of credibility
Speaker 3: with magnation, and there's an opportunity now to really do it,
Speaker 3: Like go on your show, Go on, Megan Kelly, I
Speaker 3: don't know, go on one of these shows and give them
Speaker 3: two hours, right, and walk us through what you thought
Speaker 3: going in and what you ended up learning. Because when
Speaker 3: there's a vacuum like this, of course people are going
Speaker 3: to expect the worst and suspect the worst and they
Speaker 3: and that's that's my criticism.
Speaker 1: You're fully right, yeah, but of course it's the Masad
Speaker 1: part that I find, like you know.
Speaker 2: Anything to do with it?
Speaker 3: You know, obviously Massad. I don't think Massad is doing
Speaker 3: blackmail operations against Americans, which is what the Jeffrey Epstein
Speaker 3: against Donald Trump.
Speaker 2: It's not even just Americans.
Speaker 1: It would have to be Donald like it would have
Speaker 1: to be our president, right.
Speaker 3: But the Masad is an intelligence organization, a very lethal
Speaker 3: and effective intelligence organization has juststrated in the Twelve Day
Speaker 3: War and before with pager operations and so forth. They're
Speaker 3: in the skullduggery business. What I want to say here
Speaker 3: is I don't think that they're doing this against like
Speaker 3: American politicians or American celebrities, And there is no evidence
Speaker 3: to suggest at this point, you know, other than like
Speaker 3: kind of throwaway comment that was made by a journalists
Speaker 3: like I recently went through like reading like how did
Speaker 3: this thing start? But on the other hand, if you
Speaker 3: just wanted to look at well, does do intelligence organizations?
Speaker 3: Does the Masad conduct what are known as honey traps?
Speaker 3: Of course they do?
Speaker 2: Sure, Sure.
Speaker 3: Do they engage in blackmail? Of course they do. That's
Speaker 3: probably one of the ways they were able to penetrate Iran.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's like and as somebody who's written a
Speaker 3: lot about the Masad over the years, and you know
Speaker 3: is read a lot of books and talk to x
Speaker 3: Masad people and a couple current Masade people over the
Speaker 3: you know, as a journalist, I don't have like you know,
Speaker 3: if you if you just want to sort of say
Speaker 3: Massa's an intelligence agency and as an intelligence agency, it's
Speaker 3: it's up to its neck and a bunch of skullduggery.
Speaker 3: I agree, But that's not what you know, what I'm saying,
Speaker 3: that doesn't mean that's not that's not what they're saying.
Speaker 3: They're kind of going much further. Yeah, and there are
Speaker 3: lots of unanswered questions about Jeffrey Epstein that I still
Speaker 3: have lots of skepticism about. I still am like not
Speaker 3: satisfied that he was that the guards just happened to
Speaker 3: not catch him killing himself in the cell. I also
Speaker 3: have come to really want to love a good financial
Speaker 3: reporter to explain to me this hedge fund with only
Speaker 3: one client, what the hell is that he's got gazillions
Speaker 3: of dollars that he's supposedly managing. He has no experience
Speaker 3: really as a financial manager. Who are his clients? How
Speaker 3: did this happen? We're talking about a lot of money,
Speaker 3: So it might be and I'm just throwing this out
Speaker 3: as a possibility that there is some perhaps maybe not
Speaker 3: even masade. It might be CIA. Might be. This might
Speaker 3: have been a sort of intelligence agency slush fund. This
Speaker 3: happened before what I want to try to do. And
Speaker 3: I did an episode of my podcast Breaking History on
Speaker 3: it was about JFK and his assassination, and I did
Speaker 3: not come up by saying I said, I don't think
Speaker 3: I think that Lee rvy Oswald did it. And he
Speaker 3: was alone assassin, which is boring at this point, But
Speaker 3: what I said is I kind of understand why so
Speaker 3: many Americans didn't believe it then and don't believe it now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they've been lied to about other things too.
Speaker 3: Exactly so. And so when you have Bongino, Bondie and
Speaker 3: Patel doing a one to eighty and not explaining why, well, like, okay,
Speaker 3: I don't believe it. I don't think there's much evidence
Speaker 3: of this, you know, Epstein Masad stuff. But I also
Speaker 3: kind of understand, like, wait a second, even these people
Speaker 3: are not being straight with us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, switching gears, let's switch gears. What do
Speaker 2: you worry about?
Speaker 3: That's a great question. I have a four year old daughter,
Speaker 3: so of course I worry about the future. Were all
Speaker 3: kinds of reasons for her, little things like you know,
Speaker 3: she's at the age now when we are walking in
Speaker 3: the city she can break away from me when we're
Speaker 3: across the street. That makes me crazy. So that's like
Speaker 3: an immediate thing. But in the more house for sense,
Speaker 3: like I want her to have the kinds of things
Speaker 3: that I guess I took for granted in my life,
Speaker 3: Like I want her to be able to go to
Speaker 3: college without being indoctrinated, without being intimidated because she's Jewish.
Speaker 3: I don't want her to, Like, I don't want her
Speaker 3: to I wanted to be able to, like have romantic
Speaker 3: relationships when she's of age without it being fraught with
Speaker 3: all this you know, political stuff, Like I just very
Speaker 3: very like, I don't want her to kind of come
Speaker 3: into a culture where all the things that I took
Speaker 3: for granted are not available for her, including maybe you
Speaker 3: could say, are the prosperity by the luck that I
Speaker 3: was born when I was born and was able to
Speaker 3: have this kind of comfort and so forth. So that
Speaker 3: that's something I say, I worry about. But on the
Speaker 3: other hand, I tend to be an optimist. I'm especially
Speaker 3: an optimist about America. I'm also an optimist in Israel.
Speaker 3: So I kind of feel like we're going to get
Speaker 3: it right. And I see all kinds of reasons to
Speaker 3: think we are getting it right.
Speaker 1: So it's a very optimistic moment. Actually, I feel like
Speaker 1: there's a lot of doom and gloom and you know,
Speaker 1: black pilling, as the kids say, But it's actually a
Speaker 1: very very optimistic, forward looking moment right now.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, I mean, listen, I think that, you know, there
Speaker 3: are there are elements of the Trump administration's policies on
Speaker 3: higher education that I don't agree with, in something I
Speaker 3: really applaud, but I also think that like it's I
Speaker 3: think we're also culturally in a moment where like that
Speaker 3: there's an understanding in these elite schools. Hey, this isn't
Speaker 3: really sustainable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, things are changing.
Speaker 3: The battle is not over. It's like the war's not
Speaker 3: over yet. But there's been major things that have you know,
Speaker 3: we went from in the course of like four years
Speaker 3: maybe where you had people at the commanding heights of
Speaker 3: our culture screaming DEI and intersectionalism and all this stuff
Speaker 3: is not a thing, like you know what I mean,
Speaker 3: Like it's not a thing to like a real recognition
Speaker 3: and the Supreme Court decision like that's.
Speaker 2: Big, huge stuff.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And again, so I have again, I have a lot
Speaker 3: of faith in our system, and I think that the
Speaker 3: Trump election is unjostling a lot of things. Some of
Speaker 3: it will not be for good. Some I think a
Speaker 3: lot of it will be for good. But it's a
Speaker 3: We're in a change and it's good. We needed to change.
Speaker 3: Like I was, I was depressed in twenty twenty and
Speaker 3: twenty twenty mine, Yeah about like we're just stagnant. And
Speaker 3: I don't feel like we're stagnant it's much anymore.
Speaker 1: I was negative on America for the first time in
Speaker 1: my life, Like, I was pessimistic for the very first
Speaker 1: time in my life life on America. During that time,
Speaker 1: I thought we were heading in such a bad direction,
Speaker 1: and I was scary.
Speaker 3: But what is it? It doesn't it? I mean that
Speaker 3: that statistic that came out that ninety three percent of
Speaker 3: Republicans love their country and like thirty six percent of
Speaker 3: Democrats do.
Speaker 2: It's a worrying number.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in a way, it's wearing, but it's also like wow,
Speaker 3: Like what is it? You know, Like that's a wake
Speaker 3: up call, Like you can't you can't get a major
Speaker 3: natural party if most of the people who identify.
Speaker 2: With hate the country.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you kind of have to, like at.
Speaker 2: A certain point sort of part of the bargain.
Speaker 3: The argument can't be yeah America sucks, it's got to
Speaker 3: be Yeah, America is great, and here's how to make
Speaker 3: it better.
Speaker 5: We're going to take a quick break and be right
Speaker 5: back on the Carol Marcowitch Show. What advice would you
Speaker 5: give your sixteen year old self.
Speaker 3: Well, the first thing I guess I would say is
Speaker 3: you have ADHD and it has been not been te
Speaker 3: coost yet. That explains why you're constantly like reading like
Speaker 3: seven books at the same time. It's fine, you know
Speaker 3: you'll but like, that's the first thing I would say.
Speaker 3: There's nothing wrong with you, it's like you know. But
Speaker 3: the second thing I just I would say is believe
Speaker 3: in your own talent like you have. You have the
Speaker 3: ability to write for a living, like you should. You
Speaker 3: should do that because by sixteen, I think I knew
Speaker 3: I wanted to do it. Just stick with it, like
Speaker 3: because I wasn't a good writer at age sixteen. The
Speaker 3: very few people are sure and don't don't be demoralized
Speaker 3: about it. So I don't know if that's a good thing.
Speaker 2: I like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely to stick with it and don't be demoralized
Speaker 1: is good advice for that age. I loved this conversation.
Speaker 1: You are just somebody. I love hearing from you.
Speaker 2: And I always love reading.
Speaker 1: You leave us here with your best tip for my
Speaker 1: listeners on how they can improve their lives.
Speaker 3: I think the best tip would be fine time in
Speaker 3: your week to read or listen to books. If you
Speaker 3: don't like reading books, if you can't find that stillness,
Speaker 3: take a walk and put on an audiobook to learn
Speaker 3: and dive into things that you're passionate about. So, in
Speaker 3: my view, like don't let you know it's it's great
Speaker 3: to listen to podcasts. It's great to like, I understand
Speaker 3: that we're living in the era of influencers, and that's fine.
Speaker 3: Maybe I'm sort of an influencer. I don't know, and
Speaker 3: you're certainly an influencer.
Speaker 2: You influenced me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, But what I mean to say is there's a
Speaker 3: whole world out there and you can become like you
Speaker 3: don't have to depend on these other people filtering stuff
Speaker 3: go out Like I find like I have a mixed
Speaker 3: I'm not a doomer about artificial intelligence, and I'm also
Speaker 3: not like I don't think it's the greatest thing in
Speaker 3: the world. But one of the things that I do
Speaker 3: that helps me with you know, when I do these
Speaker 3: deep dives for bringing history, I just ask the chat
Speaker 3: gipt or I use Brock a lot. Now, what are
Speaker 3: the three best books on X? And if you just
Speaker 3: do that and then you know they're not always going
Speaker 3: to be right, but like you can get a little
Speaker 3: summary in the answer and if it looks like it's
Speaker 3: pretty good, that's what That's what I would say. Read
Speaker 3: books or listen to books like that's that advice.
Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely you can, you know, go to the source material.
Speaker 2: Don't just rely on influencer. He's Eli Lake.
Speaker 1: Read him at free Press, Listen to the Breaking History
Speaker 1: podcast anywhere you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Eli for coming on.
Speaker 3: Thank you Carol