Amanda Carpenter and Evan Gershkovich: Trump's and Putin's Authoritarian Projects

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to the Bullock Daily. I'm your host Tim Miller coming at you live from Washington D.C. at Bullock HQ. So Charlie XCX last night, segment one, we've got the Charlie of the Bullock Day Asperer. Stick around for segment two, we have Evan Gerschkevich, who has a new book out this cursed beautiful land about the 500 days he spent in a Russian prison targeted by Putin when he was reporting in the country. It's a really great conversation to do stick around for that. But first, formally at the Bullock, she's now a writer and editor at protectdemocracy.org. The sub-stack is if you can keep it, it's a man to carpenter, what's up girl? - Hey, I think I should be complimented by being compared to Charlie XCX, but I'm not totally sure. That said, I do need some advice. My daughter wanted me to take her to a concert. Her favorite band, Weezer, is in town at DC, so we're going. I have not been to a concert probably in 15 years, so I have no idea what I'm supposed to do, but I think the vibes will be high, and I'm very excited. - Where are Weezer playing? - I'm at Capital One Center at DC. So we're driving on in on Friday night. - They're still selling out the arenas. - Yep, the shins are open, and Silver Sun pickups. - Weezer, the shit, look at this. Weezer, blue album, when I was in fifth grade, was the first CD I bought. I bought tapes before that 'cause we're old. So the first CD I bought was The Weezer Blue Album. Say it and so. Maybe we'll take people out with a little say it and so. - Well, let me inform you of this. My kids who are middle school and high schooler, they all like to collect CDs, like vintage albums now. So she does have the blue CD. My son is into guerrillas. - Sure. - Like all these bands are big right now, and they all have CD collections that they're building out, like old timey things that sit on their shelves. - 90's nostalgia. - Live with that one. - Just put me in the grave. - Okay, you'll have a great time. I'll send you to Shilv a great time. The Reno's bump and they're doing some renovations. It was good last night, same spot. We're kind of already doing a vibe check. So let's start with that. Because you have to schlep in to Capital One Arena from the Boonies. You know, you're out there in Trump country. I do like to just kind of do a check in with you. Like what's the sign? Like are you seeing signs? You know, the hats, hat count, small talk at children's sporting events, catching any vibes? - I've gotta say, the signs have not been out. It is very low key. We ran a 5K on Saturday night, which was a fundraiser for a local sports team. My son dusted me, which is just embarrassing because he's 13 years old, has not trained and just demolished me. So that's good and bad in many ways. But the local Republican party was sponsoring it. And it was just no signs about anything, just the elephant, like kind of old school. So I was a little bit like, oh, it's just gonna be like a magazine. No, low key, quiet vibes you'll look. Not to brag about. It gives me just a slight worry about the polls. It kind of cuts both ways, right? On the one hand, midterms are all about turnout and enthusiasm. So if the Democrats really refuse to answer polls, that means they're gonna be enthused to turnout. But I'm a little worried that the mega crowd is just kind of embarrassed right now. You hear this in Sarah's focus groups? And like, they get a political poll and they're like, yeah, I'm not gonna do that today. But maybe they still, but I'm a little worried that there's kind of a little undercount happening. We'll keep an eye on it. I want to do the protect democracy side of the midterms first. And since we've been helpy and pill blatantly on the podcast, I want to start with the hopey on the side of it, which is they have a ton of failures on this front. And they've been trying to rig the midterms or at least put their thumb on the scale or influence the midterms. Basically, since as soon as he got in, redistricting, plop, the mail and voting takeovers, a flop, election lies, a bunch of other stuff. Just kind of wondering like, what your assessment is, having been monitoring and fighting all these efforts. - I'm happy to walk through their failures and flops, but I don't want people to think that we are complacent or advising anyone to be. Because any of this stuff could go haywire. - We're just pointing in laughing. - Yeah, we're not complacent. We're just pointing in laughing while staying vigilant. - Absolutely. So our framework for analyzing the election was always that Trump is going to deceive the public with election lies so that he could disrupt the process and deny results later. So this deceive portion was big. You know, what was the next big lie going to be? And then you saw him setting up all these allegations of non-citizen voting, voter fraud, setting up all these pretexts so that you could have the federal database to purge voters. None of that has worked so far. As you've mentioned, the mail-in voting takeover has flops. The save database that they've tried to get everyone to use on a mandatory basis has largely flopped. Although there was that Supreme Court decision on Friday where they are allowing to go for it for individual checks. So I do want to say here very plainly, the people most at risk for being flagged on this falsely are naturalized citizens. So if you are a naturalized citizen planning devote, please check your registration now. If you get something in the mail asking you to affirm that you need to follow up with it. So we really need to raise-- - That's good flag. If you have a naturalized citizen friend that isn't listening to the Bullwork podcast, maybe give them a heads up. - Yep, yep, and so be on the lookout for that. Check your registration and make a plan to vote. But that said, getting everyone to conform to this federal database that the USPS is going to be in charge of Hasfield. You saw these attempts come out after Trump's big election speech in July that was largely a flop 'cause even networks like Fox would not cover it. And people like Maria Barteromo are benched. You saw Secretary Lutnik, which I am being very careful to say correctly then, had that big census report that he said was going to find thousands of non-citizen voters flop. Everyone could see through the fake statistics on that almost immediately. You then had Mark Wayne Mullin come out with another separate report more recently where he was saying, oh, we have 16,000 illegal voters. Another flop, that number went down to zero. And so there's been these attempts to try to set this up, it's not working. That's not to say they're not still peddling lies about Chinese parts in voting machines and pressuring Lutnik to designate voting machines as critical infrastructure. And this stuff is still out there, but the big lies that they have tried to push as pretext to set up these processes are not working. And so our message to people has been that, yes, we were worried that they were gonna throw up obstacles between the voters and the ballot box, but right now that path to the ballot box is clear. Everyone needs to make a plan to take advantage of that and then we're all gonna work together to do two more things, make sure every vote is counted and every rightful winner is seated. So this is not over yet, of course, but their plans are failing, spectacularly. - I wanted to dial in on one of the things that you mentioned, because it was so stupid, and I forget, I forget when I was on vacation, or if it was just so stupid, I didn't wanna deal with it or if I was leading to vacation, but the election lie speech, the big speech that he gave. I do think it's important to kind of step back sometimes and take their lies at face value, rather than just glossing over them or make fun of them, right? I mean, the President of the United States give a prime time address where he accused China of rigging our elections in the past. And that was two months ago. And here we are last week. He invites Chairman Xi to the White House and fets him, compliments him, says how great of a guy is, which betrays either an unbelievable weakness that the person he thinks rigged the election, he still wants to suck up to, or his heart isn't even in the lie, you know? - Everything is done at Trump's convenience. I mean, this lie that they are peddling is set up for his convenience so that he can deny results that he doesn't like. And I don't wanna dismiss this because that lie is still active. I don't know if you saw just yesterday, Secretary of War, Pete Hexeth put out a memo saying that I'm on special notice to make sure that there is no foreign interference in the election with machines. And so was he just doing that to say like, oh, I'm kinda doing something and make the boss happy? Maybe, but they're still on this. And so they very much want this pretext so that they can go raid voting machines potentially. All these scenarios are still on the table. I'm just saying they don't have the momentum and the buy-in from the public for that fever pitch that we saw in like 2020. - And they don't even have the guys to execute it, right? I mean, part of it is on the media side, the propaganda, you know, we've talked about this a couple times the last couple weeks, but like, the right wing like podcast, man, a sphere stuff, like they're not even talking about it anymore. Right, he's not giving them a narrative. But you can't, like these guys need a little bit more of a narrative if you're gonna try to blame China for stealing the election. - Can you bring she to the White House and don't say anything? Like, what are you supposed to say if you're Benny Johnson about this? Like, oh, the president, the president is, you know, it's a cute, it's maybe it's cute on. Maybe he was really mean to him behind the scenes. (laughs) - You know, playing 40 chats to make a deal with Chi. I, you know, you can see how people can get there. - And then people are leaving. Yeah, as you pointed out, that you had Joe DeGenerva, who was brought in to look into how former administration officials were improperly investigating Trump and they were gonna go after the investigators. Him and Kurt Olsenquit, the number two at the FBI, Andrew Bailey, he resigned. That's another number two, Dan Magino had already left. He's a big election denier. Like, one thing I'm worried about is kind of the bottom up. Like, there obviously are still some true believers in the county offices, but they don't really have the people to execute the scale of what they would like to do with the election. - Yeah, I mean, I guess we could put on the scenario [BLANK_AUDIO] people are leaving to the vacate act from the outside in like I don't totally expect someone like Eagle Ed Martin to totally disappear, but the point is that they don't have people in positions to press the lovers of power that they planned. I think it's absolutely right. I mean, we went from Pam Bondy to Todd Blanche and Tulsi's gone and a lot of the people involved in that Fulton County raid, which I thought was extremely instructive because they did get access to materials that was based on a bad warrant full of bad information that never should have been accepted. But that is good because now we can put people on notice that you don't have to take these claims that face value judges do have some kind of obligation to evaluate the veracity of the documents when you're presented with a search warrant like that. But the idea, I mean, we can't say it yet, but I think we need to get comfortable with saying that the whole Trump 2025 project is going down the tubes. It is failing on every level. If you really look at it, they had a good robust six months and getting what they wanted. But now if you look at his big weaponization project for the Department of Justice, you mentioned the fact that Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe Danva, I'll get that right someday and Kurt Olsen have left. They were supposed to be the one spearheading this grand conspiracy thing where they were going to get all the bad guys who went after Trump and put those scelps up on the wall. They have no case. They have left without prosecuting anyone. And I know that there are some indictments going forward, but as a project and what they promised and what this big campaign of retribution that they said was going to rain down on anyone who ever criticized Trump or pointed out his illegality is just not come true. And so I really hope that people aren't afraid anymore. There was a time where people were afraid. And I think retreating to their respective corners. But this project is failing and if the midterms go the way that the polling indicates, I think we really need to start branding this presidency as the worst one we've ever seen, failing by its own merits, by its own design and just showing that we have rejected this authoritarian direction once and for all and then really recalibrate to hold people accountable and make sure it never happens again. Yeah, it's funny, the 1984 North Korea taxpayer funded propaganda that Trump is running. I kind of locked in and focused on the line about how he's going to expel the war mongers from our government. What's just shows how out of date. Show yourself the door. Yeah, the audio that they were taking was for this old ad that we're all paying for with our money. But there's another line in there too about how we all demolish the deep state. And I think this ties together what you're talking about the failure of the weaponization project, the fact that the mega media sphere doesn't have a good story to even tell their own people. And it's like Sam and Will did a thing yesterday on both French, this guy running for Railroad Commissioners, racist guy in Texas and how many times in the past he called for the execution of Trump's foes. This was all very common language in this world. Trump was going to get in and they were going to jail all the people that had come for them that had supposedly weaponized the government and the Biden administration. And they have pop kiss again. What is Benny Johnson and Dan Rodriguez was to talk about on their podcast like who were the deep state operatives that they've gotten? Nothing. Yeah. I mean, again, I don't want to get too far ahead of things, but I think we can fairly start to judges on the merits. Go back and look at what they set out to do, the high standard that they put out for themselves. I don't care what metric you want to put on it, whether it's the bullshit retribution or the spending cuts or the terrorists or the war. I mean, you name it. I am trying to generously think of one thing that they are succeeding at. And I think I could have got there in the first six months. The border. I don't know. His own people don't think there's enough deportations. Yeah. So I can say that you're doing deportations, but by their standard for what they said to you. Great, but you have no one to blame. You had a Republican Congress, right? No excuses. So I'm ready to start framing that out. All right. Well, we have ongoing corruption efforts. That is one thing they succeeded at. Amanda, they do some ongoing corruption efforts. I enjoyed this shout out to Zach Everson over on Blue Sky. He skied at this. He identified this. A Don Jr. backed drone parts manufacturer, congratulated an Eric Trump backed drone manufacturer on winning a DOD contract. People don't even understand the skills as one of them was called unusual machines. The other one's called extend. This is just how the business of our government is working. Our national security contractors. You've got to put a Trump family member on the board in order to ensure that you're going to get a taxpayer money. It is stunning. The level involvement, the Trump and Lutnik and Whitcoff son, are they all sons, probably all sons are involved in defense, tech, AI, crypto, policy and contracts. I mean, it is a gold mine for them. And in many cases, I don't know if you looked at these mining contracts that some of them are also involved in. It is like the salindra. Do you remember salindra? We call it venture socialism. It's essentially part of the same thing. You have these investors who go in on a project and then get the government financing to back it, even though it is unproven. You don't know what you're going to get and they get to get out before everything goes in the tank. I mean, we don't know that these projects are going to work out, but they stand to make a lot of money because the Pentagon budget is gone and big on the loans. I mean, I'm not like a big economic analyst, but I can understand how this works and it's a scam. And so that there's just so much investigating and following the money to see how this stuff happened that needs to happen in a new Congress. But I do think there's just something even more easy to understand for the general public. And that is Trump is stealing your money. Look at this ballroom, look at these PSAs that he's putting out. How is he getting the money to do this? Congress never authorized it. There's documentation where he is raiding other pots of money from the Secret Service, from the National Parks to do this thing that nobody said he could do. I mean, this is illegal spending. And at some point, there has to be a Congress that says, you know what, we're going to assert our spending power because honestly, if Congress does not protect its spending power, what is the point of Congress? You just have a president who can use money to do whatever he wants. You might as well just pack it up and go home. And so on the ballroom, there was a decision that said it could go forward, but that ruled just on the standing. It did not rule on who has the power to decide that this money should pay for it. And then you add on the lie that he's soliciting private donations to pay for the whole thing. Okay, let's take that at face value. Who's giving him the money? How much? A little agar. Like, how booby-trapped with Chinese and Russian spyware is this thing going to be at the end of the day? Because there's no, it's following no processes and no standards. You can say Clark construction is a reputable company, but I don't know, seems to me like they're doing illegal work on property that Trump does not own. So I think there's a lot of problems with that. And just following the stolen money, there's a paper trail for all of this, right? And there's people who are moving around money that should not be moving around money that way. And so I think there's, you know, fines and penalties that can be imposed and absolutely need to be. And because this one is so documented and is contained between Congress and the White House, I don't have any doubt that we're capable of finding out what happened and who is responsible and holding them accountable for it. Yeah. In addition to the ballroom, when you're just going around DC, like there's more and more brand, I'm shit that's going up over on the memorial bridge. So when I saw this for the first time, it's this, I know people don't like my take about how the Oval Office got a little bit of enough grade at the beginning before the goal through. So you're into the gold dictator. There was some, I could have used a little more color. The Oval Office was a little dreary, okay, that's all, I said. But I mean, we don't need gold everywhere on the Memorial Bridge, which is the bridge between Arlington Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial. Those are my favorite statues. Yeah. This is like, this is fucking horse with like a couple, I'm looking, I took a picture. The couple of muscled. Is this like a kind of a bronze age pervert? Well, the horse is one there, but he regilded them so they've yielded the horses. So we've yielded the horses. Yes. Yes. So they're super shiny now. Yeah. Total bronze age kind of pervert. And that's right where he wants to put the arch, which also is illegal. Yeah. I mentioned, like, where's the money coming from? I mean, there was the big resisions, and, you know, case also last week that you mentioned, and kind of the question about staying on all this, like, is Russ Vote managing the ledger here? I think Russ Vote is doing a lot of it. So they came in with the game plan so that they would argue that this thing called "Recisions" is constitutional and like pocket videos, which essentially what they're saying is that even though Congress passes bills to authorize the money and decides how it's going to be spent. Once it goes to OMB, he thinks that he can kind of override Congress and redirect the money however he would like to do it. That is not true. Congress needs to fight him on that. And I don't know if you saw there was a story over the last few days where they did another pocket rescission for $800 million across a bunch of programs. And now members of Congress, I don't know if they're pretending, you know, Susan Collins was listening to the story saying that she is concerned about it. Isn't she the chair of the appropriations committee about it? Yeah. You think she would have some more to say, but this has been a long standing issue between Congress and Russ vote since the beginning. So this is not like a new thing that's happened, but what we need to have is a Congress who actually fights him on it and goes to court on these issues, especially in something so egregious as the ballroom, because I just want to point out Trump asked Congress to fund the ballroom. He asked Republicans and Congress to do it. They didn't. That is essentially saying no. And so that the fact that he's going around them anyway to steal money from Secret Service and National Parks to do it anyway when this thing is probably going to end up about as good as the reflecting pool, to be honest, because again, like what controls we have. And I had the architect quit because of health and safety standards because it is a fire hazard. So just end the darn thing because it's probably going to be nothing but a huge problem for the next president down the road. There's so many reasons to go into it, but primarily, you don't have to care about the ballroom to care about this issue because it is a constitutional separation of powers matter, and Congress needs to fight on it. I like your all caps energy on the ballroom. It's nice. It's good. I need to kick in my ass on locking in on ballroom outrage. And now a message from our sponsor, the reading room. Here at the Bullwork, we talk a lot about Jeffrey Epstein and how important it is to keep the story in the news. 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Dem Congress, we're going to assume that the Dems take the House, potentially the Senate that could have both sides, which I think adds an interesting wrinkle. What is a game plan from the protect democracy perspective and obviously there's only so much to be done. Trump's still the president and they're not going to have a veto-proof majority, but there's obviously a bunch to be done on the oversight side of things where you add on prioritizations. I will say as a baseline, there's a lot of energy on the Democratic side from the right people to do stuff on corruption. The problem is that there's too much to go after, which makes it very difficult. What you're seeing now is the oversight chairman's going to do this, the judiciary chairman's going to do that. They're starting to divvy it up, but just so people can keep it straight. There's really three main things that need to happen very quickly in all those places. Number one, you have to investigate. You do have to do the fact finding, exercise of finding where the stolen money is, who is responsible for taking it, and you can apply that to whatever topic you want. It needs to happen in a lot of different places. They also need to start legislating, doing things with the power they have. You can start to pass things called riders on appropriations bills and say explicitly, no funds can be used for construction of the ballroom. No funds can be used for this. Make it super explicit that you cannot do this so that when you go to court, there's no doubt about it. And then I think we also have to start thinking about what kind of anti-corruption reform package could be passed one day so that a president can't get away with this again, because the fact is there are laws that apply to people like judges and members of Congress, but just don't apply to the president and the vice president. So I would like to see that get together. And then we have to litigate. I do think Congress does have to go to court to defend its spending power and get a court to rule on these very basic issues, which are just reiterating what is in the stinking constitution anyway. But let's do all those exercises and in the process, I think that is accountability in itself. But I want to find out who is awarding these contracts, the shady contracts, who is moving the money around. Like all this stuff is discoverable and so let's do it. Yep. And the fact finding, like the other thing is sometimes when I hear people poo-poo this, like well, this administration doesn't follow the rules and I can play ball and I can testify that I can turn documents over. And that's true. But like you just go back to impeachment ones. And there are still government career employees in the government. They have to execute some of this stuff. Like the tungsten deal in Kazakhstan isn't just Peter Navarro and Don Trump Jr., right? Like they, that there are actual functionaries. And there's people on the private side, on the business side. There's other people in the transaction who are outside the reach of government. And so. We've already seen it just on that Navarro, I forget if it's a tungsten one or a different one, on the Don Jr. Navarro contract, where it's like, you know, there's somebody in the Department of War, I like how you follow Bullwark's style on the reason of war, the Department of War. You know, there was somebody that had to like execute the contract. And so there was the back and forth. They're like, why am I executing this contract? And it's like, oh, because Peter Navarro said so. Like that, like that's just one example of something that we've already found. And who the hell knows how much more of that there is. I think there's a lot. I think it's going to keep Congress busy for the next two to four years. Thanks a two. Andrew, I hear last thing this morning is on the impeachment again, trained. Oh, good. Where are you at on impeachment again? I mean, if you have a good case, I wouldn't say no. But like, I think there's a lot of reasons to do it. But like, I want to see exactly what we're going after. And I haven't seen anyone who is in position to do something like that begin to put it together. Let's get rid of articles. Yeah. Let's see what it looks like. Okay. But for everybody out there that is full of blood lust and just once, like, 26 impeachments in 2007, impeach him every other week. We do have a new show coming to the Bullwork Podcast Network soon. It's called Psychopolitics, George Conway. In here, we have sort of a colloquial name for it as well, which is the impeach the motherfucker again and again and again and again, show. So that will be there right here on the Bullwork Network. And Amanda, anything else that I missed that you're hot on over your monitoring, over a PD? I don't think so. I think that covers most of it. I mean, there's other stuff for you. Lot out there. We'll have you back either right before the election, depending on kind of what shenanigans are up to or right after to talk about all that kind of fallout stuff, which is sort of the next phase of this, what happens between Election Day and the seating of the new Congress and in the meantime, enjoy Weezer. Great. Thanks. I'll stick around for Evan Gerchemisch. See you, Amanda. All right. We are back. He is the foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal based in Berlin. Previously, he was posted in Moscow. He spent nearly 500 days in a Russian prison on a fabricated espionage charge. His experiences were counted in his new book, This Curse Beautiful Land, which is out today. It's Evan Gerchemisch. Hey, man. Hey, Tim. Thanks for having me. So you're in Berlin now. And I don't know. I was just there this summer in Kreuzberg. There's a lot of still East Berlin stuff there. It's just feeling a little close for comfort to me. Had I been prisoned by the FSB, I might have gotten a little further away. I don't know. Maybe San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans. I've gotten that question a lot. You're not the first. OK. Yeah. And it's still like at the center of things in the sort of new conflict that is burgeoning. My main takeaway, we get things right about Russia. We get things wrong. I've gotten some things right. I've clearly gotten some things wrong. Part of the reason I'm here talking to you today. But one thing that I think I do get right is their approach to the way they class people as either traders or let's say enemies or opponents. And I go into the latter category. So a Russian citizen who they see as being opposed to them or switching sides, like let's say the late opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, or somebody who was working in the Russian intelligence services who's now collaborating with Ukrainians, whether Europeans or the Americans. And you know, we've seen these cases where they poison them or target them abroad. I see my situation as I was a really useful sort of asset for them to trade and get something in return. And I've done my job, in a way, and they don't really need anything else from me. And I don't really see myself as very dangerous to them. I might have been kind of an irritant. The reporting that I was doing, that might be why I put a target on my back in a way as a sort of easy guy to set up Knav and swap, but I don't really see myself as posing a danger to them currently. Again, I've gotten things wrong before, so I can't claim to be the perfect, the best analyst on Putin's Russia. But I think I'm a decent analyst. All right. Well, if you just decide that you want, you know, a little charsier setting, we can put in a call to the editors at the Wall Street Journal. I think that after 500 days in prison, you know, you can get like kind of a warmer climate for your next post. But we'll talk about it. Barcelona. Yeah, Barcelona. For people who do not know, I just, I thought maybe we could just start with kind of a reader's die. version of how you found yourself in the oral with the black sack over your head. And maybe take us from, I don't know, high school to the black sack in a couple of paragraphs. - That's a big task. I'll try to be a brief in just a couple minutes. I'll try a couple of minutes. I was born in New Jersey, but my parents are Soviet immigrants. They left in this big wave of Jewish departures from the Soviet Union, Russian speaking. My mom's from present-day Russia. My dad's from present-day Ukraine. They met in the States, had my sister, then me, and enforced a Russian speaking home. So in the home, it was completely sort of this kind of like Soviet bubble, in a way. We spoke Russian, our names were in Russian, so my name's Vanya at home. And then when we watched Russian, we're Soviet movies and cartoons. And then when we steps out outside of the home, we were in a kind of like typical suburban New Jersey. Though I guess not so typical 'cause it was Princeton. So it's also a kind of bubble until itself in Central Jersey. And I got into the idea of journalism, I was messing around with it, got lucky enough to get a job at the New York Times in New York, but really competitive. I was what's classed as a news assistant, and some people worked their way up to become reporters, but it's really difficult. And a bunch of colleagues were like, dude, you speak Russian. There was a outlet called the Moscow Times that had been working in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. It was launched in 1992. And it's an amazing independent outlet that tons of foreign correspondents went through. They were looking for a reporter, I applied, moved to Russia in late 2017. So I'm 25 at this point, about to turn 26. And Putin had been in charge of this country now for 18 years at this point. He had already invaded Ukraine. Russian journalists had faced increasing pressure at this point. An opposition leader, Boris Nemsov, was murdered in the streets near the Kremlin. So it's not like it was some sort of perfectly safe place, but reporters could report even Russian journalists were doing amazing investigations at that point. And foreign journalists were treated as kind of like quasi diplomats. If the Kremlin wasn't happy with you, you may get your visa, not renewed. That wasn't even happening at that point. The last time a foreign correspondent was taken on fabricated espionage charges was in the late '80s. So Soviet period, not even contemporary Russia. Then comes the full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. I had just started working for the journal. And so then everything we're covering at that point becomes war related. That's the story of the day. But also these kinds of rules of the game had shifted because once Russia sent completely its armies into Ukraine, it passed these religious founding censorship laws. You couldn't even call the war a war. Legally, you had to call it a special military operation. To any story we were doing was violating the law. So some foreign bureaus left. We stayed. There was a debate. The foreign ministry actually called us in and asked what our plans were. And during this meeting, the foreign ministry spoke to them and told us that we call men women and women men in the West. So we can call this a special military operation. It wasn't the same. But some of us stayed thinking, you know, we'll see. We still think it's really a red line to cross. And I was reporting stories. How Putin was getting his information from the front and making decisions about the war. I went to a town where the 76th Division of the Russia's Air Force is based, which had occupied a town in Ukraine called Pucha and committed a series of war crimes there. So I was doing, you know, we can call it sort of fearless investigative reporting or reckless reporting in a way as well. You know, we could also look at that way. The flip side as, you know, Russia was at war with not just Ukraine and its view, but what it called the collective West. And in the turn of 2023, when 2023 started, I started reporting a story about how Russia was preparing for Ukraine's telegraphed counteroffensive that Ukraine was, you know, saying it was going to take back swaths of territory in the South. It took Crimea. The West was talking about this, but not much reporting was going on about how Russia was preparing its defenses. At the same time, Putin had addressed his domestic intelligence service, the FSB, formerly known as the KGB, and told them to catch a spy. And lo and behold, I was set up in a sting operation. I was meeting with the source, and we were reporting a story on how basically the economy was switching over to military production. Overall, students were being employed by factories seven days a week, three shifts a day. And we were also looking at how we thought incorrectly that perhaps, you know, looking at, say, missiles would be much too sensitive, but, you know, tanks don't go up in a really big amount, you know, maybe 10 more a year, 20 more a year, that could be a way the data point in. And it turned out to be a setup. And so I was nabbed by FSB agents, a hood put over my head. And then I think some listeners know the story, held for a year and a half, and used in a swap. - So one thing that kind of allude to there, that you read about the book, and that you do subsequent reporting on after you get out is this question of, like, did they actually think you were a spy, right? And like, the degree to which this is a setup, and you kind of read it out when you're in prison, you could tell that some people obviously knew you weren't. And, but that was harder to determine that the people that actually nabbed you, and about what Putin's thinking was. Like, what's your view on that now? Was it like just a pure setup? Or was there some element within FSB that actually thought you were a spy? - It's a great question. I think it's still an unanswered question. And in a way, it will remain unanswered. I mean, after the Soviet Union collapsed, the KGB archives opened up for a brief period, and we, you know, journals were able, you know, foreign journals included and research researchers, academics, were able to rifle through documents, and, you know, old cases became more clear. What, two FSB officers say in a private conversation, I'm not sure we'll ever get a full picture into it, but I think it's a mix of factors. And I think, you know, human beings are complicated, and not everything is so black and white. I mean, one thing that is certain is that, when Putin gives an order to his domestic television service, the FSB, they fulfill that request. So before the World Cup in 2018, you know, he gave this address to them where he said, we need to make sure that there's no terrorist attacks during it. You know, it's this big showcase event. We need to catch terrorists in extremists, and they went about that year arresting Antifa and anarchist teenagers and, you know, claiming that they were set out to, you know, take down the regime. So they're good at this. He gives them an order. He says to catch a spy, they go ahead and do it. And then, yeah, I mean, the kind of reporting that I was doing, I think, was probably raising, not just curiosity, but interest and perhaps suspicion, which I tried to detail in the book about why that might be, how Russia uses still to this day journalists as cover for its intelligence operatives, so they might say, why should we trust you that you don't? I have a first meeting with this source, which I think is a way, perhaps by FSB officers, to check whether their suspicions are correct, or to set me up to then go to Putin and say, look, this guy really is uptest me. Now, let's arrest him. And so whether they really believe I'm a spy or not, I think is an open question. Whether he believes I'm a spy is not an open question because I think he truly believed the narrative. And we have the, I reported he had these conversations, Tucker Carlson, for instance, or a head of state that I can't name. - Well, Tucker, I'm forgetting now that I read it where Putin was like, 'cause somebody pushed back on him and was like, well, I mean, if he was the spies, kind of obvious, like when he's meeting's out in the open and Putin was like, well, he's just a stupid spy or bad, or something to that effect. - Exactly, and those were the head of state, I can't name, but yeah, he, you know, the head of state was essentially saying, look, if he was a trained officer, if he was a CIFs or he would probably understand how sting operations work, probably see them coming and Putin banged his fist on the table and said, no, he's an idiot. He was rating much too. When the open, and you can see how filtered the story filtered through his understanding might track versus our understanding of all the journals doing his job and perhaps he was pushing things too far and maybe, you know, they cynically set him up, which I think they still did. You know, I do think they still cynically set me up. The Tucker thing was interesting. I think Putin was really confused. And after their interview, they, you know, Putin was giving him a tour of the Kremlin and he said that he was confused that the US would work so hard to get back a basketball player, but not a spy. - Yeah. - And Tucker at that point sort of, you know, it was a similar sort of situation where it's like, if you read this story through our lines, well, obviously they're working hard to get a journalist back as, you know, what's important to our society versus in his system, which is, you know, you get back your people, you show them that we'll have your back even if you're caught. - I don't get back to your story than what happened in prison, but just because obviously, this is something I think is an ongoing story. Like, what is the status now of like journalists who are in Russia, Western journalists, like after what happened to you? And do you feel like we're getting even less information? Like, what is your advice to people that are trying to report on this? - Yeah, I mean, there are fewer people. Some people made a decision to leave after my arrest. You know, it might just be too dangerous. The people that are there are, you know, putting more hand breaks on. They're sort of censoring what they can do. And I think, you know, their argument is that it's still worth being in the country and seeing what people think. You know, Valerie Hopkins from the New York Times just reported a story about how she had to track receipts to see how prices were changing supermarkets, because people were too scared to talk to her, so it's even becoming more difficult to get information that way, because people are scared. So my advice would be, you know, clearly be on the watch for any sort of set up, especially if a Russian spy gets arrested abroad and they want to now have another person to swap. But I also don't, you know, I don't want to make any sort of judgments from the outside, because I haven't been doing that kind of reporting for a few years now, and the environment's obviously changing, and so I would, you know, advise just being careful, and that, yeah, I mean, for us, it's difficult. This is the problem when countries become so authoritarian. It's really because local reporters haven't been able to do the kind of great reporting they used to be able to do for a long time, let alone foreign journals, and the local journals, obviously, were better source than we ever were. So you do have imprisoned, eventually sentenced for your swap. But what's life like in 500 days, like you wake up, what's a day like in a Russian prison? I think the Russian state is quite calculating on how it treats people, and, you know, when I've taken to the station, I'd reported stories before I had how people are tortured, people are interrogated, they're deprived of food, of water, of hot showers. And I was treated like the clamps on the nipples. Exactly. A whole deal. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I've got a lot of sadness and electro shock that way, and that's, you know, quite harsh to put it mildly, and I didn't have anything unless right, you know, I just had my charges handed to me, told I was accused of espionage, brought to Moscow, never really interrogated. I was brought to Lefortevo, which is Russia's most, you know, high profile in the Torres Prison. The difficulty there is that it's sort of psychologically difficult. It's really isolating. It's really small cells. You're with one cell may only one person can fit going up and down because of a bed on one side and a desk on the other, and it's about six to seven paces for an adult person. So it's tiny. You don't see the outdoors, and that really weighs on you. You don't see the outdoors at all, like you don't get an hour in the yard or whatever. You get an hour in another cell on the roof of the prison where you can look at the sky through barbed wire or a netting really, but not, you know, the ceiling. So that's really what you're dealing with, but it's clean. It's well organized. They sort of treat you with, respectfully, they use the formal form of you, which there's not obviously distinction in English there is in Spanish or French. That's very different from other Russian prisons. And then I'm treated, you know, particularly well because, you know, there's a Ukrainian journalist, Victoria Rosina, who got taken captive while she was reported and Russian occupied territory about the same time, and she was killed in Russian prison and sent home in a body bag without her organs. So her family can figure out what happened to her versus me where there's a kind of constant knowing tell, you know, on state TV, they talk about how they, you know, sort of added to what they call their quote unquote, exchange fund of people to be swapped, you know, anytime the U.S. Ambassador came to visit me, you know, they would check on my conditions to make sure I couldn't complain about anything, you know, and I hurt my knee exercising in that kind of walking pen at one point, and I went to the, the durs, gave me some exercises for my knee, even checked me out. And so when the warden came to check on me before one of these U.S. Ambassador visits, he asked how I was doing. And I said, you know, doing all right. And actually you guys, you know, I'm surprised to the extent that you're looking after me and he said, well, you know, care about your health. And I made this joke like, well, you know, obviously the package has to be holding on damage to otherwise its value will go down and he, you know, checked his shoulder and then quietly said, you know, I didn't tell you this, but yeah, so is this sort of kind of like constant. And to get some good meals at least out of that show, were you getting sloped? What are they feeding you? It's sloped, but it's better sloped than other prisons. It's sort of caution in the morning, soup for lunch more caution than fish in the evening. That people can pass you good. So my friends were passing me, you know, even fresh fruits and vegetables and ready made meals into prison, which is a sort of age old Russian tradition, even through the gulag and before in the zaris period that you can get items in that compliment your life there, as long as you have, you know, friends and family that are willing to do this. So I'd Russian friends who are risking, you know, a lot in a way to be, you know, helping me during that period. I had this kind of treatment. I had this incredible support network. I could get information so I could see all the efforts that were being made to get me out by my, you know, newspaper, by the US government, the German government that was participating in this. My friends were collecting letters to get in. So I felt, you know, I felt like I wasn't alone. I'm also blessed, you know, with the fact that I have a sense of humor, which I think is really important in a Russian prison or any prison to, you know, you have to kind of darkly laugh at the situation or you're going to be really depressed. And being a reporter for five and a half years before that happened, I had an idea of how the penal system works, how these cases go, how swaps work. So I was sort of sober about how it was going to play out. And then I also made this decision really early on kind of a coping mechanism of like, well, I can't do anything about the situation. And in a way, it's interesting. So I might as well report on it. And so my friends had passed me these notebooks, which I basically turned into a report, you know, part kind of like written therapy, but part reporters notebook, I would take notes of what I would see and I would, you know, interview, you know, cellmates, but also prison officials and FSB officials in a way. And that gave me sort of a kind of purpose there and a, you know, meaning to prison, which really, really, really helped. And so, yeah, that's what gave me structure. There were a lot of moving passages for that. And I was also interested in some of the reporting you did, the interviews, some of the other people in there. I mean, famously in every prison, you know, there's no guilty man, right? But like, what is your sense for like the people who you're talking to, like how much of this was, you know, people being targeted, you know, people giving, etc. What's astounding and you know, it is a reporter before, but it's a vast amount of people, because people are targeted, there are people who violate the law, obviously, right? And sure. And there's a large chunk of people, or you would have to assume more than half, who've actually violated the law on some shape or form. But a lot of people are targeted, even not in political cases. So one thing I outlined in the book is, it's the so-called, they call it the people's crime in Russian. It's the drug, it's violating the drug crime, and actually a lot of people who end up in Russian prison on drug charges weren't even, hadn't even violated the law. They were entrapped into it. And the reason is that the police and the, it's called the investigative committee in Russia that's sort of like the FBI, and then there's the FSB who arrested me, they have different classes of crimes, they answer for it, you know, to corrupt system, and they, and the courts are this kind of conveyor belt, 99% of people are guilty. So it's really easy to get your numbers up by just setting people up. So they might, you know, a regular traffic stop while they're searching the car, place a bag of cocaine in it, and then find it, and the person's caught. Then there are political prisoners, and some political prisoners would be entrapped. But some of them actually violated the law, and I met in the second prison where it was a bit more loose, and I could meet more people. I met people who opposed the war, spoke out against it, and we're getting double-digit sentences. Wow. It was really tough to deal with for me, because I had a kind of survivor's guilt of knowing I was going to be swapped, and obviously I was swapped only a year and a half later, and these people are going to be spending more than 10 years in prison. One guy I met wrote four words on a wall, protesting a word, like in spray paint, and he got arrested and sentenced to 17 years. And if we think about our ask of Russians in terms of protesting the regime, that is what the price is. And that's aside from, you know, the FSB going and pressing somebody and saying, you know, we know your mom works at this hospital, she might lose her job, but then the actual price, the latter of that, to spend years and years in obscure and horrible custody, and they're treated not like me in that situation, right? They're treated horribly. As somebody who's got, you know, Catholic guilt for my mother, I mean, that's a pretty powerful amount of Jewish guilt that you had that you are in a prison cell for something you did wrong, and you already have prospective survivors' guilt when you've not quite you and you've not yet survived. I mean, that guilt is sort of like you befriend these people that's your sort of support or your community and you know that, you know, they have these conversations amongst themselves about, you know, hoping the regime will collapse because that's the only way they will, you know, get out before 18 years or up or 17 years or up and I am sitting there knowing, well, so when I'm convicted for 16 years, I understand I'm not going to spend 16 years in prison and they're really, you know, it's really heartwarming and they're supporting me, you're checking and how I'm feeling. And you're feeling guilty, the survivor's guilt of like, well, I'm going to get out. It's, yeah, you're right, you're right, it's Jewish Catholic. We're bred from this from the beginning, basically. Just curious, like now, if you know what, over a year, over two actually, yeah, over two, yeah, over two, yeah, over two, oh, yeah, over two now, yeah. How long did it take to be able to get back into the rhythms of life, like, you know, going from, again, 500 days, you're in one room, 23 hours a day, six paces to, you know, kind of where you are now. Do you have residual trauma? Like what, what, you know, what was that process like? - So it took a lot of work. I mean, I, you know, I think I wasn't surprised that it was difficult. I was surprised to the extent of how difficult it was. The beginning, you know, I think I took this sort of approach kind of like, call it stoic approach to prison where I felt like I have to keep my emotions in check. I have to, you know, never let myself cry because then I'll break down. And the cost of that is when you get out, all the emotions start coming out. That's, you know, everything from tears and saddles to anger. And then, yeah, the isolation, I was hit with panic attacks, could freeze in crowds of people, completely taxed by having more than a conversation with more than two people in a day because I'm not used to socializing with that many people. I quickly started working with a therapist for PTSD. And that's a kind of like six month process. You track the symptoms. So are you sleeping better? Are you getting less angry? Or, you know, you're saying you feel normal. And one of the things that therapist told me was interesting was it's sort of like landing a plane through turbulence because you've forgotten what normal life is. You know, time moves differently in prison versus on the outside. So it took, you know, a year to remember what a year on the outside looks like. Then he let me go. He's like, you graduated. Your symptoms are improving. So we let you go. But I felt like I wanted to keep working with the talk therapist. And because of this weird split dual identity, I have in prison, I was the Russian side. I was referred to in Russian. I only spoke Russian. I kind of dealt with it with my kind of dark human resignation. So I went to a Russian speaking therapist. And I also, you know, the book. And, you know, I want this book to be, you know, it's not just a memorial, a memorializing my captivity, but also I think it was period in Russian history. And I want it to be consumed by an audience that might be interested or learn something about Russia to or ourselves. But it's also really personal in the sense that I think it's a way we get through trauma. You know, I spoke with one trauma therapist that I ended up not working with who told me that. Basically, you know, you twist your knee. The spring goes away. You tear your ACL, you have to do surgery. And with trauma, it's like you step into the street and a car was his by you. You realize you might have been killed. That's a shock. You're in a car accident where a few people die. That might be a residual trauma that keeps coming back. And you have to deal with it. And the way you deal with it is facing it, talking about it, processing it, speaking or writing. That's what the book is. So I finished it in the late spring. And then I finished it, got out of my system, finished my therapy, felt like I'm tired of analyzing and got back to work as a reporter. So I've been working for the journal again. And it felt like a normal person. And it feels now like an experience that it's kind of like, you know, you finished college two years later, you're in your job. And obviously it's an experience that was important and it informs your adulthood. But you don't think about it every day. And it doesn't come back. And so some of the stuff I describe in the book of dreaming about prison and waking up in a sweat, that's gone. I think I've worked through it. And I'm not haunted by it, but it took a long time. And I mean, it took, I guess, the same amount of time if not more that I spent inside to-- And also, you know, there was a while where I was so-- I had to stick to such a discipline schedule because an institutionalized person gets so used to that. It's comforting. And it took a while to kind of like, remember, it's OK if I have a lunch at two, not at one, you know, or if my friends, you know, want to have dinner. So I would invite you to something on a whim. And you're like, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're like, well, I have this plan for the day. I can't, you know, but now, you know, now it feels like something completely in the past, which is great. I love that for you. I love to hear that. Thank you. I want to just talk about just some of the news stuff that is related to the intersection of the book of bed. And you just mentioned some of the other guys you're imprisoned with, like, their hope is for regime collapse. Yeah. It's a constant, you know, hope and discussion and, and, you know, Putin, obviously, has a stronghold on the country. That was, I guess, a very weak maybe quasi attempt on that a while ago now. So I'm wondering what you think, kind of the state of play is based on your reporting. And like, what a future of a Russian state might even look like. I mean, for those guys, is there any hope that the successor is any better? I mean, the successor might just as well be worse, probably. Yeah, I mean, it's completely possible. I mean, basically, my sense is as journalists, we, you know, we have to play this kind of predicting game. News analysis, because that's what, you know, readers in the audience want this, right? And so it's difficult to not write up stories that are trying to predict what might happen. But often, everything seems like forever until it's not. There's that amazing, I'll say, you're a talkbook about, the end of the Soviet Union. Everything was forever until it's no more. And we see autocratic regimes. They're chugging long. And suddenly, there is a potential, a coup attempt, like in Turkey, right? Or administration back then, the autocracy deepened, or Putin post the fail the temple I was in prison, but you get any pregoge in 2023. On the other side, do you have Syria? You know, Assad falls kind of out of nowhere. Right. It gets replaced by an al-Qaeda guy who's like, now trying to rebrand himself as, it's al-Qasharia 2.0, Davos edition, or whatever. And it's like, okay. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. Any of your question of what comes next? I mean, one way of looking at it could be, he's 73, he's pretty healthy. While he's alive and in power, the logic of continued repression is in place, right? He's not gonna wake up one day. I think, you know what? I need to loosen up. I need to reform. We need to be a little more liberal now. We've gone too far. It's sort of like, you continue the spirals and the paranoia deepens with time. I think the issue is, it's not like it's impossible for people who come after him, for Russia to, you know, one day open up again. You know, the, you know, people do sprout up there like the late opposition like Alexei Navalny or Boris Nemsov, who are trying to build a democratic and free Russia. And there was a real demand for that, you know, at the late so we appeared in the early 90s and there was an attempt and the kind of security services with Putin took back over. I wonder, you know, with the state of the world in terms of this conflict that's deepening this kind of like, you know, maybe not World War III but a kind of hybrid World War III where we're at. Countries don't really in a situation like that decide that they're going to take another stab at liberal democracy. You know, this kind of access of authoritarian countries is deepening. Those alliances may stick. Russia's still at war when Putin's gone, you know, and there's a generation growing up at war and a war that, you know, what propaganda is saying isn't just with Ukraine, but with what they call the collective West, with the US and NATO at its head. And so you hope that there's another chance and you hope that it's possible. And I don't see why it's not possible, you know, obviously there's a deep and long history in Russia of being an empire and trying to take over its neighbors and, you know, those poor neighbors are always getting taken over and Ukraine is facing that again, yet again, but I don't think it's impossible. As somebody who's an alleged spy, never actually a spy, or a legend, jailed spy. I'm just curious your thoughts on what's happening coming the other direction with Russia targeting us and then particularly in the Trump administration. There have been a couple of stories recently around weddings. Trump Jr's wedding was paid for by the head of the Boxing Association, Alina Habas wedding, my colleague Michael Weiss noticed that a suspected Russian double agent is like there in a picture with her and with Kashpital. You know, who knows the extent that you've talked to Tucker since he advocated for your departure, Tucker's sure, I guess sounding a lot more friendly to Russia than he used to, maybe that's just a policy change of his, but I don't know. I'm like, what is your view of like the sense of which like the Russians have are trying to manipulate and target people and Trump's orbit? - Yeah, I think, you know, without being a counterintelligence expert, but I assume as much as you do that it's a counterintelligence nightmare. I mean, I must be right. If your job as a counterintelligence officer is to be monitoring the environment for contacts and you're hoping that-- - Oh my goodness. - Oh my goodness, they're not. - Right, I don't-- - Well, I don't know. - I don't know. - I mean, I'm sure there's people, yeah, I'm sure there's people, I mean, yeah, it's a good question. Maybe Michael Weiss knows more, but I'm sure that the counterintelligence department, the FBI is still staffed with career officers. That, right, that despite everything, maybe the staff is lower, that are still trying to put an effort in, but I'm sure you're right. I'm sure it's lower than it used to be, and you can't monitor everything when it's just, yeah, I mean, it must be a counterintelligence nightmare. But the other side of it is, you know, the FBI announced last week that it caught a ring of five foreign nationals working for the Russians who were trying to carry out an assassination on US soil. - Yeah. - They come out as well. - Yeah, and that's another ratcheting up in, you know, okay, the swap that I was part of, an FSB assassin murdered somebody in broad daylight in Germany, and then they swapped me, you know, and a host of others for him and a host of others, but that's sort of the main architecture of the swap that that hadn't happened that they were targeting the US, and I think that's another red line that were, you know, either approaching or have crossed, and it's picking up kinetic action in Europe, European countries shut down, kicked out a lot of diplomats at the embassies, so the quote, official spies are gone harder to operate, and so they're paying on the internet for people to do a job, and they're called like sort of like one-off agents, Joshua Yofan, the New Yorker wrote a really good piece on the Sean Walker and the Guardian has written about this and and that's really difficult to monitor. Yeah, gig terrorists. Exactly. And so these kind of like shadow spy wars really increase, you know, we just see more and more signs of it increasing. And so it's it's it seems to me obvious that he opened contacts like that would be a kind of counterintelligence nightmare. I want to challenge you on one element of the book. It's a little touchy, I guess, but you know, I'm just interested in your perspective on it. Obviously you have such a deeper perspective on this than I do, but in the title that you call the land cursed and cursed kind of implies that like almost as with like fate or bad luck has befall in the Russian people, you know, in some way. And and you obviously really the book talk a lot about your affection for Russian people and culture. And I'm not here to say that every Russian person is bad, obviously, but like, is it is it really a curse or is there not like something at play? It's like a cultural rock to play in Russia that has led to this. And there have been like a series of choices that have been made. Culture wide through the country that kind of have resulted. And I just decades upon decades of of tragedies that we've seen. Yeah, but I mean, I guess how far back do we want to go with that question as something? I try to, you know, I kind of explore in the book and I'm sure, you know, I'm sure perhaps rational response from your Ukrainian would be like, you know, we're the ones who are cursed because we're neighbors to this country. And I think I break that up in the book, you know, and brought it up in this interview that the curse extends to the, you know, the surrounding periphery at Baltics, Poland, Ukraine, it's just like centuries of, but, but, you know, you can look at a regular Russian person today in Russia, you know, who's born, let's say they're born in 2005, Putin's already back for five years. You know, I've suffered through the financial crisis of 1998. They suffered through this, you know, there's a stab at democracy from 91 to 93 until Yeltsin decided parliament wasn't working as well. And then there's a regular election 96. There's, you know, 75 years of Bolshevik history. There is the Tsarist period and the Tsarists were at complete control of the country and Russians were surfaced until 18, you know, from up until 1861 without really a chance. I follow some people that are on Instagram, though, are probably born around 2005 with a Moscow that are having a pretty good time. I know, I look at some of those people and I'm like, wait a minute, I wish they were more cursed. Yeah, but I also think that those people, you know, we brought this up earlier in this conversation. It's sort of like, okay, I mean, here's a, here's one we're thinking about. So they go out, they go out, they pick it on Red Square, they go, peace for all. That's considered to violate Russia's law and fake news now, which can land you for 10 years in prison. So they do that. In the lead up to it, you know, they used to support Alexei Navalny. They went out to some protests before the war, you know, they tried to election monitor. They maybe worked as a, as a journalist from Novak, because he had already had a journalist murdered on Putin's birthday in 2006 on a political scot. And so this person is like, you know, attempted some sort of life where they're trying. And there is, there is people living in Berlin all these years for happily living their life, going to Berekheim, clubbing, loving their lives. And their government is buying, you know, it was guzzling down Russian gas, like, half a wise. And I mean, it's like, it's like, well, do we want to, where's the collector's responsibility like, do we want to blame all Germans for not voting, you know, voting out their government saying, you know, that's what stocked Russia's coffers as well. We were paying for Russian gas and oil. And so I think, I just think it's a really complicated question. I think you're right that there's cultural rot at play. But how far does it go back? How difficult it is to, you know, I think one thing is that the kind of arm of the security services is always concentrated at Moscow, right? That's the heart of the empire. And the reforms for the Russian Federation, they split up the KGB into multiple agencies. The idea of being, let's get power out of the hands of the security services. Guess what? To, you know, nine years later, former KGB office service head of the FSB is in charge again. And the FSB, which is essentially like, you know, the FSB, the NSA and CIO wrapped into one, is that, you know, carries out his wishes and that is the country to a degree. So I agree with you that if I was a Russian citizen, I would hope my compatriots would, you know, be seeking out some information, caring, you know, independent information, besides the propaganda that's all around me, trying to care about what's going on in Ukraine, being horrified by it, finding some way to state tapped in. So when there's the next, you know, the next chance for, you know, liberal reforms in Russia, everybody's involved in them, I think it's hard to blame, like, you know, every regular individual Russian. I mean, what would we be doing in the situation like that might be another question? Yeah, that's tough. I don't know. You're right. You're talking about your cellmate or one of the guys in the jail, who was like, I thought it was cool that Putin mentioned you or whatever. And I was like, guy, you're in jail. I was like, why? So I don't know. It is tough. But you're in Germany now, and I like, people could have said the same thing, probably about the Germans in the 1950s. So like, this is, you know, or I mean, the call to, you know, the way charisma works is, you know, works in Democratic politics, right? And there's, you know, there's people, you know, our president, there's a, you know, let's call it a subset of people who no matter what he does, they're obsessed with him. It didn't really matter. And he said that that was the depressing part of this. I was thinking about us, about our people. It's just like, God, we can get to a point where you're jailed. And you're still like, you know, I love this guy. He jailed me. He said, what was his first campaign? I can go out on Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I won't lose an ounce of support. Like, he's aware of that. And I was asked by several, you know, diplomats from the EU from Greece and Spain about the Russian soul and why they love autocracy so much. And I said, you know, the Russian soul is not different than any other people are people. You can't essentialize them. And the Greek, you know, diplomat who asked me that in the Spanish diplomat sign a pushback and say, well, it is clearly different. They love autocracy. I was like, both of your countries had, you know, autocratic regimes, not that long as they're fine. Russia's is much longer. It's much deeper. Again, maybe it's cultural drop, but it can change, right? It can change in a different way, hopefully. Hopefully. Hopefully. I mean, it's powerful. I'm so happy. I kind of want to, I don't know, I feel like your mother right now. I kind of want you out of Berlin. It's just a little, I'm feeling a little uncomfortable. Come on back to the States. Okay. Reporters. Not happening here. Reporters up my paper have been, you know, doxed and criticized by the current administration here in the US too. I mean, it's good point. I mean, nobody's going to be, I don't think it's a good point. Anybody's being set up as a foreign agent. But you know, all right. Anyway, you're right. You're going to be fine. What's fine? What am I doing? Trying to try to try to worry. There was something I was in Berlin, the, the sirens on the, on the call out of the police cars. They're louder and they're and they're like they are in the, it's the same siren from like all of the procedures that I watched about like communism and going, you know, going behind the curtain in the 80s. Like it's the same siren noise. And so it was, you know, I don't know. I was like, I just feel like a little, yeah, we'll see. More, more kinetic. You know, more Russian attempts to blow up their port in Leipzig. Maybe, maybe we'll see. You know, give it on it. I'm happy you're safe, man. And now, and I appreciate all the time you brought to us today. And everybody should go get, check out the book there. I mean, it's beautiful. So, so please go get it. It's called this car's beautiful land. Thanks so much and I appreciate it so much. Thanks, Tim. The Bullwork Daily is brought to you. Thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer, Anzali Skipper, and with video editing by Dante DeCicco and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.