Evan Gershkovich (on surviving a Russian prison)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Lily Padman. Hi. Today we have Evan Gershkovich on. Evan is a journalist and a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. He was imprisoned in Russia for 16 months on false espionage charges. Crazy. This is our second guest who's been imprisoned in Russia. But our first journalist imprisoned. Yeah, we had a businessman on before. His new memoir, which is out now, is called The Cursed Beautiful Land, A Russian-American Story. This is an incredible book. The story is pretty harrowing. It's pretty harrowing. And I think he does this beautiful job of both loving Russia and having had the worst experience imaginable there. Yeah. So it's very complicated. Please enjoy Evan Gershkovich. We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. Not. Checking whether the turkey was fully thawed before Thanksgiving morning. You were told days ago to thaw it. Days. 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Terms apply. ♪ He's an upchair expert ♪ ♪ He's an upchair expert ♪ - How do I, do I gotta like lean back a bit? - Oh, you do, you're comfortable. - I feel like I'm just gonna fall asleep out here. - Do you wanna put that pillow between you and me? - It's not a great pillow. - That's often used. - I'm fine, I'm fine. - Okay. - It's more like a question to you guys. It's like, do you want me to sleep? You can relax, you can be up. Some people lean. That makes us nervous. Yeah. Jared Diamond last week was, yeah. Well, he's like a professor type, I feel like, you know. Yeah, and he's not young. Yeah, but I would have fatigued sitting mad at rats. Me too, but I think maybe he thought if he leaned back, he would sleep. He would sleep. Go to sleep, okay. He's 90. Well, I think he turned 81. 89. I mean, what are we going to say? Wait, he's that old? Yeah. I remember reading him in high school. Yeah, guns, germs, and steel. Exactly, yeah. And he is more articulate than any one of the three of us in this room. You're in your 30s, right? Are you 35? 34. Oh, no. I knew this would trigger you. I'm triggered. You gotta go. Yeah, but you look, wait, look at this. Well. Your skin is fresh. Look at the skin, look at this hair. The age is just a number. Yeah, sure. Let's start with Mom and Dad, because Mom and Dad left Soviet Russia in 79? 79. Yeah, Mom left Soviet Russia, Dad left Soviet Ukraine. So they were part of that Jewish exodus. Israel and the U.S. were lobbying to get Jews out. The way you would leave was basically ask for refugee status. So you had to renounce your Soviet citizenship. Mom was in Leningrad, and she left with her mom, and Dad was in Edessa. And what's. Today, independent Ukraine, and left with his parents. You had to leave your property behind, your valuables. You were able to, like, forget how much. Basically, like, a suitcase or two. Yeah. There's this amazing book by, I forget, Vlatov, who left during that period, called The Suitcase. And Mom had sewed some gold earrings into her waistband. So her dad had already died, and he had gifted her these gold earrings, but they had other valuables. And so to basically get around, to flout those rules, she sewed them into her skirt. And then she went to Vienna, and that was the first pit stop. And you're there for 10 days, unless you're going to Israel. If you're going to Israel, you just go from Vienna to Israel. But if you're going to the U.S. How was that decided? They get to pick? Yeah, they get to pick. They just, for some reason, or not for some reason, they just thought, well, the U.S. is more opportunity. Yeah. We don't really get what Israel is, I think. They never even gave it much thought. But then you go to Rome for three months. Oh. And it was just, like, milling about with Soviet Jews waiting to ship off to the U.S. And then you're supposed to basically say, where you have some relatives, so they can play as students when you get to the U.S. So my dad's family was really organized. And they had, I think, a cousin or somebody already in Brighton Beach. That's in New York? In New York, Brooklyn. So it's sort of Russian speaking. And then my mom and her mom, my grandma screwed up and basically said, well, we've got family in Detroit, even though my mom wanted to go to New York. And so they ended up in Detroit. And how did she make her way? Because she met your father in New York. In New York. So she was working in Detroit, supporting herself and her mom and then her sister. Her sister's husband ended up moving to Detroit. By that point, she felt like, okay, my mom's settled. And she kept wanting to go to New York for opportunities and ended up there. And then they met, both working at a bank. And she had wanted to be a journalist herself, yeah, in the Soviet Union. Yeah. And that was made clear to her that it wasn't going to be an option because she was Jewish? From what I understand, it didn't happen to everybody. It was this sort of low hum of anti-Semitism, maybe. But in the Soviet Union, you had these points in your internal passport. It's sort of like the document you carried. And the fifth point was your ethnicity or nationality. So you're Ukrainian, Azerbaijani, Armenian, Georgian, Bashkir, whatever it is. And being Jewish was listed. So you in class had to, like, announce your ethnicity, which is kind of wild. But also, there were some jobs in universities that would exclude you based on your ethnicity. So, yeah, so she wanted to go to the Leningrad State University's journalism department and ended up at the Shipbuilding Institute, which actually, in some ways, is better. Well, it's supposed to be removing you. She was an engineering student. Yeah, exactly. She could have gotten a job. In the cradle of engineering at that moment. But she ended up not finishing school. She left, I think it was year three, junior year. They emigrated. I think she was 21 or 20 at the time. Okay, so, and your dad being, what, did you say 16? Yeah, he's younger than her. Okay, but they're very, very Russian. I mean, they came to maturity in Russia. Russian, Russian-speaking. When they get to the U.S., all their friends are Russians or Russian-speaking. They don't really. They don't really assimilate all that much. My sister was born in 89, so that's 10 years after they left. In 89, also the walls falling serendipitously at that exact moment. Exactly, and then I'm born right when the Soviet Union collapses two years later in 91. Yeah. But they never gave it any thought. It's just like Russian kids, basically. I know there's emigre families who are like, we want the kids to assimilate. We really don't want them to speak English without an accent. But I think my parents never even talked to them about this. They never even considered it. They were just sort of like, well, why would we make our kids different from ourselves? Exactly. I think it's still weird anyway. Having first-generation kids that are not completely like yourself, you kind of lose. Also, they're inheriting at the point that they left a 30-year Cold War. I mean, whatever information they were inundated with about Americans, the notion that one day their children would be Americans has got to be. Kind of absurd. I have friends who had children with English women and raised their kids, and just their kids having an English accent is weird. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you add in that, yeah, we were the big bad guy, and now they're here. They're here. That's fascinating. My mom used to listen to Voice of America when she was college age, I guess, or even high school age. And so she had these sort of weird ideas about the U.S., you know, filtered fully through like one single radio station. Yeah. And then whatever media, too, makes its way, like anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's sort of like stuff that's passed around, stories that are passed around. You know, they have genes there, that kind of thing. So it's a very caricatured vision. And, yeah, you get there, and you're sort of in this brave new world, and then your kids just become part of that place. I can imagine. I can imagine it's really weird. And so their instinct was to hold on, I think, to some semblance of what they knew. And they didn't want the kids to lose any connection. to them of course i think it's very one or the other my parents were very you just are american like i think i mean now well clearly you're a cheerleader i know but it's hard to know what i did versus what they did where'd you grow up georgia georgia okay but yeah they spoke english they're not trying to instill any culture really of theirs it's interesting because i think i met other indians or chinese or koreans because i grew up in new jersey and it's a lot of first generation immigrants yes and it kind of went both ways some parents were just really worried that their kids wouldn't be american or make it or be in the society and somewhere like you can't forget your home exactly yes probably get to this in the book but like some point some kids rebel against it they're like no i want to be really american yeah friends are american i don't want to stick out and stand out so that happened with me later well yeah you're gonna rebel against your parents whatever it is you're just gonna right pick what things on the table for you that's a want to fucking be russian all the time yeah so you kind of had two really compartmentalized existence in a way yeah you had your house you went by what in your house vanya they never called me evan they called me ivan but all russian names get they're called diminutives or these nicknames and you can keep reducing and reducing it's sort of like a matryoshka doll like you start with the official name and it goes down to like the cutest the most cutesy name or like vanusinka like would be like the cutest way you could say that name yeah so vanya would be the normal way to say yeah and then if you've really messed up they might say ivan mikhailovich because you take on the patronymic you don't have a middle name you have the father's name so of mikhail so ivan of mikhail is like just reminding you you're shaming multi-generations right now going back to the status shaming yourself you're fucking up this whole right how were you socially so monica had her experience which i've learned a lot about which is like she's not trying to have anyone over to see any of the indian shit happening what was that like being immersed in new jersey culture yeah i remember being like slightly embarrassed russian culture is if guests are over at the home you have to put like sweets and tea and and food and force people to encourage themselves on that on that food and i would go to my friends houses and i remember one friend i asked the mom can i get a glass of water she was like dude you know where the fridge is right yeah it was sort of the opposite like you're welcome you're part of the family and i remember like friends coming over sitting on the couch trying to play video games or whatever and like mom is just like dashing serving round and around cootery what is it and you were kind of a popular guy that took a while you were the captain of the soccer team that feels like a popular position that's when i peaked yeah what grade was that that was senior year of high school i was a super shy kid up until like freshman year of high school junior senior year i really came into my own were you getting fucked with at all when i was a kid some kids called me gershka which i found very clever and fun hit me at gershka so like i'm gershkavich yeah that's nice it's not too clever but it's something and it's also mild yeah that's true actually yeah it could be worse we've given the spectrum of options yeah that's kind of on the mild side but you're younger it's interesting yeah if you would have grown up when i grew up in the 80s it would have been much probably more wrong yeah yeah i know i was just having this conversation with a friend it's a dicey conversation but i just feel like it's kind of a conversation with a friend it's a dicey conversation but i just feel like it's a conversation but i just feel like it's a conversation with a friend it's a dicey conversation but i just feel like it's a conversation with a friend it's a dicey conversation but i just feel like bullies were worse like we already started consciously thinking about i think bullying's gotten better over the years but also i can't say that because there's a lot of horrible stuff happening because of bullying like children taking their own lives and things like that which wasn't really happening back then you would just take it yeah i think two things are happening one is i think the face-to-face bullying is less in that it's less extreme certainly like it was just so violent where i grew up you got beat up physically all the time yeah when my dad went to lincoln high when he got to brooklyn it was constant fights in school like italians and puerto ricans and yeah jews and whatever it's just like it's physical all the neighborhoods yeah yeah yeah so i think it's reduced in that way but you had the freedom of going home after school and being free of it whereas now you're engaged in this other online life where they're still there yeah i think that i think it's like less severe but more ever present it feels less capable and then i think the version that's happening online because it has the anonymity is then even harsher than maybe sure like kids aren't saying go kill yourself they're doing that online that's like step one in the uh yeah and then we work our way down kids should not have fun no i really shouldn't they're not gonna miss anything okay so you found your way you got less shy don't even know how that happened but it just did but to your like earlier question it was a sort of dual world not just with the names but it was like russian food and russian movies and russian cartoons and so i'd have these like pop culture gaps how about mentality there was a dude in my a group for years i loved him to death just the way he had shared taking his kids to disneyland and what a bizarre experience that was for him i just got such a kick out of was the mentality also different oh totally i mean i've had this for my whole life where my american friends think i'm a pessimist and my russian friends think i'm an optimist right right right right i'm probably somewhere in the middle but to each culture i'm completely i remember always being called a pessimist as a kid through high school and like college and then i get to russia and everybody's calling me this like crazy optimist like what happened i didn't think i changed i think the cultural context changed if i could distill what his numerous experiences that i got to hear over two decades with this man living in america for the first time is like the suspicion of anything kind of good and fun and nice and kind if that's like what i could distill it down to it's like he's at disneyland just waiting for someone to do something like there's no way this can be happening yeah i mean my parents thought disneyland was a crazy thing and they would never take us there but yeah that's actually sweet they were in the church so we're like racking up we we said we went we went later it was like a soccer tournament i think in orlando and some of us went over to a great place so much fun it'll melt even the hardest that's why they don't go they're afraid to be fair the russians and the difference with americans is americans are really warm right away but they can stay distant yeah or icy kind of russians go from being super cold to just so deep and warm within seconds as soon as they think that you're their friend yeah yeah so that maybe it's like we just got to get them all to disneyland yeah the hard shell will fall away the exterior will melt uh three and a half eggs what age were you when you went to russia as a kid we went once when i was nine that was the only time i'd gone before 2000 that was july and august 99. and what did you think of that it was my first time out of the country at all first time traveling so it was super exciting to fly super exciting to see a new place but i mean it was really intense the first day out we went to change dollars into rubles and these two kids they're much older than me but they're probably like teenagers without shirts i remember running and my mom's friend they thought she had put the money in her purse they like tripped her from behind ripped the purse off and ran away yeah because russia 99 was just economic collapse that defaulted 98 height of the mafia yeah my mom remembers seeing people shooting up on the street me and my sister didn't she was 11 and i was nine and so we don't remember that but we also remember this phenomenal beautiful images too like the opulence of an empire right it is an empire right it was an empire and it was an empire in the 18th century in the 19th century and those empires i mean you can see it in other capitals in europe they love to build these amazing buildings and monuments to themselves and you're walking around as a kid looking at red square it's just shockingly gorgeous well i went in 2000 weirdly i would then ultimately go to cuba eight years ago or ten years ago and there was a very interesting parallel which is like we went to catherine's palace in st petersburg it was so magnificent right it's so overwhelmingly magnificent and additionally it had not been maintained clearly for four decades so it's like watching these treasures kind of erode i don't know it's very similar to cuba in that way it's like they're kind of coasting off of this explosion of productivity they had at one point and that's what was wild to then go back 17 years later and see like oh my god they poured so much money into it but only two cities it's really only moscow and st petersburg that got all that investment yeah 99 there was no investment it had faded my mom remembered she had left in 79 we're back in 99 so a long time had gone by 20 years and she's like i don't think any of this has been renovated that entire time right which is pretty insane yeah also just driving around in st petersburg dumb stuff would have never occurred to me what capitalism equals like there's no restaurant there's no coffee shop there's nothing where anyone would gather and be able to like kind of create a little pot of conversation because there's no businesses my first boss in moscow was describing when he got there it was 89 for the first like rock festival in the soviet union yeah and he said that this thing that shocked him the most on the drive from the airport is just pitch black like he had come from amsterdam and amsterdam's like at night you know there's shop signs yeah neon lights and it's just like it was just dark that image is kind of striking and 89 to now how much it changed but when you were there at nine years old were you in any way thinking i'd like to return or no no it was really fun to meet more people kind of like me yeah in a way because we would go to brighton beach which i've mentioned to see my grandparents my dad's parents lived there throughout my childhood and that had stayed this kind of like post-soviet bubble yeah because it had all these emigres from azerbaijan and armenia and georgia and russian ukraine but everybody's speaking their common language then because it was all one country at that point russian imposed russian from moscow going there it felt like not just my american friends in new jersey but like oh there's this this other place then you get to russian you're like oh my god there's a lot of these people yeah it's really fun and it's fun to chat with with them but could also tell they were really different and they didn't fully accept me as one of them because I had a super heavy accent I didn't know a lot of words to them I'm just this American kid so no at that point not at all no thought that I'm like ever gonna go like it was an interesting trip and I don't even remember thinking like oh I want to go back when I'm older at that point okay so you go to college you get a degree in English and philosophy and you're also writing for the school paper yep so do we already know we want to be a journalist at that point so yeah I started messing around in high school and messing around in college but I didn't like news like I liked the idea of writing I was taking also creative writing seminars at Bowdoin College and my fiction it wasn't great yeah I was like it was okay sure I remember I was talking to this guy who had finished the Iowa Writers Workshop 10 years older had gone to Bowdoin and then he was just like you know I just want you to know I'm in LA now waiting tables trying to write a screenplay yeah it's competitive it's really hard I got really swept up in this idea that I should do something about climate change which is probably a good thing to be swept up by and thought okay I don't really know about journalism I like writing and I ended up getting a job placement through Princeton in Asia this fellowship program in Thailand working on forestry stuff but doing comps so like I was writing kind of these success stories and development but really quickly I got disillusioned with development and I had a friend running the English language version of a major Thai newspaper she had also gone to liberal arts school in the U.S. moved to Thailand and then kind of got a job at the University of New York and she was like why don't you just try to freelance you know I was always of this persuasion and would that mean just go out and find your own story write it up and submit it she was like there's a story that I'm interested in that this Thai TV channel that I know is going out to report on and it's in your field so it's basically these villagers were trying to protect this piece of land of theirs that they were worried the government was trying to take away to build like a resort on and that's what the NGO I was with was working on and she's like why don't you go with this TV station come up with a story yeah I'll pay you for it and I did it and it was way more fun and interesting to me to be an observer and kind of like get to write sentences get paid for it they paid me $35 for that story yeah I was like I got money like I remember sitting with a friend my friend and I who was in Thailand too we went on a little beach vacation after that I was like I got paid money for writing yeah and it was just such a thrill and so from then it was journalism journalism journalism but I still then it took a lot of time to get into the competitive fire of it beating each other to a story being first that's for a lot of people comes later meaning you weren't interested in using like you weren't consuming tons of it you're not terribly interested in current affairs at that point I really liked human stories like I thought it was just a sort of another way to tell some sort of human story like you can do that through fiction you can do that through like a long work of literary non-fiction but also a feature story in a newspaper can get at some truth or it's like a slice of life that you can capture my fiction writing professor then when he was like sort of encouraging me to keep going down that path and I was talking about it was like you know the difference between us is that we make up scenarios you find them in the real world and then you write them yeah yeah and I was like well yeah I'm clearly not good at making up scenarios I'm going to have to rely on them yeah I'm finding them ones existing in the real world how do you end up at the New York Times that fellowship finished in a year I was thinking you know there could be a way to stay and keep doing journalism in Thailand that woman who had offered me that freelance opportunity had moved to AFP in Thailand their Southeast Asia Bureau AFP is Agence France Presse it's a news agency there's Associated Press Reuters Bloomberg AFP those are like the big news agencies in the world so there was a path there but I had this college girlfriend in New York we were still talking I missed her missed friends missed family they were in Princeton still in New Jersey at that point and thought I would move there and try my hand at journalism or try to get a job in journalism which was really hard for me and I was like I'm going to do it I'm going to do it I'm going to do it because it's really hard so I spent many months at firing off applications with zero response I did some copy editing with connections I had through Thailand like I think for FAO or WHO somebody I was like still copy editing freelance and I was cooking I was catering worked at a restaurant while I was still trying to get a job so who knows maybe I should have stayed but that's just kind of how it went and the New York Times life is just full of serendipitous moments but I had my college friends in LA and I was getting tired of this chase in New York that wasn't working out and the restaurant I was working at shut down and so I had a friend moving out to San Francisco and I had friends out here and thought you know what why not like drive out with him who knows what will happen in LA I had friends trying to work on screen plans here thought okay maybe that instead and the New York Times was looking for what they called a news assistant but was really used to be called a clerk and it was a temporary gig on the foreign desk for three months like a night clerk what would the duties entail the duties were picking up the phone if a foreign correspondent called to the editors in New York or the editor in New York's like I need this guy and call him in Columbia and are you allowed to stay on the call no you're not you literally just connect and put it through you're the assistant agency world the assistants are allowed to stay on the call so they can learn the agency business this is very devil wears Prada very Anne Hathaway yeah so glamorous but you were doing that in LA for New York Times no so I put in this application just think like you know what final chance I've been rejected not rejected I haven't I didn't get a response from like 50 places at that point so I put an application to kind of just be like you know what last chance and we were packing for this road trip move and then two days before we leave I get an offer for an interview so my friend kind of was like how about we drive into the city for the interview on our way and they told me right there they're like you know we need a person we really like that you're a live pumping blood and so they offered the job and then I ended up being like well can I still go on this road trip and so I did oh wow a couple weeks and then I flew back and started the job and so that's how I ended up at the New York Times and then once I was there I was looking around for full-time things before the three months ran out I mean I got really lucky really because there's tons and tons of people applying for those jobs and there were people at that level who had finished Columbia and I was like I'm gonna go to New York and I'm gonna go to New York and I'm gonna go to New York and I'm gonna go to New York and I'm gonna go to New York and I'm gonna go to New York and I was like oh my god I'm gonna go to Columbia University journalism masters so they had paid huge amounts of money so I kind of look at the draw I mean not completely you weren't incompetent I wasn't totally incompetent okay and then someone suggests to you if you really want to be writing more and have a big career what about moving to Russia exactly so I started in 2016 I made it a year I ended up from the news assistant job got a job as an assistant for the public editor so the New York Times used to have a public editor which is basically like an ombudsman a person who wrote a column criticizing the work of the paper the audience could write in emails with their own thoughts and I was the assistant sifting through all that and then finding something that seemed worthwhile super interesting job kind of like journalism graduate school because you're seeing how journalism should be put together where its flaws are where it's done well but I was trying to report more and more and one of the ways people used to do that it's stringing so in journalism it's called gathering string to is gathering like the reporting for the yarn that you're going to end up producing right and so a stringer runs around doing some of the basic reporting filing that to the desk and a reporter will write it up and when the New York Times had a metro section it'd be sort of like you know the daily news or the post you do crime reporting so if there was a shooting in Queens or like a stabbing in Brooklyn on a Saturday morning you might get a call and you dash out there you describe the scene talk to the witnesses or the police spokesman who is out there giving a press conference but I didn't really know how to craft the idea of pitching a story you know you were asking like was that assigned or pitched in Thailand yeah I have this idea of like what is a story how do you pitch it and craft it there are all these kids my age you know they were like the editor of the Harvard Crimson or whatever and they're already know what they're doing and it was really hard to move up and I was impatient and a colleague of mine I'd met he was working then he was investigating Rikers Island and the abuses in the prison system then but he had been in Moscow and he was like dude you speak Russian yeah it's this historical breeding ground for foreign correspondents and I mean it's fascinating you know Putin had already taken Crimea by then Eastern Ukraine a lot's happening Navalny that spring so it was April of 2017 you know these massive protests had broken out against Putin so I'm at the New York Times watching that when I had a friend she was the editor of the student newspaper at Bowdoin in college she graduated and went to Ukraine to cover all of that you could see how that works out for a young journalist because people take your pitches there is a story if you're sitting around in a place where there's no story yeah or there's a ton of reporters yeah very true story exactly yeah that's the supply and demand totally yeah yeah you're an English Russian speaking journalist exactly some people use you know let's say you have like a master's degree in science you might become a science journalist or you have Chinese or Russian you might use that to your advantage and so there was an English language outlet working in Russia then called the Moscow Times which had been founded after the fall of the Soviet Union so 1992. founded by who it was this guy Derek Sauer he was Russian or he was a Dutch guy so he and his wife Ellen verbic moved to the Soviet Union to be Dutch foreign correspondence and then stayed loved it founded this English language newspaper and then actually brought glossy bags to Russia brought Cosmopolitan and Harper's Bazaar oh wow and then launched a Russian business daily that was amazing in those years before the clamp down the press and built like this incredible they called their publishing house independent media so they really helped drive the you know new world of independent media in Russia at that point. - Did you go there with a job? - They were looking for a reporter. I applied, interviewed, and got the job. Tell them you had a quick road trip now to Florida. And after that, they were surprised. Let's cross it off the list. Exactly. Got to get to know Russia a little better. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Not checking the weather forecast before you walk out the door? You looked outside, saw a blue sky, felt great about your outfit choice. No jacket, no umbrella. Fast forward two hours, you're sprinting through a parking lot in a downpour, holding a notebook over your head like that's going to help. Yeah, checking first is a brilliant idea. Allstate North American Insurance Company and affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois. We get support from Quince. Okay, so I have it. Confession. I'm the worst holiday shopper on the planet. I wait until the last possible second, I panic, and then I end up buying something nobody wants. But this year, I've cracked the code, and the code is cozy. 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They are wrapping my little babies, and I feel great about it. Mine are striped. They're so cute. They're very fashionable and very comfortable. And it's not just bedding. Quince has everyone on your list covered with Mongolian cashmere sweaters, fine jewelry, leather bags, chef-grade cookware, five-star luggage, and more. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order. And 365-day returns. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was Armchair Expert. So, yeah, and so I quit the New York Times and moved to the Moscow Times. But everybody who I was talking to in the journalism world, to us, that was like the most logical thing you could do. I don't remember anybody being like, yeah, stick around the New York Times. Be a news assistant for 10 years. I have friends who did that. They're now top reporters at the New York Times. So sort of alternate path to the same. And, you know, I ended up being a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. But I kind of went into reporting sooner. So I moved there in late 2017, it was. Okay, so from 2017 to 2020, you're at the Moscow Times. Yeah, exactly. And tell me about what it's like to arrive there and how quickly do you start to fall into a rhythm there? And just tell me about the experience of, in a way, returning to where you're from, even though you're not from there. So the experience of returning was incredibly odd. It felt almost like stepping into, not Narnia, but like this world that you already knew. It's very familiar, not just because you've been there, but the language, the customs, the culture, you have an awareness of it. You grew up in the kind of facsimile of it. But the Russian I speak is only with my family. It's not like with 24-year-olds talking about the things 24-year-olds talk about. And so I have this kind of characterized vision of the place. You know, when I was there, I was a kid. But right away, it just feels like, oh, I know it. There's just something familiar about it. And that's really exciting. Yeah. And I think every first-generation kid who goes back to their parents' homeland kind of feels that, this sort of, oh, there's this other place that I kind of belong to. You don't really belong to. You're not a citizen of the place. Well, in my case, I wasn't. Didn't grow up there, but you have some sort of connection. There's something cellular that happens. Yeah, yeah. You can't really explain it. Yeah, I remember just getting to the. I was staring at an Airbnb, which was in this, like, Soviet apartment tower, and just entering. And there's just this feeling of, like, oh, I know it. But then getting to work was really hard because I'd never been a reporter before. And that first day, I'd gone in on a red-eyed flight, and I'd get in, and the editor was just like, I need you to file this story tomorrow. You're just dropped in, and you learn on the fly. And so my head was always exploding because I'm learning how to do journalism at the same time. You know, my Russian was. It was spoken. My parents made us do Russian. They made us learn grammar and reading classes up to, like, fifth or sixth grade. And then they were just tired of us complaining about it all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm shocked they got that far. I know. Yeah, they got pretty far. Brazilian, the Russians. Exactly. Nothing else, they're Brazilian. Exactly. I stopped reading. Now I have to read Russian news. And write it. Well, you're writing in English. But you write, you know, you write requests for comment, requests for interviews in Russian. I would have people check it for me. AI wasn't, you know, Google Translate wasn't that good in 2017. Now you wouldn't even think twice about it. But, you know, I'm trying to put it together. And then the assistant would be fixing it. But, you know, they're getting annoyed. Yeah. And so you quickly, you're getting up to, you know, your first months are kind of just. Paddling as hard as you can. Totally, yeah, yeah, yeah. Are your friends that you're making that are Russian, are they kind of introducing or bringing out in you somebody that was there but was kind of dormant? Yeah, I think so. I mean, because I went through this rebellious period when I went off to college. When I'd call home, I would start. Speaking English instead of Russian. And I'm hanging out with, like, very American kids. And so that means that the kind of ways my parents react to things or talk about things is sort of in the background. And I remember really just diving into it. Like, I was really excited. I met this kid who was interning at the Moscow Times. Then he was also a Russian-American kid. His parents had emigrated. He grew up in San Francisco. And he had already met all these Russians outside of work. And he started introducing me to them. I had no interest in hanging out with foreigners. Like, I wanted to hang out with them. I wanted to hang out with Russians. That was interesting. I think it's also part of my personality of adventure-seeking. Like, I really wanted to live in Southeast Asia because it was interesting. I'd gone on a trip there. Gone backpacking South America. And it was fun to meet locals. And so it was sort of the same thing here, except I felt like I belonged in a way. And I really wanted to belong at the beginning. It's kind of a funny way, looking back on it, because some of the Russians would make fun of my accent. They'd be like, well, you're not really foreigners, so why is your Russian so bad? Why can't you pronounce R as the correct way? Like, you're supposed to roll your R. And I remember there was this, like, Russian. Tongue twister that you'd use to practice rolling R's. And I'd go around town, like, speaking it to myself. Will you say it to me? And so you're doing the R over and over and over again. Sounds so good to me. It's good now. It used to be a restaurant, like, ribney. I'm so tainted. My well is so poisoned by all the media I watched growing up. Like, I hear that, and I go straight to. Villain? I'm in trouble. There's a Soviet KGB person talking to me. But so, I'm watching, and this is, I mean, darkly funny. To what happened to me eventually, but I was watching The Americans then. Yeah. And The Americans was the first time I had watched something made in Hollywood where I felt like we were being treated like people. Yeah. Like, we have internal lives. We have feelings and thoughts, and we have flaws. And it's not just, like, Igor or Vlad, the drunk, leather-wearing. The guy Schwarzenegger's gonna fight. Exactly. It's actually kind of funny. I'm watching that show at that time, too. Fine, it's about sleeper agents, but it's fascinating. And I felt like this sort of. You know, wanted to be part of it. Familiar. Yeah, familiarity. Now, this is very philosophical, I guess. I think at that age, you're what age? I turned 26 a week after I moved. So, I was 25 when I moved, 26. Okay, so you're pretty much out of that little quadrant of your life when you're a young man. But I can imagine, we all feel a bit like we belong at Hogwarts, but we're not there. But we all feel a little outcast-y, and a little different, and a little weird. And I can imagine me going. Going there and thinking, oh, this is gonna be the explanation. Like finding yourself, sort of. Yeah, but which is just, I think, a universal quagmire of identity searching. You know, when you're young, you're trying to define it. And you're just like, man, I don't know if I fit in any one of these paths. None of them feel perfectly right for me. And I just imagine I might go to the homeland and think, oh, the answer may lie in here. You know where it ended up lying? It took a little bit until I met them, but I met two of my best friends, just like in life, there. Pyotr Sauer, who was the son of Derek and Ellen. So he grew up in a funny family in the sense that he grew up in Russia, but speaking Dutch at home. The flip side, and then we both befriended this woman, Polina Ivanova. She was born in Russia, emigrated to the UK, and grew up in the UK. She was three when she moved, so she's a lot like me. So she grew up speaking English, but Russian at home. And she'd move back in the same time as me, and it was the hybrids. And so we have this, like, funny mix of way of we speak mostly English, but we'll flip into Russian when it's more comfortable with each other. I love the Russians that I met, and I love my American friends, but it was this sort of, oh, I'm not the only one like this. Yes. And not the only one like this, you know, my Chinese-American friends. We have similar things we can talk about. It was really, like, the comfort of speaking both languages as comfortable anyway. And having kind of, like, a foot in both the West and Russia was fascinating to me. That's where, like, I felt like, oh, that is my identity. Right. And they were both doing journalism, too. We're both excited by journalism the same way. It was this sort of, like, uh-huh moment. I also think that situation. Can produce one of two outcomes. outcomes one is i don't belong anywhere like i don't really belong in this russian family i don't belong in this american school or maybe more optimistically is like oh i belong everywhere that's how it felt it felt like we belonged in both great and it felt like you wanted access to both always yeah and like oh this is rad i am a connector of these two worlds yeah i don't think we looked at ourselves that way yeah but it felt like yeah you want both you don't want them to be separate you want the pleasures of both and it's hard to explain people sometimes their jaw drops and i'm like you know i like russian food a lot but it's because that's what you grow up on yeah it's the comfort why does the jaw drop i don't know i think people don't know what it is they think is like yeah yeah yeah they're not famous for it yeah i guess the unique thing psychologically that's going on is you have agency over in group out group which is generally you're kind of assigned one in group and that's your in group and then you might join another in group but this one is like oh no i get to pick i can be in this group of russians with my american cap on or i could be with this group of americans and have my russian cap on and i really think i have purchase in both those worlds it's a classic code switching yeah and a feeling of like i have options with my in group is interesting yeah i think that's kind of cool as you're building your life there for those three years it's quite fulfilling yeah between work and friendship super fulfilling it's a place if you're a journalist or foreign correspondent and foreign correspondents ultimately why the job is so interesting is because you're constantly learning so your life is very active you go through life very intentionally because everything is a study is a learning experience you're trying to pick up information constantly if your eyes are very wide everything's always active any book you might read any newspaper article or a new bar opens in the neighborhood and maybe that says something about the way the economy is going and from a journalist perspective russia was vastly interesting it's sort of on this autocratic decline at that point but you've got this incredible figure alexander volney doing what he was doing i mean the opposition leader during his looked hopeful stuff's happening and then it was also a really modern european comfortable city so it was also just really fun on top of things like there's a nightlife and restaurants and bars you know you're 25 26 27 29. it's fun and it's fun and then outside of the city is not that far to get to so the sort of countryside you go out there cross-country skiing in the winter you had a fun soccer team sort of in a way combined all the these things into one place up until 2020 there was not one point where i think any of my friends felt any sort of danger at that point yet that would come yeah but in that period the country is on the decline but you've made your social group you've gotten a handle on your job it's interesting you're kind of hitting your stride with it yeah there's a ton of contradictions happening totally separate people are getting more economic freedom that's one kind of freedom but then they're also losing this other kind of freedom losing political freedom losing and the right and they've annexed crimea so there's a lot of stuff happening you describe it as this period of time is like cosplay democracy yeah his regime putin's contemporary period i mean he's gonna get to the point where he'll be the longest ruler he'll have ruled more than stalin if he gets through his full period i mean it's a crazy long period it's 26 years now they started in this really i mean it's a smart idea you can go to university in the u.s to college in a political analyst right they have a job called political technology you're a political technologist and that's gaming the system oh wow and so the way they set it up was so it's not just sort of like this totalitarian soviet cell government to retain control it was to give the feeling of participation in the democracy without actually ceding control ever so there was putin as the main populist united russia was his party sometimes he would run actually separate of it to be like above the political system sort of like the king of the uk but more often he was with the united russia party but then there were all these token parties so there's the liberal democratic party was really the nationalist party communist party for socialist leaning people and then yablika or apple which is the liberal party and you could vote for all of those and pretty much every time he and his party we got like 65 of the vote so they win they don't win with two and sometimes you know you'd be in some regions where they're really trying to out catholic the pope and for their worth and they're like he gets 95 and you're like guys you should have done a little better job faking that you should have done a little better job faking that you should have done a little better job faking it yeah but also it was the same thing with journalism civil society protest well this is fascinating i learned from your book which is like foreign journalists at this time have a quasi-ambassadorship existence in russia explain that a little bit the russian press is already feeling some heat in places so like anna politkovska the famous journalist for nova gazeta which is this independent newspaper investigative newspaper she was shot in her stairwell and killed on putin's birthday on 2006. is this the one that she was dismembered before her body was returned no that's the ukrainian journalist during the current invasion now yeah yeah this one was a russian journalist who was shouting from the rooftops where this regime was going okay this is like a cat uh or even before which is actually wild to think about how early from the first days of the regime there were voices throughout who were talking about what was going and then you know about seven years after her and so she had already been killed some news outlets had been taken over by the kremlin but they still were doing investigative reporting in this way that was like you're allowed to have that as long as it's not dangerous to us yet it has to have the appearance of criticism but not too much criticism and the russian audience 145 million people won't generally be reading all these independent outlets they'll be mostly listening to the radio or watching tv and that's mostly state propaganda so we'll let you play with that the foreign press was actually completely different it was this like giving russia cover as actually we're a normal country you have the financial times and we know they can't be controlled but they're writing for abroad or reporting for abroad and it's actually a way to show the rest of the world that we are a normal country of functioning economy you know they never wanted to be iran at that point they didn't want to be isolated yeah so if at that point iran had taken a foreign correspondent on espionage charges jason resigned for the washington post or anything 2014 that was very in a theme of russia at that point yeah they want to be a normal european country if i recall right they're still trying to bolster confidence economically right they want to have companies traded on the new york stock exchange yeah they had spief which was known as the davos of russia and saint petersburg foreign investors would come every year what is the foreign press in any country you're invited with a visa and an accreditation document that allows you to report there and some countries let those run out every so often they were a year long at this point at this point they're a year long yeah but you had moments where you had preferential treatment oh totally yeah yeah there was a protests in uh 2019 when i was getting funneled to the police wagon with all the protesters and then i get up there and the senior cop is like why'd you bring him over here he's an american journalist yeah get him out so it's actually we don't want to fuck with we don't want to mess with it yeah yeah yeah it's also like we'll get in trouble from on high actually and so in 21 was the first time i was there that somebody gets expelled but that's exactly what happens to them they get expelled a bbc reporter i mean that's what happens to a bbc reporter i mean that's what happens to them they get expelled a bbc reporter i mean that's what happens to them they get expelled a bbc reporter i mean that's what happens to them they get expelled but you could see that over the years those unwritten rules really applying because over the years it gets more and more repressive russian independent outlets critical of the regime are getting labeled as foreign agents or undesirable organizations and some people actually have to flee the country and we're going along reporting all the same stuff so we're very aware of this distinction between our russian colleagues and us and are you carrying any guilt about that the moment where i first felt that guilt i write about in my memoir it's 2021 so there was this outlet called project or project investigative website and they uncovered putin's third daughter who he had out of wedlock pretty soon after that they get slapped with this tag undesirable which means that anybody associated with the organization can go up to prison up to six years oh my god just for associating with them so like if you talk to them virtually if you have a contract with them you can go to prison so you are working with undesirable i mean pretty intense and so i have a crew of friends now at this point some of us are foreign some of us are russian journalists mostly hang out together and you know i remember we had this little dacha outside of town and dacha is like a country home so we were there it's late summer is this the one you built we got to renovate it yeah we were allowed to renovate it which and we had it for a couple years and it's super fun but yeah my two russian friends are talking about whether they should stay in the country or not you're kind of this outside observer and i think that is a weird thing also about being a foreign correspondent you know an earthquake happens you parachute in people have lost their face and they're like oh my god i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die their family members and you talk to them you write about it and then you leave and so this was a sort of oh it's now beginning it's affecting my social circle yeah yeah and you're kind of outside of it yeah how and why do you end up going to work for afp agence france press so i three years at the moscow times was trying to move up the kind of classic thing is the way foreign correspondents in moscow moved up and they staffed news agencies and then newspapers or tv stations was you started a place like the moscow times and then you work your way up by that point media is fracturing everywhere everywhere financing is not doing well so the newspapers if in the 80s or the 90s the kansas city star and the baltimore sun had moscow correspondents right yeah now we're now we have two at the washington post a few at the new york times the wall street you know and these jobs come up very few and far between and news agencies are also a great job and a great job to do journalism and they don't love hearing this but sometimes it's a stepping stone too it's sort of like the next step it's like the next step and then you're next step. And so AFP had a job come around and they had some people already from the Moscow Times. nice place to work, a nice step. The one thing that's worth explaining is that they're a French news agency, but their English language news wire is massive. So like the BBC subscribes to it. I forget which other outlets, American newspapers subscribes to it too. The reason you have a news agency is partly you might be, let's say you're putting together the evening news and then you get these alerts from Reuters or AFP being like, you know, a plane has gone down and you realize that you have to change your segment. But sometimes we will fill those out into full stories and in local newspaper and Cleveland might not have the resources it used to have or run an AP story in full. And so that's how I ended up there as a kind of next step in the career. Okay, and so between the Moscow Times and then AFP and then ultimately you do get a job with the Wall Street Journal. Which is the sort of what I wanted, the final step. Like I'm going to be a foreign correspondent and then once I have a job at a newspaper which still has this wide network, I'll probably be able to move with them later. I didn't want to leave Russia until I had this sort of, okay. Now I'm a foreign correspondent. Maybe I'll get a posting in Turkey after this or the Middle East or back home in D.C. or something. Right. You'd have your bona fides and be able to do whatever. Yeah. What kind of stories are you reporting on? How dangerous are they getting? Like how much are you poking the beehives? Up until the war, nothing was dangerous. I mean, it's interesting. So when I'm still at the Moscow Times, I reported a story. Russia had a failed nuclear missile launch up in a closed region in the Arctic Circle, Siverodvinsk, where like, a foreigner can't go. So it's still sort of like a Soviet leftover. The region gets quarantined. Iodine's passed around because of radiation. Foreign correspondents, some were getting permission to travel there. But a colleague of mine, we noticed in local chat groups online in that region that three people were taken to a civilian hospital instead of the military hospital who were exposed to radiation. And they're brought in translucent bags. Two die right away. One, they try to save them. They can't. Then the, the hospital gets quarantined. They get sent to Moscow for radiation testing. One of the doctors has radiation found in their thigh. The domestic intelligence service, the FSB, which is formerly known as the KGB in the Soviet period, comes and makes everybody sign NDAs. We report out that story completely. Wow. And no one calls to say, what the fuck are you doing? In retrospect, you know, if that was happening when I end up getting arrested, the difference, so the difference in temperature, right? So when I'm at AFP, nothing, there was, there was a protest. There was Navalny who had been poisoned, left the country to get treated and came back arrested. And that was this real sort of inflection point of autocratic decline because they labeled all his volunteer groups extremist. They started fining Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for having any posts about Navalny because they're saying you're spreading extremist material. He's his biggest threat to date or had been? Yeah, by far this biggest threat. Yeah, because he actually was able to sort of get a movement around him. And so when I joined the Wall Street Journal, it's, it's January 22 right before the full scale invasion. And then everything's about the war. So that's when it's an actual debate. That's when the debate begins on what's safe and not safe, really. Okay. That's when it gets dangerous. But you're probably, is it fair to say you're underestimating the danger at that point? Obviously you got arrested. Fair answer would be that I was always underestimating. Yeah. We weren't looking at espionage as a worry at that point. Well, let's talk about what Putin says. What year does Putin say this? To catch a spy. He gives an, yeah, an edict. That was at the end of 22. So the full scale invasion starts at the end of February 22. So that's in late December 22 is when he gives that edict. That says what? So he always addresses the FSB. He gives them tasks. So in 2018 ahead of the world cup, didn't want to ruin this sort of nice party. They told them we need to catch more terrorists and extremists. Lo and behold, they go around catching teenagers and Antifa anarchists saying that they were trying to overthrow the regime. And you know, we've done our jobs here. He addresses them and says, we need to catch more traitors, foreign spies and saboteurs. Three months later, I'm arrested. But before that, the debate really began. So it was supposed to be this lightning strike on Kiev. Doesn't go well. A week later, Russia's digging in for a long haul war. One of the things they do is they pass these incredibly draconian censorship laws and they called the war a special military operation. Right. It wasn't a war. It wasn't a war. Yeah, or like Vietnam. And so if you called it a war in a social media post or a news article, you could go to prison for up to 10 years, 10 years for calling it a war. So the Russian press fled the country. That's it. That's our signal. We can't work anymore. If we want to work, work from the outside, some state. So it was a mass migrate, mass exodus, mass migration, but some stayed and decided what we're going to do is follow the rules because it's still more important to be on the ground. So there was a debate, some of them potentially, they could be feeding. And so that's when in the news we saw like the New York times announced it was temporarily shutting its bureau until the rules are clear. The Bloomberg left my bureau chief stayed. You moved to London though. So I was in London because when you switch news outlets in Russia, you go through this bureaucratic process of the accreditation switches. So I just switch it from the AFP to the wall street journal and legally you can't work in the country at that period. So I was in London where our foreign desk is based when it happened and the reaction we're talking months ourselves of like, does this apply to us? Do these unwritten rules no longer apply? And it was the Russian foreign ministry that actually called in all the heads of bureaus to a meeting, a closed door meeting. Then, and an audio recording was passed around. I ended up writing about it in the book for an hour. Everybody's pressing the spokeswoman on do these rules apply to us or not? And the end, she just goes, you know, you call men, women and women, men in the west. You can call this a special military operation. You follow that logic? Wait, say it like it's not gonna be so hard for you to refer to this as a military operation or whatever, because you already called Ben and women and women may referencing our trends. If we have traditional values in Russia, you guys are willing over there to, to call a man, a woman and a woman. Why is it that hard for you to call this war a special military option? Like, why is it that hard? Just call it this. And so then some of us are debating whether they've completely lost their minds. But what we're watching over time is this unwritten rules thing. Do the rules apply? And what they did was they tried some Russian journalists in absentia, put them in a wanted list. I took it as a signal. Don't come back. Don't do the job. Foreign journalists. No, still a little gray still. Yeah. And so some people are still working. The BBC, my bureau chief, others, some of us are coming back. I came back, a correspondent for the New York times came back, correspond for the guardian correspondent for the financial times. And we're kind of discussing, watching thinking espionage at that point. You know, the last time I didn't even come to mind in a way, as I said, we're underestimating the danger, but the last time was the late Soviet period, not contemporary Russia. And that had happened where they had tried journalists for being a spy. Yes, exactly. Since cold war. Yeah. And so then the year is going along, keep reporting more and more. Sensitive stories because it, I mean, it is a war. And so that is the topic. Also in your very honest about it in the book, which I appreciate, like the addiction parts, yes. And by the way, if I could relate to you anymore, it's this it's like now it's dangerous. Now we've got high octane fuel. Yeah. Just tell me about what's going on there with your own ego and fantasy. Yeah. Yeah. Ambition and adrenaline. I think a foreign correspondent faces this all the time. I think on the one hand there's the early, early thing we were talking about. How do you actually make it? How do you get noticed? Yeah. It's often where the story is and where the story is, is not always the safest, but we also find it really important and it should be important. It's important to show these things. Yeah. It's important to document them. It can be multifaceted. Yeah. But then I think a lot of the people who do this job or end up being war correspondents have this kind of draw to the action or draw to the danger or draw to what's exciting, even if it's bad. Yes. Of course. So, you get caught up in this cycle. If we were taking hormone levels, you'd be like a stock trader who made a very risky trade. Yes. A hundred percent. At the same time you're debating, you're talking to yourself about, well, the work's really important. One of the things we were talking about was that if you don't have a Russian passport, you're treated as a foreigner, not a Russian. Russians can't do the kind of reporting. It's this massive country waging war. It has to be me. It's almost an inflated sense. Yeah. It's an inflated sense of ego. Almost right. If it's not me to debate, we're talking about that amongst ourselves. I'm not the only one. I'm the only one. And yeah, and it is exciting. And then there's, you know, what I describe in the book is like going back to London or then visiting family in Philly, you're bored. It's sort of a hurt locker thing. And so then you're going back to the importance on the one hand, it's an important mission. It's an important job. It's a valuable job. On the other hand, it's the adventure too. And it's sort of wrapped up together. You're in a dopamine cycle. The fact that when you're home, you're bored out of your mind and uncomfortable. This is the world's war one pilots returning and starting the hell's angels. I mean, this is like an age. Old condition. And more correspondents die on the front lines. Sometimes it's, there's nothing that could have been done. Sometimes we mess up, right? And newsrooms mess up. We don't think through everything correctly. Also reporters. Our job is to be out chasing information. The editor's jobs or the newsroom is to like, kind of know when to pull us off the leash and pulls in. But we also know the environment much better than them. And so it's this constant and we get things wrong. So take us to the story. You have a colleague that would normally have reported on this, but as. Yeah. Yeah. So Putin has given them this address. We need to catch a spy. If you take away the other stuff, one of the tasks is, so it's like trader. That's a Russian who works with the foreign intelligence. There was changed sides. Foreign spy. Okay. We get that as a saboteur. That's either Ukrainian or local. Who's like bombing railroad tracks or whatever. So he's like, these are the three things we need to stop. So they go around doing the job. One other thing is that they need Americans. So I'd been reporting at that point, there was this guy, Paul Whelan, Paul Whelan was in Russia on. an espionage charge is, and. The Americans were trying to get him back. What was he doing there? I mean, he said he had gone to a wedding, and he said he was getting from a friend a flash drive of Russian churches. It was a sting operation. The FSB gave him what they said was a flash drive of all the identities of secret agents. Okay. Russia never published any evidence of that, though. You know, and the Americans said he was arbitrarily detained and arbitrarily arrested and ended up classifying as wrongfully detained. Okay. That was the end of 2018, and that's still the period where journalists were watching these things. So he's been in custody for five years. He's been in custody for five years. There was him, you know, Trevor Reed, another Marine had been arrested, Brittany Griner, the WNBA player. Trevor Reed and her, they're both traded. The Russians seem to be stalking Americans to be using these swaps to get people home. Paul Whalen, they're telling the Americans he's not going to leave Russia, actually, in any trade unless Vadim Krasikov and FSB. An assassin who was sent to Germany on a mission to kill somebody in broad daylight, sentenced to life in prison, leaves Germany, and the Americans are saying, well, this is crazy. This FSB assassin is in Germany having been convicted. Of murder and is sent for life. Is for life. For life. Another guy's got a trumped up or questionable. Trumped up, well, yeah, questionable, trumped up, whatever it is. I mean, they've never shown any evidence. That's the key thing, right? So, and the U.S. has said he's wrongfully detained. That's what we go by. I mean, it's weird he got a USB drive of churches, whatever. Sustained operations work, too, though, right? Sustained operations, you just decide to. Who knows? The thing to rest on. Unless there's anything else that they provide is that they've never provided evidence that he's actually received that information or wanted to, right? So that's what we can say. The main point is probably who cares if you violate a crime. Just in terms of trade logic, you're asking us to get Germany to release a guy? Yeah. Right, like what does Germany have to do with it? Yeah. They realize they don't have enough trade to get back this capital. But they're also looking around for a spy, and I think I'm up to some stuff that they, one, don't like, but two, might be suspicious of. Stay tuned for more. Your armchair expert, if you dare. I'd done a story right at that period about how Putin was getting information from the front and making decisions about the war. Gone to Pskov, which is this town that hosts the 76th Division of the Russian Airborne Forces, which had occupied Bucha in Ukraine, committed scores of war crimes. No matter what, they don't like that kind of reporting. Yeah. Also, you did a bunch of stuff on Wagner, yeah? Yeah. Done stuff on Wagner. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Done stuff on Wagner at that point. When I got arrested, I was doing a story. I'd filed it. It was going to run. It ended up not running, but was about how he was building this political movement. And the last quote in the story is from a pro-Putin lawmaker, you know, a ruling party lawmaker saying, well, like, you know, if he becomes a problem, we can do it the Stalinist way, no person, no problem. So, you know, four or five months later. No person. No problem. Man, shit is popping off over there. Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's scary. We're working on a story that. It is about basically how Russia is switching its economy to a military footing, how it's growing military production. So, we were looking around at different data points how to do the story because Ukraine was planning this big counteroffensive in 23, the summer of 23. They were telegraphing. They were going to cut through Russian lines in the south, separate off Crimea from the east, and then they could go back to the negotiating table. The U.S. was backing that. Europe was backing that. It was all loud. But Russia was publicly saying, like, we're building defensive lines in the south. We're ramping up our production. And it seemed like an important story to do that. To me, you know, it's not going to be as easy as everybody thinks. Doing that in country is not the right decision. But anyway, so I think, you know, all that's coming together. And I have a colleague who used to cover the defense industry in Russia when that was still okay to do. He did that for Reuters. Then he did it for Wall Street Journal. He had left Russia in 21, and he was trying to get a visa back to Russia, and they kept denying him because it was all hands on deck. Anybody who spoke Russian knew Ukraine knew Russia. Biggest war since World War II in Europe. And so we were working together on a lot of stories. And he had this source who was a union boss for factories, and they were all including this tank factory, Pavel Sergenya. And he had helped a colleague with stories since 2019. NPR had talked to him. Russian outlets had talked to him. And he said, yeah, I can help with this story. We should meet. So the first meeting, we talk about, like, what's going on at this factory. You know, we were trying to get on the floor of Kalashnikov talking to the CEO. They seemed open to it, but they're like, we need to get permission. Talking to military experts. Talked to a few other sources. And so we were talking to Pavel about basically what the conditions were like. Like, oh, I talked to the ruling party lawmaker. He was saying students were being just sent from university right into factories. They were working around the clock. This is the economy now. This is the job now. And so we had all these different bits. And so with him, I was trying to figure out, okay, well, they're kind of like crown jewel. So I wanted to understand how that was going. And the main thing, the thing that he ended up doing, he said, well, you know, I think something that would be interesting for you is sort of like the production potential of this factory. You know, I recorded that conversation and listened to it after I got out. And it's actually in the court case. I go like, yeah, that does sound interesting. And then we move on with the conversation. Yeah. That ends up being the thing that they say is the classified information. You had a not great feeling here. There's like a spidey sense. He said at one point, when I did the Putin story about how he's getting information from the front and how he's making the decisions about it, I called the Kremlin for comment. And the Kremlin spokesman called back and said, everything you're publishing is classified information. We went ahead and published it. Like, that's their comment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But almost like they're establishing. Yeah. Some kind of pattern. Maybe that comment on its own should have been a signal to us that we're done here. You know? You're in a zone of, yeah. Probably. But we put that comment in. Yeah. My visa and my accreditation get extended. We keep going. In that meeting, he says, I think he says it specifically about this production. I'm pretty sure. This I don't remember. But I'm pretty sure he says specifically about the production. He goes, but that's classified information. And I remember just being like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because really quick, as a journalist here, you hearing classified information is fine. It's fine. The problem would be for the source, not for the journalist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. You're allowed to receive. They're not allowed to tell you classified information. But you're allowed to receive. But we can report. But the spidey sense is, it should be more than spidey sense. It shouldn't be common sense. It's sort of like, Jesus, why is he hitting the word classified? Saying this straight out. Yeah. But what I remember it being was, you know, I'm working on five, six stories at once. It's a rush. I wanted somebody to check the newsroom. They're busy. Nobody checked the transcript. And I think there's still this sort of latent idea of, okay, there's this red line they're not going to cross. They will kick us out. I had a colleague who their visa wasn't extended. Right. You thought that was the potential risk. I thought I was about to not get my visa. I thought I was about to get kicked out. There was a colleague at another paper who just had their visa not extended. Yeah. And I was like, okay, I'm probably next. So final, like, last chance dance to get whatever we can get from here that's important before it's everything from the outside. I think I just, like, put it aside. But really what that was, was obviously. A trap. Yeah, it was a trap. What the first meeting's about is also about establishing the case. And then you go to the big man and you say, well, we have one. He's. We're chasing all this stuff. And he's actually agreeing to receive it. So then the second meeting. Funny enough, Bukowski's. Is it. And it's no reference to my favorite writer. I think it is. Okay. I actually never looked up the history of Bukowski Grill, but I think it might be. Okay, Bukowski's Grill. You can't. The city. I would call it safe there. Exactly. Yekaterinburg is kind of amazing. So it's the city and the roads in Russia, in central Russia. And they have this sort of walk, footpath along the river where they all have, like, various monuments, like the Beatles. Oh, wow. And different bands. I think Bukowski Grill might be. It's sort of an artsy town. It was actually one of the more liberal cities, the longest in Russia. Had the last opposition mayor, Yevgeny Roizman, up until, I think it was 2019. So it was sort of a holdout. So I think it could be. Okay. But the reason we went there is because on my first trip, a source I had met was like, that's a pretty good restaurant. So we had lunch there with my photographer the first time and was like, well, let's go back there. So he, at the first meeting, said, we're gonna have to meet a second time and Yekaterinburg is gonna be easier for me this time. Anyway, that's where the sting happens. That's where I get arrested. Yeah. So you're having. We're having lunch. We're meant to go talk about. Tank production. Basically, you go back, talk to colleagues. Maybe he'd be able to get some information. You're also, I want to add, at this moment. Worried about him. You're worried about him. I'm really worried about him. That's what I was gonna say. Well, exactly. Is he injuring himself? That's very American journalist to think like that because it's your source you want to protect, not the other way around. Yeah. Though, one thing I should say is this was all being discussed with not just me and my editors, the lawyers, the security. Everyone at the Wall Street Journal knows about this. Yeah. You haven't gone rogue or unilateral. Exactly. And then they find out about it later. So we've discussed this all. We've agreed on it all. And I think one thing we also got wrong, it's not just about me, but probably it was too dangerous for the source anyway. Let's say he was a real source and not an FSB agent setting this up. Probably too dangerous for him anyway. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know? Because the consequences for him are going to be. Yeah. And that's also like the ethics of journalism is do no harm. That's so freaky. And so actually in retrospect. In retrospect, one of the things we should have probably done is pull out and be like, it's actually too dangerous for him, even if he's volunteering. Right. When's the line? It's really funny because what you end up getting accused of weirdly has so many parallels to actual CIA agents, which is they too are constantly weighing what's going to happen to this source. Right. But I think the CIA. I mean, I don't want to hurt their feelings, but I don't think they care as much. Well, they as an organization don't. They have a very utilitarian look. Got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the agents themselves who become friends with the people. It's a massive risk. are absolutely plagued with the guilt of this. I was reading Benjamin Weiser's book. The kind of handler is always worried about what might happen to this person who's risking their life. Yeah. So anyways, you're at this lunch and my editors were like, he said he wanted to bring notes and they're like, okay, well, notes is fine, but don't take anything from him. Ah. And he brings papers that look like official production tables. Like he drew them out and he hands them to me and I take them. Yeah. Okay. At that point, the room kind of wobbles. I think another Spidey sense moment. Uh-huh. But I don't know if it's. Whatever. You're also, like, you might not be intending to walk away with them, but you're being polite, and he's prepared all this. You feel maybe obligated. It's more than polite. I'm like, well, I have it. I might as well take notes on this. Yes, yes, yes. And that's when, and this is how a sting happens anywhere. Yeah, the drug deal. Whatever it is, you know, the FBI does this here, too, right? That is the moment then. They have everything they want. Exactly, yeah, you've taken it. Yeah, it's whether you've left the restaurant or not. Exactly. Your only saving grace probably at that moment would be to not take the papers, but I think the Russian system wouldn't even matter. Yeah, exactly. You'd be like, you were there. You were wanting to receive them. The fate has been sealed, I think, at that point. Are you first seeing other diners respond, or are you seeing them first yourself? So what happened was my back is facing the wall, so I'm facing the dining hall. Pavel's facing me. It's kind of half empty because we met at four. Here, basically, marching feet look up, and there is a half dozen men. Then I hear them say, I believe we booked that table, which I think is a really smart thing to say, actually, if you're doing an arrest like this, because you get kind of frozen. You're like, wait, what? You're trying to make sense. I remember getting up. They booked this table? And then I just register it's balaclavas, like they're masked. So then they approach. They announce that I'm under arrest by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, which is the FSB. And then as I'm getting dragged down on the ground, I see Pavel step. And at that moment, you put it all together. Oh, he's actually. Not really yet. I clock it. Then I'm just thinking of me, hoods overhead, being dragged out. If I'm you, it's like, oh, shit, they're going to grab this guy I was already worried about. Oh, no, they're not grabbing him. That's interesting. The other thing I should say is that the papers, I start stuffing between the wall and the couch. It's like this animalistic fear. You're freaked out. You're realizing, like, holy shit, what this is. You just got to get all. I'm at that moment still scared for him, which is bizarre. Yeah. That I am. Yeah. And then when they're arresting me and he steps out in the crowd, I just clock that. It's just scary. Fight or flight. Fight or flight, yeah. They put a bag over my hand. They take me out into a van. They take the bag off my head. They ask me who I work for. I say the Wall Street Journal. Then they put the bag over my head. They punch me a few times. And then I'm like, okay, you know, it's espionage they're accusing me of. And I'm still worried about Pavel. Yeah. At that moment. They take me to the station. And then they just calmly hand me my espionage charges. And they don't interrogate me. And they don't ask anything about Pavel. And so then that moment of him stepping out into the crowd clocks into clarity of, oh, it was a setup. He was setting you up. Yes. And also, you're doing a ton of math. I found this fascinating. On the right there, you think you know what's ahead for you, which is, wow, they really think I'm CIA. Yeah. They're going to torture me for months and try to get things out of me. I had reported cases over five and a half years where I reported a case about there's a murder outside of Moscow in the suburbs. And the cops, the local cops basically took like a local alcoholic and his buddy and tied them in the garage outside of the police station, went to go see it actually, and strapped them into their seats and attached electrodes to them, including to the tip of the guy's penis until he signed papers attesting to the fact that he committed the murder. His friend signed papers attesting to be the witness in the case. And it seems from going through the whole trial with the defense team, it's just completely fabricated. And so I'm really worried. One, knowing that can happen, maybe for their story, they're going to want to have me say I'm guilty. But also, if they think I'm CIA, then who knows? You have to consider they really believe this. Yeah. And well, it seems like they do because they're seriously confronting me. In that moment, it's when they don't at the station, when they don't. And I've also then reported on cases of setups and swaps. That's when I'm like, oh, this isn't real. That's why in the book, I described it as a sense of relief. Yes. Like, oh. Well, I mean, it's real in the fact that you're going to prison and you're going for a long time, but you're not going for 20 years. It's not an interrogation. And they're not going to torture you. They're not going to treat you the way they can. The woman that you mentioned earlier, Victoria Rushin, the Ukrainian journalist, she was taken captive around the same time. I mean, a little later, but reporting in Russian-occupied Ukraine. She's killed in Russian custody, sent home in a body bag without her internal organs. So her parents can't even figure out what happened to her. God. Oh, my. They removed all of her organs. The Russian state's very calculating, basically. But you know that as a reporter. I'm a reporter. And so some of those signals, so there's signals I missed, obviously, with the arrest. There's other signals you can read. Some things you get right, some things you get wrong. These I clearly got right. If they think you're CIA, why would you be CIA and a journalist? Well, that would be your cover. That's a bad cover. We used to use journalists as cover. Really? So up until 1977, there was a church committee ruling. Congress did this whole investigation to how many journalists were being used as officer cover. And they banned the CIA from using journalists. Journalists and priests. But it was only in 1997 that they codified it as policy for all intelligence agencies. And then even then, I found for the book, there's an exception. In the event of U.S. national security, the president of the United States or the DNI, the director of national intelligence, can write a written waiver. So we don't use journalists as cover. But it could. But if you're a Russian counterintelligence officer, there's a long history, and they still use journalists as cover. And if he is CIA, they need to find out who he's talking to in Russia. It's giving him information. Who is he converted? Who are his marks? Like, they've got a lot to find out. Right. To shore up how much damage has happened. Yeah, yeah. As we would do. If we caught a Russian spy here, we need to find out his entire network. But what's also amazing, when I end up going through my case, there's no evidence, or I don't find out of anybody who's actually interrogated. But like, when we find a spy, or a real one, or maybe when they do too, we follow them forever. Right. To wrap up the network. Before we bring them in too. Yeah, totally. You know, and also. So, there's a higher bar for not just suspicion, or, you know, let's say it was suspicion for them. There's actual, like, meetings or whatever, communications. But I also have to say, for balance, I was talking to, at the end of the book, there's a sort of investigative reckoning when I'm trying to figure out what happened. And I talked to intelligence officials and former officers about this, and many agreed with me that, you know, it's crazy that they didn't even try to get any information from you. But there was one who said, look, baby, out of respect, if they think you're high level CIA officer, and it's sort of professional. Oh, interesting. Maybe that's why they didn't. So, just for balance. Perhaps someone did or didn't. Perhaps. But my read then was, they're clearly just taking me for a swap. And that's what calmed me down. Because there wasn't any torture, there wasn't any interrogation. So, the first place you go to is Lefortova? Lefortova Prison, yeah. It's the highest security prison in Moscow, where all the FSB's highest profile inmates are kept. Or just in general, big cases, like if a governor is arrested for corruption, or a spy, they go to this prison. And the FSB's investigative department is connected to the prison, so that's where they would bring you up for interrogations and whatnot. That's why I was brought there. How many months were you at that one? I ended up being there for 15. 15 months. Until I'm sent to Central and Yekaterinburg, which is because you're tried where you ostensibly committed your crime. Okay. So, I'm sent back, basically, for trial. So, in this section where you're at, Lefortova. That's definitely not what it is. It comes named after a. It's named after a Swiss guy. Oh, it is. Lefort was his last name. Lefortova. You write these incredible descriptions of the rhythm of the place, like the sounds, the routines, the food, the boredom. Tell me what you're going through there. So, the beginning is this real wobble. Moments of, okay, it's just a swap. I've reported on cases like these. Brought to prison. The second night, we have a TV. I'm watching the news channel, and one of the hosts. One of the hosts is saying, you know, as cynical as it sounds, we replenished our exchange fund, which is the term they use for the people they hold for swap. That's comforting. Yeah. But then you're in prison. You're accused of espionage. You're in solitary confinement in the beginning. Your thoughts are going wild. And I'm like, well, what if I am here for 20 years, the full extent of the case? And what if, you know, I come out of prison, my mom's not even. Or my dad's not even alive. Like, what? And so, the beginning is a real wobble. Well, also, like, this I would relate to deeply. You're cycling through shame. Of course. Because I'm like, how did I fall into this trap? How did we trust. And I'm putting my family through this crazy ordeal because I want to go have a risky, adventurous life. Yeah. Or, like, you've convinced yourself it's important work, but it is. No matter what, it's risky. This job is risky. And they never asked for this. They didn't sign up. They didn't sign up to be every waking hour of their day worried about their kid in. In a Russian prison. In a Russian prison. And so, yeah, there's this moment of berating myself. Like, how did I trust him? The thing that made me feel a lot better later was that it turned out there was a second sting operation they were running. Like, a second dangle at the same time. And that had to do with the Wagner story. And that one I definitely don't think I would have seen coming. So, they were going to get you. They were working on multiple angles. Yeah. I think they were going to get me anyway. That's what that elucidated for me. But in the moment, all I know is we walked into this really dumb trap, honestly. Yeah. I mean, really. They said it. They're the bad guys. But we walked into it. But your friend had been working with this guy. I know. But, you know, it's a war. It's a war they think that is happening not just with Ukraine, but with the U.S. and NATO. And I know what you mean. Like, we trusted the source. Yeah. In retrospect, everything is easier to see. All these signals come into focus. But you're alone in a prison cell. So, you're also berating yourself. Of course. You don't have a friend to go out to coffee with. It's like, what are you talking about? Anyone would have fallen for that. Yeah, yeah. There's this moment I describe in the book when, you know, this little mirror in the wall. And I looked up at myself brushing my teeth and I had to look away because I'm so ashamed. What helped was, so the Russian state is very calculating, what I had was access to information. I have the best sort of communication. of conditions you can have, right? They're not torturing me. My conditions are fine. I'm getting hot showers, blah, blah, blah. also getting letters. And so my friends are collecting all this global uproar, the news articles and the nice things being said and the importance of the job, whatever. Right. And you start being, okay, I'm not alone in this. Yeah. Russian journalists came to your defense. Everybody did. All journalists kind of pulled together. There was a kind of incredible early moment. Do you have a hard time feeling worthy of that while it's happening? No, you haven't inflated a sense of ego. Okay. That's honest. Yeah, no, it's kind of funny. I remember writing my diary. So my friends passed me, there's this age old tradition of Russian prisons where you can get stuff into prison. So from food to notebooks to pens, their family and friends can pass you that stuff. So I quickly get notebooks and I start using the diary as a bit of like a therapist. So one thing is you're in solitary confinement for two weeks in Russian prison, no matter what, they call it quarantine. I think diseases don't spread more than 14 days like COVID we all remember. So they don't spread it in the prison. And so you're alone and you're talking to yourself. And so I was like, this is my therapist and I start writing. And when I was going back over those diaries, there's this moment where I'm like, I'm going to write a diary. One day I'm like, wow, I'm so important for the first amendment. And then the next day I'm like, dude, keep it together. Like, why do you have these fits of grandeur? Yeah. There's this little like mini essay that I have not in the book. It's just sort of for self. Like you can kind of see how when people get into power, they start thinking, wow, I am so important. It's like, it happened to me in this little day to like, keep myself in check. Like you're just a normal dude who is just being used as his pawn. And also you walked into this trap. Fine. You're doing an important job. And you're like, I'm going to do this. And I'm like, I'm going to do this. And we're just doing your job. The power of everyone in the world looking at you, we've gotten to see it firsthand where it's like, it has made certain people crazy. Like you have a mental collapse. You start thinking like you're, oh my God. Yeah. I am very, very important. Yeah. Especially a journalist who can rest on some moral laurels. Yeah. High grounds. You're like, oh, I am doing a very important job. I am doing the Lord's work. I'm brave. Yes. And it's all, that's true. But it's also like, dude. Yeah, exactly. You're best not to focus on that. It's funny to me, it's with myself and I'm really glad that I landed on the stay normal, regular, you know. And how about the rhythm of the prison life and your cellmates, like the friendships and stuff that develop? It's a really regimented prison. It's a tiny cell. It's paradoxically maybe kind of the best run and cleanest in the Russian system. Sounded like it. It sounded way better than I was expecting. Exactly. I mean, some prisons, I didn't even know the second one I saw what it can get to, roach infested and all, you know, all the things. Freezing in the winter. Exactly. But here there's it's clean, it's organized, but it's really tiny. It's like this room and, you know, there's a bed here, a bed there, a desk there, you know, the toilet there, the fridge. And so only one adult man can fit walking up and down six or seven steps. I mean, it's tiny. And you spend your entire waking hours there. You go out on one walk, which is in a cell on the roof of the prison, which isn't outside. It's got metal wire over it. Yeah. And then you're in that cell with one other person. Were the other inmates. Are the other inmates largely political dissidents? They gave me as direct cellmates only really regular criminals. I think it's partly like, you know, I'm a journalist. I'm gonna write a book about this. I think they didn't want me with like some of the most interesting people personally. Yeah. I don't know. It doesn't seem like they leave a ton to chance. So I imagine it was handpicked for you. I think so too. I meet a lot of political prisoners in the second prison because it's more loose and you can chat. So the other thing in this prison, when you're moved around to your shower once a week or to see your lawyers or whatever, they have this old archaic snapping and clicking system, which they use to notify each other, their colleagues that they're moving prisoners around so you don't see anybody else. So it's really isolating. That is tough psychologically. But it's regimented. You're woken up at six, you're put to bed at 10. And my first cellmate and I, we come up with this, you know, real strict regiment. He'd already been there for a while. So he helped me kind of learn it. But, you know, wake up, make your bed, read, take turns each morning, who cleans the cell? After roll call, one of you gets to work out in the cell that day, the one who's cleaning, wash off in the sink. Then we, you know, would spend the rest of the morning reading. We treated that as reading time, unless we're taking for a walk, which might be the way it changed each day. In the afternoon, my cellmate loved reading. I would start doing my work, which I called it. I was focused on transcribing my diaries into paper to mail out just in case they'd be lost. I'd be like taking notes from the books I was reading. I'd meditate. I'd read the newspapers that I'd get each day. That was like my working period. And then in the evening, we would relax, play around a backgammon, watch a movie. Could you get booze? Did you ever get drunk? No, but some Russian prisons you can. This is very high security. You can make, one of the Russian prisons they make is Braga. Braga, which is like moonshine. We have a camera. They check the peephole every seven minutes. There's nothing you can get away with there. So no booze. So we had a really regimented life. Yeah, I do think it's fascinating that they, on some level, know you're going to get drunk. They know you're going to write about this. I think that's another thing that they're calculating about. Well, they're mentioned a couple of times, like in your book, when you write a book. I think, you know, it's a bit, it's a big global uproar. And partly they're doing that. If we go back to the trade and you're stocking, you really big ask. And you're kind of like, if we're already playing this game, if we have a rest that really makes a splash, it's going to be easier for us to get this guy back, which is lo and behold, the gambit that worked. That is what ended up happening. Yeah. But they also, I think, want to give me, you know, the Human Rights Ombudsman from Moscow comes and visits me at the beginning to check in on me. Every time before the U.S. ambassador came for my one monthly meeting, the warden would come and check how things are going. My mattress was thicker than my cellmates. Like they make this Potemkin village. And I think partly because, you know, one day I'm going to be going, telling the story. They don't want to be seen as. They want you to include that part. I want to tell the world about Victoria Roshna and this Ukrainian journalist, what happened to her and all the other people who are suffering and what the conditions are like. But at the end of the day, they can always say, well, that's hearsay. They'd say that's not true. That's fake news. You had a big. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So tell me about navigating the trial aspect and particularly the story of the prosecutor is fascinating because he was intermittently kind. The investigator or the prosecutor? Alexei. Oh, the investigator. Yeah. So the Russian systems, they divide the detective into operatives and investigators. So it's kind of like you go down the factory line. First, the operative makes the arrest, the investigator investigates, then you get sent to the prosecutor. And the penal Russian justice system has a 99.7% conviction rate. It's pretty high. So you're just being sent along each thing. And so the investigator, I found him really fascinating personally, because, you know, on the outside, journalists working in Russia, we don't just have access to the FSB. The FSB is like, take the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA, wrap it all into one. And it's massive. And it answers to the president, who's not really a president, but an authoritarian leader has been in power for 26 years, waging an imperial war, killing off his enemies at home. That's the FSB. And from the outside, it's this monolith structure of. You know, almost pure evil in a way, right? Like, that's how you think of it. How do the citizens think of the FSB? So I would say either like the incarnate evil or scary and I want nothing to do with them, no matter what I think about it. Or some people think that they're the elite. Good. Good. Yeah, they're helping protect the state from its enemies. If you had to assign arbitrary percentages to those groups, what do you think? Like, that's where I guess, and I want to be fair, I imagine much of the world is sitting at home wondering. Yeah. The percentage of Americans like what Trump's doing to global relations. And of course, I want to be here screaming like, just like the majority of us think this is insane. But do we? Because we can still poll in the US, right? And okay, the majority. The majority thinks Iran is a terrible idea. You're right. You're right. It's like the majority of the Republican Party is still. Especially now. Going to war with Canada. Yeah. The majority of Americans is insane. Thinks that's insane. And I think in an era where we're trying to get a global policy on AI before it destroys us. Yeah. It's impossible in the last 30 years because of someone. Yeah. I think the majority of people are nervous about our relations globally. Yes. I think you're totally right. I think with Russia, polling is really hard there. Right. Because when a pollster calls you and it's a country where an FSB official might come to you and say. Conducting the poll. You keep speaking out. Your mom works at that hospital. You sure you want her to keep her job. Yeah. Let alone ending up in prison for double digit years for speaking out against the war, which people have. Like, I met people in prison, a teenager who spray painted anti-war phrase on a government building, four words, double digit sentence, 17 at the time. But in your friendship circle in Russia or at restaurants in Moscow, like what were you sensing was the percentages? So polling and also just work as a reporter. I think that Russia has a vast silent majority, two thirds that have just tapped out. Yeah. They know they can't affect anything or they just believe they can't affect anything, whatever it is. And they've tapped out, call it apathy, call it whatever it is. They don't want to think about the war. So it's really hard to get a sense of where their views are. Yeah. Yeah. Fifteen percent probably really for the war and 15 percent probably really, really, really against the war. OK. And then it's debated. And each each end of the polls claiming the silent majority is on their side. Right. The Russian state wants to say it's a holy war. Everybody's on our side. The other side wants to say, no, we don't believe in war. It's not our war. It's Putin's war, right? And Ukrainians will say, well, it's Russians war too, obviously. It's not just him carrying out all these bombings and massacres. But it would be insane to think that a country of 145 million people, they're all like blindly believing the war is a good thing. Yeah. So it's not being there. It's hard for us to know how effective the state run media is or how we've been seeing the propaganda is or, you know, it's hard to know. Yeah, of course. Of course. But anyways, back to this investigator, you're asking the question that would have been driving me nuts. Yeah. By the way, of the aforementioned leader, I'm like, I just want to know how much he's in on it. Right. That's all I want to know. Like, how much does he believe of what he's saying and how much not? So you're trying to ascertain whether this investigator actually believes you're potentially C.A. or not. Yeah. So at the beginning, I just assumed this is all a game. Yeah. Everybody's in on it. It's cynical. They talk about it on TV. There are other prison officials and people in Corrie Mell along the way. You know, you tell them their story, story and they're like, yeah, I hope you get home soon. We're at war. We get it. We get you're not a spy. Or maybe like you shouldn't have been reporting what you're reporting on. We can get why they might have arrested you, but you're not CIA. With him, I just assumed that for a while too. And I thought he was a good actor, but it turned out in conversation that he would get frustrated with me too. He was like, dude, stop playing your game. And so he's my age. You're both very young to be in this position. He had gone to the FSB Academy when he was 18, which is kind of like the FBI Academy. Grew up in the provinces. So call it, I don't know. It's not like he's from New York City. Iowa. Yeah. You know, he's grew up. He was telling me he was very patriotic. Wanted to go to the FSB Academy. Goes at 18. He's studied there for five years. After I get out, I meet somebody who had also graduated the FSB Academy and talked about it. And they're like, you know, you go through this kind of like, it's not indoctrination, but you believe you're doing this really important job. And in some ways you are in any country. Counterintelligence is an important job. He joins the FSB and for 10 years, he's investigating these cases. He lives on the outskirts of Moscow. He takes the subway to work. He's got a couple of kids. He sometimes sleeps at work during the week. We have this argument at one point where he basically saying, I'm going to see these documents proving I'm the CIA. And I'm like, be news to me. Like, I would love to see them at some point. He was like, you know, we rely on facts in our job. And I start laughing. And at one point he says to me, he goes, you know, of course we take this job seriously. I give him the hours to this job. Like I obviously take it seriously. And you can see he's like frustrated with me that I'm demeaning him. Yeah. When that switch happened, like halfway through, I'm like, oh my God, he really does think I'm a spy. I start trying to understand his point of view because I think it's a unique situation. You can only be served by understanding his point of view. And I can imagine a guy from Iowa going to work for the FBI, believing what he's doing. Hypothetically, Trump never leaves office. The FBI starts becoming his instrument of keeping in power. Kind of misses that shift or he doesn't believe it or he's convinced himself his job is still important. He starts investigating whatever enemies of state Trump decides are. And he can't let himself believe that his job isn't. Yeah. They are very cynical and know what they're doing. Yeah. But this guy, I don't think was. The most depressing moment to me was that I pled the fifth the entire time, which is actually in Russia, the 51st. It's funny in their constitution, everything's a little lower. Freedom of speech is the 29th, freedom of the fifth is the 51st. That's funny. But the reason was my lawyers were like, look, we know how this is all going to end up. Let's just do a statement in court. There's no need to play the game during the investigation. But at the end, before I'm going to trial and the last time I see him, I'm like, how about I explain to you how journalism works and you can explain to me how your job works. We can just try to. Yeah, air it all out. Yeah. So I explain everything to him. And then he's like, well, you clearly are working as a, what they call a NOC, non-official cover spy. So spies are either official, they're at embassies or you're sent in as a businessman or whatever. That's illegal. That's not covered by the Geneva Conventions. And so they can arrest you and not kick you out. So he's like, you're clearly a non-official cover spy. The thing that was so depressing was that we're taking the same story, the same information, and we're filtering it through our different prisms. No matter what, they're incongruous. Yeah. You're never going to meet. Some people in these interviews have been asking me like, do you have Stockholm syndrome or are you giving them too much credit? And I just don't think there can be anything more fascinating than trying to figure out these people that we never have a chance to speak with. Well, you kind of, if you're the least bit thoughtful, you start with the realization you both were just born into households. Yes. And if we swap you two babies at birth, you're the same age, you're probably in the same shoes. It doesn't absolve us of responsibility. Right, right, right. I think he's responsible for what the FSB is doing. Sure, sure, sure. He worked for the FSB. But I don't know that you need to hold the judgment and the moral superiority while also fighting for your cause. Right. And also what's collective responsibility? Who's more responsible and why did I end up there? And who's responsible for the assassinations in Ukraine? Is it him? And his job, is he just a paper pusher? And so it's fascinating to try to think of all these different levels. Well, it's back to the human story. Yeah. It's why you started doing any of this in the first place. Right, right, right, right. Okay. Well, the last thing I want to know about is, because this is uniquely depressing, I think when you get to Central. I keep getting more depressing. When you get to Central and you're in this bigger prison, you're moving more freely. Yeah. You need more people. There's this whole fascinating thing about the feeder, which is the little hole you get your food through. And as soon as the guards go to bed at night, like the ropes come out and things get passed and people put their head out. It takes you a while, right, to get the courage. To learn, to know that I can do it. Yeah, put your head out of the feeder and just chat at night. On the hallways, yeah. Wow. But in here, you discover, tell me about Nikita. Nikita in this kind of prison to war pipeline. This is heartbreaking. So one of the things that Russia has done is, they first, it was with the Wagner Group. The Wagner Group, or Prigozhin, this guy who ended up getting killed, took on the initiative of saying, how about we use convicts? Was he not a chef originally? Was he like, he had a catering business or something? He spent 10 years in prison for theft in the Soviet period. Yeah. Got out and like the wild capitalism of the 90s. Yeah, he started a restaurant that Putin really liked in St. Petersburg and ended up becoming a caterer, and he catered for the Kremlin, and so he became known as Putin's chef. Isn't that nuts? It's insane. The movie on him is going to be spectacular. To our earlier conversation, he like negated this whole thing of, in Hollywood, trying to show Russians as thoughtful, interesting, introspective people, because he is the Hollywood bad guy. Yeah. But they came up with this idea of, you fight for six months, and you earn your freedom. That ended up changing a bit. It got taken over by the military after the failed putsch, and now it's, I think you have to get a medal, or you have to be injured, or you fight till the end, but people still see it as a way out of prison to see their families in breaks, or maybe they'll get their hero's medal. So it's one of the ways that Russia's been able to keep restocking its forces, even though, you know, it's cannon fodder, essentially, right? Yeah, they're just getting killed. The casualties are astounding, right? They're very asymmetric, too, between the Ukrainians and the. I think Russia's like way over a million now casualties. I mean, of killed and injured, but the injured of not being able to return to action is the is also one of those numbers, and there were some people in prison, in that prison I was talking to, who were wanting to go just because it was a way out. Some people who were patriotic and thought, okay, they can get me there quicker. Or how about even a third domain? When I was 18, I just wanted some fucking adventure and action. The adrenaline guy. Yeah, whether I was pro or not. Or a mission, or a sense of purpose, or adrenaline, or action, whatever. Yeah, just like, that's where the action's at. That guy I met that was one of the more mind-blowing conversations to me, he was in prison for murder, got out. He fought in Bakhmut, which was this part of Ukraine which was essentially just like a bloodbath. Ukrainians would just spend all day mowing down these rows of Russian convicts. In fact, this is happening in this day and age. I know. Astounding. He survived that, got free, committed petty theft, back in prison, and he's telling me he's going to go back. And I'm like, dude, prison isn't great, but it's not a death sentence, just do your time. And he was like, you don't get it. And I'm like, what don't I get? And he goes, I've never felt that kind of adrenaline. Not women, not cars, not drugs. And that, I think. That, I think, is very applicable anywhere, right? Yeah. To a lot of American men who fought in the wars we fought in. Ugh. I was talking to former Marines. Yeah, you don't have to believe in the mission to believe in keeping your bros safe. That's right enough, and that's better than living in some impoverished town in the Russian hinterlands, stealing shit to do more drugs, which is what they told me they would do. Every time you're out of money, you just steal something, and then you get the hit again, and it's cycle. Some dudes were like, well, they get drugs at the front, they get amphetamines, so maybe that's a way, because in prison, it's harder to get drugs. I mean, it's insane, some of those conversations. Yeah. That's the reality of it all. And so Nikita, my cellmate, was 20 at the time. He had defrauded the elderly. It was his crime. He would steal for booze, that's what he told me. It was a kind of ridiculous conversation at one point. I was asking why he stole, and he was like, well, I like drinking. And I was like, well, you can drink other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He didn't get me. He was like, what do you mean? Yeah. It's so obvious. But he was a self-professed neo-Nazi, which is also amazing, because the Kremlin says that the Ukrainians are Nazis. But somehow. There's a big neo-Nazi movement in Russia, there's a neo-Nazi movement in Ukraine, but they're like, they're marginal. It's not like one's bigger than the other. And he used to play Counter-Strike with Ukrainians growing up. And then when the war started, he was like, well, it's my country, so I'm not on their side anymore. Oh, wow. Which is insane. But they were, you know, they were Russian-speaking online, and what ended up separating them was this pure youthful, you know, for him, not for. I mean, obviously, they were defending their country from invaders, but for him, it was just like, well. The power of this in-group thing. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. My president said so, and he's from. I'm from, like, this village. His dad did this job where he would scrape off paint from oil refineries, from the towers, so they could get repainted. And so he was saying he wanted to go, because he felt like it was the good thing, the Russian army's doing the right thing. His grandpa had been a military police officer. There's a calling to serve. I was telling him not to go. I was just like, dude, you're going to die immediately. Then when I got out, I found out that he did go and died on his first one offensive. They're not trained at all. They're tossed. They're tossed at the front. I mean, by now, it's this insane drone war where Russia's trying to, in, like, tiny little groups, a soldier goes forward, maybe on a motorbike. They snag, like, a little shed, and they hold that. Their own drones will toss provisions to them, but, like, that dude has a death sentence already anyway, because the Ukrainians see it. They just don't give a fuck about their own people. No, it's horrifying. They're just sending their own people out to slaughter. Oh, it's Putin who's doing it. Well, exactly. Yeah. Okay, well, you were convicted July 19th, and you were sentenced to 16 years for espionage, and then August, so that's real quick, after two weeks. Two weeks. And how do you know you're getting. How does it come to your attention that you're about to get traded? They say publicly you're only traded after you're convicted. But you know, you understand, my lawyers and I talked about this, they can convict you tomorrow, so we'll know how the swap's going. based on the time. And so FSB investigations, pretrial investigations, Investigations usually take 12 to 18 months. Mine took 15 months, so that was a sign, okay, the swap talks aren't going that well. Yet, I get shipped to Yekaterinburg by train, get there, the first hearing, the trial, late June, June 26th, I think it was, or June 24th, one of those two days. The judge says, we're taking a six-week recess for my summer vacation. I'm going to Kislovodsk, which is the spa city in the Caucasus. I'm like. You can't wrap this up before your vacation. Clearly, there's nothing to wrap up because. So they're just going to keep extending it. And then on July 11th, my lawyer comes to visit, and she's like, I think it's happening. Like, what's happening? She's like, the swap. The day before, the FSB investigator, Kizhnak, Alexei, called her and said, we need you to put in a request asking for the trial to be heard earlier. Start on Wednesday, end by Friday. And she's like, this is crazy, we need to prep for the trial. And he goes, it's in everybody's best interests for the trial to end by Friday. So like, hint, hint, hint. They negotiated, and we started actually on the Thursday, July 18th, and finished on Friday, July 19th. Wow. So I knew the swap was happening on July 11th. So like, three weeks before it happened was when I knew the swap was coming. I didn't know when. I didn't know how long it was going to take. And that's actually the most excruciating period. Because when you're in the thick of it, when you're in your rhythm, you're kind of like, the days are going by, they have some form, you have your routine, and you're not thinking of an end date. It's palatable. They go by. When you think, oh my God, I'm about to get out of here, I'm about to get out of prison, those days stretch into eternity. And so those three weeks were really long. Longer than like seven or eight months in the middle of it. And the fucking brain is so fast. Crazy. Yeah, you introduce this idea, and it changes your whole reality. And everything's relative, too. The way time feels. The weirdest thing about prison time, because of like the non-form that you have to your days, or the days there in this detention center without work, when you're convicted in Russia, you go to a penal colony, which means you can go to work, you can play basketball, whatever. Like we've seen in prison in America, in American movies, right? But in the detention center, you're just kept in the cell. So what's wild is that the weeks and the months fly by because you can't grasp onto anything. But each day is so much longer than out here because there's nothing to do. Yeah. It's a bizarre paradox. And then, yeah, and then you introduce this concept, and suddenly now the weeks are longer. That's excruciating. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And do they move you by what? Do they take you to an airplane? So there, they took me in the regular way, which is by train in these cages, which is. So insane. So insane to the point that one of the prison guards working on the train asked me if that's what we do here because he's like, I think we do it pretty rough. And I'm like, yeah, dude. You guys really do. But then for the swap, so they took me back to Moscow by plane. Then we're held back in the Fort DeVos for five days. And then we're taken by bus to the airport, fly to Turkey. Then we're on an American plane back to the U.S. Long journey. Wow. Who did they get? They got the killer. So they got the killer from Germany. They got that guy? Their gambit worked. I didn't know that was for you. I mean, you've got to thank Germany for allowing this. So the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who was then the chancellor, I've thanked him already twice, and I'll keep thanking him. His right-hand man, Wolfgang Schmidt, who really made it happen. Jens Plotner, his national security advisor, really made it happen. Thank those guys. Yeah, because if you ask us to let a murderer out of prison, we're going to have some shit to say about that. Yeah, I mean, our Justice Department, we're always against swaps. The Justice Department is always like, no. Because it's political, not legal. Right. The decision. And it incentivizes this type of thing. You getting arrested. Theoretically. Theoretically, yeah. We do have this. Thomas Jefferson, I think it was 1805, or the early 19th century, there's 12 U.S. sailors held in Tripoli. And he said, like, every American life, no matter where, held abroad is valuable, and we need to get our citizens back. And so we have this sort of ingrained notion. It doesn't matter the administration. Like, the Trump administration is also freeing hostages. Democratic, Republican, we do this. To your point, I mean, the Russians know that Americans are valuable in this way. A guy close to Putin, after I was released, said, you know, an American in the closet is always a good thing. I put that in the book, right? Yeah. So their gambit works because the U.S. government's split. It's debating, should we accede to this moral demand? And they tried other ways for a long time until, and that's also why it took 16 months. So until they asked Germany to actually go in, and Germany agreed, they were trying other ways to do the swap, and the Russians kept saying, no, it's this one guy. So even though it was clear at the beginning, you don't morally want to do that. The kind of answer that the Americans and the Germans have is that the moral good, of the release, not just of myself, but these other Russian political prisoners and other Americans and Germans, versus who the Russians get back, outweighs the moral bad. Which is how I've tried to think of it, because I had a guilt over it. I'm sure you did. Well, if I'm Germany, A, I need to take threats to our citizens off the street. They did that. And he's either going to sit in prison there for the rest of his life, or they're going to send him back to Russia. And it's like, he's probably not in the business account. Well, he is in the business account. Well, he could work from an office instead of in the field. But, I mean, they clearly made the decision that, it's okay to do, so they did it, right? And it's not just one, you know, they had agreement, you know, it was like their justice department, each party, the different departments. So they did come to a consensus on it, but, you know, it's a question. Yes. Okay, my last question, and I've had you for so long, thank you for your time. You went for 10 days of this post-isolation support activities program when you got back? I went actually for a day. Oh, just a day. I wanted out. I just wanted to go hang with my girlfriend and family and friends. Like, I ended up doing my own kind of recovery program in my own way. Right, yeah. Which was with a therapist or just. Yeah, I started with a PTSD therapist. If I were you, I imagine I would get back and go, oh, I don't have PTSD. Yeah, because through prison, I feel pretty normal. And the way that you adapt to your environment, you come up with some sort of routine. One major thing, I was like, I can't let myself feel emotions. It's kind of like a stoic approach. And so I never actually cried during prison. I stay pretty regular. So you kind of get that it's going to be hard to come home, I think, but you don't get it completely. And so when I get back, I'm not sleeping because everything's so overwhelming. I think the sights and sounds. Seeing the sky. You said not having your routine. Yeah, it would, like, freak me out because I was so institutionalized. Panic attacks in a crowd of people. Quick temper. All that emotion starts coming out, including anger. Yeah. And that's directed at the people closest to you. Frustration. I'm like, I need somebody. And I was recommended a therapist who used to work with soldiers and then also started working with foreign correspondents too. The PTSD thing is basically tracking it over the course of six months. If your symptoms are improving by six months, you don't have PTSD. Yeah. If they're entrenched or getting worse, you do and you treat it. So I had symptoms, but they were getting better. So then he let me go. I was kind of numbed, didn't feel much. I would freak out when I wasn't on my schedule. And, you know, I felt like I clearly, you know, there's some baggage there. I need some work. You felt vulnerable. Yeah. And so I got a therapist, a Russian-speaking therapist, because this dual personality disorder from growing up here, I was like, my Russian side went, it was Vanya. I was speaking Russian in the cell. That's so true. And so I don't know why, but I did that. And so we worked for up until, actually up until August, I was working with him. And then I felt like I just needed a break from analysis. I was already feeling good by that point. I finished the book in late spring. So I had like this nice fun summer. I was like, all right, I'm done. Feel back to life. I was back to work at the journal. I was just like, I don't need analysis anymore. I need a break. But the book was also a form of therapy because the book, I found this woman that I ended up not working with. She was, she did a form of what they call narrative therapy for trauma. And she explained it this way, where she said, you know, if you twist your knee playing soccer, that's a shock. It heals. If you tear your ACL, you need surgery. If you step out on the street, a car whizzes by you and you're like, oh my God, I almost died. That's a shock. You're in a car accident where a few people die. Maybe you're even the driver. You have a trauma. You need to do surgery. And so you do it through attacking it by speaking about it, by writing about it, by thinking about it. And so I could have done that just with her, but I thought the book is that. The book is my narrative therapy, plus I have a talk therapist. He helps me. And so the book was this constant processing of it. Do you think the core of the PTSD is some bizarre sense of shame about something and that that's what you're somehow releasing? What I was feeling? Like, what do you think is the fuel source for PTSD? That's a really good question. I mean, my girlfriend helped me a lot with it. So maybe she's like a fourth therapist, but she was like my major support system. Masha. Yeah, and this is sort of like, dude, you were doing this for me. You were doing your job. Stop blaming yourself. They cynically set you up. Fine, there might be mistakes in a way, but you. You were a victim. What's crazy, I actually didn't even break the law. Like, my lawyers were like, there's not even a. Because the way the Russian legal system works, you need to go get the classified information, which I passively was like, yeah, yeah, sure. There's not this act of seeking it out, but also you need to have the intent to pass it to a foreign government. Right. And in the case, they just have this brief that says, I work for the CIA. And then my lawyers are just like, you know, in some cases, maybe you accidentally violate the law. Maybe that happens. But Masha was just like, you need to let it go. And I have. And I think that wasn't therapy. But I think in this case, what's fascinating for me was, one, I was a political prisoner. So it's not like I committed a crime or I was a career criminal. I had a newsroom that was back, an employer that was paying me. I had a job right when I got back. I had a loving family that was supporting me. I wasn't about to go commit now, like, petty theft again. And there was a dude I met in the second prison. He was back for his. His 11th time. And he was telling me, like, every time he gets out, nobody understands him. Yeah. Nobody speaks his language. He works as a cab driver. He makes less money than he makes in prison. So he sends that money. And he got in, again, on purpose. And he was, like, dapping up prison guards and other prisoners. And so I have this moment early on where I feel this pull back to prison. That's interesting. It blew my mind. Because I'm not of the kind of background that should feel that, right? It's like the comfort of an institutionalization. Nobody knows. knew what i had gone through nobody knew the kind of customs the conversations the jokes the in language right and so i was dealing i think a lot with that how to become an uninstitutionalized person well just weirdly the comfort of the routine the comfort of the routine like i need to have lunch at this period and i would panic if it wasn't yeah you also didn't have to think about anything outside you weren't you didn't pick up dry cleaning or mission driven send a birthday car like all the other extraneous things were also you were liberated from weirdly tolstoy describes soldiers and prisoners is very similar because the way they live the way they're directed the way they have a purpose what they do and suddenly you're back in the big world you're part of an organization you have no autonomy yeah yeah there's a lot of similarities yeah yeah but back to what your girlfriend was saying oh yeah about the shame yeah yeah yeah if your girlfriend was telling me that over and over yeah what would you i think the way out isn't you did nothing wrong for me mine was yeah you , you made some bad decisions can you forgive yourself for making some bad decisions is it okay that i made some bad decisions i think i had a pretty similar one yeah because i've sometimes at least thought like sometimes kind of i was like you make a mistake in normal life that's mistake doesn't end up always in 16 months yeah yeah yeah and a mistake maybe you made as a group yeah you know maybe you like had beer too late you all agreed to park in this spot yeah and now it's been towed and you're like we really could have avoided this does it always end up like this yeah it's like it's like you're like i'm like i always end up in 16 months so anyway i i think it's kind of like that i'll tell you what helped me actually too which is really funny one of these intelligence guys who i was talking to about how sting operations worked was like man don't go so hard on yourself we've had actual officers fall for much easier traps yeah and i was like okay so maybe that was it too i think what i was doing is similar to you forget this chat about they are wrong like you're this white knight they're the bad guys yeah yeah it's one thing if everyone else forgives you but you gotta still forgive yourself but i think that really helped i was like okay yeah i'm not as much of an idiot as a part of your identity is i'm smarter than that and so yeah right that's true that gets like disrupted your identity oh my god i'm an idiot like yeah so wait i thought i was smarter than that i've been operating on this level that i'm smarter than that and now that's been crushed that's a scary way to go about life like well now who am i do i trust myself do i am i as savvy as i think yeah so that's like something to wreck yeah you got like forced into a really wild bit of self-examination yeah yeah yeah very extreme but fascinating too what's really interesting about it is you're sort of watching yourself go through something and you're sort of watching both your adaptability and your resilience and the way you react to things it's kind of like an incredible journey to how humans work but also other humans that are in there i would rather it have not happened well evan you wanted adventure boy you got yeah i mean there's a cynical way of looking at it you know there was somebody who wrote a review of this book which was like journalists always go out seeking like great stories for memoirs that's what this guy essentially did oh and i don't think that's fair no i don't think that's fair but i do if you go back to the kind of like subconscious of what the pull to adventure or the pull to these stories and what does sometimes happen yes i would say there's like a kernel of truth without it being some conscious pull and desire yeah i mean way wants to write about orwell right yeah everyone yeah i think it's okay i think when you're at peace with those dichotomies is when you're thriving once in a while there's an incredible journalist that happens to be present for a crazy story i just think of um john krakauer having to oh yeah yeah yeah deadly everest trek of all time i hate to say the good fortune of that to have that good of a reporter be able to tell us what that experience like is yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah like is like a crazy gift and i would say that your book this cursed beautiful land is the exact same the fact that someone that had gone through this is also as skilled of a writer as you are is like a crazy blessing for all of us thanks for saying that about the book no it's beautiful i appreciate it the thing is maybe it's dark humor but stalin's era the gulag you know were packed with incredible memoirs about that time that are you know a gift to humanity archipelago archipelago gulag archipelago but there's journey into the whirlwind there's a lot of them and because they arrested just sweeps of people there were writers and artists and musicians and and people who could reckon with it in a literary way and so i wanted to kind of join the canon yeah in a way not to be again the too inflated but you can strive for something absolutely and you've accomplished it and we're all lucky to have it so everyone check out this cursed beautiful land it is a gorgeous and harrowing memoir of the incarceration evan it's been a blast meeting you so great so much so great to meet both of you thanks for having me this is really fun we hope you enjoyed this episode unfortunately they made some mistakes hi hi there hi it's me monica hello you're wearing a soft brown corduroy i know i love it tell me more they're new pants and i love them how new days old i'm gonna wear them today oh really yes i got them hemmed and uh they were hemmed and now they're perfect perfect they're perfect do you ever get the hem job and then try it's like huh it's not perfect even though you measured it yeah that happens that and that's a horrible day that's a real let's just shut it down and start over tomorrow let's let the armchairs behind the curtain okay got a notice on the door yesterday we have a big week oh yeah we have two tomorrow and i got a notice on the the door from uh la department of water and power yeah ld dwp dwp we don't say any la just dwp department of water and power saying hey we're going to be shutting the power off on thursday between 9 a.m and 3 p.m yes to which we panicked we need power for lights and recording yeah we do and we can't cancel the day we already tried to move the gas not an option not an option what do you do yeah you hire an electrician to come put another input into the circuit breaker and then go rent an enormous generator yeah all of which i did uh-huh and then just now fired up the generator is not putting out any power oh and oh and why do we think that is well we were on the phone with the technician and we went through everything that a non-certified electrician could handle and so now they're sending someone out oh fingers crossed 3 p.m mid-interview later we might hear that thing rev up oh you know a little great yeah a little well our guest today is really fun and i think he will he will enjoy that even if the lights go out he'll like that he'll love it yeah i love it um and a strobe comes on i love that i love it all yeah yeah um okay well i my fingers are crossed yeah you know i do have some major fear oh tell me that this power outage situation which first of all i didn't get a notice on my door so that's weird and annoying i think that's because your power comes off of los filas that's why you had to drill that crazy hole and everything and mine comes off of oh i am now relieved my fear is over because i thought potentially this had to do with my house and i was like maybe they are gonna flip the switch tomorrow for my power still i still don't have it if it's my house i'm sorry and i really hope it's my house like i need they i got this crazy procedure yeah pricey just sitting here waiting for the city to flip a switch that's what's happening yep is what does bill say he's on top of it but it's like they just do what they want he's bugging them he's pestering he is poking yeah he takes care of me he's one of my dads as we know and um but there's only so much we can do i can't turn on one of the showers like yeah you're underpowered yeah it's crazy you're overpowered as a person but underpowered as a home oh it's like the universe balancing trying to homeostasis yeah between you and the house there needs to be some kind of equilibrium god and i don't know what's going to happen when you have excess power over there oh my god oh boy we felt like i had we had some powers last night because well i had a girl i've had two girls dinners in a row oh you had one again last night yes i had another different batch of girls yes wow and um it was what one was better no both really fun both very different because you know it's a dump fest no what do you mean a dump fest where you you come to air your sadness and get oh support from the group well sure those things happen they happen if you're good friends with any people yeah that's gonna happen at any but i would imagine it's a little like my meeting on tuesday which is like often everyone's in a great mood and then often the shit's hitting the fan for a bunch of people at once right monday's group hang is was the podcast i think it was the podcast so yeah it's it's more intimate probably so yeah it was share time and but there were laughs of course there were always laughs within even the misery sadness anyway and then yesterday was a different group and um old friends or newer friends i would say newer okay not brand new but newish and uh really fun we we hung out in a different area of my house which was great where the living room and i've been wanting to get people don't ever get in there no like everyone really congregates in the kitchen which i get standard standard and then sometimes dining room happens which is nice but i've really been wanting to get people in that living room i just knew it would have cozy vibes yeah and uh i had a cheat because it yesterday was the election and so the tv was on and we wanted to all keep tabs on it so i got people into the living room with the tv oh that's right you lured them in with politics yes and it worked and it was great and everyone's having great everyone liked the news that was coming out very pleased with what was happening and uh so everyone was so chipper and then i had i got a cake i didn't even mean to get a cake that happened to be blue oh my god i know it was sim yeah are you sure that wasn't i mean look i do again i have some powers that i don't know how to how to harness yeah and sometimes they're for bad uh but this time it seems like it was for good and i'm like oh my god so i was happy yeah did you learn anything intimate about any of your friends oh yeah that's what i'm really yeah like you learn so much intimate thing did your friends say that you could tell everyone i can't okay i can't i did learn a new phrase that i really like which that i don't think i should say why is it gagged on what's that that's prevalent in this movie i watched yesterday and the guests we're about to interview uses it quite a bit oh yeah what does it mean it's the same as saying like i i died you know it's like sure remotely positive yeah yeah i gagged like gasped gagged yeah oh my god gag used to be like such a word it was this is a second go-round with gag gag yeah i'm i forgot all about it but that's of my youth that's a millennial term okay wow but i don't know about gag duh i guess that's new oh gag duh oh gag ed gag g-a-g-g-e-d okay yeah i know it yeah from my youth and it was in many of the interviews i read in print i got to see it spelled out that's how i know how to spell it g-a-g-g-e-d that's right yeah that's right i know it you got it try to use it now at your next dinner party so what did the what did you learn um i learned a phrase called i'll ask her if i can share it um called uh whisper network i mean it's a real phrase it's based in the old times yeah and it was like a network of women who would you know basically be like this person's bad like be careful like wait i think in witchy times oh okay i don't really remember the times okay um but we were using that phrase in like our circle of like when we were talking about something or someone it was the whisper network because it's like we're sharing some things about our lives and everyone's like oh my god i don't know what to do with this learning about that and it's best whispered exactly okay it's not to be shouted okay and it's not to be shared it's kind of like whisper network is like secrets keep it here yeah secret squirrel yeah i don't know if i did a great job explaining it or understanding it well i don't think i did so hot with gags so we're yeah we're even stevens yeah we're not doing well with those definitions today i was on a podcast and i saw i saw a comment you know i don't look at them but i do i look at the top ones that are my friends and so every now and then then i'll see the next one right yeah um and it was positive oh but it was like this person said i don't see her chin filler but did she get a nose job oh wow and i was so flattered sure sure oh my god yeah i didn't but if you think that my nose is looking better this is great assuming that it doesn't look crazy to her like that's not unnatural shape right but it but it can't be because it is my nose yeah so in my head she must be thinking oh but her nose is looking maybe you were using a different contour you maybe you had contoured it differently than normal and and it red is a new shape to her i mean it's a compliment i'm not trying to get that away from you i'm just trying to really figure out what's going on since you did not get a nose job to my knowledge and if you did boy did you recall that i did not get a nose job i did not get a nose job i did i i kept going on a friday afternoon and then monday i was good normal i have heard that about um breast implants these days that like you can go and get a breast augmentation and like go out go to dinner oh what i've heard this have sex that night and use them i'm not sure about using them in sexual activity but you can like be out okay maybe just visually for the sexual activity i bet it oh you mean don't do it because of the we'll just look at them yeah but you could still be doing sexual activity because it probably has bandages not if they go in through the armpit or the belly button they're still gonna be oh yeah they're still gonna i don't know how you're not sore as hell no matter what i know sticking all of it but i think these i think these procedures are getting like really quick and fast and easy in and out in 10 minutes yeah so i if that does start happening with nose jobs in the afternoon it might be hard for me to resist for just saying also it's interesting they thought they were gonna see chin filler well i can see it like she's saying i can't see a difference okay the shape of the yeah um but but i see a difference in her nose but what she is saying i assume it's a she um what she's seeing is that the chin filler isn't like like what it does is just sort of elongate the face so there is a chance it's like made my nose look a little smaller yes relative to the now length of your facial pragmatism it is a slippery slope though because this morning i was looking i was like okay because last time i was there my guy who i love casey love him he was just like okay yeah the chin has gone down you know i had it once before and i was like yes i know i'm dying over here yeah and i was like i would like to re-up on that and then he was like okay and i was like and he was like is there any do you have any other concerns and i said no but do you like do you this work it's yeah exactly do you see anything you know and he was like no he's really cautious and good so he was like no i don't he was like the it was like the only thing i was gonna touch a thing yeah basically it was like you don't like you don't need it but he was like the only thing is i'm i could do a teeny bit and i'm not gonna say where because i might do this and then we'll see if people notice okay it's a fun game i mean he told me something and i was like okay i'm gonna wait on that but this morning i looked in the mirror and i was like doing it oh my god you're gonna end up with one of those big jug puffy jug faces it's just full of filler you should follow your dreams i just have i have seen a lot of people get some results they liked and then i know and then go down a rabbit hole more it's like you just wear out of like the excitement of the first new improvement there's another improvement or it's like god i wow like i really like that improvement yes so oh no like what else yeah what else because i'll really like i might really like that too and then i think you do like i think that's the problem it is and you lose perspective yes listen this is the world we live in and i wonder how much this has traveled around the country like i know la is well i think the whole country does a lot of filler yeah i think so i mean you had um lady gaga talking super openly about it over 10 years ago and i think that's the problem right and then she got it all removed oh oh yeah and she's like on stern talking about i think it's everywhere i'm gonna ask my friend group from home okay and just see what they have to say movie magic i reset a clock yeah we're gonna you took some time to set a clock and in the meantime results are in oh great they said yes both said yes yeah and they said and well one person said common might depend on the demographic you're looking at sure and i said well i mean i have it so that's why i was wondering and then one of my other friends said i don't have it but i would say it's common in the area we live in okay okay great okay tell everyone to just be careful they don't get carried away have fun with it have fun and get carried away and get carried away yeah next time i see you you look like a pumpkin feel free to get carried away okay now that's one poll yeah since polls are on the mind yeah it's one poll and i have another one poll that this is kind of for armchairs this is for men okay but i want you to weigh in both of you to weigh in okay what do you think the percentage is of men who pee sitting down one percent okay what if under five percent okay so i so jess p is sitting down yes he has an explanation though he does but also he says it's just easier he's lazy also he's tall he's so tall yeah and he the distance between his end of his urethra is about five inches and he's sitting down And the water's a lot farther and presumably harder for him to aim at. in there he says they're splashing yeah i think he gets splatter all over and then he's gotta clean up so yeah that's a huge motivator he did he does you clean it up he does use his height as a reason yeah um but then he also he said culture he was like well no maybe just in sweden i was like yeah i was like that's wild yeah and i was like nobody does that and he was like no they do and i was like and then he said you could ask you could ask your audience okay um and he said ryan does and so then i texted ryan yeah and he said at home he does at home he does yeah okay so so how do you find that as far as attraction level would you be more or less attracted to a man who sat down when he peed and be honest no it really doesn't but you're sitting to poop yeah yeah so like who cares would you would you be more attracted to a female that stands up while she pees um yeah yeah for sure no imagine the mess well no she's perfect that is that that's her like parlor trick at party she's like i want to see me straddling the toilet standing up like a dude and then she aims her urethra i'm a little nervous about the urethra placement it would be very hard as i think that's why you don't see it a lot but that's why it would be a parlor i mean i don't think it has any i'm not attracted to women so i don't think it's gonna sway me either way attraction wise but i guess i respect it right if you are dealing with our if you're dealing with a man who's you have anatomy that's um interesting and you can do fun tricks with it yeah i guess great fun fun yeah yeah fun for all again it's a very cool trick if you can do it at a party only do it if you want to do it at a party like when people if people are like show us your show us your trick and you don't want to they're constantly bringing you glasses of water yeah chug chug chug everyone's standing in the bathroom wanting to watch like only if you and then you don't know if they really want to see the trick or they're just trying to see your private parts exactly that's why you have to really be like you have to know what you're getting yourself into yeah yeah and be maybe only viewed from behind i always think is the move to mitigate the looky-loos huh will you see the pee if you're from behind because the legs there'll be a gap in the legs and you'll hear it going into the no they're gonna stand normal with the some you're not standing with your legs touching that's why i'm asking okay yeah when i pee i have a normal you don't want to fall over when you're peeing so you want a little shoulder width apart probably oh for stability you never really want to stand with your feet close together because you're not very stable oh you mean while you're peeing or in life in life oh i see them that way a lot i think you could be pushed over pretty easy well we know that yeah i'm a but if you had more of a feet at the shoulder length oh with yeah steadier stance wow we learned a lot but anyway i want people to weigh in what does chat say oh good question but i don't know if they've done any real research on this well this is something like the kinsey institute might have or maybe we can ask or urology departments okay should i say in the world or america america okay what percentage of american men urinate sitting down according to a 2023 ugov survey 23 of american men urinate sitting down either always or most of the time whoa okay wow in germany 62 percent of men sit down always or most of the time wow those kinky germans i love it okay great well that was the only thing that's a bummer for those guys the 25 percent is when they go into uh our bathroom there's always three x urinals than there are commodes so you're relegating yourself to having to stand in line for a long time for dudes taking a shit well just did say that he was like i mean if they're if the q yeah if it's a line and um people are in the stalls he will he can use a urinal yeah he knows how doesn't he doesn't prefer it okay all right it's not preferred stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare okay well i guess we can do some facts this is for evan this is um not our first gentleman we've interviewed that's been incarcerated in russia which is wild that's a scary scary place okay so he brings up the iowa writers workshop have you heard of it kind of vaguely yeah yeah it's like a big deal to get into that program um it's okay it's a world-renowned graduate creative writing program at the university of iowa in iowa city and it's very prestigious very hard to get in um in i think the last season of girls she goes to that oh really oh and it's funny writing's interesting i wonder what percentage like if you go to harvard law you're gonna definitely get wooed and recruited and preferential hiring treatment from prestigious law firms yeah we don't know if you're a good lawyer yet right what's interesting about having like a really high credential writing degree is ultimately you have to submit your writing oh yeah so they might be a little more interested in reading it because they know you come from this but unlike law where i wouldn't even know if you're a good lawyer yet you'll still get hired this is like there's no getting around it yeah you can't like just get a degree degree your way into a job as a writer which is i like yeah me too but you can't get into this program without well presumably yeah that you're very very good and then the program itself is obviously there to make you better and to critique your work and the way you think about writing and write i guess so yeah it doesn't mean that you just have a book out it's not like you just like have a book out immediately get something published or but if you spent your time there writing something it's probably might be extra good because you all these people are weighing it's like a different process than normal writers i mean i don't know i've never been you want to go no okay i'm good yeah i mean i would you want to go now now he's more you think about it okay all right turns out i want to go i'll go all right if they let me i mean it's like acting in that way like you can go to juilliard and come out and like you might there might be some things you like get into rooms or something but yeah if you can't do the thing then you don't get the job yeah i don't know why i feel like juilliard will get you more like i think you're a turnkey to get an agent i think so many agents would just represent you if you have juilliard on your uh resume but ultimately you're always submitting to the marketplace yeah as a writer and the marketplace either wants your writing or it doesn't yeah but again i yeah i think that's similar though because i bet if you come out of iowa you probably get a literary agent exactly yeah and they can help try to they can set you up with publishers like they can set you up with casting directors and things but if yeah if no one likes it yeah sorry sister sorry sister those four years were for nothing that is um probably two that's a fun fantasy to imagine myself moving to iowa city and going to class every day i know oh wow it accepts 50 writers each year oh we better get our apps in quick i think it's first come first serve oh it's the first 50 people who apply it's the oldest mfa creative i'm not getting in not now that was the test oh my god it's the oldest mfa creative yeah you're i'm too old you have to take the lsat to get into this no well a lot of graduate schools you do that's for a law oh it is yeah and the mcats medical yes i mean there is a gmat but that's mainly for business oh yeah okay for not for goblins the oldest mfa creative writing program in the united states wow that was impossible but like just because i can't read doesn't mean i can't write that's what i'm going to say to them that's what you should say yeah yeah it's two years okay you can squeeze that you can do fiction or poetry i'm probably not gonna do poetry i have a couple books of poetry one is shell's silverstein well yes he an original and uh dr seuss uh there's been a few breakthroughs you know i went on a couple dates with someone who wrote poems and when they told me that i was like oh boy and but then they sent me one of their poems and it was like so incredible yeah really moving it was it moved you i hope he's still at it yeah interesting uh well he's married now or is yeah he is an amazing person so i'm very happy for him yeah but it's really weird what that does to the human brain like my brain tell me i am like oh like a door just shut yeah even though that was not an open door for a really long time and i didn't want it to be an open door yeah yeah as much as i really really like him now you like him now now you want him now i want him no it's just that is weird what what it does this seems to be a little bit of an epidemic because another person i went on a date with recently um got engaged and i don't i didn't even know i was following him And, like, I kind of don't think I was, but my algorithm just, like, showed me him proposing. Wasn't there a movie about this? Like, you're the girl the guy dates right before he finds true love. Yay. That's, like, a premise, isn't it? Probably. I think it was. Sounds right. And that was interesting, too, to see also someone—I mean, I do—I went on, like— Half a date? Yeah, with this—one date with this person, and then COVID, and then that was it. He's engaged, and so it's very exciting. Did you want him back? No, like, I don't think what's happening—I don't think for either of these stories, it's, I want them back. It's just, like, whoa. Yeah, it just gives you a little shock. Yeah, it just does. Oh, it's over, over. It's closure. I don't know if that's the right wording, but it does something to your body that's, like, oh, yeah, people are out there just getting engaged. Oh, it's more— Maybe it's that, or, like, maybe— Maybe it's that door is completely shut, even though it was already shut, so it's, like, I don't— Yeah, but there can be multiple shuts. Yeah, maybe it's, like, locked. It can be, like, a compartment of the hull of a ship where it's got multiple doors to protect each compartment. But it was, because it was. Yeah, but now it really— Yeah, but now it's—now the other side's shut, too. Right, it's, like, both people have to shut. Oh, here we go, better than the ship hull, because you're not quite familiar with that, but when you have an adjoining— Adjoining room in a hotel room, you shut your side and locked it, but he hadn't, in your mind. Yeah. You could always deadbolt it and walk back through. Even though that's not true, but— But, theoretically. In theory. And then all of a sudden, you were in your bed, and you're in your hotel room, and you just got sticky toffee pudding, and you're feeling so happy, and then you hear a click. Yeah. And you go, oh, oh, wow, okay, so that's— Yeah. Even though I was certain. Yeah. Now it's— Now it's on up to me. Exactly. I'm out of—I don't have control over this. Yes. Which you never do. I never did. Never did, never will. Never will. Anyway, oh, what are the most popular cuisines for people to eat? Because we said Russia isn't really known for its food. Although if they have borscht, now that I love borscht, for my trip to Hungary— Right, but that's just you. I could be quite happy. I know. We're talking about in general. Yeah, I know. Yeah, okay. And I looked up for Americans, like what their favorites are. Chinese and Mexican are the top. Oh, Christ, I thought you were talking about, is there food in Russia? No, we did—that's how I got on this list, because in the conversation— Yeah. He talks about food or something, and then he was like, I even like Russian food. And I was like, well, yeah. And then I was like, why wouldn't you? And then I was like, oh, both of you were like, it's like not known for its food. Yeah. Famously, the Russian soldiers in the Battle of Stalingrad ate their shoe. They ate their shoe laces, their leather shoe laces. And you have to imagine that the baseline cuisine was low enough that they were able to eat their shoe laces. Do you think—it's because they were starving. Yeah, they were starving. I don't think that has to do with— You don't think it's because their food is so bad? No, I don't. They're like, mm, yummy shoe laces. I think even if you had access to Mexican food on a daily basis, which is the best, and then you're starving for a long time, you're going to eat your shoe laces. Yeah. What's interesting, though, is I presume the shoe laces were leather, and I presume there's calories in leather, because it's a— It's like cow's skin. Protein. But cotton shoe laces, I don't think you can get anything out of those. So, you know, if you— But it's filling. You want leather—I think you want leather shoe laces. But do you think it's just because you just need to, like, fill your stomach with something? Yeah, yeah. Oh, this is, like, a hor—this is horrific. It is. Okay, based on national data from culinary and research analysis, such as Seeding Masters and Food Studies, the most searched for and popular cuisines nationwide rank as follows. Number one, Chinese. Whoa. Number two, Mexican. Number three! Italian. Indian. Oh! Number four, Italian. Five, Thai. Six, Korean. Seven, Japanese. Eight, Vietnamese. Nine, Jamaican. Ten, Greek. Poor Greeks. They're way down there. In Detroit, we have a very large Greek population and Greek food scene. Yeah. We have Greek Town. Right. I think I took you there, perhaps. You took me to Orna's. We did our cruise of— What's that place? Olga's. Olga's. You took me to Olga's. What if I opened up a competing Greek food scene? Fast food restaurant called Orna's. Well, you should probably make it a Chinese restaurant, since that's what people want the most. I wonder how much that is driven by how many Chinese restaurants there are versus— It's probably based on search. It says the most searched for, which makes sense. Oh, but it is— Okay, now let's go by major cities. This is so fun. This is making me starving. Okay. New York, Chinese, Japanese, Italian. Los Angeles. New Yorkers love their Chinese food. I love Chinese food. Oh, they do? In movies? Jewish people eat it on— On Christmas. That's what they say, yeah. Yeah, there's like a big New York tradition. In movies, they are always having New Yorkers eat Chinese food. Seinfeld, they're always ordering Chinese food. Yeah. Yeah, Stern always ordered Chinese food. I love Chinese food. We don't have good Chinese food here, though. We don't order much Chinese food. Although, Los Angeles— Injured yourself? Do you want to get this off with your hyper factor? It's a scab, though. Oh, I mean, I could try. My mother asked me to remove some stuff. Did you? No, she said— She'll schedule it around Delta's birthday. Oh. Why? So she can, like, mentally— I don't know. I don't know what— Well, I think she found out I had it— Yeah. —on late Saturday night, Halloween. Uh-huh. And then she left early in the morning on Sunday. Oh, I see. So she wanted to schedule it for a trip back. Okay. Yeah. Well, I've been asking you— It feels a little intimate. Oh, really? Well, I don't know where these skin tags are. Oh, you didn't ask? Oh, my God. I was just like, yeah, I guess I will do it. You're going to do it for your mom. I'll do anything for my mom. Not anything. But would you want to burn skin tags off your dad? I mean— Who cares? —on his neck? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think I would care. You just, like, her skit— Like, you don't want to, like, touch— You hug her all the time. I know, but I'm not, like— Her shirt's not off. I don't know what, like— Oh. Was she going to be in a bra? No. Right? You see what I'm saying? She's not going to be in a bra. Well, if the skin tags are where mine— Like, they're probably around her chest. Or her lower neck. I don't know. Doesn't that sound a little intimate? I don't want her to do the boob ones. No, I'm not. I don't think she wants me to. I certainly will not do that. They're probably— Like, if it's on her neck, she can just move her shirt over. Yeah. I just picture— I don't know what I picture. Just see her in her bra strap or something. I don't know. You got to get her a gown. Oh, fuck. Oh, no. Okay. We know how those can just— Oh, there's high winds. Just blow, right? No, I don't want anything to do with any of these scenarios. Listen, I've been trying to schedule with you a hyperfector day to get this foreckle off, and you have not done it. I will do it. I'll do it whenever. I mean, Friday I can. I don't have any free time until Friday. Oh, okay. I'm going shopping, but after that— Okay. Los Angeles, Mexican, Italian, Chinese. Chicago, Mexican, Japanese, Italian. Houston, Mexican, Japanese, Italian. Okay, the pussy rat thing. Pussy riot. Right. I typed in pussy rat. Yeah, that's something different. Because I thought that's what you guys said. But it actually does have— Okay, so I didn't know what that was. Pussy riot member Lucy Stein escaped Moscow in March 2022 while under house arrest by disguising herself as a neon green food delivery courier. Wow, ding, ding, ding. I wonder what she was delivering. Greek? Greek. Leaving her GPS tracking ankle monitor behind and smuggling her pet rat out with her. Oh, my goodness. So— Okay. Do you think it's just telling me that because— Because you said pussy rat? Yeah. Yeah. Those are rough words together. Pussy rat. I agree. Declared pussy riot an extremist organization, completely outlawing its operations inside Russia. Okay. When I just fixed the word to riot, I'm really not— I'm not seeing anything about her rat. Yeah. So that actually worries me that it just said that. It lied. Just generated. I'm seeing pet rat. Oh, you are? For Lucy? That was her name, Lucy Stein. Yeah, yeah. She had a rat. That's weird that it was a rat. Is there a photo of them? You should ring a bell when you see the image of them. Yeah, I see them. They wore like masks, right? Mm-hmm. And they're a punk band? Oh. Yeah, and they were like, you know, challenging the system with their punk rock music. And playing in public on streets and stuff. Oh, it was a performance art group, punk rock music. Turned into a more accessible stuff. With an anti-Putin message, I think. Yeah. My AI could have told me that, you know? It would have been nice. They are masked in this photo, but they are clearly Caucasoids. Here's her with her rat. Oh! Oh, it's a cute rat. It's got a— It's two-toned. It's two-toned. Great. Great word. She kind of looks like it. Uh-huh. They say rats and their owners end up looking alike. I mean, she's very pretty. She's beautiful. Yeah. I'd love to attend the Iowa writing program with her. Oh, you think she's good at that? Yeah, she's got a lot to say. Oh, well, she does have a lot to say. But she'd be very inspiring. Yeah. Okay. Is the Bukowski Grill where he went to named after— Where he was abducted? Yeah. Named after Bukowski? Yes. Ah! Bukowski Grill in Yekaterinburg is named after the American author Charles Bukowski. Mm. So, I don't trust any of this. Okay. Did I told you that I am, I started season one of Traders. Oh, okay. You've gone back. Yeah, I've gone back. And I am, can't trust, you can't trust anyone. Oh, that's what's. That's my takeaway. Informing your current mindset. Can't trust anyone. Yeah. No one. That's been my motto since eight. So, welcome to the club. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Oh, it even brought, it brings him up. It brings Evan's name up. As a famous abductee. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Oh, wait, hold on. Let me, oh, let me just read you the concept of the restaurant. Okay. Operating for over 15 years, the establishment markets itself as a brutal and masculine steakhouse and bar, serving heavy meat dishes, burgers, and craft alcohol. Aligning closely with the rough around the edges, alcohol-soaked lifestyle famously depicted in Bukowski's literary works. Like barfly. I wonder if they encourage bar fights as well. Probably. Because that was the, most stories involved a good dust up. I have a sense. That it's fine. They allow it. Yeah. All right, that's it. Love you. Love you.