Russian Plague and Putin's Prisons

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Prescription products require an online consultation with a licensed healthcare provider who will determine if a prescription is appropriate. Restrictions apply. Individual results may vary. Based on a survey of HIMS customers, visit HIMS.com for full details. Welcome back to Pods Day of the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, I take back everything bad I said about Drake May and the Patriots. And I also take back everything good I said about the Red Sox because that was a very quick series. We're out. Yeah, fortune's kind of flipped there. Yeah, the Yankees are cruising. It feels like. Well, now they're. Well, now they're. They run into the Tampa Bay buzzsaw. They're down 2-0. Weird. Yeah. Weird. I'll take it. Someone has to beat the Yankees. That's all I care about. Yeah, that's all we're asking for. Also, like, I guess we live in one of the two cities that Trump wants Iran to target with some sort of attack. We'll play that clip for you guys later. But that was fun to wake up to. Yeah. Curious to have the president of your country desire your nuclear annihilation. I assumed it was nukes too. It's kind of a new thing. He didn't specify. But I assumed it was. Los Angeles and San Diego. Right. We take a lot of conventional weapons. Anyway, that's our president. Big fans here. Yeah. Yeah. Big fans. Today, we're going to talk about some very important recent elections. Speaking of terrible presidents, we're going to talk about what happened in Brazil and the right-wing surge across South America, what it means for us here, what it means for the Brazilian people. Nothing good. No. Doesn't mean anything good. We're going to talk about political turmoil in Spain, a major protest movement in France, which also is coinciding with the budget crisis. We'll talk about. About separatists in Quebec, a crazy story about espionage in Germany that we woke up to this morning. Very severe German man is seemingly in a lot of trouble. Yes. We're going to dig into what we know about reports of a plague outbreak in Russia. That's a fun one. Never a good thing. What we know, what we don't know, what to worry about, what's just hype and fear-mongering, we think. Finally, we're going to talk about the latest from Iran and a strange story about Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to the U.S. and potentially his health. Ben, then you did our interview today. What did you talk about? Yeah, I talked to Evan Gershkovitz, who people may remember was a Wall Street Journal reporter, still is, but was detained by the Russians in prison for a year and a half. Ultimately, he was part of a spy swap negotiated under the Biden administration. He's got a new book out, This Cursed Beautiful Land, which is really terrific. We'd talk about, you know, his book, obviously how he got picked up in kind of the sting operation, you know, whether the Russians were just trying to grab him as a pawn or whether they actually thought he was conducting espionage. What life is like in a Russian prison, what he learned about Russians in a Russian prison. I guess it's not fun. No, not great. What the attitudes are he could kind of get about the war in prison. So it's great. We cover an extreme experience that hopefully none of us will have to go through. Yeah, God help us all. I mean, so my understanding is it's about his time in prison and his experience, but also about like other people he feels like have been imprisoned by the Russian state, right, in various different ways. Yeah. He kind of covers his own imprisonment like a journalist, which is interesting. Like how does the FSB operate? How does the judicial system operate? What are the experiences of these other prisoners he meets? Some of whom are like in for politics. You know, they spray paint and sign against the war. Some of them are just common criminals. So you get this kind of tableau of who is in Russian prisons and what is that like? It's really interesting. Well, check that out. Subscribe for that interview and also buy his book. Yeah. The dude did some really hard time and the least we can do is purchase it. Yeah, and it's a great, you know, sometimes you read these memoirs and they're kind of like, oh, you know, we just, here's the record of what happened. And this is like a literary memoir. It's really well done. Cool. All right. Let's start in Brazil, Ben, because they held some elections over the weekend and the results are not good at all. The headlines are all about the presidential election. And so we'll start there. That pitted the leftist 80-year-old incumbent Lula da Silva against the right-wing 45-year-old Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of the disgraced former president Jair Bolsonaro. Flavio got about 47%, which is a little more than anticipated in opinion polls. Lula got about 45%. We're going to play some clips and then we'll explain the results. Here's Trump and Rubio commenting on the election. A little clip from one of Flavio's events to give you a sense of what it was like on the ground. Well, it's a big victory. Close, but very, very big victory. Amazing. Excellent. We're going to a second round. I think everybody expected that it would. So. We'll see how that plays out. I want you to know Anisha tried to cut like a better clip from Trump. That incisive commentary was the best he had. Well, it's like he's describing the results from like a, you know, house race. Wow. Loads. I will say the Brazilian far right still manages to look like a better time than anybody else's far right. It looks fun. They're rocking out there. So the way this works is because neither candidate got 50% of the vote, they go to a runoff on October 25th. But Flavio is widely expected to win the runoff because there were other right-wing candidates. In the first round, they got about 5% of the vote. Those votes are likely to go to him. Lula's best hope is that enough of the 33 million or so Brazilians who did not vote decide to re-engage and show up in the second round or that one of the many rumored scandals about Flavio kind of explodes into the press. There's already lots of reporting about his corruption, but there's other things rumored to be out there that are a little more titillating. I'll put it that way. So the key issues in the campaign were the economy, like anger, the status quo, crime, and corruption. But the presidential results do not capture how bad the totality of the results were. In the Senate, the Bolsonaro, the Bolsonaro's party and its allies, got nearly 47% of the seats. Then the traditional conservatives got around 18% of the seats, while the centrists and the left got 17% each. In the Chamber of Deputies, which is like our House of Representatives, Bolsonaro's allies got 34%. Traditional conservatives got 25%. The centrists got 17% and the left got 23%. So what that means is that Flavio, if he's elected president, will start with like 60% of the vote on most issues and he can get up to two-thirds majority. And that's what you need to do stuff like impeach officials, like a Supreme Court judge who just prosecuted your dad and threw him in prison, for example, like Justice Alexander de Moraes. So the right-wing candidates also won like most of the governor's races. So it's a terrible night for Brazil, terrible night for democracy. If Flavio wins, we should expect more alignment with Trump generally, more draconian law and order policies like we saw in El Salvador with mega prisons and people arrested without, the trial. And then potentially most catastrophic is what Flavio Bolsonaro could do to the Amazon and the impact on climate change. I think with him as president and with a right-wing parliament, there's going to be no check on permitting for oil and gas or minerals or whatever other like logging industries. And some experts already think the Amazon is at a tipping point where it could turn into a dry Savannah, which would be bad. That'd be bad. So Ben, with that really depressing setup, thoughts on the results so far? Yeah, it's not great. And it's a very steep mountain to climb for Lula to even have a chance here in the runoff for the reasons you said, like most of the smaller parties were right-wing to begin with. There is something eerie, like everything is apples to oranges, but still like it does feel a bit like Brazil's just like living our lives two years behind us. I know. Because like 2016, Trump's elected. 2018, Bolsonaro, this kind of Trump-like figure is elected on very similar message. 2020, he's elected. 2020, the older well-known commodity, Joe Biden's elected. 2022, Lula comes back and he's elected. And then we have 2024 election. And now there's an 80-year-old incumbent running for reelection in Brazil who's seen as like representing things people are pissed off about, shitty economy, high cost of living. There's a lot of common threads. And we had January 6th and they had their own version of it. They had their own version of that. So like we are in a strange like relationship with Brazil. I love Lula. I think he's done extraordinary things in his life. He's also 80 years old. He's too old. And definitely is representative of some version of the status quo that people don't like. Whether they don't like just the state of the economy in Brazil, whether they associate Lula with some corruption scandal or another, or whether they just think this guy's 80 and like things aren't great and let's try something different. I mean, there's any number of factors. And also like, you know, there's an innate conservatism to part of Brazil. There's a growing, you know, evangelical population. There's some things that are happening society that are moving it to the right as well. But I think we have to reckon with the fact that this same disease of kind of right-wing nationalist politics has infected all parts of the world. We're not the only ones going through it. Latin America is going through it in a big wave right now. You had a bunch of left governments that were in charge. People don't like incumbents. And now we've just seen a huge wave of right-wing governments. Some of that, again, is anti-incumbency. But some of that is like these concerns about crime in Latin America are kind of akin to the concerns that we had about immigration here in this country, a sense of disorder, a sense that the institutions don't work anymore. They're not responsive. Maybe this strong man will at least punish some people I don't like and bring some law and order. Flavio is a little less like maga-pilled than some of the rest of the Bolsonaro family. By the way, we should note, Tommy, so many Bolsonaros got elected, I can't even keep track of it. We all celebrated Brazil for prosecuting Bolsonaro and for doing what Merrick Garland couldn't do. I still think that was the right thing because that guy deserves to be where he is. But it didn't stop a lot of Bolsonaros. Didn't solve all the problems. Yeah, just to give you the full count, Ben. So Jair Bolsonaro's wife, Michelle, and his son, Carlos, both won Senate seats. And then Jair's brother and his other son won seats in the Chamber of Deputies. So it is a Bolsonaro family affair. Yeah, it is. The Don Roderick doctrine is well alive and kicking in Latin America. I mean, what does that mean for Trump? I mean, what's strange about it is it means this kind of neo, not even really neo, this imperial view of Latin America will somehow be validated by an increasing number of far-right leaders down there. You've got Mille in Argentina. You've got potentially a Bolsonaro back in Brazil. You've got Bukele in El Salvador. Keep on going to Colombia now. Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Venezuela, obviously. The Latin American left is going to have to regroup. And it's going to need a different kind of message. And it's going to need a message that, as in this country, cannot just be about protecting social progress, protecting social safety net, how bad the far right is. They're clearly going to need, as Democrats in this country need, an alternative vision to reach people where they are. Yeah. Yeah. And obviously, Brazil is the 10th biggest economy in the world by some measures. It's the biggest kind of, it's the political heavyweight in South America. But to your point, I think in December of 2023, you had three right-wing seven left-wing to kind of other. Flavio will make it eight right-wing governments, three left, one other. So it's quite bad. Thanks, by the way, shout out to Nick Zimmerman, who's at the Wilson Center and used to work with us in the Obama administration for talking to me through a lot of it this morning. I mean, I think to your point about Lula, like we, I think he is a lion of Brazilian politics. He's an icon. He's a legend. The Brazilian left needs a total reboot. Yeah. You know what I mean? And it has for a while. It's been too dependent on Lula for a long time. It's been decades of Lula or Bolsonaro. Yeah. You know, back and forth and back and forth. And Dilma Rousseff was Lula's chief of staff. Right, his chief of staff. And I think he seemed out of touch. He seemed like he can't shake these corruption allegations no matter what happens. I think there was some concern, Ben, understandably around the Brazilian insurrection about whether Brazil would return to a military dictatorship. But if you look at the political kind of status quo now for Flavio, if he wins, it's like, why bother? He's got the presidency, the parliament, he can reshape the Supreme Court. Yeah. Like, it's kind of got a bird in hand. I think there's also been kind of chatter online about, was this U.S. interference? Did the U.S., you know, the CIA do something? It's like, I don't know that they needed to because Trump slapped, you know, the biggest tariffs on anyone in the world besides the Chinese on Brazil for absolutely no reason, despite, I think, us having a trade surplus with the Brazilians. So the coordination has been happening in plain sight. Yeah. Yeah. And look, some of the tech people like Elon Musk have, you know, backed Bolsonaro. But clearly, you know, as in this country in 2024, like, clearly the election is telling us something about people's openness to this kind of politics. They know who the Bolsonaros are. Just like we lived through one term of Trump and then we elected him again, like, they know what that's like. I think the two other things that highlight are like, so what's in it for Trump? Like, what does he really want down there beyond someone who, like, welcomes his weird Venezuela, you know, colony? I honestly think it's just going to be corruption. Right. Because there's a. And minerals. There's like a lot of critical minerals and a lot of these things that Trump and his associates are constantly circling. Like, I just kind of look for business deals between the Bolsonaros and the Trumps. Like, it's not something that's going to, like, benefit Americans if we're aligned with, like, the potential far-right leader of Brazil. I do think that as much as we might say, well, this is a cycle of politics and, you know, we're just going to weather this. Your point about the Amazon is probably the most important, which is, like, this could be an irreversible verdict for the Amazon. Like, if these guys continue to open things up to permitting, logging, you know, this could have a devastating impact on the rest of the world. And so that's something that I think, you know, the last time around when Bolsonaro was president, like, the Europeans were, like, considering different kinds of sanctions just to protect the Amazon. I don't think that's in the cards. But that's something that we should pay careful attention to. And then the last thing that's kind of crazy to think about, Tommy, is that, you know, we could do everything right in this country and win the midterms and elect a Democrat. That Democrat may be dealing with, like, a completely far-right alliance in Latin America. And in Europe, they could be dealing with, like, a French far-right government. So it just reminds you that this is not all about Trump, what's happening in global politics. Like, Trump, you know, that's just one piece of a much bigger puzzle of the far-right having a lot of resilience. Yeah. I mean, there's, like, 90% chance that Don Jr. starts, like, a drone company based in the Amazon that also does, like, logging or something with someone named Flavio. Yeah. Speaking of Europe, let's turn to Europe. So there's political turmoil and protests that we want to talk about. Let's start in Spain. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced a snap election on November 29th. The decision was driven by anger about the cost of housing. So there was this crazy story, this 87-year-old disabled woman named Mari Carmen. She was forcibly removed from her apartment in Madrid. She had lived there for 71 years. But then in 2018, a developer bought the building. They checked up her rent. They made her some, like, completely affordable offer for her to buy the place. She couldn't do it because she's a pensioner. Then they forcibly evicted her, which led to this dramatic scene with protesters and cops and people getting tear gassed. And it was just, like, a huge thing. And so Sanchez's party has tried to pass legislation to address the problem. It failed last week. So we called the snap election to try to use anger around the issue to get the legislative majority. Victory in that race is far from guaranteed. Spanish voters are upset about immigration. Back in July, we talked about the situation in Ceuta. Tens of thousands of migrants passed into this city of Ceuta. All of them were, basically, all of them were expelled soon after. The city is in northern Africa, not continental Europe. But those scenes kind of exacerbated tensions around immigration in Spain. Sanchez is also dealing with corruption allegations that have not been made about him personally, but it's touched on a former top official in his party, the former prime minister, his wife, his brother. So it's all around. And then in France, students are now protesting in more than 40 cities. Those protests started late last month near Paris over a lack of school funding. This is a clip from TikTok of a French student named Rx explaining why students have been hit in the streets. Let's watch. The learning conditions right now in France are getting worse day by day. We're 35 in most classes. We lack teachers enough for people to fail their exams. My school has water dripping on the power outlets. The walls are so damaged. It cannot be heating up during the winter. Basically, the French students are right now protesting against a government that doesn't give a single fuck about them. The media are calling us lazy. They're saying we're protesting because we don't want good classes. Well, what we're asking for is actual good education and for us to not fail all classes because of the way the government works. The problem is that we're walking that much without any teacher to actually teach us. And the fact that our environment where we're learning in is actually dangerous. So these protests started with just kids like that, and then they've grown to include labor unions, activists, teachers, many more. I think the Interior Ministry estimated that on Tuesday, the day we're recording this, there were like 256,000 people on the streets. Some of the protests got violent. Twenty four schools were burned or damaged. Six thousand arrests. A 15 year old kid got his hand blown off when he picked up some sort of like police grenade and it exploded. And this is happening in the midst of this bruising budget fight. France's debt is now at three point five trillion euros, which is one hundred twenty percent of GDP. It's well above the eurozone average that interest rates have spiked. The current government proposed this package of tax increases and spending cuts, including changes to pensions and civil service salaries that will be very, very unpopular, which could lead to more protests, the government getting toppled. So like the Macron government is squeezed between a pissed off French public. And then bond markets that are worried about France's debt. And this is all happening in the midst of an economic slowdown, higher borrowing costs. And, you know, there's a presidential election next year, which is likely to see the far left against the French far right. So pretty scary stuff, man. I mean, it feels like there is a non-zero risk that the Spanish election leads to the Vox far right party gaining a lot of ground. And then in France, as we've talked about many times, like twenty twenty seven, we could see Marine Le Pen as president of France, which is not fun. Yeah. the Spanish thing, I just, I love Pedro Sanchez. He's been the vanguard of progressive politics globally. Some of this is he's just been in power for 10 years, you know? And so, I mean, even like you mentioned the corruption scandal, like when your party's been in power for 10 years, like somebody did something stupid, probably, you know, hopefully he can weather it, but it's going to be a tough one. I think that to offer a theory of everything that addresses the French piece too, America is symbiotic with these other places. Like to take what I said about Brazil and turn it inside out. Yes, what's happening to us is happening in the world, but also what happens in America matters to the rest of the world. And one of the things that is not coming from America yet, and it could, is some kind of model for progressive politics. Like the example I'd give is like Obama, after he was elected, you know, you had some kind of copycat in a good way, like Renzi in Italy and Trudeau. And in Canada, like people taking the kind of Obama model of a campaign and having it work in their countries. Then Trump comes along and, you know, Bolsonaro is impossible without Trump. It's like, oh, I'll do that act, you know, I'll use social media and I'll bludgeon my opponents. And I think part of what you're seeing on the kind of, you know, and I should say Biden comes along and then you get Lula, who's kind of like, and you get Keir Starmer, like this kind of cautious brand of more returning to something. I think that there's, if you look at where the energy is going on the right, it is able to flow to these personalities, right? It's able to flow to the Bolsonaro family in Brazil. It's able to flow to Marine Le Pen in France. And then you look at this left-wing energy, like among these students, and there's just doesn't seem like there's anywhere for that to go. There's not like a French political party or politician that is kind of capturing this sense that, hey, wait a second, the basic bargain of society is breaking down. Because, you know, if you look at what the French students are going through, yeah, like they're. Their shit keeps getting cut. Sounds like here, like schools, we can never find the money for that. Oh, what is, and we should take this seriously. What does Macron spend a lot of time talking about? Like Ukraine and defense spending and foreign policy. And he's constantly flying off. If I was a French student, I'd be like, you know, and this is not to say that the Ukrainians don't merit our support, but I'd be like, what the fuck, man? Like I, you know, you can't even heat the school in the winter. There are no teachers. Like you're making cuts to my education. There needs to be like a political argument on the left globally about taking that seriously again. Not just about like defending against the far right or defending against the Russians, but fixing the fucking schools, you know, which Macron has never seemed to care about. You know, like he cares about macroeconomics. He cares about geopolitics. Like he's calibrating some centrist position. There's just this kind of giant vacuum that, and hopefully the Democrats can begin to offer some kind of. Or some blueprints for how other people can fill it. Because if not, the far right will capture all the populist energy and the left will just kind of be unmoored and angry. And weirdly in France, you have a situation where like Marine Le Pen is seemingly more responsible than Jean-Luc Mélenchon from the far left. Like she's proposing 140 million in euros in budget cuts over five years, like national debt limit at 60% of GDP. But also she's saying, we're going to lower the retirement age for some and cut the VAT tax. So she's talking out of both sides of her mouth. But Mélenchon is like, we could take the French bonds and throw them into the fire. So it's like the bond markets are spiraling, right? The spread between the yield on the French and German debt is getting higher and higher. It's close to like financial crisis levels. And then, you know, people are talking about like an ECB bailout. It's like, it just feels like a very dangerous setup and an election that is going to yield some sort of extremist outcome in some way. And it feels like a recipe for the far right, because it's like the fiscal situation is unsustainable. There's societal divisions. The one thing I would say, Tommy, just to take a passing shot at our far right, is I see all these people from Trump on down, like Trump himself, like posting that what's happening in France is a sign of like the radical Islamic takeover of France. So stupid. If you didn't have YouTube, like the French kid we saw is not like trying to impose Sharia law. He just wants his school to. To be funded. Yeah, it's, yeah, I hate when the Trump people try to like give themselves credit for some movement or like blame everything. It's like, just shut the fuck up. One other weird thing we want to talk about in terms of kind of political ruptures, Ben, is there was the Canadian province of Quebec held an election earlier, I think last week, earlier this week, where the separatist Quebecois party for the first time in 12 years won. They got 59 out of 127 seats. It's not a majority, but it's a big victory. And they promised to wait until Trump leaves office to call for a referendum on independence. But in the past, like the kind of independence referendum question, I think was much less of a focus in the election. And in this round, there was an overt promise to hold a referendum on independence for Quebec. It's not popular. Like there have been, there have been past, I think it's like 30% of the population supports it. And they only have a minority in the legislature. They need to get other parties on board to actually get a vote. But it's just another example of where the like center-right coalition that won the last two elections got literally wiped out and decimated. And you're seeing these more sort of extreme parties get support. Yeah. And it's a vulnerability for Canada. I mean, we talked about how in these trade negotiations, like, you know, Carney's stood up for French language and Netflix algorithms and things like that. But this is why, right? And at the same time, if you're Trump, this is not helpful for Canadian unity, because you're just like, what can I do to create more fissures between Quebec and the rest of Canada? Like, if they were smart about it, and maybe not Trump, but maybe somebody over there is smart about it, they will just do whatever they can to poke the bear of like Quebec separatist intentions. Like they've been doing in Alberta, which has basically a referendum on whether to hold a referendum on October 19th. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. The results for that shoe itself was the Quince alternative version, exact same shoe, looked identical, but it was literally one sixth the price. So I bought the Quince version of the shoe. I wear them all the time. They're these super comfortable, like white Italian sneaker things, but they were literally one sixth the price of this main brand. So that is why I love Quince. You get super high quality stuff. It's way, way, way cheaper. It showed up right away. Just cannot recommend it enough. That's the experience with Quince, clothes. I know that the bedding experience will be the exact same. You're going to get quality stuff. 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This offer is exclusive to pod save the world listeners. That's helixsleep.com slash world for 27% off site wide. The weird story out of Germany that I mentioned. So this morning we woke up to reports that someone named August Hanning, who is the former head of the BND BND is Germany's Federal Intelligence Service. He was arrested Tuesday for, quote, treasonous espionage and attempting to pass along state secrets to foreign governments. So the BND collects foreign intelligence like the CIA from human sources, but also they run Germany's signals intelligence like the NSA. So they have a lot of authorities. They don't have all the covert action shit that our guys do, but a lot of authorities. So Hanning led the BND from 1998 to 2005. He also served as the top civil servant in Germany's interior ministry from 2005 to 2009. German law enforcement also arrested his former chief of staff, who I guess was in government and was basically paid to give Hanning documents since 2010. It's been going on for an awfully long time. They estimate that 2000 documents were taken in total. Hanning reportedly provided information to at least two separate foreign intelligence services. The Financial Times said Russia was not currently part of the investigation. The word currently is doing a lot of work there though. Yeah. Apparently some of the documents, were found in Hanning's office in 2025 in a search that was part of a different investigation, but that led to his arrest. The previous search was about an attempt by a German steakhouse heiress to kidnap her children from their dad when they were living in Denmark at the time. Crazy story. Bunch of dudes ambushed the dad, beat him up, threw like the 13 and 10 year old kids into a car, took them back to Germany, and then ultimately like it got unraveled. But anyway, like we don't know who Hanning was selling secrets to. I think there's been speculation that it was Israel. He has a relationship with the Israelis, but this is a disaster for the German government and for any other intel services that have like a liaison partnership with them. We'd shine a lot of light on the story if we knew who it was. I saw speculation from Israel, I saw speculation from Azerbaijan. Interesting. Which is also close to Israel. And you know, so look, bottom line is, it's never good if the chief of a major Western intelligence service is literally excelling secrets to foreign governments. Like that's not good. And it does suggest, you know, like a degree of kind of corruption inside of, like when you see something like this, you wonder, is there more to this? Are there other people doing this? Is this something that has become kind of wink-wink, something that happens? We don't know. Also, what is your counterintel if this is happening for 16 years? Well, that's what I mean. It's like, how does someone not see this if like this stuff is just walking out the door? And the US shares intelligence with them. I mean, this is like a John le Carré novel of like moles and, uh, and actually like, it'd be interesting if, because if it's not Russia, it could be some backdoor, by the way, to Russia. It could be to Russia via some other intelligence service. But let's say it is Israel or Azerbaijan. Like, what are we doing here? Like, like major world power, like putting yourself up for sale to some smaller country because you just need the money that bad? I mean, it doesn't feel that ideological to me. You know, it feels like it's for money. Yeah. And it, it does kind of play into the, the, the feeling that there's something vaguely corrupt about all of this infrastructure that's been built up over so long. And I think Friedrich Merz is trying to get the BND more authorities to do like offensive cyber operations more in line with the US kind of version. I bet this kind of pumps the brakes on that a bit. And then in 2023, there was another top BND official who was arrested for selling secrets to the Russians as the war in Ukraine is, is ongoing. Yeah. Yeah. There's something rotten in the house over there. You know, no, like, you know, they're not the first. It won't be the last we've had our own share of like moles, but this guy was at the top of the thing. Yeah. Well, you know, the, the BND is, um, you know, not the most, uh, celebrated history. I do believe it was set up by an ex Nazi. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was with us. We gave him a pass to be in the, on the team. Yeah. Good shit. Everybody. Uh, all right, Ben, because all of the existential dread about artificial intelligence, wasn't keeping you up at night enough. Uh, let's talk about reports of pneumonic plague in Russia. I'm sure our, most listeners have seen this by now. It's like articles or social media posts about potential pneumonic plague outbreaks in Russia, potential coverup, trying to figure out what to make of them. Here's what we think we know, uh, a 28 year old female lab worker at the Irkutsk anti-plague Institute of Siberia in the far east. She died last week. The Institute was created in 1930s as an anti-plague research facility and later expanded to researching other diseases like cholera, anthrax, et cetera. The inpatient facility where this worker was treated is under quarantine and 200 people who came in contact with her are under medical observation. The Russian government, uh, of course is denying it all. They said, quote, no microorganisms linked to her professional activity were identified in the patient samples and quote, no health changes related to infectious pathology had been identified among her contacts. There's a lot of reasons not to believe that official story for us. Just Putin's, you know, government lies about everything. There's also the history of the Soviets lying about health disasters, Chernobyl. There was an anthrax leak. There was a smallpox outbreak. It's a long list. Um, second, the local government officials keep saying the opposite of what like Peskov is saying in Moscow. Yeah. The Irkutsk regional governor said he had a meeting with Russia's top official in charge of disease control about some sort of dangerous infectant in a resident, uh, and that the person's contacts were put under quarantine. There was a local mayor who said that a hospital was closed for quarantine. The governor of a, the governor of a neighboring region put out a statement referring to, uh, a quote woman who died, who died of plague in the Irkutsk region. So, uh, a lot of those statements get amended or taken down, but you know, notable, um, Ren TV, a Russian media network reported the lab worker had research plague. A local news outlet has reported on the closures of this clinic and the hospital and that the young lab assistant broke a test file and then died. Right. So there's a lot of smoke here. Um, Trump and Rubio, uh, secretary of state, Marco Rubio were asked about these reports. Here's what they had to say. Well, looking at it very strongly, we just heard about it and pneumonia, you know, uh, years ago, you could treat pneumonia easier. The, the microbes and the germs have gotten stronger disproportionately, but we'll help them. We know what we know, obviously about whatever the Russians have provided. Um, there's very limited travel between the us and Russia, obviously. Uh, but like anything else, something like that gets out, it could quickly spread. So we're watching and monitoring it closely. I don't think it's cause for alarm, but it is cost for focus and a cause to just keep an eye on it. And we're doing that cause for focus. Uh, okay. So, so interesting, Ben, that, uh, the crew that was once very hot and bothered a potential lab leak from China is a little less hyperbolic about this one, but what, what do you make of what you've read and, and kind of the reaction from the Trump administration so far? We talk a lot about things that are, you know, concerning on this show. Like plague is not something that I thought I was gonna have to worry about. Um, but here we are. I mean, cause what I take from it, look, first of all, uh, you don't trust anything that the Russian authorities say, and that's always worrisome, you know, like in any kind of, as we learned in COVID, like transparency is your only friend when you're dealing with these types of things. And if you have these discrepancies between local authorities and the Kremlin, like it just makes you wonder like what on earth you can trust. Uh, and that's concerning. Also, I, it makes you wonder what kind of biological weapons programs and research Russia continues to do. Correct. Because it's kind of not the most normal thing in the world for people to go to work and study plague. You know, like it's, it's, you tend to be studying plague if you're like, you know, I don't know, developing plague, uh, as some kind of crazy biological weapons hedge. So I, I, the, the need to kind of revitalize the anti-biological weapons, cause AI is part of that too, right? We don't want the AI to be developing biological pathogens to make it easier for bad actors to develop biological weapons. So, so, so, so, so, so that, that's a piece of this too. And again, I, I think this is just highlighting once again, that when you have a breakdown in any kind of geopolitical trust or cooperation or organizations like the World Health Organization are discredited, you just kind of feel like stuff like this happens and you just hope it doesn't get worse because you don't feel like the people in charge, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio, the World Health Organization, the Russian authorities, whoever it is, are all going to like share information and figure out a way to make sure that this thing is like kept in a box. Like it feels like we're just, you know, not like everybody else. I'm like researching how, you know, contagious plague is. Thankfully it doesn't seem to be as contagious as airborne flus, uh, uh, and COVID viruses are, but, uh, you know, that, that's, you know, cold comfort here. So I, I, and Rubio and Trump, like they just, it is like just so notable the extent to which they, they just don't want to call out Russian behavior, you know? Not anything ever. Trump's a goddamn idiot. He's like, we're, we're, we're strongly. Why can't you just say like, like, yeah, like, like if this had happened, honestly, this had happened in a Western European country. It was in Germany. He would be slamming Mertz and, you know, boosting the AFD or something. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So like I, I scrolled past this like you did and I'm like, God damn it. You know, like, do I have to worry about this? Is this clickbait? Like, what is it? So I reached out to an expert named, um, Haley Ann Severance for like a gut check. She's currently the deputy vice president for the nuclear threat initiatives, global biological policy and programs team previously worked at the Pentagon doing a bunch of counter WMD and biological weapons stuff. So scary shit, long titles. Um, here's some reasons not to worry, right? And then I'll tell you some things to worry about or what experts are worried about. I'm ready for this. So not to worry. Uh, if it's standard pneumonic plague, we have antibiotic to treat it. Uh, and you can cure it pretty easily, but you got to cat it, catch it in like 24 hours. I know. Um, Russia actually has seen, we didn't develop the vaccine. Cause I think that we didn't think it worked very well. Um, but there's lots of like public health tools to deal with something like this. It's not like a novel virus. Um, transmitting plague requires long, a prolonged face-to-face contact for it to spread. measles, or COVID that was kind of like airborne and fast. Also, this is morbid, but the mortality rate is really high. And it happens pretty quickly after symptoms start. So there's not like a long incubation period where you're traveling around giving it a bunch of people to spread the thing, like you're just fucked if you get it, basically. So that's part of the good news. That's the good news section, unfortunately. Here's the bad news section, things experts are watching and kind of thinking about. An outbreak like this in Russia raises more questions because as you said, they had and have a biological weapons program. If this was in whatever, name a country that doesn't have one, you'd be like, oh, someone ate a marmot or something. Some natural transition. In Russia, it's reasonable to ask, did this come from a biological weapons program research facility? And if yes, was the bacteria enhanced or altered in any way? We have no evidence that it was, but that's the kind of thing you'd be very worried about. Yeah. Where this incident occurred has been linked to Russia's broader biological weapons program in the past. It's probably like defensive research. Like you make the new pathogen over here and then at this place, you research ways to defend against it. But none of that is good. And then, as you said, there's just like the general lack of transparency for the Russian government. Like if Peskov, the spokesman, says the sky is blue, the sky is red that day. And then also, it's not great that we don't trust our own government. We don't trust our own government. We don't trust the Trump administration. And then, as you mentioned, they've been pulling out of these international organizations like the WHO and organizations that deal with global biological threats and weakening them, or at least flirting with pulling out of them. So, I don't know, man. I think we're probably going to be okay here, but who knows? Yeah. It just speaks to the need that there's something not sustainable about a global political system where you can't trust anybody about something as basic as like plague, you know? And like you don't trust your own authorities, you don't trust their authorities, nobody trusts the WHO anymore. Like we are going to, at a certain point, have to put aside all of our neuroses and kind of rebuild these systems so that they can work again. Because otherwise, every time these things pop up, like, yeah, you're just sitting there and like you're you're just sorting. You're like parsing information on the internet and you're like parsing Dmitri Peskov's statements. I mean, like this is why we built an international system, so that there would be like trusted sources of information when things like this happen. And I think part of what is so disorientating about the last few years is to suddenly realize we don't live in that kind of system anymore. Yeah. And just like, it would be great if we just had trusted experts telling us, not Bobby Kennedy Jr. Like I was gonna say, I was just about to say like, our trusted experts at HHS, like Bobby Kennedy. What happens if like we have some leak and Bobby Kennedy is the voice of that? Yeah. And he's like, you know, Kid Rock's gym benching shirtless in jeans. Like, you know, he's scalping a bear or something. Yeah. He probably got, he probably killed the marmot and ate it and got the goddamn plague in the first place. Speaking of places you could get the plague, Ben, Crooked Con is happening in Washington, D.C. from November 5th to 7th. I'm kidding. No one's gonna get any diseases. You're just gonna get some hopium. We are very excited that we're recording a live show. We're recording a live show. We're recording a live episode of Pod Save the World on Saturday, November 7th at Crooked Con. Come see me and Ben. We're gonna have a great time. We're gonna talk about oversight and corruption and what we want Democrats to do when we get power, knock on wood, hopefully. So get your tickets to Crooked Con. Get them now. Come see us there. Go to crookedcon.com to check out the lineup and get your tickets. Pod Save the World is brought to you by Sundaze. 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All right, a couple of Iran updates. So listeners probably remember the story from last month where a bunch of dudes were arrested near an airbase in the UK that the US uses to fly B-1 bomber missions, including missions that hit targets in Iran. Over the weekend, the US just immediately, just like very quickly and suddenly, pulled all of its B-1 bombers from this base. The New York Times reported that the planes were moved so suddenly that some, quote, left while aerial refueling aircraft were still being scrambled to support their flights back to the United States. So it sounds like it was a pretty sudden decision. The Wall Street Journal reported that the decision was made over fears of a possible drone attack on the base ordered by the IRGC, which would target the aircraft and the pilots and obviously attempt to kill them. Again, here's what our president had to say about this decision to make you guys feel good. Let's watch. Out of a base when like a Democrat was president, like the right-wing media would be like, it's weakness. I mean, remember that Chinese balloon flew over like during Biden's administration. It was like a two-week standoff. Like people lost their fucking mind for a week. It is kind of nice that he'd be like, yeah, we moved. There's an abundance of caution, whatever. However, lest you think that the B-1 bombers moving from this airbase back to the US means the war is winding down. Last week, the Journal reported that 10,000 more US service members are going to the Middle East and a third aircraft carrier strike group. Maybe that means they will. Rotate one of the aircraft carriers that are already there home. Probably they will. But I think we should take very seriously these reports that Trump is planning to ramp the war back up after the midterms. Speaking of that war in Yemen, the Yemeni government announced a military operation to recapture areas taken by the Houthi rebels. That's going to be done in concert with the Saudis, but also according to the New York Times, about 200 US military and intelligence analysts are embedded with the Saudis working with them. So we are very much a part of this mission too. But finally, Ben, Trump seems to have settled on a closing argument about the war just in time for the midterms. This is from a campaign rally on Monday night. It's a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay, and it's going to be over very soon. It's essentially almost over with. So was that a threat, a recommendation? It landed like a laugh line in the room. Yeah. It almost feels like his heart's not fully in the bit, though, you know? Because he keeps trying to find some formulation that can land with the audience at these rallies. Every week, there's some new, different way to either declare the war over or threaten to annihilate Iran. And he's just kind of not landing the applause lines. Right. The war is so unpopular that his new is well, maybe we could kill a bunch of liberals. We support it now. - Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's like-- - That's good, that's cool. That's right, he's just groping around for something that can, like, fire up a crowd. For Natalie? Oh, yeah. It's like that's what his—all he's thinking about is, like, he's, like, road-testing material, like a stand-up comic who's, like, trying out different things in clubs. When, in fact, like, what he actually has to do is solve, like, the fucking war that he started, which he can't solve because he doesn't have answers. Also, I know we're a bunch of libs here in L.A., but San Diego is, like, a big military town. Yeah, no, but, I mean, that's, like— Like, okay. Like, they no longer cheer for the annihilation of Iran because they've heard him say it so many times. So now he's threatening to kill us, you know, because maybe they'll cheer for that, you know. Like, it just shows you how he's just, like, unmoored. Like, he has no place to land on Iran anymore, you know. Yeah, it's so unpopular. It's so unpopular that, like, it might be more popular for him to argue for the annihilation of Southern California than for, like, you know, maintaining his war in Iran, you know what I mean? Yeah. That's depressing. Anything about these other stories, the Air Force base, the carrier movements, the Uthis jump out at you? Yeah, I want to say something about the bombers because I think I have a theory about what's happening here, as strange as it seems, right? So, and we talked about this in other contexts, but I'm going to do the callback to the second Obama administration. There was, like, this plot that was uncovered about, like, an IRGC operative who was going to— Who was going to come to the United States and assassinate the Saudi ambassador at Cafe Milano. Oh, yeah. Remember this? Yeah, yeah. And, you know, Preet Bharar announced this case. Look, I'm not here to—I wasn't down in the weeds of this thing. I remember feeling like, at the time, there was probably some, like, distant Iranian aspiration to do something like this. But I had a hard time believing that they were actually going to, like, in a movie, like, shoot up Cafe Milano. Like, at the Saudi ambassador. I think part of what happens to the Trump people that's interesting is they get these whiffs of Iranian intelligence and they, like, just take them as something that's happening, right? So, you remember the reason that Trump was, like, rushed out of Air Force One in, like, a food cart was because there was some intel reportedly passed by the Israelis that they were going to, like, shoot down Air Force One with, like, an RPG or something. Right, right. Out of Turkey. It just feels like—because what do we— What did we see? We saw them detain those guys who were casing the airbase and then release them as if, well, those guys clearly probably weren't hard on Iranian terrorists, so they wouldn't have released them. It feels like they have, like, some whiff of intelligence that, like, Iranians have discussed, you know, drone attacks on bases, including this U.K. one, and they're, like, just freaking out. And the point is it doesn't, like, suggest that you have a lot of confidence in what you're doing. You know, like, we're not confident. We can defend B-1 bombers in an airbase. So that's the weird thing. Are there no—I mean, I guess it's a base in the U.K., so you would think it's relatively safe, but there's no air defenses on the base to speak of. I mean, like, maybe what they were worried about is some sort of IRGC operative in the U.K. that, like, launches a quadcopter drone that hits the planes. Like, I don't know, but you can't put a bunch of cops around the base to prevent that from happening? Yeah, I mean, because it just feels like the Iranians could almost, like, do psyops with us and, like, talk to each other in open lines about all the things they want to do, and then suddenly we're moving military equipment. Right. And Trump's in a food cart. You know, like, it does just feel like he's—these people are in his head. Like, we've been rattled by the Iranians, you know? Because, like, it's not a small thing to be, like, yank B-1 bombers from the U.K. Like, it suggests, like, an empire that doesn't feel safe anywhere. Yeah. That Iranian assassination plot, that was 2011. The target was Adel Al-Jubeir at Cafe Milano. Was that 2011? Yeah, I remember I was there for this. Because I remember it was like—like, the IRGC reached out to some naturalized U.S. citizen. He was, like, a used car salesman, literally, from Texas, who then tried to hire someone he thought was in the Zetas cartel, but that guy was a DEA informant. So the whole thing just unraveled. It just—again, it felt like, you know, some guy had a, you know, no bad idea and a brainstorm. Right. You know, like, let's take Adel Al-Jubeir at the Cafe Milano. But, like, I just think sometimes we overreact to bits of intelligence. You know? And that's kind of what it feels like this is all about. Yeah. It was quite rushed. They certainly freaked the fuck out. Final story we wanted to flag for Ben's interview. So listeners probably know that Chinese President Xi Jinping was just in D.C. for a state visit. They accomplished nothing. The Wall Street Journal, though, had a report over the weekend about some unusual requests that Xi made while he was here and what it might say about his health, what the bunch of requests and sort of the observations of him might say. So, first of all, they reported— The Wall Street Journal reported that, quote, a private room in the West Wing for Xi Jinping and his wife was required to take breaks between events. No one else was allowed to join or go in the room. Not even Xi's chief of staff. They called it the hold room, which is just, like, hard to think of any other time that's happened or why you wouldn't let your own staff in the room. Also, Xi just had, like, very limited schedule. So there were no activities the night he arrived. And then on the last day he was there, he was supposed to go to the— He went to the National Archives with Trump, but spent only 10 minutes inside, which was way less than the Trump team had planned. One of the days he was in D.C., there was a five-hour gap in the summit agenda. I think it was, like, Trump meeting with Xi. There was no working lunch. He just, like, peaced out for five hours and then came back for the state visit, which is just weird. Like, when you're on the ground for 48 hours, you flew 14 hours to be there. Like, usually you make the most of it. And then there was this incident at a summit of the— six countries earlier last month, earlier in September, where Xi skipped the dinner that was attended by Putin and others because he was feeling sick. So, Ben, this could be nothing. There have been health rumors about Xi and other leaders before. But if he's really sick and he dies, it's, like, a huge succession question that will have global ramifications. And also, I think, like, my big takeaway was surprise— well, maybe not surprise— probably a bad idea for all the Trump people to leak this. Yeah. So, that was mine, too. It's, like, wildly sensitive. Yeah. Because, look, on Xi's health, we don't know. There's a bunch of smoke. Like, he travels far less than he did. He's out of sight a bit more. He's getting older. He's gripping his wife's hand really strong, going up the stairs and stuff. I mean, he's also just getting older. But, like, there's enough to suggest maybe there's something happening there. It's a—and to your point, it's just a reminder that he is so wildly consolidated power. Like, he's turned that system from, like, a party system into, like, a one-man-one-rule system. That, yeah, like, there— it's worth thinking about the fact that there could be, like, a real power struggle if he just drops dead. You know, it's just one more variable out there. However, to me, the headline was, wow, crazy thing to leak. You know, the Chinese are going to be fucking apoplectic that the Trump people are leaking out stories that had to come from them. It's like the Chinese delegation was leaking this out. Right, no. That she needed rest, that it was peculiar. Also, like, talk about whiplash. Because if you're Xi Jinping, you come over here, Donald Trump is just kissing your ass. Like, he's meeting you at the airport. Carrying your bags. He's just carrying your bags. He's talking about how handsome you are, all this stuff. Like, you know, the White House chief of staff, you know, Dan Scavino, is, like, tweeting out, like, weird AI videos of, like, a wild party at the state dinner. Remember that? Yes. And then other White House staffers are leaking that you're, like, an old man who had rest. You know, like, what is your guy's fucking approach to this country? Right. You know? Because, like, you can't do a charm offensive and embrace the guy and then leak that he's, like, you know— An old weak man. An old weak man. Like, that's—like, it just—it shows you how undisciplined this whole thing is because this is going to really piss off the Chinese. I mean, that's the only practical result of this. Remember that there was, like, 2022, the party congress, when Xi's sitting next to Hu Jintao, previous leader, and all of a sudden, he just gets frustrated. Frogmarched out of the room. They fucking dragged the guy out, and I don't think— And then they, like, erased him from history. I'm not sure we've seen Hu Jintao since, you know? Like, that was one of the strangest things that's happened in the last decade. Really weird. It's an underrated thing for—when you, like, basically frogmarched the former chair of the party and president of the country out, you know? And then I think all of his, like, all of his faction within the party was just purged. Yeah. I mean, it's just—it's, like, it's a parable about what could happen to Xi if he's perceived as weak or if he gets sick or incapacitated in some way. I mean, it's just—there's a lot going on. Well, remember, he— He also replaced the chief of the military not too long ago. I mean, there's clearly machinations happening in that Chinese system. And one of the things that maybe is, like, potentially hopeful, too, we have to remind ourselves, as much as we've been talking about, like, the shitty leadership in the world, like, Putin's fucking old. Like, Trump is fucking old. Xi Jinping's old. Erdogan's old. Like, at a certain point, just by Mother Nature, like, there's going to be a lot of turnover here in the world. And, like, that's— And that can go for better or worse. Hope springs eternal. Okay. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, you're going to hear Ben's interview with Evan Gershkovich about what it was like being in a Russian prison for way too long and about life in Russia under Putin. So stick around for that. This podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to elevate your online presence and drive your success. 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And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash world to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace.com slash world. All right, I'm very pleased to be joined today by Evan Gershkowitz. He is the author of the really extraordinary and beautiful new book, This Cursed Beautiful Land. He is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He was, of course, detained in Russia for a year and a half and released as part of a swap that makes up for a good chunk of his memoir. Evan, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Ben. So, you know, I've had a chance to chat about this book before. I just want to reiterate for our audience. This is not just, you know, you check the box and wrote the memoir. This is like deeply insightful into Russia, deeply reflective personally. It's got literary flourish. It'll take you inside of a Russian prison. So I really urge everybody to pick up this book. But I want to begin where you start in the prologue, which is kind of the anatomy of a sting. You know, you travel on a reporting trip thinking you're meeting with the source to get information about Russia's military, military complex. And you quickly find yourselves in the middle of a sting operation. He's trying to give you documents that essentially play to a narrative that you're a spy. I want you to just take people into in that experience when you realized you were being set up. And then share a little bit about how you spent a lot of time in the book unpacking how what to you is, you know, traditional reporting, whether it was clearly just a setup, whether some people might have actually believed that you're engaged in espionage. Yeah, so when I moved to Russia in late 2017, an American foreign correspondent or a foreign correspondent at all hadn't been arrested for espionage charges since the late Soviet period, since the late 80s. And so when we got there, when I got there, the Russian press was feeling some pressure, but the foreign press was allowed to report on whatever it wanted. And we were treated as kind of quasi diplomats. The worst, you know, that would happen, and it happened to one person before the full-scale invasion in 2022 was getting kicked out. And when the, you know, the reason really is just that the Kremlin wanted to control the information environment, censor it for a domestic audience. But for a global audience, you know, it didn't really matter what the global audience knew. And it gave the Kremlin cover, you know, it's a regular functioning country, regular economy, if the New York Times, the BBC, the economists and so forth are reporting on it. When the war, full-scale war starts, obviously the ground had shifted. But we were trying to read the signals the same way we had always done of whether the rules applied to us. So Russia passed these draconian censorship laws, which criminalized calling the war a war. They were calling the war a special military operation. And you could land in prison for up to 10 years. The Russian press at this point completely flees the country. I was reporting in London at that point when the war started, just happens. Stance happened to be there, decided I'll wait to come back. Over the months, some Russian journalists are targeted in absentia. And we took that as a signal of the Russian state saying, do not come back. And the foreign press left alone. So my bureau chief had stayed, you know, other journalists had stayed. I came back, the Washington Post came back, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Guardian and so forth. We start reporting more and more sensitive stories, so to speak, because, you know, it's a war and it's the most that that is the topic. It is basically all there is to report on, really. Not really sort of, you know, a museum opening in Moscow, but the war effort. I reported a story on how Putin was getting information from the front and making decisions about the war. Went to Pskov, which hosts the 76th Division of the Russian Airborne Forces, which had occupied Bucha in Ukraine and committed a series of war crimes. So I was doing stories that, you know, we would consider probably, you know, either brave or reckless, given the sense that the war was going on. But not something that we would consider to be espionage. At the end of 2022, Putin addressed the FSB, which used to be the KGB, Russia's domestic intelligence agency, and told them that they needed to catch a spy. Three months later, I'm arrested. I was working on a whole bunch of stories at that point. But the story I'm arrested while doing is about, as you said, basically Russia was switching to a complete war footing. The war wasn't going as well as it wanted to. And Ukraine was telegraphed. And so, you know, I was working on a whole bunch of stories at that point. But the story I'm arrested while doing is about Russia was telegraphing a large counteroffensive for the summer of 23. It was saying it was going to drive to the south, split Russian lines between Crimea and the east, and that way be able to get back to the negotiating table. The Biden administration and European countries were backing that as a tactic. But nobody was really reporting on or discussing the fact that Russia was saying, well, we're going to defend the land that we've occupied. They were building four defensive lines. They were switching their economy to military footing. And my colleague and I at the Journal were planning on doing a story about this. And so we're doing this story. We're connecting with different sources. And he has a source who's a union boss in the Urals for various factories and said that, you know, he'd be able to help, you know, with this story. He had helped my colleague before and actually journalists from NPR and other places. And he said he could meet in person. And so that's where the sting really begins is that I'm the one who's lured to go to this meeting. At that meeting, we talk about how we wanted to get a view into how Russia's main tank factory was basically increasing its output. And so really what we were trying to do was get a sense of how much they were prepping. So one of the sources I was talking to was a lawmaker in the region who was talking about how students were being sent right from universities into all the factories. They were working three shifts around the clock. You know, it wasn't just this guy. But this guy at this meeting suggested that one of the things that would be interesting to me would be the total capacity output of the factory would be interesting to us. And I say, yeah, yeah, yeah. Turns out that is what Russia considers classified information because we don't have a sense of what a tank factory could produce. And I, by saying, yeah, that does sound interesting, have agreed to receive it. Second meeting, there's the actual sting. When we meet, he brings papers that he's drawn official tables of production figures onto. Hands them to me. And that's when masked men storm in and arrest me. Lo and behold, from the FSB, the service that is responsible for espionage cases, they march in, tell me I'm under arrest. And as I'm being, as they're approaching to drag me on the ground, I noticed that the source is stepping away into the crowd. When I'm brought to the station, I'm simply handed my espionage charges. I'm not interrogated. I'm not tortured. And so at that moment, I realized, oh, this was a setup. This was a sting. And I, I assume for a specific reason to, as the Russians call it, to stock up their, what they say, their exchange fund. The Russians use journalists as cover for their intelligence operatives still. We banned that practice back in 1977, codified it as policy in 1997, but they still do. And I think, you know, where I basically landed on is, you know, they're ordered to catch a spy. They're trying to find more Americans to swap. It turns out when I get out, I find that they were running a second sting operation at the same time, which had to do with the story I was doing about Wagner, the paramilitary group at the time. So I think they were looking for different ways to set me up at that point. Yeah, no, I mean, you, clearly they wanted you for a swap. They may have also not liked what you were doing and how you were doing it. You're a Russian speaker, parents born in the Soviet Union. Maybe that raises other suspicions. You go to prison and you're in this, this world where you're kind of reporting. It's interesting. You, you get access to no reporter usually gets to FSB officers, to other prisoners, to prison guards. The war is kind of a constant, you know, background noise, right? It's, it's on the state media that is on television in your cell. Some of the convicts are debating whether to take the offer to go to the front so that they can break their sentence, knowing that they might just be put in the meat grinder. Obviously people are not being totally candid with you because they think the police might be listening in prison. But what did you surmise about Russian attitudes about the war and about what Putin has done, where he's taken Russia based on your conversations with everybody ranging from, you know, FSB officials to common criminals to people who are in prison for their war? Yeah. I mean, on the first part about the reporting exercise, just for, you know, listeners who might've not gotten to the book yet or read anything about the book, I basically, I had wanted to do a book already. because You know, I was one of the last foreign reporters on the ground. Rush of news gathering from, you know, reports to news analysis to blog posts. It's hard to capture how much Russia is really drastically going off a cliff in this sort of autocratic descent return to its kind of, you know, the normal way its government had gone about doing things after kind of like the blip of the 90s, so to speak. And I was thinking of characters for a book to memorialize this period, follow their lives, how their lives had changed. And then I get arrested. Some of those characters have ended up in this book. But when I get arrested and realize that's for a swap, you know, I'm treated better than some other people there. You know, the warden checks in on me before the U.S. ambassador comes to visit on state television. I hear news programs talking about how they had to replenish their exchange fund. You know, it's. It all becomes clear that I'm not really being treated as a spy. That's not what they're concerned about. They just needed an asset, a bargaining chip. And so I. A coping mechanism that I had was essentially, well, this place is interesting. There's nothing much I can do about this. Swap deals take a while. Brittany Grinders, who some people might remember, the WNBA player, her swap took 10 months. But most take, you know, more than a year and a half. Some take two years, some take up to five. And so I thought, well, I'm going to be here for a bit. And a coping mechanism was. Reporting on the place. Reporters don't really get to waltz into the FSB offices every day. Or like you said, Ben, you know, meet regular, you know, this many, you know, regular Russian criminals or soldiers who had fought in Ukraine and so forth. I mean, the state of affairs when I got to Russia in 2017 was already then this notion of kind of apathy. I think Russians take umbrage with that word because apathy sort of makes. I think Russians take umbrage with that word because apathy sort of makes it seem as if they've checked out on their own volition. And some would argue that they've checked out because Putin's government made clear that they should check out politically. And it's always felt like, you know, there's maybe a third of society is really tapped into what's going on and two thirds are not. And when it came to the war, especially, you know, when criticizing the war is criminalized, you can land in prison for 10 years for criticizing the war. And I met a teenager in prison. Who had spray painted for anti-war words on a government building in protest and ended up with a double digit sentence for defacing a government building and committing a terrorist act and so on. That tells you the real fear that exists in Russia to really speak out. And so when a pollster calls you and asks what you think of the war, you know, you might not, you might reserve your better judgment. And I think both from, you know, there's interesting kinds of pollsters working. In Russia, Keith Gessner, the New Yorker, wrote about these different kinds of pollsters that spread it up, trying to really do it, do this more creatively through focus groups, asking kind of tangential questions. To me, it seems like there's something like 15% of people who are really, really, really pro-war, 15% of people who are really, really, really anti-war and something like two thirds that are a silent majority that we can't really tell. Maybe they like Putin, but they don't like the war. Maybe they are for the war, but they actually don't like Putin. They just, you know, or maybe they don't want to think about it. Or maybe they think the war is totally bad, but they won't speak out about it. And that was the kinds of people I met in prison, too, including prison guards. I got in a conversation with the prison guard and, you know, I asked him what he thought about the war. And he kind of, you know, gave me a little smile and a nod. And I said, I understand, you know, because he has to wear an audio recorder and a video recorder whenever he's moving a prisoner around. And he had that on me and he can't speak out loud. I hate that. With another prison guard once, we were having a cigarette and there was a second prison guard. And we started talking about Putin with the first and the second one just turned on his heels and walked off as far as he could because he didn't want to be anywhere near this, no matter what we were saying. So I think it's a black box that's really hard to get a true view into. But I think that silent majority is really key in terms of understanding what might happen after Putin eventually. It doesn't necessarily have to remain. Yeah, well, in going beyond even the war and Putin, you know, you're in good company. You know, Solzhenitsyn was in prison in Russia. Dostoevsky was in prison in Russia. And you also clearly had some affection. You create a composite of your cellmates at the prison you're at outside of Moscow. But clearly you had some affection for this person or these people that you were forced into such intimate quarters with in a cell. My question for you is like. As someone who, you know, has a Russian background, speaks fluent Russian, is fascinated by this country, what did you learn about Russians from being imprisoned with them? Is there something you learned on the inside that you could not have learned, you know, in Moscow or even traveling on reporting trips? You know, I have this dual kind of dual identity since when I was a kid. I grew up in a Russian-speaking home with a Russian name at home, Vanya, which is Ivan. Evan is the American name. We step out. You know, at home, it's Russian food, Soviet cartoons. You step out into the world and there it's American pop culture and an American name, English. And, you know, in prison, it kind of felt like it was my Russian side in prison, right? I think it was also another coping mechanism. You kind of became your Russian side. You became Vanya. Exactly. I became Vanya completely, basically. Evan was left somewhere out there. You know, I'm watching the news, reading the news about him. And a journalist is usually the one observing the news. He isn't the main character in a story, the subject of the story. And suddenly, my position in life is flipped upside down. And I think I kind of was, you know, in the cell, we speak Russian. I'm referred to by my Russian name. The U.S. ambassador came once a month and I spoke one hour of English. And actually, over the months, I started, you know, in the 11th month, the 12th month, I started being, it was hard to recall certain English words, you know, which is a total tangent on how insane language, you know, emigres, Russian or Chinese or Mexican will forget some, you know, some words. Over the years, my parents don't remember all Russian words. That's a kind of, you know, a total fascinating thing about the plasticity of language. But so I become my Russian self. And I, you know, one thing that I really felt was this kind of, you know, there's this sort of majestic terror of an autocratic regime. It's immovable. There's nothing you can really, you know, I couldn't do anything about my situation. I'm there. I can't change anything. Obviously, my case is fabricated. But 98%. 99.7% of Russian cases end in a conviction. So you're sort of being passed along down the conveyor belt of this rubber stamping court. And you have to, how you kind of handle it is with dark humor. And my cellmates handled it with that way. It's kind of resignation and dark joke. And that's depressing, obviously. But I think it's a kind of way to deal with this. And, you know, I think one thing about Russians is that, you know, their history is much more tragic. But they're a bit more, they're a bit more grounded and able to sort of swim with these various currents that go around them. And there's something that I could really relate to about that. And they try to keep living in a way. But, you know, also interesting, you know, my cellmate, I thought sometimes it can be really, you know, some of these decisions can be really conscious. So my cellmate, one of my cellmates was, had tried basically normal. Office work was not making much money, wasn't able to move up in the career. There's not, you know, the job market isn't that great. After Crimea, the economy is sort of grinding to a slow stagnation with all the sanctions that have been imposed on it. And he's like, well, you know, Putin and his regime are up to corruption and crime. Why can't, why can't the rest of us? And so he made a conscious decision. Yeah. And so he made this conscious decision to become a professional criminal because, you know, sort of. If the big man is doing it, why do I need to follow the rules? And, you know, I think, I mean, I hate these direct comparisons, but we're watching our administration in the U.S., the norms that are being violated on what, you know, what kind of money you're allowed to be making while you're in office and foreign deals and so on and so forth. And we kind of become inoculate to that. And you can, I think, you know, more and more people find it kind of comfortable. You know, there's if the norms shift, so be it. So I found that really interesting, too. I think, like, you know, our norms are malleable. And I think Russians have, you know, they've had this tragic, difficult history and they kind of find ways to exist in it. Yeah. It's interesting because you sometimes become more Russian. I'm sure that allows you to see the experience of Russians through different eyes. And then part of what you're seeing is people who are both coping and in some cases adapting to the kind of enterprise that they're living under. There's one other thing I want to ask you that I actually. I meant to ask you that, Dan, and I didn't get to it, which is you kind of allude to this at the end. So you go through this extreme experience. You weather it, but it's not obviously with that difficulty. Then you're released in this dramatic swap. But part of what you're realizing is, you know, one, you're leaving behind Russia. You don't know if and when you'll be able to set foot on this, you know, cursed, beautiful land again. Two, obviously, you've been to this extreme circumstance. Of reporting in dangerous places and getting apprehended. Do you do you think about as you've kind of processed this? reentry, what and how you're going to find that kind of, I don't mean to be pejorative about it, but that thrill that you probably got in reporting in a dangerous place and taking risks, right? Because you clearly like the, you know, every foreign correspondent I know likes to kind of be on that line that you're on, you know, like I'm taking some risks, but it's worth it. Prison itself was an extreme experience. Now you're back, I imagine, and kind of on the one hand, loving the mundane nature of day-to-day life. But do you think to yourself, like, where am I going to find that next act that is both thrilling and rewarding for me after what I've been through? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, there's really, I guess, two questions there and two points to make. The first one about Russia is just that, you know, I am Russian American. I moved there with no illusions about the Russian state at that point. It occupied Crimea, Eastern Ukraine, murdered people like Boris Nemtsov in the street, Anna Polakovskaya, a journalist. When I was arrested, it was shock, not surprise, shock that they would cross this red line, not surprise in terms of the logic of the regime. And I, you know, I feel like somewhat part of the people, right? I'm not a citizen of Russia. I wasn't born there, but much of my family's from there. I grew up in Russian culture. I met some of the best friends. I've ever had in my life there. My girlfriend there. I became an adult there. And so I think a country is much more complex and greater than just simply what its government might be up to at any given moment. And so, yeah, you know, I don't think there's this change suddenly of, oh, I never want to go back to Russia again. I can't go back while he's alive, but, you know, we'll see what happens one day. And it's a history is long. And maybe we'll. Maybe there will be a moment where there's a free Russian, like the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny was, you know, dreaming of and a lot of other Russians and his supporters, the tens of thousands of people who support him and the thousands who came out to his funeral in Russia, even amid, you know, the draconian measures that are going on there. The other side in terms of, yeah, this sort of foreign correspondent nature, I think, you know, foreign correspondents aren't the only ones that feel this way. I mean, I think you and your job probably felt this way, leaving government too after, you know, traveling the world, being at the heart of things, making these decisions. And suddenly we become what? Reporters, podcasters, columnists. Exactly. That's probably the reason I asked the question. Exactly. Yeah. And I think it's this kind of comedown. I think what it is, is I think addiction in a way comes from the repetition. You are used to that kick. So people were asking me when I got out, what were you craving? What did you want to eat? And I'd lost my cravings. Because I, you know, it's, I wasn't thinking about sushi because I couldn't order it off Uber Eats every two weeks. And so the craving isn't being satisfied. Yeah. Yeah. You learn to look forward to other things. So I was looking forward to when my lawyer would visit each week to when I would go on my walk each day to when my friends would send in fresh, you know, fruits and vegetables. And, you know, I actually made guacamole in prison because they sent in fresh avocados and red onions and whatnot. And I was able to, that was like, that guacamole was the best thing I had eaten in forever. And so I wasn't, like the cravings go away. And I think it's the same thing with this kind of work. At the beginning, I was thinking about it a lot. And I was exploring that in the book of sort of this, wow, Hooton and, you know, the FSB stole this from me. They stole this ability to work. But where I've come to is like, I'm a journalist again. I've got back to reporting at the Journal. And some of the stories we were working on and that I was helping do over the summer were fascinating in their own right, without having to go to the front lines. We did a story. We did a story on how actually the Biden administration was deciding whether to give the UAE chips for its AI program, which was a big debate given the UAE does work with China and Russia. And should we cede this technology that we have to them? Ended up being a CIA operation to make this decision. It was a fascinating story. Then we did a story on how the Trumps were building a new tower in Tbilisi with the help of a sanctioned oligarch, U.S. sanctioned oligarch. Anyway, the, I think finding, other things that give you some sort of, maybe not thrill, but make life interesting. - Curiosity. - I think reporting is interesting, you know? - Yeah. - Yeah, yeah. - Curiosity is like a. - Yeah, exactly. - A virtue that can fill a lot of space. Yeah. Well, look, Evan, it's been great talking to you again. Everybody should read, I mean, like your glimpses of prison life that you just mentioned are fascinating in their own right. It's also like a detective story. It's a prison story. It's a story about what's happened to Russia. So thank you so much for writing it. And thank you for spending some time with us today. Thanks again. Ben, it was two great conversations. - Glad to have a second one. - Yep, I really enjoyed it. Thanks to Evan for joining the show. And thanks to you all for listening. And we will talk to you soon. Pod Save the World is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Ilona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith, and Anisha Banerjee. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Cantor, Kenny Moffitt, David Tolles, and Ryan Young. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.