True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 63: Exiled on Main Street
Aired: 2020-04-24
Duration: 01:34:09


=== Special Guest Revealed (05:15) ===

[00:00:01]  Hello, this is Radio Door Nerd.
[00:00:03]  We're going to be reviewing...
[00:00:06]  This is episode 62 in our Doors of the Old West series.
[00:00:12]  We've been looking at a lot of saloon doors lately, and the thing about those, well, we have a special guest, a door expert who was a high-ranking member of the Derg in Ethiopia, Elizabeth Francic.
[00:00:26]  Liz, a lot of people think that saloon doors are just through sort of bursting through both arms forward, hidden to the side.
[00:00:33]  But in fact, you can also be pushed through saloon doors.
[00:00:37]  Is that correct?
[00:00:40]  I can't do it.
[00:00:43]  I'm not an improv star, but that was very funny.
[00:00:46]  Thank you.
[00:00:47]  Also, I knew I was image.
[00:00:49]  I don't know who that voice was, but I liked it.
[00:00:51]  That wasn't, that wasn't, to be clear, for those who hasn't heard the war nerd, that was neither of them.
[00:00:56]  That was, you know who it was?
[00:00:58]  I was doing Adam Driver.
[00:01:00]  Oh, my.
[00:01:01]  Because we just talked about how he was canceled.
[00:01:03]  Ghouls.
[00:01:04]  I was doing Driver.
[00:01:06]  That wasn't a bad driver.
[00:01:08]  Thank you.
[00:01:12]  I'm the door nerd.
[00:01:17]  Please drive me to Urban Salvage.
[00:01:20]  I'm sorry, but why is he getting canceled?
[00:01:23]  Looks like he invented several new slurs.
[00:01:27]  No.
[00:01:29]  No, I believe he was caught selling fentanyl.
[00:01:32]  No.
[00:01:35]  I did just read that King Jong in the two seconds while my GChat crashed.
[00:01:40]  I did read that the intelligence community, which I hate that phrase. Is saying that Kim Jong-un is in the hospital after bad.
[00:01:49]  He had a surgery.
[00:01:50]  Something went wrong.
[00:01:52]  But here's the thing.
[00:01:54]  Obviously, by the time this episode comes out, we'll know one way or the other.
[00:01:57]  But this news just broke.
[00:01:59]  And as of this episode, you know, we have no idea.
[00:02:02]  I will say that news out of the DPRK in North Korea is almost always, I don't know if this will be, but oftentimes it's sourced from like South Korean, like basically tabloid papers.
[00:02:16]  And so I'm withholding judgment.
[00:02:18]  Also, so that I'm not wrong.
[00:02:20]  But no, I have no idea because it could be any.
[00:02:23]  I'm going to need some second, third opinions on this.
[00:02:25]  Yeah, you're not ready to confront that that might be a possibility.
[00:02:30]  So we have today, well, let's introduce ourselves first.
[00:02:36]  I'm Liz.
[00:02:38]  My name is Brace.
[00:02:39]  We are joined by producer Tung Chomsky.
[00:02:43]  And we are true anon.
[00:02:46]  That was a last back into Driver there.
[00:02:48]  Ghouls.
[00:02:49]  It was good.
[00:02:51]  We got a big special guest today.
[00:02:52]  Fuck, no, fuck.
[00:02:53]  Sorry.
[00:02:54]  I should, no, keep going.
[00:02:55]  But I should have said that Adam Dragot got canceled because they found out his real name was Adam Screwdriver.
[00:03:01]  I fucked up.
[00:03:02]  I want to be accountable to you.
[00:03:04]  I should have said that.
[00:03:05]  I'm sorry.
[00:03:05]  And that's where we should put the music.
[00:03:30]  Bryce, put the gun down.
[00:03:32]  I'm sorry.
[00:03:33]  The problem is I keep it in my desk drawer.
[00:03:36]  And when we start recording, I start fidgeting and I open the desk drawer.
[00:03:39]  You're always fidgeting.
[00:03:40]  I can see through the camera too.
[00:03:42]  I always see your little eyes.
[00:03:43]  I understand that, but you guys told me I wasn't allowed to play with the gun while we record anymore because it makes noises when I open the cylinder and stuff.
[00:03:52]  But the thing is, I jewel too much when we record.
[00:03:55]  And so in my brain, I'm like, I'm smart.
[00:03:56]  I'll put it in this fucking drawer.
[00:03:58]  And then you see the gun.
[00:04:00]  Yeah, I see the gun and I'm like, fuck.
[00:04:01]  And then I have to put the gun away like two minutes later because I realize I'm being loud because I'm playing with it.
[00:04:06]  And then I see the jewel and I take the jewel out.
[00:04:08]  So it's not, it's a bad, it's a cycle.
[00:04:10]  That's what they call it, a cycle.
[00:04:12]  I'm literally, I'm putting both in the drawer right now and closing the drawer.
[00:04:15]  Liz, introduce the episode instead of humiliating me.
[00:04:18]  All right.
[00:04:18]  Well, we've got big special guests today.
[00:04:21]  Mark Ames from The Exile Fame, of course.
[00:04:26]  Also, Radio Warner.
[00:04:30]  And we're talking, what are we talking?
[00:04:31]  We're talking Russia.
[00:04:32]  We're talking Corona.
[00:04:34]  We're talking Yeltsin.
[00:04:36]  We're talking Putin.
[00:04:38]  We're talking money.
[00:04:41]  Briefcase is full of money.
[00:04:43]  Oligarchs.
[00:04:44]  Larry Summers.
[00:04:47]  You know, all our favorite guys.
[00:04:49]  We're playing the hits here, baby.
[00:04:51]  Yeah.
[00:04:51]  So, well, let's get to it.
[00:05:10]  What's up, Marcus?
[00:05:10]  How you doing?
[00:05:13]  Tired, a little bit.
[00:05:15]  Yeah.

=== Northern Italy's Warning (03:59) ===

[00:05:16]  Kids are exhausting.
[00:05:18]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:05:19]  Especially, I'm sure, during this, too.
[00:05:21]  Yeah.
[00:05:22]  We just, I got paranoid from talking to one of our Radio Warner, our most sort of popular Radio Warner guests from Northern Italy.
[00:05:32]  I'm familiar.
[00:05:33]  You know, who goes by the Klitschka by the Nom de Guerre of Anibale.
[00:05:38]  And he just, he put sort of the fear of God.
[00:05:41]  I mean, he actually tried not to.
[00:05:43]  He just tried to sort of tell us how it is because Northern Italy is like three weeks ahead of us.
[00:05:51]  And basically he said, you know, you're probably screwed.
[00:05:56]  Everyone here thinks things are really bad here.
[00:05:58]  And from what we're seeing here, we think you guys are going to be more screwed than we are.
[00:06:02]  But just look for a few signs.
[00:06:04]  Basically, look for how your political leaders are handling this.
[00:06:10]  And maybe we're wrong.
[00:06:12]  Maybe they'll take it seriously.
[00:06:14]  And you know, obviously Trump wouldn't, but you kind of hoped, hope against hope, you know, it doesn't matter how many decades you're alive, you'll keep thinking, you know, the liberals, when it comes down to it, they won't be stupid on this.
[00:06:27]  Yeah.
[00:06:27]  Yeah.
[00:06:27]  You know, and then I flip on the radio the next morning and there's Cuomo saying there's no evidence that children can pass the virus on to people.
[00:06:36]  They're like, they have magical powers like in the Lord's Resistance Army where, you know, they can't get bullets.
[00:06:41]  Bullets don't.
[00:06:42]  Like ghost shirt.
[00:06:45]  And then de Blasio was saying there's no need for testing.
[00:06:48]  Testing is, you know, so 20th century or some bullshit.
[00:06:52]  And no, de Blasio was even worse.
[00:06:55]  He said, people are saying they want to keep kids at home.
[00:06:59]  They want to keep the kids out of school.
[00:07:01]  And I mean, basically, it was the teachers that were saying we don't want to go to school and die also.
[00:07:07]  But parents were also saying they wouldn't want our kids there.
[00:07:10]  And people were complaining.
[00:07:12]  And he said, do you realize if we cancel schools, that means kids are going to be at home?
[00:07:17]  Do you know what kids will be like?
[00:07:18]  They'll be restless.
[00:07:19]  Then parents won't be able to work.
[00:07:22]  These guys had no fucking clue that a pandemic or they're just paralyzed.
[00:07:28]  Yeah, absolutely paralyzed.
[00:07:31]  I kept waiting to see like how long it was going to take before they put the gun to their head and shut down Broadway.
[00:07:38]  Because that was like the, that to me was like when I knew they were finally taking it seriously.
[00:07:42]  Because they were just like waiting till the last possible moment where they're like, how much money can we squeeze out for the city?
[00:07:49]  $2 million your industry.
[00:07:51]  Yeah.
[00:07:52]  Yeah, it was bad.
[00:07:55]  That scared me.
[00:07:56]  I mean, that's when you're sort of like, you are kind of in that horror movie where no one, you know, no one around you is taking it seriously.
[00:08:04]  And what also freaked me out, so there's a guy in my building.
[00:08:06]  So we live in a 37 floor, sort of one of those lottery government subsidized buildings.
[00:08:13]  And my wife got lucky, we won a lottery.
[00:08:16]  And there's one guy, as there must be in every building, who's the guy who knows everything.
[00:08:20]  And he really kind of does, like every little trick, every little way of working the system, everything that you should be doing that you're not doing.
[00:08:27]  He's always there to kind of tell you with a smug smile on his face.
[00:08:31]  And I saw him the last day I think I had my kid in school.
[00:08:35]  His kid is in my kid's class.
[00:08:37]  And I said, you know, I started talking again, like, we probably should cancel school.
[00:08:42]  And, you know, this thing is really serious.
[00:08:43]  And we should think about even getting out of New York or something.
[00:08:46]  And he said, I don't know what you're talking about.
[00:08:49]  And so this is the guy who actually in the horror movie is the guy that tries warning everybody and then gets killed and nobody laughs.
[00:08:56]  But it turned out he was actually the guy who was saying there's nothing wrong.
[00:08:59]  And he says, well, I'm under 40.
[00:09:00]  It doesn't hit me at all.
[00:09:02]  And I said, you understand people under 40 are dying too, not at the same numbers, but like this thing is, it's not what you're being told.
[00:09:09]  And he just refused to believe it.
[00:09:11]  And to this day, actually, he's still in the middle of the shit.
[00:09:14]  We have people we know who've caught it.

=== Russia Gate Mystery (15:48) ===

[00:09:16]  Oh, shit.
[00:09:17]  People who've had it bad.
[00:09:18]  I mean, yeah, a lot of people in my kids' class, parents and kids have caught it in our building have caught it.
[00:09:25]  Well, thank God you got out when you did.
[00:09:27]  Yeah, it's a nightmare.
[00:09:28]  I mean, you know, it's a packed, like the elevator is all I thought about.
[00:09:33]  Yeah.
[00:09:33]  And like, I had pneumonia about a year and a half ago.
[00:09:35]  My kid had croup a year ago.
[00:09:38]  He had croup several times, but it was so bad.
[00:09:41]  When you see your little kid gasping for air and turning blue in front of you, and he has this problem, you know, he's had this problem.
[00:09:48]  I don't know what the hell it means.
[00:09:49]  And we had to get an ambulance to come and give him steroids.
[00:09:53]  And I'm just not going to take that chance.
[00:09:56]  And I mean, they still don't understand what this thing is, except that it was grown by the Chinese Communist Party in a Wuhan lab.
[00:10:04]  Yeah.
[00:10:05]  But beyond that, they still don't understand it.
[00:10:08]  Or we've got dueling tales because maybe it came from Fort Dietrich.
[00:10:11]  That's the other one.
[00:10:13]  I like that one.
[00:10:15]  The one thing we're sort of missing in that square of theories then, because we've got the wet lab, or excuse me, we've got the wet market in China.
[00:10:22]  We've got the lab in America.
[00:10:23]  We've got the lab in China.
[00:10:24]  We need to sort of develop a theory where it came from a wet market in America.
[00:10:29]  And then we'll sort of have total symmetry, which is always what I'm looking for.
[00:10:34]  That'll perfect the new Cold War that we're entering with China.
[00:10:38]  I know.
[00:10:38]  Yeah, the whole, the Russia one was, well, everything with liberals is always kind of a squishier version of something worse to come.
[00:10:46]  Like they kind of pave the way and then they get paved over.
[00:10:49]  And yeah, the whole Russia gate hysteria of the last few years is, it seems to me it's just kid stuff compared to what the China Cold War thing is.
[00:11:06]  But, you know, it's going to be.
[00:11:07]  It is kind of funny because I was thinking about it today because I was watching Trump's press conference for like the first time in a while.
[00:11:15]  And I was wondering about that.
[00:11:16]  And I was like, man, you just, they really just dropped the whole Russia gate thing.
[00:11:20]  Yeah.
[00:11:21]  It's just like, I was like, well, man, remember when they impeached him like two months ago or whatever?
[00:11:26]  I know.
[00:11:29]  Yeah, while everyone was supposed to be focused on retroactively, you know, why weren't you paying attention to what was happening in Wuhan?
[00:11:36]  Why weren't you paying attention?
[00:11:37]  Oh, yeah.
[00:11:38]  You were trying to impeach him over the one thing that was the stupidest thing of all to impeach him.
[00:11:43]  Yeah, that had a list of like 100 things you could have impeached him for.
[00:11:47]  I mean, you don't hear word one about that anymore.
[00:11:50]  I mean, which is, I mean, it's kind of spectacular, but it's really fucked up because I've seen people in the Trump world from my old building talking about the fake news thing.
[00:12:05]  And, you know, anytime you try to bring up something about what Trump's doing and they say, oh, it's fake news, fake news.
[00:12:11]  But like, what do you say about the fact that for three years all of the respectable media was pushing fake, a big fake news story that even they dropped.
[00:12:20]  And then, you know, that's it.
[00:12:22]  Like, Rachel Maddow just like rebuilt her career on it.
[00:12:26]  And like, I mean, I don't know.
[00:12:27]  I, you know, I was like really following all the Russia Gate stuff that you got, you know, you and Yasha and other people were really following it closely.
[00:12:36]  And really, I mean, you know, Blumenthal and other people trying to be like, everyone stop.
[00:12:42]  This is crazy.
[00:12:43]  This, you know, is getting out of hand.
[00:12:46]  Like from even before Trump's election, it started like kind of ginning up with Hillary a little bit, which I'm, I mean, you know, I always assumed was about like Syria stuff, to be honest.
[00:12:58]  But then it just like reached this fever pitch.
[00:13:02]  And it's like, people forget.
[00:13:04]  I think maybe we mentioned it on the podcast before, but it's like, remember when Morgan Freeman did like a YouTube ad saying we were at war with Russia?
[00:13:12]  Yes.
[00:13:12]  I mean, it's just like totally nuts.
[00:13:15]  And like Google was blacklisting websites.
[00:13:17]  Like naked capitalism was like taken off of Google.
[00:13:20]  Anyone that was critical.
[00:13:22]  And it kept going through the midterms, like literally up until just a couple months ago.
[00:13:27]  And now it's just, I mean, I don't think anyone has even talked about Putin in months, which is why we have you on.
[00:13:37]  Let's get it going again.
[00:13:38]  Let's restart RussiaGate now.
[00:13:40]  I mean, that should be the whole, that should be the motive here.
[00:13:43]  Yeah, no, I mean, look, I'm like the only American journalist who had his newspaper shut down by the Kremlin and who had to flee the country when one of his little, you know, the former head of NASHI, which was the pro-Kremlin sort of youth goon squad that was threatening me and all this stuff.
[00:14:04]  I mean, I'm the only American who actually had to flee Russia, journalist, and had his newspaper shut down, was charged with extremism, which is terrorism, basically, as well as other offenses like corrupting the youth and promoting drug use and stuff.
[00:14:20]  Really sick shit, yeah.
[00:14:22]  And here, here in the middle of Russia, like 10 years later in the middle of Russia Gate, I'm being accused by all of these hacks.
[00:14:28]  Happened many times of being an FSB shill, a Putin shill, a traitor, a red-brown Nazi, like everything under the book.
[00:14:37]  I mean, the Kremlin was at least pretty straight up.
[00:14:40]  Like, you're doing stuff we don't like.
[00:14:42]  Fuck you.
[00:14:42]  We're shutting you down.
[00:14:43]  Like they didn't kind of come up with a whole bunch of smoke and mirrors about this and that.
[00:14:48]  It's just like, we don't like you, go.
[00:14:51]  We finally found you.
[00:14:53]  You know, you were on the margins and things.
[00:14:54]  We finally found you.
[00:14:55]  Boom, go.
[00:14:56]  And they're a little bit more straightforward about it.
[00:14:58]  But the hysteria here, it's really weird.
[00:15:01]  I mean, and people whip themselves up into a frenzy and believe it.
[00:15:05]  It's a weird thing about American culture, man.
[00:15:07]  It's kind of scary.
[00:15:09]  That kind of dark psychotic mob mentality, that desire to just find, I don't know, enemies and burn them.
[00:15:18]  It's really deep in this culture.
[00:15:20]  Well, I mean, it's like, you know, it's really part of our fabric.
[00:15:22]  And it's not like we're the only culture that like rooted out people and, you know, talk about the Spanish Inquisition, you know, whatever.
[00:15:31]  But like, I mean, the Salem witch trials, McCarthyism, it's like, it's a pretty big part of our history.
[00:15:37]  And it works.
[00:15:38]  That's the thing, though.
[00:15:39]  Like, it works.
[00:15:40]  You sort of gin up like, you know, as I obviously I'm not breaking any ground here with this, but like prior post, you know, Cold War, there wasn't like a communist anymore.
[00:15:51]  And only so many people are Muslim.
[00:15:53]  You can't really accuse someone.
[00:15:55]  I mean, you can in a way.
[00:15:56]  They accuse Obama, I guess, of being a Muslim.
[00:15:58]  But like, I can't like accuse like you of being a Muslim or something.
[00:16:02]  And so you got to figure something else.
[00:16:05]  Of course.
[00:16:05]  Yes.
[00:16:06]  Yeah.
[00:16:06]  But like with Bernie, they, you know, they, they, they busted that out like just three months ago where a government official from Trump's government told Bernie Sanders that the Kremlin was supporting him in some way, which is, was pretty undefined how that was.
[00:16:21]  And then a whole rash of articles came out with just every single kind of like intelligence think tank scumbag being like, yeah, we've noticed a 20% uptick in pro-Sanders RT articles lately, which is like, I mean, come on.
[00:16:36]  You can quantify it.
[00:16:37]  I know.
[00:16:37]  It's like, you know, here's some actual data to prove our insanity.
[00:16:41]  Yeah, it's like, yeah, like graphs and shit.
[00:16:42]  And they're saying, oh, the bots are really active at this time.
[00:16:45]  And so we know that the Russians are behind us.
[00:16:48]  Well, that's actually just in that article.
[00:16:50]  Yeah.
[00:16:50]  He's like.
[00:16:51]  Wait, really?
[00:16:52]  Yeah, he said this guy, Clint Watts, of course, an ex-Army, I believe, intelligence officer.
[00:16:59]  And FBI guy.
[00:17:00]  Exactly.
[00:17:01]  Which is, you know, my source of news when it comes to going-ons with the left.
[00:17:08]  Yeah, he said it was all information in this article, this NPR article from Clint Watts.
[00:17:12]  There's literally no other sources in it.
[00:17:14]  And it just showed, all it showed was that some Bernie Sanders stories appeared in RT that made him look good.
[00:17:20]  There's no other facts.
[00:17:22]  There's no statistics.
[00:17:23]  They don't show exactly what happened.
[00:17:26]  He doesn't quantify it really in any real way.
[00:17:29]  He just said, yeah, RT is going pretty soft on Bernie.
[00:17:32]  And it's a headline on NPR.
[00:17:35]  And you multiply that by a million.
[00:17:37]  That's like, that's how you live in New York.
[00:17:40]  I don't know if you had this in San Francisco, but in New York here we have this guy kind of, I guess he's he's sort of a fixture here in the New York liberal radio media world, Brian Lair.
[00:17:52]  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:17:53]  You know, he's, and, you know, he's like, he was okay.
[00:17:57]  I mean, for what he was, he was always sort of okay.
[00:17:59]  I mean, he's squishy and all that stuff, but, but kind of okay.
[00:18:01]  And then he bit the Russiagate thing harder than, you know, he was like Maddow level, but in that kind of, you know, NPR voice, Damn it.
[00:18:11]  That really kind of NPR voice.
[00:18:12]  And so, um, and I had to listen to him all the time.
[00:18:16]  And this guy pushed it.
[00:18:17]  You know, they'd sort of say every day, without us, we're all going to be in Hitler's Germany.
[00:18:23]  So please give money to NPR, you know, and fight fake news.
[00:18:26]  Now, we're bringing on, you know, Susan Glasser, one of the New Yorker hacks who is also pushing Russia Gate.
[00:18:33]  Yes.
[00:18:33]  And, you know, Susan, tell us, is it true that Trump is related to somebody who's related to somebody who's related to a Russian who once drove past the Kremlin?
[00:18:43]  She's like, oh, yes, it's really true.
[00:18:44]  It's like, you see, this is, you know, how can we have this every day, every day?
[00:18:48]  And then all of a sudden, one day, the Mueller report came out and said it was bunk.
[00:18:52]  And he just dropped, like you said, he just dropped it.
[00:18:55]  He just dropped it.
[00:18:56]  And I thought, all your listeners have been listening to you and getting worked up into a frothing frenzy to the extent that NPR listeners do.
[00:19:05]  But every day for two and a half years.
[00:19:08]  And then you just, you just drop it.
[00:19:11]  And like, how does that, okay, if you're not going to, if you're not going to directly sort of address that and talk to your listeners and say, here's what we did right and here's what we did wrong, here's what we can learn or anything, you're just going to drop it, which they all did in unison.
[00:19:28]  How do you think that's going to kind of subconsciously affect them, first of all, and their trust?
[00:19:33]  I mean, they may, you know, when you're in a cult, you don't want to be, you want to believe it even when it's disproven and absolutely want to believe it harder.
[00:19:44]  Yeah.
[00:19:44]  But over time, when you notice it's not being talked about anymore, it does something to your belief.
[00:19:49]  Yeah.
[00:19:49]  No matter what.
[00:19:50]  It does.
[00:19:51]  And certainly in the other cult, the counter, you know, the opposition cult looks at it and says, well, now we know we're right and we'll never have to believe you.
[00:20:00]  And so now they can go with conviction, you know, out to a rally in Lansing or wherever, you know, and say that the whole COVID-19 thing is a Bill Gates, Soros, China conspiracy.
[00:20:14]  And if you say otherwise, well, you're the guys that were pimping Russia Gate for three years.
[00:20:20]  Why should we trust you anymore?
[00:20:21]  And it's like a total similar thing, too, because with the roll-up, whatever, into, you know, COVID-19, it was like, okay, first the media was like, oh, no, because Republicans are paying attention to this.
[00:20:39]  It's not serious.
[00:20:40]  And you had all these Vox articles being like, oh, actually, it's totally fine, blah, blah, blah.
[00:20:46]  You know, everyone talks about, you know, it's like our mayor telling people to go out and hang out, you know, in Chinatown or whatever.
[00:20:53]  Yep.
[00:20:54]  Even though people are coming back from Lunar New Year, you know, et cetera.
[00:20:58]  And you're exactly right.
[00:21:00]  And then they're like, you know, again, it's like what you were saying.
[00:21:04]  It's like, well, oh, you can't get it from kids or, oh, actually, you don't need tests.
[00:21:08]  Or, oh, now actually you do need tests.
[00:21:10]  And oh, now you can get it from kids.
[00:21:12]  And it's like, all it does.
[00:21:14]  The mask thing was the most important thing.
[00:21:15]  The mask is so insane.
[00:21:17]  But like, all it does is, you're right, is it sub, you know, even if you don't realize it and you aren't yet polarized in that way.
[00:21:23]  Because, you know, not even talking about the already, you know, Trump people or whatever.
[00:21:28]  It's like it eats at you.
[00:21:30]  And how do you not walk away with that being like, why do we trust experts?
[00:21:34]  Or why do we trust the media?
[00:21:37]  It's an impossible situation.
[00:21:40]  I mean, it's dangerous.
[00:21:41]  That's one thing a lot of Trump people sort of have over a lot of people on the left is just like not only an implicit distrust of the media.
[00:21:48]  Obviously, there are certain outlets which they trust very much, you know, OAN, Fox, or whatever.
[00:21:53]  But for everybody else, they don't trust a lot more.
[00:21:57]  And you see, you know, I think left-wingers have sort of this implicit trust because they'll read an article.
[00:22:03]  The article will have, you know, a quote from a scientist.
[00:22:06]  And a scientist would never lie in a major newspaper about anything that would ever affect you.
[00:22:11]  But I think what COVID has shown us is that like, it's all bullshit.
[00:22:15]  The CDC was saying you don't need to wear masks.
[00:22:17]  Yeah.
[00:22:18]  You know, it's, it's.
[00:22:19]  Which was counterintuitive.
[00:22:21]  And so, and because, I mean, like, what's the worst that would happen if you wear a mask?
[00:22:25]  But it does, at the very least, it will help protect other people somewhat.
[00:22:30]  At the very least, it might even help protect you somewhat.
[00:22:33]  It was counterintuitive.
[00:22:34]  And it's hard not to think in your mind while they were saying that because we didn't have any masks.
[00:22:38]  And they were that's the same thing.
[00:22:40]  What, you know, that's really what Cuomo and de Blasio were doing.
[00:22:43]  They were rationalizing shit policy backwards.
[00:22:46]  Well, I can't actually close down schools yet because my donors don't want to fucking have their kids at their home.
[00:22:54]  And I can tell you, it's a serious pain in the ass having kids at home.
[00:22:57]  People are fighting, screaming like you've never imagined before.
[00:23:00]  You're shoving your kid.
[00:23:01]  I like drag my kid and shove his face in front of Blippy.
[00:23:04]  I'm like, you know, and he's like addicted to Blippy now.
[00:23:07]  I don't know if you know who Blippy is.
[00:23:09]  No, I'm not familiar.
[00:23:10]  This is one that, you know, in the horror movies about pandemics, they tell you Blippy would become like front and center.
[00:23:15]  Blippy's like this dude who's a YouTube clown.
[00:23:19]  And somehow we stumbled across it and my kid immediately took to it.
[00:23:23]  And I was like, okay, something's not right with this.
[00:23:25]  And I looked it up and it turns out Blippy's a huge YouTube star.
[00:23:28]  But before that, he was a gross out comedy guy or trying to make it as a gross out comedy guy and never quite got there.
[00:23:35]  And YouTube videos sort of surfaced, or somebody leaked to it of him like having people take a shit on him.
[00:23:43]  So, this is like Blippy's into classic behavior.
[00:23:49]  So, my kids watching this guy, and there's actually a whole my kid's favorite episode.
[00:23:53]  I'm sorry to say this, is the chocolate episode.
[00:23:55]  How's chocolate made?
[00:23:56]  Yes.
[00:23:57]  And my wife's like, I can't do this.
[00:23:58]  I can't have my kid watch it, knowing that Blippy had people take shits on him, you know.
[00:24:05]  And how does this relate to we were supposed to do a show together?
[00:24:15]  Let's just say, I'm one, even though it didn't happen, unfortunately.
[00:24:19]  I mean, I knew you guys individually, but I didn't know.
[00:24:23]  I kind of like vaguely knew about your podcast.
[00:24:25]  Like, most of my mind is a vague soup these days.
[00:24:28]  But now that I focused on it, and I love you guys' show, and I love your feed.
[00:24:35]  I mean, you guys are doing it right.
[00:24:36]  You guys are on the way to getting a cult started, and that's the future, man.
[00:24:41]  It's really the future.
[00:24:43]  We are delighted to have one half of the Warner podcast, one half of, or not one half, I don't know how many of you motherfuckers there were, but a guy who used to be an editor at the Exiled.
[00:24:55]  I don't know what else.
[00:24:56]  What else do you do?
[00:24:57]  Your dad?
[00:24:58]  Dad, man, dad is like a more than anything.
[00:25:02]  Yeah, way harder.
[00:25:03]  Trying to get out of it.

=== Delighted for Democracy (05:12) ===

[00:25:04]  Yeah, I was reading.
[00:25:06]  I was reading a quote about you earlier from a woman named Gene McKenzie who said, Mark Ames should move to New York and live under a bridge.
[00:25:16]  And I'm delighted to be almost there.
[00:25:18]  Yeah, I was going to say, I'm delighted to be speaking to you.
[00:25:21]  You're not under a bridge.
[00:25:22]  You appear to be in some sort of building.
[00:25:24]  Yeah, well, and I got out.
[00:25:26]  Yeah.
[00:25:27]  Gene, I remember Jean.
[00:25:31]  So she was a Moscow Times correspondent.
[00:25:33]  The Moscow Times was, it was like the, you know, if neoliberalism in the 90s was, I mean, it was very different than the 2000s and now.
[00:25:48]  It was a religion.
[00:25:52]  It was a faith.
[00:25:53]  I mean, it was a very, it was a faith that was so, so fundamentally held that you didn't even, for most people, even question that it had some kind of basis.
[00:26:02]  It was just, it was like a law of an act of nature.
[00:26:05]  Yeah.
[00:26:05]  Yeah.
[00:26:06]  And she was, she was, I don't know, she was either meant to be a provocation or I don't know what her deal was, but she, she was actually not a bad journalist.
[00:26:16]  I'll give her that.
[00:26:17]  But for some reason, she decided to be a columnist instead.
[00:26:20]  And every column, she would scold Russians for being not American enough.
[00:26:25]  Every single column.
[00:26:26]  Can you believe how dumb Russians are?
[00:26:28]  You know, Americans would do it this way, but Russians do it that way.
[00:26:31]  It was like every single time.
[00:26:32]  And it just got more and more grading.
[00:26:35]  So yeah, being man boys, we made fun of her.
[00:26:39]  She wasn't upset.
[00:26:41]  Can you do?
[00:26:44]  I'm sorry to say it looks like I looked her up and she has apparently been beheaded.
[00:26:48]  So near somewhere called Derez.
[00:26:52]  Nothing to do with it, I swear to God.
[00:26:55]  Well, so you've been in a country.
[00:26:57]  I mean, you lived in Russia.
[00:26:58]  When did you move to Russia?
[00:27:00]  Sorry in front of me.
[00:27:01]  Yeah, I moved there in late 1993, just before Yeltsin bombed and burned his parliament.
[00:27:11]  Oh, we were just talking about that.
[00:27:12]  Yeah.
[00:27:14]  I actually moved.
[00:27:15]  I mean, the first place I lived in right at that time was an apartment.
[00:27:20]  I mean, it was right behind what was, it's called the White House, the parliament.
[00:27:23]  Now it's a government administrative building, but it's a large, late Soviet, very solid granite building, and that's where the parliament was.
[00:27:33]  And it was called the Bieli Dome, the White House.
[00:27:34]  It's actually where Yeltsin famously, when they had their 1991 revolution against the putsch, the geek of chippa, geekachippa.
[00:27:44]  And then Yeltsin sort of brought the Democrats in and they overthrew that putsch.
[00:27:50]  That was also standing in front of the White House because that's where the Russian SSR parliament and government was situated.
[00:27:58]  So he sort of stood up for democracy there.
[00:28:01]  And then two years later, he brought the tanks and helicopters in and bombed it to the ground and set it on fire with full backing from the U.S. Not backing, I would say, looking back at the record, prodding and pushing from Clinton people and Treasury people.
[00:28:17]  And like cheering.
[00:28:19]  I mean, like cheering it on.
[00:28:20]  So the cheering came from the Western Press Corps.
[00:28:23]  Yeah.
[00:28:23]  David Remnick, who at that time was a correspondent.
[00:28:27]  And then now he's everyone's favorite.
[00:28:30]  He's still at the New Yorker?
[00:28:33]  Is he at Pan Affair?
[00:28:34]  Yeah.
[00:28:34]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:28:35]  He's New Yorker's editor.
[00:28:36]  He ain't there.
[00:28:39]  He's writing those Obama Hesiographies.
[00:28:42]  That's where I knew him from.
[00:28:43]  He wrote Lenin's Tomb.
[00:28:45]  Yeah, he wrote Lennon's Tomb, which people say is good, but when you know too much about him, it's not.
[00:28:50]  No, I don't read any.
[00:28:52]  All these books, you go to the fucking bookstore, Barnes and Noble, whatever.
[00:28:56]  I guess that doesn't exist anymore.
[00:28:57]  Borders, whatever.
[00:28:58]  They always got like three books in the Soviet Union.
[00:29:01]  That's one of them.
[00:29:01]  And then there's like one on The Court of the Red Tsar or something, which, of course, I'm also never going to read.
[00:29:08]  Let me see his next.
[00:29:09]  So Remnik, let me just give you a couple things he said.
[00:29:11]  I mean, since we're on the subject of Remnik, but because he also had another book that had some shocking, it was like, he put out a book.
[00:29:19]  I guess they don't.
[00:29:21]  Here we go.
[00:29:21]  Hold on one second.
[00:29:22]  He wrote a book called The Bridge, Life and Rise of Barack Obama.
[00:29:27]  Yeah, you're right.
[00:29:27]  You're right.
[00:29:28]  You're right.
[00:29:28]  And of course he did his Muhammad Ali book, A Resurrection.
[00:29:31]  So it's Resurrection, The Struggle for a New Russia.
[00:29:33]  That came out in 97, a year before the collapse, where he said democracy is firmly ingrained now forever.
[00:29:40]  Despite Yeltsin's warts and all, Russia's never going back and it's forever going to be a pro-Western country.
[00:29:48]  And then he was like, whoops.
[00:29:49]  And you could take it from me.
[00:29:50]  I'm David Remnick and I approve of this message.
[00:29:52]  But in 1993, he went on Charlie Rose and said, and I've actually found it so you can watch it, where he said you can't.
[00:30:00]  He defended bombing the parliament and said you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.
[00:30:06]  I mean, he actually used that.
[00:30:07]  Oh, my God.
[00:30:08]  I mean, people died.
[00:30:09]  Yeah.
[00:30:10]  Oh, yeah.
[00:30:10]  Parliament.
[00:30:10]  It's a couple of people.
[00:30:12]  Oh, wow.
[00:30:13]  The official death toll was a few hundred, but it was.

=== World Trade Under Siege (04:10) ===

[00:30:17]  I think there were some Americans, too.
[00:30:19]  I mean, like, yeah.
[00:30:21]  Woof.
[00:30:23]  That's a nice guy, though.
[00:30:24]  Yeah.
[00:30:25]  Yeah.
[00:30:27]  But that's how people were then.
[00:30:29]  It was always Yeltsin or Red Brown.
[00:30:35]  You know, you hear these liberals talking about Red Brown Alliance.
[00:30:40]  Red Brown then, Red Brown bashing or Red Brown shaming or whatever was used to allow Yeltsin to bomb his parliament, burn it to the ground.
[00:30:50]  I mean, it's the first time a parliament had been set on fire since the Reichstag fire in 1933.
[00:30:56]  But we fully backed it and literally like two days after he set his parliament on fire and then and imposed Kamandansky Chos.
[00:31:06]  I don't even know why I'm forgetting this.
[00:31:08]  Martial law and all this kind of shit.
[00:31:10]  I mean, I was there and, you know, curfews and martial law in Moscow.
[00:31:13]  So you've been under curfew before.
[00:31:15]  Yeah.
[00:31:16]  And at that time, so the bombing happened and then I immediately moved more towards the outskirts, actually towards where, but I was walking around that day.
[00:31:25]  I was stupid, you know?
[00:31:27]  I mean, how old are you today?
[00:31:29]  How old are you, Brace?
[00:31:30]  I'm 30.
[00:31:31]  Okay, so you're just getting out of it because I would say any 20-something male, okay, not any, I'm flattering myself, me 20-something male was an incredibly stupid fake person.
[00:31:42]  I can't say I've gotten less stupid, but yes.
[00:31:47]  I mean, I was walking around in the middle of the gun battle.
[00:31:52]  I don't know how I didn't, something bad didn't happen there.
[00:31:55]  I just got lucky.
[00:31:55]  Some did and some didn't.
[00:31:57]  And I mean, I was watching the tanks bomb, and then I'd walk around the back, and then I was like literally standing next to some Russian Amonci or paramilitary guys like firing a gun.
[00:32:09]  And I was like, oh, wow, cool looking.
[00:32:11]  I mean, there were crowds of people like birds flocking around watching.
[00:32:15]  And I was with the birds.
[00:32:16]  And I, it, it, and I remember thinking at the time, like, oh, if I die today, this will be cool.
[00:32:22]  And I got that exact thought.
[00:32:25]  You know what I mean?
[00:32:26]  Yeah.
[00:32:27]  And it's a really, I don't know if this happened to you.
[00:32:29]  Well, you actually went to war.
[00:32:31]  So, but I'm not sure.
[00:32:34]  Okay, yeah, I'm sure.
[00:32:36]  I mean, but like, it was sometime afterwards, I thought about it, what the fuck was I thinking?
[00:32:44]  I mean, but I, because I really meant it.
[00:32:47]  And, you know, it just, it kind of scared me.
[00:32:52]  It freaked me out.
[00:32:52]  Like, cause I knew I really meant it.
[00:32:54]  And I just happened to get lucky.
[00:32:56]  There was a guy who was shot and killed.
[00:32:57]  Like in the, there's Armin Hammer, you know, was that industrialist who did a lot of business with the early Soviets.
[00:33:05]  The grandfather or father of Army Hammer.
[00:33:07]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:33:08]  So, and they have a building there also right next to the White House called the World Trade Center.
[00:33:16]  It's called the World Trade Center.
[00:33:17]  And I was hanging out there too for a while.
[00:33:19]  I know.
[00:33:20]  Wait, did it get bombed?
[00:33:22]  Well, it didn't.
[00:33:23]  No.
[00:33:25]  But and then right when I left, like two people were shot and one was paralyzed, one was killed there.
[00:33:31]  And just it just weirded me out, but it wasn't the first, it wasn't the last time.
[00:33:37]  You know, you just, I don't know, you just do stupid things.
[00:33:42]  Well, it's like Russia at that time was a country that was being looted pretty openly.
[00:33:48]  Oh, yeah.
[00:33:49]  Like, I mean, I think it's one of the most, one of the more famous instances of sort of mass looting of a country's properties and assets being looted.
[00:33:59]  But, you know, there are some, I'm not going to say perfect allegories to what's going on now.
[00:34:05]  But, you know, there's curfew.
[00:34:07]  You see a ton of just out in the open graft.
[00:34:10]  It's, it's, I don't really even know where I'm going with this.
[00:34:14]  No, I know where you're going.
[00:34:15]  I mean, because there's no, it's, it's not right to say the U.S. or really any country has always been and always will be this flat.
[00:34:25]  Like, it's always exactly this way.

=== Mass Looting Allegories (15:07) ===

[00:34:27]  There's no doubt, as far as I can tell, that it's worse now, certainly anytime in my lifetime.
[00:34:33]  I mean, the open corruption, it's corruption.
[00:34:37]  For some reason, we can't use that word corruption about us because it only applies to slaps.
[00:34:45]  Yeah.
[00:34:47]  But it's corruption on a scale, actually, that kind of does put them to shame.
[00:34:51]  I mean, and the corruption in Russia was with our backing completely and our advice and so on and our participation.
[00:35:01]  It was, for that time, it was off the scale.
[00:35:04]  It was just a lot more open.
[00:35:05]  I mean, I learned a lot about America by being there at that time because the layers had been kind of stripped, the layers of bullshit about what goes on in society were stripped off by all of the traumatic things that Russians went through from, let's say, the 1990 through the end of the 90s.
[00:35:26]  And so you saw, I mean, that's why, you know, to brag, but I'll brag, but that's why Yash and I were, it was so obvious to us in February of 2009 when that Tea Party, the very first Tea Party protest, it was a smaller one.
[00:35:40]  And we just looked at it and I was supposed to write something for Playboy and they're like, well, this just looks like a whole bunch of oligarch Astroturf events in Russia.
[00:35:48]  Like this is a fake protest.
[00:35:51]  I mean, that one wound up exploding, but when we wrote about it as a billionaire Astroturf thing, we were mocked widely as conspiracy theorists.
[00:35:59]  I mean, now everyone is onto it, but we just saw it happen all the time in Russia.
[00:36:03]  It was easier for us to see it.
[00:36:04]  And I think people, it first took a while for Americans to kind of, I think for good liberal Americans to kind of accept the possibility that a lot of what went on was just manipulation by rich people.
[00:36:21]  You know, just a bunch of theater and manipulation by rich people.
[00:36:24]  It just, it was hard for them to accept that for a while.
[00:36:27]  Now people accept it, but only think the other guys do it, not them.
[00:36:31]  Yeah, that's the thing.
[00:36:33]  It's like, I don't even know, like when you say like, we can't say corruption out loud, it's like we can't even say like what's going on out loud.
[00:36:40]  It's like people won't say that, you know, a ton of members of Congress were just caught selling stocks right before this massive sell-off in the market because of the pandemic.
[00:36:53]  Then they go out of session.
[00:36:55]  Then you've got one of the biggest cash grabs in American history.
[00:36:59]  I think the biggest, with now the most powerful Treasury Secretary in American history just picking and choosing who he gives money to and what companies get what.
[00:37:09]  I mean, you have massive consolidation.
[00:37:12]  Like, you know, we were talking about the media and all this problem with the media.
[00:37:16]  It's like, you know, this is a big problem in Russia too.
[00:37:18]  It's like after Yeltsin, it was just, you know, a bunch of oligarchs coming in, consolidating media.
[00:37:23]  You have no journalists left.
[00:37:25]  Absolutely.
[00:37:26]  And you're seeing that same kind of, you know, you never let a crisis go to waste, even if you're manufacturing part of it, right?
[00:37:34]  And you see these massive companies and these oligarchs, and we should be able to call Americans oligarchs.
[00:37:38]  It's so insane that we can't use this vocabulary.
[00:37:42]  Just coming in and getting what they can, you know, until the dust settles, it feels like.
[00:37:50]  I mean, what's weird is the 2008 bailout seems so much more, so much less corrupt now by comparison.
[00:37:58]  That's when you know things are really fucked up.
[00:38:00]  I know.
[00:38:01]  Like the 2008 bailout, there was some talk and there was some pushback and there was this time just everybody's just sitting in their homes.
[00:38:10]  Everyone's frozen.
[00:38:12]  Frozen, yeah.
[00:38:14]  And as you said, like the whole thing is just, it's completely fucked up.
[00:38:19]  I mean, I remember that night when it came out that some of these senators had banked a bunch of money, basically publicly saying everything is fine with COVID-19.
[00:38:28]  They got these intelligence reports.
[00:38:30]  And I mean, it's so naked.
[00:38:33]  And if this happened in Russia, it would be front page news, right?
[00:38:35]  Or if it happened in China, some equivalent.
[00:38:38]  They don't have the system that would be equivalent enough, but it would be front page news as proof that our enemies are bad and we should be grateful for the leadership and the system we have.
[00:38:48]  But it happened here and everyone's like, oh, this is really going to result in something.
[00:38:51]  I'm just like, no, it won't.
[00:38:52]  It never.
[00:38:53]  That's a thing.
[00:38:54]  It doesn't.
[00:38:54]  It never does.
[00:38:55]  It doesn't.
[00:38:56]  It's also kind of new.
[00:38:58]  I mean, you know, even thinking about it.
[00:38:59]  It does feel new.
[00:39:01]  It is.
[00:39:03]  Even in the first Bush term, W. Bush, I mean, even that dipshit, first term, some Enron guys went to jail.
[00:39:11]  Some WorldCom guys, you know, who were even his own major sponsors.
[00:39:17]  WorldCom guy went to, it's like CEOs went to jail and he fixed it.
[00:39:21]  I mean, they got rid of that first SEC, DOJ.
[00:39:26]  They got rid of these people and put in people to make sure no one went to jail anymore.
[00:39:30]  And they didn't go to jail.
[00:39:31]  They just got bailouts.
[00:39:33]  But it's kind of weird to think that there was more accountability.
[00:39:37]  The last time we had any kind of corporate accountability was George W. Bush.
[00:39:44]  It's terrifying.
[00:39:45]  It is really terrifying.
[00:39:46]  It seems like we've crossed some Rubicon.
[00:39:48]  And obviously, like, you know, you know, this country is started for and run by in the interests of the rich since it began.
[00:39:57]  But like, it just seems like now it's almost like there's just no hope of doing anything about it.
[00:40:01]  Like there's this sort of nihilism when we talk about these things.
[00:40:04]  Like, of course, Kelly Loeffler is not going to get in trouble.
[00:40:06]  Maybe she won't get re-elected, but like she's, I mean, she's not going to get any trouble in any meaningful sense.
[00:40:14]  And like, you know, whoever can pardon whoever, like, it doesn't matter.
[00:40:17]  Like, I mean, and again, every president does that.
[00:40:19]  Like, it just doesn't matter.
[00:40:21]  There's no way for anyone to get into any trouble.
[00:40:24]  And that's, I think, what sort of like drives so many people so crazy is because they see all these just like very nakedly corrupt things happen while they're being lied to very openly.
[00:40:34]  And then that, those sort of lies disappear and are replaced with other lies.
[00:40:38]  And I think it just like, I mean, the American brain, I don't want to be somebody who's talking about particular nations' brains or anything like that, you know?
[00:40:46]  I will say, I think the American brain is specifically psychotic because of these things.
[00:40:54]  Psychos.
[00:40:55]  I agree.
[00:40:56]  I mean, it's crazy, scary, dumb psychos.
[00:40:59]  I don't know.
[00:40:59]  I mean, what else can you say?
[00:41:01]  It's, I think you can talk bad about your own family, you know?
[00:41:06]  That's a nice way to put it.
[00:41:08]  That's a better way to put it, I guess.
[00:41:11]  But no, it's a bad time.
[00:41:15]  I mean, getting back to Russia, you know, I mean, look, one thing, if you watched Russia in the 90s, I mean, I remember we, so we had most of the people who wrote for us were pretty like wildly dissident in one way or another, Russian or American.
[00:41:35]  And one guy we had writing for us, Matthew Malley, he was like a Soviet émigré to America, taught at Smith College, whatever, and was like a real true believer liberal.
[00:41:45]  Went back with the USAID programs because there were a lot of USAID programs in Russia.
[00:41:50]  Russia was a mission in the 90s.
[00:41:53]  And the mission was to Americanize Russia.
[00:41:59]  And this is real.
[00:42:00]  I mean, I know there's a lot of cynicism to it, and there is, because underneath it all, there was a lot of looting and plundering and a very deliberate attempt to weaken the country and so on.
[00:42:11]  But there was also a genuine Victorian Protestant, whatever, you know, mission to Americanize the place.
[00:42:19]  And Matthew went with that as a believer, as somebody who was anti-Soviet.
[00:42:26]  And he started having like a series of disillusioning, very deeply disillusioning experiences there.
[00:42:34]  And then he started writing about his disillusionment with the liberals, which would be, I think, in our spectrum, I mean, Russian liberals are something more like, well, they're neoliberals, right?
[00:42:45]  But they're more kind of openly right-wing about some social thing.
[00:42:50]  More like libertarian, I guess, like more openly Islamophobic and anti-immigrant and some of the like anti-politically correct, what we call politically correct things, but liberal socially about, I don't know, weed or, you know, sexual, some other sexual.
[00:43:07]  Broads working.
[00:43:08]  Yeah.
[00:43:09]  But anyway, one of the things that just kind of disillusioned him most deeply, I think, was the fact that under Yeltsin, under sort of neoliberal rule, as he said, there was no accountability at all anymore.
[00:43:25]  And he said, you know, in the Soviet days, there was accountability.
[00:43:29]  In fact, everyone was always scared of being wrong or being aware of the people.
[00:43:33]  Famously, there was accountability.
[00:43:35]  Famously, yes.
[00:43:36]  I mean, that's the Stalin time.
[00:43:38]  But I mean, even in kind of the Brezhnev and post-Brezhnev period, you know, you had like you had Zach, you had people who were responsible for each apartment block and making sure that, you know, the bills were paid, but also that the hot water ran.
[00:43:54]  And if they did something wrong, then you can tell on their superior and so on.
[00:43:58]  Like there were always people who were accountable.
[00:44:01]  And there was just, it was out the door completely.
[00:44:05]  And that was a great thing if you were a male 22-year-old protagonist in a sci-fi novel.
[00:44:17]  And those guys became oligarchs or they died.
[00:44:20]  But some of them made out well.
[00:44:22]  And, you know, but the lack of accountability is something I think that is very similar.
[00:44:29]  You know, the first thing I saw after I got kicked out of Russia was the bank bailout.
[00:44:33]  And it was so, I mean, the 2008 bailout.
[00:44:35]  And it was like, it was the most nakedly corrupt thing, most nakedly oligarchical thing I'd seen since the Yeltsin years.
[00:44:44]  It just blew my mind.
[00:44:47]  And no one was held accountable for it.
[00:44:50]  I mean, that's, and that's, it is a fairly new thing.
[00:44:52]  And I think, you know, what elites realize there and what they realize in this country is, wait a minute, if we are a class and we're in the, you know, we sort of like control the good spots in the media, which sort of controls opinion to a certain degree, to a large degree.
[00:45:12]  And we're in the political class and we're in the sort of, you know, in the business and banking class and we fuck up, who says we have to be accountable?
[00:45:21]  Why?
[00:45:22]  Why not just fuck up and stay there?
[00:45:25]  Why not be wrong about Iraq war and still keep my job?
[00:45:28]  Like, why should I give it up to somebody who was right?
[00:45:31]  Why should we actually punish the guy who was right?
[00:45:33]  Like, what law of nature says so?
[00:45:35]  I mean, and this is a very Yeltsin Russia 90s level of nihilism that is happening here.
[00:45:42]  But one thing I would say that's very, that is different, like if you think about, if you think about America in terms of, well, is America on its way to collapsing?
[00:45:51]  I mean, I mean, I don't want to get that crazy.
[00:45:54]  No, no, no.
[00:45:55]  I don't think it's like Soviet Union.
[00:45:58]  I think people almost like pray for that, which also speaks to the nihilism.
[00:46:02]  It's like they don't even realize that they're taking, that they're like feeding into that.
[00:46:06]  It's the same strain of nihilism, right?
[00:46:08]  Because it's kind of like a one river with lots of tributaries, maybe.
[00:46:13]  Totally.
[00:46:13]  I can't really blame anyone for being like elated at the prospect.
[00:46:17]  Even if it's like in a weird dark way.
[00:46:19]  No, I know.
[00:46:20]  I don't mean that, but I just mean like, I think it's like a false, like yeah.
[00:46:26]  I mean, I think, first of all, I think these, you know, things can go on a lot longer than you think they can.
[00:46:33]  And things can always get a lot worse than you think they can.
[00:46:36]  Worse the worser.
[00:46:37]  Yeah.
[00:46:40]  But yeah, I do think that it kind of like stems from the same place or the same like kind of like dark, like no rules, something will happen.
[00:46:51]  Or maybe it's even a hope that there'll just be like some quick fix, like, and then we will all stop feeling so crazy.
[00:46:58]  Yeah.
[00:46:59]  You know?
[00:47:00]  I think part of that is like, I think people see sort of like the way our society is structured.
[00:47:04]  And like you were saying how in the 90s people took neoliberalism as like a force of nature, as just a given.
[00:47:10]  I think a lot of people just see the way like things are structured.
[00:47:12]  Now, of course, of course, no one gets in trouble.
[00:47:15]  Like, I mean, I'm 30 years old and my whole life, I can't name one guy who's like, the most guy who's gotten in trouble was Bill Clinton when he got his dick sucked.
[00:47:23]  Like nobody else gets in trouble.
[00:47:27]  And it's, which by the way, he should have gotten a lot worse trouble for different reasons.
[00:47:33]  But I mean, it's like, it's almost like, I think in a lot of people's minds, it takes like a force of nature to displace this force of nature, right?
[00:47:40]  So like the only thing that could really affect things like, oh, Bernie can't, whatever, these social movements can't, which, you know, they ended up being correct on that.
[00:47:48]  The only thing that can affect it is just like another insane force of nature that like we have no control on.
[00:47:54]  Like something else that we can't affect, which is corona.
[00:47:57]  And I, again, like you guys are saying, I think that's incorrect.
[00:48:00]  I think we might, you know, fingers crossed, we might be seeing the beginning of some sort of collapse, but I, it's, that wouldn't be for decades, I don't think.
[00:48:09]  I think you don't know.
[00:48:11]  I think the thing that I like would, I, I totally get that impulse and I like definitely go to those places for sure.
[00:48:19]  But I think it's like so dangerous to hope.
[00:48:21]  I guess, and we've talked about this on the podcast before, like it's so dangerous to hope that something you don't have control over will somehow do the work for you or something.
[00:48:32]  Do you know what I mean?
[00:48:33]  Because it's like giving up total control of the situation or not control, but even like participation in what that future might look like, which, I mean, that is nihilism in a way, right?
[00:48:46]  It's just like completely ceding any role in any of that.
[00:48:52]  And, you know, then it's like, well, it'll just be, you know, it'll, maybe it'll be a collapse, but it'll be Bezos's, you know, management collapse for the next like 30 years or whatever it is.
[00:49:03]  You've lived through a collapse before, or like you've witnessed part of a collapse before.
[00:49:08]  I mean, there was, I've heard some, you know, dark things about what happened in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.
[00:49:14]  So, I mean, what you're saying, from what I understand, it was pretty bad basically up until the early 2000s.
[00:49:20]  Yeah.
[00:49:21]  I mean, you know, people wonder why Putin is, you know, generally, because it really was awful until he came to power.
[00:49:28]  And you talk about people giving up all hope and hoping for some force to come in and fix it.

=== Shock Therapy Savings (15:59) ===

[00:49:35]  I mean, that was, that was Putin.
[00:49:37]  Now, you know, Russia didn't have a long, I mean, it's a very different culture, very, very different culture.
[00:49:43]  And it's hard to grasp that.
[00:49:45]  I've only been to Ukraine, but it's, you know, I feel like they somewhat related.
[00:49:49]  They're very close, even though, you know, it's weird.
[00:49:52]  They were killing each other, but they're very, very similar from my experience in Ukraine.
[00:49:57]  Yeah.
[00:49:58]  But Russia is, Russia is even more, you know, different in a lot of ways.
[00:50:02]  And I mean, you brought this up earlier too, but about the media, the media was, well, the media in Russia, like when I very first got there, was insanely free.
[00:50:13]  It really was.
[00:50:14]  They had the whole spectrum laid out in front of you.
[00:50:18]  And even TV was pretty free.
[00:50:19]  I mean, there was a real, it was an oligarch, a future oligarch and a really cynical bastard, Vladimir Gusinski, who owned a TV channel called Entive, Independent Television Network, but was very critical of Yeltsin and stuff.
[00:50:38]  And then he bombed his white, he bombed his parliament and shut down all the opposition newspapers.
[00:50:43]  And then they got going again, and they were still wild and free and muckraking.
[00:50:48]  And then Yeltsin did the big privatization move starting in a big way in 96 and then, yeah, 95, 96.
[00:50:56]  And they took over all the big newspapers, which still were very important.
[00:50:59]  And like news would be made by muckraking newspaper writers and then go to TV or not to TV from there and have an effect.
[00:51:08]  And when the oligarchs bought them out, they got turned largely into organs for oligarch interests.
[00:51:15]  And people got sick of that really fast because their lives kept getting worse and worse.
[00:51:20]  I mean, you know, the average Russian male life expectancy dropped from like 68 years to 56 years.
[00:51:28]  The Soviet economy, I think, was the third largest in the world towards the end.
[00:51:32]  And Russia's economy at the end of the 90s was smaller than Peru's, I think.
[00:51:36]  I mean, it was close to a third of the country was living on subsistence farming to supplement their diet by the end of the 90s.
[00:51:46]  You had, you know, a million homeless children.
[00:51:50]  I mean, you could just go through every mark of the six deaths.
[00:51:54]  Like, 86% of the wealth was just literally only in Moscow.
[00:52:00]  So in that way, it's kind of like London.
[00:52:02]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:52:05]  No, it was an appalling disaster, and people were very ashamed.
[00:52:11]  Russians are very ashamed of being Russian.
[00:52:13]  You saw that a lot back then.
[00:52:15]  You know, you get the nationalism is always kind of a flip side of that.
[00:52:20]  And, you know, maybe you'll see that here.
[00:52:22]  I'm not sure.
[00:52:25]  But one big difference in the collapse, and I think this is kind of instructive for people who are hoping it might just happen.
[00:52:33]  I mean, it's always been kind of a mystery in a sense, hasn't it?
[00:52:36]  Like, why did the Soviet Union collapse?
[00:52:39]  Okay, we want to believe, well, because they all want to become Americans, you know, and the people rose up.
[00:52:44]  I mean, Yeltsin's big rally against the putsch.
[00:52:47]  The putsch was not popular at all, but there were something like 10,000 people on the street.
[00:52:51]  It was a small rally by perestroika era, and there was a lot of activism in the perestroika era.
[00:52:58]  By that time, people were getting disillusioned by everything.
[00:53:01]  Plus, it was August, so a lot of people were on vacation.
[00:53:04]  It wasn't a big people's uprising.
[00:53:06]  In fact, you know, when the uprising succeeded and the coup started falling apart, this is in 1991, and the Soviet Union then was officially falling apart.
[00:53:16]  I don't know if you remember the first big statue pull down of the Soviet Union was when they pulled down Dzerzhinsky's statue.
[00:53:24]  Djerzinski was right there, the founder of the Cheka and Lubyan.
[00:53:27]  Iron Felix.
[00:53:28]  Yeah, you know who pulled it down?
[00:53:29]  I learned this from Paul Klebnikov's book.
[00:53:31]  He was the Forbes journalist who was assassinated in the mid-2000s.
[00:53:37]  I didn't even know this because it's so little publicized in the West.
[00:53:42]  And then I looked for some backup, and he's right.
[00:53:44]  But it was members of the organization Pomyet.
[00:53:48]  I don't know if you know Pomyet.
[00:53:49]  Pomyet was like the first big fascist organization.
[00:53:53]  They were all black and just railed against Jews.
[00:53:57]  And they were extremely anti-communist and they were basically invented by the KGB, the directorate of the KGB, led by Felix Bolbkov, who became the head of security for this oligarch I just told you about, who headed the independent television station, Vladimir Gusinski.
[00:54:15]  I'm sorry to say this, but Gusinski also was the head of the World Jewish Federation.
[00:54:20]  And all these guys, they were just so profoundly cynical.
[00:54:25]  Jewish and anti-Semitism meant nothing to them.
[00:54:28]  They were just chess pieces to play and they would light up one, you'd heat up one and cool off another, heat up the other, cool off one.
[00:54:37]  Just as to the KGB is what it meant to an oligarch, nothing, you know, at that time.
[00:54:42]  And yeah, so the famous statue pulled down was by actual Nazis.
[00:54:48]  And this is what we celebrate.
[00:54:50]  Nazis backed by the KGB.
[00:54:53]  And yeah, isn't that incredible?
[00:54:56]  But my point is that the Soviet Union would not have fallen apart if because in March of 91 of that same year, six months earlier, there was a vote.
[00:55:10]  Gorbachev held a vote across the whole Soviet Union.
[00:55:12]  Do you want to keep the Soviet Union together or not?
[00:55:15]  I think only Georgia and maybe one or two of the Baltics wanted out.
[00:55:19]  But overall, the vote was something like 73%.
[00:55:22]  It was a very, it was way more free and fair than any elections we have or any elections Yeltsin had.
[00:55:27]  I mean, everybody, if you even look back, you know, how it was reported at the time, everybody agreed.
[00:55:32]  In Ukraine, it was 90%.
[00:55:33]  Keep the Soviet Union together.
[00:55:35]  They wanted to keep it together.
[00:55:36]  People were already getting sick of things falling apart.
[00:55:41]  It was a Soviet elite.
[00:55:44]  The nomenklatura, they were really a very kind of decadent, elite, Materially relatively well-off class that knew that their country was rich and that they could and should be as well-off as Western counterparts because, especially under Perestroika, they're allowed to go visit and see and they're ashamed ashamed of their clothes, ashamed of the way they looked, ashamed of their cars, and they did.
[00:56:10]  They still to this day, liberals fucking hate communism, the Soviet Union, because it shames them how shameful the uh, the cars were and the clothes were and stuff like that.
[00:56:23]  I mean it's really kind of that gross.
[00:56:24]  Yeah, it's like embarrassing to them yeah, but it's like Gorbachev in the supermarket in Texas just having like a mental breakdown and um and so, and these guys were right, I mean if they, you know so they wrote on the back of a lot of popular let's, it was much more democratic, social.
[00:56:45]  I mean the, the democratic movements, the opposition movements, were very kind of Northern European socialist.
[00:56:53]  I mean, if you were to ask the ideal, in fact they did poll.
[00:56:55]  It were very socialist.
[00:56:56]  They were never like, we want shock therapy, we want shock therapy.
[00:57:00]  There's never anything.
[00:57:01]  It's not the nicest sounding term, you know.
[00:57:06]  Yeah, I want to like.
[00:57:07]  I feel like um, Americans are woefully uneducated about actual American involvement, not just in shock therapy.
[00:57:15]  But you brought up Yeltsin's like 96 election and what happened between basically like 96 and through to the economic crisis, like I don't think Americans really understand how involved like literally, like hands-on, we were in like the you know those years in Russia and like really I mean the whole decade, but really those years I mean it was like I, I I feel like from my understanding,
[00:57:41]  is that it it was basically like Harvard running economics programs like restructuring the entire political economy of Russia.
[00:57:49]  Well, real quick.
[00:57:50]  For those who don't know what shock, what do you want to give them a little brief explanation of what shock yeah, I can kind of give, I try to give even sort of the the, the dark politics of shock therapy in a sense too.
[00:58:02]  But so, you know, the Soviet Union collapsed and then Yeltsin had a chance to do something.
[00:58:07]  And I think Yeltsin saw as a kind of thick-headed but ambitious provincial Communist Party boss, for lack of a better word, who really hated his old Communist Party bosses, that these young English-speaking Friedrich Hayek-reading economists who had counterparts in Harvard, and, and the next panel of the company of the United States was classified as one of the fesssidis and broadcasted Americans.
[00:58:32]  were proposing something.
[00:58:34]  I mean, to the Russians, you know, to their defense or to whatever they, they, they saw the angles on these things.
[00:58:41]  They weren't just like, oh, wow, this is the future.
[00:58:44]  It was like, what's the angle on this?
[00:58:46]  The angle is, I can destroy, like da, I can create society in this way and my block will win out, my demographic will win out in when, in the new order.
[00:58:59]  So if you want to destroy your enemies, who are?
[00:59:04]  And you know, Soviet life was very people deeply believed in it.
[00:59:09]  You know the average person deeply believed in it and liked it.
[00:59:13]  It was the elites again who hated it.
[00:59:15]  It was still pretty popular, the ideas of it, right up to the end.
[00:59:20]  And the new order was not popular at all.
[00:59:23]  It wasn't except among English-speaking elites who spoke to the NEW YORK Times and the Washington POST and gave us our idea of what Russian, what Russians wanted.
[00:59:34]  But so shock therapy was Yeltsin was given.
[00:59:39]  So the the coup.
[00:59:42]  The Soviet officers tried to overthrow Gorbachev in August of 1991 and restore the Soviet Union.
[00:59:49]  They were, they were total bumpkins who tried it total, failed almost immediately, like immediately started drinking themselves under the table when he shot himself in the head, like they were.
[01:00:01]  Yeah, it reminds one a lot of the Gulenist coup where it's just like you guys have one jet.
[01:00:08]  Yeah, I know there are, there are theories, because these guys were such bumbling idiots that they could have been, of course.
[01:00:14]  Yeah, there is a lot of that by a lot of people um, and it fell apart.
[01:00:19]  And so the parliament the one that Yeltsin wound up bombing two years later because, as all the US press said, these are fascist communist, red brown that parliament, which is the parliament that named Yeltsin as president through their system, then voted to give him emergency economic powers for a year, from the end of 91 to the end of 92, and he could rule by, dictate like a dictator, because it was an emergency period.
[01:00:48]  And he put together this team with Jeffrey Sachs who's weirdly become good lately and he won't fucking fess up to what he did in Russia.
[01:00:59]  He blames everyone but himself.
[01:01:02]  And Sachs got together with these English-speaking elite economists and they devised shock therapy, which is basically so.
[01:01:09]  Russia had this Situation actually under Gorbachev, towards the end, Gorbachev actually raised wages a lot, but people couldn't buy much.
[01:01:21]  There was, for a variety of reasons, both systemic and also crime and so on.
[01:01:27]  There weren't a lot of goods.
[01:01:28]  So people had pretty large savings.
[01:01:31]  People forget this.
[01:01:33]  And these were savings that were kind of collected over a couple of generations in the banks.
[01:01:38]  And there were a couple of ways you could deal with that.
[01:01:42]  One, and even within the liberal world, there were a couple of ways you can deal with it.
[01:01:46]  And there was this plan by this one guy, Javlinski, who's still kind of around, which was, well, we'll privatize apartments and small businesses first.
[01:01:56]  And that way we'll kind of soak up all these excess rubles that are there that are kind of an overhang.
[01:02:01]  Something has to be done about it.
[01:02:04]  And that way then everybody kind of becomes a small capitalist with a stake in a different order.
[01:02:10]  And it's going to be kind of social democratic, mixed market, mixed socialist, right?
[01:02:15]  And Gorbachev, that's the one Gorbachev wanted to do in 90 and 91, but he needed IMF funding.
[01:02:21]  He needed the U.S. and IMF to back him and they refused.
[01:02:25]  And I never, I kept hearing this from people in the international community for years afterwards how angry they were that the U.S. set up the Soviets to fail, to fall, because that could have worked, but we obviously didn't want that.
[01:02:38]  We didn't want it to work.
[01:02:39]  No, we had to get in there.
[01:02:41]  Yes, exactly.
[01:02:44]  And what Guidar with Jeffrey Sachs and Andre Schleifer, who was later indicted by the Department of Justice, and Larry Summers' protégé, and these guys did is they said, We love Larry here on True is you just actually free all the prices so that because all the prices were artificially kept down and you let you let not on commodities,
[01:03:10]  mind you, and I'll explain that in a second, but on consumer goods, bread, milk, all this other eggs, everything.
[01:03:17]  Let prices free up and let the market set the prices.
[01:03:21]  And, you know, Yeltsin promised they'd only double at most and everything would be stable within a couple months.
[01:03:28]  But what it really did, what the purpose of it was, was to wipe out everyone's savings, except for people very connected and in the know.
[01:03:38]  People didn't know it and didn't expect it.
[01:03:40]  And so all of their savings were wiped out and you didn't have the ruble overhang.
[01:03:45]  And politically, what you did is you disempowered an entire people and made them scared.
[01:03:52]  You know, think about the bailout now, right?
[01:03:54]  You're all scared and you just had a massive transfer again from to the super wealthy, which is a transfer of power and wealth.
[01:04:05]  There it was sort of up for grabs who's going to be powerful.
[01:04:07]  So you really needed to like steal tons and give it to a couple people.
[01:04:12]  And what they didn't actually free prices on like fertilizer, export goods, fertilizers and oil and all these different things.
[01:04:25]  And then the new Yeltsin regime decided who could have an export license.
[01:04:31]  And that's how you started creating the first oligarchs.
[01:04:34]  And so then you get to buy gas.
[01:04:39]  Well, I realize gas oil is now negative $40 to a barrel, but back then, you know, it wasn't quite so cheap.
[01:04:46]  But, you know, whatever, you'd sell it to, you had a license to buy it from the government oil company at, let's say, a dollar a barrel.
[01:04:56]  And then you'd sell it to your offshore company.
[01:04:59]  And then that offshore company would then sell it to somebody overseas for 20 bucks a barrel.
[01:05:04]  And you just keep the profits.
[01:05:06]  And then you plow some of that back into the people you have to bribe.
[01:05:09]  And then, you know, and setting up your power base and so on.
[01:05:12]  And that's how it worked.
[01:05:13]  So everybody became poor except a few well-connected people.
[01:05:17]  And that's totally dissimilar to kind of just the general play.
[01:05:23]  I mean, that was like, I mean, they were basically using Russia as a test case for ideas they had just come up with, how quickly you could transfer someone into a free market, right?

=== Yeltsin Family Scandals (15:52) ===

[01:05:35]  But, you know, you do see that kind of consolidation.
[01:05:38]  Like you said, the consolidation coupled with the shock of everyone, like in 2008, losing your house, losing your pension, losing your savings.
[01:05:49]  Or right now, what's happening?
[01:05:50]  A lot of people just lost their pensions.
[01:05:52]  A lot of people lost their savings.
[01:05:54]  Lost their health care.
[01:05:55]  Their jobs.
[01:05:57]  Everything.
[01:05:58]  And, you know, it, I mean, that's the, the, yeah, the, you know, I guess that's Naomi Klein's like shock doctrine.
[01:06:04]  But I mean, it really is true.
[01:06:05]  It's like it impoverishes the people while making a massive transfer into the hands of very few who then dole it out to, like you say, the people that then they'll have to owe you and you get this new little system set up.
[01:06:19]  And the media the whole time just cheered it on.
[01:06:23]  And, you know, a kind of a side story that, because I went back about a year ago and started a couple of years ago, started looking through my old notes and going back through books, sort of the mainstream books.
[01:06:35]  There weren't a lot at that time, but there were some.
[01:06:39]  You know, and just some stories that kind of I missed at the time, like really stuck out rereading it.
[01:06:45]  Like I was reading Klebnikov's book, Christy Freeland, who was a reporter for the Financial Times, who is now the Nazi granddaughter, Deputy Prime Minister of Canada.
[01:06:57]  I just got some more info from our Canadian sources who discovered that.
[01:07:01]  It's fucking nuts.
[01:07:03]  I know.
[01:07:04]  And there's this one episode.
[01:07:06]  So there's this guy, Boris Jordan.
[01:07:11]  So Klebnikov also, Boris Jordan came from one of these white Russian families.
[01:07:15]  He was a white Russian immigrant.
[01:07:17]  And a lot of these guys kind of came back.
[01:07:19]  They were very anti-communist, happy when it fell, very pro-kind of Yeltsin.
[01:07:23]  But then they kind of thought Yeltsin was too Jewish, you know, and they wound up becoming more pro-Putin at some point or whatever.
[01:07:31]  Anyway, Boris Jordan was like out of NYU, 25, 26 years old, but spoke great Russian.
[01:07:39]  So he was hired by Credit Suisse versus Boston to, and the head of Credit Suisse vs. Boston, kind of German or Swiss guy who I think had probably done some work with corrupt KGB guys in like the very late 80s or early 90s, kind of understood that there was going to be privatization.
[01:07:57]  Things were going to go well.
[01:08:00]  Yeltsin, I told you he had emergency powers, economic powers for one year.
[01:08:04]  So about a couple weeks before those powers ran up, this would be in November of 92, with the help of Credit Suisse vs. Boston, Boris Jordan and some others pushed through the first privatization plan, which was to privatize, because everything was owned by the state, to privatize industry.
[01:08:27]  And it was this voucher program.
[01:08:29]  It was another bait and switch program, which was like, well, everybody gets a voucher that's worth 10 bucks or something.
[01:08:36]  And really, they were all made worthless very quickly.
[01:08:40]  And it was just a way to provide cover for insiders to steal their own companies.
[01:08:45]  And Yeltsin made sure this was pushed through with some American USAID and CSFB's help just before Parliament reconvened.
[01:08:53]  When Parliament reconvened, they said, this has to stop.
[01:08:56]  And that's when Yeltsin said, no, this is going to go on.
[01:08:59]  And I want more emergency powers.
[01:09:01]  And they said, no.
[01:09:02]  And then Yeltsin said, well, I'm going to bomb you and burn you to the ground.
[01:09:06]  And then the American press said, yes, bomb him, burn them to the ground because they're fucking awesome.
[01:09:10]  Yeltsin's democracy.
[01:09:12]  Yes, exactly.
[01:09:13]  But anyway, it was a complete nightmare.
[01:09:19]  And yeah, Americans were involved in it the whole way.
[01:09:23]  I mean, it wasn't just that Americans, there were American advisors running Yeltsin's presidential campaign in 96, and they were and advising him on how to co-opt the fact that he could take over the entire media.
[01:09:38]  I mean, the opposition oligarch was hired, his top guy was hired.
[01:09:44]  The opposition media oligarch Guczinski was brought into Yeltsin's camp by hiring his top man at this television station to be the top campaign manager.
[01:09:55]  And the Americans sent out memos like, wait a minute, you've got control of the entire media.
[01:10:03]  Use it.
[01:10:04]  Basically create fake news, you know, do disinformation.
[01:10:08]  Do what will be accused in 15 years of Russian disinformation.
[01:10:13]  And that's what they did.
[01:10:14]  They bombarded the Russian population with propaganda that if Yeltsin were to lose, they would all be in death camps.
[01:10:26]  And the Americans were writing memos at that time.
[01:10:29]  These are Americans who worked with Dick Morris.
[01:10:32]  had been in business with Dick Morris a long time.
[01:10:33]  That was Clinton's strategist, right?
[01:10:37]  And they were writing at the time, like, you know, we're doing these focus groups.
[01:10:40]  And it's kind of amazing.
[01:10:41]  These Russians in the focus groups, they didn't trust Soviet news because they knew the angles on it.
[01:10:48]  But they're so wowed by the technology of the news propaganda that they believe it much more than, I mean, even Americans believe their propaganda.
[01:10:58]  And so they were really excited at the possibilities of this.
[01:11:02]  But it was also, you know, loans.
[01:11:04]  I mean, loans came in.
[01:11:06]  Tens of billions of dollars of loans were handed to Yeltsin, even as he was creating this oligarchy again with U.S. advice.
[01:11:14]  And like, like, I mean, suitcases of cash, too, right?
[01:11:18]  Like, just like straight up, just cash.
[01:11:20]  To be fair, that is a fairly, I don't know, just an easy way to transport money.
[01:11:27]  No, but I would go further.
[01:11:28]  It was 747s full of cash.
[01:11:32]  I'm not joking.
[01:11:33]  This was the year that the $100 bill was changed.
[01:11:36]  And there were a lot of articles.
[01:11:39]  I mean, and I think there's a lot to it.
[01:11:41]  It's, again, Russia as a mission, as the center of even debate between Republicans and Democrats and everybody, like the transformation of Russia was the number one mission.
[01:11:54]  And Yeltsin had about a 3% popularity rating going into the 1996 election.
[01:12:00]  And the goal was not to get Yeltsin to win because that was going to happen.
[01:12:04]  Yeltsin openly said, I'm not going to give up this seat.
[01:12:09]  I'm not going to lose.
[01:12:10]  So the question is, how you deal with this to the communist opposition guy who is the perfect foil.
[01:12:15]  He's like the Washington generals to the Harlem Globe trial.
[01:12:18]  I'm like, he's born to lose.
[01:12:19]  Anti-charisma.
[01:12:21]  Yes, yes.
[01:12:21]  Anti-Suganov.
[01:12:22]  He's there to lose.
[01:12:23]  Azuganov.
[01:12:24]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:12:27]  But so, yeah, so we came out with the new $100 bill and there were reports.
[01:12:35]  And in fact, the embassy, I think Matt Taby, my former partner, did one of the follow-ups on this with a Russian reporter because there was so much evidence.
[01:12:43]  And the embassy admitted, yeah, there was a 747 that did, that was bringing cash and we would park it here in the embassy.
[01:12:50]  But we promised, swear to God, hope to die, you know, cross and stick a needle in my eye.
[01:12:54]  None of that money went to the Yeltsin people.
[01:12:56]  But what did happen was, you know, there were factions Within the Yeltsin camp, kind of wrongly called the hardliners versus the pro-Westerners, but they played up to some degree that.
[01:13:10]  So let's just call them that the hardliners versus the, I mean, it's bullshit, but let's just call them that.
[01:13:15]  And the pro-Westerners were caught by the hardliners.
[01:13:18]  Pro-Westerners were caught carrying suitcases full of cash out of the government building that Yeltsin had previously bombed.
[01:13:27]  And they caught them and arrested him because it was illegal.
[01:13:29]  You're not allowed to walk around Moscow with suitcases with half a million dollars in brand new, just shipped in $100 bills.
[01:13:37]  And so they were caught with that.
[01:13:40]  And these were the guys who were actually running the campaign for Yeltsin.
[01:13:45]  And they, with our backing, convinced Yeltsin to turn it all around and say the hardliners are trying to stage a coup.
[01:13:56]  And we have to back these guys who were caught with the suitcases.
[01:14:00]  This really happened.
[01:14:02]  And in fact, the guys who were caught with the suitcases went to the Radisson Hotel in Moscow that day and spoke English to the English-speaking reporters and told them what happened.
[01:14:11]  And the reporters clapped and cheered for them.
[01:14:13]  Jesus.
[01:14:13]  And it was really that gross.
[01:14:15]  Yeah.
[01:14:15]  And they wound up winning out.
[01:14:19]  One of them, this guy Anatoly Chubias, he later admitted when everything collapsed in 1998, he said about the Westerners.
[01:14:26]  And we genuinely means we screwed them.
[01:14:30]  We rat fucked them.
[01:14:31]  We took all their cash and we did it.
[01:14:34]  They played the Angles.
[01:14:35]  Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[01:14:37]  Yeah, Clinton couldn't lose, so he had to.
[01:14:40]  Exactly.
[01:14:41]  Like he basically had to pay everything off because he couldn't.
[01:14:44]  I mean, yeah, because that was his election year, right?
[01:14:46]  Yeah.
[01:14:46]  Yep.
[01:14:47]  That was his election year.
[01:14:48]  The corruption was starting to become an issue, but the question was, you know, he was being rightly criticized, but mostly by Republicans and then by some people who were sort of just levelheaded people like Stephen Cohen, who's later denounced as a red brown, of course, because he didn't go along with the consensus, for placing all their eggs in the Yeltsin.
[01:15:11]  It's like, you shouldn't personalize this.
[01:15:13]  You should be for Russia's future.
[01:15:15]  But actually, they were for Yeltsin because Yeltsin was the perfect leader of a large former enemy.
[01:15:21]  It's what you want.
[01:15:22]  100%.
[01:15:23]  You want somebody who's drunk, stupid, feckless, and who, you know, you just, you want somebody weak like that.
[01:15:30]  Yeah, totally.
[01:15:31]  Of course, they didn't like, they didn't like Putin.
[01:15:33]  Putin was sober.
[01:15:34]  That was his first problem from our point of view.
[01:15:37]  He didn't drink.
[01:15:38]  It's like, well, what the fuck can we do to this guy?
[01:15:40]  You know, it always seemed to me that Yeltsin was always like in a little awe of Putin after that.
[01:15:45]  Like he gets trotted out to like criticize him sometimes, but like, or he got trotted out to.
[01:15:50]  Oh, I wouldn't say he was, he might have been in awe, but it was more like, so in 90, so 98 was the collapse.
[01:15:57]  And after the collapse, you know, there were a lot of pent-up forces.
[01:16:02]  I mean, we forgot 1993 and the bombing of the parliament because, hey, you can't make an omelette, you know, as Remnik said, but a lot of Russians didn't.
[01:16:11]  And they didn't forget all the other transgressions.
[01:16:14]  And they started, Yeltsin did genuinely lose power after that crash.
[01:16:19]  He lost a lot of power and didn't know how to get that power back.
[01:16:23]  And so he had to share power with a kind of, I don't know what you'd call it.
[01:16:29]  It was somewhere between like post-Soviet establishment that wasn't in on the big corruption and partly what would become Putin's people, I guess.
[01:16:39]  And they started going after the oligarchs and they started getting really close to the Yeltsin family and like, I mean, some real big bribery scandals, just incredible stuff that used to come out in the Russian media.
[01:16:51]  Bribery scandals, offshore scandals that were all the Yeltsin family was involved in.
[01:16:56]  And Yeltsin understood he was about to go to jail and he needed something big to save his own personal ass.
[01:17:03]  He didn't care about democracy.
[01:17:05]  He didn't care about anything anymore.
[01:17:07]  Just how do I save my ass because I'm old and I might die and my daughter's ass and you know and the few people around him.
[01:17:16]  And so he finally waited until he started bombing Kosovo, pretended like he really cared about Serbia.
[01:17:24]  And then behind the scenes said, okay, look, I got a problem, which is my opposition.
[01:17:29]  I need to do some dirty shit.
[01:17:31]  You got your war going on.
[01:17:33]  I'll stop criticizing you and let you take Yugoslavia.
[01:17:37]  You just shut up and let me do what I got to do.
[01:17:39]  And that was the deal.
[01:17:40]  And so then he, so he fired the prime minister at the time, Primakov, put in this guy Stepashin, who was also an FSB KGB guy.
[01:17:49]  And then he, the Yeltsins, the Yeltsin family, the families they called it, and Berezovsky and stuff, they worked with their buddies in Chechnya to start a war.
[01:18:01]  And Stepashin, despite being, you know, no Boy Scout, did not have the stomach for it.
[01:18:09]  He really just literally didn't have, he was kind of talking himself up as a new Pinochet, but he didn't have the stomach for it.
[01:18:15]  So they fired him, brought in Putin, who proved himself by, he got rid of the prosecutor general who was starting to open up cases against the Yeltsin family and Berezovsky.
[01:18:27]  They basically, you know, Putin essentially like hid in a closet with a camera and filmed him screwing some prostitutes and then put it on the air.
[01:18:34]  A classic move.
[01:18:37]  Americans could learn something from that.
[01:18:39]  We need more of the, we need more like Anthony Wiener scandals sort of.
[01:18:43]  I know.
[01:18:44]  Well, there was the whole Jeffrey Epstein thing, but we didn't get any tapes.
[01:18:47]  We didn't get any tapes.
[01:18:49]  Yeah, they took the tapes.
[01:18:50]  Yeah, they did.
[01:18:52]  Yeah, that was too juicy.
[01:18:54]  See, that's a level, that's a brain-breaking level.
[01:18:56]  So you have to have it prostitutes, you know, in a room.
[01:18:59]  Yeah.
[01:19:00]  Kind of a big, you know, 60-year-old prosecutor's body.
[01:19:04]  It's someone sitting on your lap in a sauna.
[01:19:07]  Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[01:19:09]  And so Yeltsin, I mean, Putin proved his loyalty.
[01:19:12]  Putin was not, you know, he had the metal to do what it took.
[01:19:18]  And so, I mean, he's often blamed for the second Chechen War.
[01:19:22]  We never talk even about the First Chechen War anymore, even though that one was.
[01:19:25]  Way bloodier, killed way more people.
[01:19:28]  The first one.
[01:19:28]  But that's because we financed the entire thing, and the NEW YORK Times Compare Clinton, compared Yeltsin to Abraham Lincoln in the first Chechen war.
[01:19:36]  The second one we like to blame well, a lot of soldiers did get killed, um and um.
[01:19:44]  And the second one is blamed entirely on Putin, but it was really.
[01:19:47]  The second one was intended to protect.
[01:19:51]  You know, they say it was all about boosting Putin's ratings.
[01:19:54]  It's true, but Putin didn't have much power yet.
[01:19:56]  It was about protect.
[01:19:57]  You know, coming up with a, a way to protect the Yeltsin family.
[01:20:02]  You get a war going to make Putin popular, to kind of put a lid on everything, including opposition to, to the Yeltsin family.
[01:20:11]  And you know, the first decree that Putin signed when Yeltsin handed him the keys of the White House, was complete immunity for Boris Yeltsin and his family for life.
[01:20:20]  That was it there was.
[01:20:22]  So that's the deference.
[01:20:23]  If there is deference, that's the deference.
[01:20:25]  It's like man, you really did save me.
[01:20:28]  You really didn't go back on your deal because Yeltsin was a dick to Gorbachev.
[01:20:32]  Um, he was a vindictive prick to Gorbachev and he kind of expected at some point Putin would go back on his word and he didn't.
[01:20:41]  And now Putin's here to stay.
[01:20:43]  Yeah, Putin's here to stay.
[01:20:46]  You know, and it's funny, Putin was a protege.
[01:20:49]  I mean, his name, he was actually brought to Moscow and elevated to the head of the FSB by this guy, Anatoly Trebias.
[01:20:55]  He's a guy that had Americans cheering him.
[01:20:57]  He's the guy whose buddies were caught with the suitcase.
[01:21:01]  So Chubias was the main liaison between the Clinton administration and the Yeltsin regime.
[01:21:07]  You know, Larry Summers called him my dear friend, Anatoly Trubias.
[01:21:11]  The press loved him, like ate out of his hand.
[01:21:15]  He's the guy because Putin was from Petersburg and Tubias was from Petersburg and Tubias was a more powerful figure.
[01:21:22]  Putin was like some muscle and somebody Chubias needed.

=== Putin's Muscle Man (06:59) ===

[01:21:27]  In a system like that, you want to put in your guys.
[01:21:31]  So really, like without Clinton and without American interference, Putin would never have been the guy who was put there.
[01:21:38]  Which is so ironic considering now he's the one interfering in our elections.
[01:21:44]  Imagine that.
[01:21:46]  Yeah.
[01:21:47]  I know Trump is our Putin.
[01:21:52]  That's like, yeah, Yasha Monk.
[01:21:53]  That's what Yasha Monk says or whatever, right?
[01:21:56]  The good Yasha.
[01:21:59]  Every country has two Yashas.
[01:22:01]  One's good and one's bad.
[01:22:02]  Yasha Monk is like that, you know, you're talking about like David Remnick and all those guys from the mid-90s.
[01:22:06]  Yasha Monk is like that version now, always pronouncing something.
[01:22:11]  And then like six months later, he's like, guys, I think we need to start taking a hard look at what's happening in Hungary.
[01:22:19]  And you're like, thank you.
[01:22:21]  Thank you, Yasha Monk.
[01:22:23]  You're on it.
[01:22:24]  Yasha Monk's on it.
[01:22:25]  Problem solved.
[01:22:26]  I know.
[01:22:26]  Like, Jesus Christ.
[01:22:27]  Yeah.
[01:22:28]  These guys, I know, and talking about populism.
[01:22:31]  And I mean, it's things are just so bad.
[01:22:34]  Like they, they can't get anything right.
[01:22:37]  That's what I find kind of weird.
[01:22:39]  I mean, you know, for worse and for worse, I'm old enough to remember when they got some things right.
[01:22:44]  I mean, there was a time.
[01:22:45]  I guess what happened with journalism, at least in the mid-70s, it was, it was, I mean, I say this on Radio Warren a lot.
[01:22:52]  Like it was basically, it was like our glassnost, you know, it was our paris striker or glasnost.
[01:22:57]  And there really was, and, but, but it wound up having a kind of bad effect in a way.
[01:23:02]  I mean, first of all, it brought us Reagan eventually because Americans are crazy.
[01:23:06]  Yeah.
[01:23:06]  They didn't really like learning all that stuff and didn't want to fucking hear about it anymore.
[01:23:12]  That was kind of what happened.
[01:23:14]  But also what it did is it gave these really rotten media institutions this sort of story to tell for decades after.
[01:23:27]  We're needed for democracy because in that two years.
[01:23:31]  Pentagon papers.
[01:23:32]  Yeah, like in this two or three year period, we actually did our job.
[01:23:37]  And without us, where would you be today?
[01:23:39]  Yeah, my dad was a journalist, well, up until last year, I guess.
[01:23:44]  Like he worked at a local news station.
[01:23:46]  And in the, I believe, early 70s, he was present, although neither on the giving nor receiving end of the first on-radio blowjob ever given.
[01:23:55]  My father was in the room for that in San Francisco.
[01:24:00]  So, you know, it's.
[01:24:01]  So an actual blowjob, not a PR fluff job.
[01:24:05]  No, a real DJ got his dick sucked vocally on air.
[01:24:10]  Wow.
[01:24:11]  While my father, I guess, watched or tried not to watch it.
[01:24:14]  I guess it was actually watching.
[01:24:16]  I know.
[01:24:17]  Wow.
[01:24:18]  He and that guy, I believe, later, pushed a stolen car into the San Francisco Bay.
[01:24:24]  Wow.
[01:24:24]  This is back when journalism was a real profession.
[01:24:27]  Exactly.
[01:24:28]  You chip off the old block, Brace.
[01:24:30]  It's pretty impressive.
[01:24:30]  I don't know how to drive.
[01:24:33]  But can you push?
[01:24:35]  Yeah.
[01:24:37]  Well, we're kind of running out of time here.
[01:24:38]  I mean, is there, I don't even know how to cap this off.
[01:24:44]  It should be depressing.
[01:24:46]  Yeah.
[01:24:47]  Let's think of some way we can dial the mood down and walk away feeling partly suicidal.
[01:24:54]  No, I don't know.
[01:24:58]  What is the lesson?
[01:24:59]  I mean, I do think a lesson is that Trump is not the worst of what we're going to see, I guess, is the point.
[01:25:08]  I mean, you know, we all go on our own paths, but like I think it seems to me almost inevitable.
[01:25:15]  I mean, if the 2008-9 bailouts and the Bush war failures and stuff led, and Obama's bailout corruption led to Trump, and now we just had the same thing on steroids with no talk even.
[01:25:31]  I mean, it's so much worse now, and the reporting is so much worse.
[01:25:36]  And, you know, again, I mean, for all the shit we give all the major media and the centrists and liberal media, and they do screw up all the time, they're still kind of important.
[01:25:48]  And it just, it blows my mind still that they spent two and a half years on a conspiracy theory that Trump was put into the White House by Putin-controlled bots.
[01:26:01]  It's the weirdest story.
[01:26:03]  And then it fell apart.
[01:26:04]  And people believed it.
[01:26:05]  Like they believed, I don't know, anything they've ever wanted to believe in.
[01:26:10]  And it fell apart.
[01:26:13]  And so I just, I feel like, you know, if Russia had anything to teach us in that way, I mean, things, well, but Putin, you can't say is worse than Yeltsin, but from what we, I think, kind of believe in and stand for, it would be worse.
[01:26:35]  I mean, it's a semi-dictator, you know?
[01:26:37]  It's fucked up.
[01:26:39]  It's the failure of democracy.
[01:26:41]  I mean, like I said, the population, which really kind of initially really welcomed democracy and, I mean, a real democracy like they've had in the very last sort of three, four years of the Soviet Union, the first maybe year or two of Yeltsin's regime, they had somewhat democracy.
[01:27:01]  By the end of the 90s, people wanted to see the media get stomped.
[01:27:06]  And I mean, this is probably the most popular thing Putin did was end oligarch ownership of media and media wars and all the bullshit.
[01:27:17]  And they just, it's all these years later and still a lot of people, they don't care that much that their media is state-run, fucked up.
[01:27:26]  I mean, there's a class that does, the kind of liberal urban professional class, but it's amazing that it's kind of lasted that long.
[01:27:38]  And, you know, it would be a lot worse.
[01:27:42]  I mean, I don't think we would get somebody as kind of as semi-dictators go successful as Putin.
[01:27:49]  I think we get a much, much, much worse version of that.
[01:27:52]  And Trump will be looked at as like a feckless hack.
[01:27:57]  You know, people have no idea what authoritarianism is.
[01:28:00]  Yeah.
[01:28:02]  But, but also like the decay of democracy, it's very, very real.
[01:28:09]  It's very real.
[01:28:11]  And I don't know.
[01:28:14]  It's fucking bad.
[01:28:16]  I mean, it's, I can't, you know, I can't even think of a comparison to Trump versus Biden.

=== Decaying Institutions (04:20) ===

[01:28:27]  Oh, my God.
[01:28:29]  It's like poetic.
[01:28:30]  There's no analogy.
[01:28:31]  Yeah, there is no analogy.
[01:28:33]  It's just, it feels like two dueling, decaying institutions.
[01:28:37]  Yeah.
[01:28:37]  What are you guys talking about?
[01:28:38]  It's like Yeltsin versus Zugunov.
[01:28:42]  It kind of is.
[01:28:45]  Trump is like a sober Yeltsin.
[01:28:48]  Doesn't he say he never doesn't know?
[01:28:49]  Yeah, he doesn't drink.
[01:28:51]  But he doesn't drink.
[01:28:52]  He's a cola man.
[01:28:54]  Yeah, cola and Adderall, I guess.
[01:28:55]  And Biden is just, you know, but you can't say that he's got dementia, you know.
[01:29:01]  But fuck, we all know that we, you know, we all have.
[01:29:04]  I mean, if he doesn't have, he should, if he doesn't have dementia, he's just fucking dumb.
[01:29:09]  And so it's like, I don't know.
[01:29:12]  I don't know really which alternative people would prefer.
[01:29:15]  Which is bad.
[01:29:16]  But at least having dementia makes me feel sorry for you.
[01:29:19]  Yeah, I know, exactly.
[01:29:21]  No, it's, it's, it's bad.
[01:29:23]  It's, it's bad.
[01:29:24]  And so I just think like we're, we're just in for bad, weird fucking times ahead.
[01:29:29]  Very weird and very bad times.
[01:29:31]  And when you think things can't get weirder and worse, they will.
[01:29:36]  You know, you'll look back six months later and say, God, how good we had it then.
[01:29:40]  Yeah, they will.
[01:29:41]  And I think that's the kind of note I'd like to leave you saying.
[01:29:44]  It can get worse and it will.
[01:29:46]  You guys, I tell this, I've said this before on the show, but listeners, my favorite podcast is Radio War Nerd.
[01:29:52]  Well, thank you.
[01:29:53]  Done by likewise.
[01:29:54]  I'm not joking.
[01:29:55]  I actually don't really listen to podcasts.
[01:29:57]  I'm kind of embarrassed to say I don't really listen to podcasts.
[01:30:00]  I don't really know the genre too well.
[01:30:02]  And I started listening to you guys and you guys are doing a lot of them too lately and I love it.
[01:30:07]  And you guys are like, you just have a real, you're more than just commenting.
[01:30:12]  I don't know.
[01:30:13]  You're funny and a good escape too.
[01:30:18]  You're like funny and a good escape while talking about things that are relevant.
[01:30:21]  And also you like to go down rabbit holes and I fucking love going down rabbit holes.
[01:30:25]  Like should not fear the rabbit hole, man.
[01:30:30]  I mean, yeah, it's you, you guys got to check out Warner.
[01:30:33]  Like they were saying, the coverage they've been doing on COVID from Italy with Annabale has been fantastic.
[01:30:41]  That guy's probably my favorite.
[01:30:42]  No disrespect to you or any of our other guests.
[01:30:44]  That guy's probably the most beloved guest on any podcast in podcast history.
[01:30:50]  Yeah.
[01:30:50]  He's just got that voice.
[01:30:52]  He's so reassuring.
[01:30:54]  It is reassuring.
[01:30:55]  He's like, he can tell you about how you're going to die a horrible death, and everybody knows, but you feel somehow reassured.
[01:30:59]  Like, ah, I'm in a cardigan and sipping, you know, cut cocoa.
[01:31:03]  My horrible death is coming.
[01:31:05]  He does.
[01:31:05]  No, he's great.
[01:31:06]  One day when I finally figured out the exact combination of research chemicals, which curves COVID-19, we will do a show together.
[01:31:16]  Great.
[01:31:17]  That sounds great.
[01:31:17]  Yes, we will.
[01:31:18]  I know.
[01:31:18]  I'm looking forward to it.
[01:31:19]  I can't wait.
[01:31:20]  We are going to do it.
[01:31:21]  By gum, that virus will not stop us.
[01:31:24]  We will do it.
[01:31:25]  There you go.
[01:31:27]  But cool.
[01:31:28]  Well, thank you.
[01:31:29]  Thank you guys.
[01:31:30]  Thanks so much.
[01:31:31]  Thank you.
[01:31:32]  I really appreciate it.
[01:31:33]  You know
[01:32:06]  what's weird?
[01:32:07]  Spasibo is Russian for thanks, but in Kurdish, it's spas.
[01:32:12]  They have like no other similarities.
[01:32:14]  Interesting.
[01:32:15]  Nobody can tell me what that's about.
[01:32:16]  Hey, if you know what that's about, let me know.
[01:32:19]  That sounds nice.
[01:32:21]  Yeah.
[01:32:21]  That was a fantastic interview.
[01:32:23]  I love talking about this stuff.
[01:32:24]  I was telling you, I could go a lot longer.
[01:32:27]  I have, yeah, I have lots of thoughts and things to say about what the Americans did in Russia between like basically 96 and 98.
[01:32:35]  It's so insane.
[01:32:36]  It's so insane.
[01:32:39]  Just another country that we're responsible for the total, complete destruction of.
[01:32:45]  And people forget that.

=== Why We Left Russia (01:21) ===

[01:32:47]  Well, I don't think people are usually taught that in the first place, Liz.
[01:32:50]  I know.
[01:32:51]  That's right.
[01:32:51]  They never learned.
[01:32:53]  All I know when I was growing up is that Russia was baller and red-pilled.
[01:32:58]  And then sometime in the 90s, it became cuckolded and blue-pilled, but also scarier.
[01:33:07]  Cucked and blue-pilled is scarier.
[01:33:09]  Yeah.
[01:33:10]  Oh, yeah.
[01:33:10]  Yeah.
[01:33:11]  I agree with that.
[01:33:13]  All right.
[01:33:13]  So I think it's time to go.
[01:33:16]  Yeah, let's cut it off.
[01:33:19]  Wait, hold on.
[01:33:20]  I'm trying not to embarrassingly cough.
[01:33:22]  Every time anyone coughs on a podcast, I'm very aware of it.
[01:33:24]  So I'm just going, clear my throat.
[01:33:27]  I think you guys like that.
[01:33:29]  No, You're good.
[01:33:31]  I like to be transparent.
[01:33:34]  Okay.
[01:33:35]  This has been why I don't do that.
[01:33:38]  That's not part of our outro.
[01:33:39]  I don't know why I'm doing that.
[01:33:40]  My name is Bryce.
[01:33:42]  I'm Liz.
[01:33:43]  We're joined by young Chomsky, and that is true or not.
[01:33:49]  Bye-bye.
[01:34:09]  Come here.