Transcript of Evan Gershkovich (on surviving a Russian prison)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to "Armchair Expert Experts" on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard, and I'm joined by Lily Padman.

Hi!

Crazy.

This is our second guest who's been imprisoned in Russia.

Ugh. But our first journalist in prison.

Yeah, we had a businessman on before. His new memoir, which is out now, is called "The Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story." This is an incredible book.

The story is pretty harrowing.

It's pretty harrowing, and I think he does this beautiful job of both loving Russia and having had the worst experience imaginable there.

Yeah.

So it's very complicated. Please enjoy "Evan Gershkovich." We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. Not checking whether the turkey was fully thawed before Thanksgiving morning. You were told days ago to thaw it. Days. And now you're standing in the kitchen holding a 20-pound ice block, wondering if a hair dryer counts as cooking. Yeah, checking first is always a great idea. So check Allstate first for an auto quote. It could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate.

How do I strike? I gotta like lean back a bit?

Oh, you do.

I feel like I'm just like a fallen pillow.

Do you want to put that pillow between you?

It's not a great question.

That's awful news.

I'm fine. Okay.

It was more like a question to you guys. It's like, do you want me to sleep?

You can be relaxed. You can be up. Some people lean.

That makes us nervous.

Yeah.

Yeah, once we're up.

Jared Diamond last week was.

Well, he's like a professor type.

Yeah, and he's not young.

Yeah. But.

Did you like your body?

I wouldn't hurt to.

Fatigue sitting matteracts.

Me too.

And I got nervous about his stamina.

Maybe he thought if he leaned back he would sleep.

Go to sleep. Okay.

Yeah. He's 90.

Well, I think he turned 89.

89. I mean, what are we going to say?

Wait, he's that old?

Yeah.

I remember reading him in high school.

Yeah, guns, germs, and stuff.

Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah.

And he is more articulate than any one of the three of us in this room.

He's wild.

You're in your 30s, right? Are you 35?

34.

34. Almost.

Oh no.

I got a couple of weeks.

Oh boy.

I knew this would trigger you.

I'm triggered. You gotta go.

Yeah, but you look at this.

Well.

Look at the skin. It's fresh. Look at the skin. Look at this hair. Age is just a number.

Yeah, sure.

Let's start with mom and dad. Because mom and dad left Soviet Russia in '79.

'79. Yeah, mom left Soviet Russia. Dad left Soviet Ukraine. So they were part of that Jewish exodus. Israel and the US were lobbying to get Jews out. The way you would leave was basically ask for refugee status. So you had to renounce your Soviet citizenship. Mom was in Leningrad, and she left with her mom, and dad was in Odessa, in what's today independent Ukraine, and left with his parents. You had to leave your property behind, your valuables. We were able to like forget how much, basically like a suitcase or two.

Yeah.

There's this amazing book by Sergey Lavlatov who left during that period called "The Suitcase."

And mom had sewed some gold earrings into her waist.

So her dad had already died, and he had gifted her these gold earrings, but they had other valuables. And so to basically get around to flout those rules, she sewed them into her skirt. They went to Vienna, and that was the first pit stop. And you're there for 10 days unless you're going to Israel. If you're going to Israel, you just go from Vienna to Israel. But if you're going to the US.

How is that decided? They get to pick?

Yeah, they get to pick. They just for some reason, or not for some reason, they just thought, well, the US is more opportunity.

Yeah.

We don't really get what Israel is. I think they never even gave it much thought. So then you go to Rome for three months.

Oh.

And it was just like milling about with Soviet Jews waiting to ship off to the US. And then you're supposed to basically say where you have some relatives so they can place you. And so when you get to the US, so my dad's family is really organized, and they had, I think, a cousin or somebody already in Brighton Beach.

That's in New York.

In New York.

Yeah.

Brooklyn. So it's like the sort of Russian-speaking. And then my mom and her mom, my grandma screwed up and basically said, well, we've got family in Detroit, even though my mom wanted to go to New York. And so they ended up in Detroit.

And how did she make her way to? Because she met your father in New York.

In New York. So she was working in Detroit, supporting herself and her mom, and then her sister. Her sister's husband ended up moving to Detroit. By that point, she felt like, okay, my mom's settled.

Yeah.

And she kept wanting to go to New York for opportunities and ended up there. And then they met, both working at a bank.

And she had wanted to be a journalist herself, yeah, in the Soviet Union.

Yeah.

And that was made clear to her that it wasn't going to be an option because she was Jewish.

From what I understand, it didn't happen to everybody. It was this sort of low hum of antisemitism, maybe. But in the Soviet Union, you had these points in your internal passport. It's like sort of like the document you carried around. And the fifth point was your ethnicity or nationality. So you're Ukrainian, Azerbaijani, Armenian, Georgian, Bashkir, whatever it is, and being Jewish was listed.

Yeah.

So you in class had to like announce your ethnicity, which is kind of wild.

Yeah.

But also, there were some jobs in universities that would exclude you based on your ethnicity. So yeah, so she wanted to go to the Leningrad State University's journalism department and ended up at the Shipbuilding Institute, which actually, in some ways, is better, you know?

Well, especially removing your job.

Engineering student.

Yeah.

You're back to your job.

In the cradle of engineering at that moment.

Exactly. But she ended up not finishing school. She left, I think it was year three, junior year. They emigrated. I think she was 21 or 20 at the time.

Okay, so and your dad being, what, did you say 16?

Yeah, he's younger than her.

Okay, but they're very, very Russian.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, they came to maturity in Russia.

Russian, Russian-speaking. When they get to the US, all their friends are Russians or Russian-speaking. They don't really assimilate all that much. My sister was born in '89, so that's 10 years after they left.

In '89, also the walls falling serendipitously at that time.

Exactly. And then I'm born right when the Soviet Union collapses two years later, in '91.

Yeah.

But they never gave it any thought. It's just like Russian kids, basically. I know there's emigre families who are like, we want the kids to assimilate. We really don't want them to speak English without an accent. But I think my parents never even talked to them about this. They never even considered it. They were just sort of like, well, why would we make our kids different from us?

American.

Exactly. I think it's still weird anyway. Having first-generation kids that are not completely like yourself, you kind of lose.

Also, they're inheriting at the point that they left a 30-year Cold War. I mean, whatever information they were inundated with about Americans, the notion that one day their children would be Americans has got to be kind of absurd. I have friends who had children with English women and raised their kids in English. Just their kids having an English accent is weird.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then you add in that, yeah, we were the big bad guy, and now they're here. That's fascinating.

My mom used to listen to Voice of America when she was college age, I guess, or even high school age. And so she had these sort of weird ideas about the US, you know, filtered fully through like one single radio station.

Yeah. And then whatever media too makes its way, like any.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's sort of like stuff that's passed around, stories that are passed around. You know, they have genes there, that kind of thing. So it's a very caricatured vision. And yeah, you get there and you're sort of in this brave new world, and then your kids just become part of that place. I can imagine it's really weird. And so their instinct was to hold on, I think, to some semblance of what they knew. And they didn't want the kids to lose any connection to them.

Of course.

I think it's very one or the other. My parents were very, you just are American. Like, I think. I mean, now it's all what's memory.

Well, clearly you're a cheerleader.

I know, but it's hard to know what I did versus what they did.

Where'd you grow up?

Georgia.

Georgia, okay.

But yeah, they spoke English. They're not trying to instill any culture, really, of theirs.

It's interesting because I think I met other Indians or Chinese or Koreans because I grew up in New Jersey and just a lot of first-generation immigrants.

Yes.

And it kind of went both ways. Some parents were just really worried that their kids wouldn't be American or make it or be in this society. And somewhere like, you can't forget your home.

Exactly.

Your homeland.

Yes.

You'll probably get to this in the book, but like at some point, some kids rebel against it. They're like, no, I want to be really American.

Yeah.

My friends are American. I don't want to stick out and stand out. So that happened with me later.

Well, yeah, you're going to rebel against your parents, whatever it is. You're just going to pick what things on the table for you. That's a really easy one on a silver platter.

Totally.

I don't want to fucking be Russian all the time. Yeah, so you kind of had two really compartmentalized existences in a way.

Yeah.

You had your house. You went by what in your house?

Vanya. They never called me Evan. They called me Ivan. But all Russian names get, they're called diminutives. They're these nicknames. And you can keep reducing and reducing. It's sort of like a matroska doll. Like you start with the official name and it goes down to like the cutest, the most cutesy name, like Vanyachko or like Vanyusinko would be like the cutest way you could say that name.

Yeah.

So Vanya would be the normal.

The playful way to say it.

Yeah. And then if you've really messed up, they might say Ivan Mikhailovich because you take on the patronymic. You don't have a middle name. You have the father's name. So of Mikhail. So Ivan of Mikhail is like sort of.

Just reminding you, you're shaming multi-generations right now.

Going back to the shtetl room.

Shaming yourself. You're fucking up this whole.

Right.

How were you socially? So Monica had her experience, which I've learned a lot about, which is like she's not trying to have anyone over to see any of the Indian shit happening. What was that like, being immersed in New Jersey culture?

Yeah, I remember being like slightly embarrassed. Russian culture is if guests are over at the home, you have to put like sweets and tea and food and force people to engorge themselves on that food. And I would go to my friends' houses. And I remember one friend, I asked the mom, can I get a glass of water? And she was like, dude, do you know where the fridge is?

Right.

Yeah.

It was the sort of the opposite. Like you're welcome. You're part of the family. And I remember like friends coming over, sitting on the couch, trying to play video games or whatever. And like mom is just like dashing.

Serving round after round of cootery, what is it?

Shark cootery.

And you were kind of a popular guy.

That took a while.

You were the captain of the soccer team. That feels like a popular position.

That's when I peaked.

Yeah, what grade was that?

That was senior year of high school. I was a super shy kid up until like freshman year of high school. Junior, senior year, I really came into my own.

Were you getting fucked with at all?

When I was a kid, some kids called me Gershkovich, which I found very clever and fun.

Hit me again.

Gershkovich.

Gershkovich.

So like I'm Gershkovich.

Ryan.

That's nice.

It's not too clever, but it's something.

And it's also mild.

Yeah.

It's true, actually. Yeah, it could be worse.

We've given the spectrum of options.

Yeah.

That's kind of on the mild side.

But you're younger. It's interesting.

Yeah, if you had grown up when I grew up in the '80s, it would have been much more rough.

Probably more rough.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I know. It's just having this conversation with a friend. It's a dicey conversation, but I just feel like bullies were worse.

Like we already started consciously thinking about it?

I think bullying's gotten better over the years, but also I can't say that because there's a lot of horrible stuff happening because of bullying. Like children taking their own lives and things like that, which wasn't really happening back then.

You would just take it.

Yeah.

I think two things are happening. One is I think the face-to-face bullying is less in that it's less extreme. Certainly, like it was just so violent where I grew up. You got beat up physically all the time.

Yeah. When my dad went to Lincoln High, when he got to Brooklyn, it was constant fights in school, like Italians and Puerto Ricans and Russian Jews and whatever. And it's just like, it's physical.

All the neighborhoods.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So I think it's reduced in that way. But you had the freedom of going home after school and being free of it, whereas now you're engaged in this other online life where they're still there.

Yeah, that's fair.

I think it's like less severe, but more ever-present. It feels less escapable. And then I think the version that's happening online, because it has the anonymity, is then even harsher than maybe.

Sure.

Like kids weren't saying, go kill yourself. They're doing that online. That's like step one in the cell phone.

Yeah.

Like let's start with you.

Start with your start and then we work our way down.

Kids should not have phones.

Yeah, I really should. They're not going to miss anything. Okay, so you found your way. You got less shy.

Don't even know how that happened, but it just did. But to your like earlier question, it was a sort of dual world, not just with the names, but it was like Russian food and Russian movies and Russian cartoons. And so I'd have these like pop culture gaps.

How about mentality? There was a dude in my AA group for years. I loved him to death. Just the way he shared taking his kids to Disneyland and what a fucking bizarre experience that was for him. I just got such a kick out of. Was the mentality also different?

Oh, totally. I mean, I've had this for my whole life where my American friends think I'm a pessimist and my Russian friends think I'm an optimist.

Right, right, right, right, right.

I'm probably somewhere in the middle, but to each culture, I'm completely. I remember always being called a pessimist as a kid through high school and like college. And then I get to Russia and everybody's calling me this like crazy optimist. I'm like, what happened? I didn't think I changed. I think the cultural context changed.

If I could distill what his numerous experiences that I got to hear over two decades with this man living in America for the first time is like the suspicion of anything kind of good and fun and nice and kind, if that's like what I could distill it down to. It's like he's at Disneyland just waiting for someone to do something. Like there's no way this can be happening.

Yeah, I mean, my parents thought Disneyland was a crazy thing and they would never take us there. But yeah, that's actually sweet. They really make sure to do that. So we're like ragging on. We set the. We went later. It was like a soccer tournament, I think, in Orlando. Some of us went over to see it.

It's a great place.

So much fun.

It'll melt even the hardest.

That's why they don't go. They're afraid.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. To be fair, the Russians and the difference with Americans is Americans are really warm right away, but they can stay distant.

Yeah.

Or icy, kind of. Russians go from being super cold to just so deep and warm within seconds, as soon as they think that you're their friend.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that, maybe it's like we just got to get them all to Disneyland and then suddenly the hard shell will fall away. The exterior will melt.

They'll eat three and a half eggs. What age were you when you went to Russia as a kid?

We went once when I was nine. That was the only time I'd gone before I moved.

2000?

That was July and August '99.

And what did you think of that?

It was my first time out of the country at all. First time traveling. So it was super exciting to fly, super exciting to see a new place. But I mean, it was really intense. The first day out, we went to change dollars into rubles. And these two kids, they're much older than me, but they're probably like teenagers, without shirts. I remember running and my mom's friend, they thought she had put the money in her purse. They like tripped her from behind, ripped the purse off and ran away.

Yeah.

Because Russia in '99 was just economic collapse. It defaulted in '98.

Height of the mafia.

Yeah, my mom remembers seeing people shooting up on the street. Me and my sister didn't. She was 11 and I was 9. And so we don't remember that. But we also remember this phenomenal, beautiful images too. Like the opulence of an empire, right? It is an empire and it was an empire in the 18th century, in the 19th century, in those empires. I mean, you can see it in other capitals in Europe. They love to build these amazing buildings and monuments to themselves. And you're walking around as a kid looking at Red Square. It's just shockingly gorgeous.

Well, I went in 2000. Weirdly, I would then ultimately go to Cuba eight years ago or ten years ago. And there was a very interesting parallel, which is like we went to Catherine's Palace in St. Petersburg. It was so magnificent, right? It's so overwhelmingly magnificent. And additionally, it had not been maintained clearly for four decades. So it's like watching these treasures kind of erode. I don't know. It's very similar to Cuba in that way. It's like they're kind of coasting off of this explosion of productivity they had at one point.

And that's where it was wild to then go back 17 years later and see like, oh my God, they poured so much money into it. But only two cities. It's really only Moscow and St. Petersburg that got all that investment. Yeah, '99, there was no investment. It had faded. My mom remembered she had left in '79. We're back in '99. So a long time had gone by, 20 years. And she's like, I don't think any of this has been renovated that entire time.

Wow. Right.

Which is pretty insane.

Yeah, also just driving around in St. Petersburg, dumb stuff that would have never occurred to me what capitalism equals. Like there's no restaurant. There's no coffee shop. There's nothing where anyone would gather and be able to like kind of create a little pod of conversation because there's no businesses.

My first boss in Moscow was describing when he got there, it was '89 for the first like rock festival in the Soviet Union.

Yeah.

And he said that this thing that shocked him the most on the drive from the airport is just pitch black. Like he had come from Amsterdam and Amsterdam's like at night, you know, there's shop signs.

Yeah, yeah.

Neon lights. And he's just like, it was just dark. That image is kind of striking in '89 to now, how much it changed.

But when you were there at nine years old, were you in any way thinking, I'd like to return or no?

No, it was really fun to meet more people kind of like me.

Yeah.

In a way, because we would go to Brighton Beach, which I've mentioned to see my grandparents. My dad's parents lived there throughout my childhood. And that had stayed this kind of like post-Soviet bubble.

Yeah.

Because it had all these emigrés from Azerbaijan and Armenia and Georgia and Russia and Ukraine. But everybody was speaking their common language then, because it was all one country at that point. Russian, imposed Russian from Moscow. Going there, it felt like not just my American friends in New Jersey were like, oh, there's this other place. And then you get to Russia and you're like, oh my God, there's a lot of these people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's really fun. And it's fun to chat with them. But I could also tell they were really different. And they didn't fully accept me as one of them because I had a super heavy accent. I didn't know a lot of words. To them, I'm just this American kid. So no, at that point, not at all. No thought that I'm like ever going to go. Like it was an interesting trip. And I don't even remember thinking like, oh, I want to go back when I'm older. At that point.

Okay, so you go to college, you get a degree in English and philosophy. And you're also writing for the school paper.

Yep.

So do we already know we want to be a journalist at that point?

So yeah, I started messing around in high school and messing around in college, but I didn't like news. Like I liked the idea of writing. I was taking also creative writing seminars at Bowdoin College. And my fiction, it wasn't great.

Yeah, yeah.

It was like, it was okay.

Sure.

I remember I was talking to this guy who had finished the Iowa Writers Workshop. Ten years older, had gone to Bowdoin. And then he was just like, you know, I just want you to know, I'm in LA now waiting tables trying to write a screenplay.

Yeah, yeah.

It's competitive. It's really hard. I got really swept up in this idea that I should do something about climate change. It was probably a good thing to be swept up by. And thought, okay, I don't really know about journalism. I like writing. And I ended up getting a job placement through Princeton Asia, this fellowship program in Thailand working on forestry stuff, but doing comms. So like I was writing kind of these success stories and development. But really quickly, I got disillusioned with development. And I had a friend running the English language version of a major Thai newspaper.

And would that mean just go out and find your own story, write it up and submit it?

So she was like, there's a story that I'm interested in that this Thai TV channel that I know is going out to report on. And it's in your field too. It was basically these villagers were trying to protect this piece of land of theirs that they were worried the government was trying to take away to build like a resort on. And that's what the NGO I was with was working on. And she's like, why don't you go with this TV station, come up with a story.

Yeah.

I'll pay you for it. And I did it. And it was way more fun and interesting to me to be an observer and kind of like get to write sentences, get paid for it. They paid me $35 for that story.

Yeah.

Wow.

And I was like, I got money. Like I remember sitting with a friend, my friend and I who was in Thailand too. We went on a little beach vacation after that. I was like, I got paid money for writing.

Yeah.

And it was just such a thrill. And so from then it was journalism, journalism, journalism. But I still then, it took a long time to get around to liking news. That took forever. There's a lot of news journalists that say this. They sort of later get into the competitive fire of it, beating each other to a story being first. That for a lot of people comes later.

Meaning you weren't interested in news and like you weren't consuming tons of it.

Yeah.

You're not terribly interested in current affairs.

At that point, I really liked human stories. Like I thought it was just a sort of another way to tell some sort of human story. Like you can do that through fiction. You can do that through like a long work of literary nonfiction. But also a feature story in a newspaper can get at some truth or it's like a slice of life that you can capture. My fiction writing professor then, when he was like sort of encouraging me to keep going down that path, when I was talking about it, it was like, you know, the difference between us is that we make up scenarios. You find them in the real world and then you write them.

Yeah, yeah.

And I was like, well, yeah, I'm clearly not good at making up scenarios.

To rely on them.

Yeah, on finding things existing in the real world.

How do you end up at the New York Times?

That fellowship finished in a year. I was thinking, you know, there could be a way to stay and keep doing journalism in Thailand. That woman who had offered me that freelance opportunity had moved to AFP in Thailand. They're Southeast Asia Bureau. AFP is Agence France-Presse. It's a news agency. There's Associated Press, Reuters, Bloomberg, AFP. Those are like the big news agencies in the world. So there was a path there. But I had this college girlfriend in New York. We were still talking. I missed her, missed friends, missed family. They were in Princeton still in New Jersey at that point and thought I would move there and try my hand at journalism or try to get a job in journalism, which was really silly because it's really hard.

Yeah, that's how it goes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did some copy editing with connections I had through Thailand. Like I think for FAO or WHO, somebody I was like still copy editing freelance and I was cooking. I was catering. Worked at a restaurant while I was still trying to get a job. So who knows? Maybe I should have stayed, but that's just kind of how it went.

And the New York Times.

Life is just full of serendipitous moments. But I had my college friends in LA and I was getting tired of this chase in New York that wasn't working out. And the restaurant I was working at shut down. And so I had a friend moving out to San Francisco. And I had friends out here and thought, you know what? Why not like drive out with him? Who knows what will happen in LA? I had friends trying to work on screen plans here. Thought, okay, maybe that instead. And the New York Times was looking for what they called a news assistant, but it was really used to be called a clerk.

What would the duties entail?

The duties were picking up the phone if a foreign correspondent called to the editors in New York or the editor in New York's like, I need this guy and call him in Colombia.

And are you allowed to stay on the call?

No. You're not. You literally just connect and put it through.

You're the assistant.

You're the assistant. In the agency world, the assistants aren't allowed to stay on the call so they can learn the agency business.

This is very Delaware's Prada, very Anne Hathaway.

Yeah.

So glamorous.

Yeah.

So glamorous.

But you were doing that in LA for New York Times.

No. So I put in this application and just think like, you know what? Final chance. I've been rejected. Not rejected. I didn't even get a response from like 50 places at that point. So I put an application to kind of just be like, you know what? Last chance. And we were packing for this road trip, move. And then two days before we leave, I get an offer for an interview. So my friend kind of is like, how about we drive into the city for the interview on our way? And they told me right there, they're like, you know, we need a person. We really like.

That you're alive.

Exactly. You're a sentient being. You're interested in this.

Pumping blood.

And so they offered the job. And then I ended up being like, well, can I still go on this road trip? And so I did.

Oh, wow.

A couple of weeks. And then I flew back and started the job. And so that's how I ended up at the New York Times. And then once I was there, I was looking around for full-time things before the three months ran out. I mean, I got really lucky, really, because there's tons and tons of people applying for those jobs. And there were people at that level who had finished Columbia University journalism master's.

Yeah.

So they had paid huge amounts of money. So I kind of lucky the draw. I mean, not completely.

You weren't incompetent.

I was totally incompetent.

Okay, and then someone suggests to you, if you really want to be writing more and have a big career, what about moving to Russia?

Exactly. So I started in 2016. I made it a year. I ended up from the news assistant job, got a job as an assistant for the public editor. So the New York Times used to have a public editor, which is basically like an ombudsman, a person who wrote a column criticizing the work of the paper. The audience could write in emails with their own thoughts. And I was the assistant sifting through all that and then finding something that seemed worthwhile. Super interesting job, kind of like journalism graduate school, because you're seeing how journalism should be put together, where its flaws are, where it's done well. But I was trying to report more and more.

Yeah.

And this idea of like what is a story? How do you pitch it and craft it? There are all these kids my age who, you know, they were like the editor of Harvard Crimson or whatever. And they're already know what they're doing. And it was really hard to move up. And I was impatient. And a colleague of mine, I'd met, he was working then. He was investigating Rikers Island and the abuses in the prison system then. But he had been in Moscow. And he was like, dude, you speak Russian.

Yeah.

It's this historical breeding ground for foreign correspondents. And I mean, it's fascinating. You know, Putin had already taken Crimea by then, Eastern Ukraine.

Yeah, a lot's happening over there.

Navalny that spring. So it was April of 2017. You know, these massive protests had broken out against Putin. So I'm at the New York Times watching that. And I had a friend, she was the editor of the student newspaper at Bowdoin.

She's very special.

She gradually went to Ukraine to cover all that. You can see how that works out for a young journalist because people take your pitches. There is a story. If you're sitting around in a place where there's no story.

Yeah. Or there's a ton of reporters and very few stories.

Exactly. Yeah.

It's a supply and demand.

Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're an English, Russian speaking journalist.

Exactly. Some people use, you know, let's say you have like a master's degree in science. You might become a science journalist. Or you have Chinese or Russian. You might use that to your advantage. And so there was an English language outlet working in Russia then called the Moscow Times, which had been founded after the fall of the Soviet Union, so 1992.

Founded by who?

It was this guy, Derek Sauer.

He was Russian or?

He was a Dutch guy. So he and his wife, Ellen Verbeek, moved to the Soviet Union to be Dutch foreign correspondents and then stayed, loved it, founded this English language newspaper, and then actually brought glossy bags to Russia, brought Cosmopolitan and Harper's Bazaar.

Oh, wow.

And then launched a Russian business daily that was amazing in those years before they clamped down on the press, Vetomosti, and built like this incredible, they called their publishing house Independent Media. So they really helped drive the, you know, new world of independent media in Russia at that point.

Did you go there with a job?

They were looking for a reporter. I applied, interviewed, and got the job.

Tell them you had a quick road trip now to Florida.

And after that, they were surprised.

Exactly.

Exactly. Got to get to know Russia a little better.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

So yeah, and so I quit the New York Times and moved to the Moscow Times. But everybody who I was talking to in the journalism world, to us, that was like the most logical thing you could do. I don't remember anybody being like, yeah, stick around the New York Times, be a news assistant for 10 years. I have friends who did that. They're now top reporters at the New York Times. So sort of alternate path to the same end. You know, I ended up being a, you know, reporter for the Wall Street Journal, but I kind of went into reporting sooner. So I moved there in late 2017, it was.

Okay, so from 2017 to 2020, you're at the Moscow Times.

Yeah, exactly.

And tell me about what it's like to arrive there and how quickly do you start to fall into a rhythm there? And just tell me about the experience of, in a way, returning to where you're from, even though you're not from there.

So the experience of returning was incredibly odd. It felt almost like stepping into not Narnia, but like this world that you already knew. It's very familiar, not just because you've been there, but the language, the customs, the culture. You have an awareness of it. You grew up in the kind of facsimile of it. But the Russian I speak is only with my family. It's not like with 24-year-olds talking about the things 24-year-olds talk about. And so I have this kind of characterized vision of the place. You know, when I was there, I was a kid. But right away, it just feels like, oh, I know it.

Yeah.

And I think every first-generation kid who goes back to their parents' home kind of feels that, the sort of, oh, there's this other place that I kind of belong to. You don't really belong to. You're not a citizen of the place. Well, in my case, I wasn't. Didn't grow up there, but you have some sort of connection.

There's something cellular that happens.

Yeah.

You can't really explain it.

And I remember, yeah, I remember just getting to the, I was staying at an Airbnb, which was in this like Soviet apartment tower. And just entering, and there's just this feeling of like, oh, I know it. But then getting to work was really hard because I'd never been a reporter before. And that first day, I'd gone in on a red-eye flight. And I get in, and the editor is just like, I need you to file this story tomorrow. You're just dropped in, and you learn on the fly. And so my head was always exploding because I'm learning how to do journalism at the same time. You know, my Russian was, it was spoken.

Yeah.

I'm shocked they got that far.

Yeah, they got pretty far.

Brazilian, the Russians.

Exactly.

Nothing else that Brazilian.

Exactly. I stopped reading. Now I have to read Russian news.

And write it. Well, you're writing in English.

But you write, you know, you write requests for comment, requests for interviews in Russian. I would have people check it for me. AI wasn't, you know, Google Translate wasn't that good in 2017. Now you wouldn't even think twice about it. But, you know, I'm trying to put it together. And then the assistant would be fixing it. But, you know, they're getting annoyed.

Yeah.

And so you quickly, you're getting up to, you know, your first months are kind of just.

Paddling as hard as you can.

Totally. Yeah, yeah.

Are your friends that you're making that are Russian, are they kind of introducing or bringing out in you somebody that was there, but was kind of dormant?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, because I went through this rebellious period when I went off to college. When I'd call home, I would start speaking English instead of Russian. And I'm hanging out with like very American kids. And so that means that the kind of ways my parents react to things or talk about things is sort of in the background. And I remember really just diving into it. Like I was really excited. I met this kid who was interning at the Moscow Times then. He was also a Russian-American kid. His parents had emigrated. He grew up in San Francisco. And he had already met all these Russians outside of work.

Please say it to me.

Yeho, griakucheriz rieku videl vreke grieku rak. And so you're doing the R over and over and over again.

It's so good to me.

It's good now. It used to be like restaurant, like ribni.

I'm so tainted. My well is so poisoned by all the media I watched growing up. Like I hear that and I go straight to, I'm in trouble. There's a Soviet KGB person talking to me.

But so I'm watching, and this is, I mean, darkly funny to what happened to me eventually, but I was watching the Americans then.

Yes.

Oh, and the Americans was the first time I had watched something made in Hollywood where I felt like we were being treated like people.

Yes.

Like we have internal lives. We have feelings and thoughts and we have flaws. And it's not just like Igor or Vlad the drunk leather-wearing.

The guy Schwarzenegger is going to fight.

Exactly. It's actually kind of funny. I'm watching that show at that time too. Fine, it's about sleep paralysis, but it's fascinating. And I felt like this sort of, you know, wanted to be part of it.

Yeah.

Yeah. Familiarity or something.

Now this is very philosophical, I guess. I think at that age, you're what age?

I turned 26 a week after I moved. So I was 25 when I moved, 26.

Okay, so you're pretty much out of that little quadrant of your life when you're a young man. But I can imagine we all feel a bit like we belong at Hogwarts, but we're not there. Like we all feel a little outcasty and a little different and a little weird. And I can imagine me going there and thinking, oh, this is going to be the explanation.

Like finding yourself certain things.

Yeah, but which is just, I think, a universal quagmire of identity searching. You know, when you're young and you're trying to define it and you're just like, man, I don't know if I fit in any one of these pasts. None of them feel perfectly right for me. And I just imagine I might go to the homeland and think, oh, the answer may lie in here.

You know where it ended up lying? It took a little bit until I met them. But I met two of my best friends just like in life there, Pyotr Sauer, who was the son of Derek and Ellen. So he grew up in a funny family in the sense that he grew up in Russia, but speaking Dutch at home. The flip side, and then we both befriended this woman, Polina Ivanova. She was born in Russia, emigrated to the UK, and grew up in the UK. She was three when she moved.

All these hybrids.

She's a lot like me. So she grew up speaking English, but Russian at home. And she'd moved back in the same time as me. And it was the hybrids. And so we have this like funny mix of way we speak mostly English, but we'll flip into Russian when it's more comfortable with each other. I love the Russians that I met. I love my American friends. But it was this sort of, oh, I'm not the only one like this.

Yeah.

And not the only one like this, you know, my Chinese-American friends. We have similar things we can talk about. It was really like the comfort of speaking both languages as comfortable anyway. And having kind of like a foot in both the West and Russia was fascinating to me. That's where like I felt like, oh, that is my identity.

Right.

And they were both doing journalism too. We're both excited by journalism the same way.

Yeah.

It was this sort of like, uh-huh moment.

I also think that situation can produce one of two outcomes. One is I don't belong anywhere. Like I don't really belong in this Russian family. I don't belong in this American school. Or maybe more optimistically is like, oh, I belong everywhere.

That's how it felt. It felt like we belonged in both.

Great.

And it felt like you wanted access to both always.

Yeah. And like, oh, this is Rad. I am a connector of these two worlds.

Yeah, I don't think we looked at ourselves that way.

Yeah.

But it felt like, yeah, you want both. You don't want them to be separate. You want the pleasures of both. And it's hard to explain. People sometimes their jaw drops when I'm like, you know, I like Russian food a lot. But it's because that's what you grow up on.

Yeah.

It's the comfort.

Why does the jaw drop?

I don't know. I think people don't know what it is.

They think it's very awful.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they're not famous for it.

Yeah, I guess the unique thing psychologically that's going on is you have agency over in-group, out-group. Which is generally you're kind of assigned one in-group and that's your in-group. And then you might join another in-group. But this one is like, oh, no, I get to pick. I can be in this group of Russians with my American cap on. Or I could be with this group of Americans and have my Russian cap on. And I really think I have purchase in both those worlds.

Yeah, it's like classic code-switching.

Yeah. And a feeling of like, I have options with my in-group is interesting.

Yeah.

I think that's kind of cool. As you're building your life there for those three years, it's quite fulfilling, yeah, between work and friendship.

Super fulfilling. It's a place, if you're a journalist or foreign correspondent, and foreign correspondent is ultimately why the job is so interesting is because you're constantly learning. So your life is very active. You go through life very intentionally because everything is a study, is a learning experience. You're trying to pick up information constantly.

Yeah.

Your eyes are very wide. Everything's always active. Any book you might read, any newspaper article, or a new bar opens in the neighborhood. And maybe that says something about the way the economy is going. And from a journalist perspective, Russia was vastly interesting. It's sort of on this autocratic decline at that point. But you've got this incredible figure, Alexei Navalny, doing what he was doing. I mean, the opposition leader.

Looked hopeful during his.

Looked hopeful. Stuff's happening. And then it was also a really modern, European, comfortable city. So it was also just really fun on top of things. Like there's a nightlife and restaurants and bars. You know, you're 25, 26, 27, 29.

Yeah, it's fun.

And it's fun. And then outside of the city is not that far to get to. So the sort of countryside. You go out there cross-country skiing in the winter. I had a fun soccer team. It was sort of in a way combined all these things into one place. Up until 2020, there was not one point where I think any of my friends felt any sort of danger at that point yet. That would come.

Yeah.

But in that period, the country is on the decline. But you've made your social group. You've gotten a handle on your job. It's interesting. You're kind of hitting your stride with it.

Yeah, there's a ton of contradictions happening on the subway. People are getting more economic freedom. That's one kind of freedom. But then they're also losing this other kind of freedom.

Losing political freedom.

Losing political freedom.

And the tipping point of losing their economic freedom hasn't happened yet, which will come.

Right. And they've annexed Crimea. So there's a lot of stuff happening. You describe it as this period of time is like cosplay democracy.

Yeah. His regime, Putin's contemporary period, I think he's going to get to the point where he'll be the longest ruler. He'll have ruled more than Stalin if he gets through his full period. I mean, it's a crazy long period. It's 26 years now. They started in this really, I mean, it's a smart idea. You can go to university in the US, to college in the US, and be a political analyst, right? They have a job called political technology. You're a political technologist. And that's gaming the system.

Oh, wow.

And so the way they set it up was so it's not just sort of like this totalitarian Soviet-style government to retain control. It was to give the feeling of participation in the democracy without actually seizing control ever. So there was Putin as the main populist. United Russia was his party. Sometimes he would run actually separate of it to be like above the political system, sort of like the king of the UK. But more often he was with the United Russia party. But then there were all these token parties. So there's the Liberal Democratic Party was really the nationalist party, Communist Party for socialist-leaning people, and then Yablica or Apple, which was the liberal party.

Yeah, it's not possible.

But also, it was the same thing with journalism, civil society, protests.

Well, this is fascinating. I learned from your book, which is like foreign journalists at this time have a quasi-ambassadorship existence in Russia. Explain that a little bit.

The Russian press is already feeling some heat in places. So like Anna Politkovska, the famous journalist for Nova Gazeta, which was this independent newspaper, investigative newspaper, she was shot in her stairwell and killed on Putin's birthday in 2006.

Is this the one that she was dismembered before her body was returned?

No, that's the Ukrainian journalist during the current invasion. Now, yeah, yeah, yeah. This one was a Russian journalist who was shouting from the rooftops where this regime was going.

Okay.

There's a pussy cat. Even before. Which is actually wild to think about how early from the first days of the regime, there were voices throughout who were talking about where it was going. And then, yeah, pussy routes. About seven years after her. And so she had already been killed. Some news outlets had been taken over by the Kremlin. But they still were doing investigative reporting in this way that was like, you're allowed to have that as long as it's not dangerous to us yet.

And that's of the appearance of criticism, but not too much criticism.

And the Russian audience, 145 million people won't generally be reading all these independent outlets. They'll be mostly listening to the radio or watching TV. And that's mostly state propaganda. So we'll let you play with that. The foreign press was actually completely different. It was this like giving Russia cover as actually we're a normal country. You have the New York Times or Bloomberg or the Financial Times.

And we know they can't be controlled.

But they're writing for abroad or reporting for abroad. And it's actually a way to show the rest of the world that we are a normal country of functioning economy. You know, they never wanted to be Iran at that point. They didn't want to be isolated.

Yeah.

So if at that point Iran had taken a foreign correspondent on espionage charges, Jason Roseine for the Washington Post already, I think in 2014, that was very anti-themed to Russia at that point.

Yeah.

They want to be a normal European country.

If I recall right, they're still trying to bolster confidence economically, right?

Yeah.

They wanted to have companies traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Yeah, they had SPIFF, which was known as the Davos of Russia in St. Petersburg. Foreign investors would come every year. What is the foreign press in any country? You're invited with a visa and an accreditation document that allows you to report there. And some countries let those run out every so often.

They were a year long at this point?

At this point, they were a year long.

Yeah. But you had moments where you had preferential treatment.

Oh, totally. Yeah, yeah. There was a protest in 2019 when I was getting funneled to the police wagon with all the protesters. And then I get up there and the senior cop is like, why'd you bring him over here? He's an American journalist.

Yeah.

Get him out. So it's actually.

We don't want to fuck with it.

We don't want to mess with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's also like we'll get in trouble from on high, actually.

Right, protect yourself.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And so in 2021 was the first time I was there that somebody gets expelled. But that's exactly what happens to them. They get expelled. A BBC reporter. And that's what happens to a diplomat. They're kicked out of the country if you're no longer welcome. Not arrested. But you could see that over the years, those unwritten rules really applying. Because over the years, it gets more and more repressive. Russian independent outlets critical of the regime are getting labeled as foreign agents or undesirable organizations. And some people actually have to flee the country.

And are you carrying any guilt about that?

The moment where I first felt that guilt, I write about in my memoir, it's 2021. So there was this outlet called Proyekt or Project Investigative website. And they uncovered Putin's third daughter, who he had out of wedlock. Pretty soon after that, they get slapped with this tag, undesirable, which means that anybody associated with the organization can go up to prison for up to six years.

Oh, my God.

Just for associating with them. So like if you talk to them virtually.

If you have a contract with them, you can go to prison. So you are working with undesirable. I mean, pretty intense. And so I have a crew of friends now at this point. Some of us are foreign. Some of us are Russian. Journalists mostly hang out together. And, you know, I remember we had this little dacha outside of town. A dacha is like a country home. So we were there. It's late summer.

Is this the one you built?

We got to renovate it. Yeah. We were allowed to renovate it. And we had it for a couple of years. It was super fun. But, yeah, my two Russian friends are talking about whether they should stay in the country or not. You're kind of this outside observer. And I think that is a weird thing also about being a foreign correspondent. You know, an earthquake happens. You parachute in. People have lost their family members. And you talk to them. You write about it. And then you leave. And so this was a sort of, oh, it's now beginning. It's affecting my social circle.

Yeah, yeah.

And you're kind of outside of it.

Yeah. How and why do you end up going to work for AFP?

Agence France-Presse. So I, three years at the Moscow Times, was trying to move up. The kind of classic thing is the way foreign correspondents in Moscow moved up. And they staffed news agencies and then newspapers or TV stations was, you know, you start at a place like the Moscow Times. And then you work your way up. By that point, media is fracturing.

Everywhere.

Everywhere. Financing is not doing well. So the newspapers, if in the '80s or the '90s, the Kansas City Star and the Baltimore Sun had Moscow correspondents.

Right.

Yeah.

Now we're down to three.

Now we have two at the Washington Post, a few at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. You know, and these jobs come up very few and far between. And news agencies are also a great job and a great job to do journalism. And they don't love hearing this, but sometimes it's a stepping stone too. It's sort of like the next step. And so AFP had a job come around. And they had some people already from the Moscow Times. Nice place to work. A nice step. The one thing that's worth explaining is that they're a French news agency. But their English language news wire is massive. So like the BBC subscribes to it.

Okay. And so between the Moscow Times and then AFP, and then ultimately you do get a job with the Wall Street Journal.

Which is the sort of what I wanted, the final step.

Yeah.

Like I'm going to be a news foreign correspondent. And then once I have a job at a newspaper, which sells this wide network, I'll probably be able to move with them later. I didn't want to leave Russia until I had this sort of, okay, now I'm a foreign correspondent.

Yeah.

Maybe I'll get a posting in Turkey after this or the Middle East or back home in DC or something.

Right. You'd have your bona fides and be able to do whatever.

Yeah.

What kind of stories are you reporting on? How dangerous are they getting? Like how much are you poking the beehives?

Up until the war, nothing was dangerous. I mean, it's interesting. So when I'm still at the Moscow Times, I reported a story. Russia had a failed nuclear missile launch up in a closed region in the Arctic Circle, Severodvinsk, where like a foreigner can't go. So it's still sort of like a Soviet leftover. The region gets quarantined. Iodine's passed around because of radiation. Foreign correspondents, some are getting permission to travel there. But a colleague of mine, we noticed in local chat groups online in that region that three people were taken to a civilian hospital instead of the military hospital who were exposed to radiation.

Oh.

One, they try to save them. They can't. Then the hospital gets quarantined. They get sent to Moscow for radiation testing. One of the doctors has radiation found in their thigh.

Oh.

The domestic intelligence service, the FSB, which is formerly known as the KGB in the Soviet period, comes and makes everybody sign NDAs. We report out that story completely.

Wow. And no one calls to say, what the fuck are you doing?

No. In retrospect, you know, if that was happening, when I end up getting arrested, the difference, so the difference in temperature, right?

Yeah.

So when I'm at AFP, nothing. There was protest. There was Navalny, who had been poisoned, left the country to get treated, and came back arrested. And that was this real sort of inflection point of autocratic decline because they labeled all his volunteer groups extremists. They started fining Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for having any posts about Navalny because they're saying you're spreading extremist material.

He's his biggest threat to date or had been?

Yeah. By far his biggest threat. Yeah. Because he actually was able to sort of get a movement around him.

Yeah.

And so when I joined the Wall Street Journal, it's January 22, right before the full-scale invasion. And then everything's about the war. So that's when it's an actual debate. That's when the debate begins on what's safe and not safe, really.

Okay. That's when it gets dangerous.

That's when it gets dangerous.

But you're probably, is it fair to say you're underestimating the danger at that point? Obviously, you got arrested.

Fair answer would be I was always underestimating it.

Yeah.

Yeah. We weren't looking at espionage as a worry at that point.

Well, let's talk about what Putin says. What year does Putin say this?

To catch us by?

He gives an, yeah, an edict.

That was at the end of '22. So the full-scale invasion starts at the end of February '22. So that's in late December '22 is when he gives that edict.

That says what?

So he always addresses the FSB. He gives them tasks. So in 2018, ahead of the World Cup, didn't want to ruin this sort of nice party. He told them we need to catch more terrorists and extremists. Lo and behold, they go around catching teenagers and Antifa anarchists saying that they were trying to overthrow the regime. And, you know, we've done our jobs.

Uh-huh.

Here, he addresses them and says, we need to catch more traitors, foreign spies, and saboteurs. Three months later, I'm arrested. But before that, the debate really began. So it was supposed to be this lightning strike on Kyiv. Doesn't go well. A week later, Russia's digging in for a long-haul war. One of the things they do is they pass these incredibly draconian censorship laws. And they called the war a special military operation.

Right. It wasn't a war.

It wasn't a war.

Yeah, or like Vietnam.

And so if you called it a war in a social media post or a news article, you could go to prison for up to 10 years.

10 years for calling it a war.

So the Russian press fled the country. That's it. That's our signal. We can't work anymore. If we want to work, we're working from the outside. Some stayed.

So it was a mass migration out of that.

Mass exodus, mass migration. But some stayed and decided what we're going to do is follow the rules because it's still more important to be on the ground. So there was a debate. Some made that decision.

And then potentially they could be feeding one to the left.

And so that's when in the news we saw like the New York Times announced it was temporarily shutting its bureau until the rules are clear. The Bloomberg left. My bureau chief stayed.

You moved to London though somehow?

I was in London because when you switch news outlets in Russia, you go through this bureaucratic process of the accreditation switches. So I had to switch it from the AFP to the Wall Street Journal. And legally, you can't work in the country at that period. So I was in London where our foreign desk is based. When it happened, and the reaction, we're talking months or so of like, does the supply does do these unwritten rules no longer apply? And it was the Russian Foreign Ministry that actually called in all the heads of bureaus to a meeting, a closed-door meeting then. And an audio recording was passed around.

You follow that logic?

Wait, say it one more time.

Like it's not going to be so hard for you to refer to this as a military operation or whatever that is.

Because you already called men women and women men.

Referencing our trends.

Yeah. If we have traditional values in Russia.

I literally do not understand what that means.

Like you guys are willing over there to call a man a woman.

She's like, why is it that hard for you to call this war a special military operation? Like, why is it that hard? Just call it this. And so then some of us are debating whether they've completely lost their minds. But what we're watching over time is this unwritten rules thing. Do the rules apply? And what they did was they tried some Russian journalists in absentia. Put them in a wanted list. I took it as a signal. Don't come back. Don't do the job. Foreign journalists, no.

Still a little gray still.

Yeah. And so some people are still working. The BBC, my bureau chief, others. Some of us start coming back. I came back. A correspondent for the New York Times came back. A correspondent for the Guardian. A correspondent for the Financial Times. And we're kind of discussing, watching, thinking. Espionage at that point, you know, the last time, I didn't even come to mind in a way. As I said, we're underestimating the danger. But the last time was the late Soviet period, not contemporary Russia, when that had happened.

Where they had tried a journalist for being a spy.

Yes. Exactly.

Since Cold War.

Yeah. And so then the year is going along. Keep reporting more and more sensitive stories because it, I mean, it is a war. And so that is the topic.

Also, and you're very honest about it in the book, which I appreciate.

Right.

Like the addiction part's kicking in.

Yes.

And by the way, if I could relate to you any more, it's this. It's like now it's dangerous. Now we've got high octane fuel.

Yeah.

Yeah. Just tell me about what's going on there with your own ego and fantasy and ambition and adrenaline.

I think a foreign correspondent faces this all the time. I think on the one hand, there's the early thing we were talking about. How do you actually make it? How do you get noticed?

Yeah.

It's often where the story is. And where the story is is not always the safest. But we also find it really important.

Yeah.

And it should be important. It's important to show these things.

Yeah.

It's important to document them.

It can be multifaceted to motivate you.

It can be multifaceted.

Yeah.

But then I think a lot of the people who do this job or end up being war correspondents have this kind of draw to the action or draw to the danger or draw to what's exciting, even if it's bad.

Yes, of course.

And so you get caught up in this cycle.

If we were thinking hormone levels, you'd be like a stock trader who made a very risky trade.

Yes. 100%. At the same time, you're debating and you're talking to yourself about, well, the work's really important. One of the things we were talking about was that if you don't have a Russian passport, you're treated as a foreigner and not a Russian. Russians can't do the kind of reporting. It's this massive country waging war in Europe.

It has to be me. It's almost an inflated sense of.

Yeah. It's an inflated sense of ego almost, right?

Yeah.

If it's not me, it's debate. We're talking about that amongst ourselves. I'm not the only one. And yeah, and it is exciting. And then there's, yeah, what I describe in the book is like going back to London or then visiting family in Philly. You're bored. It's sort of a hurt locker thing.

Yeah.

And so then you're going back to the importance. On the one hand, it's an important mission. It's an important job. It's a valuable job. On the other hand, it's the adventure too.

Yeah.

And it's sort of wrapped up together.

Well, you're in a dopamine cycle.

Yes.

The fact that when you're home, you're bored out of your mind and uncomfortable. This is the World War I pilots returning and starting the Hells Angels. I mean, this is like an age-old condition.

And war correspondents die on the front lines. Sometimes it's, there's nothing that could have been done. Sometimes we mess up, right?

Yeah.

And newsrooms mess up. We don't think through everything correctly. Also, reporters, our job is to be out chasing information. The editor's jobs or the newsroom is to like kind of know when to pull us off the leash and pull us in. But we also know the environment much better than them. And so it's this constant, and we get things wrong.

So take us to the story. You have a colleague that would normally have reported on this, but is left.

Yeah.

Yeah?

So Putin has given them this address. We need to catch a spy. If you take away the other stuff, one of the tasks is, so it's like traitor. That's a Russian who works with the foreign intelligence service, changes his heads. Foreign spy. Okay, we get that as a saboteur. That's either Ukrainian or local who's like bombing railroad tracks or whatever. So he's like, these are the three things we need to stop. So they go around doing the job. One other thing is that they need Americans. So I'd been reporting at that point. There was this guy, Paul Whelan. Paul Whelan was in Russia on espionage charges.

What was he doing there?

I mean, he said he had gone to a wedding. And he said he was getting from a friend a flash drive of Russian churches. It was a sting operation. The FSB gave him what they said was a flash drive of all the identities of secret agents.

Okay.

Russia never published any evidence of that, though. You know, and the Americans said he was arbitrarily detained and arbitrarily arrested and ended up classifying him as wrongfully detained.

Okay.

That was in the end of 2018. And that's still the period where journalists were watching these things.

So he's been in custody for five years.

He's been in custody for five years. There was him, you know, Trevor Reed, another Marine had been arrested. Brittany Griner.

Oh, okay.

The WNBA player.

Ugh.

Trevor Reed and her, they're both traded. The Russians seem to be stalking Americans to be using these swaps to get people home. Paul Whelan, they're telling the Americans he's not going to leave Russia actually in any trade unless Vadim Krasikov, an FSB assassin who was sent to Germany on a mission to kill somebody in broad daylight, sentenced to life in prison, leaves Germany. And the Americans are saying, well, this is crazy.

This FSB assassin is in Germany, having been convicted.

Of murder and is in for life.

Is for life.

For life.

Another guy's got a Trumped up or questionable.

Trumped up. Well, yeah, questionable Trumped up, whatever it is. I mean, they've never shown any evidence. So that's the key thing, right? So, and the US has said he's wrongfully detained. That's what we go by.

And it's weird he got a USB drive of churches, whatever.

Some sting operations work too, though, right? Sting operations, you just decide to, who knows? The thing to rest on, unless there's anything else that they provide, is that they've never provided evidence that he's actually received that information or wanted to, right? So that's what we can say. The main point's probably, who cares if you violate a crime? Just in terms of trade logic, you're asking us to get Germany to release a guy?

Yeah.

Right? Like, what does Germany have to do with it? Yeah.

They realize they don't have enough trade to get back this capital.

But they're also looking around for a spy. And I think I'm up to some stuff that they, one, don't like, but, two, might be suspicious of.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

So I'd done a story right at that period about how Putin was getting information from the front and making decisions about the war. Gone to Pskov, which is this town that hosts the 76th Division of the Russian Airborne Forces, which had occupied Bucha in Ukraine, committed scores of war crimes. No matter what, they don't like that kind of reporting.

Yeah. Also, you did a bunch of stuff on Wagner, yeah?

Done stuff on Wagner. I was doing stuff on Wagner at that point. When I got arrested, I was doing a story. I'd filed it. It was going to run. It ended up not running, but was about how he was building this political movement. And the last quote in the story is from a pro-Putin lawmaker, you know, a ruling party lawmaker saying, well, like, you know, if he becomes a problem, we can do it the Stalinist way. No person, no problem. So, you know, four or five months later.

No person.

No problem.

Man, shit is popping off over there.

Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's scary. We're working on a story that is about basically how Russia's switching its economy to a military footing. How it's growing military production. So we were looking around at different data points how to do the story because Ukraine was planning this big counter-offensive in '23. In the summer of '23, they were telegraphing they were going to cut through Russian lines in the south, separate off Crimea from the east, and then they could go back to the negotiating table. The US was backing that. Europe was backing that. It was all loud. But Russia was publicly saying, like, we're building defensive lines in the south.

Yeah.

That ends up being the thing that they say is the classified information.

You had a not great feeling here. There's like a spidey sense.

He said at one point, when I did the Putin story about how he's getting information from the front and how he's making the decisions about it, I called the Kremlin for comment. And the Kremlin spokesman called back and said, everything you're publishing is classified information. We went ahead and published it. Like, that's their comment.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But almost like they're establishing some kind of pattern of.

Yeah. Maybe that comment on its own should have been a signal to us that we're done here, you know?

You're in a zone of, yeah.

Probably. But we put that comment in.

Yeah.

My visa and my accreditation get extended. We keep going. In that meeting, he says, I think he says it specifically about this production. I'm pretty sure. This I don't remember. But I'm pretty sure he says specifically about the production. He goes, but that's classified information. And I remember just being like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because really quick, as a journalist here, you hearing classified information is fine.

The problem would be for the source.

Not for the journalist.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're allowed to receive. They're not allowed to tell you classified information.

Exactly.

But you're allowed to report.

But the spidey sense is, it should be more than spidey sense. It should be common sense. It's sort of like, Jesus, why is he.

Hitting the word classified.

Yeah. But what I remember it being was, you know, I'm working on five, six stories at once. It's a rush. I wanted somebody to check the newsroom. They're busy. Nobody checked the transcript. And I think there's still this sort of latent idea of, okay, there's this red line. They're not going to cross. They will kick us out. I had a colleague who, their visa wasn't extended.

Right. You thought that was the potential risk to get kicked out.

I thought I was about to not get my visa. I thought I was about to get kicked out. There was a colleague at another paper who just had their visa not extended.

Yeah.

And I was like, okay, I'm probably next. So final, like, last chance dance to get whatever we can get from here. That's important before it's everything from the outside. And I think I just, like, put it aside. But really what that was, was obviously.

A trap.

Yeah. It was a trap. But the first meeting is about, is also about establishing the case. And then you go to the big man and you say, well, we have one. He's chasing all this stuff and he's actually agreeing to receive it. So then the second meeting.

Funny enough, Bukowsky's. Is it, and it's no reference to my favorite writer.

I think it is.

Okay.

I actually never looked up the history of Bukowsky, but I think it might be.

Okay, Bukowsky.

The city.

I would call him safe there.

Yeah. The Caterpillar is kind of amazing. So it's the city in the rules in Russia and central Russia. And they have this sort of walk, footpath along the river where they all have, like, various monuments, like the Beatles and different bands. And I think Bukowsky Grill might be a reference. It's sort of an artsy town. It was actually one of the more liberal cities, the longest in Russia. Had the last opposition mayor, Yevgeny Roisman, up until, I think it was 2019. So it was sort of a holdout. So I think it could be.

Okay.

But the reason we went there is because on my first trip, a source I had met was like, that's a pretty good restaurant. So we had lunch there with my photographer the first time and was like, well, let's go back there. So he at the first meeting said, we're going to have to meet it a second time. And the Caterpillar is going to be easier for me this time. Anyway, that's where the sting happens. That's where I get arrested.

Yeah. So you're having.

We're having lunch. We're meant to go talk about.

Tank production.

Basically, you'd go back, talk to colleagues. Maybe he'd be able to get some information.

You're also, I want to add, at this moment.

Worried about him.

You're worried about him.

I'm really worried about what I was going to say.

Well, exactly. That's very.

He's injuring himself.

That's very American journalist to think like that because it's your source you want to protect.

Yeah.

Not the other way around.

Yeah. Though one thing I should say is this was all being discussed with not just me and my colleague, but my bureau chief, my foreign news editors, the lawyers, the.

Everyone at the Wall Street Journal knows about this.

Yeah.

You haven't gone rogue or unilateral.

Exactly. And then they find out about it later. So we've discussed this all. We've agreed on it all. And I think one thing we also got wrong is not just about me, but probably just too dangerous for the source anyway. Let's say he was a real source and not an FSB agent.

Yeah.

He set this up. Probably too dangerous for him anyway.

Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know.

Because the consequences for him are going to be.

Yeah. And that's also like the ethics of journalism is do no harm.

That's it.

So it's tricky. And so actually, in retrospect, one of the things we should have probably done is pull out and be like, it's actually too dangerous for him, even if he's volunteering.

Right.

Wends the line.

It's really funny because what you end up getting accused of, weirdly, has so many parallels to actual CIA agents, which is.

Yeah.

They too are constantly weighing what's going to happen to this source.

Right. But I think the CIA, I mean, I don't want to hurt their feelings, but I don't think they care as much.

Well, they as an organization don't. They have a very utilitarian look on it.

Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But the agents themselves who become friends with the people.

Too massive risk.

Are absolutely plagued with the guilt of this.

I was reading Benjamin Wiser's book. The kind of handler is always worried about what might happen to this person who's risking their life.

Yeah. So anyways, you're at this lunch.

And my editors were like, he said he wanted to bring notes. And they were like, okay, well, notes is fine, but don't take anything from him.

Ah.

And he brings papers that look like official production tables. Like he drew them out. And he hands them to me and I take them.

Yeah. Okay.

At that point, the room kind of wobbles. I think another spidey sense moment.

Uh-huh.

But I don't know if it's whatever.

You're also, like, you might not be intending to walk away with them, but you're being polite. He's prepared all this. You feel maybe obligated.

I was more than polite. I'm like, well, I have it. I might as well take notes on this.

Yes, yes, yes.

And that's when, and this is how a sting happens anywhere.

Yeah, the drug deal.

Whatever it is, you know, the FBI does this here too, right? That is the moment then.

They have everything they want.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. You've taken it.

Yeah.

You've taken the material.

Whether you love the restaurant or not.

Exactly.

Same material.

You're only saving Grace probably at that moment would be to not take the papers, but I'd think the Russian system wouldn't even matter.

Yeah, exactly.

You'd be like, you were there. You were wanting to receive them. The fate has been sealed at that point.

Are you first seeing other diners respond? Are you seeing them first yourself?

So what happened was my back is facing the wall, so I'm facing the dining hall. Pavel's facing me. It's kind of half empty because we met at four. Here, basically marching feet look up and there's a half dozen men. Then I hear them say, I believe we booked that table, which I think is a really smart thing to say, actually, if you're doing an arrest like this, because you get kind of frozen. You're like, wait, what?

You're trying to make sense.

I remember getting up, being like, wait, what? They booked this table? And then I just register, it's balaclavas, like they're masked.

Uh-huh.

So then they approach. They announce that I'm under arrest by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, which is the FSB.

Ugh.

And then as I'm getting dragged down on the ground, I see Pavel stepping away into the crowd.

Ugh. Pavel. And at that moment, you put it all together. Oh, he's actually.

Not really yet. I clock it. Then I'm just thinking of me, hoods over head, being dragged out.

If I'm you, it's like, oh, shit, they're going to grab this guy I was already worried about. Oh, no, they're not grabbing him. That's interesting.

So the other thing I should say is that the papers, I start stuffing between the wall and the couch. It's like this animalistic fear. You're freaked out. You're realizing, like, holy shit, what is it?

Yeah. He's going to get all.

I'm at that moment still scared for him, which is bizarre, but I am.

Yeah.

And then when they're arresting me and he steps out in the crowd, I just clock that. It's just scary.

Fight or flight.

Fight or flight. Yeah. They put a bag over my head. They take me out into a van. They take the bag off my head. They ask me who I work for.

Punch you down.

I say the Wall Street Journal. Then they put the bag over my head. They punch me a few times.

Oh.

And then I'm like, okay, you know, it's espionage they're accusing me of. And I'm still worried about Pavel.

Yeah.

At that moment. They take me to the station. And then they just calmly hand me my espionage charges. And they don't interrogate me. And they don't ask anything about Pavel. And so then that moment of him stepping out into the crowd clocks into clarity of, oh, it was a setup.

He was stepping well.

Yes.

And also, you're doing a ton of math. I found this fascinating. On the right there, you think you know what's ahead for you, which is, wow, if they really think I'm CIA.

Yeah.

They're going to torture me for months and try to get things out of me.

I had reported cases over five and a half years where I reported a case about there was a murder outside of Moscow in the suburbs. And the cops, the local cops, basically took like a local alcoholic and his buddy and tied them in the garage outside of the police station, went to go see it actually, and strapped them into their seats and attached electrodes to them, including to the tip of the guy's penis until he signed papers attesting to the fact that he committed the murder. His friend signed papers attesting to be the witness in the case. And it seems from going through the whole trial with the defense team, it's just completely fabricated.

Yeah.

Maybe for their story, they're going to want to have me say I'm guilty. But also, if they think I'm CIA, then who knows?

You have to consider they really believe this.

Yeah. And well, it seems like they do because they're.

Yes.

Seriously confronting me. In that moment, it's when they don't at the station, when they don't. And I've also then I've reported on cases of setups and swaps. That's when I'm like, oh, this isn't real. That's why in the book, I describe it as a sense of relief.

Yes.

Like, oh. Well, I mean, it's real in the fact that you're going to prison and you're going for a long time, but you're not going for 20 years. It's not an interrogation.

And they're not going to torture you.

And they're not going to torture you. They're not going to treat you the way they can. The woman that you mentioned earlier, Victoria Roshin, the Ukrainian journalist, she was taken captive around the same time. I mean, a little later, but reporting in Russian-occupied Ukraine. She's killed in Russian custody, sent home in a body bag without her internal organs. So her parents can't even figure out what happened to her.

God. Oh. They removed all of her organs.

The Russian state's very calculating, basically. But you know that as a reporter. And so some of those signals, so there's signals I missed, obviously, with the arrest. There's other signals you can read. Some things you get right. Some things you get wrong. These I clearly got right.

If they think you're CIA, why would you be CIA and a journalist?

Well, that would be your cover.

That's a bad cover.

We used to use journalists as cover.

Really?

So up until 1977, there was a church committee ruling. Congress did this whole investigation to how many journalists were being used as officer cover. And they banned the CIA from using journalists and priests. But it was only in 1997 that they codified it as policy for all intelligence agencies. And then even then, I found for the book, there's an exception in the event of U.S. national security, the president of the United States or the DNI or the director of national intelligence can write a written waiver. So we don't use journalists as cover.

Right. But it could.

But if you're a Russian counterintelligence officer, there's a long history and they still use journalists as cover.

And if he is CIA, they need to find out who he's talking to in Russia that's giving him information.

Yeah.

Who he's converted.

Who he's wrapped up the network.

Basically.

His marks. Like they've got a lot to find out.

Right.

To shore up how much damage has happened.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And we would do. If we caught a Russian spy here, we need to find out his entire network. But what's also amazing, when I end up going through my case, there's no evidence or I don't find out of anybody who's actually interrogated. But like when we find a spy.

Yeah.

Or a real one, or maybe when they do two, we follow them forever.

Right.

To wrap up the network.

Before we bring them in two.

Yeah, totally. You know. And also there's a higher bar for not just suspicion or, you know, let's say it was suspicion for them. There's actual like meetings or whatever communications. But I also have to say for balance, I was talking to at the end of the book, there's a sort of investigative reckoning when I'm trying to figure out what happened. And I talked to intelligence officials and former officers about this. And many agreed with me that, you know, it's crazy that they didn't even try to get any information from you. But there was one who said, look, maybe out of respect, if they think you're high-level CIA officer and it's sort of professional.

Oh, interesting.

Maybe that's why they didn't. So just for balance.

Perhaps someone did or didn't.

Perhaps. But my read then was, they're clearly just taking me for a swap. And that's what calmed me down.

Yeah.

Because there wasn't any torture. There wasn't any interrogation.

So the first place you go to is Lefortova?

Lefortova prison, yeah. It's the highest security prison in Moscow where all the FSB's highest profile inmates are kept. Or just in general, big cases, like if a governor is arrested for corruption or a spy, they go to this prison. And the FSB's investigative department is connected to the prison. So that's where they would bring you up for interrogations and whatnot. That's why I was brought there.

How many months were you at that one?

I ended up being there for 15.

15 months.

Until I'm sent to a central in Yekaterinburg, which is because you're tried where you ostensibly committed your crime.

Okay.

So I'm sent back.

Okay.

Basically for trial.

So in this section where you're at Lefortova.

That's definitely right.

It comes to named after a it's named after a Swiss guy.

Oh, it is.

Lefort was the last name.

Lefortova. You write these incredible descriptions of the rhythm of the place, like the sounds, the routines, the food, the boredom. Tell me what you're going through there.

So the beginning is this real wobble. Moments of, okay, it's just a swap. I've reported on cases like these. Brought to prison the second night. We have a TV watching the news channel. And one of the hosts is saying, you know, as cynical as it sounds, we replenished our exchange fund, which is the term they use.

Oh my God.

For the people they hold for swaps.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's comforting.

Yeah. But then you're in prison. You're accused of espionage. You're in solitary confinement at the beginning. Your thoughts are going wild. And I'm like, well, what if I am here for 20 years, the full extent of the case. And what if, you know, I come out of prison, my mom's not even, or my dad's not even alive. Like, what? And so the beginning's a real wobble.

Well, also like at this, I would relate to deeply. You're cycling through shame.

Of course, because I'm like, how did I fall into this trap? How did we trust Pavel?

And I'm putting my family through this crazy ordeal because I want to go have a risky, adventurous life.

Yeah. Or like you've convinced yourself it's important work, but it is, no matter what, it's risky. This job is risky. And they never asked for this.

They didn't sign up.

They didn't sign up to be every waking hour of their day worried about their kid in.

In a Russian prison.

Russian prison. And so, yeah, there's this moments of berating myself, like, how did I trust him? The thing that made me feel a lot better later was that it turned out there was a second sting operation they were running, like a second dangle at the same time. And that had to do with the Wagner story. And that one I definitely don't think I would have seen coming.

So they were going to get you. They were working on multiple angles.

Yeah. I think they were going to get me anyway. That's what that elucidated for me. But in the moment, all I know is we walked into this really dumb trap, honestly.

Yeah.

I mean, really. They said it. They're the bad guys, but we walked into it.

But your friend had been working with this guy.

I know, but you know, it's a war. It's a war they think that is happening not just with Ukraine, but with the U.S. and NATO. And I know what you mean. Like, we trusted the source.

Yeah.

In retrospect, everything is easier to see. All these signals come into focus. But you're alone in a prison cell. So you're also berating yourself. Like, I mean, it's horrible.

You don't have a friend to go out to coffee with. It's like, what are you talking about? Anyone would have fallen for that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's this moment I describe in the book, you know, this little mirror in the wall. And I looked up at myself, brushing my teeth, and I had to look away because I'm so ashamed. What helped was, so the Russian state's very calculating. What I had was access to information. I have the best sort of conditions you can have, right? They're not torturing me. My conditions are fine. I'm getting hot showers, blah, blah, blah. But I'm also getting letters. And so my friends are collecting all this global uproar, the news articles and the nice things being said and the importance of the job, whatever, right?

Yeah, Russian journalists came to your defense.

Everybody did.

The all journalists kind of pulled together.

Yeah. There was a kind of incredible early moment.

Do you have a hard time feeling worthy of that while it's happening?

No, you haven't inflated a sense of ego.

Okay.

That's honest.

It's kind of, yeah, no, it's kind of funny. I remember writing my diary. So my friends passed me, there's this age-old tradition of Russian prisons where you can get stuff into prison. So from food to notebooks to pens, you know, family and friends can pass you that stuff. So I quickly get notebooks. And I start using the diary as a bit of like a therapist. So one thing is you're in solitary confinement for two weeks in Russian prison, no matter what. They call it quarantine. They think diseases don't spread more than 14 days, like COVID, we all remember. So they don't spread it in the prison. And so you're alone and you're talking to yourself. And so I was like, this is my therapist. And I start writing. And when I was going back over those diaries, there's this moment where one day I'm like, wow, I'm so important in this law.

Yeah.

You're going to for the First Amendment.

You might overthrow this whole.

Yeah. And then the next day I'm like, dude, keep it together.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, why do you.

Yeah, these fits of grandeur.

Yeah, yeah. There's this little like mini essay that I have, not in the book. It's just sort of for self. Like, you can kind of see how when people get into power, they start thinking, wow, I am so important.

Right.

Yeah. It's like it happened to me in this little day and I had to like keep myself in check. Like, you're just a normal dude who is just being used as his pawn. And also you walked into this trap. Fine, you're doing an important job and you were just doing your job.

No, the power of everyone in the world looking at you, we've gotten to see it firsthand where it's like, it has made certain people great.

People go crazy.

Like, you have a mental collapse over there.

You start thinking like you're, oh my God.

Yes.

I am.

Yes.

Very, very important.

Yeah.

Especially a journalist who can rest on some moral laurels.

Yeah, high ground.

Yeah.

You're like, oh, I am doing the Lord's work.

I'm brave.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's all, that's true.

But it's also like, dude.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Your best not to. I've had funny debates with myself and I'm really glad that I landed on the stay normal, regular.

Yeah.

And it's like, you know.

And how about the rhythm of the prison life and your cellmates, like the friendships and stuff that develop?

It's a really regimented prison. It's a tiny cell. It's paradoxically maybe kind of the best run and cleanest in the Russian system.

Sounded like it. It sounded way better than I was expecting.

Exactly. I mean, some prisons I didn't know the second one I saw what it can get to, roach-infested and all, you know, all the things.

Freezing in the winter.

Exactly. But here, there's central heating. It's clean. It's organized. But it's really tiny. It's like this room. And you know, there's a bed here, a bed there, a desk there, you know, the toilet there, the fridge. And so only one adult man can fit walking up and down six or seven steps. I mean, it's tiny. And you spend your entire waking hours there. You go on one walk, which is in a cell on the roof of the prison, which isn't outside. It's got metal wire over it.

Yeah.

And then you're in that cell with one other person.

Were the other immense largely political dissidents?

They gave me as direct cellmates only really regular criminals. I think it's partly like, you know, I'm a journalist. I'm going to write a book about this. I think they didn't want me with like some of the most interesting people personally.

Yeah.

I don't know.

It doesn't seem like they leave a ton to chance. So I imagine it was handpicked for you.

I think so too. I meet a lot of political prisoners in the second prison because it's more loose and you can chat. So the other thing in this prison, when you're moved around to your shower once a week or to see your lawyers or whatever, they have this old archaic snapping and clicking system, which they use to notify each other, their colleagues that they're moving prisoners around so you don't see anybody else.

Oh.

So it's really isolating. That is tough psychologically. But it's regimented. You're waking up at six. You're put to bed at ten. And my first cellmate and I, we come up with this, you know, real strict regiment. He had already been there for a while. So he helped me kind of learn it. But, you know, wake up, make your bed, read, take turns each morning, who cleans the cell. After roll call, one of you gets to work out in the cell that day, the one who's cleaning, wash off in the sink. Then we, you know, would spend the rest of the morning reading.

Could you get booze? Did you ever get drunk?

No. But some Russian prisons, you can.

Yeah.

So this is very high security.

Yeah, yeah.

You can make, when Russian prisons, they make is braga. Braga, which is like moonshine. We have a camera. They check the peephole every seven minutes. There's nothing you can get away with there. So no booze. So yeah, we had a really regimented life.

Yeah, I do think it's fascinating that they, on some level, know you're going to write about this.

I think that's another thing that they're calculating about. Well, they mentioned a couple of times, like in your book, when you write a book.

Yeah.

I think, you know, it's a big global uproar. And partly they're doing that. If we go back to the trade and you're stocking, you're really big ask. And you're kind of like, if we're already playing this game, if we have an arrest that really makes a splash, it's going to be easier for us to get this guy back, which is lo and behold, the gambit that worked. That is what ended up happening.

Yeah.

But they also, I think, want to give, you know, the human rights ombudsman for Moscow comes and visits me at the beginning to check in on me. Every time before the U.S. ambassador came for my one monthly meeting, the warden would come and check how things are going. My mattress was thicker than my cellmates. Like, they make this Potemkin village. And I think partly because, you know, one day I'm going to be going telling the story.

They don't want to be seen as.

They want you to include that part.

I want to tell the world about Victoria Roshana, this Ukrainian journalist, what happened to her and all the other people who are suffering and what the conditions are like. But at the end of the day, they can always say, well, that's hearsay.

They can say that's not true.

That's fake news.

Whatever it is.

Yeah, yeah. All right, so tell me about navigating the trial aspect and particularly the story of the prosecutor's fascinating because he was intermittently kind.

The investigator or the prosecutor?

Alexei.

Oh, the investigator.

Yeah.

So the Russian systems, they divide the detective into operatives and investigators. So it's kind of like you go down the factory line. First, the operative makes the arrest. The investigator investigates. Then you get sent to the prosecutor. And the penal Russian justice system has a 99.7% conviction rate.

It's pretty high.

So.

Suspiciously high.

You're just being sent along each thing. And so the investigator, I found him really fascinating personally because, you know, on the outside, journalists working in Russia, we don't just have access to the FSB. The FSB is like, take the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA, wrap it all into one. And it's massive. And it answers to the president, who's not really a president, but an authoritarian leader who's been in power for 26 years, waging an imperial war, killing off his enemies at home. That's the FSB. And from the outside, it's this monolith structure of, you know, almost pure evil in a way, right?

How do the citizens think of the FSB?

So I would say either like the incarnate evil or scary. I want nothing to do with them, no matter what I think about it. Or some people think that they're the elite.

They're also good.

Good. Yeah, they're helping protect the state from its enemies.

If you had to assign arbitrary percentages to those groups, what do you think?

Like, that's where I guess, and I want to be fair. I imagine much of the world is sitting at home wondering, what percentage of Americans like what Trump's doing to global relations? And of course, I want to be here screaming like, just, you know, like the majority of us think this is insane. But do we? Because we can still poll in the U.S., right? And okay, the majority. The majority of Iran is a terrible idea.

The majority, you're right, you're right.

It's like the majority of the Republican Party is terrible.

Going to war with Canada.

Yeah.

The majority of Americans is insane.

And I think in an era where we're trying to get a global policy on AI before it destroys us and we have the worst conditions possible in the last 30 years because of some. Yeah, I think the majority of people are nervous about our relations globally.

Yes.

I think you're totally right. I think with Russia, polling is really hard there.

Right.

Because when a pollster calls you and it's a country where an FSB official might come to you and say.

Conducting the poll.

You keep speaking out. Your mom works at that hospital. You're sure you want her to keep her job.

Yeah.

Let alone ending up in prison for double-digit years for speaking out against the war, which people have. Like, I met people in prison, a teenager who spray-painted an anti-war phrase on a government building, four words, double-digit sentence, 17 at the time.

In your friendship circle in Russia or at restaurants in Moscow, like what were you sensing was the percentages?

Polling and also just work as a reporter, I think that Russia has a vast silent majority, two-thirds that have just tapped out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They know they can't affect anything or they just believe they can't affect anything, whatever it is. And they've tapped out. Call it apathy, call it whatever it is. They don't want to think about the war. So it's really hard to get a sense of where their views are.

Yeah, yeah.

15% probably really for the war and 15% probably really, really, really against the war.

Okay.

And then it's debated.

And each end of the polls claiming the silent majority is on their side.

Right. The Russian state wants to say it's a holy war. Everybody's on our side. The other side wants to say, no, we don't believe in war. It's not our war. It's Putin's war, right? And Ukrainians will say, well, it's Russians' war too, obviously. It's not just him carrying out all these bombings and massacres. But it would be insane to think that a country of 145 million people, they're all like blindly believing the war's a good thing.

Yeah, well, us not being there, it's hard for us to know how effective state-run media is or how convincing the propaganda is or, you know, it's hard to know from here.

Yeah, of course. Of course.

But anyways, back to this investigator, you're asking the question that would have been driving me nuts.

Yeah.

By the way, of the aforementioned leader, I'm like, I just want to know how much he's in on it.

Right.

That's all I want to know. Like, how much does he believe of what he's saying and how much not? So you're trying to ascertain whether this investigator actually believes you're potentially CIA or not.

Yeah. So at the beginning, I just assumed this is all a game. Everybody's in on it. It's cynical. They talk about it on TV. There are other prison officials and people in court I met along the way. You tell them their story and they're like, yeah, yeah, I hope you get home soon. We're at war. We get it. We get you're not a spy. Or maybe like, you shouldn't have been reporting what you're reporting on. We can get whether we might have arrested you, but you're not CIA. With him, I just assumed that for a while too. And I thought he was a good actor, but it turned out in conversation that he would get frustrated with me too. He was like, dude, stop playing your game.

Yeah.

And so he's my age.

You're both very young to be in this position.

He had gone to the FSB Academy when he was 18, which is kind of like the FBI Academy. Grew up in the provinces. So call it, I don't know. It's not like he's from New York City.

Iowa.

Yeah. You know, he grew up, he was telling me he was very patriotic, wanted to go to the FSB Academy. Goes at 18. He studies there for five years. After I get out, I meet somebody who had also graduated the FSB Academy and talked about it. And they're like, you know, you go through this kind of like, it's not indoctrination, but you believe you're doing this really important job. And in some ways, you are. In any country, counterintelligence is an important job. He joins the FSB and for 10 years, he's investigating these cases. He lives on the outskirts of Moscow. He takes the subway to work. He's got a couple of kids. He sometimes sleeps at work during the week. We have this argument at one point where he basically's saying, I'm going to see these documents proving I'm CIA.

Yeah.

He was like, you know, we rely on facts in our job. And I start laughing. And at one point, he says to me, he goes, you know, of course, we take this job seriously. Like, I give so many hours to this job. Like, I obviously take it seriously. And you can see he's like frustrated with me that I'm demeaning him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When that switch happened, like halfway through, I'm like, oh my God, he really does think I'm a spy. I start trying to understand his point of view because I think it's a unique situation.

You can only be served by understanding his point of view.

And I can imagine a guy from Iowa going to work for the FBI, believing what he's doing. Hypothetically, Trump never leaves office. The FBI starts becoming his instrument of keeping in power. Kind of misses that shift or he doesn't believe it or he's convinced himself his job is still important. He starts investigating whatever enemies of state Trump decides are. And he can't let himself believe that his job isn't.

Yeah.

Some there are very cynical and know what they're doing.

Yeah.

But this guy, I don't think was. The most depressing moment to me was at I pled the fifth the entire time, which is actually in Russia the 51st. It's funny. In their constitution, everything's a little lower. Freedom of speech is the 29th. Freedom of defense is the 51st.

That's funny.

But the reason was my lawyers were like, look, we know how this is all going to end up. Let's just do a statement in court. There's no need to play the game during the investigation. But at the end, before I'm going to trial and the last time I see him, I'm like, how about I explain to you how journalism works? And you can explain to me how your job works. We can just try to air it all out.

Yeah.

So I explain everything to him. And then he's like, well, you clearly are working as a what they call a NOC, non-official cover spy. So spies are either official, they're at embassies, or you're sent in as a businessman or whatever. That's illegal. That's not covered by the Geneva Conventions. And so they can arrest you and not kick you out. So he's like, you're clearly a non-official cover spy. The thing that was so depressing was that we're taking the same story, the same information, and we're filtering it through our different prisms.

Yeah.

And no matter what.

They're incongruous.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

You're never going to meet.

Some people in these interviews have been asking me like, do you have Stockholm syndrome or are you giving them too much credit? And I just don't think there can be anything more fascinating than trying to figure out these people that we never have a chance to speak with.

Of course.

Well, you kind of, if you're the least bit thoughtful, you start with the realization you both were just born into households. Yes.

And if we swap you two babies at birth, you're the same age, you're probably in the same shoes.

It doesn't absolve us of responsibility.

Right, right.

Like, I think he's responsible for what the FSB is doing.

Sure, he works for the FSB.

But I don't know that you need to hold the judgment and the moral superiority while also fighting for your client.

Right.

And also, what's collective responsibility? Who's more responsible and why did I end up there? And who's responsible for the assassinations in Ukraine? Is it him? And his job, is he just a paper pusher? And so it's fascinating to try to think of all these different levels.

Well, it's back to the human story.

Yeah.

It's why you started doing any of this in the first place.

Right, right, right, right.

Okay, well, the last thing I want to know about is, because this is uniquely depressing, I think when you get to central.

Keep getting more depressing.

When you get to central and you're in this bigger prison, you're moving more freely and you're meeting more people.

Yeah.

There's this whole fascinating thing about the feeder, which is a little hole you get your food through. And as soon as the guards go to bed at night, like the ropes come out and things get passed and people put their head out.

Well, yeah.

Put their head out. It takes you a while, right, to recur to know that I can do it.

Yeah, put your head out of the feeder and just chat at night.

On the hallways. Yeah.

Wow.

But in here, you discover, tell me about Nikita in this kind of prison-to-war pipeline. This is heartbreaking.

Yeah. So one of the things that Russia has done is, first, it was with the Wagner group. The Wagner group or Prigozhin, this guy who ended up getting killed, took on the initiative saying, how about we use convicts?

Was he not a chef originally? Was he like, he had a catering business or something?

He spent 10 years in prison for theft in the Soviet period.

Yeah.

Got out. And like the wild capitalism of the '90s, yeah, he started a restaurant that Putin really liked in St. Petersburg and ended up becoming a caterer. And he catered for the Kremlin. And so he became known as Putin's chef.

Isn't that nuts?

It's insane.

The movie on him is going to be spectacular.

But to our earlier conversation, he like negated this whole thing of in Hollywood trying to show Russians as thoughtful, interesting, introspective people because he is the Hollywood bad guy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But they came up with this idea of you fight for six months and you earn your freedom. That ended up changing a bit. It got taken over by the military after the failed putsch. And now it's, I think you have to get a medal or you have to be injured or you fight till the end. But people still see it as a way out of prison to see their families and breaks or maybe they'll get their heroes' medal. So it's one of the ways that Russia's been able to keep restocking its forces, even though, you know, it's cannon fodder, essentially, right?

Yeah, they're just getting killed.

The casualties are astounding, right?

They're very asymmetric too between the Ukrainians and the.

I think Russia's like way over a million now casualties. I mean, of killed and injured. But the injured of not being able to return to action is also one of those numbers. And there were some people in prison, in that prison I was talking to, who were wanting to go just because it was a way out. Some people who were patriotic and thought, okay, they can get me there quicker.

Or how about even a third domain? When I was 18, I just wanted some fucking adventure and action.

The adrenaline rush.

Yeah, whether I was pro or not.

Or a mission or a sense of purpose or adrenaline or action.

Yeah, just like whatever your actions are.

Yeah. That guy I met that was one of the more mind-blowing conversations to me. He was in prison for murder, got out, fought in Bakhmut, which was this part of Ukraine, which was essentially just like a bloodbath. Ukrainians would just spend all day mowing down these rows of Russian convicts. In fact, this is happening in this day and age.

I know.

Astounding. He survived that, got free, committed petty theft back in prison. And he's telling me he's going to go back. And I'm like, dude, prison isn't great, but it's not a death sentence. Just do your time. And he was like, you don't get it. And I'm like, what don't I get? And he goes, I've never felt that kind of adrenaline, not women, not cars, not drugs. And that, I think, is very applicable anywhere, right?

Yeah.

To a lot of American men who fought in the wars we fought in.

Ugh.

I was talking to former Marines.

Yeah, you don't have to believe in the mission to believe in keeping your bros safe.

That's hard enough. And it's better than living in some impoverished town in the Russian hinterlands, stealing shit to do more drugs, which is what they told me they would do. Every time you're out of money, you just steal something and then you get the hit again.

Yeah.

And it's like some dudes were like, well, they get drugs at the front. They get amphetamines. Maybe that's a way because in prison, it's harder to get drugs. I mean, it's insane some of those conversations.

Yeah. The reality of it all.

And so Nikita, my cellmate was 20 at the time. He had defrauded the elderly. It was his crime. He would steal for booze. That's what he told me. It was a kind of ridiculous conversation at one point. I was asking him why he stole. And he was like, well, I like drinking. And I was like, well, you can drink other ways.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He didn't get me. Like, he was like, what do you mean?

Yeah, yeah.

So obvious. But he was a self-professed neo-Nazi, which is also amazing because the Kremlin says that the Ukrainians are Nazis. Actually, there's a big neo-Nazi movement in Russia. There's a neo-Nazi movement in Ukraine, but they're like, they're marginal. It's not like one's bigger than the other. And he used to play Counter-Strike with Ukrainians growing up. And then when the war started, he was like, well, it's my country, so I'm not on their side anymore.

Wow.

Which is insane. But they were, you know, they were Russian-speaking online. And what ended up separating them was this pure youthful, you know, for him. Not for, I mean, obviously, they were defending their country from invaders, but for him, it was just like, well.

The power of this in-group thing.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

My president said so. And he's from like this village. His dad did this job where he would scrape off paint from oil refineries from the towers so they could get repainted. And so he was saying he wanted to go because he felt like it was the good thing. The Russian army is doing the right thing. His grandpa had been a military police officer. There's a calling to serve. I was telling him not to go. I was just like, dude, you're going to die immediately.

Yeah.

Then when I got out, I found out that he did go and died on his first one offensive.

Oh. Yeah, they're not trained at all.

They're not trained at all. They're tossed at the front. I mean, by now, it's this insane drone war.

Yeah.

Where Russia is trying to, in like tiny little groups, a soldier goes forward, maybe on a motorbike. They snag like a little shed and they hold that. Their own drones will toss provisions to them. But like that dude has a death sentence already anyway because the Ukrainians feed them.

They just don't give a fuck about their own people.

It's horrifying.

They're just sending their own people out to slaughter.

No, it's Putin who's doing it.

Well, exactly. Yeah.

Okay, well, you were convicted in July 19th and you were sentenced to 16 years for espionage. And then August, so that's real quick, after two weeks.

Two weeks.

And how do you know you're getting moved? How does it come to your attention that you're about to get traded?

They say publicly you're only traded after you're convicted. But you know, you understand, my lawyers and I talked about this. They can convict you tomorrow. So we'll know how the swap's going based on the time. And so FSB investigations, pretrial investigations usually take 12 to 18 months. Mine took 15 months. So that was a sign. Okay, the swap talks aren't going that well yet. I get shipped to Yekaterinburg by train. Get there. The first hearing in the trial, late June, June 26th, I think it was, or June 24th, one of those two days, the judge says, we're taking a six-week recess for my summer vacation.

Can't wrap this up before your vacation?

Clearly, there's nothing to wrap up because.

Right.

So they're just going to keep extending it. And then on July 11th, my lawyer comes to visit and she's like, I think it's happening. Like, what's happening? She's like, the swap. The day before, the FSB investigator, Kuznyak Alexei, called her and said, we need you to put in a request asking for the trial to be heard earlier. Start on Wednesday, end by Friday. And she's like, it's crazy. We need to prep for the trial.

Yeah.

And he goes, it's in everybody's best interests for the trial to end by Friday. So like hint, hint, hint. They negotiated and we started actually on the Thursday, July 18th, and finished on Friday, July 19th.

Wow.

So I knew the swap was happening on July 11th. So like three weeks before it happened was when I knew the swap was coming. I didn't know when. I didn't know how long it was going to take. And that's actually the most excruciating period because when you're in the thick of it, when you're in your rhythm, you're kind of like the days are going by, they have some form, you have your routine, and you're not thinking of an end date.

It's palatable.

They go by.

Yeah, yeah.

When you think, oh my God, I'm about to get out of prison, those days stretch into eternity.

Yeah.

And so those three weeks were really long.

Yeah.

Longer than like seven or eight months in the middle of it.

And the fucking brain is so fast.

It's crazy.

Yeah, you introduce this idea and it changes your whole reality.

And everything's relative to the way time feels. The weirdest thing about prison time, because of like the non-form that you have to your days or the days there in this detention center without work, when you're convicted in Russia, you go to penal colony, which means you can go to work, you can play basketball, whatever. Like we've seen in prison American movies, right? But in the detention center, you're just kept in the cell. So what's wild is that the weeks and the months fly by because you can't grasp onto anything. But each day is so much longer than out here because there's nothing to do.

Yeah.

This is a bizarre paradox. And then, yeah, and then you introduce this concept and suddenly now the weeks are long.

That's excruciating.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. And did they move you by what? They take you to an airplane?

So there, they took me in the regular way, which is by train in these cages, which is so insane. So insane to the point that one of the prison guards working on the train asked me if that's what we do here because he's like, I think we do it pretty rough. And I'm like, yeah, dude, you guys really do. But then for the swap, so they took me back to Moscow by plane. Then we're held back in the Fordovo for five days. And then we're taken by bus to the airport, fly to Turkey. Then we're on an American plane back to the US. Long journey.

Wow.

Who did they get?

They got the killer. So they got the killer from Germany.

They got back on?

Their gambit worked.

I didn't know that was for you.

I mean, you've got to thank Germany for allowing this.

So the Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, or who was then the Chancellor, I've thanked him already twice and I'll keep thanking him, his right-hand man, Wolfgang Schmidt, who really made it happen. Jens Plotner, their national security advisor, really made it happen. Thank those guys like.

Yeah, because if you ask us to let a murderer out of prison, we're going to have some shit to say about that.

Yeah, and I mean, our Justice Department, we're always against swaps. The Justice Department is always like, no, because it's political, not legal.

Right.

The decision. And it incentivizes this type of thing.

More law.

You getting arrested.

Exactly.

Theoretically, yeah. We do have this Thomas Jefferson in, I think it was 1805 or the early 19th century, there's 12 US sailors held in Tripoli. And he said like every American life, no matter where held abroad, is valuable. We need to get our citizens back. And so we have this sort of ingrained notion. It doesn't matter the administration. Like the Trump administration is also freeing hostages. Democratic, Republican, we do this. To your point, I mean, the Russians know that Americans are valuable in this way. A guy close to Putin after I was released said, you know, an American in the closet is always a good thing. I put that in the book, right?

Yeah.

So their gambit works because the US government's split. It's debating, should we exceed to this immoral demand? And they tried other ways for a long time until, and that's also why it took 16 months.

Yeah.

So until they asked Germany to actually go in and Germany agreed, they were trying other ways to do the swap. And the Russians kept saying, no, it's this one guy.

Wow.

So even though it was clear at the beginning, you don't morally want to do that. The kind of answer that the Americans and the Germans have is that the moral good of the release, not just of myself, but these other Russian political prisoners and other Americans and Germans versus who the Russians get back outweighs the moral bad. Which is how I've tried to think of it because I had a guilt over it.

I'm sure you did.

Well, if I'm Germany, A, I need to take threats to our citizens off the street. They did that. And he's either going to sit in prison there for the rest of his life, or they're going to send him back to Russia. And it's like, he's probably not in the business account. Well, he is in the business account.

Well, he could work from an office instead of in the field. But I mean, they clearly made the decision that it's okay to do. So they did it, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And it's not just one, you know, they had agreement. You know, it's like their Justice Department, each party, the different departments. So they did come to a consensus on it. But, you know, it's a question.

Yes. Okay, my last question, and I've had you for so long. Thank you for your time. You went for 10 days to this post-isolation support activities program when you got back?

I went actually for a day.

Oh, just a day.

I wanted out. I just wanted to go hang with my girlfriend, family, and friends. Like I ended up doing my own kind of recovery program in my own way, yeah.

Which was with a therapist or just?

Yeah, I started with a PTSD therapist.

If I were you, I imagine I would get back and go, oh, I don't have PTSD.

Yeah, because through prison, I feel pretty normal. And the way that you adapt to your environment, you come up with some sort of routine. One major thing I was like, I can't let myself feel emotions. It's kind of like a stoic approach. And so I never actually cried during prison. I stayed pretty regular. So you kind of get that it's going to be hard to come home, I think. But you don't get it completely. And so when I get back, it's not sleeping because everything's so overwhelming. I think the sights and sounds.

Seeing the sky. You said not having your routine.

Yeah, it would like freak me out because I was so institutionalized. Panic attacks in a crowd of people, quick temper. All that emotion starts coming out, including anger.

Yeah.

And that's directed at the people closest to you, frustration. I'm like, I need somebody. And I was recommended a therapist who used to work with soldiers and then also started working with foreign correspondents too. The PTSD thing is basically tracking it over the course of six months. If your symptoms are improving by six months, you don't have PTSD.

Yeah.

If they're entrenched or getting worse, you do and you treat it. So I had symptoms, but they were getting better. So then he let me go. I was kind of numb. Didn't feel much. Would freak out when I wasn't on my schedule. And, you know, I felt like I clearly, you know, there's some baggage there. I need some work.

Yeah. You felt vulnerable.

Yeah. And so I got a therapist, a Russian-speaking therapist, because this dual personality disorder from growing up here, I was like my Russian side went through prison.

Yeah.

It was Vanya. I was speaking Russian in the cell.

Yes.

That's so true.

And so I don't know why, but I did that. And so we worked for up until, actually up until August. I was working with him. And then I felt like I just needed a break from analysis. I was already feeling good by that point. I finished the book in late spring. So I had like this nice fun summer. I was like, all right, I'm done. Feel back to life. I was back to work at the journal. I was just like, I don't need analysis anymore. I need a break. But the book was also a form of therapy because the book, I found this woman that I ended up not working with. She did a form of what they call narrative therapy for trauma. And she explained it this way where she said, you know, if you twist your knee playing soccer, that's a shock.

Do you think the core of the PTSD is some bizarre sense of shame about something and that that's what you're somehow.

What I release in?

Like what do you think is the fuel source for PTSD?

That's a really good question. I mean, my girlfriend helped me a lot with it. Maybe she's like a fourth therapist, but she was like my main support system. Mashia, and this is sort of like, dude, you were doing your job. Stop blaming yourself. They cynically set you up. Fine. There might be mistakes in the way, but you.

You were a victim.

Which I actually didn't even break the law. Like my lawyers were like, there's not even a because the way the Russian legal system works, you need to go get the classified information, which I passively was like, yeah, yeah, sure. There's not this act of seeking it out, but also you need to have the intent to pass it to a foreign government.

Right.

And in the case, they just have this brief that says I work for the CIA. And then my lawyers are just like, you know, in some cases, maybe you accidentally violate the law. Maybe that happens. But Masha was just like, you need to let it go. And I have, and I think that wasn't therapy. But I think in this case, what's fascinating for me was one, I was a political prisoner. So it's not like I committed a crime or I was a career criminal. I had a newsroom that was back, an employer that was paying me. I had a job right when I got back. I had a loving family that was supporting me. I wasn't about to go commit now like petty theft again.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nobody speaks his language. He works as a cab driver. He makes less money than he makes in prison. So he sends that money. And he got in again on purpose. And he was like dapping up prison guards and other prisoners. And so I have this moment early on where I feel this pull back to prison.

Yeah.

That's interesting.

Blew my mind because I'm not of the kind of background that should feel that, right? It's like the comfort of an institutionalization. Like nobody knew what I had gone through. Nobody knew the kind of customs, the conversations, the jokes, the in-language, right? And so I was dealing, I think, a lot with that. How to become an uninstitutionalized person.

Well, just weirdly, the comfort of the routine.

Comfort of the routine. Like I need to have lunch at this period. And I would panic if it wasn't.

Yeah. You also didn't have to think about anything outside. You didn't have to think about dry cleaning or.

Mission-driven.

Send a birthday card. Like all the other extraneous things were also you were liberated from, weirdly.

Tolstoy describes soldiers and prisoners as very similar because the way they live, the way they're directed, the way they have a purpose, what they do, and suddenly you're back in the big world.

You're part of an organization. You have no autonomy.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's a lot of similarities.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But back to what your girlfriend was saying.

Oh, yeah, yeah. About the shame. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, if your girlfriend was telling me that over and over again.

Yeah, what would you?

I think the way out isn't you did nothing wrong. For me, mine was, yeah, you made some bad decisions. Can you forgive yourself for making some bad decisions? Is it okay that I made some bad decisions?

I think I had a pretty similar one because I've sometimes at least thought like sometimes I was like, you make a mistake in normal life. That mistake doesn't end up always in 16 months in prison.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And a mistake maybe you made as a group.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, maybe you like had beer too late.

You all agreed to park in this spot.

Sure.

Now the car's been towed.

And now it's been towed and you're like, guys, we really could have avoided this. Doesn't always end up in 16 months in prison.

Yeah.

So anyway, I think it's kind of like that. I'll tell you what helped me actually too, which is really funny. One of these intelligence guys who I was talking to about how sting operations worked was like, man, don't go so hard on yourself. We've had actual officers fall for much easier traps.

Yeah.

And I was like, okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So maybe that was it too. I think what I was doing is similar to you. Forget this chat about they are wrong. Like you're this white knight. They're the bad guys.

Yeah, yeah. It's one thing if everyone else forgives you, but you got to still forgive yourself.

But I think that really helped. I was like, okay.

Yeah.

I'm not as much of an idiot as I am.

But that's part of your identity is I'm smarter than that. And so.

Yeah, right.

That's true.

That gets like disrupted.

It threatens your identity.

You're like, oh my God, I'm an idiot.

It's like, yeah, it's like, wait, I thought I was smarter than that. I've been operating on this level that I'm smarter than that. And now that's been crushed. That's a scary way to go about life. Like, well, now who am I?

Do I trust myself?

Insane.

Do I am I as savvy as I think?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's like a something to reckon with.

Yeah, you got like forced into a really wild bit of self-examination. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very extreme.

But fascinating too, what's really interesting about it is you're sort of watching yourself go through something. And you're sort of watching both your adaptability and your resilience and the way you react to things. And it's kind of like an incredible journey to how humans work, but also other humans that are in there. I would rather it have not happened.

Well, Evan, you wanted adventure, boy. You got.

Yeah. I mean, that's one way of looking at it.

You true.

You wanted a story also.

You really.

Yeah. I mean, there's a cynical way of looking at it. You know, there was somebody who wrote a review of this book, which was like, journalists always go out seeking like great stories for memoirs. That's what this guy essentially did.

Oh.

And I don't think that's fair.

Seeking memoirs.

No, I don't think that's fair. But I do, if you go back to the kind of like subconscious of what the pull to adventure or the pull to these stories and what does sometimes happen.

Yes.

I would say there's like a kernel of truth without it being some conscious pull and desire.

Yeah. I mean, Hemingway wants to write about.

Orwell, right?

Yeah. Everyone. Yeah. I think it's okay. I think when you are at peace with those dichotomies is when you're thriving. Once in a while, there's an incredible journalist that happens to be present for a crazy story. I just think of John Krakauer happening to be on the most deadly Everest trek of all time. I hate to say the good fortune of that, to have that good of a reporter be able to tell us what that experience is like is like a crazy gift. And I would say that your book, This Cursed Beautiful Land, is the exact same.

Thanks for saying that about the book.

Yeah. No, it's beautiful.

I appreciate it. The thing is maybe it's dark humor, but Stalin's era, the Gulag, you know, were packed with incredible memoirs about that time that are, you know, a gift to humanity.

The Archipelago.

A Gulag archipelago. But there's Journey into the Whirlwind. There's a lot of them. And because they arrested just sweeps of people, there were writers and artists and musicians and people who could reckon with it in a literary way. And so I wanted to kind of join the canon.

Yeah.

In a way. Not to be, again, the too inflated.

No, no, no.

But you can strive for something in art.

Absolutely. And you've accomplished it. And we're all lucky to have it. So everyone, check out this Cursed Beautiful Land. It is a gorgeous and harrowing memoir of incarceration. Evan, it's been a blast meeting you.

So great to meet you.

Thank you so much.

So great to meet both of you. Thanks for having me. This was really fun.

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes.

Hi.

Hi there.

Hi, it's me, Monica. Hello, Dad.

You're wearing a soft brown corduroy.

I know. I love it.

Tell me more.

They're new pants and I love them.

How new? Days old?

They arrived today.

Oh, really?

Yes. I got them hemmed and they were hemmed and now they're mine.

Perfect.

They're perfect.

Do you ever get the hem job and then you try and it's like, huh, it's not perfect, even though you measured it and everything?

Yeah, that happens. And that's a horrible day.

That's a real.

That's a real.

Let's just shut it down and start over tomorrow. Let's let the armchair is behind the curtain.

Okay.

Got a notice on the door yesterday. We have a big week.

Oh, yeah.

We have two tomorrow. And I got a notice on the door from LA Department of Water and Power.

Yeah.

LD.

DWP.

DWP. We don't say any LA. Just DWP.

Only DWP. Yeah, you can.

Department of Water and Power. Saying, hey, we're going to be shutting the power off on Thursday between 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m.

Yes.

To which we panicked. We need power for lights and recording.

Yeah, we do.

And we can't cancel the day. We already tried to move the guests. Not an option.

Not an option.

What do you do?

Yeah.

You hire an electrician to come put another input into the circuit breaker and then go rent an enormous generator.

Yeah.

All of which I did.

Uh-huh.

And then just now fired up the generator is not putting out any power.

Uh-oh. And uh-oh. And why do we think that is?

Well, we were on the phone with the technician and we went through everything that a non-certified electrician could handle. And so now they're sending someone out.

Oh.

Fingers crossed.

Fingies crossed.

3:00 p.m. mid-interview later.

Oh, fuck.

We might hear that thing rev up.

Oh.

You know, a little.

Great.

Yeah, a little.

Well, our guest today is really fun and I think he will.

Chill.

He will enjoy that.

Even if the lights go out, he'll like that.

He'll love it.

Yeah, I'll love it. And a strobe comes on.

He'll love that.

He'll love that.

He'll love it all.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, well, my fingers are crossed.

Yeah.

You know, I do have some major fear.

Oh, tell me.

That this power outage situation, which first of all, I didn't get a notice on my door. So that's weird and annoying.

I think that's because your power comes off of Los Vilas. That's why you had to drill that crazy hole and everything. And mine comes off of.

Oh. I am now relieved. My fear is over because I thought potentially this had to do with my house. I mean, I was like, maybe they are going to flip the switch tomorrow for my power. I still don't have it. If it's my house, I'm sorry. And I really hope it's my house. Like I need, I got this crazy procedure.

Yeah, pricey.

Just sitting here waiting for the city to flip a switch.

That's what's happening?

Yep.

What does Bill say?

He's on top of it, but it's like they just do what they want. He's bugging them. He's pestering.

He is poking.

Yeah, he takes care of me. He's one of my dads, as we know. And but there's only so much we can do. I can't turn on one of the showers. Like.

Yeah. You're underpowered.

Yeah, it's crazy.

You're overpowered as a person, but underpowered as a home.

Oh, it's like the universe balancing.

Trying to homeostasis.

Yeah.

Between you and the house, there needs to be some kind of equilibrium.

God.

And I don't know what's going to happen when you have excess power over there.

Oh my God.

Oh, boy.

We felt like I had, we had some powers last night because, well, I had a girl, I've had two girls' dinners in a row.