0:11 - Intro
2:25 - Tom Brady un-retires, and other stories of star athletes having difficulty facing life off the field.
11:05 - Zelensky addresses Congress, and discussion of the prospects of a No-Fly Zone.
23:04 - Saudi Arabia turns to China in an expression of discontent with the Biden admin, while US allows Russia a $10 billion contract as part of the Iran Deal revival
35:56 - Daylight Savings Time made permanent - not such a great idea.
41:44 - Interview: Dr. Joe Serio spent years in Russia as a high-level security expert and gives us the insider's account of the current Ukraine conflict and what led to it.
Calvary Audio, Ladies and gentlemen, May seventeenth, two thousand and twenty two. I am at Bolinsky and this is your weekly dose of sanity. Is always the prevailing narrative. So the war in the Ukraine still raging as we speak, in the fall out of the Russian invasion, um having second, third, fourth order impacts all over the place in terms of the global economy, balance of power, what have you. And we will get to some of the details and current status of that in just a minute or two. Um. Also on this episode, I will be airing an interview that I did this weekend in Austin, Texas for south By Southwest with a gentleman named Dr Joe Serrio. Dr Joe Siria was the author of the book Vodka Hookers in the Russian Mafia My Life in Moscow, Okay. So what experience is this? Does this book rely on? Um? So? In the late eighties early nineties, uh Joe Seria was the only American to work in the Organized Crime Control Department of the Soviet National Police, the m v D. After the fall of the Soviet Union. Uh Joe worked as a security consultant for three years in Moscow, helping foreign corporations understand the pitfalls of operating in Russia and interfacing with all elements of Russian police, security, government, organized crime, what have you. He worked as a Moscow based consultant to the global corporate investigation in business intelligence from Krol and Associates and was named the director of Karl's Moscow office. He also served as the co chair of the Security Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce in Moscow. So, as you can imagine, he has a firsthand insiders of account of how the current conditions in that region, Russian the Ukraine came about. The corruption in the nineties, the rise of the oligarchs, the melding in essentially hybridization of organized crime and and government actors in that region. And this is something that that seems so foreign to the United States that it seems something noteworthy or or truly criminal, but it's kind of understood as business as usual out there. And these are all the elements that led to the conditions that we have now in that region. The kleptocracy or at least claims of cleptocracy against Vladimir Pout and Joe was there for it all. I mean he still has innumerable contacts in the region. When you want to discuss, you know, the status of this conflict, how it came about. Joe doesn't have to speculate. He literally can go directly to high government contacts on both sides of this conflict. It's also a very interesting, smart and nice guy. It was a great discussion and I hope you guys stick around for that and enjoy it. Okay, But before we get to some Rush Ukraine stuff, Tom Brady comes out of retirement after just a month. Only about a month ago, I had given a bit of a an honorarium to Tom Brady as a worthy opponent. And how you know, I disliked him during the earlier parts of his career, but crown to respect him as a competitor and wanted to honor him in his retirement. But that retirement only lasts a month. As Tom said on Twitter, these past few months, I've realized my place is still in the field and not in the stand. And this brings up a really fascinating topic that I've studied over the years, which is the athletes and top performers having difficulty, uh lee evening behind the glory of the field and acclimating to regular civilian life, and at first glance to kind of makes sense that they're the center of attention. They get incredible buzz excitement. These are people that have dedicated their entire life to their craft into competition at its highest levels, and these days most most professional athletes have been working day and night on this since they were just a kid. Most of them don't really necessarily even have normal childhoods in that regard. It's not necessarily so it's such a wild idea that they have a difficulty letting go. But there are some particularly interesting stories that come out of this. Thinking back to a couple that I've read over the years, one a very unfortunate one was Junior say Out. I don't know if everyone recalls, but Junior say Out it's a beloved um All Pro linebacker for at the San Diego Chargers many times over, an All Pro Hall of Famer, and just known as an incredibly upbeat, positive, happy guy who committed suicide in two thousand twelve. It's been a lot of discussion of that incident since then in terms of CTE brain damage from his days on the field. But there were a couple of pieces written about Junior and his life in this this suicide before they really got into this CTE discussion. It was really about how difficult the time he had adjusting to life outside of the NFL, and he was trying various business ventures and opened up restaurants and how none of them are really satisfying and trying and he just could not let go of the game and and living his life is just a normal everyday citizen, you know, off off the football field, and the difficulties of doing so, and that created in of itself mental health issues for Junior. And I think that this is something that replicates itself many times over in a lot of a lot of circumstances UM And I don't want to discount the the impact of ct but I found Junior Sayo story particularly interesting, um and tragic. And there was a piece in Sports illustrated just after his death by a gentleman named Scott Tinley who was a former UM iron man triathlete, And obviously he doesn't iron man triathletes do not operate under the spotlight that NFL stars do, but Tinley accepted that, hey, it's very difficult to go from such from focused on competition and high performance your entire life to to finding other outlets for that in your life, and I've just always found it very fascinating the psychology behind that. In Tinley's piece, um he mentioned references andre Agassi. I finally began to realize what tennis great and philanthropist Andre Agassi meant when he said, in a way, professional sports can can keep people from becoming who they are. Major League Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr. Talked about how he designed his life after ten years before his last at bat. Speed skater Eric Hayden shared stories about sitting a little wooden classroom desk because he saw entrance to medical school with five Olympic gold medals in his backpack and some nineteen year old kid asking, dude, do I know you? Um? So, I think the point being, I mean, don't be trying to become just a normal, everyday person, even if you've had all that success and have community and love and financial independence, is very difficult. And you know, at first glance, like Tom going back onto the field, sure he's forty four, he's still operating at such a high level, and it seems like, okay, what's wrong with one more? Go? Around. But um, I do think it's interesting to consider, you know, the fact that he just took one look into the abyss of a life outside of professional sports and all that glory, and it scared the living shit out of him. And and I think that's a fascinating dynamic. Another one of these incidents that I found very interested was around around Mike Piazza, form baseball star Mike Piazza, who apparently went, you know, in his his kind of midlife crisis. Incident was documented in The Athletic with a piece called the Passion of Mike Piazza. The midlife crisis of a baseball Hall of Famer led to the demise of a hundred year old Italian soccer club. So apparently Mike piazzas of Italian heritage, he and his wife, after in his retirement, went ahead and bought a kind of second rate Italian soccer team called I Believe. Reggio Amelia was one of these small towns in Italy. The entire town is centered around the soccer team wasn't even a particularly successful soccer team, but Mike Piazza figured he and his wife can go run this organization, be heroes to the small Italian town, rise this team into the upper echelons of Italian soccer, and this would be a great way to spend the middle of his life. Didn't work out too well. It was an absolute disaster, and it was kind of defined by all this ubrisk, all this kind of arrogant thinking. His wife did not endear it was was put in charge of a lot of operations, did not endear herself to the citizens, the residents of the town. And I just I can remember the in the athletic piece, and you know, and and her even being very blunt and honest about, you know, trying to negotiate some of these situations with Piazza. That Piazza would always harken back to just the rush and the thrill that he got from succeeding on the baseball field, and that the feeling of hitting a home run with forty screaming fans around you was just irreplaceable. Here's actually how he describes it. I've never done cocaine, I've never done crystal meth. I've never done hard drugs or any drugs for that matter, besides aspirin. But let me tell you that was fucking intoxicating And and It's interesting we see this repeated itself quite often, and that that the eu brisk gained from that trying to you know, from having that buzz, and that success on the field leads to not such great judgment and decision making another aspects of one's life. Um, but I find this particularly interesting for vasional athletes trying to acclimate to off the field activities and trans trying to trying to find continuity in the principles and characteristics of what helped them succeed on the field that don't necessarily serve them so well off the field. So the Sayo incident very interesting in tragic Mike Piazza's not quite as heavy and with as much gravity hey him and his wife went. It just took a little embarrassment and infamy in a small town in Italy, but drifted off into the sun, setting onto other ventures. Another one which wasn't necessarily as directly about retirement, but which is a fascinating story about of an athlete struggling with the push and pull between you know, what they're doing within their competitive sport and off the field activities was one that I just found A captivating article about tiger woods called the secret history of Tiger Woods. This is from ESPN in two thousand and sixteen. If you got a half an hour this week, I highly recommend that you go ahead and read this. So, Uh, Tiger Woods was incredibly close with his father. I believe his mother had died young, as father was very active presence in his life. It was pushing him Uh in golf from age of about three years old, since he could grip a golf club. His father was a Navy seal. After his father died, Uh Tiger Woods became almost obsessed with Navy seals and went and actually I don't know if people know this, Tiger Woods during the late oss after his father died, was participating in Navy seal training with Navy seals on the weekends, right, So Tiger Woods would go train for golf Monday through Friday and then directly go on the weekend to a local military training facility with Navy seals and do everything that they were doing, carrying eighty pounds of equipment on his back. That's actually how he injured his knee, which led to the painkillers that he was on which led to his incident. Um and before Thanksgiving and I believe it was either two thousand nine or two thousand and ten with his wife attacking his car and him crashing his car and and all that controversy and his initial fall from grace, and since then he's done an incredible job of coming back from that. But I mean, it's just the psychology behind this is all fascinating. I don't want to even try to summarize it here, but the angst and of someone who had just been for his entire life focused on nothing but being greatest ever um in his craft, in his sport and the sport of golf tiger Woods, and then having to try to be a normal person and try to kind of feel normal emotions and participate off the course in this case, and it led to a lot of difficulties. So a fascinating story and just overall the notion of athletes who have a difficult time detaching from the sport and acclimating to normal life. I mean, hey, I don't want to I'm trying, not trying to be critical of Tom Brady. I just you can kind of see what's going on here. He much like Christopher in the episode of The Sopranos when he took one look at what his life would be like in witness protection at that And I know, you know this mafia thing. My I think I'm gonna stick with his mafia thing for a little while longer. Tom wants to stick with the NFL. On the field glory eighty thousand scream and cheering fans, and UM, I imagine by all means best of luck to Tom when he does decide to retire. But UM, I just found it very interesting that these athletes trying to stare at the detaching themselves from those those experiences, just can't let go and got to go back to the sport no matter what. But best of luck to Tom Brady either way. Okay, the conflict in the Ukraine. Big day today is President Zelinsky addressed Congress. I will get you the contents of that address and Congress's response in just a moment or two, But first let's try to sift through the fog afore to understand once again the military realities on the ground. UM. The Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Study, they came out with an interesting assessment today. UM here's how they started off in acknowledging that this has been a bit of a battle of information and knowledge. Thus far that can kind of distort what's going on on the ground, so they put it. The war in the Ukraine has been dominated by an effective and far reaching information campaign led by the Ukrainian state. The Ukrainian narrative is dominating both the news and social media cycles, which are now of equal importance in forming public opinion. The narrative is litting littered with broken Russian convoys, farmers triumphantly towing boutique Russian air defense systems away from their hiding places, and harrowing footage of Russian tank formations being destroyed. And once again, all all those visuals are accurate. Right. There have been logistical and operational failures by the Russians, and this all has been more difficult than they anticipated. Right, But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to loose. As the defense editor for The Economist relays it from the institute that I just mentioned, the Ukrainian forces opposite Danteska Luhansk at risk of encirclements on the eastern side of the Nippier to hold Kiev and other major cities at the cost of allowing the forces of the g FO to be encircled could prove disastrous. Okay, so it seems in that trying to hold on and defend Kiev, the Ukrainians have seated some of the northern and eastern territories to the Russians, and the Russians are making more of an advancement than people may believe. As Bill Roggio, a representative the Foundation of Defensive Democracies who I found, who has been a pretty credible source here. The most recent map illustrates many of the points made yesterday. However, I think it understates Russian advances. In the southeast. Ploy is p O l o h Y and the area around it is under Russian control. This shows how precarious the situation is. In the northern part of the East. Russian troops of bypassed Kharkivan are pushing into Easium, where there's fighting inside the town. As Rossio puts it, Kiva is no doubt a strategic objective of the Russians, but it isn't the only strategic objective. Taking eastern Ukraine in the Black Sea as off coastal areas is also of high importance to the Russians. The Russian assault of Kiev is tying up a large number of Ukrainian troops, which is enabling Russian operations on the other fronts. Okay, so as we've seen, as some Oboria who appeared on my podcast a couple of weeks ago had predicted, Listen, the Russians may not accomplish all their objectives. They may not take down Kiev and overthrow the government, they may still accomplish any number of other objectives. And it appears that that's what's going on with the Ukrainians kind of digging in for Kiev and the Russians making advancements otherwise. Okay, so where does that leave us and the Americans involvement UM, NATO's involvement, and the conversation today UM with President Zelinski addressing Congress. So a lot has been made over on social media at least, but the commentators trying, you know, people on one side lining up believing that Zelinski is this heroic, courageous figure who has stayed in the Ukraine and fought and led his people admirably, and a lot of people who seemed to be more critical of him because in him making overtures or trying to persuade the United States and NATO to get involved, believe that he is selfishly putting the United States and and NATO at risk. And the way I see it is, I don't fault Zelinsky whatsoever for trying to convince the United States that's in his interest for the West to get more involved and to come to the Ukraine's aid. I can't. It's not a matter of him being response. It's not his responsibility to keep the U s out of the war. It's not gonna say, listen, guys, don't come to our aid, don't help us out. You know something, We're completely outmanned, and I don't want you instituting a no fly zone or sending US weapons because that might put the you guys at risk of this uh of Russia counter attack and the war breaking out. More broadly, like, that's not Zelinsky's job. Okay, that's the job of American politicians. It should be people in the West who are taking a more measured and judicious look to this war and trying to keep US out of broader involvement. Noem Blum, who's one of another really good online commentator. Um. He responded to Congressman Adam Kinziger, who I'm not much of a fan of making a strong case for a no fly zone, and a lot of people reacting that Kissinger and Zalinski are one and the same in both being really irresponsible about trying to go the United States deeper into the war. As Blum puts it, here's the difference. Zalinsky calling for a no fly zone is not irresponsible. Adam Kissinger, You're calling for a no fly zone is irresponsible because Kissinger is in a position to make a less emotional decision. If the family of someone who is wrongfully killed by cops in a no knock raid said everyone should get life in prison, we shouldn't resent them for it, but we also can't oblige them, because that's not how it works. Same here. Sometimes they really need it isn't enough, And the point being, you can't expect people who have skin in the game, whose life and whose well being as at stake, to think the same way as sober people, as the kind of sober neutral thinking that we need to have if we're a sovereign nation thinking about getting involved in the military affairs of a distant land. And that's what the United States is faced with here. So there's been a lot of conversation back and forth about the prospects of a no fly zone, I myself from completely against it because I think people have to acknowledge that, yes, that will be tantamount to a declaration of war. The once you have a no fly zone, you have to enforce it, and that means almost inevitably a Russian plane is going to get shot down. And if a Russian plane gets shot down by Western forces, NATO forces, the US, is it a hundred percent certain that Vladimir Putin is going to use tactical nuclear weapons in response. No, but you can imagine that with his back up against the wall, he's going to take some action. And this simply doesn't serve our strategic purposes. And we have to balance out our humanitarian concerns and empathy for the Ukrainians as the underdog and and as the attack nation with just that sober judicious thinking and understanding that that we don't need it does not serve our interest. We have to think of our interests and our citizens and soldiers first in deciding which military confrontations we want to get into. There was an interesting counterpoint made by Shaddi Hamid, who's usually someone who is a little more hesitant about military confrontation and involvement. But he says, listen, we can't necessarily take a no fly zone off the table. It's one of strategic bargaining chips um, as he puts it. Observing the debate of the Ukraine War on what to do about it, one thing has confused me above all else. For all the talk about no fly zones, most of the talk has been about why no fly zones are bad and dangerous, with the implication that perhaps even discussing the idea idea publicly and treating it is something that could be done, is its own sort of escalation. This instant can lead to what political sciences sometimes call as escalatory aversion, to find as a bias in which careful way of multiple risks has been abandoned in favor of avoiding a single case, worst case outcome. So he says, yes, clearly, war with Russia and a nuclear confrontation is a single worst case outcome. But it's not an automatic, It's not an inevitability by any just as a result of any escalation whatsoever, as he goes on. In effect, this escalatory a version has led the United States to make preemptive concessions to Vladimir Putin, seating the initiative to him. In the process, the U S and NATO have made themselves hostages to Russian threats. We have rendered ourselves so afraid of provoking Putin without asking whether Putin himself is or should be afraid of provoking the United States. There's a fundamental imbalance. And how we talk about this, okay, fair enough, I understand that I'm very much opposed to any escalation, any involvement. I think that the United States over the past twenty years has been far too hawkish and far too flippant and reckless in its use of military authority and thinking that we can simply mold the world as we wish with little consequence, and slowly but surely over the past two decades have eroded both our hard power and our soft power and credibility, and that for all all our empathy, for all that we we wish the best for the Ukrainian people, this was this is, to a certain extent, a regionalized, localized ethnic dispute about borders, and it does not does not really involve us and in the encroachment of NATO and trying to wrap more of the countries in that region entire sphere of influence was probably a bad idea in the first place, and in something that is really more of a relic of the mid to late nineties when we were such an overpowering global hegemonic power that we could do whatever we wanted. Well, we've frittered away those conditions and that leading that power, and we have to accept our limitations now. So given that those circumstances, I'm heavily against any sort of no fly zone, um even to a certain extent, arming the Ukraine. I was against even considering their uh them joining NATO and even considering joining the EU and understanding that, hey, for for better for worse, we have to accept that there is a a threatening country that does have military capabilities in that region that does not want that to happen, and we have to acknowledge those realities and the strategic risks that come along with opposing that. But you know how, it makes an interesting point here that we still need to be able to bargain and that keeping the prospects of a no fly zone in our back pocket, I mean we we do, you know, And in showing that the Russian military hasn't been quite as even if they're still making headway and are probably going to achieve any number of their objectives in the long run, they've shown themselves to be less powerful and intimidating and effective as we had anticipated, and they should be more scared of us than we are of them. And I see a point there. It's a worthy debate. I like that someone has put forth this idea, but at the end of the day, I'm I'm sticking with my original position that no flaw zone is not something that we should even consider, and this is more of a regionalized dispute that does have humanitarian concerns. We all have an instinct to gravitate to the side, to the side of the underdog. And yes, I mean Putin is clearly the aggressor here, but this for better force is none of it, not none of our business, but very little of our business. Okay, So then moving on once again, not blaming President Zelinsky for trying to convince us to get involved, because that is in his best interests. And I don't blame much like I do not blame. To a certain extent, I can accept the objectivity of an a moral actor in Vladimir Putin acting in his interest. I understand them a moral neutral actions of Vladimir, of Vladimir Zelinsky in trying to protect his country's interest. So today in his address to Congress, yes, it was very flowery. He's, of course an incredibly effective communicator, and appeal to our best instincts and our and our reaction to have been being attacked on September eleven at Pearl Harbor. And listen, I from a rhetorical perspective, these are worthwhile rhetorical devices. I don't blame him for using it and advocating for a no fly zone, luckily, and I believe listen, when you're right, you're right. And I'm going to give Joe Biden credit. Um taking a no fly zone off the table and doing so publicly, I think was the right thing to do. So what did Congress do in response? We're deciding to arm the Ukrainians. So here's the eight hundred million dollars in military equipment. President Biden just announced the U S will provide to the Ukraine eight hundred Stinger anti aircraft missiles, two thousand Javlin a thousand light anti armor weapons in six thousand, eighty four anti armor systems, a hundred tactical unmanned aerial systems, a hundred grenade launchers, sets of body armor and helmets. Okay, So we're providing UM surface to air anti aircraft missiles, responsive technology, and protective weapons, and we're helping arm the Ukraine. Okay, So are we being wrong here and kind of trying to be half pregnant and getting involved to a certain extent but not really taking any uh really tangible steps that we could to protect the Ukrainians. Um. You know, I think we're I'm actually okay with these half measures. We're giving the Ukrainians the ability to defend themselves without putting our own troops, without actually taking any any household action ourselves. UM. So you know, given the available given the available alternatives, I think this is one that I can live with. Um Zelinsky sim as I've mentioned before, is going to continue to advocate for further involvement by the US, but we'll have to see. From what I've gathered, there are active tangible settlement negotiations UM going on right now, and I can't say that we'd be too surprised if some sort of ceasefire is negotiated within the next week or two. Um. So, sticking with Zelinski here for a second, because this guy, he's obviously become a worldwide hero, at least in the West as of recent with his response. And you know what seems to be a very courageous act as a head of state in protecting and standing by his people. All Right, what else is going on the world right now? Everything seems to be a ramification of the Russia Ukraine conflict and another troubling development this week that kind of speaks to the precarious strategic position that the United States is in and how we may not be able to simply operate as we wish, when we wish, how we wish. In the Wall Street Journal, Saudi Arabia considers accepting the Chinese you on instead of dollars for Chinese oil sales. Um the captain reading talks between Riad and Beijing have accelerated as the Saudi unhappiness grows with Washington. Okay, so the story goes like this. The United States and Saudi Arabia have had a unique special relationship for decades, with the United States providing strategic and strategic support and military support for a long time in exchange for cheap Saudi Arabian oil, and look past any number of wrongdoings and bad acts, um, and just kind of differences in governing philosophy with the Saudi Arabian royal family. It all hasn't really mattered. Um. Everyone remembers in the first call for Saudi Arabia even provided the state Agian grounds um for American forces in the Gulf. And they've been a key ally of ours for years. UM. Obviously they've been a an enemy of our other strategic ally in the region, Israel, but that even seems to have been thawing over the of the last few years. And you know, say what you want about him, but Donald Trump did seem to cultivate warm relations with Saudi Arabia and break some of the thought and thought some of the relationship between the Israelis and the Saudi Arabians, with Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with with Israel much both as a counter measure to Iran and Iran's growing influence in the region, Iran being a predominantly Shia Muslim nation, Saudi Arabia in contrast, being the leading Sunni Arab nation in the region. UM. So things have been going very well. There was a kind of reformist up and coming young leader in Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman UM, and he seemed to be wanting to westernize the economy, UM invest in American domestic startups, and the Trump administration seemed once again look asked a lot of other faults with the Saudi Arabians and their governing class in exchange for that and realizing, hey, these are a strategic partner of ours, that that it it serves our interest to be in their good graces and have a positive, clean relationship, even if they don't have the same view towards human rights as we necessarily do. Well, the Biden administration has not been warmed to Saudi Arabia. UM. The Biden administration has been very vocal in calling Saudi Arabia even a rogue state. For um, the death for the murder uh in two thousand and eighteen of American journalists Jamal Kashogi, and it's been rumored that Mohammed been Salmon was behind that killing and ordered it, and UM, the Biden administration is not apt to look the other way and let the Saudis off the hook um. However, look what happens in in return? So look what happens in response. Saudi Arabia is in active talks with Beijing to price some of its oil sales to China in Yuan. The talx with China over you want priced oil contracts have been off and on for six years, but have accelerated this year is the Saudi's have grown increasingly unhappy with the decades old U s security commitments to defend the kingdom. The Saudis are angry over the US's lack of support for their intervention in the Yemen Civil War and the Biden administration's attempt to strike a deal with Iran. China buys more than of the oil that Saudi Arabia exports. If priced and U on those sales would boost the standing of China's currency. The Saudis are also considering including you on denominated future contracts known as the petro U want in the pricing of the Saudi Arabian Oil co O known as ARAMCO. It would be a profound shift for Saudi Arabia to price even some of it's roughly six point two million barrels of a day of crude exports and anything other than dollars. The majority of global oil sales, around eight percent, are done in dollars, and so I mean this would be a very this would be very negative for the strength of the American dollar. I mean, it's kind of key to American strategic interest that the dollar remained the world's global reserve currency. And because that means we can just keep on printing more of it, that people will always lend to us, that we can always borrow, and this keeps the American economy going. But now with the with our relationship souring with the Saudi Arabians and Chinese as actually Chinese demand and economic might increasing, I mean this puts us at this we now have some competition here. As the Wall Street Journal puts it, China's oil imports have swelled over the past three decades in line with it It's expanding economy. Saudi Arabia was Chinese top crude oil supply in two thousand twenty one, As a Saudi official mentions, the dynamics have dramatically changed. The u S relationship with the Saudia's has changed, and China's the world's biggest crude oil importer and they're now now offering many lucrative incentives to the Kingdom An economists got looked puts it at the risk of the United States. Here, the oil market and by extension, the entire global commodities market is the insurance policy of the status of dollar as reverse as reserve currency. If that block is taken out of the wall, the wall will begin to collapse. So we want as much international business transacted in dollars as possible. Okay, we need to keep the Saudis in our good graces. This has been a really beneficial allive to us for a long time, and I don't see the point in in selling this relationship. And you know, obviously the the murder of Jamal Kashogi is something that needs to be looked into. But we cannot ruin We cannot essentially Kneecap and Hatchett a relationship with the strategic ally who's key to our interests in the region and are are essentially entire energy policy um over some human rights violations. This is the kind of magical thinking is getting keeps us getting into a lot of sticky scenarios, and that while we would like to be able to, you know, order the world as we see it, judging by our principles and our values, and make making sure that all of our allies and countries that we are in strategic alliance with share and reflect those values. That's simply not how it works, right. And the more that we we are so used to being the only game in town that we are really missing the boat and have a blind spot that these countries that you know are that have a lot of resources that we need can start looking to China to fill the demand. They don't have to look to the United States to supply all for all their dollars. Like they can sell to other people, they can sell to China. And this is a problem. So who knows. The decision has not been finalized yet. We can't necessarily say that they're at the Saudi Arabians are going to start accepting the UN for some of their oil trade. But even the prospects of this this is now a a possibility that was not even considered up until very recently. And I think the Biden administration needs to look towards repairing our relationship with the Saudis, Um and UH and we've benefited from it a lot. It has been mutually very prosperous and it should continue to be so. And to throw that all away for you know, some minor human rights violations, I think is just not smart in any way, shape or form. In that vein, the Biden administration is trying to revive the the Iran Deal otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action j c p o A UM. That is also exposing some of our strategic weaknesses here. So in reviving that deal, the new Iran Agreement would let Russia cash in about ten billion dollars of contracts to build nuclear sights. So the the Iran Deal was entered into in two thousand and fifteen, we were at a different stage of our relationship with Russia, and we understood that Iran and Russia have a strategic relationship UM. And you know, they're very much supportive of each other. Russia is very supportive of Syria, Iran, and the Shia Muslim countries in the Middle East. So okay, in order, in Barack Obama's perspective, was in order to put the Middle East on solid footing UM. And that you know, the the Iran has agreed not to uh produce nuclear weapons. But we you know, essentially we have to ensure their economic prosperity in return. We can discuss the wisdom of that decision and the Iran deal another time, but one of the pieces of that deal is that Russia would get to supply Iran with a lot of nuclear sites and other resources and uh there would be an open line of trade between Russia and Iran. And so in reviving the j c p o A, we have to revive that deal too, and it runs completely contrary to the economic squeeze that we're trying to put on Russia in response to the Ukrainian invasion. UM, as the Washington Free Beacon puts it, roast Um, Russia's leading energy company, as a ten billion dollar contract with Iran's Atomic Energy Organization to expand tohrons, boucher and nucle your plant. Russia and the Biden administration confirmed on Tuesday that the new nuclear agreement includes carve outs that will wave sanctions on both countries so that Russia can make good on it on this contract. So listen to this. We're sanctioning the hell out of Russia right now in order to put the squeeze on them and make them an international pariah because of the Ukrainian invasion. Simultaneously, we're releasing those sanctions selectively within the scope of the the Iran Deal to revive the Iran Deal and allow Russia to freely trade with Iran and essentially receive ten billion dollars UM in contracts to build nuclear sights that what's supposedly um not for building nuclear weapons nuclear sights in in Iran. I mean, does this make any sense whatsoever? Is there any strong strategic consistency or cohesion, Like we're simultaneously trying to squeeze out this country and making a complete enemy of them, and putting our access to their oil and their gas and their resources at risk um and making them, you know, an outright enemy, and simultaneously allowing them to Osbourne get ten billion dollars through business with Irant through a deal that we did not have to revive. I mean, once again, we can separately discuss the wisdom of reviving the Iran Deal, but if you're trying to load, if you're trying to line up the pros and cons, costs and benefits, it's clearly a con that we then have to selectively release the sanctions on a country we're trying to sanction through other through other means, Like this is not that if you're looking at this from a purely neutral perspective, this does not seem like shrewd behavior. But yet the Biden administration seems to have no content and no qualms about it whatsoever. State Department spokesperson Ned Price says, we, of course would not sanction Russia participation in nuclear projects that are they're part of resuming full implementation of the j c o P, adding that additions were made to the text of the Future Agreement of Restoration to ensure that all the j c p o A related projects, especially the Russian participation, as well as the Boucher and nuclear plant, are protected from negative impact of anti Russian restrictions. Like we're completely defanging our our sanctions and our economic warfare on Russia, so we're come completely uh, we're making an enemy of them, We're putting access, We're sending global oil and gas markets into complete upheaval for stuff that's not even gonna have an impact because we can enforce the sanctions across the board, because we're we're allowing them to operate outside the scope of the sanctions to revive the Irand Deal. I mean, this is just an absolute mess that does this Does this seem taking the two stories I just mentioned in tandem with each other, does this seem like shrewd strategic behavior? It sounds pretty nonsensical and all for what to serve these vague notions of of our humanitarian principles and that you know, this ethnic uh, this ethnic warfare in Eastern Europe between Russia and the Ukraine, that you know that is just such clear morality as one country attacking another, that we have to kind of cut our nose despite our face and and and making decisions against our strategic interest in support of the Ukraine. Uh, similarly to do so in order to revive the irand deal, Like, are are the benefits here really outweighing the costs? I don't think any of this is true strategic behavior whatsoever. And it seems to be, Uh, this seems to be all falling to the wayside in the background. Nobody is focusing on this, and everyone is just enamored with our supposed, you know, support of the Ukraine and us being on the right moral side of that situation. And um, I don't think it's so clear and while the Baden administration has been able to revive Joe Biden's approval ratings which were in the tank, we've gone up a little bit recently. Seems like he's performed generally admirably or at least above what we're pretty low expectations going into this Russia situation. But I mean, are we sure? Are we got not going to look at the look back on this in a year or two and see that this was a complete strategic disaster. And just because we were able to hold together a bit of a Western alliance in response to Russian aggression, that that means that this is really turning out to be a net plus for the United States. It seems like a lose loose We're putting ourselves in a variety of lose lose situations. We're losing on on the value of our currency, we're losing on access to re sources, and we're losing on trying to enact economic warfare and restrictions um in order to get our way on an enemy country. And the more you're looking at it, the more you're seeing that the United States doesn't have as many cards to play as we would like to believe. Um, it's somewhat troubling and somewhat disconcerning. So um, we'll be tracking all of this. Who knows, it could just be all uh this, this could all be smoke with Saudi Arabia threatening US on the taking payments for oil in the Yuan. But it's clearly it's clear that our relationship with them is not looking particularly bright right now. I'd certainly rather be allowed with Saudi Arabia than be cow tewing and being serving the interests of Iran in that region right now. So the Biden administration seems like a mess internationally. Um, some of this will rise to the surface over time, as as the Ukraine Russia conflict recedes into the background and everybody be aware of it. Our ongoing study of institutions overreacting to people yapping on social media. Okay, this week it is daylight savings time. We pushed the clocks forward an hour. This week, everybody lost an hour of sleep in response an outcry on social media. Oh my god, I hate daylight savings time. Blah blah blah blah blah. Well, the US Senate seems pretty reactive to social media. On Tuesday, they consented to keeping the clocks on daylight savings all year long. So this means the sun will rise later, will set later. Later, we will not have that early sun sunset in the winter months. Um. And first glance, everyone thinks, oh, this is such a great idea. People have been advocating for this for a while. Um. As it turns out, I'm not sure everybody thought this through. Turns out that we actually tried this experiment before January nine, seventy four, the U S entered what was supposed to be a two year experiment with permanent daylight savings time. Unfortunately, daylight saving time daylight savings time does not add daylight to the day, It only shifts the daylight into the afternoon from the morning. Once people realize that the daylight savings time in January means doing everything in the dark in the morning, they hated it. There was a mass outcry to repeal the law, which Congress did later that year. The vote margin for the repeal in the House of Representatives was three hundred and eighty three to sixteen. Once again, that is three hundred and eighty three to sixteen in August seventy four. Okay, so we already tried this once. It didn't work out well. People did not like it because once again, you can't increase the amount of time the sun is out that the way that the Earth tilts on its access access does not change. All you're doing is dragging more sunlight into the afternoon and early evening at the expense of sunlight in the morning. And apparently the our last go around with this did not go very well. It lasted less than a year. Let's look at the implications of this, um Josh Borrow is what I just read was from Josh Burrows piece. Um. You know. His piece was titled actually changing the clocks as good Listen, it's a bit of a pain in the asked to change the clocks. But look now, with permanent daylight savings time and this is when the sun is going to rise in various cities. Um uh. In America, in Salt Lake City, the sun will rise at eight fifty one Boise, Idaho, nine eighteen. Bismarck, North Dakota at the sun is going to rise at nine Okay, that's the latest. So there's a lot of pretty much most of the u s at least the northern half is going to be taking their kids to school, and they're gonna be spending the morning hours of the day in darkness nearly the entire year. I'm not so sure that's the best idea. Is that really what what's gonna accentuate and optimize human happiness? And I think this was a complete misinterpretation because a lot of people. The polls are showing that people just don't like having to shift the clock, shift the time right. They don't like having to change the clock. Nobody really pulled whether people had more of a problem with the spring forward or the fall back right. So there's just as many people who might have wanted to maintain standard time, where the sun rises a little bit earlier and sets a little bit earlier. So so this doesn't I'm not really sure what the Senate, what tea leaves, or what constituency they were trying to play off in uh in making this decision. You know who else tried to standard I tried to set daylight savings time permanently. Vladimir Putin, as it turns out, believe it or not, two thousand eleven to two fourteen Vladimir Putin. And as Josh Borrow puts, it is sometimes minion Dmitry Medvedev. We're able to impose the apparently preferred policy of the entire United States Senate on Russia for about three years, outlasting the single winter that the Nixon and Ford administrations managed within our democratic system. But even Putin repealed this change under pressure from a groggy public that was sick of getting up in the dark, changing instead to permanent standard time. Uh So, we societies have experimented with this book before. They've seen what it's like for the sun to be rising pretty late and for everybody to be spending a bit of their their wake up hours the morning hours in darkness. Everybody seems to think it's a great idea that that that feeling of of extended daylight, Um, you know, enjoying a nice later sunset and during having a nice happy hour drink with the sun still out into the spring and summer, that we want that feeling all all year long. Well, maybe the system we had in place made sense. Maybe while a bit of a pain in the ass, and you know, it's kind of discombobulating and disorienting for a week or so around the times that the clock changes, that there was a reason for that, right, because of the way that the Earth has tilted on its access and it's and expends that it made sense to to kind of optimize uh, the sunlight for the later day sunlight for the spring and summer and optimized morning sunlight for the fall and winter. Maybe there was actually some thought put behind it. And despite the minor inconveniences in trying to change the clocks that you know, we should have stuck with that system. I'm betting that this is going to turn out the same way that our experiment with it turned out previously. And then within a year two everybody's gonna be biting and moaning to change it back, and we're gonna have to repeal this, and it's gonna be yet another in the litany the graveyard of stupid social media antics, where otherwise serious institutions overreacted to people yappen on social media and made decisions that don't serve anybody's interests. But either way, I guess the only time will tell you. Yet again. In the meantime, everybody, enjoy your extended sunlight. Um and once again coming up shortly, the author of Vodka Hookers and the Russian Mafia, My Life in Moscow. Dr Joe Serrio uh an incredibly smart and informed guy. He is going to give us a full, in depth, first hand account of the Russian region of the history leading up to Vladimir Putin's rise and then the Vladimir Putin rain in Russia. UM, and all the dynamics and elements that have gone into the conflict with the Ukraine. And you know, his a relay of the inside information that he's getting from high ranking people on the ground in Russian the Ukraine as to where this conflict is headed. UM. A great discussion. I hope you stick around for it, everybody. This is the prevailing narrative, and we'll have more of the prevailing narrative after the break. Hey, everybody. So, I'm Matt Bolinski, and the the eyes of the world right now are on Russia and Eastern Europe. UM. And a man who has been uh In that was in that region for really really critical period at the end of the so the collapse of the Soviet Union and kind of into the nineties, and understands the area better than anyone I'm with today, Dr Joe Serrio. He was the only Aerican to work in the Organized crime Control Department of the Soviet National Police the m v D, and conducted groundbreaking research on Soviet organized crime in the nineties. Joe, thanks so much for joining us here today. Thank you man. So you described the Soviet Union as a kaleidoscope with patterns endlessly turning, endlessly shifting to the point where it's difficult to tell what's real and how the picture will change. Um, what brought a young man to such a society? Um, you know in your earlier days and your I believed during your college days. Yeah, none of it was a conscious decision. So when I was a sophomore in college, I opened up the course catalog, I shut my eyes, I twirled my finger in the air, and I slammed it down on the page and it landed on a class called who are the Soviets? And I took it because I had no idea what I was doing with my life. And I said, you know why not? It was it was Soviet culture, history, literature, politics, everything except language. And then that summer after the semester, my father said, my father was an immigrant from Sicily. He said, if you want to have any chance of unders standing these people, you better start studying the Russian language right now, because that's the gateway, you know, and I did, I was I was too stupid to understand that that was gonna be really hard. So I jumped in and I just got obsessed with it. So you still found yourself in the Soviet Union while this was still a communist country, the Iron Curtain, and for the most part, it's pretty difficult for Westerners to access to to even get access to this region, and how technically, what were you there for. So the first time and I went with six so Gorba Chad was in power less than a year. It was still Soviet. We were still foreigners, and people would look at us and stare at us on the street because our clothes look different, and you know what, even our gate looked different, even our eyes look different. We carried ourselves differently. So I went for three weeks for a tour, and then in nine seven I went for six months and studied at a Russian language school, and that just started opening up all of the realities. And as I went through year after year, you go from tourists, Okay, you're on a bus a lot, you go to school. Now you're out on the street a little bit more and that ended up leading to an internship long story short, an internship in the Soviet Police. So I just had all these different pieces of the kaleidoscope, right, so I had different vantage points to look at Russia from. After the tour in eighty six and the language in eight seven, I went to the University of Illinois, Chicago, got my master's degree in criminal justice, and I worked for a guy who had been a cop in New York City, a detective at the NYPD, and I wanted to set up exchange programs and you know, cross cultural programs for cops around the world. And he said, look, I don't have any contexts in Russia. I know Russia is your thing, but I'll send you to China for six months. So he sent me to China, and then by he started developing the contexts in Russia. And he's said, you know what, You're gonna go to Moscow for a year and work inside the organized Crime Control Department of the Soviet National Police because you're the only one they allowed you access to this. I mean, this is still it was Russia. The Soviet Union was reformist at this time. Glass Noos in Paris Stryker, but I had to. The Cold War was still raging. They weren't suspicious of an American. Well, they definitely were suspicious. There were some people who were suspicious. The supervisor I ended up having inside the Organized Crime Control Department came to me one day and said, listen, that guy you've been hanging out with, who you think works in the m v D works for the police. He's really KGB, so be careful. Like it was a lot of that, But the thing was, these guys were cops. The guys who came to Chicago were cops, and they said, look, our Russian mafia problem is going to be your Russian mafia problem. So let's figure this out. And they said, you know what, We'll have this kid come in and he'll he'll study and figure us out and do that. Can you tell you can break down the distinction between the m v D and the KGB. Yeah. So the m v D is the Russian initials for the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the KGB is state security. So essentially, the m v D are the cops the KGB of the spies. If you put it in very simple terms, the m v D was the red headed step child of the KGB. The KGB got the best resources, they had the best equipment right for for surveillance and all that kind of thing, and the m v D got this table scraps. Uh. No love loss between those two agencies. I imagine, not imagine not. So there you are um end of the end of the Soviet Unions coming, you have access to Soviet police forces. You're becoming you're essentially infiltrating the the criminal justice to the extent that there is criminal justice infrastructure in Moscow and the Soviet Union. Where does your story go from there? So, when I was working in the Organized Crime Control Department, the director would bring me stacks of intel and documents and say, look, we want you to know what's happening in this country. And what was happening in the country was crazy. It was bombings and kidnappings and hijackings and all kinds of things going on. I finished up that period, went back to Chicago, finished my master's degree, and then, in one of the few brave moments of my life up until that point, I decided just to throw everything to the side and moved to Moscow. So I moved to Russia on my own. I set up my own consulting company. I did that for a couple of years, working with American and Europeans, this post Soviet so the internship was so the union collapse at the end of and then I moved back over there in July. Worked for two years on my own and then I got picked up by Coral Associates, which is a global corporate investigation business intelligence leader, top in the world at that time, so I was a consultant to them. Two years after consulting with them, I became the director of their Moscow office, and essentially that meant keeping our American and European company Aliens out of trouble in Russia. And when they got into trouble, my job was to make that trouble go away. And once in a while it would be organized crime groups banging down the door of our client and I had to pull whatever lever that I had access to to make that threat go away. And sometimes the level would be a colonel in the KGB or a general in the m v D or Moscow City Police. Moscow City Police had a great reputation and no gangsters wanted to mess with them, so we would pull the level we had to pull to make the problem go away. And so to set the picture here, this is kind of the the the Soviet Union has collapsed. Were the you have a massive society that's switching from a controlled centralized government with state ownership overall assets to privatization of those assets. And pretty much this was a fierce struggle over the spoils of of all these resources from the Soviet Union and a determination of who gets those resources. And it seemed to be pretty helpful if you had access or contacts in the government, and that even while it was supposed to be liberalizing and democratizing, that it really was still kind of crony is m and gangsterism in that whoever had the most guns, and there was kind of a melding of organized crime forces and local law enforcement um local law enforcement and that essentially in Russia, these are the elements of which people are using to battle over the spoils. Taking the spoils of the Soviet Union. Yeah, it was a free for all. It was a free for all with a K forty seven's hand grenades, grenade launchers, and contacts. So if you had friends in the KGB or m v D or the highest level of government. Now you could get access. You could get access to everything that was up for grabs. And here's the thing, everything was up for everything was up you would have you know, we say the word mafia. What do you think about Italian Americans whatever? You know, the New York City situation, all that they had their mafia. They had the hotel mafia, they had the furniture mafia, they had the automobile mafia. They had everything. Why the entire system collapsed. It left a massive vacuum at the time when there was a thousand percent, two thousand percent, three thousand cent inflation. What are you gonna do in a case like that, the status collapsed, subsidies have gone away, you might have lost your job if nothing else. You can't keep up with the rate of inflation. So you know what, joining a gang not the worst idea in the world. And that's what That's what happened. So for years, you know, for me, in my apartment, for example, you can hear gunfire pretty regular basis because everything was being contended over right, and you'd have one gang against another gang. You'd have the Russians against the Chechens, against the Armenians against the arts of Bijans, and you would also have at the same time Russians against Russians against Russians, and everybody was vying for a piece of the pie, and the pie was huge. And I think I want people to understand that we think of the American mafia as controlling certain vice oriented industries, um, prostitution, gambling, maybe a little bit in hospitality, things like that. No, we're talking about think about if the mafia, the five Family mafia families were battling over who gets to own all the mineral minds in the nation, or oil companies or media, or who gets to supply the entire nation with cars? Was every core industry was up for grabs. Yeah, and if you put on top of that the idea that the mafia mentality was not just the gangsters, right, the state had a mafia mentality. I was walking across Red Square one day and a friend said to me, we were talking about mafia. And my friend said to me, of course, that's where the real mafia lives. And he points to the Kremlin and he wasn't just being cute. In the nineteen eighties and nine nineties, there's this thing called the cotton Scandal, the cotton in Uzbekistan a right. To make a long story short, the Uzbek government, together with the Soviet government, was controlling the cotton market. That sounds innocuous, but what was connect to to it was death, murder, torture, embezzlement, kidnapping. You know, you all the all the telltale signs of the mafia. Right, So when people said mafia, they weren't necessarily being flippant or cute. They really meant mafia in terms of really deep interconnected relationships backed by power, political power and physical power. So it becomes no real stretching the imagination when you know that someone like Vladimir Putin is very good friends and partners with traditional underworld mafia gangster bosses, and that's been going on for decades. So this world, like you said earlier, right, the great word is melded. It's all become, uh you, you can't extract the various parties. They're so interconnected and they're so identified with each other, and they are useful to each other. Of course, that's why their partners. Otherwise it wouldn't it in your book, just to reinforce ruling structures. You know, it ended up there's kind of there's continuity amongst the ruling class and who the powerful parties were from the communist system into the early days of so called democratic system and liberalized system. Right, And when you move into that space you were talking about, it's like, okay, who has power over property, who has power over decision making? Who has access to all these things? Coal, gas, oil, diamonds. Russia is People don't seem to understand this. Russia is filled with all the world's medals, minerals, resources, and all of that stuff was up for grabs. So you have the situation where the person that can be the most powerful to get the access and who's that. That's Communist party members at the at the top, that's KGB, that's the intelligence agencies, Military intelligence KGB, m v D, the security services. That's people that with an entrepreneurial spirit. All of a sudden, we see twenty year olds who just popped up as leading an industry and they had ten million or fifty million or a hundred million dollars. Like, wait a second, scratch the surface and find out who stands behind that kid, Because this kid did not do it by himself, and he didn't build, you know, work, himself up, lift himself up by his bootstraps. He had a hell of a lot of help, and whoever was helping him out probably had a few machine guns with him. Huh. They had machine guns that they had the power of the pen right, so we could change laws, we can legislation rights and and u licenses. That was also there was a gentleman named Anatoly shoe Bags who was the first Deputy Prime Minister Um. He seems to have played a pretty integral role in all of this, along with the Harvard Institute for International Development and essentially you know, that's kind of termed the Harvard Boys, where after a shocked therapy economic there's a program was called shock therapy. You Gore Geddarum was kind of the first you know that the Soviet the post Soviet economy was put in the hands of you cor Gadar. It was heavy, uh shock liberalization. Everything was privatized, not smoothed out and kind of done in an orderly process. And that led to, as you mentioned before, insane inflation um and just kind of chaos and these assets floating around and you know, essentially people trying to step into the void via machine gun. Then you know, Gadar falls into infamy and he's replaced by anatotally Shubay And from what i've Shube is supposed to come and and clean up this situation, right and conduct a more valid, orderly um allocation of state assets, right. But it turns out he was just as corrupt as everybody else, and a lot of a lot of the oligarchs will appear to have attained their wealth and their access to these You know, you spent up a gas prom It's like, oh, then that essentially nationalist or oil company was like, well, someone had to someone had to authorize, someone had to gift you that company, right, And it appears that access to Shubai seems to have been the path to wealth and Russia in the nineties. So there's one thing that we have to make super clear, and that is somebody like Anatoly Tobias or Guy Dar or any of the people at the top, they were not trying to build democracy. They were in the fight for their lives over resources and access. So I saw a journalist and American journalist on television one day, asked the guests, so is Anatolely Tobias corrupt? The Diego guy dot corrupt? You know, is Baris Yelton corrupt? It's the wrong question because corruption, as they see it, is the oil that greases the machinery. Right, you don't do things without corruption as we would look at it, because Russia is not based on laws, It's based on relationships. It's always been that way, it will likely always be that way when you think about democracy. I was a media consultant in Russia. I worked with New York Times, CNN, BBC, Washington Post while I was also doing the security work. And I went to this interview one day with a corresponding from the New York Times, and they had the conversation, and then I read the article that came out on the paper and said, that's not quite what happened in that interview. And by the way, you're gushing about democracy arriving in Russia. Democracy and never arrived in Russia. And I don't care about the elections or elections people call them free elections. My personal belief is that there's never been a free election in the Soviet Union, in the post Soviet Union, this is not a democratic space. In their roots as people, they have tried mentality, and you better connect yourself to a group that can protect you, because if you have protection, and you have access, and you have relationships, then you can get what you need. If you don't, you're going to die, either metaphorically or physically, if you don't have someone protecting you and watching your back. I had people protecting me when I when I was in the organized crowd control department. I had Pete that looked out for me. I had people that warned me about things. I had people who told me stay away from these people. They don't have your best interests involved. I had people who filled my refrigerator when there was no food in the stores. So if you're a Russian and you don't have contacts and relationships and access to a network, what are you going to do when there is no food on the store shelves? And guess what's happening right now again in Russia. In the last three weeks, the banks of closing because of sanctions, The stores are emptying out, Western businesses have left, Unemployment is skyrocketing, the prices have doubled, if not more already in the last two weeks, and Russians now are going to do what they've always done for a thousand years. They're going to rely on and resort to their relationships and their survival techniques because right now the country's being closed down. They're shutting off social media, they're shutting off flights and shutting off all kinds of things. Russians have seen this before. They've seen it before countless times. I'm reminded of a comment that a friend of mine made. A friend of mine was the head of Interpol for Russia, and in the nineties he said to me, the West is all freaking out over what's happening in Russia. We've always been this way. The only thing is that now you're finding out. And again I think that's what's happening now. To some extent, the West is shocked on some level because we're seeing it in real time, twenty four hours a day. And what's happening is what's always happened in Russia. And the circumstances that might lead to complete civilization collapse in the West, because we're not used to it, are pretty much just another day at the office over there. You know what. Let me tell you something about COVID. During COVID, what happened. People freaked out, Then they ran to the store and they wiped out toilet paper, paper towels, rocks, wipes, whatever. Okay, but that's a fraction of the total goods that were available in the large supermarket. Russia lived for years and years and years living that game based on everything, not just toilet paper or paper towels. For example, in seven, when I was studying over there, I went into a supermarket. I saw oranges. Oranges was like weird to see in the Soviet Union. And this was February, so you're in the middle of the winter. It's like, wow, oranges. I go to the supermarket. I looked for a bag to collect my oranges. No bags, So I'm stuffing all these oranges in every pocket that I could find. I never see oranges again. Wow. Because the state is not geared to the population. The state was not geared to providing consumer goods. What happens when we don't get consumer goods? Or in Chicago, if it snows too much and the government doesn't there's a lot of the streets, there's enough ward, we vote the may or out, we get a new one. It Communist Party didn't have to worry about that. Yeah, so who cares if you have what you need or not. I keep the eye as the dictator, keep the people in line, literally in line for three hours a day trying to find what they need to cook dinner that night, and then they're going to do it again the next day and the next day. I don't have the energy to do an uprising, right, I just yeah, as And I think that people might be overestimating the impact that sanctions and and isolation is going to have on the Russians, because, as you describe their their deprivation and scarcity is not such a new thing for them. They've experienced it quite a bit. And I mean, you know what something that you mentioned in your book, um is that you know the quote civilization is just a thin veil of illusions. And Americans can maintain such veil because we're a young country. We've only been around for two hundred fifty somewhot years, and we haven't been disabused of these illusions. The Russians have been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and they've had they have pain and suffering and deprivation in their culture and their history and their heritage. And it doesn't quite it's it's not doesn't trigger that type of reaction from them. They're the adults, they're the parents. Where the children. If you look at it like that, we're so young as a country. One of the things, this kind of uh quirky little phrase that's in my head a lot. The two best things and the two worst things that ever happened to the United States was the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean because it kept us from all of that strife in Europe, kept us from all those wars, it kept us from all the things that they experienced, but it also isolated us, so that as Americans generally, we don't know how the world functions. We don't know that America is slipping in world standing. We don't know that places like Poland and South Korea and Singapore have amazing infrastructure. We don't pay attention to that because we have a wire in our head that says America, USA number one, number one. We're amazing and a lot of things. And the one thing that we're super amazing at that the world is still perplexed by is the mentality that we can do anything. But the fact of the matter is we're getting in our own way right now. We're shooting ourselves in the foot and we're we're going to kind of waste the potential, the renewed potential that we could have, while the world, Asia, Europe other places have looked at us and said, oh, that's how they did it. Let's adapt some of their processes to our reality and build amazing skyscrapers and amazing infrastructure and all of that, and maybe even play a little bit with democracy. But that's the least important thing we need to provide for our people. When I was living in China, I lived in China before the big explosion of growth and all that, where the Padung region in Shihai, which is all skyscrapers now, was basically a dirt lot when I lived there, And the US government said, China, in order to get most Favorite Nation status in the late eighties, you have to reform and build. Okay, the Chinese started building like crazy. Yeah, now they're eating our lunch. They are, and they're taking over the world. And they built a super highway in a couple of months. They connected the airport in Beijing to downtown Beijing. They built skyscrapers, and what's their perspective? Do you believe on on growth and development and it being completely detached from personal independence and freedom because they seem you know, once again, we always connected to because that's our history and that's our heritage, and we ascended based our ascension was based on that foundation. But other countries have shown that you don't have to have those two pillars both in place necessarily to ascend. So the question really depends on what ascension means, an ascension of what let's call China's ascension over the past. But so if you look at if you're talking about democratic ascension, that's one of thing China doesn't have to worry about that. If you look at China and Russian they're both societies and cultures that are built on collectivism and not individuality. That's one of the biggest differences between those physical spaces, right those geographic territories and all geographic territory. We have a different psychology, We have a different mentality about the value of an individual. We have a different mentality about the value of the perspective of work and what work means. So if you take the Russia situation, which will speak a little bit to what's happening now in the in the United States, we have law, we have individual rights and we have predictability. Right, so we developed out a system of law. In Russia. The territory is so huge that number one, if you try to saddle me with law, and if you're after me, I have plenty of places I can run to, right, And historically that's what they did, and they said, well, I don't need to hang out here. I can go out there where there's nobody. I don't have to create law in an area where there's nobody. Can go to Siberia. I can go to Siberia. And if I have a relatively all number of people, now we're just a tribe or a clan, I don't have to create a system of law because if I don't like it here, then I can go somewhere else. And and the thing is that if you have people moving, moving moving, because they can because there's a lot of space, we have to do something to keep them in place. The thing that we do keep them in place with is serfdom. Why because there's no private property, you don't have any law. You know what, any private property? What does that mean the big picture? It means that everything is up for grabs all the time. In Russia, right now. It seemed kind of stable for the last twenty years. When I went to Moscow in two thousand nineteen, I met with some KGB agents friends of mine, and I said, what's what's worrying you, what's disturbing you? Now? This place looks amazing compared to what I lived there, Moscow is incredible. And they said, everything's great, and everything looks great. That we have two problems. Number one, the corruption that we experience in the nineteen nineties has morphed. The cops on this street are taking fewer bribes than they used to. But what happened in the nineties was if I, as a government official, said hey Matt, you started up this company, You're worth fifty million dollars. You give us five million dollars and we won't arrest you. What's happening now in the recent years is hey Matt, you have a hundred and fifty million dollar company, and we're going to take your company and we're still going to arrest you. Right, So it's shifted. The power at the top is becoming incredibly greedy and incredibly corrupt by any metric, that the unpredictability is back. You try to set up a business. You try to work over there and think you can keep the profit if you haven't shipped it off shore, you're not. Because one of the ideas about Russian business is, especially if they're dealing with a foreigner. Matt comes to Moscow, sets up a company, and I'm Matt, Matt's partner, Russian business partner. Matt. I think I'm not going to say this out loud, of course, but I think the business is yours as long as there's expenses and debt. As soon as we make a profit, now the business is mine and I'm going to run you out of the country. That the mentality is about possession, The mentality is about relationships, and the mentality is about power and force. That is how everything functions. So if you think about what Vladimir Putin wants to do in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is a god right and that mentality, He's at the top of the pile. He can do anything he wants, and so if he needs to go into Ukraine for all kinds of reasons, he can do it. He can kill his own fairly speaking brotherhood relatives, right, well, So is that is that? The question then, is is Putin becoming I imagine this off flows from the top and we'll get some We're gonna kind of rewind on Putin in just a second. Um, But is he becoming more autocratic because it wasn't you know, he seen the keys to his reign Thus far, seems to be that he did clean up some of the worst aspects of the corruption of the nineties, at least put the country on a more stable footing, and towed the autocratic line just enough. He did not, um, he did. He did not act so tyrannically as to alienate all the people, and was able to at least give the the facade of you know, balancing um, balancing modern concerns and liberalization, um with you know, putting the country on more stable ground than it had been during the chaos of the nineties. But now he seems to be trying to consolidate power even further. It would that be correct. So, and there are a lot of Russians who will always think that Vladimir Putin was a great leader, Okay, and to some extent that's fair. Like you said, at the end of the nineties, there was there was a decade of turmoil. People are tired. There was unpredictability, and all of a sudden this figure comes in and now we have somebody for twenty years, from more than twenty years, the same guys in charge. Uh. It gave us a chance to breathe, he gave us a chance to work. It gave us the chances to develop entrepreneurship to some extent. But what he did was consolidated at the top his power and the power of his cronies in everything. Right. His buddies run the oil companies, His body buddies owned the you know, all the access of the minerals and metals and materials. And because he came from the KGB and had a vast KGUB network, he's got a lot of control from one end of the country to the other. Uh Now, what happens to somebody as he gets older? What happens to somebody when he sees the end near What happens to somebody? There have been rumors, I'm not I don't know if there's if they're substantiated or not, that he has Parkinson there. What happens to somebody who says, hey, I want to leave a legacy, and the legacy might be tinged with I really thought the Soviet Union was a great place. I don't believe he's trying to reconstitute the Soviet Union. I don't think he would be able to even if he wanted to. But that idea, especially of Ukraine, he already has Bielli rous well enough. Yeah, Alexander Lukashenko is in his pocket to put Russia Belarus in Ukraine, that three, the triumvirate of Russian culture, like fractional imperialist Russia, and keep those guys together or try to reintegrate them. That might be something that you think is a legacy worth killing over, worth fighting over. It's a lot more complicated than that, but that might be one of the strands of definitely one of his drivers. Yeah, yeah, what what are you what other drivers are you seeing? I mean, also, as you and I have discussed separately, we all you know, and what the the kind of common media narrative seems to really ignore is the fact that there's been some um skirmishes in a battle going on since the Maiden Revolution in two thousand fourteen, where you know, the President of the Ukraine was overthrown more you know, kind of pro Western anti Putin government was installed, and there's been skirmishes on the eastern in the eastern regions of the Ukraine between the Russians and Ukraine is now for eight years, and some could even say that there's only this recent conflagration has just been an escalation of a war that was already going on. Imagine that's a lot of those factors you're driving this as well. So if you look at if you look at Russia, and you look at the Soviet Union, Historically they're very sensitive about the borders. Right, we used to call it a buffer zone. You can call it zone of influence whatever. The Warsaw Pact countries was a buffer zone for them from Russia, specifically Ukraine, Belarus, Baltic States. They're still there, obviously that Russia doesn't know in the Baltic States, but they're still in the in the mindset that's the buffer territory. Why, because Russia has been invaded over and over and over they have, They have jokes that reference wars from the fourteenth century. Right, how do you even as an American, how do you even start to get your head around that. So they say, look, historically, don't mess with my borders because you come too close. We've suffered a lot over the centuries. You come too close, we're gonna get a little itchy. And so part of what uh, part of what Prutin is saying right now is for the last seven, eight, nine, ten years, you haven't been listening to us. You helped the collapse of the Soviet Union, the dismantling of the Soviet Union. You help that happen. You ran into the space thinking you're going to rip us off and take all the money and and and show the poor backward Russians how to do business, which, by the way, was not successful because one of the mentalities of the West was the Russians have never had a capitalist system. Therefore they don't know how to do business. So they wait a second. They've been merchants for centuries, and they know a scam, and they know how to run a scam, and they know corruption and bribery and swindling and all the rest better than American businesses will ever know. So you try that move, not such a great move. Then Ukraine starts, you know, getting getting antsy. Now, this is where it gets a little crazy, because you say, okay, Ukraine is anty because of Russia and Putin's attitude. Putin's getting nancy because Ukraine's getting armed by the West. And he said, wait a second, that's my territory. Think about the modern Roe doctrine in eighteen three or something right in the US said hands off, hands off South America. Hands up, that's us. Putin's doing, in some ways doing the same thing. He said, look, hands off my neighborhood. And I need that neighborhood for all kinds of reasons. Ukraine's filled with resources. Ukraine's got oil under the Crimea, Ukraine's got warm water ports, Ukraine's got a lot that that I want. But here's the thing. We lost superpower status. You decide there's a new world of order and you're the only one in it. You created this unipolar world. You didn't think enough to ask our advice. We are a world power, we will always be a world power. We are eleven time zones with nuclear weapons and oil and gas, not to mention all the other resources we have. And you kicked us when we were down. Do you think we're not going to be piste off? So one of the big feeders for the drivers for Putin now, I believe one of the biggest ones is respect and said you are, let's talk about the mafia mentality, thing about scenes in the Godfather. You don't respect me. I told you in Munich in two thousand seven. I told you year after year after year, if you do this is gonna be something bad coming. And if you do this, there's gonna be something bad coming. Well, guess what something bad is coming in the eastern Ukraine. Of the last eight years, there's a separatist movement and that's all this Lugans done yet, conversation about seceeding from Ukraine and putin recognizing those territories as independent. Right. For the last eight years there's been that civil war going on where the Ukrainian army from a Russian perspective, Ukrainian army is abusing us, killing us, you know, and so you have all this going on. Russian state's not going to stand by the side and watch this happen. And we'll have more of the prevailing narrative after the break. And one point that, an interesting point that a previous guest of monsanma Boria had made was that however tough it is for Russia to invade the Ukraine right now, it'll be tougher in five years. So as the West continued to arm the Ukraine, Putin was going to he was eventually going to take certain uh, he was gonna instigate certain actions. It is better to do it in two thousand twenty two than in two thousand seven, perhaps even because of concerns over his own health. Um in that that, as you mentioned, and this can all be People keep on trying to pick apart these uh, these these arguments or just acknowledging these realities as Puttin apologism or or justifying the invasion or blaming the West for the Putin invasion. Was like, no, these are just the realities of geopolitics, right that countries are in a power struggle over scarce resources. They have separate interests, and if you challenge the interests of other countries that sometimes you may be challenged in return. The United States might have gotten a little too used to being able to challenge anybody and only think about their own concerns when they were the sole hegemonic power in the late nineties into the two thousands. Were not necessarily in that position any longer. And that's why we seem to be I don't know, wondering if you see it this way right now, it seems that it's mutually assured destruction almost economically, that we're trying to isolate Russia socially, technologically, and economically. And they're saying, well, okay, you know. In response, I mean, you've got problems. You're dependent on us for a lot of natural resources, and and we're gonna draft if you're trying to take us down, We're gonna take you down with us. Russia is so much more integrated into world glow economy. And combine that with what you were saying earlier. One of the big problems that we have as Americans is the way we deliver and consume information. So we've we've gotten to this, you know, this hundred and forty character world. Whatever we want simplistic narratives, especially ones that come out with us as the good guys. It's the Hollywood Rocky story, right. We were rocky, we we grew up, we became strong, we were biggest in the world and all that. And Russia is the bad guy. We have a default reflex that Russia is wrong, lying or the bad guy. That's a dangerous way to look at the world. This is where those two problems come in. The Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean and combine that. I don't want to get off too much on a tangent. But the fact of the matter is we have a problem with the education system. We have a problem with and we we talked to each other. We have a problem with who we see ourselves as Americans, and we don't know how to view the world outside of us. So how are we going to look at all? Right now, we're in the honeymoon phase. Okay, the honeymoon phase of the war. We're in the everything is Ukraine. Ukraine is getting butchered. Okay, yes, heart is breaking for the Ukrainians. I have friends in Ukraine that the situation is horrific and we have to say that, right, we have to acknowledge it. It's the right thing to pure human humanitarian concern. You must say that. However, like you just said, we need to also understand what's the phrase, keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer. We have to understand where they're coming from. Because if we're just a bulldozers saying we're America, we're going to do it the way we want. Well, guess what, there are a lot of countries that may fall down lie down to that because they're not prepared to stand up where they're not equipped in terms of res sources and all of that. Russia is not that person. They grew up in a really tough neighborhood and they're tough people, and there are people who have pride and there are people that don't let anyone push them around. So how to what extent are we going to hurt ourselves by isolating Russia? Uh And, And that's the big unknown. And there's something else that has to be said. There are so many unknowns. I don't think anybody knows where this situation is going. I don't think anybody knows how it's going to develop. There could be an internal coup on the Russian side. Putin could drop dead of a heart attack, in the whole dynamic changes. He could take a step beyond Ukraine, which is gonna be bad. It could be an errand missile that flies into Poland, which could be bad. There could be a nuclear accident. There could be a nuclear not such an accident. There could be all kinds of scenarios are endless as to what could happen from here on out. But we have to under stand that this isn't We're right, they're wrong, But unfortunately it fits into the bipolar, the polarization world that we've already created in terms of media, in terms of politics, Democrats against Republicans, Fox News against MSNBC. Right, if you just put it in those terms, it's really hard to solve problems in that headspace. Yep, not accepting adult realities. And that's when once again, you're not you're not at fault, you're not blaming, but you have to accept the realities that you could end up when when you proceed as if everybody should bend to your righteous and benevolent will and they don't, that could put yourselves and lose loose scenarios like we're in right now. That might have been avoidable if we had been a little more careful, and that seems to be where we found ourselves now. And so in terms of trying to understand, you know, through the see through the fog of war and understand the realities on the ground or perhaps where the situation is going. You have a lot of very informed, high level contacts on the ground right now in Russia. What are you hearing from them? What's the chatter been Um to the extent that you're getting messages from Russia. Um, do you look upon any of them with skepticism for any particular reason? You know, what's your interpretation of what's coming out of from the ground on Russia in Russia. Yeah. So one of the things that context of mine in Russia have been saying is and reminding me as their little brother, right, these people are older than me, and I've been with them for a long time, and I said, look, don't forget that this is number one, more complicated than the West is making it out. Number two, don't forget that this isn't just about us, that you guys have been doing things all along the way that impact our perception. Number three, Uh, the things that you're showing on television may not be what you think, whether they're right or not. Okay, But I'll give you this quick example that just came up the other day, the bombing of the maternity ward. I'm not saying categorically because I don't know what the truth is, but Russians came back to me and said, what if they had gotten they had they had empty maternity ward will award first and put Ukrainian snipers and soldiers inside that building. What if that happened? You know, it's like, oh, that changes the picture a little bit, doesn't it. Listen, the Soviet both of these nations were part of the Soviet Union. The Soviets new propaganda. The Russians are using propaganda. You couldn't you can't be shocked if the Ukrainians are as well. Speaking of properly, you know, I'd love to float in an idea out to you, UM in terms of hero mythology and the use of propaganda UM to create these hero hero leaders. And you know, obviously Putin uses that in his own favor and has over the last twenty years. You see it being done with with Zelinski in the Ukraine. There's another individual, I'm sure you kind of you know, at least indirectly cross paths, was named Boris Yelson, who initially was presented to the world as a very you know, warm, fuzzy and heroic, turned out to be kind of corrupt of failure and overall the disappoin Wintment seeny similarities that that we might be getting our hopes up about Zelinsky, that this might be a little bit of smoke and mirrors and they're gonna be some revelations about him that that made disappoint um. Those who have, you know, quickly become fans of his um, much as as people were disabused of many, you know, many presumptions about Boris yeltson Um. I don't know what are your thoughts, you know, it's it's yea. We're in the early days. The only thing that we know as a population, generally speaking, is that Zelinski is brave, he's charismatic, not a bad looking guy, talented, and we see what we see his picture on the screen, we see what's happening to his country, and we conclude certain things. The fact of the matter is, we don't know who he is. We don't know who he's connected to. We don't know what the role has been of people inside Ukraine. We don't know what the role has been of people inside of Russia. We don't know what the role has been of people inside Washington. Russians will their reaction will be the US has their guy in in Ukraine. So if that's their overwhelming belief, and if that's true, that we were the reason that Zelinski is in Ukraine, even more reason for the Russians speed disturbed. Not only are we talking about weapons and separatist movements, but we're talking about, if you want to put in dramatic language, our number one enemy has their boy on our doorstep. Yeah, the time will tell. I mean we you know, in terms of where it goes from here. Uh, number one, nobody knows. Number two. What's a little more disturbing is that my Russian contacts I have no clue. Even even the KGB people I talked to, even the the m v D people I talked to, they know that there's such a high degree of instability, there's such a high degree of ambiguity, and they also know they could go anywhere, and that it's scared. This whole thing is really scary. It's some and some are even saying, kind of morbidly ironically that it would have been better off if the Russian said achieved a very quick victory, because then that takes any number of options off the table. Instead, we're sitting here with the possibility of a Straian missile. I'm still very skeptical of the idea that that Prutin is going to voluntarily deliberately expand the war beyond what he's got. I mean, it seems like he's already got a little more on his hands that he bargained for, and that seems to be a factor that Yes, Um that on the one hand, clearly the Russian military is underperforming their expectations, but still probably overperforming what the West's uh, the west interpretation is that simply a victory is inevitable, just going to be at higher cost and and uh and take a longer time. Um, so we've got to kind of be abreast of the game plan all these potential scenarios. Um, you know, uh, like you said, in real time, which is both is disconcerning. Yeah, so let's mention something very quickly about military. We grew up with this mentality of maybe up until the the the hockey game in nineteen eighty, right, that the Russians are indestructible, that the Russians are powerhouse and their military marching and parading the missiles out in that looks pretty scary business. But menace, you know, kilocami for mommy, better dead than read. All these phrases that some of the older of us grew up with. And what you find out when you start digging in the seventies and eighties and you look at the Afghan War nineteen seventy nine when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and that now the that that sheen of of perfection and monstrous military force and military might that marches across the land, gobbling up territory. The Russian military and the Soviet military were part of the culture, which meant there was corruption, scamming, line cheating, stealing, all that going on inside the military as well. Couldn't be couldn't be otherwise. So they had some elite divisions, but they also had equipment that was collapsing. They had horrible leadership. The word that I hear is that the leadership these days is still not up to snuff. That you know, the mentality of the Russian military. Some people are speculating we're gonna see a lot of desertions coming up. We'll see. But you have a history of World War two. How how did the military be so brave during World War Two and accomplish incredible things to to help to help almost single handedly beat the Nazis is because the n k v D, the security services were on the back lines shooting anybody who was deserting to desert. You know, one way another take their bullets, take out bullets. You know. You put on top of that the overlay mentality of goulag, of KGB, of informants everywhere. I met so many informants then in nineties they would they didn't mind telling me. They're like, oh, I informed for the KGB. Oh I in formed for the KHB. They're otherwise normal, nice people. What would you do if you lived in the Civiet Union the KGB came to you and said, tell me about your neighbor and you say, no, you're not gonna say now. And and every family had somebody who disappeared, cousin, uncle, whatever, who was arrested, who disappeared, never to be heard from again, you know. And I had a friend also in this mentality world, who was a flight attendant on Aeroflot, and she said, yeah, when we finished a flight, we would report to a specific room and we would have to talk about who were the farm businessmen on that plane? And they would report all this stuff, and and the KGB would decide, is that somebody that we need to track, Is that somebody whose room we need to tap, Is that somebody that we need to send hookers to? Is that somebody. We need to compromise, comp amont complement in Russian compromising material, right, is the hook that we get. I mean it's not just a Russian thing, but it's they had a whole system of getting COMPROMI where we everyone has a hook. You know, you hang up your coat, you have this little hook on the back. Everyone's got this invisible hook. And attached to the invisible hook is a fishing line. And I can reel you in at any time I want. And that's the mentality of this place. So you think about that in terms of military, in terms of the downside of the military, the poor performance of poor preparation. Um, you think about it in terms of how the Russians are going to survive from here on out. You think about mentality, survival, mentality. You think about a thousand years of surviving to become this global power on eleven time zones. Yeah, I'm pretty proud of that. Yeah, we are going to be powerful. Yeah, we understand force and power in ways that you don't. And guess what I decided to use it against Ukraine and hey when we spend you know, a couple of decades getting the entire Western world addicted to our cheap oil and gas and natural resources. And we tell you, hey, um, you know the whole, this whole, Well, the Ukraine gets to choose, it voluntarily choose its alliances. Well though they don't. Um, we need a an affirmative uh stands to an affirmative guarantee from you that the NATO is not going to absorb the Ukraine. Okay, we're not getting that. Well, okay, now we're gonna take You took strategic gap, you threatened strategic action against us. We are taking strategic action against you once again, not justifying it, but simply realities. This is reality. How many people know or understand that a lot of metal that's used by Airbus and Boeing to construct the aircraft comes out of Russia. What is going to be the long term effect on the price of fill in the blank, gas, air air travel resources. We fertile Apparently they supply the world's fertilizer. They have an enormous mineral fertilizer industry, enormous. You know, you can't ignore Russia, and that's one of the primary drivers of Vladimir Putin's mentality that you've ignored us, you disrespected us, You kicked us to the side, you treated us like we don't matter, and now you talk about nuclear weapons on our border and you're arming our Look, there's an argument on both sides. You can argue that Russia has always been hegemonic, Russia has always been aggressive, Russia started it. How do you even pull this gordion not apart? How do you get to the beginning of well, who's to blame it? Come on? Yea, it is as you said, and that going back to the kaleidoscope. I mean you also mentioned that in Russia, up is down, black is white, and nothing is what it seems. Accidents look like coincidences, coincidences look like patterns, and patterns feel like plots. A tough one to unwind that. I think a lot of people are looking at this way too simplistically in terms of both good and eve and our ability to isolate Russia. And they're gonna say, great, we don't get to use Visa and Facebook, we don't really care. You don't get to use our fertilizer, our minerals um, and our gas. And that's gonna have an impact. The idea that we can just economically isolate Russia without a significant burden and cost on our side. It's a bit of a fantasy. Um, speaking of fantasies. Uh, and some well not fantasies, realities of your book. Um, Vodka hookers in the Russian mafia. Um, Let's get to the vodka part real quick, because this is something else that people seem to underestimate in Russia is the true extent of how much people fucking drink. Their people drink a lot, the prevalence, and this is to a certain extent, Um even considered one of the one of the issues that you know, um, at the beginning of World War Two is there were too many, too many of the Hitler thought Russia was gonna be easy to in Vegas as well as these soldiers are all drunk all day. And you want to know something, he wasn't necessarily that wrong. And people have been trying to trace the unique love of the Russians have for drink, even back to Prince Vladimir and as supposedly in the tenth century adopt Orthodox Christianity because it didn't prohibit drinking alcohol. Russian historian Boris Medvedev argued that the chaos that the nineties was actually that vodka was in opiated the masses, explaining how Russian state property was transferred into private hands so rapidly without any social unrest because everyone was drunk all the time. Do Russians truly drink that much? Do you know what? One of the big rises of the Russian mafia was the traditional organized crime gangs. Alcohol is what it was when Gorbachev said, oh yeah, prohibition and and billions of rubles did not find their way into the state coffers, and and they provided the gangsters provided you know, possibility, um it. So over the last twenty years has been a shift in how people think about vodka and drinking, and the public campaigns against drinking excessively and all that that almost doesn't matter. What do you think is gonna happen? Now? There are some things in the book thing Dot means I came across to the past talking about how we drink and when we drink. We drink when there's a newborn baby, We drink when the sun is out. We drink to celebrate. We drink when we're morning. We drink when we're sad, we drink when we're happy. We drink just because it's Tuesday. When I was living over there. I'm not a big guy. I didn't come from a big drinking family. When I came back after a year year of working with the cops, I could sit at a table and do fifteen shots of vodka without a problem and get up and walk home. It wouldn't be a big deal. And that's scary. That's the sickness. Uh. So they drank a lot, you know, we drank to toast all kinds of things. Uh. And what's gonna happen is I'm betting that if this continues and Russia's sealed off the way it looks like it's being sealed off, and and unemployment skyrockets, and inflation skyrockets and all the rest of it, what do you think people are going to resort to. They have world champion drinking jeans, and they're gonna make the vodka cheap. Why because that's a great way. That's a great way to keep the people down on the farm, right, to keep the population under control. Yeah, and and the OLPI of the masses, as they say, you know, so let's get to the hooker's part. Okay, So you know we didn't talk about the lifestyles of the the oligarchs. But clearly, um, much like there's a culture of drinking, there's a culture of unapologetic opulence, and that those a lot of those who prospered in the nineties were these pleasure seekers who came, you know, who knew that there were spoils, that knew that there were fortunes to be found, and that would lead to big, big yachts docked off the coast of the you know, big yachts and god knows what, and and hookers and everything, all trappings of that lifestyle. And obviously you experienced that as well amongst some of your you know, the people you came across in Russia. Yeah, so when when your society collapses, what do you do if you're not connected or you don't have a job that has uh, you know, big income, you have to use whatever you have access to, and what people have access to, most readily of their bodies. So like any other country, they are levels, right, you have your five thousand dollar night hooker, you have your girl on the street. The oligarchs were also involved in human trafficking and underage girls. So they have these big parties on their boats and they organize all this very structured kind of business around. Uh, females. Uh. There was a place that I would go to with people from out of town, a restaurant. Restaurant had great steaks, but it also happened to be a brothel basically, such a meme market, right, not just the stake me market. Right. So it at ten o'clock at night, the ownership would open the front door. There'll be all these women standing out on the street. They would file in and be dressed to the nines, all made up, and they would stand in two lines and men would walk through the middle and they size them up, check them out. There's a half mile from the Kremlin, right up the street from Red Square, and they would check them out and pick and pick one or two whatever, how many, howe, however many of you want go to the corner of the lounge, drink, hang out, go home, dance, well, do whatever you need to do, negotiate the prices and all that. And these women were hookers, but they were teachers and secretaries and engineers. You know, because if if you just have a thousand, two thousand percent inflation and you're making four roubles a month, and that hasn't changed that much in the past year or two. How are you going to buy a new pair of shoes. So the hooker thing that that was most intriguing to me and I got most protective about, as it turned out, was when arners come in and abused that process. Like I've seen people negotiate and then say, oh, never mind. It's like, what do you never mind? They could have been making money with somebody else. You have no idea. This is not that feeling. This is this is survival. They literally could have been a nurse and then their salary all of a sudden became not enough to buy a loaf of bread and they had to go sell their body. And this is once again the very things that we cannot contemplate. The reality is that the Russian people experience that are pretty commonplace, that are just so completely I losory and fantasmal to us. And not that any of this doesn't exist anywhere else. And by the way, let me just say this, when it comes to organized crime, prostitution, drinking, all of it exists, obviously, and we have problems with any number of things in our country. One of the big things about Russia, besides obviously the different culture, is it's so much more intense. The scope of what they do, like anything, is an extreme that comes out of the psychology and the culture in the history. What they do is an extreme. They build bigger rockets and build bigger buildings to have a bigger country. They do things in a big way, and they do their problems in a big way too. And and how do you avoid it? It's eleven time zones of collapse based or built upon a foundation. That's that, by necessity has taught you how to scam. When one of a couple of things I was talking about in the book was in when I was living there, if it started to rain, you would just see all these cars pull off to the side, and what were they doing. They would then open their front door, get their windshield wipers out of the pouch in their door, and clip them on. Why because on the sunny day, those things are gonna get stolen. Because supply and demand didn't work the way it works here, because the government didn't really care about keeping the population happy or or fill with consumer goods. You had to learn how to maneuver and navigate and manipulate everything. So they did. And by the way, these are normal people. Normal people meaning like like you and me trying to figure out how to put food on the table, trying to figure out how to get their kids dressed to go to school, trying to figure out how they're going to work their way through the high school and university system where they're gonna have to pay bribes to get accepted into the best schools, where professors will write your dissertation for you for five thousand bucks or ten thousand bucks. That's the reality. The entire system was like that. It was a system, right, we don't have to do that. Yet. If we mess with our country the way we're messing with our country, if the middle class disappears in the United States, what do you think we're gonna do. I'm gonna see people pulling out all the stops, resorting to more let's call it engineered solutions than you know, operating within uh traditional market forces. And as I think people here with the experiences of a more traditionally autocratic country, the principles that have really that people have been dismissing recently, like free speech and freedom and do process and all these you know pillars and these pillars of American democracy that yes, sometimes leave things a little, a little messy, but are probably the best option we've got. You know, maybe people need to go rediscover a value in an appreciation form. One of the things that happened ino in the Soviet Union is that when the Soviet Union was dismantled and there was the free for all for resources and all the rest, is that the institutions collapsed. You look at the institutions in our country and just examine them and see what kind of shape there is. The institutions collapsed. Who fills a vacuum. That's where the gangs came from. That's where they grew up. They existed for years before that, but they got their big power boot when the institutions collapsed, when everything was up for grabs, when KGB and m VD and gangs and every politicians and bureaucrats could all team up together to make things happen. And what happens to the average person. You don't matter anymore to the extent you ever did. But you don't matter anymore. I'm a cop. I don't need to help you. The officer friendly idea that I grew up with in the sixties and seventies was not quite the same thing in the Soviet Union, and after the Sovie Union collapsed, you better have cop friends. You know, justice came through the network of influence and friends and relationship. You can't wait, you can't rely on that backstop of principle. Yeah, the value system was different, and the way we thought about each other it was different. And if you die, then you die, and that's what happens. And I'm gonna try to not die, right, But what the gangsters did but said, look, all this stuff is up for grabs. It's worth dying over, it is worth dying trying. Hey, we're rolling to get Richard die trying. Because they roll the dice, and you roll the dice and it comes up nicely. You end up Roman Abramovich with fifteen billion dollars owning the Chelsea soccer teams and with those yachts. We talked about if things came up nicely for a couple of them, and that's then you know their relationship to put in, which we would probably do another hour on, and his his attempt to corral and enforce um, you know, kind of push the Alli Garks into a subservient role when he came into power and absorbed some of them into his fear over the last ten fifteen years. I imagine we probably have an entire other conversation about, but we will save that one for another time. Um. The type of background and kind of fundamental understanding of the situation that we need to help everyone see see what's going on in that region which is becoming more important to world affairs every day through more clear lens um. Dr Joe Seria, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me fantastic. I am at Bolinski once again. You can listen and subscribe to The Prevailing Narrative on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you're listening right now. Make sure to follow me on my socials at Matt Bolinsky m A T T B I L I N s k Y. The Prevailing Narrative is a Cavalry Audio production and association with iHeart Radio, produced by Brandon Morgan, Executive produced by Dana Burnetti and Kegan Rosenberger for Cavalry Audio. I'm Matt Bolinsky.