[00:00:01] Due to the themes of this podcast, listener discretion is advised. Lock your doors, close the blinds, change your passwords. This is Secrets and Spies. Secrets and Spies is a podcast that dives into the world of espionage, terrorism, geopolitics, and intrigue. This podcast is produced and hosted by Chris Carr.

[00:00:37] On today's podcast, I'm joined by author and entrepreneur Bruce Talley. He joins us today to talk about the complexities of running a business in Russia as an American. We've got everything here from navigating the complex legal system to corrupt border guards and Bruce's encounters with the FSB, which is very interesting. Bruce also shares some insights from his recent visit to Ukraine. We've got a jam-packed episode here full of insights. I hope you find this episode interesting and enjoyable. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. Take care.

[00:01:07] Bruce Talley, Secrets and Spies The opinions expressed by guests on Secrets and Spies do not necessarily represent those of the producers and sponsors of this podcast. Hello, Bruce. Welcome to the podcast. How are you?

[00:01:33] Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: Fine. A little bit tired after a return trip last night from Ukraine, but glad to be here with you, Chris. Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: You've been traveling a lot through some interesting places, which we'll get into, but with your journey to and from Ukraine, what's that like traveling in? Because it's an active war zone, so it must be quite challenging.

[00:01:48] Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: Yeah. It's a lot of overland travel. I usually fly into Warsaw, Poland and travel. I've traveled by car, bus, train from there. There is a direct train that goes from Warsaw to Kiev. It's about 17, 18 hours. Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: Wow.

[00:02:06] Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: Yeah. And then we were there for a few days for business, did some things, quite busy, and then went to Lviv and wound up Luzgorod, which is on the Slovakian border. Crossed from there, flew back out of Kosice to points west. Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: Out of interest, is it expensive getting into Ukraine on the train and stuff?

[00:02:28] Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: The train, it kind of depends on the class service that you get. Occasionally, you get a two-person cabin. More often, it's four. It's not terribly expensive. I think it was something like $100 a ticket, and it was an overnight ticket, so it wasn't so much. Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: Traveling within Ukraine right now is relatively inexpensive. There's not huge demand in the hotels, as you might guess. Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: Yeah, yeah.

[00:02:55] Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: And restaurants are very expensive. And my memories of Ukraine pre-war are that it actually seems less expensive, which seems a little counterintuitive with some of the shortages that might happen. Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: Yeah. For the benefit of the audience, please can you just tell us a little bit about yourself? Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: Sure. I've kind of bounced around a bit. So I was born in South Dakota, grew up in South Dakota.

[00:03:17] Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: I was born in South Dakota, grew up on a farm there. Later on, moved about as soon as I could to Southern California, and I found myself in the American capital markets working for an investment banking firm that specialized in bond issues. Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: We underwrote and sold traded municipal bonds. California has a huge market for those. For your non-American listeners, it's a great way, or it's a way that under the American system that a lot of the infrastructure is financed.

[00:03:42] Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: So there are thousands of issuers and it's a huge market. I did very well working for that company. Our offices were in Solana Beach, fantastic spot in coastal North San Diego County.

[00:03:55] Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: Eventually, I ran West Coast sales for that company. And then later on, I had this idea that Russia was going to democratize and have a, I guess, the rule of law and join the responsible community of nations.

[00:04:13] Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: And there would be a lot of opportunity there as it was a huge market. I had somewhat romantic notions about Russia from earlier reading and following the Soviet Union and the press from reading a lot of Russian Soviet literature and history. So maybe a little bit naive on some of my ideas about what Russia was really like.

[00:04:35] Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: Well, I often say that, you know, whenever I see the anything about the Dunning-Kruger effect, I think, well, let's see, there were extended period where I was at the mountain of stupid there and I thought I knew a lot more than I did. Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: Well, yeah, that's fun being in the 20s. I remember, you know, in the early 2000s, I regress it now because I never went to Russia. But I remember reading a lot about Russia in my very early 20s, which was in the early 2000s.

[00:05:01] Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: And it seemed like a very exciting place to go. But unfortunately, in the last few years, it feels like probably a place to avoid for now. But maybe I'm wrong in that. But yeah, no, you had some good adventures by the sounds of things. Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: Yes, I did. And I think your instinct is it's a good place to stay away from. I mean, I don't know if the risk calculation is quite the same for a British citizen, but as an American, you're a target.

[00:05:26] I mean, and this was part of the reason, one of the reasons that I left in 2014 is I recognized it was no longer a safe place as an American. I mean, clearly, I've had high risk tolerance anyway. But due to some interactions with security services, which you may want to ask me about, I knew. Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: Yeah, yeah, totally. Well, tell us a bit about this journey then you've been on. So you've been working in the financial markets in Salona Beach, California, and you ended up in sort of post-Soviet Russia, which is a remarkable journey in itself.

[00:05:55] So you mentioned you had this sort of romantic idea that sort of originally drew you there. But what made you sort of stay in Russia? And talk a bit about that early period, because this is the early 2000s or was it the late 90s? Bruce Talley, Ph.D.: Yeah. So I did a lot of traveling and scuba diving was kind of my forte, but I was also interested in other places in the world. So my career allowed me quite a bit of independence. And I just went out of curiosity.

[00:06:20] I'd read, as I said, I'd read a lot when I was about, when I was very small, my father had this book, Khrushchev's Memoirs. And I didn't understand everything that was going on in that book, but I read it and I was fascinated. And of course, there's Cold War period and all this. And so it was just in my brain. And then later, there was a film that I watched. It was many, many years after it was made, but it was Dr. Zhivago.

[00:06:45] And of course, romantic film and certain sort of universal themes were touched on there. And something about the place just kind of grabbed me. I think maybe Mexico does this to some people or Italy or the United Kingdom, but there was something about it grabbed me. And so I always read about it. I had the opportunity in 1998, in the middle of the ruble crisis, my very close friend and I decided kind of on a whim, went to Moscow.

[00:07:11] And it was just as the ruble collapsed and it was fascinating to see this post-Soviet city that really hadn't made the tradition to a big, vast place that it has become now. It felt a little dilapidated, but it was interesting. And then I went back again several years later and did that a few times.

[00:07:33] And of course, I understood that markets that were changing from Soviet command economy to a demand economy, that there were opportunities there. And so without boring you too many details, I began to meet people rather quickly.

[00:07:54] I found myself in Crescent Arcry in the southern part of Russia where I had friends and I began to look at property and lands that hadn't yet been privatized. So, yeah, I thought that, you know, land was probably a good way to kind of get started. And there were a couple of things that drove my interest in Crescent Ar. Having lived in California for many years and participated in the bond markets and seen how California had grown.

[00:08:21] Of course, this is really before me, but in the post-war period, California exploded. It kind of became the heart of the American dream. You can go out there, reinvent yourself. The weather's nice. There's lots of opportunities in many different areas. And it's kind of a mentally not a restricting place. So in Crescent Arcry, Crescent Ar region is that part of Russia. It's, I don't know, 800, 900 miles south of Moscow.

[00:08:49] And it's along the Black Sea. So it's warm water coastline, mountains behind it. There are advantages with agriculture, with oil and gas. And many of the smaller places in post-Soviet Russia didn't really work economically. So there was a population movement towards Crescent Ar. And I thought that, you know, Crescent Arrygion is going to experience some of the same things that, you know, on a smaller scale as to what California has.

[00:09:20] And so that was kind of my genesis of that. Yeah. What were your early days of business like? What impressions did you kind of get? Yeah. Yeah. So I started out opening companies up to acquire properties in South Russia in 2005, 2006. And there were a couple of ideas that we worked on in addition to property acquisition.

[00:09:43] Initially, I looked at smaller pieces of property that several cities had yet to privatize that I thought offered opportunities. But I wound up at the end of the day buying property that actually had been privatized simply because there were better locations, bigger pieces, better opportunities. But, you know, there were some really interesting experiences in this because Russian law was codified in a way that there were conflicting.

[00:10:15] The law was written in conflict with itself so that if you were complying with one law, you really couldn't comply with another. And for instance, when I opened my first companies up, in order to have a company, you have to have bank account. But in order to have bank account, you had to have company. And so we opened temporary bank account in order to open a temporary company in order to open a permanent bank account in order to open a permanent company. There were these fantastic workarounds.

[00:10:42] And all this entailed many, many, many trips to one of the most powerful people in the region. And that would be the notary. Here in the United States, it's kind of a, you know, pro forma thing. You pay a few dollars and sign it and stamp it and it's done. But there was so much fraud in Russia that the notary became a very big and important business. And virtually every document had to be notarized. And there was a special green thread and yellow wax stamp. Everything was signed and certified.

[00:11:11] So it was quite an expensive process. But, you know, that extended those kinds of conflicts and difficulties with the law, extended far beyond just making sure you signed a lot of paper. And because of the conflicts inherent in the system, you were virtually always vulnerable. And there were special folks that went around looking for holes in your documents.

[00:11:39] And if they could find one, then, you know, that was a pressure point to either extort money or steal your property. They call them raiders. So they use the same word in Russian as we do in English. Yeah. How did you protect yourself from that thing? Because that must require some really good lawyers, et cetera. Yeah. I don't know that there was really perfect protection from those things.

[00:12:03] One of the things that happened to me was a former employee ginned up a—she stole some money, bought an office, ginned up a series of leases stating that I had leased these offices at exorbitant rates for years and owed massive amounts of back rent.

[00:12:28] And the objective was to win a judgment against me in court and use that judgment then to go after the significant amounts of real estate that I owned. And so we fought that in court. This went on and on for years. But at one point, she bought a decision in appellate court that—so my lawyer heard her bragging that, well, she'd already paid the judge, so she was in good shape. So, you know, it's very, very difficult.

[00:12:55] And it takes someone—in Russian, they use the word kreza. Kreza. Yeah. And I've got to be careful because there's rat and roof. And the idea is that you need a roof to protect you. And as a small businessman in provincial Russia, I didn't really have—you know, I discovered a little bit late to the game that that's something that I sort of needed. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:13:25] So, you know, I was working on getting building permits. And, you know, I bought several pieces of property, unified them, did a lot of things in that process. But, you know, it's very difficult to get those things done because you need somebody to help you. You need someone to give those building permits. And if they're going to require a Russian to pay, then they're going to require an American.

[00:13:50] And, of course, that's something we don't do is we don't pay, you know, we don't pay bribes. And once that process starts, it might start with your finger and wind up with your arm, too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love that saying, if you give them an inch, they'll take a mile kind of thing. Were there any kind of like positives from your experience of doing business in Russia? There were enormous positives. Enormous.

[00:14:13] I mean, you learn about yourself when you go there. And, you know, I met some amazing and wonderful and kind and generous people. I met my wife there. I still have many close friends that came from Russia. And, you know, it's a great experience to get out of your comfort zone, I guess, your environment.

[00:14:41] As the great Buckaroo Bonsai said, though, no matter where you go, there you are. That's a classic film. Yeah. Well, one of the things, Chris, that happened to me when I first started going over there, I began to feel like, oh, you know, socially, I really like this experience.

[00:15:03] Because I would go to a small party with, you know, six or eight people and there's a loaf of black bread and a bottle of vodka on the table and just have this amazing time. And I thought, you know, the people are more present here. I'm having more fun with eight people in this Soviet air apartment than I did with 250 of the cool people in La Jolla. So I had this kind of idea for quite a while that that was the case.

[00:15:31] And, of course, you know, speaking Russian, I had Russian lessons for several years and I lived there for a long time. But speaking imperfectly, you always had to pay close attention to what's going on. And it took me some period of time to realize I'm not sure that those people are any more present than the people in La Jolla are. But maybe I was more present, you know. Maybe it was – maybe the change was within me. Those are the kinds of things.

[00:15:56] I don't know if you've ever lived as an expat, but those are the kinds of kind of mental dyrations you go through when you're living out of the friendly confines of the United States of America. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I've never lived as an expat. The closest I've ever had that experience, I spent one month in South Korea in 2002 staying with a family. And after a little while, you do start to – you know, you do feel like an alien for quite some time and then eventually you start to pick up on things.

[00:16:25] Well, and I can imagine, you know, I mean, there are certain – Russia is certainly very, very different from the United States. But I can imagine Korea is even, you know, further from the UK. Well, yeah, yeah. Very, very rigid culture in Korea. I became a bit stressed because, like, there's lots of honor culture things. You're not supposed to eat or drink before the older person, et cetera. And, you know, I'm trying to be a good guest.

[00:16:50] You don't want to make all these faux pas all the time being the kind of terrible, you know, English guy who drinks before the oldest person in the family. Oh, yeah. Well, there's a lot of that. I faced a lot of that in Russia. Oh, did you? Yeah, and also I spent time in this de facto independent place called Abkhazieh, which got its own set of rules that are complete – in some cases very different. But, yeah, you would go to a party or a wedding or something like that. And the drinking rules were I don't really drink very much.

[00:17:19] And, you know, they want – of course, I became the guest of honor very, very often at these things. And everyone wants to drink with you. And you can't – you have to finish it and, you know, you can't put it down on the table until it's finished. And, you know, there were times that – I drank this Caucasian beverage a couple times called cha-cha. In fact, I had it three times and twice. I never left my seat that night. But, you know, there are all these cultural things.

[00:17:48] And the Russian culture had a number of superstitions that at first I didn't really understand very well. One of them was you're not supposed to reach across a threshold to shake people's hand or to hand them something. So that was regarded as bad luck. And I had this woman cleaning one of my apartments. And I went up – she actually lived to the floor above me. And she had a couple of small children. She didn't want to leave her apartment.

[00:18:13] She didn't want to invite me in because that was probably something that she felt personally uncomfortable with a single man. And I couldn't reach across the threshold to hand her the money. And she couldn't reach across the threshold to take it from me. And I finally had this moment where I don't know what to do. And I just threw it on the floor and walked off. Oh, my goodness. I'm surprised they haven't invented some sort of system where you can just, like, put it into a little, you know, pouch or something.

[00:18:42] And the Russians are quite inventive about these things, about workaround. So, yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's quite funny. That's quite funny. So, you were obviously doing business in Provincial Russia during a very volatile period. So, what were some of the sort of toughest realities of operating in that environment? I used to feel jealous of the Americans.

[00:19:01] And there are a lot of American and especially British and German expats who are working for big companies, either foreign or Russian big companies in St. Petersburg and especially Moscow. They'd be afforded a beautiful apartment inside the garden ring, maybe a driver and this, you know, kind of very nice lifestyle. And Russians always say Moscow's not Russia. You know, it's quite different. So, I would be kind of jealous of them.

[00:19:26] But now looking back on it, I think, you know, I really had quite the genuine experience because I started and owned companies in Provincial Russia. So, I faced problems that maybe some of those folks didn't have. And, you know, it forced me to learn a lot. But one of the things that was kind of a consistent, especially the last five years I was in Russia, was the presence of the FSB in my life. And so, that started out.

[00:19:57] I owned property in a small city called Kropotkin and I was living there. And so, I unified this property and I had to build a fence. One of the requirements was building these ugly green fences around your commercial property. It was kind of expensive and it was just a requirement. You had to do it. And so, I had to register my documents with the authorities on a regular basis whenever I came to the country.

[00:20:25] The problem was that no two people seemed to read those rules quite the same. If you're staying at a big hotel in Moscow or St. Petersburg, they just took care of it for you. But if you're living in a provincial city, hotels didn't usually have the capacity. You had to register your documents through someone's home. And so, for several years, it was really not a big deal. I went to the migration service, registered my documents and away I went.

[00:20:49] Well, the officer in charge changed and he saw that I built this, you know, that I owned this piece of property. And I went in to get registered and he asked for a, he'd like the money for a nice fence like that around their office building. Well, that was about $20,000. And I told him using a couple of Anglo-Saxon epithets that I didn't think he would understand. And we were speaking in Russian that that wasn't going to happen.

[00:21:21] And might have made an enemy that day. I did take him a nice bottle of cognac back. But so over the next several years, he was continued to register my documents, but he was putting violations on my visa. And if you had but one violation, you're probably okay. But two or more, you could be deported, have a visa canceled, be refused to get another one. And I didn't know this was happening.

[00:21:48] He put four on my, four of these violations on my, my documents. So when I found out there were a lot of sleep, sleepless nights, and there were people who alleged that they could help me. And I understood that this was just going to be a new kind of problem. So anyway, I moved to Krasnodar where it was easy for me to, to get registered, get my documents registered. And I went back and forth to check my properties.

[00:22:15] So I was living in Krasnodar, which was about 140 kilometers away. And I would go regularly to visit. And I did have an apartment in Kripwatkin where I would stay upon occasion. But for not very long, you're supposed to get registered every three days, every time you are in a different city for three days, or at least that was the rule at the time. But so I'm in the night market buying something there. And these guys see me.

[00:22:44] Well, he's here, but we know he's not registered because he hasn't been in our office. So he arrested me, threw me in the back car, and took me to the police station. And I get to the police station, and I'm there for about five minutes. And they take me upstairs to the office of the FSB. And for your listeners who don't know who the FSB is, FSB has many of the roles the KGB had, that the NKVD had, that the Cheka had.

[00:23:12] They're all these, I think it was the Akrona under the imperial era. But these were people to be feared, had a lot of power. And actually in Russia, very often they were quite sharp people. The FSB was able to recruit, you know, better, smarter people from the universities than probably the police force was. So anyway, they take me upstairs to the office of the FSB. And this is my first of hundreds, literally hundreds of encounters with FSB officers.

[00:23:41] Young guy, sharp guy, quite friendly. I didn't ever do drugs, but they would ask you these questions like, oh, do you smoke marijuana? I want to, with marijuana, you know, with a sly smile on your face. Like anyone would admit that. And I wasn't doing it anyway. But so trying to trick you up, trip you up. So I spent about five hours in this guy's presence. You know, it was more or less friendly questioning.

[00:24:10] I mean, he was friendly demeanor, but questions were trying to determine what was I doing in this small, provincial, southern Russian city. I was the only foreigner there. And, of course, all this is happening in Russia. And I thought, well, the training wheels are off. We're not in Kansas anymore. Whatever way you want to put this, I'm a long ways from help in this situation.

[00:24:36] And this was one of the first times that I was really surprised by something. Well, I mean, I was surprised by many things, but maybe shocked was a better term. So I'm sitting there for hours. And, you know, at one point, I don't know, my neck got a little stiff or something like that. I turned my head and I see this large, large portrait.

[00:25:03] It's, you know, I'm probably a meter tall and two thirds of one wide. And it's got the visage of Felix Jerzynski on it. Well, Felix Jerzynski's nickname was Iron Felix. And I believe he started the check very early in the Soviet period. And, you know, when they talk about making, you have to crack some eggs to make an omelet.

[00:25:28] I think this was, I don't know if this was attributed to Lenin or who, but old Iron Felix made a lot of omelets. Let's put it that way. And I was just, you know, shocked, surprised to see. And he has got a particularly cruel visage, especially in this portion. I was just shocked. And, you know, I'm thinking you can go to every police station in Germany. I'm pretty sure there aren't any pictures of Heinrich Himmler around.

[00:25:58] Right. So, but that's one of the problems in Russia. And, and so I, you know, I see this and the guy said, he sees a shocked look on my face. And he said, you know, what? And I said, well, you know, he had a lot of blood in his hands. And the typical response was something like, well, you know, difficult times. Difficult times because old Iron Felix made them difficult for a lot of people who wound up, you know, not alive. So, yeah, it was, you know, it was a real eye opener like that.

[00:26:28] And, you know, Timothy Snyder said that Yale historian and person who I've read several of his books, he's written a lot about Ukraine and authoritarianism. And he says that in order to have, democracies are self-correcting. And if they stop becoming self-correcting, they stop becoming democracies. And that's really the case in Russia.

[00:26:53] But I noticed, you know, kind of in the mid, late 2000s that there were all these programs on Russian television where they were glorifying the Soviet and especially Russian role during the Second World War, the Great Patriotic War, as they say. Russia Today and the UK broadcast those same things. And then it would usually be sandwiched between shows about like the terrible state of homelessness in America or the Vietnam War and American failures. Absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:27:21] The United States is the source of ultimate evil. And Russia, the mass media portrays itself as both, well, as a victim, as virtuous and will be ultimately victorious. So I began to see all this and, you know, I really didn't put it together.

[00:27:44] But if you talk to Russian people, very few of them understood that, well, you know, there was a pact between Stalin and Hitler, between the Soviets. And that's how they wound up with Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, chunks of Poland and Romania and controlling areas that didn't really want to be controlled by the Soviet Union. And so there was a lack of awareness of this kind of stuff. So, you know, they really haven't addressed that.

[00:28:10] And I have got this great story that you were the juxtaposition. So later on, I owned a destination management company in Sochi and we provided services to about 45 Olympic partners and sponsors. And I had a large, famous German company that I was doing a lot of work for and I thought we were going to get some big contracts for.

[00:28:32] And we were looking at renting something like 2,000 square meters of space for them, bringing in people to work for them, liquor licensing places for them, these people to stay, catering, security. It was going to be really a massive contract. And I really enjoyed working with these people. They were great to work with. But we spent several months on this process. And at one point, this would have been February of 2013.

[00:28:58] We're driving down the road and we're kind of talking about what the process has got to be. They've got to take this in front of their board. And it sounds like it's going to take about two months. And I said, well, so more or less, you know, providing that you want to move ahead with this, this will take about 60 days. So maybe we could contract this on April 20th. And these two German executives exchanges, super significant glance between them.

[00:29:27] And I, what's this about? And I said, well, the woman said, Julia said, well, you know what April 20th is, don't you? And I wasn't thinking in this context. And I do, but I didn't. And I said, no, what are you talking about? She said, well, that's Hitler's birthday. So large company, German company with some kind of historical connections to the Hitler era.

[00:29:57] They were sensitive to that. They were aware of that. And they thought, you know, if we can do it, let's probably do it another day. I don't think it would have been any great public relations disaster for them. But it reflected an awareness of the history. Meanwhile, we're traveling down Ulitsa Lenina, which means Street of Lenin Street. And so, you know, there are statues around Russia of Felix Drzezinski.

[00:30:25] There are names for people who committed atrocities and ran the gulag and, you know, killed people. So I think this is a reason why, you know, we're faced with a Russia that we are. You know, their president, their leader has an ahistorical idea about, you know, what Russia's role in the world is and what they should be doing. And they pass it along to their people. Yeah. Yeah, indeed. What is it?

[00:30:51] I mean, I've over the years as I've been running this podcast, I've become more aware of something that we call Putinism, which seems to be this idea that the West is inherently trying to destroy Russia and it's sort of this sort of victim mentality. And also I've noticed how Russia seems to appeal to sort of both the far left for historical reasons because of Soviet Russia and then the far right with through sort of kind of an extreme version of kind of Christianity.

[00:31:20] And Putin likes to present himself as the kind of savior of the white Christian world, if you put it that way. I don't know if you did you ever encounter any of those sort of things? Oh, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, yes, they they refer to Moscow as the third Rome and they're the they're the guarantors of, you know, Christian virtue.

[00:31:44] And they've created, in my view, an unholy alliance with the elements of the, you know, the Russian church and Russian nationalism. So, you know, Timothy Snyder and other folks call it Russianism, which is Russian fascism. And, yeah, there's a merging of corporate interests and, you know, certainly the government. And there are folks within the Russian church who are in the, you know, extreme far Christian nationalist right.

[00:32:15] Yeah. So there's there's really a lot to sort out in there. And then you see that sometimes there are British American Canadians who go over there and think, oh, boy, I'm this is going to be a really nice place for my family. They're promoting Christian values and and to my understanding, Christianity is quite different than than theirs. Let's put it that way.

[00:32:41] And and so I think that some of those folks are, you know, kind of deluded and and wind up maybe regretting their decisions. Yeah. But you see it, you would see it around. And I spent several years crawling on top of virtually every building in Sochi City Center, the Adler District where the Olympic Park was up in Krasna Playa, where they held the mountain events. You know, we looked at every mini hotel and building.

[00:33:09] We were looking for TV studios and locations, warehouses, offices, all kinds of things. And one of the things I noticed very quickly was how prominently a Russian Orthodox church had been constructed right next to the Olympic Park. Well, they displaced people to build all these objects, you know, the Olympic stadiums and venues. And there wasn't really a lot of blowback from the Russian church on this stuff.

[00:33:39] And I think that that's one of the things that's happened is that they've constructed a lot more churches in the in the Putin era, you know, and get support from some folks. Yeah, it seems obviously that support for whatever reason seems important to Putin and kind of holding on to control. So, yeah, yeah. He likes to surround himself with the symbols and things of that. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, let's take a quick break and be right back with more.

[00:34:22] You've got an upcoming book called Counting Grasshoppers, which is a very unique title. So what does that mean and where did that come from? Yeah, thanks for asking. Well, I grew up in a farm in East Central, South Dakota. And, you know, now they've gotten so much better with the techniques, the tools, the seeds that they use. And the ground is so much more productive than it used to be. But, you know, it was a difficult place when I was a boy to scratch out a living.

[00:34:52] And my father was both a mail carrier and a farmer. And I had two older brothers and an older sister. I was the youngest one. And so I had a lot of bosses. And so when I look back on it now, it really was an interesting thing because I was the youngest of a string of children. My father was a World War II veteran and wanted nothing more than to go back to South Dakota after war and farm, which he did.

[00:35:20] But there are all these tasks that you wound up doing as a farmer that maybe didn't seem terribly productive. One of the earliest things that I had to do was to watch the sheep all day to make sure that they didn't get into the oat field. Because as my father would say, they were harder to keep in the pasture than a hog with wings.

[00:35:40] So they would get in the oat field and without getting too far into, you know, ungulate production here, they'd eat too much oats and it would kill them. And they'd destroy the oat crop and you'd kill your animals at the same time. But it was kind of a futile exercise in a way. You're just preventing something bad from happening. You're not really producing anything. And there were a lot of things like that, I think, in farming.

[00:36:08] And I grew up around these people, my father's friends, other farmers around there, my older brothers. There was a tremendous amount of work to do all the time. There was never a shortage of that. And some of these activities didn't seem necessarily very productive. And when I wanted to start participating, which happened really early. By the time I was eight, I was taking care of sheep in the wintertime.

[00:36:30] But when I wanted to start participating, my oldest brother would say something to me like, well, why don't you go out and count grasshoppers? And I don't know if you've seen them, but they're identical. And when they show up, there are hundreds of millions of them and they don't stay in the same place. So there could be no greater or more futile activity than counting grasshoppers.

[00:36:55] And you wound up feeling that there were all these things that you had to do in Russia. You just simply had to do them, but they had no real productive. They weren't in a direct line between where you sat and where you wanted to go. They weren't a productive activity. But if you didn't do them, you weren't going to get to that point. And so there was a lot of that kind of stuff. And I've got another little story to tell about this. Okay.

[00:37:26] So, and again, this didn't actually take place in Russia. Russia has the eastern portion of Moldova is called Transnestria. And it's along the Nesir River. And so Russian separatists took control of this. And Moldova doesn't control all of its own territory. And the Russians have corrupted Moldovan politics as it is. And then they have this long, narrow band that is a de facto country.

[00:37:56] By now, you probably guess that if there's a bend in the road I haven't been around, I'm going to go around it. So I sold some property in 2008. And I went to Agnesa. I'd already been to Agnesa a number of times, spent a lot of time in Ukraine. And I hired a taxi driver to take me to Moldova because I was just curious. So I've taken a bundle of rubles along with me. And you don't want to leave them in a hotel room. You don't want to leave them in your luggage.

[00:38:25] You have to be sort of careful. I knew I could change them in both Moldova and Ukraine. And I've got them in a coat pocket. And there were a series of stops between leaving Ukraine, entering Transnestria, leaving Transnestria, and entering Moldova. And along each one of these stops, there was a cursory check. Then there was customs.

[00:38:55] And then there was passport control. So there were about a dozen of these. And when I went on my way through, the first Transnestrian guy wanted a gift. And he asked me, he said, well, you know, could you give me a gift? And I said, well, you know, what do you have in mind here? And he said, well, how about 500 rubles? Which at that time was equivalent of about $20. And that was probably pretty good money in Transnestria in 2000, whatever it was, eight.

[00:39:23] And I told him, well, that's fine. But for 500 rubles, I get your sister's telephone number. He thought that was funny and let me go through, right? But when I was coming back through, when I left Moldova, I was coming back through. And I go through the first cursory check before I'm going through customs.

[00:39:47] And I've got this thick stack of 1,000 rubles notes, all my money that I'm going to spend in this, you know, several week period in my coat pocket because I'm unsure where to take them. And I'm unsure if I'm going to be able to use a card in some of these places, you know. And, you know, I probably shouldn't even tell the story because it doesn't really reflect well upon me. But I've got them in my coat pocket. I leave the trailer where the first cursory check happens.

[00:40:16] Draped the coat pocket over my shoulder. Didn't button it. I hear this little thump. And I look down and there's about a 35-mile-an-hour wind blowing. My money has hit the ground. And it's blowing towards one of the most corrupt customs places in the entire planet at 35 miles an hour. Oh, no. Right?

[00:40:42] And I just, I have this moment where, okay, I can grab what's right there, which is maybe half of it, which would have been the sensible, and just forget about the rest. Or I can run like hell and try and get past everything and scoop up everything I can. I do this. Somehow I managed to outrun the wind, get ahead of all these. I scooped everything up, you know, I'm grabbing them madly. And I'm watching these transnestrian border guards, which is not a real country and is terribly corrupt.

[00:41:13] They made, you know, one of the main ways the country made money was by illegal arms production and trading. And I somehow get around them. And I get up and my driver, I've got all my money. I did not lose a single thousand ruble note. But while I'm doing this, I'm thinking, is this kind of metaphor for what I'm doing in the post-Soviet space? Am I just dumping my money on the ground here?

[00:41:39] And anyway, yeah, so this, you know, and I had an interesting exchange at the Knicks Customs place. But I would advise people to be very cautious about crossing through transnestrian. And of course, especially in these days. So, you know, this whole counting grasshoppers, it's a question about, or I guess it's a comment about sometimes feeling that you are tilting windmills.

[00:42:09] That you're fighting against a power system that you'll never fully understand. And it is completely indifferent to, you know, whether you're successful or even live or die. And then that's really a problem in Russia, I think, is the system is designed to make people feel that they're small, that they can't possibly bucket, and that they're not, their problems, their goals, they're not significant.

[00:42:36] Yeah. So you talked earlier about obviously being questioned by the FSB, but you've also, you were followed and you even had your, you were telling me, we had a pre-interview. You told me an interesting story about how your computer would crash on this bridge at the same spot daily. So when did you realize things were kind of no longer safe for you to stay in Russia? Well, that was ultimately 2014, but you have to recognize it with my risk profile that, you know, maybe it was quite a few years before that.

[00:43:05] And what happened to me was that there's a small de facto independent country called Abkhazia, the Republic of Abkhazia. And so the Abkhazia have a separate language and view themselves as a separate ethnicity to the Republic of Georgia. And for your listeners, and this is kind of a quick and dirty version, Abkhazia was, you know, at one point dominated by the Ottoman Empire.

[00:43:33] And I think sometime early in the 19th century, the Russians moved into the Caucasus region. And so when you move forward to the Soviet period, Abkhazia's status was a little bit undecided for several years. I think they had some autonomy.

[00:43:51] But at some point, Stalin, who was, of course, an ethnic Georgian, decided that Abkhazia should be included within the borders of this Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. So when, but it was always kind of uneasy because some of these places were sort of ethnically dominated. Well, certainly Georgia was by the ethnic Georgians, right?

[00:44:18] And so when you move ahead to the post-Soviet period, there were by this time a lot of Georgians moved that had been moved in by Stalin and Biri, who was also a Mangrelian or a Georgian guy. And they didn't quite trust some of these small ethnic groups. They wanted to have them watered in places where they were watered down, especially by, I think, Georgians, Ukrainians, and Russians. I think that there was kind of an ethnic mistrust by those early oppressive Soviet authorities.

[00:44:48] So they've moved some Georgian folks in who, you know, been living there for several generations. But in the early 1990s, there was some talk by the Abkhaz authorities about some kind of autonomy. And that was really threatening to the Georgians who believed that Abkhazia was, you know, kind of their gem. And so there was a conflict. The Georgian army actually invaded. There was a bloody conflict. There was charges of ethnic cleansing and genocide and atrocities by both sides.

[00:45:17] And so Abkhazia was self-governing, but Georgia didn't control their borders. And I went down there. A lot of Russians would go down there for very modestly priced holidays. During the Soviet period, it had been, along with Crimea, probably the two most desirous locations for the nomenklatura, the people who were running the Soviet system, for them to go on holiday.

[00:45:41] And so, but of course, nothing had been spent in decades on these crumbling resorts. You had a beautiful, beautiful series of Caucasus mountains that come literally right to the ocean's edge. And then you have a warm sea and nice food. And it's, you know, it's kind of a somewhat cooler or not so warm in the wintertime version of Santa Barbara or something like that.

[00:46:08] It certainly doesn't look like that in terms of infrastructure and how people live, but it's a beautiful location. And so I went down there several times out of curiosity. And what happened was that, you know, I'm always thinking about opportunity. And it occurred to me that these people are existing in, you know, it's one of the poorest post-Soviet places. And should it really be that way? And I had some ideas about that.

[00:46:36] And so I, you know, my social circle spread rather quickly. I had thoughts about how, you know, the United States might, the United States wasn't going to recognize Abkhazia because it's part of the borders of at least what our friends regard as Georgia. Right. And, but should there not be engagement?

[00:46:59] Should there not be the opportunity for the folks that are living there to participate in the global economy to become a tourist destination? Now, I began to write about this in my blog and I, you know, I got some attention in the press. And it is a controversial idea because the Georgian authorities feel like it ought to be up to them to make these decisions on who privatizes these resorts and who invests.

[00:47:27] At one point I was written about, the Atlantic did a profile on me and I love the Atlantic, but they portrayed me a little bit like a guy who's selling stereos out of the back of a truck. That's not good. Yeah, that's not good. And, you know, I mean, my position was that at this time, around 2009, was that Russia's military presence there was preventing violence between the Georgians.

[00:47:56] Georgians periodically would talk about attacking and invading. It didn't seem like that was going to be a good thing. People were going to die. So I didn't have a terribly nuanced view. I thought the Russians were a benign influence. Ha, ha, ha. Right. I mean, you know, I don't really think that anymore about any of their actions. But at the time, that was kind of what I was thinking. And maybe there was some motivated reasoning going on there.

[00:48:20] But I thought that Abkhazia could privatize some of these state-owned resorts, get their airport running. And people were approaching me and saying, wow, they're, you know, they've got this tremendous long runway that can be used. It can be a hub and spokes arrangement for airlines. And this really can happen. And, of course, Georgians didn't like this. Now, I wasn't interested in any property that had been abandoned by ethnic Georgians when they left, which a lot of ethnic Georgians had done.

[00:48:49] I thought that there needed to be, you know, some kind of a political solution so those folks could come back. And there was one offered by the Abkhaz, which was, you know, you can come back, but you have to swear your loyalty to the Abkhaz state. And, you know, there aren't very many Georgians that wanted to do that. So, you know, it's sort of practicalities involved. And look, there's an opportunity here. Let's integrate. Let's prove Russia right.

[00:49:13] And if they're wrong, let's get Abkhazia integrated so that they are not reliant on Russian handouts to, you know, to operate the government. And so I'm drawing a lot of attention. I got to know the president and prime minister of Abkhazia. And I have some just really cool ideas, I think, about how to get attention.

[00:49:40] And the Abkhaz authorities absolutely, absolutely agreed with me and wanted to support me. But prior to this, what happened was someone came to me and said, you know, there's someone from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs wants to talk to you. And I was pretty sure that that meant the FSB. So I didn't have anything to hide. So, sure, I'll talk to them and tell them what I'm doing, you know.

[00:50:09] And so that was the genesis of that. So I was at the same time beginning my operations in Sochi, which is just across the border. I'm working in Abkhazia. I'm trying to bring investors and attention in. I've got some great ideas. And I'm going back and forth. Sochi is sensitive because that's where the Olympics are going to be held. They're worried, of course, about a lot of things, people that they displaced when they built all these objects. You know, of course, they're worried about terrorists disrupting it.

[00:50:38] And then they're wondering what the only American in this de facto but not de jure state, what exactly is this guy doing? And they thought I was CIA for years. I was questioned every time I crossed the frontier from them. And so, yeah, that was the kind of genesis of that. And so for years and years, I would regularly meet with – there was one guy. And really interesting, I got to be quite friendly with him.

[00:51:06] We did not have an antagonistic relationship at all. He disagreed with a lot of things that he thought about Russia and, you know, some of the things that they were doing internationally. But he wasn't a cynic. And, you know, so I regularly met with him. But in my travels, I had a section driver that would drive me between downtown Adler, where my family and I lived, or downtown the city center of Sochi, which was a charming place, and Adler district.

[00:51:35] I had customers. I was doing all kinds of things to draw attention to myself to get those customers. And every day we would cross this bridge. And every day my computer would crash and reboot within about a meter, you know, of this same spot on the bridge. And so I just assumed that they were taking some information. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You talk a little bit about that. Is it an FSB guy you were meeting on a regular basis? Is that right? Yeah.

[00:52:04] Talk to me a little bit about him. What are they? What does he like? What are they? You know, is there an archetypal FSB type person? Is there a central casting? You know, what do they like generally? Yeah, I got taken in. You know, there were guys at the border who would be pretty friendly. And I would see them on a regular basis. And, man, there were other guys. I remember one time I crossed the border.

[00:52:32] You know, I had to be cognizant of how much time I was spending in each country due to visa limitation. So sometimes I'd cross very late at night. And I, you know, there was a guy with a scar across his face who questioned me about three, three, you know, for about three hours. And he was a real unfriendly character. Yeah. So I didn't see it that way. I saw a lot of guys that were kind of doing their jobs. They were controlling border stuff.

[00:52:59] They were, you know, and then there were other guys that were a little more threatening. And then I met some people further up the food chain who clearly had, you know, a great deal of authority. And, you know, you just saw it from the people, other folks that they were around. So I really didn't have a good picture of that.

[00:53:18] The one thing I would say is they were smarter and more competent than the kind of local bureaucracy that were running, you know, in the police or that, you know, some of the other organs that were working there. So they were sharper. There's no doubt that. Yeah. Yeah, indeed. And I remember you were telling me a little bit about that the Russian security services sometimes work to kind of compromise foreigners. Can you talk to us a little bit about that, how you sort of protected yourself from that?

[00:53:47] Things would happen. We put on these expat parties and I knew that they questioned the waiters and the waitresses and the restaurant. There was a friend of mine that owned a restaurant and I knew that they were questioning those people about, well, you know, what was Bruce talking about? Who was he meeting with? They, you know, they knew what I was doing. Quick question. You never had a chef called Yegevny Pregosian, did you?

[00:54:15] No, but there were a couple of times I went to restaurants and they said, you can't go in here. At this time, Medvedev was president or maybe it was already Putin again, but you couldn't go there. No, I didn't have any, any chefs like that, but they did, you know, they did question people around me. And I remember there was a guy that they questioned and he told me about it. He said, oh, a guy from the FSB came when he was asking me about some of the people I'm associating with.

[00:54:41] And I suspected, and he was a Russian guy, and I suspected that it was intentional that I get this knowledge, that they wanted to see what my reaction was. And who you'd ask about or something, yeah. Yeah, and instead of saying, oh, who was it and what did he say? Because I was pretty sure whatever I was going to say was going to get reported back. I just said, well, the guy's doing his job, you know, I mean, I'm sure he's just checking the box.

[00:55:09] So, you know, but in terms of protecting myself against that, I didn't really do that. I mean, I didn't have associations that were, I wasn't doing anything illegal. I was providing a service. I actually helped them quite a bit because my company became the largest destination management provider. A lot of the foreign companies, we were quite transparent. This is what we charge and this is how we do it.

[00:55:31] We actually charged more than the Russians, ultimately less because they would sometimes pad whatever costs were for the hotel or the venue. They would pad that. We were very transparent. And I think a lot of people just thought, okay, here's an American guy. We have some, that's no guarantee of character, but clearly.

[00:55:55] But one of the things that happened was that they came to my office and my company, the company that I'd owned and my wife was a lawyer. I met her on a bus in Krasnodar. And she arranged for my company to provide a work visa for me. So I didn't have some of the restrictions that the business visa had.

[00:56:20] But I had the FSB come by when she wasn't there and questioned me about what I was doing one morning. And then they would come by our office and want to look in the refrigerator. We had a little mini bar refrigerator to put a couple of Coca-Colas in. And they questioned because I was a foreign worker and I needed, they needed, the Russian company needed to be, make sure that during work hours I was getting the proper nutrition.

[00:56:45] So they questioned my wife and I about the nutrition that I was providing to me as a foreign worker. Well, you know, I've got a few, I hope you don't mind me sharing these, but I've got a few more stories about this. No, please go. And the first one, it kind of harkens back to an earlier period. But my wife and I hadn't been seeing each other that long. And I was down in Abkhazia.

[00:57:13] And the guy from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who never said he's FSB. And by the way, I liked him. I did. As a human being, I liked him. He didn't, I think that he understood at some point, look, this guy's genuine. I was a complete open book. I didn't offer any information about American or British or any other citizens. But as far as what I was doing, I was absolutely open and I didn't have anything to hide. A more cautious person would have said, well, just because you don't have anything to hide doesn't mean you can't become a target.

[00:57:43] And ultimately, that's why I left. But anyway, he called me up before the May holidays. And of course, Victory Day has become this pseudo-religious holiday in Russia. When I was first there, I thought, oh, this is fun. It's early in the year. And they have a parade. And everybody's in a good mood. It's a nice time of year. And of course, later on, they kind of deified the whole Soviet experience.

[00:58:09] And my wife pointed or someone else pointed this out to me that that was the case. But anyway, so my friend calls me up and he said, what are you doing? He knew I was in Alcaldia because I would have told him when I crossed the border. What are you doing for the Victory Day holidays? I said, this girl's coming down to see me, who I've been spending time with and already fallen madly in love with. So she's coming down to see me. Well, how's she getting there? Of course, she's taking the train from where she lived to Adler.

[00:58:38] And the train station in Adler was maybe, I don't know, five or six miles, maybe less to the border with Abkhazia. And so he said, well, how's she going to get from the train station to the border? And I said, well, I suppose she should take a taxi. He said, well, I can give her a ride. And of course, I knew instantly the reason for this. This has got other things to do.

[00:59:05] But he wants to find out who I am. Am I who I say I am? And I really did not want to put her in a position where she's getting questioned by them, even in a friendly way in the car. But I thought that if I try to hide her from it, she's probably going to get it anyway. And it may be a little less friendly.

[00:59:32] And it's going to look like I've got something to hide, which I absolutely didn't. I was trying to bring investors to Abkhazia. And I was ultimately working in Sochi. But this was quite suspicious for them. And looking back on it, I can see why. I mean, Abkhazia, there's nobody else there. It was me. And so he says, you know, can we give her a ride? Can I give her a ride to the border? And I said, yeah, sure.

[01:00:02] So he brings her to the border. And there was this cinematic moment. And the border, there was a bridge over the river. I think it's the American Skaya River there. There's a bridge over the river. And, you know, you leave Russia and you enter Abkhazia at that point. And she's walking across the bridge. And Alexei is standing on the other side waving. And I'm standing on this side waving. It wasn't quite a prisoner exchange.

[01:00:31] But there was a security service involved. And there was an American who was suspected involved. And, you know, it was kind of a cinematic moment for me. And, you know, so she came down there. But later on, we had a lot of that kind of stuff. And especially because American media, British media as well, but especially American media, somebody came to town, somebody from NBC or Yahoo or, you know, Time Magazine, Newsweek,

[01:01:01] all these people came to town. They found out about me and they wanted to talk to me. And there was a journalist named Bernie Goldberg who was working for Bryant Gumbel who has had a sports program called Real Time on HBO for many years. So their producers called me up. And this is maybe October of 2013. Producers called me up and we'd like to do a program about you, one of our segments about you.

[01:01:30] You're the American in Sochi and, you know, this would be interesting. So they send the producers down. And I told them a number of stories about things that I either witnessed or that other people told me around, you know, there's a great deal of corruption around this massive, massive construction project. And I told them, sorry, I said, look, I'm not going to talk about this stuff. I have a family. I have a visa. I have contracts with companies. I care about my reputation. I want to be killed or kicked out of the country.

[01:01:59] So this stuff is off limits. There are a lot of other interesting things to talk about in Russia and around the Olympic Games. But, you know, I told them stories, you know, off the record. They understood. They made it clear they understood. So some days later, this Mr. Goldberg comes and he's also was a contributor to Fox News, which is extremely ideological in a lot of cases.

[01:02:25] And so he comes down and they said, Bruce, can you find a spot in front of the Olympic Park where we can do the interview? We want to do an interview for you. We're going to use it on HBO. Okay. I was super busy. I really didn't have time to do this stuff. But, you know, it's an opportunity. So we had a small hotel of about 50 rooms and we were trying to put a company there. Big contract.

[01:02:53] And I asked the guy, can we do the interview on the fifth floor of your hotel? He said, sure. I get up there. Goldberg gets up there. The producer's up there. There's a Russian film crew up there. We start to do the interview and he starts asking me questions that, you know, either I didn't know about or I couldn't answer about Russian corruption. And I stonewalled him. I don't know about this, you know. And he got really angry and he was yelling at the producers and he was upset with me. But you told him. Yeah.

[01:03:22] It was a stupid exercise because for one thing, this was not really – a lot of this was not inside information. It's going to get me in trouble. And there is, of course, an ethical thing about pointing out the truth. But you're not coming to Russia and becoming a muckraker in three days. You want to learn about corruption, watch Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption, his YouTube series.

[01:03:48] Or you want to read something, read what Masha Gessen says or Vladimir Keremurza or, you know, a host of other people that know about – Oliver Bullock from the UK who knows about Russian corruption in the UK. There are people, sophisticated people that know about this. But coming there and putting me on the spot was kind of the wrong thing to do. So I was pretty upset. I wasted the time. I go back to my office and I get a call about a minute after I'm in the office and it's my guy from the FSB and he says – You did a good interview. Yeah. Yeah, right? That's what he said to you.

[01:04:18] No, no, no. He just – he says, what are you doing? And I said, well, I guess I'm going downstairs to the cafe and having a cup of tea with you in about five minutes because that was kind of the standard. And so I go down there and he says, what have you been up to? And I said, well, American journalist comes to town, asks me a bunch of questions about corruption I can't answer. And it just – it upset me. It was a missed opportunity. There's great – other great stories to tell. And, you know – and he said, well, you should have just pushed him off, right?

[01:04:46] We were on the fifth floor of this hotel. He said, you should have just pushed him off. Now, I didn't take this in any sense as a literal threat. He was joking. But the thing was I hadn't told him where I was. I just said I did an interview in front of the Olympic Park. If I told you I'm doing an interview at the Olympic Park, what's your default? I'm standing in front of the speed skating arena. That's your default. Yeah, yeah. That's what I was picturing when you first described it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like in a park. So he had the information.

[01:05:15] There was somebody that told him, you know, and that's just the way it was. And the thing that I couldn't decide was, was this just sloppiness? Does he want me to know how closely he's watching things? You know, or is it just sloppiness, you know? And I never really understood that, the answer there. No, my goodness. My goodness. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's just crazy, really, isn't it? It's, yeah.

[01:05:45] So what was the point then you considered walking away from all of this? Because obviously this is quite stressful, all this sort of stuff. Well, and, you know, it was stressful doing business because, you know, sometimes you'd have a contract with a company and they'd cancel with you. And because somebody else came along and offered a higher, a higher price. And I worked 364 days in 2013, but I enjoyed it. You know, I was having a lot of fun, center activity. We did have these expat parties.

[01:06:15] I may be the only guy in the history of the world who's blown off a Nobel Prize, a Nobel Prize winner in economics. I had had these expat parties at the restaurant where the friends of mine owned and there'd be, you know, 30 or 40 Russian girls that wanted to speak English. And then the guys from Canada and the UK and the Netherlands and the United States would show up and, you know, we'd have a little sangria and, you know, just kind of a nice time.

[01:06:42] And this guy comes over and he said, you know, I've been reading about what you're doing and I'm interested about what's happening in Sochi. And so I wanted to come in and introduce myself. He hands me a business card and I've got, it's my party. I've got 50 or 60 people to talk to and make sure they have a glass of cold sangria. I said, oh, it's nice to meet you. I'll come back in a little bit. And, you know, I want to talk to you. I didn't look at his card. I caught his first name as Daniel. A couple of days later, I look at the business card and it was Daniel Kahneman who wrote thinking fast and thinking slow.

[01:07:10] So as they say, I, I am the only guy who's ever blown off a Nobel Prize winner in economics. So you were moving fast, but thinking slow that day. I'm definitely thinking slow. Very good one. Yeah. Um, I, you know, while I was in the middle of this, I never considered walking away. I just thought I'm in the middle of the stream. I have a family that I'm devoted to. I care a lot about what happens to my customers. You know, I work for some wonderful people.

[01:07:39] I work for the several Norwegian broadcasters. I can't say enough about those people. The people that work for Adidas were just fantastic to work for. I mean, I cared about the results. If I signed a contract, I cared about the results for everybody that we've worked for. I, I believed it was moral obligation. I wanted everybody to have any, you know, we provided TV studios. We relocated thousands of people, sometimes with financial, um, management of the contracts.

[01:08:04] We provided staffing and interpreters and, and I used to joke, we provided laundry. And I said, if you see me on NBC washing underwear in the black sea, then you know, there's been a problem. Right. But, but yeah, we provided, we worked for some really, really great people and, um, worked for CBS. I just loved that company. They were, you know, the broadcasters were so ethical and organized and, and just, just really a pleasure all the way through.

[01:08:32] So, you know, I didn't, I never really considered, um, walking away, but what happened after the games was that I, I was, they, they'd constructed these new, this new train system. To go and, and a new, uh, uh, a new station in Adler and then a whole new spur that went up to the mountains. And it really was beautiful system, but I began to get some man on the street, kind of drunk antagonism towards me. They would hear my American accent.

[01:09:01] And this was the time when, uh, the revolution of dignity, right? When the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian folks were out in the Maidan in, in Ukraine protesting. And there were allegedly at least Russian assassins on the rooftop. There were certainly some Ukrainians and they were killing people. And this intensely bothered me. Um, I've been to Ukraine many, many times during my time in Russia and really enjoyed myself.

[01:09:30] There are a lot of cultural and business similarities, but they're different countries. They're both children of the Soviet union. And, um, you know, I had become disillusioned by this point with what Russia was doing in Abkhazia. I had several really great opportunities. And the ministry of foreign affairs was simultaneously encouraging me in Abkhazia and putting unseen barriers up. I was on the verge of some great things.

[01:09:57] We had people talk, looking at privatizing a massive resort in Pitsunda and investing potentially billions of dollars. And they didn't really want this stuff to happen. It just, they slow walk things after encouraging me. They wanted to make it appear as though, uh, and I know I'm jumping from subject to subject here, but they wanted, the Russians wanted it to make it, make it appear as though, um, they're helping Abkhazia. And they want Abkhazia to develop, but that's really not what they wanted.

[01:10:27] And as an American or a British person, I'm pretty sure you and I would think the same way about this, that if, if Abkhazia is successful, if it's, if it's able to build its economy and become a, uh, you know, a real citizen of the world, then that enhances Russia's credibility. It proves what they said is right. This is an independent place. And I loved Abkhazia. I really cared about, I had a number of friends in Abkhazia. I, very different culture than Russia, but really interesting place.

[01:10:56] I met some wonderful, wonderful people there. And I really was disillusioned. It became apparent to me at some point that they have just put enough, uh, barriers, brick bats, trees, logs in front of me. It's just not going to happen. So I was kind of disillusioned by this point with Russia. And I, I, a smart person has got to recognize when they're wrong and, and, you know, maybe move in a different direction. And I saw Russia's influence was not benign. It was not benign.

[01:11:24] It was about, it was about, um, dividing, corrupting and controlling. And I saw this not only in Abkhazia and after traveling through Transnestria, I realized that was, that was the game there too. It destabilizes, um, Moldova. It prevents Moldova from moving forward in a lot of ways. And, and that was, that was the thing. So when I saw what was happening in Ukraine, I was really upset and disillusioned by it. And I, I, you care about what happens.

[01:11:51] I mean, I knew people who were school teachers and going hundreds of miles across Ukraine to protest. And the Russians are busy saying that, oh, this has been engineered by the U S state department. It's, you know, all this kind of stuff. And I'm sorry, it was absolute, complete, unadulterated, smelly bullshit. Yeah. And on top of that, they also make out that Ukraine's a bunch of neo-Nazis, which is just outrageous. Look at the elections in Ukraine. I don't think the far right in Ukraine has ever gotten more than 3% of the vote.

[01:12:21] It, it's not, you don't see goose stepping. Ukraine is far less nationalistic. I've spent a lot of time in both those countries, Ukraine, um, you know, many years ago, and then in subsequent to the escalation of the war in 2022, spent a lot of time there. It's not, it's not a fascist regime. It's not a neo-Nazi. It's not controlled by the United States. It's not controlled by NATO. Of course, NATO is not, uh, it's a defensive alliance.

[01:12:47] And the reason the Russians don't want NATO in there is precisely the reason that they're not invading Estonia because it protects it. So it's not, it's not, NATO is not an aggressive force. NATO is a protection. And, and of course they want to invade Ukraine because as long as they, as NATO's not there, they don't have to worry about a response. It's exactly the opposite of what they said. And of course they're, they're, they're all of this shifting rationale. All their bioweapons labs, they're, they're neo-Nazis. It's NATO.

[01:13:17] It's the American state department. Um, and you know, when there's, when there are 10 reasons, I think they're all lies. And, um, you know, yeah, I, I, I, I really, I, I really didn't like that. So they came after the games in 2014 and they asked me, you know, what do you think about what was going, or maybe it was actually during the games. They came into my office and they said, what do you think about what's going on in Ukraine? And I told them, you know, I think Ukraine should be able to chart their own course.

[01:13:45] And I think they ought to be able to do it without Russian interference. And that wasn't, you know, nobody came and arrested me or caused me a problem. And it wasn't a surprise. I knew they knew what I was thinking. They probably, you know, they had, they knew who I was talking to. They, I think they probably intercepted much of my communication. So I am sure it wasn't surprising. That's kind of the way I think anyway, they probably guessed that.

[01:14:08] But, um, between that and the kind of man in the street stuff that I began to see anti-American stuff and, and the anti-American stuff on television. It was really interesting because not only was America this, you know, tentacles everywhere, controlling everything power, but at the same time it was, uh, weak and, uh, corrupted and sexually promiscuous or sexually degenerate.

[01:14:38] And, you know, you couldn't be both, but it was, there was this cognitive dissonance and it dominated Russian media. So I told them what I thought. And I knew, look, Chris, I knew at that moment, it's just a matter of a time until somebody drops a flash drive into somebody's luggage and says they're committing espionage. I'm not the biggest target in the world, but I was pretty prominent in South Russia. You know, all the foreign companies knew who I was.

[01:15:07] So, um, you know, I'm not making the cover of Time Magazine, but locally sort of prominent. And I thought I am a very, very easy target on this stuff and it's time to get, get out. It's just time to go. Yeah. Yeah. And it has happened to people, you know? So it's, uh, yeah. Yeah. You're wise to get out whilst you, you could really. Yeah. Yeah. I, I think so. And, you know, it was regrettable. I mean, I was leaving anyway. I had a business in Brazil to do.

[01:15:34] I, I, I would have gone anyway, but I, I did everything to get my family out as quick as I could. And I have to say the state state department in this process, I explained my, my, my fears and the state department was, I don't know if they expedited things, but they were very helpful. And so I'm, you know, grateful to the American government. I'm grateful to hold an American passport. Although it, in these days, uh, maybe it's not as popular as it was. Yeah. No, unfortunately.

[01:16:04] Uh, but then so that British passport is not always the most popular either. So I can, I can empathize. Well, maybe if you'd been in Afghanistan a century and a half ago, you'd have felt the same way. I don't know. Maybe. Well, let's take a break and be right back with more.

[01:16:37] One thing I did really want to ask you about, because this, this bring, this, this comes up a lot. A lot of people keep asking like, what does the West keep getting wrong with Russia? Because we've had the Clinton era in the nineties and then we've had the Obama reset in 2010. What are we missing? What are we getting wrong here? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you, you look at the individuals who are, who are behind us. It's they're not stupid people.

[01:16:59] They're, I don't think they're not exactly naive, but there's somehow this idea that, okay, if we get Ray and Bob in the middle of the room and we can, we can talk this out, you know? Well, the problem is that the Russian, I think the Russian mentality, the Russian way of business, Russian way of thinking about this stuff. And then this is whether it's business or politics, it's a zero sum game. Hmm.

[01:17:26] So instead of, you know, we can both get something out of this, we're not going to give anything up. We're going to negotiate on your turf all of the time. And, um, I don't think while there's a Putin regime or, you know, a child of a Putin regime in office, I don't think it's going to change. And I think what they're going to do is say, okay, you want to, you want to reset things. What, what are you going to give us here to start out with?

[01:17:55] They will take a maximalist approach in all their negotiations. And again, this is, I saw this in business and, and you, you, you see this in the headlines. They take a maximalist approach. If it doesn't work, then the negotiations have broken down because you won't come to an agreement. So you watch what the Trump administration has done in the last couple of months.

[01:18:18] And it's just mind boggling that nobody seems to have learned anything or, and it, it, it appears that they're actually furthering as an American, I'll just say this. It appears they're furthering Russian interests for the secretary of defense to, to go out and say, Ukraine needs to give up territory and we're, we're not going to put them in NATO. These are the things, these are, first off, we shouldn't be negotiating on behalf of making decisions for the Ukrainians, right? I mean, this is what the Biden administration said, no negotiations about Ukraine without Ukraine.

[01:18:48] So they give them two of their first requirements before they even sat down. Yeah. It's very weird. No NATO, no NATO. That is, that just is an invitation to take another bite at the apple later. So I, I just think it's massive incompetence.

[01:19:06] I can't imagine any secretary of defense in the history of the United States government ever saying anything like that to an aggressive in colonialist power. Or as Timothy, Timothy Snyder calls it, Rashism, the combination between Russian fascism, Russian nationalism and fascism. Can't imagine anyone doing that. It's just, it's, it's, it's, it's immoral.

[01:19:30] And, you know, I like what Ely Wiesel said, you know, the Holocaust survivor said, in the face of oppression, there is no neutrality. You're either, if you are trying to be neutral, you're helping that side. And that's, the United States government has done that. It absolutely has. It's, it's just completely an immoral position in my viewpoint. It kills Ukrainians. Yeah. Yeah. And I think they're doing everything they can to get Zelensky out, which is what Putin wants.

[01:20:00] That's the impression I get. They're setting up silly deals where Zelensky, if he's, you know, right-minded, will probably say no to them. And then they can turn around and say, well, Zelensky's not cooperating. You know, yeah. That, that charade in the White House, it looked to me exactly like that. We're going to, we're going to, we're going to knock him down to his knees and we're going to weaken him. He's got to go. And of course that, whatever, there is some kind of struggle or the next, who's next, that weakens Ukraine's position.

[01:20:30] I mean, I don't think there was an election. I don't think that they, you know, when Winston Churchill was making his speeches about on the beaches and, you know, there weren't elections being held at that point in time. This is a wartime economy. So I, yeah, I think it's criticizing the Ukrainian government. That doesn't help the Ukrainian people. It helps the Russian regime. I, I, I'm just so much dismay.

[01:20:58] And, you know, I, I just returned, as you know, last night from, from Ukraine. And Ukrainian people have been so, so pro-American and grateful, despite what they said in the White House. I've had so many American people say, you know, thanks a lot for helping. You know, whether it's bringing trauma kits or, you know, I call the Congress and say, we've got to support them. I believe this is the issue of our time. And, but I'm not the most influential voice out there.

[01:21:25] And, and Ukrainians have been so very expressed great admiration for the United States of America, for the wonderful things that the U.S. has done. And we haven't always done the right thing. We tried many times to do the right thing. Try and find a time when the Russian government really was trying to do the right thing. I can't, as many mistakes, as many Iraqs and Vietnams, and these are horrible, historic tragedies.

[01:21:54] You know, we've also done some, there is no Russian version of the Marshall Plan, you know? So I just think that it's very unfortunate. And fortunately, in my, on my recent trip, nobody said, hey, you dirty SOBs, what are you doing over there? They all understand separate an individual American from the actions of our government, which Americans aren't always the best at doing, right?

[01:22:24] So there is, you know, there are reasons why maybe this is happening. And I think people have done some, you know, speculating about what those might be. Yeah. Well, yeah, you were, we were talking a bit about, I think in our chat about, because there's a big debate about whether Trump is compromised in some way or whether Trump's pro-Putin. And I think Trump's just pro-Putin and wants to be like Putin and is doing everything he can.

[01:22:48] But, but you were talking to me a bit about, there's this sort of Deutsche Bank kind of connection where, is it the Russians bought up his debts? There's some very interesting sort of things there. Yeah. I mean, I don't, again, I don't have any, any insider knowledge about this. I, you know, when I was in the bond business, I watched, he got these licenses for casinos in Atlantic City. And I don't think people looked at those deals as critically as they might have.

[01:23:13] But I think folks at that time thought that, well, you got a casino license in Atlantic City. It's, it's a license to print money. He's not an operator. He didn't operate those things and went into multiple bankruptcies. They had cram downs, which means a principal amount of the bond issues was declined and that the interest rates would decline. So investors lost tremendous sums of money. And if you listen to him, it's some kind of, you know, financial triumph.

[01:23:41] But you do look at those things and you do wonder about the financial connections. Now in the middle of the election last year was announced that his daughter is, oh, she's flexing her real estate muscles again. And I think there's an island in Montenegro where a Russian developer was going to build a five-star resort. And there was going to be some kind of participation by, you know, the Trump family. Well, what's that about? I mean, that doesn't really look good.

[01:24:08] We had a president in my lifetime who sold his damn peanut farm because he was afraid of the appearance of impropriety. Yeah. So, yes. Now, Deutsche Bank was involved in that mirror trading scandal, which was allowing Russian oligarchs to move substantial sums of money. In a very simplistic way of explaining it, they buy a stock in Russia and then sell it on the London or the exchange or someplace in Europe.

[01:24:38] And bingo, the money was someplace else. These folks that are running the system, they don't believe in it. You know, Putin allegedly has got vast sums of money outside the country.

[01:24:48] But so if memory serves me correct, and again, I don't have any insider knowledge about this, but if memory serves me correct, Deutsche Bank loaned multiple times and despite a spotty track record, loaned Mr. Trump large sums of money. Well, Deutsche Bank relationships with influential people in Russia.

[01:25:16] If you wanted to influence American policy and there was an American president that had a substantial, like hundreds of millions of dollars of debt with Deutsche Bank. Do you think a guy like Putin wouldn't pick up the phone and offer to buy the loan off Deutsche Bank? You know, hey, we'll take the risk away from you. You know, I mean, to me, that's the shortest line.

[01:25:42] Doesn't mean it happened, but it's not hard to imagine any one of these participants taking the required action in the middle of all that. And it can be just simply, as you say, that he has a seeming infatuation with authoritarianism. So, you know, I know I'm talking quite a bit about the guy, but I, you know, I'm really deeply concerned about I care about what happens in Ukraine.

[01:26:11] I think it's really important. It's important not just for the Ukrainians. It's important for the people in Moldova and Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. And if we allow countries to redraw borders, we've gone back to the 19th century. We've gone back to the 1930s and it won't stop there. And, you know, if you watch Russian television, you know, there's all this dehumanizing cunt to talk about the Ukrainians. They're deluded.

[01:26:41] They're Nazis. They're deluded Russians. We have to reeducate them. We got to take their kids away, teach them that they're really Russians. I mean, this is a war crime. This is an atrocity. It won't stop there. And who stops? When does this stop? I'm less, truthfully, I'm less worried because Ukrainians have got a strong military and they are a very resilient people. There are a lot of folks there.

[01:27:09] They are, I'm less worried about Kiev than I am Estonia. You know, you've got a porous border, a small country. Without American support, I don't think that the British, the French, the Germans, the Italians, the Spaniards together, I don't mean to say anything offensive here, but American military might is unparalleled.

[01:27:31] We have got these nuclear powered aircraft carriers with hundreds of state of the art airplanes, the best training, the best soldiers, the best leaders. Who's able, better able to respond to a threat in the Baltics? And Trump's put all that in doubt now. Trump's put all that in doubt. Yeah. You know, the nuclear umbrella is the very thing that's kind of guaranteed European security. Obviously, there are debates, some healthy debates about how Europe could be a bit more independent about this.

[01:27:59] But still, you don't sort of take that guarantee off the table until somebody's got the capacity to look after themselves. It's ridiculous. It's reckless. It's, yeah. It is. I think, you know, my high school physics class, they talked about nature of abhorring a vacuum. And I think it works the same way with this stuff.

[01:28:18] And when the United States departs or threatens to depart or changes the perception in Europe and Russia, China, all these places about, you know, our part in it, there's a vacuum. And there are other actors that will fill the vacuum. You know, I hope it's France and the United Kingdom. I really do. But I'm not sure that, you know, it takes some time to do all of these things.

[01:28:45] And you've got a number of parties that have to work together. It's not so simple. And you have folks within the European Union that are trying to weaken it, like Hungary. And so, you know, it concerns me deeply. And people will say to me, well, you know, it's so far away. And it isn't. We're all interconnected. We're all interconnected. What happens in Finland, it matters in the UK. And certainly it matters in the United States. These are our cultural allies.

[01:29:14] These are military allies. These are our friends. These are our commercial partners. And, you know, I think it's crucial. Yeah, alliances are very hard to build. And they're very difficult to put back together again if you disrupt them or destroy them. And this unfortunately seems to be the kind of era we're in at the moment.

[01:29:35] There's this sort of isolationist movement from the United States that's sort of just taking a wrecking ball to a lot of very important institutions that have been around for a very long time. And doing a lot of good in the world. And the people taking the wrecking ball don't really understand what they do. And it's really appalling. I've had friends from Finland, Czech Republic, the UK, Ireland, France, you know, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, all across Europe.

[01:30:04] And probably have somewhat different political views on a host of different issues. But on this one, it's been unanimous. This is not the right development. And I don't understand it. I mean, now we're threatening. Now we're saying that Russia didn't start the war and we're threatening Greenland. Yeah. Well, yeah. Greenland, Canada. It's just insanity.

[01:30:27] Again, all this helps, should we say, the enemies of the United States and the enemies of NATO because if we fight amongst each other, we become weak. And then it leaves opportunity for, as you were saying, to fill the vacuum. I want to ask you a question, Chris. How long do you think it takes? Let's suppose that somehow this, you know, we have concerns long term about democracy in the United States and our election and our elections, things that we never thought about before.

[01:30:54] But let's say we get through the next three and a half years. How long does it take before the United Kingdom says, yeah, we can trust those guys again? You know, we can count on the United States. I mean, it didn't matter whether Reagan was president or Clinton was president or Kennedy was president or Johnson or Bush senior. It didn't matter about American trustworthiness on this.

[01:31:21] And I think that is a real I fear that's a real long term casualty. Well, yeah. But we were just on this podcast just chatting with Shane Harris about the Five Eyes community and whether it's in danger or not and how allies are reacting to the signal gate scandal, etc. And I think I guess the answer is probably in how bad it gets over these next three years and how many scandals there are, etc.

[01:31:48] And what happens, you know, if America does go and invade Greenland or annex Greenland, if you could put it that way, and then take a wrecking ball to NATO over that, that could change the dynamic dramatically. I think it's unlikely an invasion of Canada. But if, you know, I don't know what Trump's mental state is. I really don't. I think I am surprised that his mental state hasn't been caught into question over this rhetoric over Greenland and Canada. I think his behavior is really abnormal for a president in the United States.

[01:32:16] And so, yeah, I don't know the answer because it just depends on how bad it gets. But I think Britain always takes the special relationship very seriously. You know, we've got a lot of historic kind of connections. And I hope we all can kind of get through this. But I guess it's just sort of goes beyond Trump, really, isn't it? Because I think there's a because we have a similar problem in the UK and in Europe as well with this rise of the far right.

[01:32:42] And, you know, maybe people who don't quite understand how institutions were built and the importance of them or even what they do. We seem to have for the last 20 years, the tech sector champions this idea of disruption and disruptions become this very popular word. But people are happy to disrupt things without understand the consequences of that and don't understand how you have to rebuild things. And my example I use is the disruption of the TV business because I come from a film background.

[01:33:09] And what's kind of ironic is all these so-called disruptors like Netflix, Amazon, etc., who are all about, you know, being different from television and are moving away from the advertisement model. All they've managed to do is recreate television again and go back to the advertisement model because they realized what they were doing didn't work. And the original TV, you know, business model did work. And they've disrupted it and now managed to make it work for them. But it could have taken a wrecking ball to an already established industry.

[01:33:38] So that seems to be the world we're in. And that's the thing we need to kind of get a better handle on, I guess, because this even if Trump, you know, does manage to leave office and not totally destroy everything. I just worry about who's next. And again, like with the situation with the Democrats who are the opposition to Trump, you know, the Democrats have faced an awful lot of negative messaging via social media influences.

[01:34:06] You know, people on the kind of alt-right who are, should we say, almost the Diet Coke of right-wing extremism. They could have put it in a nice kind of package where people who are listening to it don't really understand the roots of where they're coming from. And, you know, and so people are kind of adopting a lot of ideas without kind of critically examining them. And, yeah, going down very strange paths.

[01:34:33] So like the whole anti-woke movement, which Russia has also benefited from as well, is a really interesting example about how very kind of right-wing and, should we say, far-left ideas in some areas too have kind of gone into kind of combat with each other. And it's sort of slowly sort of this whole debate kind of is wrecking democracy and it's very sad. And ultimately, a lot of the woke ideals are pretty positive things. And yet there are people out there who are trying to take a wrecking ball to anything.

[01:35:01] So it's very weird. I don't know exactly where it started, you know, but it's certainly in the over the rise of the Internet, a lot of these things like with conspiracy culture and things, which is something I fell into in my very early 20s and thankfully got out of. It's just a weird cocktail of a lot of things have kind of come home to roost now. And it's just how do we get past that? I don't know. And that's a very long-winded answer to your question and probably not even answering it really.

[01:35:29] Well, I gave you nothing but long-winded answers. But I know who I am. Well, you know, it's interesting though. You make a couple of great points. I think one of the things is that, you know, the World War II generation sort of died out. And I think those folks, whether they're on the left or right, there was sort of a moderated influence. Okay, I got strong opinions about this, but I'm going to temper this.

[01:35:55] I've seen what happens when people get too excited about that their views are right. And then I watched how language is used and, you know, these words like disruption and my journey and all those words. I find that they're really, I think it's really obscuring meaning. I think disruption in a lot of cases, it makes it sound like, okay, we're, you know, we're, we're taking something apart and we're going to rebuild it better. And really what it is, it's very often it's just destruction.

[01:36:25] It's just hiding, you know, Elon Musk is disrupting. No, he's, he's, you know, he's taking funding away from centers that are providing rehabilitation for amputees in Ukraine. And I'm not saying that there's not mistakes and, and fraud and, you know, government operations, but you're more than throwing the baby out with bathwater. You're throwing a lot of babies out. And so I see that in the Canadian thing.

[01:36:51] I've had friends of mine from Canada have said, you know, it kind of looks to us like you're trying to destabilize Canada to, with the ultimate goal of annexing us. United States of America, the United States of America. And, and, and I wish I could, parts of me wishes it was that strategic because I think the guy is just sort of ad hoc and hopping from subject to subject. Yeah. If you go by his biographer, that's very accurate.

[01:37:18] You know, if that's the case, I, my, my working theory with my colleague Matt on the podcast was there's two big security things involving Canada and Greenland. And I think Trump got some sort of security briefing, but his understanding was that he thinks he needs to take over those places. When in fact, all you need to do is just work with them, you know, because you've already got really good, you know, bases, et cetera, in Greenland.

[01:37:41] And you've got wonderful relations with Canada or did have, and obviously Canada is connected to NORAD and there's some radars that need updating. That's all you kind of need to do. You don't need to go and annex the places. And this is why I think Trump's off his rocker, to put it bluntly. And Mr. Vance is saying Denmark has served Greenland poorly. And those people are saying, well, five weeks of vacation a year, you want us to work weekends. Yeah. Yeah. There's all sorts of crazy things going on at the moment. Yeah.

[01:38:10] It's, it's, it's really hard to understand things, but you know, I'm, I'm really glad to have an opportunity about this and, you know, kind of getting back to the original thing. I don't want anyone to think I hate Russia. I love Russia. Russia is one of the most fascinating places in the world. It's, it's, it's so interesting. It took me years to understand. I really didn't understand that much about it. And you, you see that as folks spend time there, it takes about five years before you, you realize, oh, there's so much I don't know and understand.

[01:38:41] But it is fascinating. There are a lot of wonderful people there. They're, they're not well served by their government. They're hearing nothing propaganda all day long. And, you know, I'm, I'm deeply concerned about Ukraine. I care a lot about it. It's, when you go on the square and if you, I'll send you some photographs of this, but you go on the square on Maidan and there are hundreds of thousands of flags and photos of people.

[01:39:10] And I, you know, I was there just a few days ago. And, and there was a young woman standing there and she was quietly weeping with sunglasses on. And, you know, I mean, this is repeated all over the country all the time. And I, it's something about her. Of course, you don't want to disturb someone in their, in their grief, but there was something about it. I could tell that she wanted a little interaction. She told me, well, that's my boyfriend's picture right there. And, you know, I have many other friends there.

[01:39:39] And so, you know, she's having a death of a dream of family and children and of life with this person. And, you know, grieving that for who knows, you know, forever. And the worst tragedy is the young man's life is gone for no purpose other than the imperial ambitions of one small person sitting in Moscow. So, you know, and lots of stories.

[01:40:07] When you travel around Ukraine, there are so many stories like that. A very good friend of mine who speaks a number of languages and translates for French television was telling me last year that he was going around in eastern Ukraine, close to battle zones. And they were, I don't know, in a school or someplace where there were some internally displaced people. Their town had been bombed out. They were going to be moved elsewhere.

[01:40:36] The guy comes in looking for his, the French folks, French television was interviewing local authorities. Man comes in while they're in this process and he's looking for his wife because there are some IDP around. They don't know where she is. They suggest he goes someplace else. Well, there were also body bags in this facility.

[01:41:05] So the guy goes someplace else and someplace else in the city where there's some other IDP. He doesn't find his wife. He's no thought in his mind other than that she's alive. He just needs to find her. Eventually comes back while the interview is still in process. And has she shown up yet? And looks around and they suggested, you know, maybe you try, have you tried calling her as your phone switched on? He said, yeah, I keep calling her, but she must have dropped her phone someplace. I can't, I can't.

[01:41:35] She's not answering. And they suggested that she, she, he dial a telephone. He dials the telephone in one of the body bags in the corner of rings. Oh God. And right in front of my friend Arkady, this man finds out that the love of his life is, you know, gone. So, and those stories are, this is an extraordinary story for you and I, for Ukrainians. This is every day. And this is almost every family. Their families have been separated.

[01:42:04] There are people that are collaborating. I have a close friend in Kiev whose family's broken apart. Um, and, uh, you know, his son is collaborating in southeastern Ukraine and they don't really have contact, much contact with their, their granddaughter. And, you know, it, it, it's all over the country. Everyone's got it. Everybody there has got a story like this. Yeah. What are your hopes for the future of Ukraine and what can listeners do as opposed to help get us there? Yeah.

[01:42:34] I mean, right now I'm involved in commercial enterprises there. Ukraine has got, I know it sounds crazy that they're fighting a battle and not a battle, you know, they're fighting a war. Um, but, um, it's got a bright future. It's going to be a manufacturing hub for Western Europe. There are some amazing cities, Lviv, Kiev, Odessa stand out. There are other great places. They're a motivated, educated population.

[01:43:04] Costs are much lower than in Western Europe. I'm sure that manufacturers will see an advantage there. Um, Ukrainians will start to come back and rebuild their country and their lives. I, I think Ukraine is going to, I don't know exactly what this is going to look like, whether it's got something, you know, kind of a long-term frozen. There's a lot of frozen conflict in the East.

[01:43:26] Um, I, I don't know what exactly how it looks, but I think most Ukrainians believe that the future of their country is going to be driven by growth and development, especially in Kiev and Lviv. So there are parts of Eastern Ukraine that probably will never be rebuilt or won't for a very, very long time. There was a population shift that started in about 2011 or maybe even before that. And a lot of folks are moving to Kiev.

[01:43:53] You know, Kiev has an outsized, um, importance within the, the Ukrainian economy and it's a beautiful, vibrant city. And, and, and so, um, we're working on, we see opportunities to help out in, uh, construction residential field. There's, there's, there is, um, you know, a lot of infrastructure that needs to be rebuilt. There's not enough housing right now in Kiev. There's something like 2 million square meters short of what they need.

[01:44:19] And, um, cities like, uh, Ushgorod on the Slovakian border, which is growing really quickly. There are a lot of defense industries there, pharmaceutical industries there. A lot of companies have shifted west to Lviv. Lviv is going to be a very important place. There's infrastructure going in with new airport and ring roads and things like this. Um, Ukraine has got a fantastic, um, agricultural sector.

[01:44:46] They've got 25% of the black earth, the very best agricultural land in the world. So, um, yeah, there, there are some real uncertainties there, but don't stay away. Now is the time to get involved when, um, there still is uncertainty because once, once that uncertainty is off the table, those folks, the, the early adapters will, will be the ones that will have, have profited and helped the Ukrainians a lot.

[01:45:11] So there's, there are chances to, to get involved, add liquidity right now to the Ukrainian economy and, and help folks. Yeah. So I have partnered with Leopard Capital and Leopard Capital invests in frontier, uh, markets and they're forming several, uh, private real estate funds to invest in residential in Ukraine.

[01:45:34] Which will add, uh, liquidity to the market and, uh, ultimately help in reconstruction and building of, of, uh, uh, residential in that country, which is, you know, it's a big issue right now. There's, there's shortage of housing and that will be even more acute when millions more Ukrainians hopefully return to the country soon. Fantastic. So Bruce, where can listeners sort of find out more about you and connect with you?

[01:46:01] Yeah, I would say either, either destination hyphen Ukraine or brucetalley.com, either one. Um, brilliant. The, you know, the blog has a little different information and, um, destination Ukraine is really focused on Ukraine. So yeah, fantastic. Well, Bruce, thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much for sharing your stories. I've really appreciated everything you've contributed today. Um, so, you know, thank you for joining me. It's been a really interesting conversation. Thanks a lot. You're, uh, you're a great, uh, interviewer and, uh, it's a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you.

[01:47:04] Thanks for listening. This is Secrets and Spies.