 A lot of reverberations around the interview of Taka, of Putin, a lot of commentary around that. We'll get to that. And a lot of follow-up from Taka about his experiences in Moscow. We talked about him saying how wonderful of a city he was. We'll talk in more detail about that because he's released a couple of videos, one in the subway and one doing shopping, grossing shopping in Moscow. Taka is ready to pack up and leave and move to Moscow. And I really, really, really, really hope he does. I mean, it would be good riddance. It would be fantastic. Anyway, Putin had an opportunity to comment on his interview with Taka. And kind of Putin agrees with me in terms of the quality of the interview. Speaking to Russian state TV, Putin said he had thought that Taka Kostun was like a edgy, kind of dangerous, kind of tough person. But he says, quote, I honestly thought he would be aggressive and ask so-called sharp questions. And I wasn't just ready for that. I wanted it because I would have given me the opportunity to respond sharply in kind. But he chose a different tactic. He thought the interview was not very satisfying. He didn't view it as challenging. He wanted to go toe-to-toe with a real opponent. And the Kremlin had picked Taka Kostun because they thought Taka is kind of right wing and going to be tough and everything. And he turned out to be, you know, nothing. And so Putin is having a good time trolling Taka. I think you'll see more of this. He continued to go on, quote, he tried to interrupt me several times, but still surprisingly for a Western journalist, he turned out to be patient and listened to my lengthy dialogues, especially those related to history, and didn't give me reason to do what I was ready for. So frankly, I didn't get complete satisfaction from the interview. What can you do? You know, Taka's going to have to go back to school to figure out how to please Putin more. This was not an interview that satisfied Vladimir Putin, because Taka just didn't live up to his- To cost. Everybody hears from the United States. Whoops. It is, you know, I guess, reputation of being a tough guy, of being a tough guy who asks tough questions and is sharp, quick, fast. So in the meantime, Taka, when he was in Moscow, he kind of went around, he went to the Bolsheviks ballet. I'm sure we'll get a short video about that. It is quite an impressive place. He went to the subway, as a pretty much every western has gone to the subway system in Moscow since the old Soviet Union, because it's the one place that's really nice in Moscow. And it's, particularly if you compare it to, let's say, the subway system in New York or subway systems in some other places in the United States, it's well kept. It's clean. It's got this old architecture, which we know, right, when people in the United States just adore anything that's old and has like old looking architecture. They consider that civilization. So, you know, for many on the right in America, anything that dates before, I don't know, 1960, and particularly if it's got a little bit of a Guico-Roman sense to it or a Gothic or something like that, something old, then they go gaga over it. They just love it. Gothic in particular, cathedrals, they just, you know, orgasm over. That is real culture to them. Anything modern, no, no. That's leftist, woke, nonsense, Frank Lloyd Wright, no good, no good, throw him out. Anyway, you know, so, you know, he was at the subway station, as was Bernie Sanders in 1988. And both of them gushed over the subway station. It was clean and amazing and looked great. And then, Taka also went grocery shopping. He went grocery shopping in Moscow. And you already heard about White Streets and how clean they are and just how wonderful Moscow is. And when he went grocery shopping, he was stunned. He spent $100 and he bought a lot of food in the United States. He couldn't have bought so much food for $100. And at Taka Carson, gushes over this. And I don't know, you know, I feel stupid even having to bring this up. I mean, Taka Carson and the people who admire him have now descended into, you know, an abyss of stupidity that is really hard to comprehend and hard to catch up with. And again, this is the Trump effect. The Trump effect is to make people stupid. That's what Trump has done. He's made people stupid. Because he says the most nonsensical things and he goes, yeah, yeah, he's tough on the left. And Taka just does the same thing and he goes, yeah, yeah. Taka basically is saying the West sucks. Moscow is amazing, amazing. Interesting. I always like to run this thought experiment. You know, maybe you guys can participate in this thought experiment. Maybe you can ask your Russian friends. American Russia had open borders. And Putin was still in power and Biden, incompetent, awful, horrible Biden was still in the White House. In which direction do you think people would move? Would Americans go to Russia or would Russians come to America? And to me, the answer to that is simple and straightforward and easy and you don't have to think very long for that. But it's no question Russians would flood into the United States and basically the country would be emptied. Certainly, it would be empty of anybody with brains. And indeed, the number of Americans going to Russia would be trivial and minimal. I mean, you could do the same thing with the left. If you opened up the borders of the United States with Cuba, you know, who has, according to what's his name, Moore. The best healthcare system in the world. Just like Tucker thinks that Russia has the best subways and the best food and the cheapest food and everything else of anybody in the world. You know, same thing, you know, Moore and Taki Carlson are the same type of mindless propaganda. Anyway, if you open up the border between Cuba and the United States, where do you think people would flow? And it's kind of obvious that everybody in Cuba would come to the U.S. and nobody would go to Cuba. You can even do this with Sweden, you know, just in case some of you think Sweden is heaven or Denmark is heaven and there you wouldn't get a flood. But there's no question in my mind more people of Sweden would come to the U.S. than Americans would go to Sweden. A lot of budding entrepreneurs, Swedish budding entrepreneurs or Danish budding entrepreneurs would rather go to Silicon Valley than anybody really want to go live in Stockholm, although some people would. So Jennifer says, I hate Michael Moore. I do too, but I now hate Taka Carlson more. I have to say it. I hate Taka Carlson more than I hate Michael Moore. They're the same. They're the same. But Taka Carlson is duping people who at least used to be kind of maybe a little bit on my side. Michael Moore just duped people who were gone for anyway. Anybody who was duped by Michael. And Taka's so now the world is really split up between Michael Moore dupes and Taka Carlson dupes. That that is that is the split now. That is the split. Anyway, the reason a hundred dollars will buy you more in Moscow is because you know, cost of living in Moscow is significantly lower. The problem is if you do the actual analysis is that first of all, I don't think Taka Carlson knows how far a hundred dollars go in a grocery store in the United States. I mean, when did any of you think was the last time Taka Carlson actually went grocery shopping? I mean, Taka Carlson is a snob from a relatively wealthy family, lives in a wealthy town, has other people. I think I expect do his grocery shopping. But a hundred dollars is a fortune in Russia. And a hundred dollars in the United States is not that much. And there are a few examples of this. I mean, you could you could slice this in different ways. You can look at the you can look at the exchange rate between the rubble and the dollar. You have to exchange a lot of rubles, a lot of rubles. Particularly today for that hundred dollars as compared to how many rubles you had to exchange for it, you know, before the war and further back. I mean, one of the things that Putin has done is he's devastated. The rubble has gone to hell. I will also know what we'll get to that in a minute. So a hundred dollars is a fortune in Russia. So very few people could buy what Taka Carlson could buy. Just to give you an example before the war, it's much worse today. Before the war in 2022, a food expense accounted for 33 percent of Russian household spending. So whatever Russians brought in, they spent a third of everything they brought in on food. Americans, this is median household, 13 percent, 13 percent. So about a third. In other words, food in America costs a third of what it costs in Russia when you adjust for cost of living, when you adjust for cost of living. So, I mean, that's not hard to figure out. Now, answer that, that you look at the grocery store that Taka Carlson went to, and he went to a grocery store in the center Moscow. The center Moscow is where, you know, the richest 500 people in Russia live who control something like 75 percent of the wealth in Russia. It has really, really nice grocery stores for the very, very rich Russians. But 99 percent of Russians, 99.9 percent of Russians, don't live in the center Moscow. A large percentage of them live in those old housing complexes that the Soviet time, they're ugly, they're filthy. Their grocery stores look nothing like the well-lit, beautifully cleaned, fully stocked grocery store that Taka went into. I mean, Taka is participating here, not in communist propaganda, as many Americans did during the USSR days. He's participating in Putin's fascist propaganda. But it's so propaganda, and he is now part of the Putin propaganda machine. It's not only that Taka went to Moscow and gave Putin this amazing platform of his 200 million views, I think it has. But now he's creating videos on top of that to make Moscow look like, wow. Now there's a city I want to live in, and maybe Putin's not that bad if the city he lives in is so cool. Maybe having a fascist government is not that bad if you can buy groceries for a hundred bucks. Maybe fascism generally is not that bad if the subway system's clean and the trains run on time. Maybe we need somebody like Putin, a strongman like Putin in the West. I mean, literally propaganda. You know, he's talking about high stand of living in Russia. There is no high stand of living in Russia. You're crazy. I mean, you're literally crazy. You're literally buying into the propaganda. And now this is not a mistake. It cannot be a mistake. This is not, you know, figuring out the dollar exchange rate, figuring out how much a Russian, typical Russian pays, and how much, you know, GDP per capita I think in Russia is 13,000. GDP per capita in the United States as well over 60,000. I mean, God, they are so much poorer. The middle class Russians are significantly poorer than working class poor, you know, the working poor are in the United States. Significantly. I mean, Taka, I hope, is going to fly out of Cuba. And, you know, following Michael Moore will declare it amazing, a paradise of free healthcare. And maybe he could go to China and tell us about how there's no crime in the streets in China and how orderly everything is. And plus, maybe he can admire the modern architecture. I mean, it would be great if he went to North Korea. Maybe they'd keep him and tell us how wonderful it is that nobody in North Korea criticizes their, you know, presidents. I mean, maybe we need more of that in the United States. Or maybe he can go to Afghanistan and tell us about how wonderfully religious the Afghans are. And what we need in America is a little bit more religion. And maybe also, and here he could follow Matt Walsh and tell us how wonderful the Afghans treat their women. And finally, in Afghanistan, you've got some masculine men. I mean, it's the haven of masculinity. And maybe the next documentary Taka does, maybe he can do it with Matt Walsh. And they can talk about masculinity in Afghanistan and the role of women in society. I think that would be absolutely, absolutely perfect. So anyway, I don't know. The world is nuts, completely and utter nuts. Oh, and of course, you remember the dollar stores. I mean, it's absolutely true. Russia doesn't have dollar stores. Well, that is proof that Russian society, Russian culture is better. Look, you can criticize America. You can be anti-Biden. You can criticize the administration. You can criticize the cost of living. You can criticize the cost of housing. The shrink-flation. You can do a lot of things about how things are bad in America. I'm happy to do it. We'll be doing it in a few minutes once I finish talking about Taka. To elevate, Russia is sick, sick. Russians have, again, $13,000 per capita GDP. Alcoholism is chronic. They have a .7 birth rate. It's where South Korea is. But here it's all because of depression. They are waging a war of aggression in which tens of thousands of Russian boys, young men, have died for what? For Putin's delusion? That would have been a good question for Putin. And yet Moscow is this amazing, beautiful place, much nicer than New York or any American city. Any American city, according to Taka Carlson. It's just, again, mind-boggling, crazy, really crazy. They have good vodka. I hear from people who actually know vodka. All right, a few other things. You know, not to be left kind of, not to let Taka do this all by himself and so on. Here's some other people's commentary on what happened, particularly, you know, Matt Walsh, 2.7 million followers on Twitter. He said, he tweeted this. Tonight, as Putin gave intelligent, scholarly answers that delved into a thousand years of Russian history, President Biden was babbling incoherently about how President of Egypt is actually the President of Mexico. No mention here about the sheer falsehood of much of that history. The irrelevancy of it to a war of aggression, to the fact that tens of thousands, really hundreds of thousands, if you think about all the injured, Russians are suffering from Putin's megalomania and fanatic nationalism. Irrelevant for Matt Walsh. Any opportunity to take a stab at Biden, I'm sure Scott would be thrilled at this tweet. I mean, yeah. Benny Johnson, a Republican YouTuber with more than 2 million followers on Twitter. 2 million. He said, quote, Taka maybe may literally bring peace to the world with this interview. And quote, lies create war and slavery. The truth shall set you free. The truth is spoken by a dictator, literally a dictator. And yet, the truth shall set you free. We no longer believe in liberty and freedom. We now believe everything dictators tell us. I mean, if only we'd listen to Hitler, maybe we'd have understood him better. And maybe we could have prevented and saved ourselves a whole war. We could have just, we should have just listened. Just sat down with the guy. I mean, how bad could he be? And podcast host Joey Manarino. People have never heard of it. Anyway, 456,000 Twitter followers that he'd quote, take Putin over Biden any day of the week. Well, guys, we're going to get Putin over Biden. We're going to get an authoritarian in this country. It's people like Walsh Johnson, Manarino and Taka Carson, who are laying the groundwork, creating the foundation for a right-wing authoritarian in this country. The left, we know, has those tendencies. But this is the right. This is here. In many ways, this is worse because they're doing the name of Americanism. And they're laying the foundations and they're saying it. We'd rather take Putin over Biden any day of the week. Well, then, of course, if we had a Putin who wrapped himself in the American flag and declared himself a good Christian, who could resist him? To hell with freedom of the press, freedom of speech. To hell with economic liberty. I mean, it's much better if we just give all the wealth of the country to a bunch of our friends and have them run it. Isn't that better? Right? I mean, the problem with capitalism is a lot of these people who become billionaires, they turn out to be leftist. That's a real flaw in capitalism. Obviously, we should reject capitalism because it creates leftist billionaires. All right, I don't know. I mean, I don't know how I used to be not that long ago and I keep fluctuating. I used to be kind of the guy who everybody thought was kind of optimistic. That optimism is fading fast, I have to tell you. Every time these people, Trump and his accolades, become more prominent in the world out there, it just makes me go.