 Tucker is not an independent actor in Moscow, because when you see that supermarket, for instance, and you say, oh, how amazing everyone lives. Look at these subways. I did something that I mistakenly, the other day, when I was reading up again on the apartment bombings, I went back to this because I was just thinking about this with Tucker and conspiracy theories. And I think it's Raison was the name of the town that's just southeast of Moscow. So I looked at the apartment buildings on Google Maps. And then I did Google Street View in this town. It literally looks like nothing has changed since the 1960s. It's a Soviet dump. And I apologize to anyone who's listening who lives there, but I'll tell you what, it does not look modern. It does not look post-Soviet. It looks pre-Soviet in so many ways. And everyone looks grim and miserable. And this is the stuff that Tucker is not going to see because when you try to go and say, I'm going to go visit, you know, Memorial, the dissident group that's been shut down by Putin, by the way. And what did Memorial do? Incidentally, this is not about Putin. They were an organization that did incredible archival work of people that were killed in the Gulag and killed by the Soviet Union and killed by Stalin. And it's an incredible organization. Memorial was shut down because the past has to be controlled to not just the present. And if you went to see somebody like that, if you were Tucker Carlson, you wouldn't last very long. They would make it very, very clear that that was not allowed or they would interfere with it in some way. So you're not, you know, on your own. I mean, when I was in Russia, I had to get a visa through the government. And that requires a lot of very specific stuff. The other thing, I mean, I've made this point in a few different places. And for whatever reason, people continue to not really grok it. But like, you know, I was recently in Bucharest, Romania and you know, you get a car and you venture outside of sort of main city corridor. Okay, suddenly it feels like the shitty Romanian rust belt, right? Like I'm literally, I was like breastfeeding my child on the side of the road in rural Romania. And there's just these like, almost like zombie apocalypse looking people with like clearly haven't had dental care in the last two decades or whatever. Like literally since Chalcescu was in power, like they haven't had, you know, brushed their teeth. And I'm just sort of looking and it's like, well, I've seen a lot of different forms of poverty around the world. But like if you just came to Bucharest and you just saw the, you know, film production crews and went to some of the nice restaurants, then went to that like cool cocktail bar down there, you would have no clue that this type of thing is happening an hour away. And that's not just Romania, right? Like it's a gazillion, you know, whole countries are formerly shit-hole, formerly communist countries that are like that. And that's just the side of it that I really wish people would pay some. Yeah, I mean, I spent like four days in St. Petersburg, Russia on vacation. So, you know, probably not that much less time than Tucker spent in Moscow. And, but just in that amount of a period of time, and I was just there, you know, to see things, you notice right away that there's a lot of, it's like there's this really grand architecture, but like you get close to stuff and it looks kind of dingy. And then like, yes, driving back just to the airport, you just see like desolation. So it just raises the question to me of, you know, it's almost cartoonish the way that he put together these shorts. Like it's over the, like the style, the edit egg. Well, let's play the subway one because I just want to comment on like the way this is- The music, the score is incredible. Yeah, so he enrolled the subway clip for us. One of the ways you understand the society is through its infrastructure, the places where people gather, the places where they go to travel. You've got a lot of people in one place that tells you a lot about the people. So with that in mind, we're standing in front of the Key of the Sky Metro Station and there's train station next to it. Now the metro station was built by Joseph Stalin 70 years ago. And the question is, how's it doing now? There's no graffiti, there's no filth, there's no foul smells, there are no bums or drug addicts or rapists or people waiting to push you onto the train tracks and kill you. No. It's perfectly clean and orderly. And how do you explain that? We're not even going to guess. That's not our job. We're only going to ask the question. And if your response is to shout at us slogans dumber than the slogans we used to call Soviet and mock, that's not really an answer. Like, what the hell is going on here? The hills are alive with the sound of communism. Do you notice, by the way, he did Soviet in air quotes, which is pretty funny for somebody who is- By the way, that montage ends on a shot of a portrait of Lenin. Yes, there's a relief of Lenin in there. But also, you might have noticed the name Kyiv is in the name of the station. And there is a plaque beneath Lenin, which is that final shot in it, which is about the eternal friendship between the Ukrainian and Russian people. And I imagine that that was on purpose. I'm not entirely sure if that was a little Easter egg, but you look at all these other images, which are classic constructivist Russian images of lantern-jawed men with flags. And the subway that was built with slave labor, people from the gulag, I mean, that's not even disputed. I mean, can you break this down for us, Michael? Because you and Liz are in New York City. The subway can be pretty shitty. So why does Moscow have this beautiful artwork and New York City doesn't? I mean, well, we didn't have Joseph Stalin, that's for sure. We did have the WPA and these public works projects, which actually tried to create socialist art in New York City and it became very, very controversially. Go back to the 1930s during the New Deal, that these Diego Rivera creating this big communist memorial in the middle of New York City and people objecting to it. But the reason this happens is dictatorships can create things like that. Yes, yeah, sure. I mean, let's be honest about it. North Korea has less crime than New York City. Do you wanna live in North Korea? Do you wanna live in New York City? In these types of places, you can round up bombs, right? Like you can just do all kinds of things then far outside of the law, right? Like to some degree, I want to, you know, I am frequently, you know, a critic of NYPD and I think, you know, most libertarians are, there's absolutely situations where they use excessive force on all kinds of people doing things that, you know, we might dispute whether or not they should be considered crimes, right? Like NYPD definitely airs in some ways, but by and large, they're not like rounding up bombs and putting them in trucks and imprisoning them for a really long time or sending them to like forced labor camps or like, like that's not how bombs and junkies are disposed of in New York. In fact, a big part of the criticism is that they're not really disposed of at all, right? Like we had this big push to do away with institutionalization and to some degree, you know, we could kind of trace some of our current predicament to that, right? Like, and I, you know, maybe lots of New Yorkers are not comfortable with those trade-offs, but these are trade-offs either way you slice it, right? It's either public despair or private despair, but it's not like you're doing away with despair altogether, I don't think. Yeah, there's no Thomas Saas in Russia. I don't think, but the interesting thing about this is what he's essentially saying, I mean, but he's not saying in so many words because it's kind of, you know, camouflaged in so many ways. Is it, this isn't a policy thing, right? I mean, even if this were true, it is not true. There's an enormous amount of crime in Russia. There's an enormous amount of poverty in Russia. There's homelessness in Russia. They're, you know, at the last phase of the Soviet Union. There's alcoholism in Russia, by the way, also. So that was the big public works thing in 1985 and 86 when Gorbachev took over. It was like, it was an anti-alcohol campaign because alcoholism was so bad and alcohol was so cheap. The only thing you could get plentifully in the Soviet Union. So there's a lot of that, but why isn't it apparent right there? Well, I mean, are you talking about the Putin regime, talking about the Russian character? I mean, because it all exists. Why do you not see it in the subway? Well, it's a police state. Number one, number two, you know, imagine what would happen if this news story, which got a lot of press in New York City of this, these two NYPD cops that were set upon by a bunch of migrants, right? And they were arrested and no bail. They were released. And then a bunch of them committed more crimes. Imagine something like that happening in Russia. Obviously it wouldn't. And I can hear the tuckers of the world saying, what shouldn't happen here? Yes, they shouldn't happen here. But the sort of tweaks around the edges of what could make the city life better is not, the answer to that is not to have all power in the state. I don't understand people who are, quote unquote, conservatives or libertarians, especially, believing that the way the state controls everything in Russia is something to be applauded or ended. I'll give you one example of this. When I was in Russia, I was with Vitalik Buterin, the guy who created Ethereum. And he speaks Russian perfectly, met with Putin actually the day before I met him and was denouncing Putin yesterday. This is somebody who doesn't care. He has family there. His parents moved after the fall of the Soviet Union to Canada. But when I was with him, we went to a, it was a technology park, I guess is what you call it, outside of Moscow. And I was talking to the guy who was like, our handler and he's like, this is our competition with Silicon Valley. And at one point I asked him, I was like, do you realize that you've done, the government has done this and you guys have a very poor record of the government creating big technology projects like we have in the United States. The Silicon Valley was created by some people like Sergey Brin, Russians who were allowed through the magic of the free market to create it. And they were still doing this. They were still trying to create in a centrally planned way. It's not a communist country but it's still that central planning instinct in like, is this the country that people like Tucker Carlson want to live in? Good God, I would, I would escape immediately. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our new show, Just Asking Questions. You can watch another clip here or the full episode here. New episodes drop every week. So subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel to get notified when that happens or to the Just Asking Questions podcast on Apple, Spotify or any other podcatcher. See you next week.