(In bed with) the Russians

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We took our podcasting from bed concept to its logical conclusion: Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage style video content. We finally went full internet. We’re streamers now.

We talk about Philip K. Dick and his wife Tessa who seems to be living in poverty, PKD’s concept of the Black Iron Prison, VALIS, gnosticism, Judaism, Israel, demonic forces that want to keep us enslaved, autism, marriage, staying holy in this age of total corruption…and lots of other things.

This full inaugural video episode is for paid subscribers only. So…subscribe. And give Tessa Dick some money!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit yasha.substack.com

For the first half hour we talk about the Hebrew god, zionism, and Yasha’s newfound vocation as the self-appointed Chief Rabbi of All Jews. Then we discuss the opening salvo of Israel’s digital device bombing campaign in Lebanon and about all the nukes that Yahweh has. And in the last twenty minutes we talk about a memoir that chronicles a Russian woman immigrant’s success story — marrying rich, duh. It’s called Dreaming in Russian and Evgenia thinks it’s so bad it’s actually good.

We recorded this from bed last night. Sweet dreams.

We get out of bed again to do a quick ep on Pavel Durov, his arrest in France, what happens when you run a successful international tech business like Telegram without playing by the rules, and how this all fits into the thesis of my book Surveillance Valley.

The fact that Durov isn’t tied into the US imperial-military complex like his biggest competitors — including Signal, which was launched with CIA spinoff money — clearly hasn’t been doing him any favors. Can you imagine Zuck not cooperating with the cops and getting snatched off his plane? No, because Zuck and the rest of his peers are made men in a system that demands loyalty.

Take a listen.

—Yasha

A few notes. On the show I mentioned a few of my articles that touch on the political aspects of privacy, crypto, surveillance, state power…

* The Crypto- Keepers: How the politics-by-app hustle conquered all. This one features my extended interview with Pavel Durov from 2017. One thing that Durov and I shared was bewilderment that big name privacy activists, including Edward Snowden, could with a straight face promote Internet crypto tools like Signal and Tor—apps that are openly funded by CIA spinoffs, the State Department and the Pentagon.

* All EFF’d Up: Silicon Valley’s astroturf privacy shakedown

* And of course I cover all this in Surveillance Valley.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit yasha.substack.com/subscribe

We got out of bed yet again…this time to talk to Miloslav Chemodanov, a Russian journalist now seeking refugee status in New York. He talks about fleeing the war, his experience growing up gay in Russia, about how anti-gay politics are cynically deployed by the government for political control…and a lot more.

A note: We had a slight technical issue with the recording…the issue being that Yasha forgot to press the record button. So we’re missing an early chunk of the interview but it’s great anyway. So check it out!

PS: You can follow Miloslav on Instagram. And read about him here…

PPS: We talk about Evgenia interviewing Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey. Here’s the link.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit yasha.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit yasha.substack.com

We get out of bed to talk to Corey Robin about the evolution of Jewish politics in the United States and how this politics has regressed to an older European model. The Jewish mainstream now only looks out for its own narrow interests, working through centralized orgs to lobby for protection and has moved away from the egalitarianism that marked its politics before. Someone like Hannah Arendt would probably say it’s a return to a court jew-type approach…and it’s not something that’s good for Jews.

We also talk about President Biden’s unsettling statements that he can’t guarantee safety for Jews in America…about non-Jewish politicians being increasingly comfortable dictating to Jews what it means to be Jewish…and a lot more.

Our discussion was inspired by an essay Corey just published in the New Yorker, Two Paths for Jewish Politics. Corey is a Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Read his blog, buy his books!

Listen and have a good night.

We got out of bed this time to talk to Vadmin Nikitin, a journalist and blogger born in Murmansk, about his immigrant experience.

We had a really interesting talk. Vadim’s story is unique. His father, a captain on a fishing ship out of Murmansk, was sent to the U.S. to get an MBA during perestroika. He took Vadmin and his family with him and while they were in America, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. When he returned to Russia right after the failed 1991 putsch, he was told to take a hike. Nobody wanted him back at his job. The huge Soviet Murmansk fishing fleet — worth billions — was being picked up apart and privatized by his former coworkers and comrades and they, not surprisingly, weren’t too eager to share the spoils.

Some of the things we talk about: sanctions and the corruption of the democratic process, Russia’s liberal intelligentsia, 1990s privatization, the war in Ukraine, similarities between “the West” and the Soviet Union…

Enjoy!

PS: You can follow Vadim on Twitter and check out his writing in the London Review of Books and the Nation and others.

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An emergency broadcast from bed. We talk about the secretive and surprising prisoner exchange between America and Russia and get into the details of some of the cases we’ve been following for years. Sweet dreams.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit yasha.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit yasha.substack.com

We are lying flat in our NY bed…back from Montreal. We talk about the latest political news, movies, the death of journalism, and about writing fiction vs. nonfiction. Also if you power through to the end you’ll find out which wildly successful writer Yasha calls “a cisgender white walrus.” Sweet dreams.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit yasha.substack.com

Yasha is back from San Francisco and we talk about his reaffirmed disdain towards the city where he became an American. We also talk about David Berman and his rabbinical poetry, the documentary about his 2007 Israel tour, and the newly surfaced fan fights about whether he’d be supporting Israel or not right now. We do all this under the spell of Biden’s contagious senility, which seems to be affecting our entire society, like something out of the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Have a good night!

Evgenia

David Berman and the Third Temple

We talk about Daniel Simonsen, a Norwegian comic who is blowing up in the New York comedy world. We also talk about another Norwegian, Kris Borgli, who is blowing up in the movie world with recent films like Sick of Myself and Dream Scenario. We discuss how dark Nordic humor is similar to Russian humor. We also answer a reader question about why we don’t live in Russia. All from bed in a hotel room in SoHo.

Have a good morning!

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit yasha.substack.com/subscribe