Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of New Abnormal. We thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with Joseph Weisberg, who is of course the creator and showrunner of the amazing show The Americans. And he's going to talk about his new book today.
Russia upside down. Welcome to the New Abnormal, Joseph. Thanks, Molly. It's very exciting when we have a guest who is in the intersection of entertainment and politics.
I'm in the intersection. That's where I'm at. I never thought of it that way. I'm living in the intersection.
That's right. So I want to know the story of how you came to this book because I think it's cinematic. So go. Molly, I'll tell you this book is at the intersection of the introduction of the knowledge.
I had a sort of a bouncing and interesting route that really did run through those two places. So I was always really obsessed with so many minutes after it collapsed. And I also had to tell you it's working at CIA. So I was really interested in intelligence and espionage.
And whatnot. And I was just fine. I'll tell you after I left the agency. I called from an agent in Hollywood.
I would have said we'd be like, right television, because we're looking for spy shows. We're looking for a lot of software. So I was surprised that they were listed. I'm going to have a job application.
I'm going to get whatever we did. I'm feeling the whole big issue out there. There's just a really happy to have a 50s. It's a sort of bureaucratic now.
You know you're not the only person who's been on this podcast who has called this CIA and asked for a job. Really? Yeah. Evan McMullen has story after story about calling this CIA and then being like your 13, no.
I have to have a drink with imagery. So create that story back to work. So anyway, so go on. So you got into the CIA.
Yeah. I was only ever a couple years. I really do much of the train. But I read a lot there and saw a lot of things that were happening for it.
And if I left, I just started rethinking. I can't remember this book by a guy who had a k p o t e officer named Victor Tchaution. And he's what was my name is friends at the KGB. And he sounded exactly like he might as well see I a it.
He worked. He's like, he'll hold blood killers. I still had this sort of child like view of it. And I started to rethinking really everything that gone on.
I started to read more widely. Of course a lot more was able from our guys. I don't know if he was reading people or reading some of our guys. And I started to see what a narrow view I had at the whole place.
And then I started to serve people that gave it a show. Based on the fact that if it wasn't such a black and white situation, it was a really important way to be able to make it as a very important way to make it as a part of the show. And I was always looking at the plots and stories and things that really weren't more history. I started developing even further the notion that this was a complex rich country like our own rather than some far away people who were superior.
Yeah, I mean, that's so interesting. I love the Americans. It's one of those shows that is even better than you think it is. You know, it's a really a show that's still the test of time.
So you're more experienced with the CIA. I really made you have compassion for the experience. You know, I think that I really started to offend my views and I was really trying to join some combination of James Bond and like, all right, I know it was a really kept James Bond and I was like, all right, but that was okay. But what I really was, I would find sort of the secret wheels that were turning and how things really worked.
And I found it's that a pretty dysfunctional bureaucracy. Like any other dyslexia of your office. I want to say that there's a good thing about that bureaucracy. So things work well.
I love the people there. But overall, I concluded that it's not a reason obviously for me that as the international nonprofit they've adopted the demand for damage and then anything positive. And so it started to kind of open the idea that I, generally the way I was looking at the world was maybe a little narrow or even as I say the title of the slide down. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
And so I came to the book from the show. Yeah, kind of. I mean, it was a little more, this book sort of came out of me thinking about in study, this is just some time I was pretty young. I was almost like 17.
I started getting obsessed with this topic. I guess it was, I think it was a great idea for the show and a friend of mine who started the CIA and put in charge of electrical room there. And called me up and said you should come to the lecture. And so I started thinking about it and I thought well, I have a lot of ideas about how not just high but our country sort of mismanaged the policy.
And the CIA was obviously very central called that. So it'd be sort of fun to go to the CIA and say hey guys, I think we sort of had it all wrong. And I was already going to go and then he called me back and said I would have a lecture as counterintelligence. And I was like, I'm going to choose a copy and said no.
And I said no, I didn't get that. And I was also very disappointed because I realized I actually had a lot to say about all this. And I already had a lot. So I just thought it was, you know, when we were in a couple of three days, I thought I'll just make a book which was, you know, because I obviously didn't do much, but that's what I did from the radio down.
Just give us the central thesis of your book. Sometimes in my late 20s, I went to therapy. And I started looking at myself and my feelings and my lack of access to my feelings and sort of the rigidity in which I viewed myself, my relationship to the world in general. And I found that I had trouble accessing my life and I had trouble seeing the world in complex terms.
And the tour very closely related because if you see things in kind of a black and white way, it affects you. It affects relationships and it affects how you see the whole world including politics. Not to be years or so, put that together and send it out to politics. But when I started then looking at a broader way, at the surface of this particular way, I started seeing that I had missed the fact that the whole place was really complex society.
It was like ours and that it had good things and bad things. People supported it and people didn't. It was just anything other than a simplistic evil empire. And essentially once I refought that, I started seeing modern day Russia very differently too.
And seeing that we were kind of repeating our same habits of, you know, making Putin nothing but a villain. And making the Russians only a country that casts us and we're at innocent victims. So to the Greek book as a thesis, it's to kind of connect the personal to the political and look more broad. It's interesting because, and I'm curious to know, you're taken this because you have never spent so much time on Russia.
You're a Russian expert in as much as anyone is. It strikes me that right now America is kind of refocusing on China. Yeah, it's hard to know. I think my concern is that we're going to get ourselves in kind of versions of Cold War with Russia and China at the same time, which is something we've done for.
So we're certainly able to have two enemies at the time when I think we're probably more sense to have no enemies. You know, I think these are human impulse. I had very strongly myself. And I was a young man and I was looking for a purpose in meaning in my life.
And I found that by picking an enemy that I could fight against. That made me something to do. It gave me a job. It gave me a belief system.
It was very appealing in so many ways, but it was dangerous. And it's dangerous when we do it collectively. So I agree that we're moving towards that China. I think we're already there with Russia.
And I think we could easily afford to back off of that. It would be a great favor to ourselves into the world. It seems like Russia, even though they're still this big American enemy, right? They have interfered in our elections.
Putin is, you know, it's very powerful. These Russian oligarchs have all this money. They're moving to America and the UK and the country itself is in pretty sad shape compared to the China. Yeah, it's often been a kind of debate.
I think about whether or not Russia would have been, whether it's a Soviet Union or a Soviet Union or a European Senate before we go here, we formed it. It changed the way that China changed, would have been still here and much of a richer and more successful. Nobody knows the answer to that in their last two different countries, which are going to get to the politics. And more chocolate was always a leader in Congress.
So there was no way he was going to make that decision. But Russia simultaneously struggling, but not sure it's as bad as we had to receive it. They're coming out because he has also improved. We kind of compare them to us.
So they're not as rich as others. They're not as rich as others. They're just China. They're not doing well.
But they're really focusing on their own terms under which they're probably certainly economically doing better. They've done a long, long, long time. And I said to him, this is one of my favorite moments in fact, I said, you know, you had democracy and you lost it. And he said, we never had democracy in Russia.
And I'm wondering what you think of that. It's an interesting comment. I don't know exactly what he meant without hearing what he does, but I think the claim that they had democracy, of course, was under Yeltsin in the 90s. Things weren't freer and more open and more unless they were further free or more open and certainly more democratic.
And I think that they were so corrupt and Yeltsin and so powerful and really that power and things like that. It couldn't be common to democracy. But in a way, I think it's very constructive and important question because we tend to see a three-to-five. They should have democracy.
They probably have democracy. So they're probably done. They're not really supported that idea. There's certainly always been in Russia and in the Soviet Union and since Westernizers and people who essentially are Western, the government president are outlook.
But they have never been popular and they have never really swayed the majority. And it's probably fair to say that most in Russia, you know, that democracy doesn't have the same ring in Russia that it has here. I'm told by many people who have been there and who see Russia. That isn't the sort of unambiguously positive idea.
It's not an aspiration. They are, for example, most Russians more concerned with stability. And that's, you know, if you think about the history of that country, that's pretty understandable. If we've gone through a wave on through, we might also be more of an instability than democracy.
We might be headed in that direction now. Whether or not they've had it, I don't think it's where they're headed. And I don't think it's where most of them want. So interesting.
I mean, it is, you know, when Afghanistan fell, we did have a whole conversation about, like, you know, American nation building. When I was going up in the 90s, it was like, we're going to bring democracy to everyone in their 11 and 11. And we have learned that they hate us for it and they don't want it. And we can't do it anyway.
And, you know, if Afghanistan has proved anything, it's that we're just complete morons when it comes to, like, going into a country and giving them what we think they want. And I'm curious to know, I mean, I feel like there's a lesson there in Russia too. Yeah, I think it's very much the same. I think the problem is we think that I've learned that lesson over and over again, which is really shame that it doesn't have to stick.
But, you know, I was growing up as you are uncindly mentioning how a little debate over there. I mean, I personally was at the Soviet distance, like, Zagra, and transient and all those guys. But they were the great Soviet heroes. And that everybody loved them.
But couldn't say so, because they Go jail, they were supposed to support for them. And that, you know, it was only the evil repressive Soviet government that was keeping those guys from transforming the nation into Western and the world of democracy. Well, what was that wrong? Those are just never have widespread support in the Soviet Union.
After the Soviet Union collapse, they were not popular in retrospect. They're not looked back on his heroes now. They were outliers. the small percentage of the country that saw things like we did.
And it's very hard for us, for me as an individual, it seems hard for us as a country, to sort of get past the idea that there's supposed to be like us. It's a very powerful notion. And it's almost literally countless people their lives. And it has mostly been not an Arab-like so, of course, that's also why we lost so many of our home people by getting in Korea and Vietnam.
So it's a dangerous dangerous misconception. Yeah, it's so interesting. Can you tell us what TV you're doing now because Americans were such a huge success? I mean, when you go back to Russia, are you doing something more CIA-ish?
Can you just tell us, please? Yeah, sure. You know, my partner told me I worked with an Indian Americans together and we're now going to be making a new limited series about a serial killer in his therapist. And we're going to start shooting at the summer.
Steve Corral is going to be the therapist, which we're super excited about. And we're almost done writing the script, so I think it's going to be pretty fun, Chef. Oh, that's so cool. Well, definitely invite us to the set and by us.
I mean, me. That sounds amazing. That's going to be incredible. Who's playing the serial killer?
Oh, that's so cool. I can't wait to watch that. Steve Corral is a dramatic actor. It's amazing.
He's so good. Yeah, that's really cool. Well, thank you for joining us. I hope you'll come back.
I would love to do great for you. Thanks.