Michael Calvey (on being wrongfully imprisoned in Russia)

Summary

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Episode: Michael Calvi (on being wrongfully imprisoned in Russia)
Release Date: June 18, 2025

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Introduction

In this gripping episode of Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, host Dax Shepard engages in a profound conversation with Michael Calvi, an accomplished investor and entrepreneur who experienced wrongful imprisonment in Russia. The discussion delves deep into Michael's extensive career in Russia, the circumstances leading to his incarceration, and the broader geopolitical implications of his ordeal.

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Background and Early Career in Russia

Michael Calvi's Journey Begins

• Timestamp [03:01]: Michael shares his origins, being born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to parents from the Midwest, and moving to Oklahoma during his upbringing.
• Timestamp [04:20]: He graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1989 with a degree in computer science and business, initially aspiring for a political career but pivoting to Wall Street after meeting a friend’s older brother working there.

Transition to Russia

• Timestamp [06:34]: In 1991, Michael inadvertently found himself in Russia when plans to join Salomon Brothers' London office changed abruptly. Instead, he was recruited by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to invest in the burgeoning Russian oil and gas sector.
• Timestamp [07:18]: Upon arriving in Moscow shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, Michael witnessed the rapid dissolution of the USSR, a transformative period that set the stage for his future endeavors in Russia.

Life in Post-Soviet Russia

• Timestamp [09:07]: Michael recounts his initial fascination with Russia, describing the harsh climate, the challenging living conditions, and the surprising warmth and generosity of the Russian people beneath their stern exterior.
• Timestamp [12:00]: He details the economic chaos of the 1990s in Russia, highlighting rampant underemployment and the rise of opportunistic entrepreneurs who capitalized on the volatile market.

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Building a Business Empire

Successful Investments

• Timestamp [18:36]: Michael discusses his significant investment in Yandex, often referred to as the "Google of Russia." His early faith in the company led to substantial returns, culminating in Yandex's public offering on Nasdaq with a $10 billion valuation.
• Timestamp [20:08]: Despite initial opposition from other investors, Michael's steadfast belief in Yandex's potential paid off, showcasing his strategic foresight in the tech sector.

Personal Life and Community

• Timestamp [22:28]: Michael introduces his wife, Julia, a Russian native, emphasizing the strong personal connections he formed in Russia. He shares heartwarming anecdotes, including an encounter with General Tom Stafford, symbolizing his deep integration into both the business and social fabric of Moscow.

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The Downfall: Wrongful Imprisonment

Triggering the Conflict

• Timestamp [23:02]: Michael explains how a merger within a banking investment led to fraudulent activities by the other party, resulting in a series of manipulative tactics aimed at stripping control from his venture fund.
• Timestamp [24:02]: Despite his efforts to negotiate and maintain control, Michael faced aggressive threats and countermeasures, culminating in a sabotage event where his apartment was set on fire by suspicious contractors.

Arrest and Initial Imprisonment

• Timestamp [27:16]: On February 14, 2019, Michael was forcibly taken from his apartment by armed men, leading to a harrowing arrest experience. He describes the chaotic scene as multiple armed individuals stormed his home, marking the beginning of his wrongful imprisonment.
• Timestamp [37:04]: Michael details his first days in prison, the intimidation tactics employed by the interrogators, and the initial shock of being accused of fraud without substantial evidence.

Life in Prison

• Timestamp [38:07]: He paints a vivid picture of the prison conditions, likening the environment to "a 50-year-old prison" with pervasive smells and minimal facilities.
• Timestamp [42:26]: Michael shares his experiences in solitary confinement, the emotional toll it took, and the rare moments of camaraderie with fellow inmates, including a Deputy Minister of Culture and a Chechen general.

Legal Battle and House Arrest

• Timestamp [45:18]: Following months in prison, Michael faced a Kafkaesque trial devoid of proper judicial procedures. Despite a lack of credible evidence against him, the corruption within the Russian legal system made acquittal nearly impossible.
• Timestamp [49:17]: After two years under house arrest, Michael was eventually released due to high-level interventions, including attempts by U.S. political figures to secure his freedom.

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Reflections and Insights

Betrayal and Disillusionment

• Timestamp [52:05]: Michael reflects on his deep sense of betrayal by Russia, a country he helped rebuild and believed in. The realization of systemic corruption and the ruthless control of the FSB shattered his trust.
• Timestamp [58:57]: He discusses overcoming cancer during his ordeal, which, combined with his imprisonment, led to a newfound appreciation for life and the importance of family and integrity.

Geopolitical Implications

• Timestamp [68:46]: Michael provides a nuanced analysis of Putin's motivations, linking them to historical grievances and perceived Western provocations. He emphasizes the complexity of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the challenges in negotiating a lasting peace.
• Timestamp [75:20]: He breaks down the Russian populace's perspectives on Putin, categorizing them into opposition, passive support, and the majority who perceive life as inherently corrupt and are influenced by state-controlled media.

Future Outlook

• Timestamp [82:00]: Michael expresses confidence in Western institutions' resilience in contrast to Russia's totalitarian system. He underscores the importance of investing in businesses that empower individuals and foster transparency.

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Notable Quotes

1. On Initial Imprisonment:

   • "And I know immediately that it's related to this case, but still, just, you know, adrenaline."
     — Michael Calvi [27:36]

2. On Friendship in Adversity:

   • "The best part of my book is the story of our camaraderie in that cell. These were not the hardened criminals or killers that I was expecting. They were really decent guys."
     — Michael Calvi [46:46]

3. On Betrayal:

   • "I felt betrayed by Russia. I had done so much to help this country. I believed in it."
     — Michael Calvi [52:05]

4. On Resilience and Integrity:

   • "If I get out of this, I have to give up all my money... But I have my dignity and my kids and my house on the inside."
     — Michael Calvi [58:57]

5. On the Nature of the Russian System:

   • "The FSB's control over life in Russia today is way deeper than it was at the time of the KGB because of technology, manipulate people's information and the degree of control they have inside all the big institutions of the country."
     — Michael Calvi [67:33]

6. On Moving Forward:

   • "I love that look you just gave him right now."
     — Dax Shepard [82:06]

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Conclusion

Michael Calvi's harrowing experience as a wrongfully imprisoned American in Russia serves as a stark testament to the perils of doing business in a rapidly changing and often volatile geopolitical landscape. His story underscores the importance of resilience, the human spirit's capacity to endure unimaginable hardships, and the critical need for integrity in the face of systemic corruption. Through his narrative, listeners gain invaluable insights into the complexities of post-Soviet Russia, the ruthless nature of its legal and security institutions, and the profound personal cost of geopolitical conflicts.

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For those intrigued by Michael Calvi's journey and the intricate dynamics of international business and politics, his book, Odyssey Moscow: One American's Journey from Russia Optimist to Prisoner of the State, provides an in-depth exploration of these themes.

Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

Wondry plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondry plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome welcome to Armchair Expert. Expert. Sign Expert. I'm Dan Shepherd. I'm joined by Lily Padman.

[Monica Padman]

Hi.

[Dax Shepard]

This is a crazy story today. Really crazy, crazy story. How often do you talk to a man that was imprisoned in Russia wrongly?

[Monica Padman]

Not that often. Only a couple times.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, you're up to a couple times. Michael Calvi is an investor and an entrepreneur and he was in Russia from almost the beginning of their foray into capitalism and he was very well established and very, very successful. And then something went wrong and he has a thrilling book called Odyssey Moscow. One American's Journey from Russia Optimist to Prisoner of the State Wild. There's a nail biter. Please enjoy. Michael Calvi. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Each Apple product, like the iPhone 16, is thoughtfully designed by skilled designers. The titanium Apple Card is no different. It's laser etched, has no numbers, and earns you daily cash on everything you buy, including 3% back on everything at Apple. Apply for Apple Card on your iPhone in minutes, subject to credit approval. Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch terms and [e-mail] we are supported by Michigan. Ding ding ding. Oh, I'm such a proud Michigander. I love Michigan. The people, the nature in summertime in Michigan, I'm telling you, I would put it up against any place in the world. It's such a beautiful state and it's a great place for everyone, especially kids, to experience all four seasons with beaches, trails and snow a stone's throw away. What you may not know is Michigan is also a great place to work. You can have a quality lifestyle and a rewarding tech career. The fast growing and rapidly evolving automotive and clean energy industries offer opportunities for career advancement no matter what your skill level. Plus, Michigan offers accessible housing, exciting nightlife and an inclusive community for all. It's really a one of a kind place. And do not forget the lakes. Lakes, lakes, lakes, lakes, lakes. Live your best 9 to 5 and 5 to 9. You can in Michigan. Go to themichiganlife.org to learn more.

[Michael Calvi]

By the way, I love the vans. Like high school days.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Really brings you back, doesn't it?

[Michael Calvi]

Yeah. Awesome.

[Dax Shepard]

Where did you grow up? Oklahoma.

[Michael Calvi]

Oklahoma.

[Dax Shepard]

And we're roughly the same age.

[Michael Calvi]

I think so. Yeah. Born in 67.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Born in 75. So skateboarding. Did it come to Oklahoma before you graduated.

[Michael Calvi]

I wasn't a skateboarder though, because I played basketball. Easy thing to break a wrist and lose a season.

[Dax Shepard]

That's true. As someone who broke a wrist. Yeah, I can attest to that. What did your parents do in Oklahoma?

[Michael Calvi]

My dad was an engineer. Both my parents grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and that's where I was born. So the reason I don't have an Oklahoma accent, I was raised by parents from the mid, mid Midwest.

[Dax Shepard]

But they say your peers are who give you your accent. Right? Like no second generation English kids have English accent.

[Michael Calvi]

That's probably true. But I also moved abroad at the age of 23, so I've lived most of my life in Europe and Russia, basically.

[Monica Padman]

What is an Oklahoma accent?

[Michael Calvi]

It's kind of a southern accent, you know, it depends on who. Depends on who you're talking to, I guess. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, well, remember we just had Jimmy Marsden?

[Monica Padman]

Little Jimmy Marsden.

[Michael Calvi]

Little Jimmy Marsden, Yeah, I listened to that. That was a great episode.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, you heard that?

[Michael Calvi]

Yes, I did. Because he was in Oklahom because of that. But I listened to it and I thought, well, there you have it.

[Monica Padman]

He doesn't have an accent though. He has a charm.

[Dax Shepard]

He does have a unique way of speaking.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you're right.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh my God. I'm just realizing that my sriracha sauce, you had already seen that I had a big sriracha sauce disaster about 20 minutes ago. But I've largely recovered until I thought.

[Michael Calvi]

It was worth it.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so you graduate from College, I'm guessing 89.

[Michael Calvi]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

From university of Oklahoma.

[Michael Calvi]

University of Oklahoma.

[Dax Shepard]

And what was your degree in?

[Michael Calvi]

It was in computer science and business, basically.

[Dax Shepard]

And did you know you wanted to go to Wall Street?

[Michael Calvi]

I thought, and this sounds hilarious in hindsight, I thought I was going to go pursue a political career. I was like the class president. And adults would say to me, you know, we could really use a guy like you and I'll help you out. When I was going to the University of Oklahoma, it was partly, I wouldn't say for that reason, but it also seemed like a natural thing to do. But I met someone who was the older brother of one of my friends when I was in college who had worked on Wall street. And just sort of over Christmas he came back and was telling. And I thought, you know, I want to live in New York and do that. So I got a job working there. I wanted to do something adventurous. And I had job offers from Exxon and Chevron and the typical oil companies that my dad to Them, they were like deities. I mean, they were the venerable, most respected institutions on planet Earth, from his perspective. So when I said, I have no interest in a pension plan and a career, I want to do something that's more swashbuckling and fun. And especially Solomon Brothers, where I worked, where another of your guests, Michael Lewis. Michael Lewis, came out when I was there. I, of course, didn't know that I'd been there for four months or something like that when the book started out.

[Dax Shepard]

No, we gotta take two seconds on that. So you were working there after it had come out?

[Michael Calvi]

I was working there when it came out.

[Dax Shepard]

When it came out. Did you immediately go read it?

[Michael Calvi]

Of course. They called a meeting of the entire firm. There was like this giant conference room that could sit 1500 people. So we're all there. I have no idea what it's about. And the senior management of the firm that you only see rarely came in, and you could just see there was like steam coming from their ears. And they basically were saying, a book is coming out tomorrow and it's full of lies and slander, and if any of you come into the press, you're fired. Don't even think about buying the book. We all, of course, went out and bought the book immediately, of course, when possible.

[Dax Shepard]

And be dead honest. You were 21 or 21.

[Michael Calvi]

I loved it, of course. Yeah. I was working in a different part. I was working in the corporate finance team. So we were like the ugly little brother of the traders who were the swashbucklers. So there were not strippers walking through the corporate finance department.

[Monica Padman]

Sad for you.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I was going to say that would almost be maddening if I was one floor away from this party I'm reading.

[Michael Calvi]

About in the book, thumping on the ceiling or something like that.

[Dax Shepard]

In 91, you end up going to Russia. And how does that come about?

[Michael Calvi]

It was really an accident. I wanted to go to business school. I got into the school that I dreamed about. But I thought that it would be nice to spend a year living abroad. And I had an opportunity to go work for Salomon Brothers London office. And a week before I moved, the guy who was going to hire me left to join this institution called the ebrd, a bank that was like the World bank group that was set up to invest in the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. It's called the European bank for Reconstruction Development. It's owned by 50 different governments around the world, including the US government, but mostly European governments. And it was set up to invest in the Soviet Union. My Boss knew that I was an oil and gas and energy investment specialist at the time. There was apparently a lot of oil in the Soviet Union. So he basically said, why don't you just come here for a year and then you can go back to business school? So I did.

[Dax Shepard]

And let's remind people of context. So 89, the wall comes down.

[Michael Calvi]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

We're talking 91. And how quickly did all of the Soviet bloc break apart?

[Michael Calvi]

Four months later. So, in fact, the week before I started actual, I took a backpacking and climbing trip around Europe, and I was going to climb the Matterhorn with my best friend. And we pull into Zermatt, and I see in the newspaper that there's been a coup in Moscow and Gorbachev was arrested by the kgb. So I thought, oh, there's not going to be any investment. Maybe my job is at risk, or whatever. When do we climb the Matterhorn? By the time we come back down to Zermatt three days later, the headline shows, Yeltsin standing on a tank. Coup is collapsing. And it set in motion some forces that just became unstoppable. And four months later, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. I went to Moscow for the Russia for the first time. A month later, the customs forms still said the Soviet Union because they didn't have time yet to print all the documents.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So historically, you really are among a handful of the first Americans that are arriving post Communism. Yeah.

[Michael Calvi]

There were obviously scholars and people who studied Russian. I didn't have any Russian or Eastern European ethnic roots. I didn't study it in college.

[Dax Shepard]

You had seen Red Dawn, I'm sure, the Schwarzenegger film.

[Monica Padman]

Did you speak Russian?

[Michael Calvi]

No, I didn't at the time. I do now. I mean, even an American can learn a language in 30 years.

[Monica Padman]

I don't know about me. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So you got there and you already had a job. Had they already sorted housing and all that?

[Michael Calvi]

At first I was living in London, but traveling there once or twice a month and then moved there full time in 94. But I remember my first trip, I spent a couple days in Moscow and then flew straight to Siberia, where this oil project was. When I got off the airplane, it was minus 48 degrees. And I had contact lenses at the time. And that's when I learned that contact lenses are mostly water because the contact lenses started to freeze. So you had to kind of close your eyes and just briefly open them. So it was almost like being under strobe lights in a nightclub.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, this is miserable.

[Michael Calvi]

Yeah. Freezing cold. It was not love at first sight. I mean, it was fascination at first sight. In Moscow, the people were kind of scowling on the outside. Everything was brown and gray. They didn't just like Americans, they loved Americans.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, really?

[Michael Calvi]

Their view was not that they lost the Cold War, but they just chose.

[Dax Shepard]

To change sides, join the winning team.

[Michael Calvi]

They rejected communism and they thought that if they became more democratic, they would quickly become as prosperous as people in the West. It was ridiculous. Almost the admiration that the young Americans like us felt and the respect. Even though we were 25 years old and especially within the investment and finance area, we were some of the most experienced people in the whole country at 25 or 26 years old. I also quickly realized, even though on the exterior Russians can be quite harsh, that when you scratch through the initial surface, they're the most hospitable, generous, loyal friends that anyone can have. And they also have their own unique sense of humor, which I love. If I told you some Russian jokes, you probably wouldn't laugh.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know, I'm dark.

[Michael Calvi]

Maybe I would. And I made some really good friends. I did fall in love with the country, and I still do, despite everything that's happened to me much later. Love most things about Russia.

[Dax Shepard]

Would it be fair to draw a comparison to them as such a large scale societal trauma that it would be similar to what's great about folks with tons of trauma? Where I come from, yeah, it's a very stay the fuck away from me. But then when you're on the inside, there's a level of loyalty that really doesn't exist with highly functional people.

[Michael Calvi]

Certainly what happened after the fall of the Soviet Union was traumatic. Anybody who would have been over 25 years old saw complete economic devastation. We freak out in America when there's a recession, and recession means that there's like two quarters in a row where GDP falls by at least 0.1%. In the first eight years that I was working on investments In Russia, the GDP fell by 75%, twice the scale of the Great Depression.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my God.

[Dax Shepard]

And what's the unemployment rate?

[Michael Calvi]

Unemployment wasn't so high, but underemployment was rampant. You had people with PhDs or engineers and other things who were working as street cleaners. There's this legendary department store right off of Red Square that's called Goom. And this magnificent 19th century building, like a palace that's turned into a department store. It's sort of like Saks Fifth Avenue. And when I first arrived in January 1992, the first floor had some shops Selling Levi's, blue jeans and a handful of other things. But the second and third floors were just old people selling their silver or carpet or whatever they had for money. And it was heartbreaking. But for young people, it was the opportunity of a lifetime, because Russians needed everything. There was pent up demand for everything. And people who could quickly figure out that if you could go to Berlin, you could buy such and such a thing, drive back to Moscow and sell it at double the price, turn around.

[Monica Padman]

And do that, paying for it. If they didn't have any money, they had rubles.

[Michael Calvi]

There was hyperinflation, the rubles devaluing constantly, but it was still there. So you could also make money doing that, trading the currencies. It rewarded people who were super fast on their feet. Great time for hustlers. And it also, though, was a totally lawless time. I mean, if you lived in Russia under the Yeltsin period, it was a time of great hope. I remember it was just a couple months after I went to Russia for the first time. Yeltsin was invited by the US to come speak to a joint session of Congress. And I think it's the longest standing ovation any foreign leader has ever had.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Michael Calvi]

I mean, it was just such a feeling of, the Cold War's over, our bitterest enemy has come here. It was spine tingling in excitement, and we felt like we were there at the ground level.

[Dax Shepard]

Now, when did they devise the plan? Because everything was state owned. That goes for minerals to gas and oil. And they devised a plan that they're going to issue shares in all these different sectors to the citizens. When did that happen?

[Michael Calvi]

It was a good plan. On paper, it happened sort of in 1993 and 1994. At first, they gave every Russian citizen a coupon that you could use to bid for shares that were being privatized. If you worked at an enterprise, you would get shares in it automatically for free. A certain amount was reserved for the workers. That was very fair on paper. But if you worked for Gazprom or for another big oil company, your shares in the company might have been worth $50,000 overnight. If you worked at the State Institute of Geology that serviced them, you got nothing. It turned out to be horribly uneven.

[Dax Shepard]

And then clever men borrowed tons of foreign money and they just bought up all these shares.

[Michael Calvi]

The managers of those companies, some of them were unscrupulous. They would not pay their workers on time and then offer to buy their shares at a deeply discounted price. And people had no idea. What is this piece of paper is this. It's a share or whatever. So they would sell it for pennies on the dollar.

[Dax Shepard]

Because I would think a lot of people would be curious how these oligarchs came to be. How on earth did a handful of people end up with the predominant ownership?

[Michael Calvi]

Some was that. Some happened later. When in 1996, there was going another big election, that was the one when there was an initial blowback from some of these reforms, like when they freed up prices and let companies set prices themselves. And there was a massive inflation and it was very hard for people. So probably the majority of people in the country started to not support this path. But at the same time, there was a fear about going back to communism. So the 1996 election felt like it was a make or break election for the country. And in hindsight, the west made a mistake by turning a blind eye. Yeltsin used all sorts of. Of manipulative tactics to win the election. Even had American political advisors coming in and propagandistic TV programs and other things like that. They really helped to rehabilitate his image. He went from like a 10% approval rating to 52% just in time for the election and defeated the Communist candidate.

[Dax Shepard]

And then we can get into how Yeltsin then created Putin. But we'll table that for a minute because that's some years down the road. When do you move there?

[Michael Calvi]

I moved there in 94.

[Dax Shepard]

What's the just living situation?

[Michael Calvi]

It was crazy. I was living in a apartment building initially that was built by the Ministry of Defense for people that worked there. It was a brick building that would look like a housing project if it was in a major US City. But a brick building, as opposed to a concrete slab building was considered a luxury in Moscow at the time. So I was just renting it for a while. It was a mix of hilarious adventures. Crazy nightlife for young single man in Moscow.

[Dax Shepard]

We got bars right away, right?

[Michael Calvi]

Yes. Some legendary bars and clubs. Metal detectors at the doors, Mafia guys in one corner, a couple of Americans in the other. It was exciting and it was fun. And we did feel like we were participating in something that was historic as well. But it was also great fun. Sometimes it was hardship, but it was hardship. That kind of makes you laugh in hindsight. I mean, going to hotel in the north of Russia where the heating doesn't work and I'm in bed with my full overcoat on and a fur Russian hat and I can see my breath.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Michael Calvi]

I had a Russian friend who was among these nouveau riche. Russian guys who made money quickly, who was so proud he bought the first Range Rover in the country. And so he had a party at his apartment and he planned to drive up and whatever. So early at the appointed hour, he doesn't show up. And a half an hour later, an hour later, and finally comes into his apartment and his face is bright red and he explains that his car had been stolen on the way in from the dealership. So he had stopped at the parking garage and he got out of the car to like put in the code. And while he did that, someone jumped in the Range Rover and drove off right in front of his eyes.

[Dax Shepard]

I remember watching a 60 minute segment around that time. The advice was, if you're getting pulled over, you must race to the police station or race to the military output.

[Monica Padman]

Because if you get out of the.

[Dax Shepard]

Car, you cannot trust who's behind you.

[Michael Calvi]

I had my American driver's license and you're supposed to have an international license to drive there. And so I was just driving myself. And the police would pull you over, they look at my license and he would say, that's an American license, not an international. But the Russian word for international is mezhnyorodnik. And so on my American license where it said sex M, I would point to the M and say, oh no, this is an American international license. Thinking I go, okay, that's fine.

[Dax Shepard]

So you had to be agile, you had to lie a little bit, you had to figure out how to work within the system you were in. You say in the book that caviar is free.

[Michael Calvi]

Basically, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And Pizza Hut is like where you would take your first date you're trying.

[Michael Calvi]

To go if you really wanted to impress the date. Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut was the really cool place to go.

[Dax Shepard]

But you could just be dumping caviar in the trash for free. Basically.

[Michael Calvi]

Tablespoons of it. Caviar on your scrambled eggs.

[Monica Padman]

That is wild. Does your family like come home? What are you doing?

[Michael Calvi]

They thought that I was a bit strange when I went to New York and then when I went to London, very strange Moscow. They almost thought maybe there was a mix up at the hospital when he was born.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I'd be scared.

[Michael Calvi]

You co found the company like a venture capital firm. Basically. We were investing in everything from beer, brewing chocolate, mineral water. We had a forestry business. We made good money doing that. Mobile phones. We invested in the company that had had the mobile phones that were like the size of a shoe or something like that. It grew from 2,000 subscribers to 100 million. And it was the first Russian company to go public on the New York Stock Exchange. So we had some really lucky early things that helped us get through the crises and the crashes. But where we really made our name was investing in Russian technologies. In 1998, Russia defaulted on its debt and devalued its currency. Most people wrote it off. One of my investors told me, mike, let's face it, Russia's like the Titanic. It's sunk. It's at the bottom of the ocean. It'll never come up. But the people who stuck it out, and especially the people who doubled down at that time, ended up making a fortune. There was like a 10 year period from 1998 to 2008, which were the golden years in Russia.

[Dax Shepard]

And you get into one company that ends up being basically Amazon, Google and Uber all in one company.

[Michael Calvi]

Yandex is the Google of Russia. It's one of the most innovative companies in the world. We invested $2 million. It was the only money that the company ever raised. It was a consortium that invested a total of $5 million. But we put in the biggest amount and we led the whole investment. At the time, the company's monthly revenues were about $1,000. But they had this core group of 30 or 40 just genius people who were absolutely devoted to it. And the product was fanatically popular among every Russian using it. And it worked much better than Yahoo or any of the other search engines and things that worked at the time. This was before even Google emerged as the leading search engine here. It took them about five years. They only burned about a million dollars a year. After the Internet bubble burst, Google was created and they did come. They were entering Russia, but they weren't getting that much traction. So they thought they would buy Yandex. So they offered to buy for $100 million. We said no. And they came back six months later and offered 250 million. And then we would have made 15 times our money or something like that. And so some of the other investors in that 5 million consortium really wanted to sell. But my partner, Yeleni Vashantseva, who really led that investment for us and the founders of the company, believed that the company would be worth billions. And it was way too early to sell, so we had to vetoed the sale. Some of the other investors tried to sue us. But anyway, you fast forward seven or eight years and the company goes public on Nasdaq with a $10 billion valuation.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh my God.

[Michael Calvi]

And all those people who were suing us were showing up on CNBC and Bloomberg and Boasting about having been early investors.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that is wild.

[Dax Shepard]

It is.

[Monica Padman]

I probably would have been someone who.

[Dax Shepard]

Said, sell early bird in the hand.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so over the next 29 years, this company has $2.8 billion invested in 80 different companies. You're wildly successful. You guys are among the most successful Westerners in the country. Are you sitting in Moscow at any point during this, going like, well, this would be rad if I was in Switzerland. Or are you enjoying it?

[Michael Calvi]

I loved it. I had so many good friends, including a number of expats, Americans who moved there at the same time as I did, but also more and more Russian friends. The kind of people that I was working, I had two main groups of people that are influenced. The tech people. We were all wearing like sneakers, T shirts. It felt not dissimilar to what it would feel like investing in California.

[Dax Shepard]

Silicon Valley. Yeah.

[Michael Calvi]

So young people, not interested in politics at all. It was just really stimulating because they were doing exciting stuff. Our firm was being recognized not just for success in Russia, but as one of the global leaders in tech investing. And at one point, we raised a billion dollar fund in three days. Where I just flew to London, New York and San Francisco. And investors flew from all over the world to me to basically pitch me to take their money, convince me how they could help us besides just the money. But I also had a separate group of friends and influences. I was lucky to invite a partner who was a cosmonaut and one of the most famous people in Russia. Alex Leonov. He was the first human being to ever walk in space outside of a spacecraft in 1965. And then in 1975, he went into space the second time as the head of the Apollo Soyuz mission, which was when the American capsules docked together with the Soviet capsule. And he opened the hatch and in front of World tv, he reached a and shook the hand of the American astronaut and pulled him in. That astronaut turned out to be Tom Stafford from Oklahoma. The most famous person probably ever from Oklahoma.

[Monica Padman]

Don't tell that to James Mars or.

[Dax Shepard]

Brad Pitt was born there.

[Monica Padman]

No, Memno, Missouri.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, he was born.

[Michael Calvi]

Well, they don't have their statues in the state capitol yet.

[Dax Shepard]

Yet.

[Michael Calvi]

But it's funny, you know, I told my mom, she never quite understood what I was doing. And it was all a bit, Dad, I was telling. We just raised a billion dollar fund in three days. And she kind of rolled her eyes and like, when are you coming back to Oklahoma? But then one day there's a knock on her a few Days before Christmas. And she comes to the door, and it's General Tom Stafford. And he says, you must be Mike Calvi's mom. You know, I'm just here to give him his Christmas prize and remind him we're having lunch on Friday. She doesn't even know what to say, but she runs to the phone, and she calls me immediately, says, I'm so proud of you.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, you got to put it in their world.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, a billion dollars is enough. My God.

[Dax Shepard]

But the astronaut, that's cool. And you meet Julia.

[Michael Calvi]

Yes, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

You get married. You have two boys and a girl.

[Monica Padman]

Russian.

[Michael Calvi]

She's Russian, and we met in Moscow after I lived there for just a couple years. Julia is amazing, especially what we went through later and how just absolutely rock solid she is. She's just an incredible woman.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so let's talk about this business deal you get involved with. It involves a bank, and there's a merger.

[Michael Calvi]

They're mostly investing in tech companies, but we also had some investments in banking or financial service, mostly online banks or apps. We had one investment in a traditional retail bank that was working in the Far east, and they took a decision to merge with another bank. And just before that merger took place, the guys that owned the other bank did a bunch of transactions to loan money to their friends or other things that all went into default immediately. And we realized they had just stripped money out of the bank just beforehand.

[Dax Shepard]

And you're going to assume all that debt now?

[Michael Calvi]

Right. So the now the debt's there, and the Central bank of Russia, which is like their Federal Reserve, is starting to investigate. It's two guys, and we tried to negotiate some sort of a compromise or settlement. They were insisting on getting control of the bank. The only way to stop that was to start litigation against them in London, which is what the merger agreement said. That's when they started to try to take countermeasures to get us to either drop the suit or give them control or sell them the bank. There were a lot of threats and aggressive. They did get control. They were blocking us out of the actual bank buildings.

[Dax Shepard]

And really quick, these gentlemen use that term loosely. What's their background? What's the line between gangsters and businessmen?

[Michael Calvi]

They were young guys, like mid-30s at the time. I was already 50 years old. And the people of my age who lived through the 1990s in Russia were mostly involved in some kind of dispute and learned by the time we were 30 that everybody loses from disputes like that. And certainly when I had conflicts with Russian oligarchs, before. But in those days, relationship between the US and Russia was much stronger. The government was not going to let something.

[Dax Shepard]

You had a lot of leverage.

[Michael Calvi]

We were also just very useful because what we were doing was really useful for the economy. Through my friend, the cosmonaut, he knew governors across the whole country and the President, he was very well known. And so we were always able to navigate our interests. But what I didn't appreciate is that younger guys who hadn't lived through all that didn't realize yet that everybody loses from disasters. And they were well connected. They had some very good friends in the different parts of the Russian government and they were desperate. I think they realized that if they didn't get control, the Russian central bank itself would probably put them in jail. Yeah, because the Russian central bank was essentially supporting us and they're the regulator for that sector. I also though, was not naive when they started making threats that they were going to try to, to retaliate by making criminal allegations or things like that. I took the threat seriously and I consulted with some friends of mine in senior levels in the Russian government and they all basically said, these guys are low level con men, you should stand your ground. And also, no one's going to arrest a prominent international investor without a proper investigation.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you were an investor in the number one tech company. Also you have a bank investment which is the number one online banking in all of Russia.

[Michael Calvi]

It'd be like somebody came to the United States and was the founding investor in, in Google, Amazon and Facebook.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, Peter Thiel. Yeah, Peter Thiel's probably gonna have a voice in something.

[Michael Calvi]

You'd think twice or three times, you better have your shit together. And I'm taking it seriously. I'm trying to negotiate. I'm trying to explain to the guys, look, this is also a bank. Banks are fragile. If the public learns of this conflict, the depositors are all gonna take their money out, the bank will go bankrupt, there'll be nothing left to fight over. Let's find some compromise. There was one time we were gonna have a meeting for dinner. It's like five o' clock in the afternoon and I get a text saying, mike, there's a fire in your apartment building. So I race there and I see the top floor of my building where I just bought an apartment. It's being renovated, it was supposed to be finished like a week later is on fire. And the fire's just on the roof right above my apartment. So it literally destroys my apartment and almost nothing else in the building. And the two Guys who caused the fire were some contractors from Belarus who fled the country two hours after the incident happened. So very suspicious. And I go straight to this meeting with the guy guys who were quick to say, this had nothing to do with us, but it was very stressful. It was a very aggressive meeting where they were making threats to destroy our entire fund and other things like that. So it was not like I didn't see something coming. But I overestimated the rationality of the system. I kept thinking, what I do is so useful for Russia and for its economy. And I believed in Russia. I was going around the world convincing investors to share my optimism because my experience in Russia had been so encouraging overall.

[Dax Shepard]

So 2019, you're in your apartment, you're just woken up.

[Michael Calvi]

I've flown there just for a special negotiation. By that time, the relationship had really broken down with these other guys. But I kept saying, look, a war is not good for anybody. Let's find a compromise. We need to meet and sort this out. So they invite me to meet. On February 14, I fly to Moscow.

[Monica Padman]

Wait, and where were you? You were here?

[Michael Calvi]

I was in Switzerland. I'm living at that time in Switzerland, in London, but still going to Russia three times a month. So I fly on the 20 12th. I get a text the next day from one of the two guys. Are you in Moscow? Is it still good for tomorrow? Yes. So I wake up February 14th to the sound of some pounding on my door. And I always sleep with earplugs. I have for 20 years. So at first it didn't really wake me up. And then I kind of thought that must be the neighbors walk over towards the door. And I realized it's not just someone, it's probably six people pounding on the door. And I'm standing there just wearing shorts and nothing else. And I don't know what to do, when suddenly the door bursts open and 12 men, including half of them with guns drawn, come charging into the room, screaming at me to put my hands in the air. I know immediately that it's related to this case, but still, just, you know, adrenaline. I can't speak for a few minutes. I asked them to let me get dressed, so I put on some, like, jeans and a shirt. My fingers are, like, shaking, so I do the buttons wrong. Finally, heart rate comes down a little bit, and. And I'm able to ask them some questions. And that began this really pretty harsh ordeal.

[Dax Shepard]

Now there's like a 30 something, I guess.

[Michael Calvi]

Detective, the investigative committee, the Slezveni committee is like the FBI. It's part of a triangle of institutions that's headed by the fsb, which is the old kgb, basically. So there's also the prosecutor's office and then the investigators.

[Dax Shepard]

So you got a guy in the house and he's just rifling through your stuff in front of you, and he's looking at pictures and he finds a picture of your son when he's 4, and he has a black eye and he's saying, oh, are you also a child abuser? Are you also guilty of that?

[Michael Calvi]

And I just sat there with my jaw open thinking, how could you even ask that?

[Dax Shepard]

The moment there for me that would be so infuriating is I'm now in a dynamic where this dipshit gets to come in and just start accusing me randomly of stuff.

[Michael Calvi]

Just rifling through your personal photos. I'm trying to rationalize things. I keep thinking, okay, they're just sending me a brutal message to back off and give up control of this bank. I didn't think they were seriously planning to launch a criminal investigation over something that never happened.

[Monica Padman]

This was only six years ago.

[Michael Calvi]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

So you get taken into the office where they're gonna ask you, which is.

[Michael Calvi]

Like George Orwell's 1984, the Ministry of Truth.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a very Soviet era building.

[Michael Calvi]

Very Soviet era building. Like linoleum floors and long corridors with just these dark doors.

[Dax Shepard]

Every horror flashback we see in American television about this period, now really quick, I think is relevant is a lawyer that worked with company with your fund. He did arrive on the scene in your apartment because they had also raided your offices.

[Michael Calvi]

That's right.

[Dax Shepard]

And he says basically to you, right, this is Pearl Harbor.

[Michael Calvi]

Exactly. I thought, now that's a really good metaphor, actually. Sneak attack, which succeeded in its objectives, I guess, but just in the same way there's a way to fight back. It's going to get worse.

[Dax Shepard]

He basically says, there's a system in place and we're going to fight and win.

[Michael Calvi]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Are you getting a sense of what the accusations from the two bozos are?

[Michael Calvi]

I knew what they were accusing us of, and they just had it all wrong. So when they first interrog, I just said, look, I wasn't involved in that episode that you're talking about, but here's what I know about the facts of it. And if you go to this person and that company and this other company, they'll have all the documents on this which will show that what you're suspecting here was a super profitable transaction for the bank, which benefited the bank. We didn't get anything from it.

[Dax Shepard]

Go ahead and look.

[Michael Calvi]

They did. Later. I heard they were horrified because they thought that it was a slam dunk case.

[Dax Shepard]

Now, were these two guys connected somehow with somebody at the RBS or fsb? Fsb.

[Michael Calvi]

They were well connected in the gun. I'm not sure about the FSB beforehand, but they were able to get the right people to support them. And I understand that ultimately it was approved by Putin. You know, any, like, high profile arrest. You guys can't believe the degree of micromanagement in the country. And how many decisions go to his desk.

[Monica Padman]

What?

[Michael Calvi]

Because people are afraid to do anything. If you haven't gotten his approval, you can get blamed later. So they come to him and there's no papers or documents or anything like that. And he'll either say, okay, I approve or I don't approve. And sometimes he'll scribble on a piece of paper, I approve or something like that. But basically they told him. And I learned this only in hindsight, that I was the biggest financial backer for Russia's opposition. So I was like financing the people trying to overthrow Putin, which was not true. We were never involved in politics.

[Dax Shepard]

Did these two guys convince them? The fbs? I'm going to get it right. Is that right?

[Michael Calvi]

Fsb? That's all right. You're such a happy person to not know those acronyms.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you did. There we are supported by Kachava. My brother is visiting and boy, these days just unraveled quickly for us. I'm very blown away with his stamina.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow. Good for him.

[Dax Shepard]

Five years older than me, I got him to take a hike. And then to my surprise, he pushed for the seven mile hike.

[Michael Calvi]

Ooh.

[Dax Shepard]

Then the second we got home, Lincoln was like, it's time to play volleyball. You guys promised you'd play volleyball. Second, that was over. You promised to play pickleball. Play pickleball. Then when that was over, Delta, you promised a motorcycle ride. So we found ourselves wall to wall. And I'm telling you, I needed a quick hit of nutrition. I didn't have time to sit down. And wherever the day takes you, you need nutrition that fuels your daily adventure. Like Cachava's whole body meal shake will keep your body and mind nourished all day long. Because Kachava has 25 grams of 100% plant based protein and comes in five indulgent flavors including chocolate, vanilla chai matcha and coconut acai.

[Monica Padman]

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[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

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[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

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[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

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[Michael Calvi]

Is an audio ad, but I'm holding.

[Dax Shepard]

My hands really far apart to show.

[Monica Padman]

That I love dogs an awful lot.

[Michael Calvi]

You know what else I love I an awful lot?

[Monica Padman]

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[Dax Shepard]

Visit carecredit.com to apply and find a location near you. Subject to credit approval. This is Nick and this is Jack.

[Michael Calvi]

We're best friends, ex finance guys and resident 90s experts. And every week on our podcast, the Best Idea yet, we're bringing you the untold stories behind behind your favorite products. For instance, can you guess which billion dollar fashion company went viral thanks to a rhinestone covered tracksuit? Or which cartoon turned four turtles into.

[D]

A global toy empire by accident?

[Michael Calvi]

It started as a joke. Last one. Which cold beverage was so hated by.

[D]

Starbucks they actually ended up acquiring it?

[Michael Calvi]

Spoiler. The Frappuccino. Howard Schultz apparently thought cold coffee was super lame and then he bought it. From Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Juicy Couture to the orange mocha Frappuccino. Join us every week to learn how your favorite things got made. Follow the best idea yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus. And if this podcast lasts longer than 45 minutes, call your doctor.

[Dax Shepard]

Were these two guys so convincing when they told the FSB the allegations against you that they bought in or was it always corrupt from the get go? And we're gonna this guy because he's trying to us let's him.

[Michael Calvi]

I think even those two individuals believed that where there was smoke, there was fire. Maybe they thought there was something there, but they were desperate guys. They didn't do something radical, they were gonna go to jail. In hindsight, I underestimated what measures a desperate person will go through, but also how much the geopolitical situation had changed. Changed. And how being an American was no longer an asset, it was a liability. So Putin was very ready to believe by that point that an American would really be an evil bastard who would be there to try to overthrow him, when in fact I was doing things that were super useful for the country.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, he's fully a paranoid at this point.

[Monica Padman]

You think they'd like take five minutes to look into it?

[Michael Calvi]

Exactly, exactly. That's great. If they had just read the central bank's own audit report, they had done an eight month audit and issued a 1400 page audit ruling which essentially blamed our opponents for everything that was going on at the bank. So if they had just read that document, they would have realized that it was a boomerang that was going to come back to haunt them.

[Dax Shepard]

But you know, you just painted a picture of the prison of his own making, which is when you are that harsh on everybody, as you say, of course they have to get you to sign off and everything. So you have created a situation where it's back to communism, it's centralized power, centralized decision making.

[Michael Calvi]

His first two terms in office, he was surrounded by people who were his previous peers and who knew him in a way that they could offer frank and honest feedback. But over the course of 20 plus years, those people have all retired. And the ones around him now think of him as God and no one's going to ever give him any critical feedback.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, he's also demonstrated his will a lot over the last 20 years. When he just arrived from St. Petersburg, that hadn't happened. So they also are inheriting what they now know about him.

[Michael Calvi]

That's true.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so you get there, you're put in a jail cell originally with two other guys and there's just a fucking hole on the ground.

[Michael Calvi]

Yeah. The smell of which cannot be described.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my God.

[Michael Calvi]

And the Place, it's probably like a 50 year old prison, which is not that old, but old enough. The smell of. Imagine like a locker room standing on top of a sewer.

[Dax Shepard]

I once shot a movie in Joliet, that prison. And we had scenes in the showers. And just standing in the showers I was like, oh, the fucking horrors. It's permeated in the place.

[Michael Calvi]

So this is after an entire day of interrogation and then being driven around for probably six hours in Moscow in handcuffs. Handcuffs in the back of a prison convoy truck in the dark. And we get to this place that I gather is a small temporary prison. And they put me in a cell, it must be midnight, maybe early morning. I take my belt and shoelaces and everything else, so, you know, no self harm. Put me in a cell with these two guys. And one of them comes up to me, he's like this big barrel chested Russian guy, introduces himself. His name is Sasha. I say, my name is Michael. And he goes, oh, you're not Russian? Where are you from? And I said, I'm American. He goes, no fucking what way? He's like a real one. Oh, that's so cool. And then he goes, what's the source of your misery? And I'm like, oh my God, that's a very deep question. And then I realized that's Russian for what are you in for? And I didn't even know at that point. So he takes my piece of paper from the investigative committee which says I'm being investigated for fraud of exceptionally large scale. And he goes, that's so cool. And he goes, how much was it? And then I'm thinking, oh God. So I didn't want to tell him, but the dispute was over. Over two and a half billion rubles, which is like 35 million dollars. So I said it was two and a half million. So a thousand times less and he was still like two and a half million, which is like $35,000. He's like, wow, that is okay. Turns to the other guy and goes, respect. And the other guy was a young Chechen guy who was there for armed robbery. He was the age of my oldest son and he hardly said anything, but occasionally he would stand up and yell out the windows in the Chechen language. So the Chechen are very violent people, proud of their warrior codes and history. But in the prisons they are their own kind of untouchable. But they were nice. And the big guy, Sasha, was giving me advice and then going on and chatting all night.

[Dax Shepard]

Everything's great until you have to watch Sasha Take a dump in the hole on the floor. It's like all going well until Sasha's like, you know what, I gotta go to the bathroom.

[Monica Padman]

What do you think? Are you like. Like I'm dead. What is happening in your country?

[Michael Calvi]

I keep thinking decision makers in Russia have got to be pretty rational. This has got to be so self damaging that this is going to be one night in prison and I'll probably be home tomorrow night. I didn't know what they were saying about me. So the information blackout was one of the worst things about the first four or five days. I went to court the next morning and There were probably 100 journalists, paparazzi TV crews, CNN, BBC. So I realized this is global news.

[Dax Shepard]

And is it safe to assume they wanted that that wouldn't happen.

[Michael Calvi]

They didn't want it in the courtroom. It was only Russian state tv. But going in and out, you could see the foreign journalists and others as well.

[Dax Shepard]

I guess what I'm saying is they probably could have arrested you quite discreetly.

[Michael Calvi]

They couldn't have arrested me quite discreetly because of the position I had in the investment community and other things.

[Dax Shepard]

I could imagine interpreting that if it were me. Like the government wants us up. They want to say, we're going to prosecute this guy.

[Michael Calvi]

I think the FSB has such control, they don't give a damn about any of that. They have their own people inside every courthouse. They have their phones on the desk of every judge in the country that has no numbers on it. You get incoming calls from the FSB curators in the courthouse, and if you don't do what the caller says, you'll be in prison yourself very soon. So the degree of institutionalized control that they have, of course they're not interested in most cases. There's another ministry called the Interior Ministry, which where the whole police force work. So normal criminals, thieves, killers, are usually investigated by the mvd, the Interior Ministry, they're like the CIA and the FBI combined. Could be political or economic. I know, don't. I didn't really know any of this. I mean, at the time, it was such a foreign thing to me. I kept thinking, this is a brutal negotiating message. When I finally had the first interrogation, not by the Investigative Committee, but by the FSB people directly, they were basically saying, you need to admit that you're guilty and then we can make a deal. And I said, I'm ready to make a deal right now. It's about this bank. Let's just agree we can give up control of the bank. We can do whatever, but I'm not going to admit guilt to a crime that never happened. And they were like suture. So I kept imagining, okay, they're going to put me into a prison or someplace where there's going to be really violent or aggressive people that are there specifically to make me want to admit guilt or do whatever I can to get out as soon as possible. And they send me to a prison called Matroskatishina, which is a place just notorious with misery in Russia. And I didn't see it except from the inside, because when you're driven inside a convoy truck, there's no windows or anything like that. Imagine what it looked like from the outside.

[Dax Shepard]

And you get immediately put in cell 609.

[Michael Calvi]

There's three days when I was in a solitary confinement, but that's when they doing also blood tests, making sure I don't have any disease. But that's also when they were ramping up the interrogations and some intimidation. So then they tell me they're going to move me to my permanent cell. And they tell me this at around 10 o' clock at night in that prison, the lights go out at 10:30. They don't ever go completely out because there's like a eye on the wall for monitoring all the cells. I started imagining they're doing this on purpose just before lights out. And then there's going to be a really hard incident coming up and they tell me to get my stuff. I'm still wearing the same clothes I'd thrown on five days early that morning. Yeah, I finally had buttoned my shirt up. Right. But besides that, it was the same stuff I was wearing.

[Dax Shepard]

How much contact are you having with counsel?

[Michael Calvi]

I had had one meeting with my lawyer in the prison since then. There were the two hearings in court where they sent me there where I was able to speak with my lawyers and that was it. One of the guards though, felt sorry for me and he gave me a newspaper where there was a two page spread about my case. And having read that, I already started to feel better because I realized that even the newspapers that are controlled indirectly by the Russian president's administration were writing good things about me. And at the top there were very prominen people in the Russian business community and even a minister in the government saying that this case needs to get sorted out quickly, it's very damaging for the investment climate. And they were basically saying, Mike is an honest guy, he's done a lot of great things for Russia. And if you read the substance, you'd realize why the People who were oppressing me were doing it. I was encouraged by that, but still very scared.

[Dax Shepard]

And your lawyer, is his tones shifting? Is he now talked enough where he realizes, oh, this is going to be bigger?

[Michael Calvi]

He was very frank and upfront that when you're dealing with the fsb, they're never wrong. They'll never admit a mistake. He described it to me, saying, it's like a car with six gears going forward and none in reverse.

[Dax Shepard]

And the people in this prison, there's been no acquittals. That's the history. Zero acquittals.

[Michael Calvi]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

This is so scary. What about your family?

[Michael Calvi]

I had any contact with him. And actually there were three times throughout the whole episode that I really cried. And one was during those five days when I was in the solitary confinement. I start to write a letter to my family to give to my lawyer. And as I'm writing it, I am imagining my kids and my wife sitting there reading it, crying, worrying about me. And I'm trying to reassure them that guards are all following the rules. But as I'm writing this and imagining the reaction, I just couldn't stop from crying.

[Dax Shepard]

You get assigned on what day to your day?

[Michael Calvi]

5. So the guards come and collect me. All I have is my prison issued stuff, which is an iron bowl. It looks like a dog pail for water, and a tablespoon and a teacup, a bar of soap and a towel that's like the size of a restaurant table napkin. I rolled all that stuff up in a mattress that's like a. A little bit thicker than a yoga mat, but it's an actual cloth mattress that's 20 years old. And you can imagine all the things that it's seen. Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Michael Calvi]

And so I roll that up under my arm. They're taking me up these stairs. And in the stairs, there's a button they press and a siren goes off. And I call it. It's the book the Psycho Stairs, because the Alfred Hitchcock Psycho. You know, the shower scene with that screeching, you know, that creepy thing? Imagine that. Except for even louder and creepier. That's basically what the siren sounded like going up these stairs. So my heart is pounding, and they come to the sixth floor in cell 604, knock on the door three times, and open the door, and I see seven men standing inside a space that's smaller than this studio here. And my heart stops for a second, but then they see me and their faces smile and they say, mike, Michael. And the guards shove me in the room and the Door shuts. I put my mattress on the one empty bunk. It's an eight man cell. And the light goes out, but it's still sort of dim. But anyway, one of the guys says, look, come, let's sit at the table. There's like a little picnic table. They pours tea in these little rubber or plastic cups. And they all start to introduce themselves. You know, I'm Andrej. I'm Grisha. I'm Sanich. The last guy says, look, in this cell, everybody's a decent person. Oh, my God, everything's good to be okay. And I was just like, wow. And the best part of my book is the story of our camaraderie in that cell. These were not the hardened criminals or killers that I was expecting. They were really decent guys. One was a Deputy Minister of Culture of Russia. One was a general in the Russian army. One was a famous young computer hacker.

[Dax Shepard]

Who I'm sure was working for the state at some point. No.

[Michael Calvi]

Well, he missed his chance to make a deal. The usual story with hackers is the FSB will crack down on them and arrest them and then make them a deal or proposal. Come work for us or you can go to jail. And they all go work for the fsb? Basically, yeah. And then three guys who owned construction companies. There was one guy among them initially who was a drug dealer. That was later moved out pretty quickly. He was a great guy too, though. Great sense of humor. Actually, I can't say whether the guys were all innocent of the crimes they were accused of. Some were accused of corruption. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. If they were, it was arbitrary. Why would they be singled out? It was probably because some bureaucrat was being. Being attacked. I know two of them were there because they were not the main target. They were being pressured to testify against the person who was the main target, and they refused to do so.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, again, I'm gonna go back to 60 Minutes. I've seen so many segments on Russia over the years, but one of them was this interesting figure of the most impacted major at all Russian universities is government administration, which is extremely telling. All young men in college are chasing money. And so for us, if you want money, you're not going to work for the government. But there, if you want money, you'd be good to be in the government.

[Michael Calvi]

There are parts of the government in Russia, like the Tax Ministry or the Central bank or the Ministry of Finance, where the people are super professional. You look at their budget, they're really, really good. But the security structures which is these blocks people point to their shoulders when they refer to them because they wear shoulder boards in their uniforms. The fsbs the apex predator within the system. It's actually a very prestigious thing for young people to get recruited in and go do because you suddenly become very powerful, you become very useful to your friends and family. I think most of them are also patriotic, but they grow very cynical and it's obviously known for deep corruption as well. But it's not only about corruption. Corruption is part of it. They think that life is corrupt, life is cynical. They think that all businessmen are guilty of crimes too. Why should only businessmen be wealthy and not us? We're doing patriotic work to defend the, and I think the promotion system there depends on the people who are willing to do the most ruthless stuff, following orders for their superiors. So if you want to progress within that system, you have to show that you're willing to be absolutely brutal towards people. That's what breeds a very toxic atmosphere.

[Dax Shepard]

So you're in that cell for four months, for two months, and what is your optimism, your attitude, what's your sense of, oh, this is going to be worse than I thought, where are you at?

[Michael Calvi]

I had the President, United States calling the President of Russia saying, you need to let Mike out. That didn't help, unfortunately, at all. That was when Trump was there.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I'm surprised that didn't work.

[Michael Calvi]

But I had this big fund with an army of lawyers supporting me. I had senior people in the Russian government itself supporting me. My cellmates didn't have any of that. And there was one guy there, Andre, who had been there for three years already, hadn't been tried or convicted of anything. I mean, you're literally guilty until proven innocent. And he wasn't even the target. He was being pressed to testify against the, the guy who was the target and he refused to do so. And while I was there in those two months, he had his trial. He was given a 15 year sentence. The guy had two daughters, one of whom was born when he was there. So his wife was pregnant when he was arrested, so he'd only seen his three year old daughter once on the other side of a glass screen. He came back from the trial realizing he wasn't going to be able to hug his daughters till their 15th birthday. The guy was just totally shattered. The day he was heading off to the trial, he and I both woke up earlier than everybody. There was a tv, the in the cell that show just the Russian state channels, but there was one channel that in the morning doesn't have programming, but it always just shows. A nature scene. May have even been in California, but it was some sort of sea rocks. There were seals swimming around. Everybody else in the cell is asleep and the sound is off. And he's just there staring at the tv. He's got a tear in his eye, and I can imagine him thinking, if I ever get out of here, I'm never going to take for granted the things that are the most beautiful in life. When he came back, it was really devastating.

[Monica Padman]

Ugh.

[Michael Calvi]

But at the same time, there was some hilarious banter or jokes. The guys were all learning English Swear words first. Swear words 101. You know, we had kind of a competition about whose swear words were better between Russian and English. Afterwards, they were kind of like, yeah, English is much cooler than I thought.

[Dax Shepard]

The times that I have made friendships under duress, those are really, really profound.

[Michael Calvi]

Friendships, especially when you're expecting the exact opposite. But just to see those guys courage and support for each other. When you go from something that you expect to be scary and maybe even violent and it turn out to find decent people, it is inspiring. Everybody was reading different things, trying to make the best of the bad circumstances. I kept thinking that I was going to get out soon. On the tv, half of the commercials were from companies that I helped to start and found and develop. Whenever some new company would have something on tv, they'd be like, mike, is that your company too? I'd be like, yeah, that's one of our. Oh, my God. And they were also kept saying, how is it possible that our country could arrest someone like you who's done all this? We were able to get newspapers once I got into that cell and I was being written about in the papers almost every day.

[Monica Padman]

Emotionally, did you feel so betrayed?

[Michael Calvi]

You know, when you're committed to some ideology or a religion, and then you find out that God doesn't exist? Or maybe it wasn't that extreme. But I believed in Russia. I wasn't naive. I saw political situation was changing. I saw what the FSB was doing in some other cases. But I kind of thought, those are all people involved in politics. It's oligarchs who are involved in those corrupt privatizations. You were referring to Dax earlier. Surely that couldn't happen to me. Only when you see the face of it up front and you realize how cynical the system is.

[Monica Padman]

But that's heartbreaking for someone who believed so deeply.

[Michael Calvi]

Yeah, I did feel betrayed by Russia. I had done so much to help this country. I believed in it. I was Very proud of having kids who are half Russian. I was raising them to be equally proud of their Russian and Americans American heritage. And it just felt so self damaging. There was one guy who said in the newspaper when I was sitting in prison, a very prominent businessman in Russia said if the CIA wanted to design a special operation to discredit and undermine the Russian economy, they could not have come up with a better program than to have Michael Calvi arrested. What I learned later, when I got out of house arrest, because I was two months there then two years under house arrest, and then I was able to go out and meet some of the people who had been supporting, and then they told me exactly what happened two weeks after I was arrested. So I was still in Matroska tishina in cell 604. There was a decisive meeting in the Kremlin. Some of the people who were supporting me were there. Some of the people supporting my opponents were there. Putin listened to both sides and realized they had made a mistake. So he told them to take me out of prison and treat me with respect, but also then to dig and find evidence of a crime. Don't lose face and try to make some sort of a deal with the Americans and get something out of it. So I didn't know that at the.

[Dax Shepard]

Time the goal was to find you guilty of something, so they had a justification for having pulled you in in the first place. But if it had been exposed that this was completely fabricated charges, they couldn't live with that.

[Michael Calvi]

That would discredit the whole system. The legitimacy of the whole system depends on those security structures being perceived to be absolutely ethical. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Tell me about the trial. So were you awaiting trial for two years?

[Michael Calvi]

Yeah. Then I was under house arrest for two years. It's not like Covid, where you could go out for a jog or go to the grocery store. You're literally able to leave the apartment only escorted by a prison official.

[Dax Shepard]

Is your family allowed to come?

[Michael Calvi]

My family was allowed to come. I was given a special phone with buttons, but it was put with a chip in it so that everything was monitored. My apartment had video and audio surveillance equipment installed by the fsb. So it was like being in a fishbowl. The only people I was allowed to call or text were my wife and three kids, my mom, brother and sisters, and my lawyers, and that was it. So I couldn't zoom with friends. I was totally isolated from any friends, any contact whatsoever for two years. Internet and wi fi were disabled. I couldn't stream anything. We could watch DVDs this was in 2020. At this point, it was from 2019 till 2021. So it was through the COVID period as well.

[Dax Shepard]

Was that comforting at all? Well, at least everyone else was fucked.

[Michael Calvi]

Yeah. Yeah. I was being brought once a week from my apartment to the Investigative committee during the whole Covid period for some further interrogations or other case related. And at the entrance there was a guy with one of these like wands that would measure your temperature. And I would always glance at it and it would have a number that did not resemble a human being's temperature, either in Celsius or Fahrenheit. It'd be like 12.7, 56.3 or something like that. So after like the third month of this, I kind of lean over to the guy and whisper. I says, does that thing even work? And he goes, apparently not.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh my God.

[Michael Calvi]

It was a classic Russian bureaucratic, like they just follow the. It's all procedure, but it's just, just a show, basically. It doesn't mean anything.

[Dax Shepard]

Basically, I just don't want to stick out. Okay, so tumor first or trial first?

[Michael Calvi]

Tumor first. I had had what I thought was a normal lipoma, like a fatty tissue or whatever on the back of my thigh. My British doctor had said, it's a harmless lipoma. You can have it removed if it bothers you cosmetically. I said, yeah, I'll do it, but I'm kind of busy right now. And underneath your shorts? It didn't really bother me that much anyway, I'm under house arrest. You got nothing else to do when you're awake for 16 hours a day except read and exercise. So I'm exercising a lot and my legs getting. I'm thinking my legs are getting stronger, but I noticed the lump getting stronger too. I'm thought maybe it's related to the exercise I'm doing. It starts getting bigger and bigger. I'm asking to get permission to go see a doctor. And they hem and haw about it. Finally, after a few months, I get permission to go see a doctor who takes a quick look at it and says, that is not a normal lipoma. So he orders a surgery to remove it the very next day. And when the surgeon comes out, he says, look, I'm seeing some of these things. I'm afraid it looks like a malignant. And I thought it couldn't be malignant. It's been in my leg for three years. If it was, I'd be dead. But they sent away, did a biopsy and it was a grade one liposarcoma. It was the size of a pear.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Michael Calvi]

But the good news is it hadn't yet metastasized. And so the tissue around the tumor was clean. I still did radiation therapy, but it was a bit surreal.

[Dax Shepard]

And you couldn't do an MRI because you had the ankle bracelet.

[Michael Calvi]

The ankle bracelet, exactly. So they were able to do some, like, ultrasounds and things like that, but not MRIs. Mine a little bit blind.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Michael Calvi]

It was yet another thing. It felt like fate was definitely conspiring against me.

[Dax Shepard]

Two years is a very long time. What was the nadir of that experience?

[Michael Calvi]

It just kept going on and on. You know, I kept thinking, it'll be out in three months. There was a deal being worked on in March, April of 2020. A couple months after that was going to be May 2020, the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II. And Putin had invited a number of world leaders to Moscow, including, including Trump, to celebrate the old alliance from World War II that defeated the Nazis. Some friends and supporters of mine were pushing an amnesty. And it would be the kind of thing that Putin likes to do before some grand event like that, make a humanitarian gesture. It would have been a way for them to say, well, he was guilty, but we're letting him out in the spirit of 1945 and our alliance. And there would have been a face saving way to end the story. But then Covid hit in March. All the leaders canceled the visit. So there was no PR value from it. We had to kind of go back to. So there were things like that that were just constant. Get your hopes up.

[Dax Shepard]

Meanwh your business is thriving in Russia.

[Michael Calvi]

Yeah. It made me wonder why I worked so hard all those years. But the most profitable years we ever had were the two years when I was away. Wow. Among our investments were two companies we had invested in 10, 15 years earlier, which went public during that time in the US and the market values went up dramatically.

[Dax Shepard]

Talk about a very hard and real example of like, oh, I can't buy my way. This money's useless.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, exactly.

[Michael Calvi]

But, you know, also, especially when I was still in the prison, it's kind of like an onion, and you peel it back and you say, okay, well, this thing that's on the outside, like money, I'll give that up if I have to. What's in the very middle of the onion is your family. You want your kids to respect you as an honest man. You know, you don't want to go down as a criminal and unethical. What is in that very middle part. So I had already mentally shaved off the outer layers of the onion. It was like, if I get out of this, I have to give up all my money.

[Dax Shepard]

But you have your dignity in your.

[Michael Calvi]

Kids house on the inside. If the kids are healthy and happy and the rest. Okay, let's see what I can get back from the rest of you.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I'm fast forwarding ahead, but in any way, like someone who does survive a real bout of cancer, has it given you a kind of new view of life and a new gratitude and a new appreciation?

[Michael Calvi]

Well, the cancer and the case together, absolutely. I remember Andre looking at that TV and the scene. You have to live every day and appreciate every day. It's a cliche and it's so hard to forget it when you get stuck in your busy life and your routine and your plans. But when you go through a combination experience like that, well, you think you're.

[Dax Shepard]

Planning all these pillars that you really anchor your. Your safety and your identity to. And one of the pillars. Yeah. Is your health. And one of the pillars is financial. One of them is your freedom. And you remove those. And I just imagine it gets quite threatening. Just your identity.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, Just existentially.

[Michael Calvi]

You know what was also really nice is seeing the reaction of your friends. Almost all of my friends prove to be really, really good friends during that time. So when I was not there to be able to help my family, they stepped up. It's almost like going to your own funeral, Seeing who shows up and who you can really count on. That was in the inner side of what's most important in life. And knowing you'll come out of that with that was a very reassuring epiphany.

[Dax Shepard]

So what was the trial like?

[Michael Calvi]

If you've ever read Franz Kafka, it was just like that. It was a farce. We decided that I would give testimony at the very beginning because it's kind of a complicated case. It's a repo, which, you know, if you worked on Wall street, it happens 100,000 times times a day. But to a judge and many journalists, it's a very complicated thing. So I was going to give testimony at the very beginning to explain the basic outline what happened, refer to various expert opinions. And my lawyers prepped me, so I gave the testimony. And then when the prosecutor stands up to cross examine me, she says, is your name Michael Calvi? Said, yes. And she goes, okay. No further questions, your honor. So then everyone in the courtroom just burst out laughing and realized that they have no questions, that they can ask.

[Dax Shepard]

Is there a juror? How is it?

[Michael Calvi]

No, it's not a jury. It's just a judge. The judge decides.

[Dax Shepard]

Are there no jury trials in Russia?

[Michael Calvi]

There are some. It's very rare. The expert appraiser, who was appointed by the prosecutors to come in and give an opinion about this, concluded that the bank made like a 4 billion ruble profit on the transaction that they were accusing me of. So this should have been enough to disqualify the case immediately. The prosecutor just lets all the testimony come. Even the witnesses for the prosecution were saying, there was no crime. What in the world? And at the very end, the prosecutor stands up and says, in her closing arguments, during this entire trial, not a single witness testified that a crime took place. And that just shows what a well organized group of criminals we're dealing with here. But then she proceeded to say, but on the other hand, these people have done important and valuable work for the Russian economy. They've created many jobs, and so we think they should be given just a probationary or suspended sentence. She's turned to me to smile as if to say, you have no idea how long lucky you are and how rare that is that you're getting off the hook without jail time. And I leave the courtroom, I'm getting texts. By that time, I was able to communicate by phone. My British and American friends are all saying, I'm so sorry, because they went across the news wires immediately. So to be convicted of a crime that never happened is so unjust. My Russian friends were texting me, saying, congratulations, man, you did it.

[Dax Shepard]

You did the impossible.

[Michael Calvi]

There's like Mission Impossible, basically. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

That shows such a difference of the way way the two countries operate.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. You pretty quickly divest everything from Russia.

[Michael Calvi]

Well, I get permission to leave finally. Another four months later, five months later, and I leave in January 2022. Very stressful day. If you saw the film Argo about when they got the guys out of Tehran, it felt like that on the airplane. It was a huge relief to be back with my family. But I had promised my lawyers that I would go back at least once to register and then leave again.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know.

[Michael Calvi]

I went to see my family. Family. I went to see some friends and close business partners. I went to visit my kids in their schools. They're in college already and at their dorms, which I'd missed out on for three years. High school graduations and a lot of stuff like that. So I was trying to catch up on that. But I started to worry that if I don't go back. My colleagues who were also caught up in the same case and had suspended sentences like me, might get sent to prison again.

[Dax Shepard]

But you also know of the many stories of people who have returned to Russia, right?

[Michael Calvi]

So I saw people in the State Department who were saying, do not go back. And I'm like, but if I, I don't go back and four people go to prison because of that, how will I look at myself in the mirror every day? I check with my lawyers, I check with various people and they're like, look, the same system that allowed you to leave, it's still there. So you can probably come back quickly, register and then leave.

[Dax Shepard]

Probably.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my God. If you're my dad, I am so mad.

[D]

Yeah.

[Michael Calvi]

So I'm weighing the pros and cons and I kind of come down on the side that I have to go back. I cannot live with myself if I don't go back. And then my colleagues get arrested because of that. What a cowardly thing to do. Living comfortably in my home in London would be unbearable. So I buy tickets to go back February 23, 2022, with my wife, who has aged parents in Moscow. That was the time when you needed Covid PCR tests or whatever. And I'm literally in a taxi going from my home to Geneva airport and I get the email with my Covid results saying I'm COVID positive. Yes. So my wife and I spend five minutes conferring. She's negative. Her parents are waiting for her, so we decide, okay, she's gonna fly. Anyway, we stop the taxi at the nearest town and I take a train back home and she goes on to the airport and she wakes me up in the morning, 6am saying, have you seen the news? No. That night Russia invaded Ukraine and the Russia Ukraine war started that night. That night. So my wife flew there and literally that same very night, the whole whole horror show of the Russian Ukrainian war. So if I had gone back, it's quite possible that they would not have let me leave and I might still be there today. It was an incredible stroke of good luck and my wife flew back three days later and was able to come out. And so obviously I haven't been back in Russia since then.

[Dax Shepard]

And then ultimately you guys got out of business wise, which was very costly.

[Michael Calvi]

Yeah, the war obviously makes everything that happened to me seem absolutely trivial and tiny in comparison. It's one of the worst human tragedies, not just for Ukrainians, especially for Ukrainians, but also for Russians. I mean, how many hundreds of thousands of Young, young Russian men's lives destroyed, huge refugee exodus, almost zero training, half.

[Dax Shepard]

The people they're sending over.

[Michael Calvi]

And it's literally like World War I trench warfare, but now with drones, it's just absolutely brutal conditions.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Okay, so in the wake of this whole experience, when you look back and you reflect what red flags had you ignored?

[Michael Calvi]

I mean, writing the book was very cathartic in that respect, because I had a lot of time to think about what went wrong. I started off with a diary of the two months that I was in prison, which I felt was just such a unique lens into Russian society that itself tells a story of an entire book. But when I started sharing that with friends of mine who were journalists, they encouraged me to tell the story of how I came there in the first place and why I was so optimistic. But it also gave me a chance to reflect on everything I got wrong. It's not like we were blind or naive. We were just biased because of our immediate environs and also the people that we dealt with. If you would have spent time with the young entrepreneurs that we were backing, you could not have been an honest person and concluded that Russia was worse off than during the time of their parents or grandparents generation. If you imagine what their Soviet grandparents lived through in their lives and saw these young people with their iPhones and.

[Dax Shepard]

T shirts going on dates to Pizza Hut.

[Michael Calvi]

Well, by that time, Moscow had amazing restaurants, fantastic theaters and culture. The parks were amazing and clean. Even from when I first moved there in the Yeltsin period. The housing had been totally broken down and people were not being paid. So things had improved materially for almost everybody in the country. The average wage was eight times, times higher than what it was back at that time. It felt like economically the place was better off. But also in terms of people's access to information in the world, the people I was dealing with were just leading much better lives than their grandparents. So what I didn't appreciate was how deep the security services control over people's lives had become. The FSB's control over life in Russia today is way deeper than it was at the time of the kgb because of technology, manipulate people's information and the degree of control they have inside all the big institutions of the country. And when you come up face to face with the people, you really see how cynical they are. Probably patriotic, too, but cynical, corrupt, and ruthless.

[Dax Shepard]

When you were seeing other businessmen get arrested throughout your three decades there, what were you telling yourself?

[Michael Calvi]

Some of them were oligarchs who had behaved really badly towards us at the time. So I was thinking, well, I'm not surprised that that guy got taken down because he was pretty corrupt himself. And I didn't shed tears when some of those people were arrested. I also felt like the Yeltsin era was so chaotic that they needed a swing of the pendulum towards greater state control. I just didn't anticipate what it would mean to go to a system that was controlled by an institution like the fsb with a president who comes from that institution. It's not just him. It's a cast of people who really believe that they are the anointed ones and they're a brotherhood who are loyal to each other.

[Dax Shepard]

They're charged to run this society and they think the best way is with total information and control.

[Michael Calvi]

They're paranoid, they're cynical, they think everybody in the world is also cynical. They don't hate the CIA, they admire it, but they don't believe in people's movements or things like that. But ultimately they're paranoid and conspiratorial. The traditional toast that they would have at a party is death to traitors. Instead of saying cheers or whatever, it's death to traitors.

[Monica Padman]

Do you regret doing so much? Like when you say the technology is part of the reason that they're able to do this monitoring?

[Michael Calvi]

That's a really good question. It's kind of a cool. I don't. But the reason is that the companies that we help to create do empower people to get information for themselves instead of relying on state TV or something else like that. So through Yandex, even now, if you put in Alexei Navalny, you're going to get videos from him as an opposition figure or something else like that. So now after the war, Yandex is also controlled directly by the state or by state affiliate. But it's better than the situation would have been had it never existed. You know, the companies that succeeded the most from that technology area were ones that were very meritocratic from the beginning. They were anti hierarchy. They were like tech companies anywhere in the world, where if the leader of the company has a stupid or bad idea, everybody in the company should feel free to criticize it or say it's wrong. So when you think about it, it's actually the exact opposite of the FSB and the exact opposite of the system which Putin has criticized. So you had this kind of bottom up thing that was happening while there was the top down thing when it came to the major geopolitical conflict that happened, it was very obvious which side was going to win. But the fact that those success stories did exist, there's a generation of people that saw the success of those that learned from that culture, and it's still there. So it's kind of like seeds that are underground, but at some point, those seeds will come out and flourish again. They also improved lives of people. Right. So you could say Russians are our enemies. But if you invest in businesses that improve people's lives, I don't think you can feel bad.

[Dax Shepard]

Now, it's rare that I would get to ask somebody who spent 30 years there for a temperature reading on this. So I don't want to miss out on this. My first question is really, what is the average citizen think of Putin like? I think we find ourselves in an interesting situation, but we have the luxury of art being disseminated across the globe. Right. So I'm watching Saturday Night Live last weekend. The first sketch is this hilarious roasting of Trump. So I go minimally. Maybe people around the world know that. It's not like we're here pumped. We're sending a message through our art. What is the average citizen of Russia, do you think? And I want you to break it down socio economically, I imagine there's a difference.

[Michael Calvi]

Yeah. There was a fantastic TV program in the Yeltsin era. So however corrupt it was, there was a flourishing of different TV platforms and other things. And it was modeled off of the Spitting Image was the UK One with like the Dolls was a political satire making fun of the British politicians with puppets. So there was one in Russian called Kukli, and they skewered in a funny way that was respectful. But humor is one of the most powerful ways to convey essential truths. And there was one episode, it was after the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London, who was a KGB officer who became, in their eyes, a traitor. He was killed with polonium in London. This huge scandal. But anyway, on this Kukli episode, it's Putin. He's meeting with someone, and Putin says, would you like some tea? Because the guy was apparently poisoned through polonium in his tea. Putin, like, slides the teacup across the table, and the guy's shaking. He's like, no, sir, no, no. Nemo runs out of the room. And I think a week later, Kukley's license was canceled. It was the last episode that they showed. So there was a whole slippery slope of those little moments when things started to change in the direction going the opposite way.

[Dax Shepard]

But what do the citizens think? Do they love Putin?

[Michael Calvi]

No, I think there's three broad groups. There's an opposition category that's probably 15 to 20%. They're, like, ideologically opposed to Putin.

[Dax Shepard]

Are they mostly young people?

[Michael Calvi]

Not only, but mostly young people. And that's where the biggest number of refugees has been since the war. People who just decided. Decided to leave. Probably between half a million and a million Russians left since the war, but there's still quite a few people like that inside Russia. But if you stand up and protest or you go to a protest meeting now, you go straight to jail. It's easy for people in the US to say, why aren't more people protesting? There's a second group that's probably also like 20% that are people that are passively supporting the regime. They probably wish to see Russia as more globally connected and friendly with the west. But they also are very grieved by things that the west is. Has done, like the Iraq War, Afghanistan, after things like that. They will never be convinced that NATO is a defensive alliance. They see the pressure from the west to bring neighboring countries into NATO. There are people like that, essentially. There are Europeans who wish that Russia would be part of Europe. They long for the days when they could travel to Europe, but they feel a little bit sympathetic to maybe Putin's viewer. And then there's the. I would say 60%. Some people refer to it as the swamp, but it's essentially. Essentially people who are classic Russians, mostly living in small towns. They get a lot of their information from state tv. They would say that those are the rules of the jungle.

[Dax Shepard]

He's a tough son of a bitch.

[Michael Calvi]

If you come from a gang and the gang has certain rules, you break those rules, you expect to pay the price. So that's kind of the way they would look at it. I would say they're mostly people that if they were given a choice to vote against everyone, they probably would. They mostly wouldn't say that they're political, but they're very Russian. They don't believe that Russia belongs in the West. They think that Russia is different from everything else. They're Slavic. They don't believe that the neighboring countries around Russia really have the right to be independent because it was all part of the Russian empire. There's some from within that that are ideologically believing, but most are people that don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. They care more about their job. Their living standards have improved in the last 20 years. Especially the older people in the. That segment don't want to go back to the early 1990s again. So they would be nervous about political change. You can go into a lot more detailed segmentation within that.

[Dax Shepard]

What would you guess Putin's personal wealth to be?

[Michael Calvi]

I don't think if you're Putin, you need to own that much because you can control everything that you can see.

[Dax Shepard]

Because there's these rumors, right, that go around.

[Michael Calvi]

He's the wealthiest guy in the world. Yeah, he could be. If he wanted to be. He could push a button and become the wealthiest guy in the world by Saturday.

[Dax Shepard]

But that's not to say he has.

[Michael Calvi]

There's a lot of people who've made immense fortunes under his rule, and maybe they've said to him, whenever you would like your 50%, just let me know. But no one knows. I think that he's got everything he could possibly want. He doesn't need to think about having assets because he basically controls everything.

[Dax Shepard]

Is the average citizen there aware of the grift?

[Michael Calvi]

Russians probably tend to think that everybody is corrupt in the world, and it's natural for leaders. You know, in the czar's times, regional governors didn't get salaries because they were expected to enrich themselves off of official business. Corruption was just enshrined as political part of the business model.

[Dax Shepard]

What do you think the average Russian's stance on the invasion is?

[Michael Calvi]

When you say average Russian, that's like saying, what does the average American think about Trump? Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I would say 50% hates him and 50% loves him.

[Michael Calvi]

Russia's not quite that binary, but maybe there's people who are more nuanced. The people from within the business elite mostly believe that the war was a big strategic mistake, but the west provoked Russia into it by promising NAT NATO membership, and they would welcome any end to the war. Putin has a lot of room to end the war and declare victory because of his control over Russian media and information. There's a couple of red lines that he has, but I think Zelensky has much less room for maneuver, having mobilized his country to fight what seemed like an unwinnable fight and fighting it to a stalemate on the basis of no compromise, total victory, we're going to get back all our land. It's very difficult to pivot from that and say, okay, now let's find a compromise.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, there's also a principle at play. The Russians have no pr. Well, I guess their principle is they were going to join NATO, but the principle for Zelensky is, you invaded us so you can leave, and that's when it's over.

[Michael Calvi]

If they compromise with Russia. Now, this is not going to be the end of the story. So if you're left without security guarantees, they're going to come back. And for Europe, it's an issue, too. You have countries like the Baltics, which could be deeply vulnerable, maybe not to invasion, but to coercion and threats and other things like that.

[Dax Shepard]

If you're the neighboring countries to Ukraine and they go down. And we know what Putin's ultimate goal is. He is completely humiliated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he would very much like to have a full Soviet Union again. I think he's very Hitleresque in his desire to reassemble the empire.

[Michael Calvi]

I understand why you would say there's some resemblances to Nazi Germany. I don't agree with you completely. I think the Hitler analogy is always dangerous.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm not saying he's going to commit genocide. I'm saying he felt very dishonored by his countries.

[Michael Calvi]

He did. That's absolutely true. But I also think when he first came to power, he imagined Russia as a European country and thought that by the end of his reign, Russia would be firmly anchored in Europe. He just thought he'd be able to do it on terms of. That would restore, quote, unquote, Russian greatness. If you remember during the Iraq War, it wasn't just Putin who was opposing it. It was also Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah, yeah, we should not be.

[Michael Calvi]

Standing up or whatever with these. So there was a series of things that happened also in the bigger world that made him reappraise and think that America is hypocritical and doesn't follow the same laws that it often tries to force. And I think there's some truth to that. But the other side is that many of these countries that were part of the former Soviet Union, they may love the Russian language, they may love Russian culture and literature, but they'd at Moscow as a source of misery. And that's something that most Russians don't appreciate. Most Russians would say, look, we were the biggest victims of the Communists. More Russians were sent to the Gulag than any other nationality from the former Soviet Union. So don't blame us. It was the Communists, or it was Stalin who was a Georgian, not Russian. But for people in Ukraine or other places like that, they look at it as, you know, Moscow. They're arrogant. They've been the source of misery for us. And if we have a choice to pursue a European future, that's what we really want to do. So that's Essentially what the conflict is, is I think that we contributed to the problem through some of these mistakes, like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya. And it was a mistake, I think, to try to offer Ukraine to be in NATO because Russia would inevitably view that as a provocation. But even if we didn't do that, I think there would have been a war anyway between Russia and Ukraine.

[Dax Shepard]

He wants Ukraine back, period. He can hang it on NATO, but he already went into Crimea before there was the NATO threat.

[Michael Calvi]

Yeah, I'm not going to try to argue with you or change your mind about Putin, but that happened in 2000 after an uprising, which was a genuine people's uprising against the Russian favored leader, Yanukovych, and in favor of wanting Ukraine to be part of Europe. But there was a deal that was reached at the end of a long street movement, was signed off on by the us, Russia, Germany, others. And basically the protesters reneged on that. They forced Yanukovych out immediately anyway. And I think that was among the things which were like the red lines for Putin, where he then thought, I just cannot deal with the west anymore. There are bitter enemies. Another moment was the killing of Gaddafi in Libya, who was a person he would have known by the people's uprising. So he just developed this view that the west, these are neocon regime changers and they're coming after me, they're coming after us. And I can understand part of that, but I also think he just fails to understand that he did more to create Ukrainian nationalism than any other human being. The more he talks about them being not a people, the more that Ukraine, Ukrainians are like we are and get the hell out of here. So I do think that there was an inevitable conflict brewing up by the Ukrainians desire to pursue a European future and by Putin's view of that as something that was anathema, existential to Russia.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, okay, so what is the path forward for Russia? How does Russia rebuild any kind of good faith that they're a great business partner, that they're trusted geopolitically? Second question, question of that. Aren't there several of these oligarchs who have now lost hundreds of billions of dollars? I'm shocked there hasn't been a coup to assassinate him by these people.

[Michael Calvi]

Again, if you understand the degree of control of the FSB and the fact that that's the ruling cast, the oligarchs and people like that are not in the ruling cast. They operate and live at the pleasure of the fsb. And every one of them know that at any time, what Happened to me, could happen to any one of them. So the chance of a palace coup or something like that I think is close to zero.

[Dax Shepard]

Got it. I hate. What a terrible example of how totalitarianism.

[Michael Calvi]

Works quite well with modern technology and.

[Dax Shepard]

Even seeing, like, in our own country, the notion that, and I'm not on the rooftops about Trump, but the notion of disbarring lawyers from visiting state property, getting hundreds of millions in free legal services from other law firms, I mean, some of these things are so Russian. The way the law lawyers have snapped into line blows my mind. The universities almost did, and they just barely decided to no fight, but that was questionable. I could see where Harvard was going to bug, and I was like, he doesn't even have the tools at his disposal that say, Putin has. And I'm already really discouraged how quickly people fall in line with a real threat.

[Michael Calvi]

You're right to be concerned about it, because it's what separates us from countries like Russia. We should keep things in perspective and realize we're a million miles from that. We do have courts that are mostly independent, and they've even, in the last four months, have proven themselves to be, maybe controversial in some cases, but to be pretty good. And we have a press that reports on things transparently. So I'm confident in our institutions that we're going to get through this, but it's going to be a stress test, and it's not 100% guaranteed that we'll come through it as sound as we are.

[Dax Shepard]

I think the system will win, but I've been shocked with some of the hits and injuries the system did already withstand.

[Monica Padman]

I've been a lot to hear you say that. We had a lot of shocks.

[Michael Calvi]

I love that look you you just gave him right now.

[Dax Shepard]

That was I told you so sweetness. There's sweetness, and then I told you so.

[Michael Calvi]

One thing I do agree with, though, I agree with Trump about the need for urgent negotiations to end the Russia Ukraine war time is not on Ukraine's side. If your goal is not to punish Russia, but to save an independent Ukraine, there should be negotiations as urgently and as immediately as possible. And Ukraine needs help to do that, because, like I said, Zelensky has made himself into a corner and he needs cover to be able to make a reasonable compromise. So to me, the question is, how do you end the war between Russia and Ukraine permanently so that Ukraine survives as an independent, secure nation where both sides can declare victory? And I think there is a scope to do that. But we're a long way from It. It may not happen this year, but there's a way for Ukraine to accept the loss of some land without recognizing it as Russian territory, but agreeing that they'll never try to take it back. For the US to take NATO membership off the table, but provide some equivalent type of security guarantees for Ukraine to be fortified. Military. It's already the fourth most powerful military in the world today. Ukraine's and their military manufacturing capacity is by far the biggest in Europe. And for there to be a path for Ukraine to be a member of the European Union, if that happened, it would be a game changer. Russia would not have agreed to that prior to the war, but I think there's a chance they could agree to something like that today. And even if it meant a loss of 20% of Ukraine's territory, if they come out of it with a path towards European Union membership, then I think the kids of those Ukrainians who died or sacrificed will have achieved something. So I think it would be a strategic victory for Ukraine, even though it's a massive human and economic defeat for both sides. This is the kind of war that both sides are the losers from. They're both worse off. It was a disaster from the very beginning.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, boy. Well, what a thing you've lived through, Michael. I encourage everyone to read Odyssey Moscow. One American's Journey from Russia to Britain. Prisoner of the State. I'm glad you got out alive because that's literally always on the table.

[Michael Calvi]

Thanks. It is great to be here. It was very cathartic to write the book and cheaper than having a therapist.

[Monica Padman]

You should still probably, you know, I don't know, dabble.

[Michael Calvi]

I think that in some ways you can write about something with more honesty than you could even talk because you have time to think about it and you really can process your thoughts. And when I was especially under house arrest, being monitored all the time, it's so much time to process all this that it was actually very healthy for me to do this and write a book in an honest way. And it's been a great way to also draw a line under that 30 years of my life and move forward to the future.

[Dax Shepard]

Who's going to read the audiobook?

[Michael Calvi]

There's a wonderful voice actor named Arthur Mora who did it, so it's on Audible now. He did a great job. I narrated the epilogue and the acknowledgments section, but he made a great effort to pronounce all the Russian words right. But his voice is much more beautiful than mine.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. But I do wonder if you would have Started crying trying to read that out loud. We've had a lot of actors on who've written books. There's definitely when they go to read.

[Michael Calvi]

It, some of the moments like on and raised sentencing and things like that, I probably would not have been able to get through.

[Monica Padman]

Do you think that there's a chance you have a little bit of Stockholm syndrome around Russia?

[Michael Calvi]

Well, you may say that because of some of my. Yeah, I'm more of an analyst than an activist by nature. I'm not like a political activist for one party. My business has been about analyzing things very objectively. I may be too empathetic and that I'm willing to see the other guys or person's point of view. And so in my 57 years, I lived 23 years in the United States and 34 years abroad. So I also see how people look at Americans. I see all the great things about America that makes us all proud to be Americans, but also the things that we've screwed up.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a long list.

[Michael Calvi]

I think when I look at Russia, it's the same thing. I also have a huge admiration for Russian people, even today. Of course, even though I wouldn't go there, it would be unsafe very much for me to go back. And I hate the system that controls the country, but I still love Russian people. I love so many things about their culture, about their sense of humor. Be the only example of ruthlessness or harshness combined with sentimentality and generosity. It's a strange mix, but for me, it's already very dear.

[Dax Shepard]

I tell myself I understand through reading lots of Dostoevsky and loving it. There's some detached, borderline sociopathic humor that I really respond to.

[Michael Calvi]

They're just very genuine, which makes them good friends. When you do something bad or wrong, they tell you there's no superficial nicety. When you ask a Russian friend, how are you doing? They're not going to. To say, fine. That's not a word that comes after that. It's usually, huh, my back is killing me, or my sister's not talking to me.

[Dax Shepard]

The truth comes out.

[Michael Calvi]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

No sugar coating.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, well, Michael, this has been incredibly interesting. Thank you so much for coming to talk about the book.

[Michael Calvi]

Yeah. You guys have fascinating jobs. You get people from so many different backgrounds.

[Dax Shepard]

We had a sex expert earlier today. She goes, are you doing anyone? Next I go, yeah, guys, was in her Russian prison. It's like, what a span in one day.

[Michael Calvi]

I'm just looking at the book about.

[Dax Shepard]

Parts of the vagina earlier today, and.

[Monica Padman]

Then now this yeah, it is a wild job. You're right.

[Dax Shepard]

No, it's the greatest.

[Monica Padman]

It is.

[Dax Shepard]

All right, be well.

[Michael Calvi]

Thank you both very much. Stay tuned for the Fact Check. It's where the party's at.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, you're wearing the same shirt. You guys are wearing a very cute Ted Seer shirt, which I also also own and will wear soon.

[Dax Shepard]

Good colors, right?

[Monica Padman]

Great colors.

[D]

Yeah, I love the color.

[Dax Shepard]

Back to your shirt, though, which is much cooler.

[Monica Padman]

The Camel cigarette shirt. For people who are listening.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I'm trying to think, I guess if I wanted to put it in terms of fast food. Sure. Tell me if you like this comp. Like, let's say Aaron and I always ate at Wendy's or McDonald's, and then he went only raggedy. That's not a good comp.

[D]

No, really.

[Dax Shepard]

Only Popeyes.

[Monica Padman]

My mom loves Popeyes.

[Dax Shepard]

Popeyes.

[Monica Padman]

So we can't.

[Dax Shepard]

Delicious.

[Monica Padman]

Why are you trying to say it's bad?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I love. Wait, no, Popeyes is delicious.

[D]

I love Popeyes.

[Dax Shepard]

No, but I am trying to make an analogy that way, which is, I can agree, arbitrary. You're already breathing burning tobacco into your lungs.

[D]

Might as well add some fiberglass crystals or whatever the menthol provides some beaver.

[Dax Shepard]

Beaver anus and what other. Whatever else.

[D]

This is how it kind of happened at my. When I started Newports, I had the bar and everyone is such a cigarette bummer. And Hawk, it is flat out annoying. I mean, I had to go through a whole nother pack just bumming cigarettes every time I was working because you.

[Dax Shepard]

Get all these bozos who don't really smoke, so they're not carrying a pack of cigarettes. But when they drink, drink, they sm.

[Monica Padman]

And so they asked the bar they bar owner.

[D]

Well, well, I. Yeah. Sl. Bartender. Sl.

[Dax Shepard]

Fellow drunk at the bar.

[Monica Padman]

You did it all.

[D]

I was a man of.

[Dax Shepard]

You were a client. You're a customer, a proprietor, a server, and an owner.

[D]

One of my friends, I was commenting on it one night, and I'm like, these. And with bumming the cigarettes, he goes, dude, no one asked me for cigarette cigarettes in your bar because everyone's white. And this particular friend was a Mexican dude. He goes, don't you ever notice when you hang out at the bar down the street, which I frequented a lot, which I was about the only white person that hung out there. Mostly Mexican and black people. No one ever bummed one off me because no one wanted a Camel.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

So I know.

[D]

Don't decided. I just started enjoying them.

[Dax Shepard]

And I'm like, this would be the only Frugal decision you've ever made in your life.

[Monica Padman]

That's smart.

[D]

But soon after, I started smoking them, and it was very true.

[Michael Calvi]

No one.

[D]

You got a cigarette? Yeah, it's a Newport. I said that all the time.

[Dax Shepard]

Never mind. I'll pass.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah.

[D]

No cigarettes.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm not even a smoker. Yeah.

[D]

So I was like, oh, my God, this is awesome. But not long after, we sold a bar and now I'm only hanging out at the bars where people smoke Newport. So, you know, didn't work out. And then I was already hooked up the fiberglass and all that.

[Dax Shepard]

There was also Monica. As you become more and more saturated as an addict it's harder to keep bumping it into a novel direction.

[Monica Padman]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

And so you're smoking. You know, when you're getting drunk for the night, like, you're smoking two packs of cigarettes in, like, eight hours. And if you were doing drugs, like, soon as drugs were in the mix, we would always switch to Newport.

[D]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You would add menthol into the mix because the cooling. Just because it was different and you were doing something different and you just kind of. You needed something novel. So Newports were always in rotation.

[D]

Newports were great with cocaine.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Great pair.

[Monica Padman]

I think I would like those because I like tingly, tingly menthol.

[D]

You can almost trick yourself that it's a little bit healthy.

[Dax Shepard]

It's the preferred cigarette of koala bears because they eat eucalyptus. So they're used to chlamydia and they have chlamydia. But don't mix up metaphors.

[Monica Padman]

It's not the same. They're not connected.

[Dax Shepard]

We're not saying Newport smokers have chlamydia.

[D]

No, but now that you brought it up. This. I've always wondered, did they. I heard this a long time ago. Did they ban menthol cigarettes in California?

[Dax Shepard]

I think so.

[D]

What the Are people doing?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[D]

This is a big new place.

[Monica Padman]

I don't even understand that.

[Dax Shepard]

Because, like, real Newport, California, it's probably named after.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

You're supposed to think about, like, the beach and fresh air, I think. And it's like, it had, like, those little orange lines on it. They almost seem like maybe they're supposed to.

[D]

Commercials.

[Monica Padman]

They are banned. 20, 22.

[D]

Yeah. So I've. I mean, I know people tend to adjust, but I don't know how Newports.

[Monica Padman]

Are named after the seaport city of Newport, Rhode Island.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, that makes more sense. Okay. East Coast. Still. Still maritime.

[D]

Yeah. I can. I can picture the ads now. Definitely East Coast.

[Dax Shepard]

Get on that fishing boat go out go out for that long.

[D]

Oh catch a of scrubs.

[Dax Shepard]

You know white squall or two.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It says it's. It has a spinnaker sale. That's the logo.

[D]

Yes, it is a sure is.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm trying to think what were the backup menthols Cool was in the mix.

[D]

And Marlboro had one gone. All the menthols are banned and can.

[Monica Padman]

It says Camel.

[D]

Camel had a menthol. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[D]

That came way later.

[Dax Shepard]

I You know unfortunately I have to kind of thank them for this because this is what also banned wintergreen dip.

[D]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

This was a part of the whole sweeping. No flavored tobacco. And so I was having to get them smuggled in by my father in law or it was. I was always inconvenience someone to get them for another state for me and it helped cuz when I dipped it again. Yeah. I've. I haven't had dipped in a year and a half other than that long.

[D]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

I've dipped twice on the bus. Well cuz that doesn't count. It doesn't count at all.

[D]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And you were with me one time. I did.

[D]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

Just on the last leg of our grocery store too. I needed to do some.

[D]

I remember you decided to have one.

[Dax Shepard]

And then I also did when I drove back from Nashville I picked up a little tin. Do your kids care about you vaping?

[D]

They're not vocal about it if they do.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[D]

Oh and but by the way I find vapes every month in my house that are. That are empty or not your.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh yours. Okay. Okay. Yeah that makes sense.

[D]

Yeah we have discussions about. But it's yeah. Do as I say, not as I do.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Which doesn't work.

[D]

I don't know where to go.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[D]

With it. I'm just like you're not allowed to do it. And I'm like you can't do it in the house. That's right. Absurd.

[Dax Shepard]

Which.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah that's fair.

[Dax Shepard]

For the record, Aaron was allowed to smoke in his house in eighth grade. We were allowed to just casually bang darts at the table.

[Monica Padman]

Well that's what you can say like it's too I'm too far are gone. But you're not.

[D]

I think they.

[Dax Shepard]

You're salvageable.

[Michael Calvi]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So you can.

[D]

And so far no one likes it. And it's always a friends.

[Monica Padman]

Sure. But that's what I used to say.

[D]

About you know I mean if it was.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you get caught drinking and what did your parents.

[Monica Padman]

No. I would just be like oh I went to this Party people were drinking.

[Dax Shepard]

And you were too. You were saying to this to them while drunk.

[Monica Padman]

No, no, no, no, no. Like after the fact. Like, I was always, like, playing a game with them.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, I'm gon. To a degree.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

So you trust me? Yes, yes. Now, did you ever come home drunk and have to talk to them?

[Monica Padman]

I never came home drunk.

[Dax Shepard]

You just would spend the night in high school.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. We would always be out.

[Dax Shepard]

Huh.

[Monica Padman]

And around, apparently. My brother. Oh, I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but I will. When my brother was living with my parents as an adult.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

He. I guess twice. Like, came home so drunk.

[Dax Shepard]

Strong faced.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. And like acting crazy.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow.

[Monica Padman]

He claims he. And maybe. Maybe got spiked. Yes, yes. He said. He said for one of them. He was like, I really think something happened.

[Dax Shepard]

Straight women aren't dosing.

[D]

Who's wasting their drugs on them. Because we used to say that to any of our friends that would go like, you just got faced. There's no other. Like, someone would be like, I had to have been roofied. We're like, no one is wasting their roofies on you.

[Dax Shepard]

Exactly. Unless they're gonna follow him for like their shits and giggles. Watch you stumble.

[Monica Padman]

But yeah. Or you drank out of somebody. A girl's drink.

[D]

There you go.

[Dax Shepard]

That could happen.

[Monica Padman]

Or someone accidentally spiked the wrong drink.

[D]

I fucking hate people.

[Dax Shepard]

Could also.

[Monica Padman]

Right? I know.

[D]

It's like when Ruthie just did a Ted. A trip to Nashville with her girlfriends. A fun trip over like, Mother's Day weekend. None of them are mothers. They're partying. And I was like, can't believe I'm saying this, but please keep an eye on your drinks. I'm like, oh, yeah. I just keep. It comes up in my feed for some reason.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm like.

[D]

I'm like, oh, boy.

[Monica Padman]

We just had an armchair anonymous story of a girl who. Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

On her big trip, she won to go on a cruise.

[Monica Padman]

Backstreet Boys cruise as an adult. He's great.

[Dax Shepard]

Some actor had a story who had been sober. And his story of why he relapsed was he was kidnapped in Palm Springs and they made him do an eightball. And I remember Tom Arnold and I were together when we heard that story.

[D]

That's a great story.

[Dax Shepard]

And we were like, please show us the men that want to get rid of their eight balls so bad that they kidnapped this.

[Monica Padman]

Like, it's true.

[Dax Shepard]

You must abide by the rules of drugs to some degree.

[Monica Padman]

But anyway, he was cra. He was out of his Mind, apparently. And he was. And he made everyone scared.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. But the police weren't called.

[Monica Padman]

No, no, no.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert. If you. I don't know why that immediately triggered this memory of being up at Bree's house in the summertime. And I used to get hammered with her dad and her brother like every night. And these things can turn, right? Like, yeah, somehow toughness comes up, blah, blah, blah. And then these two, rightly so, decide, like, we're both taking. And we had a huge wrestling match in the middle of the night. It was me versus the father and son. And they definitely got the best of me by the end of it. And yeah, you gotta wake up the next morning. We all eat breakfast and we all know we had a, like, it kind of crossed the line tumble last night. And they feel great because they beat me. Sure.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, I just imagine Bri like looking out the window and being like, ugh.

[Dax Shepard]

No, I think they heard like furniture. Furniture and stuff getting smashed around the room at like 3:30 in the morning.

[Monica Padman]

Wow. Anyway, anywho.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, update. We did not. You'll be relieved to know we did not tackle the hiking trail on our electric motorcycle.

[Monica Padman]

You didn't because you were too tired.

[Dax Shepard]

Aaron, I have a different explanation. Tell me. Well, we. We had a glorious dinner. Eric, Nate Weekly and I. And we. I don't know. That was a 10, man.

[D]

It was. Look, I mean it sounds repetitive but so fun.

[Dax Shepard]

Food was delicious.

[Monica Padman]

Or no.

[Dax Shepard]

No harness. Okay, no harness. And then we had taken a very special car. I have that I don't. I rarely, ever, ever drive. And on the way home we took kind of the scenic ride so there'd be lots of twists and turns. And there was a dude in a Mustang that wanted to party with us. Us. Not as in an aggressive way. I just think he was pumped about the car and he wanted.

[D]

And someone else was going fast. Yeah, that's how it happens.

[Monica Padman]

Like, yeah.

[Michael Calvi]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

So we had a little. We had a little action through Griffith park that was very hair raising and exciting. And we. We ditched him. The competitor. Oh, yeah, you don't care. But that definitely satiated my adventure spirit.

[Monica Padman]

Great.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, we got home, I was like, yeah, we had a. We had. We. We conquered something.

[D]

It was great. We left them in the dust.

[Dax Shepard]

We felt brave when we went to bed so we didn't end up going. And also probably saved by the enormous week we had. I was just too afraid to be tired the next day. Tbd. Though we still have tonight and tomorrow night.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, fingers crossed. I was on a walk and I heard some really loud rumblings outside and I. I thought. Thought it was you guys, but it wasn't.

[D]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I always tend to. I. At first, I eye roll. That's my immediate reaction. Can't help it.

[Dax Shepard]

So selfish and loud.

[Monica Padman]

Yep. Like, oh, this person. And then I'm like, oh, but it might be Dax. And then I look and then it's not. And then. Then I have compassion for that person and I'm like, oh, that's somebody else's friend.

[Dax Shepard]

Ah, that's nice.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. So I feel overwhelmed. Overwhelmed.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great. Congratulations, world. Tell me.

[Monica Padman]

So. I don't know. I mean, I know we talk about this a lot, but social media is feeling so intense.

[Dax Shepard]

What is it doing? Because we have different algorithms.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, nothing's happening in mine.

[Monica Padman]

What? I mean, yeah, I'm like, there's so much stuff about what's happening, happening in la. And I'm like, h. God. And then. And then immediately it's like, all these people died in a plane crash.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, India. India.

[Monica Padman]

And I'm like, oh, my God. Like, it's just like a non stop. It's horrible. And then I put that down and then I turn on Mountain Head. The movie Mountain Head. Which Easter egg. We have somebody on who's in. In that movie upcoming. So I wanted to watch it and.

[Dax Shepard]

Scared you too much.

[Monica Padman]

It was. It was so intense. And it is about all these tech guys who basically, like, decide they want to control the world and it. Everything gets so out of.

[Dax Shepard]

They released a product that gets away from them immediately.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And then they just decide to kind of maybe embrace where it's going to take them.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And it. And like, they're all hor. Horrible. There's such disgusting pieces of. And. And I'm like. But it's like, it's too real. But it's like too intense. And then I try to take a break to go to Instagram and then. That's horrible. And that's all. That's really real.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I. And I felt so late with anxiety, I guess. And I even took magnesium and it didn't work.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[D]

A what? Magnesium.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, the hard stuff.

[Dax Shepard]

Saying I. Yeah. I even had a warm glass of milk that's supposed to knock you right out.

[Monica Padman]

Magnesium does make people sleepy.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I think it's part of it, but.

[Monica Padman]

It doesn't make, I guess, me sleepy.

[D]

You ever try searching some playful, fun stuff on Instagram? Try to change your algorithm a little?

[Dax Shepard]

You can also reset your algorithm.

[D]

Like, I've done Once I'm big on Corey Feldman. I know you've been there.

[Monica Padman]

I'm sure we've discussed.

[D]

He disappeared for a long. Well, actually you know what? That might be a different kind of anxiety.

[Dax Shepard]

Especially for us.

[D]

That might cause more anxiety. Never mind.

[Monica Padman]

I like the babies that are adults like Trump the cast of the off and not him, but the cast of the office, but their babies.

[Dax Shepard]

I love that the AI babies.

[Monica Padman]

AI babies.

[Dax Shepard]

You don't like the. I love the Trump one.

[D]

Trump baby.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that one.

[Dax Shepard]

It's fine. It's really funny like to picture him as a baby. There's something about it that I find to be extra funny.

[Monica Padman]

It's very. It is funny. But I just like don't want him in my.

[Dax Shepard]

You don't want more of him?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, just. I just, I want more Steve Carell as a baby.

[D]

Have you ever seen Christopher Walker, either of you, as a baby?

[Monica Padman]

No, and I'm actually, I'm a little upset about it. You know they have like Rogan and Theo Von as babies.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I've seen Theo Von as a baby and he's so cute. He has Theo's haircut.

[Monica Padman]

They make them so cute. It's so.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It's crazy. AI knows exactly what cute is.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Because all of the creations are so cute. If it's an animal, if it's a baby.

[Monica Padman]

I know like John, there's.

[Dax Shepard]

Isn't it funny? Like we probably can't through our own restriction even describe what a cute baby is or a good looking person. You're just kind of not allowed to do it.

[Monica Padman]

It's also hard to do.

[Dax Shepard]

I think. Yeah. It's just interesting that AI can look at as it exists online and they immediately go, we know what you think is cute. It's this.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And you know too.

[Monica Padman]

But you know when you see it. But like I don't know if I could describe cute baby.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm making a broader observation that as we move away from like it's just become completely unpc to talk about people's looks. It's like somehow anti progressive or something to be talking about looks. Do you agree?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, probably. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And so it's not like there's going to be a big verbal record. If you go back to the 80s, people just spoke very like Brook Shields is so hot because of this or whatever the hell they did. But even this stuff we won't say out loud that it can. It knows.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I, I guess I know what you mean. But I, I think it's almost deeper and that they do know they know some. Something that we don't like. They know what a cute baby is. And I can't really put words to it other than, like, I love it when they're chubby.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But like, their faces. Their faces. I can't. I mean, I do know when I see a cute baby, and when I see one, I don't think it's very cute, but I don't think I can. I don't think I could look and be like, oh, it's because of this.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, this one's making me sick because of this.

[D]

Have you ever told someone like, no. You really are lucky that you have a cute baby, cuz.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[D]

Yeah, I. And then I. I have too. My cousin just had a baby. And I'm like, oh, my God, you're so lucky that you have a cute baby. And she's like, I'm pretty sure you would have told me if he wasn't cute.

[Monica Padman]

And I'm like, no, you wouldn't.

[D]

I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

Thanks. No, you would not. Of course not.

[Michael Calvi]

But then I was like.

[Dax Shepard]

Just said, like, oh, he's got a good. You just find some. Yeah, Look. Look at all that hair.

[D]

Right? Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

There's plenty of stuff to say.

[Monica Padman]

There's stuff to say also. You just lie. You just say like, oh, my God. So cute.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. And even an ugly baby is quite cute.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. And there's something kind of cute, even about the baby being cuter. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Speaking of cute babies, I saw something so cute this morning. Not ugly babies. Cute babies.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Being very clear.

[Monica Padman]

Um, my friend from high school, she posted this series of stories about her baby. I guess her baby's maybe like two. She is so, so cute. But she was like, posting all these pictures of drawings the baby had drawn or colored, and it was all brown. Like, everything was brown. And she was like, can you guess what her favorite color is? And then it's just like, so many pictures of brown. And then she said, but the reason is so cute. And then she played this video and she said, what's your favorite color? And she says, brown. And she said, why is it your favorite color? Oh, I'm sorry. I should say this baby is half Asian.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And so she said, my eyes are brown. My hair is brown. Like, she liked that about herself, which was so sweet. And she said, what do you call yourself? And she said, brown. Brown, Elsa.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, brown else.

[Michael Calvi]

It was so.

[Monica Padman]

It really made my heart melt. And I DM'd her and I said, I love this so much. And she said, she's so proud of it. I hope she never stops.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I do, too.

[Monica Padman]

Anyway, I just thought that was heartwarming.

[Dax Shepard]

That was nice. I like to hear it. Should we do some facts?

[Monica Padman]

Sure. Okay. Some facts for Michael Calvi. Fact number one.

[Dax Shepard]

When you say couple, do you really mean two?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I don't have a lot. I wasn't gonna be honest, but I am gonna be honest, and I'm not through the episode, so there might be some facts left on the table.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. That's okay.

[Monica Padman]

But we've had a busy couple weeks and hanging on by.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, just barely hanging.

[Monica Padman]

Just barely. Okay. An Oklahoma accent. What does it sound like, you might wonder.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I am curious.

[Monica Padman]

Features both the Midlands and Southern dialects, often described as a milder Southern twang or a Midland accent with a bit of Southern influence. You might hear a light drawl, dropped ing sounds, and the use of y' all. Okay, now I'm gonna play a little.

[Dax Shepard]

So there's roof instead of roof, and there's crick instead of creek. Hey, y' all, My name is Damian, and I'm from Oklahoma.

[Michael Calvi]

Hey, y' all.

[Dax Shepard]

Five years I was in the Marines and my first year in tv. I've lived here my whole life. I've lived everywhere from the small towns to the. Well, does Oklahoma City count as a big city? And today, I'm going to teach you how to talk like an Okie. So the first thing you'll notice about the way we talk is that none of our words have ou in them. We mainly replace ou boomer with er. For example, you would never hear an Oklahoma mom say, go and get your shoes on. Instead, you'd hear your mom say, go and get your shoes on. We say that, and if you don't listen to her, you will end up in the er. Also very important, none of our words end in ing. For example, you'll never hear me say, I'm forecasting great weather for getting outside this weekend. Instead, you'll hear me say, I'm forecasting great weather for getting outside this weekend. Another thing that you'll never hear in Oklahoma are words that end in ow. For example, instead of having pillows and windows, in Oklahoma, we have pillows and windows. That one's triggering for you. That's great. That's. In Oklahoma, our preferred beverage is sweet tea. But here we make it one word, sweet tea. And if you want to sound extra stroking, you'd say, hey, darling, you want some sweet tea?

[Monica Padman]

He winked.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, he did? Okay. That's part of the Oklahoman charm.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. To me, it just sounds completely southern.

[Dax Shepard]

It to me it sounds southern light. Like if, if, if, if I think of the most extreme, like Appalachian accent maybe. And let's. We're going to give that a 10. This to me is like a three or four.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And then what was really interesting is you and I interviewed someone recently from Duluth, Georgia.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah, we do remember from Armchair Anonymous. That was so exciting.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And I was sitting there, I didn't call it out, but I'm sitting there listening to both of you and I'm like, yeah, neither of you have an accent, which is so interesting.

[Monica Padman]

Suburban.

[Dax Shepard]

So it's like even when you say Oklahoma, I bet if you're in some spots in Oklahoma City, you don't. And then even where I lived in Michigan, people had a bit of a lot of those.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Because so many Kentucky migrants in the that big migration. And I have a bunch of them and I have some southern things.

[Monica Padman]

You have a bunch, but you have words that give you away. But you don't overall sound very Midwestern.

[Dax Shepard]

But when you were at this particular beach called Blood Beach, a couple towns over, a lot of fights there. That's why it's called Blood Beach. The dudes that were hanging out there in cut off jean shorts and drinking Mountain Dew and a via tennis shoes with no laces. They're full southern. It almost was like this way to be more masculine where I grew up.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like if you were. This thing I always talk about is like if, if you embrace that you're white trash.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Which is like your only defense. I applaud it. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You all think I suck and I'm gonna lean into it. I think you'd go even further. So it was very socioeconomically broad broken down in where I grew up.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, some kids that were like, are you from the South? No, I'm just, I'm poor.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, poor.

[Dax Shepard]

Remember when you're a kid to be. I don't know if you ever had that fear. But like being poor was a tear. Like that was the thing.

[Monica Padman]

Well, sure.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, because it gave you such humiliation to be poor.

[Monica Padman]

I didn't have that, but I did have. I want the things that these other people have. But I didn't associate it with being poor because we weren't.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

So I guess that's why.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And probably most people at your school in Duth weren't poor either.

[Monica Padman]

Pretty up, I guess. I.

[Dax Shepard]

Middle class area.

[Monica Padman]

I had friends growing up.

[Dax Shepard]

The fact that your mall doesn't have a food court and it has restaurants.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, that was not there when I was growing up.

[Dax Shepard]

It's really gone up, huh? Since you.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And that's also in a town over. Okay, but Gwinnett Place Mall was the mall, and it was indoor and there was a food.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, good. Sparrows Pizza.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah, all of it. Panda Express. But I don't remember what I was gonna say.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great. That's fine. You don't always have to remember.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. So the definition of a recession. A period of temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters. That's what he said. He said two successive quarter of quarters, but he said 0.01 officially marks a recession.

[Dax Shepard]

Isn't there also something with employment rate? That's got to be one of the indices.

[Monica Padman]

Oh. A recession is not officially declared until after the fact. While there's no single agreed upon definition, economists generally use the two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth rule of thumb. Okay. It seems like there should be a real definition. That's annoying. Econ is annoying. Like they want. They try to make it so complex.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I think it is complex.

[Monica Padman]

Well, some things aren't like. But they make it. They don't have to be, but they've made it complex.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

It's not Buddhist.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not. There's just so many forces that predict the outcome of the economy.

[Monica Padman]

It's true.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a complex system.

[Monica Padman]

It is a complex system. Okay. I looked up who has the longest standing ovation in Congress. Because he said it was Yelton. Yes. It's not here. Every time I Google it, what comes up, it. It keeps. Everything that's coming up is about Netanyahu. I guess he got like a huge standing ovation.

[Dax Shepard]

Uhhuh. And pissed off Biden.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And it exactly caused all this controversy. Controversy. It says he got 28 standing ovations in 47 minutes. Okay, so that's a lot of sitting and standing.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. People are on their feet.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I wonder what was the Churchills when he came, famously.

[Monica Padman]

That would be Right. Exactly. I know. How long was Churchill's longest standing ovation for Congress?

[Dax Shepard]

Ovation has to be related to ovaries.

[Monica Padman]

Ovulation.

[Dax Shepard]

Ovulation. Ovaries, ovum. Oh, maybe I'd love to have a linguist.

[Monica Padman]

The most notable standing ovation likely occurred during his address in 1941 where he. Where he spoke for 32 minutes. Maybe they stood the whole time.

[Dax Shepard]

We will fight on sea. We will fight in the air probably.

[Monica Padman]

That speech doesn't say how long. 30 minutes.

[Dax Shepard]

You're never going to watch that doc. It's such a bummer.

[Monica Padman]

I'm sorry. I'm sorry, but you're right. Oh, and then I looked up Peter Teal's investments. Cuz you. You said he. It would be the equivalent basically.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Throwing Peter Teal in prison.

[Monica Padman]

Wide range of ventures including paler it says, a big data company.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And startups like Airbnb, Stripe and SpaceX. He's also involved in Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that has back companies like SpaceX and Palantir.

[Dax Shepard]

I think he also did Tesla. Well, SpaceX, he's done a few Elon things. I think he. He was involved with the company he sold to PayPal.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it says PayPal, LinkedIn and Facebook.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh yeah, yeah. Facebook. He made a couple bucks on that one.

[Monica Padman]

Likely. Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Those are the big whammies.

[Monica Padman]

Those are big. The big ones.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Is this funny? This venture capital as rock stars is just a new phenomenon that was created by the Internet in the 90s. It didn't even exist. There's no like famous VC people from the 70s or 80s or early 90s.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's true.

[Dax Shepard]

Because the payoff wasn't there. Companies didn't 100x back then. GM would slowly gain market share and Coca Cola would slowly gain market share. No one. You didn't have these 10,000x retirement returns like the first Facebook people. First. First in on Facebook. They're like in the 10,000.

[Monica Padman]

But like Microsoft.

[Dax Shepard]

But again that's 90s. That's part of the. The first tech boom.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And so that's when it's born.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, you're saying even then.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah. But like pre 90. Oh yes. Because Microsoft's 1975.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Your birthday.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. 9 11. Best Porsche ever.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

911 Turbo. I'm sorry? 911 Turbo.

[Monica Padman]

Most people don't hear 911 and think positive thoughts.

[Dax Shepard]

They should. They need to take a ride in a Porsche 911.

[Monica Padman]

A rebrand. All right, that's it.

[Michael Calvi]

All right. Love you.

[Monica Padman]

Love you.

[Dax Shepard]

Follow Armchair Expert on the Wonry app, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short [e-mail] survey.