Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Murders, Moscow, and the Muppets with Natasha Lance Rogoff

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

This week, Anthony talks with award-winning filmmaker and journalist Natasha Lance-Rogoff about her recent book Muppets in Moscow which details Natasha’s story of bringing Sesame Street to post-communist Russia almost 30 years ago. From the kidnapping of Elmo to AK-47s and assassinations, getting The Muppets across the finish line was more than a challenge, Natasha is incredibly honest with Anthony on what it really took–and provides insight on Putin and the Russia we see today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Don't miss the devil wears product to in theaters. Merrill Street, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blount, and Stanley Tucci are back. In light of the recent scandal, I'm here to restore your credibility. I did not hire you, and all I need to do is find my time until you fail. On May 1st, icons. I'm going to make something of this job.

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where I talk with some of the bright. Midas minds out there about everything surrounding the written word from authors and historians to figures and entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe, wherever you get your podcast, and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know. ways, let's get to it.

I'm pretty sure everyone has seen an episode of Sesame Street. We all know the characters, whether it's Elmo, Kermit the Frog, or the Cookie Monster. It's a show that has impacted everyone. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, my guest today, Natasha Lance Rogoff, made it her mission to bring the infamous Sesame Street to Russia. No one envisioned how challenging and dangerous doing this would be. And Natasha's new book, Muppets in Moscow, tells the story. So joining us now on Open Book and award-winning filmmaker, journalist, best-selling author, Natasha Lance Rogoff.

The book is titled Muppets in Moscow. What a great title and an amazing book. Muppets in Moscow, the unexpected crazy true story of making Sesame Street in Russia. So Holly and I, my producer, Natasha, were both remarking that the book felt like a thriller novel. You know, like I was reading La Carae or Daniel Silva or somebody like that, you obviously write about your consumption of Russian literature and how you were a Russia file, I guess, would be the right way to call this. I mean, you changed your name at age 16 to Natasha, which is a beautiful Russian name. And you lived in Russia and when it was the Soviet Union. So what was it about Russia for you before we get into the book? Well, first, I just want to thank you for having me on the show. I love your podcast. And your interviewing is so personal. So I love how it reveals a lot about the people that you talk to. Well, very nicely, but I do try to read these books before I get started. That's why I think

I have so much fun with this. But go ahead. Why, Natasha? Why did you change your name? Why'd you go to Russia? Well, I mean, I was really, you know, seduced by Russia early on. I mean, my grandfather spoke Russian and had left Belarus in 1912 and then immigrate. to the U.S. via Germany. So I had heard Russian as well as Yiddish growing up. And, you know, it was very intriguing. You know, the stories that he told and then a lot of the fairy tales, you know, they were so dark. And then by the time I was in high school and reading Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, the literature

really spoke to me. It was so different, you know, the absurdist characters, the deep spirituality and cruelty. as well. I definitely got hooked early and then later in college was kind of fascinated with dictatorships, both Nazi Germany and communism in general later on. So I really wanted to visit this place and then moved there when I was 22 as part of a U.S. Soviet Union exchange program. You know, when you talk about the cruelty, you know, it's interesting because like someone said to me, because I've read a lot of Russian literature, and if someone said to me, what is it? I had a Russian literature professor in college that thought it was two things. I just want to

test this on, you get your reaction. He thought it was the weather. He thought that the weather created some level of harshness and created some level of poverty, which allowed for people to have looser ethics in terms of their quote-unquote cruelty. And he also thought that the the interesting location of Russia. It's crossing 11 time zones, and it's on the Eurasian plain, if you will, the dual continents of Europe and Asia, but it's not quite Asian, and it's never been fully accepted by Europe. And so there's a little bit of a chip on the shoulder of the Russian culture. So what are your thoughts on that? That was from a college professor 35 years ago. Yeah, I think it's right. It bridges between east and west in terms of its

culture. And certainly, you know, in terms of like designing puppets and, you know, coming up with a new children's TV show that was going to reflect their culture, we were constantly facing that issue of bridging the East and the West as well as these themes that recur and are certainly present today, you know, Russian nationalism, this idea that, you know, the, you know, West is trying to destroy Russia, that the West doesn't understand Russia, and that the values are very different. So I think your professor definitely was right about that. And there's a great deal of literature, you know, regarding how much this inferiority complex coupled with a superiority complex plays into our dynamics, even to the present. You know, it's just incredible how

persistent these themes are, how strong the culture is, and how distinct it is from traditional Western democratic culture. But I would have to say, don't agree with the weather part, because there's plenty of countries that have similar weather like Finland or Sweden or, you know, other countries in the north. And they have a very different political system trajectory. It's interesting. Yeah, it's a very good point. I think we have a mutual friend in Bill Browler. who has written a couple of bestselling books recently about his tangles with the Russian government. One of the things he says in those books are that the people are incredibly children-centric, that you can bring young kids to five-star restaurants in Moscow,

and they can be rappel-rousing in the restaurant, absolutely no problem. Tell us a little bit about that aspect of the culture. So they've got this loving aspect. They've got this vacillation between superiority, inferiority, but there's a lot of love in that culture, too. Am I wrong in saying that? No, no, you're absolutely right. And I mean, before I was tasked to, you know, lead the team to make Sesame Street in Russia, I had been making documentaries in what was then the Soviet Union, you know, for 10 years already.

And I thought I understood the culture. You know, I had been, I made films on the collapse of the Soviet Union, on nationality questions, underground rock and roll. I mean, quite a bit that had spanned many different diverse areas of the culture. But in working with, you know, a team of over 400 artists from Moscow, many of them Russian, also Ukrainian and Georgian and other nationalities, but I was struck by how much I didn't understand about the culture. And it was only through the experience of making a show for their children that I grew to

understand the culture in a much deeper way. And maybe that's because of exactly what you're talking about, Anthony, which is that, you know, they do have a sense of children being sacred and a sense of how valuable they are because of their innocence maybe. Maybe it's the juxtaposition of the difficulty, the suffering that many adults in Russia have gone through for so many centuries, really. And so when, you know, when you're talking about children and the dreams and hopes that my colleagues had in creating this new TV show, it was incredibly emotional, very intense discussions, you know, about what they wanted for their children in the future, especially after the Soviet Union collapsed. And they had the opportunity, you know, with some support from the U.S. government from then Senator Biden and Sesame Street, you know, to create this new show. And their ideas, they had so many really ambitious ideas in terms of what was the new neighborhood that they wanted to create. And, you know, what are the values that they wanted their children to embrace related to.

freedom, tolerance, freedom of expression. So I think in that sense, it was more poignant to them what impact the program could have because they had this sense of the importance of children and how their upbringing will shape the future of Russia. Yeah, I think it's fascinating. So you go on, you produce these two documentaries. You have this fall on love affair. I wanted to bring up the children because it fuses nicely with Sesame Street and you're in Russia. It's 30 years ago. You are making Sesame Street in Russia. How is it different from Sesame Street in the U.S.? I mean, you write about it eloquently in the book? Just tell our viewers and listeners, how is it different? What are you learning as you go through the process of putting the show together?

Well, I had totally, I'd say, not expected the challenges that we encountered. And, you know, our initial sponsors of the show, one of them was blown up in a car bombing. That was very different from making Sesame Street in the U.S. And as well as, you know, our partners at the TV station, who ran the TV station, two of them were assassinated within the space of a year. You know, so the violence that we were dealing with, it was a period in the early 1990s or mid-1990s of incredible lawlessness, corruption, and violence. So that was one major difference. And then the other part is what I think is the heart and soul of the book is the cultural differences, the ways that the show differed from the U.S. And that was from the very beginning. You know, even when I showed the first videos of Sesame Street, because

my colleagues in Moscow didn't know the show. Some people were familiar with the Muppet show that Jim Henson had tried to bring to Russia earlier. But when I showed the the Muppets themselves, my team members didn't like them. You know, they were like, you know, these Muppets, they don't look like our puppets. You know, we have our own revered puppet tradition dating back to the 16th century and, you know, why do we need to use your American Muppets? So that was like the first step. And I did not expect that, you know, I thought everybody would love the Muppets. It's like bringing Starbucks coffee to Italy, right? It's hard to do because the Italians have a certain way that they do their coffee, you know? Yeah, well, I understand that about the coffee, though.

But the other thing is the content itself. You know, initially we were, we assembled a group of local educators who had come from all across the former Soviet Union as far as Siberia. And we brought them together with the creative team of producers and writers. and animators, puppeteers. And this team, you know, wanted to talk about, you know, how are we going to teach this new young children and their families about a different open society, which included a free market system, not a command economy. So initially I had suggested, well, you know, in the U.S., we've done scenarios where we've shown children running a lemonade stand. And, you know, if you remember from the book, you know, people met this idea with horror. And they just said, look, the only people who sell things on the street in Russia, in Moscow are criminals and mafia. And so we don't want our children selling things on the street. You were dealing with a country that was shifting from a completely different type of communist, you know, a different type of system, a communist system to a more open society with a free market. And there were, many times when, you know, there were difficulties understanding how we were going to bridge

the almost a lack of understanding of what it meant to have a free and open society. You know, I got the feeling that there was, I don't want to use the word naivete because that's not the right word, but there was a idealism in the approach that you guys were taking that was met with the aftermath of 70 years of cynicism that was generated by this. communist culture. And so describe that intersection. Here you guys are coming in with this great idealistic vision, great programming idea, but yet you're meeting the forces of the post-communist Russian bureaucracy, if you will. Tell us a little bit about that. Well, we, I mean, part of what was really important to me when I agreed to take the job, and I had no experience with children's

television before this. So I was pretty intimidated. But, one of the things I insisted on is that we produce the show independently, that we do not work exclusively with the state television entity, which was, you know, Astankana, because the whole idea was that we were going to help support and create an infrastructure for independent television. Because we were working with so many independent people, including a lot of the rock musicians to write and compose original music for Sesame Street because the music is so important for a new show that a lot of these people had really been persecuted and denied opportunities for many years under communism. So I would say that, you know, we had a combination of people

who worked for the state in television and people who were independent. And so there was a lot of tension between these two groups because the people who were more independent actually shared our idealism and they were extremely willing to make incredible sacrifices of their time and working so hard, you know, to create content that was going to blow the minds of young children and their parents in a way that was so good that would, you know, make them laugh, feel that they could do anything, that anything was possible. And so we had to work with this team that really encompassed not only generational differences, but value differences. So those people that you're talking about, Anthony, you know, the ones that were

hesitant, I also understood that it's very hard to change. And all of these changes in post-Soviet society were happening very fast. And at the same time, there were tons of recent hard. MBA grads flooding into the country and, you know, working with Russia's own new oligarchs. And everybody was trying to make a lot of money. But we weren't. We were part of the nonprofit NGO community trying to work with the Russian community and the Moscow artists and meet them where they were and to try to develop a show that would reflect their own culture and their own values, where they were. We weren't, I wouldn't say that we were pushing so hard. We were trying to be very sensitive to what was possible because of their cultural and historical background.

Yeah. I mean, it's so fascinating, I could let you go on forever. I want you to address the creativity, the artistry, the Russian pride in putting together the programming. Tell us a little bit about that, your experience with that? Well, I had worked on, previous to this, I had worked in Mexico doing Plaza Sessimo, which was a great experience. But working in Russia was like on a completely other level. It was the artist that I was working with, we had brought in from cinematography, from theater. And that was because Russia's TV industry, prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union was mostly used for propaganda. And the traditions that we had developed in the U.S., a three-camera shoot, synchronized audio recording, you know, a lot of these methodologies that we

had used for developing entertainment TV had not been adopted in Russia yet. And we introduced these elements. At the same time, we were working with some of the most creative, passionate and brilliant artists, many of whom have had to flee since the war started, you know, more than a year ago because they had been active against the war and against Putin long before that. And, you know, these artists developed the content. We had, as I say, over 400 people working on the show, which is phenomenal. And that included animators, puppeteers, set designers, The set designer who developed the new neighborhood for Ulytza-Sazam, which means Sesame Street in Russian, she came from theater and had never made a set for television before.

And the chief director of Alodio Grimantikov, he was really one of the top directors for children's cinema. And he also hadn't done television before. So we were very lucky to work with this group. So now, while you're doing this, there's a rise of Vladimir Putin. He is now ascending to power, and he's going to effectively take over. And what looked like could have been a burgeoning democracy is returning back to a KGB, FSB-FSI-style autocracy. And so some things happen, right? He fires the director of research. Tell us how Vladimir Putin fired the director of research. I don't want to give the whole book away, by the way, but the book is just,

is so fascinating. And it just speaks to the censorship and control and the fear that autocrats have of people who are intellectually free. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's, it happened gradually. So the show aired for the first time in 1996 and it lasted until 2010, with multiple seasons of two years each approximately. And the show aired on Russia's two top TV stations across 11, time zones to millions and millions, tens of millions of children. So today, when I'm in, I was in Moscow in January of 2020, so right before the pandemic doing interviews for this. And I asked my colleagues, how did, you know, how did the show end? Because I had heard all kinds of things. And it turns out that, you know, just prior to this happening is when there was an increased

crackdown on independent media. And, you know, it eventually, got way worse, but at this time it was already beginning. And there was sort of a grab for the puppet show from Astankana, from now called O-R-T, to control it. And whether that was because of the content or because of the advertising, because you had, it was also making money from advertising with bookend advertisements on either side. But in any case, the executives who were appointed by Putin, in 2010. Some just fired the research director who had been there since the beginning and for no reason. And the rest of the team quit in solidarity. And that's how the show ended. There's an undercurrent there that I want you to address because you are such a student of the culture.

The show is ending. So there's this window, this opportunity of artistic, creative, business freedom. But yet, for whatever reason, I guess it's getting out of control for certain conventional thinkers in Russia. And so they're now trying to return the country back to this sort of iron-fisted approach. And so your show has to go, right? The free press has to go. The creativity has to go in order to instill that, right? So there's tragedy in that, right? But it's very consistent with the Russian story, right?

it's thread into old school Russian literature, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, I think that's true. I also think that, you know, one of the reasons why this book has been, you know, resonating with readers is that this period of time in the 1990s and leading up to where the challenges with the government emerged is that this period is part of Putin's narrative. He uses the 1990s. He uses the 1990s, and what the West did supposedly in Russia at this time, and to some extent there's some truth in that, to justify his regime's actions and aggressions in Ukraine. And I think it's very important to look at what happened in the earlier period that led to where we are today. And that's what I try to do.

You know, it sounds really bizarre, you know, because it's a children's puppet show, a conference. show, a comedy show. But that was the goal of writing the book was to really bring you into this culture, to try to understand it better through the creation of this TV show. But then also, by the end of it, you have an understanding of where we are today because you've gone through this process. And you can see how the conservative values influence the creation of the show and where we were able to divert from those values and, you know, where the community of people is, you know, where they embrace ideas of openness and freedom, because those people still exist in Russia and outside of Russia. So that's the seminal question. I mean, I have so many questions

for you, but that is the seminal question. Those people still exist. Can they overpower the autocratic people? Can there be a free Russia? we have hundreds of years, if not a thousand years of levels of repression in Russia. Can that end? Well, certainly it's going to take a long time. And I'll tell you a story about the auditions, which made me understand this in a very visceral way, where we were auditioning about 1,200 children for the show. And they had come from all over the former Soviet Union.

They were very nervous about, you know, they were any way. from like six to 12 years old. And I was sitting in the back of the room and the chief director invited each child to come in and audition one at a time. And the first little boy comes in and he sings this song from World War II. And it goes something like, the planet is burning. Everything is lost. I'm, you know, it was just like very depressing. And I asked the director, okay, that looks, that's kind of strange for, you know, a kid auditioning for a children's comedy show. But there was no time to talk. And then the next little girl comes in and she sings this song called Ketusha, which is about her lover going off to the front in World War II. So when I talked to the director at lunchtime, I said, what's going on with this?

And why are they singing all these sad songs? You know, I was kind of expecting Itsy Bitsy Spider or Old McDonald had a farm. And he just, he says, Natasha, you don't understand. You think of these songs as sad. They're not sad. They're lyrical. And then he says something which just shocks me, which is that our children sing these songs with their grandmothers and these songs are comforting for them. And they read poetry from a very young period in their lives. And they expect sadness in their poetry, in their music, and in their lives. So when you take this background that I've had in this country, you know, for more than 15 years, and I apply that forward trying to answer your question about what is possible for Russia in the future and how will it change. So often in the West, we expect countries to mirror our own. And, you know, they have different historical trajectories. As you know, I mean, you love history too, you know. And it's just, it's naive to have some.

expectations, it's going to take time for any country that is experiencing a dictatorship to change. And we will see this in Venezuela as well. It's going to take time, even if there is a change there. And also, people's values change slowly. But there's certainly a large number of people there that have tasted freedom and freedom of expression, an independent free press, the right not to go to jail for speaking out against the war. And those people don't disappear. It's super interesting because we're here again. Ultimately, there's a, I mean, you tell me, maybe I'm wrong. The vessel of autocracy seems to be cracking a little. And I would like to get your reaction to progosen, what's going on with Vladimir Putin right now. Is there an opportunity for a reopening? Is there

going to be a further crackdown. Obviously, there are people in our agency, the CIA, they think that there could be worse, more conservative people than Vladimir Putin rising to power in Russia. So, what are your thoughts there? Well, I would temper whatever I say with, I'm sure you've spoken to many high-level people who know a lot more than I do as a, you know, children's television producer. But you have intuition. When you read your book, Muppets in Moscow, you have a hand on the pulse. They are agency so many times and not to be offensive to them, but they get things wrong because they're looking at data and they're not, you know, there's doctors that analyze the tests and they treat the test and there's other doctors that actually treat the patient. You're somebody that actually

understands the patient and the body politic. So what do you think that happened? Yeah, I mean, I will say I made a film in 1991, which predicted the coup. And a lot of my professors at Columbia had not done that. But on the ground, talking to people and covering, you know, I was embedded with the hardline conservatives who then led the coup. So, you know, I was off by three weeks because I thought Russians wouldn't give up their August vacation. I thought it would happen in September. But that's the case. And I have to say when this whole thing happened with progosin, I had told my husband, we talk about this, you know, and I said, I think this is what's going to happen. And then it happened. And I do share the CIA's concern about a worst case scenario coming, a, you know,

potential breakup of the different ethnic groups and civil war in Russia. You know, it's, I speak with people on WhatsApp all the time, friends of mine, former colleagues, and people are terrified, you know, nobody wants war. Nobody wants, they, they want to, you know, they're, the world and the place to be safe where their children are living and to have opportunity. So in that sense, you know, this is a situation where there are a lot of different pressures, different forces that can break apart this country. And in speaking with some of my colleagues, they express that concern. So that doesn't mean I advocate, you know, keeping Putin in power, what he's done is horrific. And the, you know, I was just in London last week talking with a woman who came here, came to London just after the war with her two children and she hasn't seen her husband in a year and he's on the front lines. So this is horrible. But I, but I do think the potential for something to be far worse is there. When is the last time we were talking realistically about nuclear war? Yeah, well, a long time ago. I mean, we, you know, unfortunately, we're probably, we're probably.

of the bomb shelter generation, right, where we remember that stuff. Absolutely. Yeah. The fallout shelter sign looked like. But I guess, you know, I was in Europe and I saw the call it a coup, call it a protestation, whatever you want to call it from Progotion. And I said to me, I said, wow, I've got you coming up on my podcast. I'm dying to talk to you.

So I want to keep going if you don't mind. You have a good insight into the culture and the children of Russia. And we're in a different world now, Natasha. This is just my opinion. We have this social media exposure now. It's very tough for the Chinese government to isolate their people through censorship. It's very tough for the Russian government to do the same. The world is changing.

Okay, I'll accept some of the elements of the world are getting worse. But a lot of the world is getting better. There's a lot of big opportunities out there. Are the Russian autocrats going to be able to hold back the aspirational Russian? or will they eventually get run over by them? That is the big question. And it is true that, you know, the Internet changes the scale here. And when I spoke with some of my colleagues, you know, they had said, well, it is different

from the period that you were working there, you know, when it was the Soviet Union and there was no Internet. And, you know, he says, you know, these are the kids. They're the TikTok generation. And they're not going to be comfortable giving up. their use of the internet and TikTok and everything over time. But that, that, that wasn't my experience when I went back in 2017. I did a film called Russian millennials speak openly about America. And my impression was that people were generally extremely careful and they were self-censoring.

And these are people in their 20s. So once I saw that, I thought, oh boy, this is so dangerous. that coupled with the crushing of the entire independent free press and then being able to control access to the internet, just as China does. So the fact is, over time, these autocracies that are growing in number from the perspective of our democratic country with our own problems, I think that they can be very successful by controlling media and limiting the information that people have. Or if they don't believe what they're being told, in other words, what is the level of success of the propaganda, then they self-censor due to fear because a lot of people can't leave the country. They're there taking care of their kids. They're taking care of their parents.

Many, more than a million people have left. And, you know, what gives me great comfort is a lot of these people that I talk to now in London, from Georgia, Ukraine, Russia. They all grew up. on Ulitsa Sizam, and they speak to me about that experience of how the show influenced their childhood. So I believe that ultimately, if we get the chance again, that we'll be able to go back and do the show again. But that's questionable, you know, how long it's going to take for this to shift again. It's interesting. I don't know. It feels like something's changing again, and I think you're going to be a part of it, Natasha, so I'm looking forward to catching up with you. I'm at the part of our podcast now where I have five words from my authors.

I'm going to read you the words. And then you can react. You can give me a one word answer or a paragraph answer. I just want to get your reaction to the word or the two words. Okay, you're ready? Sure. Soviet Union. Dictatorship.

Okay. Russia. A beautiful, spiritual country with a brilliant, ambitious people that hope for a better future for their country and their children. Okay. It's very powerful. Putin. Putin. A war criminal. Okay. I'm not going to do the best job of pronouncing this because I'm an Italian kid from Long Island. Ready? Ulystah Sezum. Ulytza Sezum. Right. Very. That's right. You're going to say it. Almost there. Okay. A fabulous children's television show that was created by collaboration.

between Moscow artists who are Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, and Armenian, and Americans, who believed that they could create a vision of a new, more open society first on a little screen and then hopefully in real life for millions of children. Very, very cool. Okay, last one, ready? Sesame Street. Sesame Street is probably one of the most popular children's television shows that has programs all over the world and continues to help children laugh, learn, play, and express themselves

with freedom for years to come. You know, it's interesting because when we were writing this script for our podcast, we put Sesame Street down, you know, my reaction was all of us have a little bit of Sesame Street in us, meaning at some point in our life, we've watched Sesame Street. You've created it and produced it, but from 1969 to today, every family, every child has had a little pizza slice of their life tied to Sesame Street and know the more recognized characters. It makes it so fascinating, you know? Yeah, no, it's something, I mean, when you think about how many things we share, like, as an entire nation, you know, maybe it's like

NFL football or, you know, basketball or, you know, they're just certain things. But Sesame Street is this universal, you know, unifying idea for the entire kind of. You know, country. Yep. And as you said, in many parts of the world now. So we have a television series coming, Muppets in Moscow. What do you think? We hope so. Well, I signed with CAA, which is a great thrill, completely unexpected. And, you know, it's this whole writing of the book and publishing the book has been life-changing. And I do hope. Of course, there is a writer's strike and a actor strike currently. So it's not going to happen right now. No, but it will happen. It's a fascinating story, and it'll get a lot of buzz, and it's something that we'll catch on. And I look forward to watching it when it eventually happened. So, well, first of all, thank you so much for joining Open Book. The title of the book is Muppets in Moscow, the unexpected, crazy true story of making Sesame Street in Russia, Natasha Lance Rogoff. Thank you for joining Open Book today.

Thank you so much, Anthony. This was great and just fabulous conversation, as you always do. Well, Natasha wrote quite a book and what's so interesting because of the Ukrainian war and the situation now of Vladimir Putin, you get to really see in her book what goes on in Russian culture. And so for me, having been a student of Russia my whole life and a person that actually loves Russian literature, I see the pathos of Russia, the pain of the Russian people. I don't want to overgeneralize, but I'm going to say this because I think it's true about most of mankind. Most people are generally nice and most people want to get along with others. And really all they're looking for is to make their family's lives better and perhaps their children's lives better.

But then you get the rogues and you get the autocrats that for some reason, this temporary existence known as life, they need to leave some kind of lasting legacy or they think if they can trounce on other people, it leads to some personal immortality. You see all of this in this book. It's a fascinating book. What I found most fascinating reading it is that it was important to infuse. Her mission was to infuse some Western values into the Russian system. Of course, we've been trying to infuse Western values into that area of the world since Caesar Augustus with absolutely no success. I can remember my Roman law teacher at Harvard Law School showing us a map and explaining to us anywhere Caesar Augustus through Marcus Aurelius conquered became the West, became the traditions of Western liberalism

and individuality and the concepts of democracy and sharing power. If you go to the north and to the east, it was impossible for the Romans to conquer those areas. I mean, those people, frankly, were just too tough, but those Slavic and what ultimately became the those Orthodox nations became nations that faced, dealt with, and accepted by and large autocracy, and rejected all things elemental in the West. And so the Sesame Street story, Muppets and Moscow, is emblematic of that whole 2000-year legacy, that 2000-year history. So many of the people fighting back today in Russia are children that would have watched and

been influenced by what they saw in Sesame Street. So it's interesting. You have concepts of leadership and freedom combating concepts of autocracy and repression. We'll have to see what happens in Russia. It's sad for me to watch that because we know there's so many good people there. And I think you'll enjoy Natasha's book if you decide to pick it up, Muppets and Moscow. Okay, Ma, you're back on the air. Ma, you like joining Open Book? All right. All right. So this week I had a woman that went to Moscow to produce Sesame Street after the Soviet Union fell. So the title of the book is Muppets in Moscow, but the woman was a television producer.

Do you remember Sesame Street, Ma? Yeah. Uh-huh. You kids watched it. Okay. Do you remember putting me in front of the television and have me watch it? Yeah. Did you ever really watch it, or that was like a form of babysitting for you?

No, I never really watched it, but the little figures were cute. All right. What did you think of Mr. Rogers, Ma? Did you like him? I thought he was good. Yeah. It was very entertaining for children. Right.

And he actually seemed like a nice guy. He wasn't like a nut or anything. You know, thank God, right? No, he was good. We finally found one guy that seemed like you're a legit, normal guy, not a nut, right? He was good. So, Ma, let me ask you something. Do you remember any of these characters like Elmo or Kermit the Frog or Big?

What are you doing, Ma? What are you doing? Tell Kevin to take a back seat, Ma. You're on the air, okay? This is important stuff, okay? I'm on the air. Yeah, you're the star of the show, Ma. Okay, it's important to have you focused, okay?

What is your favorite Sesame Street character, Ma? Would it be Elmo? Kermott, the Frog, Big Bird? Why Elmo? That's the one that all the children wanted. Okay, that's right. You remember the Elmo doll, right? That was a big...

Yeah, the Elmo. Yeah, and she squeezed it with talk. Right, exactly. That was a very big item in the mid-90s. The kids were scratching each other's eyeballs out for it. So how important is it for kids to have that type of entertainment? What do you think they learn from that? I think they learn a wick.

You know, like they learn things that are funny. And I think that it keeps them busy. It keeps their little mind busy. I know. I think it's good. Okay. And what do you think of the Russians, ma'am? What do I think of the Russians?

Yeah, but be polite. Be diplomatic. Well, I have some friends that are Russian background. And you like them, obviously, right? I like them. And I think Putin, he's a terrible human being. Right. Terrible, terrible human being.

He's like a Hitler. Maybe he's starting to even be worse because he's destroying the country of the Ukraine. Right. And he's also hurting his own country for all of this egotism and this nonsense, right? Yeah, right. He should be killed. I don't know why it's taken so long to kill him. So you're like a mafia done now in your old age, right?

Yep. A little bit, right? Okay. All right. Well, I love you, Ma. You're good? I love you too, baby. I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book. Thank you for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends,

and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, it's at Scaramucci on Twitter or Instagram. You can also text me at Plus 1, 917, 917, 9. 909-2996. I'd love to hear from you. I'll see you back here next week.