Михаил Зыгарь Интервью | Политика, Бизнес и тоска по СССР | В чем измеряется Успех? Игорь Рыбаков
– There are no crazy people who would figure out what kind of crap I came up with. – I don’t care what others do. – Success without money is probably an incomplete success. – What’s the number of copies sold, what’s the business, what’s the revenue? – Tears unseen by the world, but you sit down and work. For him, media are still a printed newspaper that he reads in the morning. – A movie about a guy who… – …who is such an idiot that he found himself in such a situation.
– Go ahead, spread the wings. – It looks like biological driving out of the nest. – What’s the point in making plans if you have to change them anyway? – Well, what level of the skill of generating protection should I have now? CHANNEL No.1 ABOUT MONEY AND BUSINESS – So, guys, each video brings us more and more surprises, so now we will take cards with our guest and answer them one by one, and at the same time we will understand what we have in common, what we differ in and so on, and our guest today is Mikhail Zygar, a political journalist, as they call him, a war correspondent, writer, historian, but now he is also a businessman, so now we will get acquainted. Let’s go. – Hi! Let’s go. – The first card is for you as a guest.
– “What professions will be in demand in the next 5-10 years?” That’s actually my favorite topic. I know exactly what professions will be out of demand, there are many. First of all, the old system of education will not be in demand, because it largely trains people according to the standards by which people were used to work in the 20th century, and now it all doesn’t work anymore.
The profession which I studied, it was called journalism, no longer exists. The approaches to content production that existed 20 years ago don’t exist. It was common that every person who produced some content didn’t produce it as a whole but a small piece; that is, a person wrote a text and handed it over to the editor without any responsibility for the further life cycle, nothing depends on this person, he/she produced a little brick. This approach is outdated because now anyone has to think about the full life cycle of his/her product, be it the production of his/her social media accounts or YouTube channel, any content, a person is his/her own general producer, and in that sense lots of professions, as we saw them 20 years ago, will be finally mixed up in the near future.
Journalism in the past, cinema, show business – it will all boil down to a super-subject, or rather, it has already boiled down to a super-subject called content-making. I hope that a more euphonious term will be invented, and there are a lot of examples of that. – Wait, so what will be in demand? You talk about what won’t be in demand, but what will be? Why don’t you answer the question? – I’ve elaborated on what content-making is. People who are solely responsible for what they produce are exactly what will be very much in demand, of course. – Look, my turn to add, I’ll tell you what’s in demand, it turns out you and I agree on this point, I agree that a lot of things we know won’t be, and we don’t know what will be.
However, we do know that the renewal of professions will be rapid, even emerging professions like a TikTok blogger, for example. It has emerged, some 2-3 years ago it didn’t exist, and now a TikTok blogger is already a profession of sorts. Who the hell knows if that profession will still be around in 5 years. A live life, or life skills, that’s the kind of profession that will be. Renewal or the ability to renew, the ability to change the profession. – To reinvent what you do. – To reinvent as a profession, because otherwise you become a hostage to the obsolete, so basically we’re in agreement here.
“Is success measured in money?” Okay, success, success, success. It turns out that everyone thinks that success or happiness is not about money but wants to make sure of it through their own experience. I made sure, I have money, but I do not sense and feel success from it, not from money. It turns out it’s not. My personal answer as a person is no, but from my observations in society, yes.
What do you think? – I think it’s definitely not. I have a very good buddy who was very successful and made a lot of money some time ago as a very successful hacker. And then he’s dreamed for a long time, and still dreams of creating a project, as he says, that he could tell his mom about. Something he could be proud of.
He even has this example: if I invent, for example, a cure for cancer and no one finds out it was me, why would I want it at all? Why would I want to achieve that, what do I need that cure for? So, it seems to me that success is a complex concept, and money may be partially present there, success without money is probably an incomplete success, but money is not the most important component, that’s for sure. – So, we have a partial match here as well. – Yes. Let’s move on. – “How do you choose partners and advertisers and who are you not willing to work under any circumstances?” – As far as I know, you have corporate clients in the agency. – I have a lot of different partners, and I have a venture called Mobile Arts Theater. – Mobile theater. Does mobile mean moveable?
– It’s a mobile app. – Okay, okay, I know it, it’s a very cool thing. – The Mobile Art Theatre, MAT, the MAT app, there are performances that, you walk around the city, there are already in several cities, you walk around listening and you find yourself inside. – I have a complete match, it was presented to me, great stuff. – The main partners we worked with over the last year were Yandex, X5 Retail Group, Tinkoff...
– I hope they are watching us now and are already unzipping their wallets for the advertising. – Sberbank was one of the partners. – There you go. – Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do I pick my partners? Basically it’s important for me to do what I think is interesting and right, and what can become legendary, we’ll rewind to the previous question now. For me, an important criterion is being legendary, not how much money a project brings in, but whether it becomes iconic, whether it becomes revolutionary, a new word in the space where it starts to live. Then that’s what I want to do. Spending time
on trivial money-making is something you dream of when you are 15, but when you are already 40, it seems to me pretty silly. – I also select partners in projects on a similar principle, whether there may be some phenomenal revelation, maybe at the moment it will be small, but I predict whether the next big revelation may happen with a partner and whether later my son or grandson, someone from close people will tell me, “Dad, what kind of bullsh*t is this, what are you talking about on TikTok?” So, no matter how I select so far, my selector sometimes fails apparently. So, who’s next? – It’s not my turn. – So it’s my turn. “Who is the most influential person in the world today?” I know the answer to that question.
I am the most influential person in the world, in the living space in which I live. I sometimes wonder, there is no such significance – Trump, Putin, Biden, whoever, I see what people live on, I see how they say, “These people don’t let us do this or that.” It turns out that I live in a certain living space where I’m very influential, but not because I’m bigger or stronger, I don’t care what others do, I just know damn well that whatever I can do or create, it all depends on me anyway, and whatever happens to me, too, on me and my nearest ones, the ones I do it with.
So, my answer is I’m the most influential. What do you think? – It’s very funny, because I’m trying to remember now where I was interviewed a year ago on a YouTube channel, and the final question there was exactly the same, and I answered that the most influential person is me. By saying “me”, I mean that for every person, the most powerful person must be him-/herself, because we have this civilization where the center of the universe for everyone shifted away long ago from the heavens into the person him-/herself, and I think a very good symbol of this shift is selfie culture. While before people thought that there were some great celebrities, politicians, pop stars out there and wanted to touch them and get their autograph, now if these people have any meaning at all, and they do, it’s to emphasize one’s own importance, they are the background for you and your personal center of the universe, and they are somewhere flashing in the background. For anyone now, in today’s culture, he/she is the center of the universe.
– A very interesting turn of events, let me now take a selfie with you in the background. CHANNEL No.1 ABOUT MONEY AND BUSINESS – “What is the future of the media business in Russia?” Wow, that’s quite a setup. I had a case, I like to tell it; about three years ago, I joined President Macron’s public council, with Mario Vargas Llosa, Francis Fukuyama, the economist Stiglitz, that is, there were different people, Nobel Prize laureates, and I was there representing Russia. He was talking about media, and I understood that for him the media... He articulated this like, “When I have coffee and a croissant in the morning and read the newspaper”, for him, media are still a printed newspaper that he reads in the morning.
Strangely enough, these old media are still alive in many European countries. In America, in many ways they are not, and in our country, they are not at all. Traditional TV channels already understand that... It’s not about a box, a box is just one way of delivering the content they produce, but the most important thing is the content and the different ways of delivering it.
In that sense, the media business has no future, but the new content production and delivery business have a fantastic future, because we have so many quality content-makers, and more and more money is being invested in making that business grow. – It seems to me that it’s completely different, I mean, I disagree with you, I think that right now the media business is flourishing, but the media business has become distributed and decentralized, that is, if before it was grouped in the form of TV channels, newspapers, some publications, and somewhere it still remains, now the media business... Well, you are an entrepreneur now, you are a one-man business. – I am the media, of course, that’s what I’m telling you. – You have the ability to use platforms and other tools, but you are the media.
– That’s what I’m talking about, the old media are gone, it’s set up differently now. – I mean, the business is flourishing, it’s flourishing with a variety of manifestations, it can’t be controlled like it used to be, like snap, as some people still try, snap, but twice hell, it sneaks right through. And where there’re media, where there’s their reach and fame, that’s where there’re media for equity, you can trade your media channel for a stake in a company or for money, advertisement flow, and so on. I can take an alcoholic producer who is banned from advertising, like Sasha Tsypkin does, put a bottle of cognac, pour some out, and say, “What a good cognac”. – Everyone does this, not only Sasha,
but all and sundry, everyone does it. – That’s the media, you know? CHANNEL No.1 ABOUT MONEY AND BUSINESS – “Do you invest? If so, who invests where?” Yes, I invest, more than I would like to invest. Apparently, I am lucky enough in investing, there is a lot of money and it becomes even more than I wanted, so I have to invest more every time, and I’ve got my hands on it, so of course I invest. As for where I invest – I invest everywhere, damn it, cybersecurity, education, financial services.
I would even say it’s easier for me to say what I don’t invest in. – In what? – In politics, in various political movements, in elections, because this issue is taken by others, everything has already been chosen and taken away. I don’t invest in petrochemicals, because that also has been taken away. That is, I invest where it is not taken and chosen yet, and I sprout it all there. By the way, we don’t have good schools and kindergartens, for example, that’s where I invest, so that there would be some. This is my compass,
that is, if I then see a lot of smiling people where I invest, in schools and kindergartens, I increase investment there. That’s the kind of stuff I have, rather unconventional, I think. What about you? – Forbes wrote about me last time as an example of a very successful company that invents what it wants to do and then does it. Roughly speaking,
the money I make from books and selling book rights, I invest it in other projects of mine which are at a different stage of production. There are no crazy people who would figure out what kind of crap I came up with. It’s much easier for me to invest my own money, and after a while it will already be making money which I will take back and invest in more of my own inventions. – Would you list a few of them? – The Mobile Theater, which I actually maintained in many ways for two years, started bringing in money in the third year.
– Look, do you treat books as investment projects, or is it floating rationality that shows up and then you suddenly find that it has come through? – This is where we get to the investment of time, because in terms of the amount of time spent, a book is the most thankless product, because – I can already tell averages – it takes 2 years to write a book. I know for a fact that it is wrong to do a book full time, because it is boring, exhausting, you feel unhappy because of tears unseen by the world, but you sit down and work. However, half a day for two years is a normal working schedule, it’s a great investment. – Two years,
half a day to write a book. And what’s the number of copies sold, what’s the business, what’s the revenue, how much do you get for copyrights? For example, for All the Kremlin’s Men. – All the Kremlin’s Men is an example of a book that has sold in 30 countries, or rather has been translated into 30 languages. That’s a lot, it’s more than any of my books. Plus the adaptation rights. I sold the adaptation rights for All the Kremlin’s Men in the USA, and that’s a good contract. – Tell us the approximate order,
so that people know. – There’s almost no market in Russia, so they almost don’t pay royalties. In Russia, the book market is very tough, you tend to get paid once, and 99% of writers never get a second payment because until you’ve worked off the upfront fee, you don’t start getting paid anything. – The custom in business is that you either say you won’t say, or you say how much. – I can tell you about the order. The upfront fee is millions of rubles, and then the royalty fee is millions of regular rubles.
– I see. I mean, it’s not bad. If someone’s sitting around thinking about what to do... – But the U.S. book market is a completely different thing. There are hundreds of thousands of dollars there.
– Alright, who picks next? – I picked the previous one. – No, it was me. Pick your card. – “How old should a child be to leave the nest and live on his/her own?” – Well… – How many children do you have? – One daughter, she’s 11, she’s still [too young]. – Anyway, you’re already getting ready to answer this question, I guess. – This topic has been covered in plenty of texts written by different sociologists who study the effects the digital sphere has of people’s mentality – digital technologies like a smartphone and everything of that kind. A good example – they’re becoming less independent and have less inspiration for independence, since they get an adequate level of autonomy in their smartphone, so they can live with their parents for a long time and, at the same time, separate from them mentally, since no one can look into their chats and social media.
– So, they’re already independent there. – Right, well-known statistics say that in the USA, the curve showing the people’s age of getting a driving license has fallen dramatically over the last 10 years – now there’s no point in making for somewhere, trying to break away from the family, since you already break free of your parents in the smartphone. I think this analysis is a bit lopsided and too pessimistic; it’s done by elderly people who take a parochial view and who remember that when they were young, everything used to be better, so they talk about it from this perspective. – Hold on, how old are you? – I’m 41. – It turns out you’ve called me ‘elderly’.
– I call myself ‘elderly’ too. – I believe that a child must leave the nest and live on his/her own. – ‘Elderly” is everyone who is older than 20, those who were born in the previous, pre-digital age, those who didn’t have a mobile phone at school, we’re dinosaurs. – Guys, it turns out that my YouTube audience is mostly elderly, my congrats. – That’s okay, we should put up with it
and accept it. – Anyway, answer the question on the age one should leave the nest. – The age, well, I think that at the age when a child starts feeling that he/she can and wants to earn money – that’s when he/she should separate. Slightly before 20 years old or straight after 20 years old, I think it’s a logical and natural age for it. – Well, I’ll express my opinion. For me, the word ‘must’ in this context is not about vital necessities like you’ll die if you don’t do it, it’s rather an important imperative which is promoted by adults or put by them as a dogma in the educational environment, so that an adult-to-be gets some guidelines, like “My dear, people tend to leave their nests by N age,” even if this ‘must’ is formulated as a charge for the room the child lives in – he/she used to live there for free until the age of 18, then the child turns 18, so… A room charge in Moscow is 30,000 rubles, so if you don’t want to rent a room here, you can rent it there and get out of here.
– It looks like biological driving out of the nest, sounds interesting. – Indeed. If I don’t suggest that the child leaves the nest, he/she won’t start a family. So, go ahead, spread the wings. – Have you done it with your children? – I have. – Wow. – Hah, I’m making money on my children now. When children see the room bill, they’re like, “Dad, hold on, we can rent a flat for such an amount of money,” and I answer, “If I were you, I’d do the same thing.”
CHANNEL No.1 ABOUT MONEY AND BUSINESS “Qualities one needs to have in order to survive in the modern world.” Basically, it’s rather hard to survive in today’s world if you don’t have life skills. In particular, these are
the skill of generating protection from the abuse of power, manipulation and control, that’s one, and the skill of generating freedoms as a skill of intending something and achieving it with the things you have. In general, it’ll be really hard to live without these two competencies – you’ll come to the state of “My birthplace determines a walk of my life”, or “We’ve never lived well so there’s no use in starting now.” It’s worth saying that statistics show these competencies are at quite a low level in 80% or even 90% of people, especially the first one, the one of generating protection.
People don’t see it both in themselves when they abuse power, manipulation and control, and in others; they see it neither in themselves nor in others, and, a result, they accept it, which leads to the society of hatred, since such things happen when we’re steeped with it, we bring our children up in such social norms. – I thought up two qualities which I consider important, too. The first quality – and it’s quite a strange word – is adaptability, I’ll put it this way. You know, I had my birthday the other day, and lots of my ex-colleagues, those I used to work with on a cool TV channel, wished me a happy birthday and quoted my saying a lot… – Wait, you worked on the Dozhd Channel, right? – I used to be its editor-in-chief. – It’s a foreign agent, isn’t it? – Now it is. – It means I’m talking to a foreign agent… or an ex-agent? – Well, what level of the skill of generating protection should I have now? You know, as my friends say, good children don’t hear bad words.
Lots of my ex-colleagues in journalism recalled that and, wishing me a happy birthday, quoted my favourite phrase I used to say when I was their editor-in-chief: “The main principle in imposing is re-imposing.” It’s a must; if you start preparing a newscast, you made up a plan and you should know that everything can go horribly wrong in any second, and you must re-arrange it in any second. – With no regret. – Of course, it’s very important. And the second quality, it’s also a journalistic principle, but it’s essential everywhere in life – it’s a critical approach to the things you see and a critical attitude toward the source. To my mind, one should treat the information coming out of woodwork with a slight doubt. Recently, I made a speech before schoolchildren, and I needed to imbed this point on the importance of tracing the sources, and things like “I found and read it on the Net” are not a source. I made a slide
with a bottle of Svyatoy Istochnik mineral water (eng. “Sacred Spring”, ‘istochnik’ is ‘source’ and ‘spring’ in Russian) and said that sources were the most important thing. The joke was a success, and they told me afterwards they understood everything, that a source must be sacred, only such a source is worth believing. CHANNEL No.1 ABOUT MONEY AND BUSINESS
“Is there any point in making long-term plans in today’s world, both for a person and for a State?” – A simple question to answer, because making plans always makes sense, since if you didn’t formulate a goal for yourself and didn’t come up with the way to achieve it, it’s not clear what the hell you are doing and what for. It’s really necessary to make plans. However, the second thing is that one must get ready to change these plans all the time, since you’re not the only one in this world. – What’s the point in making plans if you have to change them anyway? – Well, if you don’t build them, it’s like being a piece of sh*t in an ice-hole.
There’s a wonderful dialogue in the movie Parasite, “You can’t go wrong with no plans,” – Look at the permanency and stability this phrase contains. We’ve found the point where we totally disagree. Maybe I wouldn’t propose something against it, I’d rather say that I don’t agree and can’t rally to it, I’d rather formulate something different. As a very wise person said,
the hierarchic arrangement of complex things – which is a trait of the industrial world – this approach had completely lost to the structural and behavioural diversity. There’re some structures, behavior, motivation, and some multi-agents – you’re an agent, I’m an agent, someone else, everyone has their interests, and we all, coming into collision with each other, suddenly create a field of logical reasons where something emerges against this background. I mean, they didn’t plan it, they collided with each other, they had some interests, intentions and so on, and suddenly something emerges, for example, a global shipbuilding leader in South Korea. Everyone has their interest, everyone rushes to some places, collides with each other, and something emerges at the interface of these collisions and relations. So, looking at Russia, we can see that our collisions are too samey, they’re vertical. If you look how this collision happens in Russia, you’ll see there’s a main line where all these collisions are clear – the vertical of power or something – while the rest is very poor, it has little energy, that’s it. In such a structure,
few things can emerge or happen. If we take the USA, we’ll see a boiling pot of everything, a bunch of lots of things, one thing over another. Lots of things emerge in this boiling pot, load of bullsh*t, but among this bullsh*t, something really worthy emerges which leads to phenomenal things – companies, innovations and so on. That’s why making plans is a good thing, but it’s a low tactical level. Basically, we should strive for all-powerful structural and behavioural diversity. So, it’s really cool that you’ve become separate business media, as well as other hundreds of thousands people who’re now media, too. Look
how many alternative sources of transfer and collision, while back in the day we would turn on the 1st or 2nd TV channels and definitely watch and absorb it, and now your book has been translated into 30 languages, it’s really cool. – Alright, nobody planned it. – Nobody planned it, it was about the structural and behavioural diversity, only about your initiative and behavioural things, some inner things. – At that point, when those conditions were formed, some people started acting, others – didn’t, that is, someone tactically – well, the word ‘plan’ bothers me, too – it was something… – Did you plan to write a book? – Of course I did, why not? – Hah, like in that meme, “Did you have any strategy?” “Yes, I had some strategy and followed it.” – Absolutely, in my case, well, I compiled materials for the book for seven years, and at some point I decided that I had to sit down at that time and type it. – I’d like to pay you a great compliment: in your book, you managed to preserve this distancing from the facts described, as if you didn’t have your own feelings and thoughts about those facts, it’s quite interesting in terms of professionalism.
– I targeted my audience. – Anyway, do you have any feelings or thoughts about it? Maybe you’ll share it now? – What thoughts? – Well, let’s put it this way: as an investigator and historian, you wrote this book so that your readers reflected on it themselves, but do you have your own feelings and thoughts? Or you, being an investigator, consider your feelings… – Do you want me to express myself as a political journalist and war correspondent? – Yes, I do. – There’s no question about it here.
Let’s answer the questions we have. – Alright, who picks? – Well, who spoke about plans? It was me, so it’s your turn. – “What was the hardest moment of your life and how did you go through it?” Wow, bloody hell, the hardest… I suppose there were lots of hard things, and all of them were felt as the hardest – a trauma I went through feeling it as a tragedy. Here is a story: it seemed to me – it only seemed, I stressed it out – that my partner screwed me over. At that point, I prepared everything to start a thermonuclear war, and he prepared, too. – He’d already pressed the button.
– And a great thermonuclear war was about to start. We can speak about it rationally, but I felt a tragedy being inside of it, because in fact, we were that close to a massive war that would destroy everything. So, I had such a situation. What about you? – I’ve had a few similar situations, but being in them, I did come up with the way of getting out of them I always use.
– Did you think it up by yourself? – I did, at that point. – Wow, cool, sounds interesting. – I’ll tell you how it happened. – I was a political journalist in my childhood and a war correspondent in my early childhood. When I was about 20 to 30 years old, I worked for the newspaper Kommersant as a war correspondent, and I often went to various flashpoint areas. So, I went to Estonia, to Tallinn, it was probably in 2008 or 2007, and Tallinn saw some unrest because of the relocation of the moment to the Unknown Soldier fighting in the Great Patriotic War, so it was relocated from the Central Square to the cemetery. For that reason, the Russian community
of Tallinn felt very indignant, and there was something really similar to the recent events in Kazakhstan – violence, broken shop-windows, and even one victim, I guess. So, it wasn’t a flashpoint, but for that period of time, it was really serious. So, train travels were temporarily canceled, and I thought up a very strange route for myself – I decided to return through Helsinki, I took a ferry ride to Helsinki and then, having come there – it was really strange, I think I could have thought up a good way out of the situation – I found out that the money I had was enough only for one thing – either for a train ticket or for a hotel room, and the next train left only the next day. I bought a ticket realizing that I would spend the following 20 hours in Helsinki streets, and it was in May, so it was a bit cold. Well, there were lots of funny stories happening at that point, I got credited for some events taking place in Helsinki at that point, I made a very interesting day for myself, but then, at the last moment, when I watched everything – I even went to Eurovision – in the end, I realized I wanted to sleep, I was extremely sleepy, but I realized that I would freeze down in Helsinki, in front of a church, and a crystal-clear thought came to my mind: it’ll be funny to remember all this as early as tomorrow. It’s like looking at yourself as a stranger in the situation of your feeling badly.
– Like watching a movie, right? – Indeed, watching a movie about yourself. – A movie about a guy who… – …who is such an idiot that he found himself in such a situation. So, now it’s my turn. “Where do Russians, including the younger generation, have this USSR nostalgia from?” – Well, those young people who have the USSR nostalgia know that everything was free-of-charge in the USSR, including the Internet. – Hah, really?
– First of all, I’d like to say it’s plain to see that the questions were written by an elderly person, the one like you and me, since the word ‘USSR’ implies…well, you know. I remember those remote times, when I just graduated from institute and entered a Ph.D. programme, I taught there for some time, and there were groups that weren’t that prepared, and in order to help them, I started asking questions that seemed elementary to me, for example, what the USSR stands for, but it turned out that I flunked them all, that’s it.
– Hah, as simple as that. – There was one more question on what the CIS stands for, and it was even worse because there was at least a hint of the word ‘union’ in the USSR, unlike the rest. – By intuition. – While in case of the CIS, they started with ‘union’ and couldn’t get any further. – Well, my opinion is that it’s not very important to know history, and in fact, history doesn’t determine the future, or something that will happen to us today and tomorrow, at all; the latter is determined by the field of reasons, and we always can influence this field of reasons.
Of course, some reasons were formed in the past, and now they may have an effect, but it’s not history that should be studied but the field of reasons where the desired things are being formed, that’s one. On the other hand, it turns out children don’t have these roots and have no understanding on where they come from, I don’t know how to deal with it, tell us about it, maybe I’ll borrow your view, as I’m still sorting it out and have no answer. – I agree partly with the fact that history doesn’t determine the future, and I strongly disagree that there’s some kind of predestination, like someone is destined for something and so on, or a certain country has its history and that means it can’t have something specific in the future… it’s bullsh*t. Things work in a different way, and I think history has specific practical application: history is a rehearsal of the future. – Like a plot. – Indeed. People can’t rehearse
the choices they make; they can experience them once or they can look at the choice made by other people, the same human beings. The prime advantage if history is an opportunity to look at almost yourself from the outside, to look at how other people made their choices: they had different options to choose from, they made their choice and got a specific result. History is really important for this purpose. – You know,
this definition really works for me, as it removes this contradiction that we must know our history and roots, it doesn’t work for me, but considering it as a plot, a plot of making choices, puts it on par with modern plots; it’s all about plots, about behavioural strategies that bring one or another result in certain situations, you commensurate it with the results you want to get, and you enrich your library of choices, scenarios or strategies, that’s really cool. CHANNEL No.1 ABOUT MONEY AND BUSINESS Well, guys, you can see there’re some cards we haven’t picked, let’s have a look at the questions we didn’t answer and we’ll answer them next time. “Do you believe that history repeats itself?” Buahaha.
“How many Instagram and YouTube subscribers do you have?” Well, some not-that-serious questions are coming out. “Is Russian journalism dead? If not, when will it die?” “Is it possible to predict the future?” “Is entrepreneurship for everyone?” “To run a business or to get hired?” “Do you believe in marriage? What does the family means to you?” “Five cities of Russia – apart from Moscow – where one can live a comfortable life.” I suggest that you choose one question from those we didn’t answer, the one that you find the most difficult, the one you’ve never answered before. – I definitely know that I have no answer to the question about five Russian cities. – Or the one you don’t want to answer at all. – I have no answer to the question about five Russian cities, I’ve never thought about it.
– Take an occasion to answer the question that will give you some new experience. – All these questions can be answered in monosyllables, some of them – with yes or no, others – with three words. – Let’s take the one about family and marriage. – Right, all of them except for the question “Do you believe in marriage?” – I do, but at the same time I don’t believe that there must be one marriage for the whole life, I believe in the monogamous marriage, but a few consecutive monogamous relationships, i.e. a few marriages, that follow each other is very much a marriage. Basically, family is rather interesting and complex notion in the 21st century.
– What a difficult question, isn’t it? – It is, I’ve never thought of this, it’s really interesting that things are different now; it’s obvious that today’s family is not about mother, father and children, it is arranged in a different way, these are different partners, it often happens that friends become a family. I really want to think up a striking definition of what family is. It seems to me that family is a set of people with whom you’re connected with the most irrational ties possible. – Sounds interesting. That means family is something that is not a family at all. – Not really, family is something that is not based on mutually beneficial cooperation.
– Quite interesting. – I mean, something that sometimes comes to our disadvantage; these are not people you need something from and not the ones who need something from you, I mean people with whom you have a kind of commodity-money exchange, or some other type of exchange, well, some kind of rational interdependence or just interdependence. – Well, I found such words as a ‘viable community, or a unit, of mutual support’, some kind of alchemical reflection. I do believe that a man becomes 10 times more forceful – I’ve chosen this word, rather than ‘efficient’, ‘productive’ or ‘effective’, they don’t fit here – more forceful, when there’s a family, The same about women.
Family itself is a new essence. After all, lots of people wonder what happiness is, and I say that if you feel a surge of energy, you’re happy. So, that’s how we’ve talked about family, and I guess we’ve found the most difficult question, we opened this card, too. My friends, how do you find this episode? Please write your comments, if you want to express some hate, go ahead.
– Hate is welcome. – If you want to ask something, go ahead, be outspoken, since Mikhail and I are ready for everything, as you can see, we didn’t prepare for the questions we have here, at all, we answered them offhand, and we’re also ready to respond to your questions, comments and heated statements. Mikhail, will you promise to give something, like your book, for the best question, the best comment or hate? – My book, of course, it’ll be my book. We’ve talked about plots. The most interesting thing will be if someone has a cool plot to answer any of these questions, so we give my book for the best plot. – So, we’re looking forward to your plots, Mikhail promised to give the book,
subscribe to Igor Rybakov’s channel, to Mikhail Zygar’s channel, we really need to have these great opportunities for disseminating goodness and brightness all over the world, and we can do it by joint efforts, so here we go. See you! CHANNEL No.1 ABOUT MONEY AND BUSINESS
2022-02-12 23:43
