Vladimir Putin is the most powerful man in the world, and he s also the most terrifying. In this episode of the podcast, we talk about how he got to where he is now, why he s a monster, and why we should be worried about him.
00:00:00.000This also shows me that the argument that this is about self-defense for Russia is wrong or that this is about defense against NATO is wrong.
00:00:06.560Oh, yeah, because they're destroying any human capital for self-defense capacity that they have.
00:00:11.900Yeah, if he was actually worried about self-defense, he would have stopped the war a long time ago.
00:00:17.800Leaving a government like that in power in the Ukraine was not worth a guaranteed death of his entire ethnocultural group.
00:01:12.100But I also want to apply sort of geopolitical knowledge to a world issue that I've noticed, especially within right-leaning communities.
00:01:19.940There's a lot of misconceptions about what's going on and what the motivations are of various players.
00:01:25.680Yeah, I titled our stupid stream yard room, Russia.
00:01:30.180I do not think that country means what you think it means.
00:01:33.380Which is the thing that came across my inbox this week, which I thought was fascinating.
00:01:40.100So a very underrated substack called Axis of Ordinary by Alexander Kruhl is a daily part of my reading routine, even though I have cut pretty much everything else out, sadly, due to workload and whatnot.
00:02:35.440Many people on the political right admire Russia and see Putin as the savior of white Christendom.
00:02:41.400What they don't know is that Russia is a higher percentage of Muslims than, say, Germany, and it's not because of an open border policy.
00:02:48.600Worse, instead of building a wall, Putin has sacrificed thousands of Russian soldiers, not only to keep Muslims in Russia against their will, but to give them Russian passports, which has led to numerous major terror attacks, such as the Beslan school massacre that ended with the deaths of 334 people, which I haven't even heard of.
00:03:06.300At an official event where Putin gifted a copy of the Koran during a visit to a mosque, he noted that the desecration of the Koran is a crime in Russia.
00:03:15.020Nikita Zurelev, a teenager who burned a Koran, was extradited to Chechnya under Putin's watch.
00:03:23.000There he was tortured and beaten on camera.
00:03:24.960In 2015, Putin inaugurated the Moscow Cathedral Mosque, a city where tens of thousands of Muslims fill the street for Eid prayers.
00:03:34.180Russia has also introduced the Islamic banking system.
00:03:37.760P.S., one of Russia's most famous TV hosts, the Jewish Vladimir Solovyev, recently chanted Alo Akbar in front of Russia's Islamist mercenaries.
00:03:47.160So, I think the biggest thing that really surprised me here was this note about Germany, that there's a higher percentage of Muslims in Russia than Germany.
00:04:25.000And then there's the new view of Russia, which is coming because of Putin's psyops campaigns in the West.
00:04:32.440Specifically, he wanted to appeal to right-leaning political groups, and he did that by acting as if he was like this.
00:04:40.800And keep in mind, we've got nothing against Muslims or anything like that.
00:04:43.980But what I would say is that the image that a lot of people have of Putin is not correlated with his behavior at all.
00:04:51.820Yeah, he represents a bastion of, well, they say Western culture, Western civilization, but really people are referring to broadly Christianity, if I have that right.
00:04:59.520Yeah, they're referring to like an old school, like homophobic, which Russia is, I should be clear about that, white-centered Christian.
00:05:07.820And a lot of people, as we point out, I mean, racists are generally dumber than the general population.
00:05:13.820So it's very easy to confuse them with these sorts of tactics.
00:05:17.180And a lot of them have actually been swayed into believing this iteration of Putin and believing his motivations around this war.
00:05:25.180Because I think the question could be, because you could say, well, why is Putin doing all this, if his goal is the savior of like old European values and a return to, you know, Christendom and a return to Esno states?
00:05:39.180And it's because that's not what Russia is doing. That is not why they are invading the Ukraine. That has nothing to do with it.
00:05:46.880This idea of they're not, and a lot of people on the right, I've actually seen believe this, like right-wing conspiracy theorists, that there are like Nazis in the Ukraine, which there were.
00:05:56.940There were Nazi sympathy groups in the Ukraine that were bigger than in other regions, but they were not, like it wasn't like the country was about to become a Nazi state or something like that, right?
00:06:06.140This would be the same way that the left will find, you know, somebody making okay signs at a rally and then be like, oh, we're going to go attack them or Chan.
00:06:16.820This is a long story about how this became a thing in the U.S.
00:06:19.380But there are occasional Nazis in like U.S. rightist groups as well, right?
00:06:24.420We allowed that to be used as justification for the extermination of those entire populations.
00:06:33.120And that isn't his justification because that that's not what he's fighting for, right?
00:06:37.620He's not fighting for a return to this whole system.
00:06:39.900If you're wondering just how little Putin cares about Nazism as a serious threat, here is the guy who named the Wagner group, the primary fighting group he has in the Ukraine right now, covered in Nazi tattoos.
00:06:53.860Here is a Wagner soldier covered in Nazi tattoos.
00:06:57.420So the question is, what is he fighting for?
00:06:59.720Like what motivates Russia's foreign policy decisions?
00:07:04.740Well, when you look at Russia's recent history since Putin came to power, and even before that to an extent, it becomes clear what's motivating Russia.
00:07:14.720The mistake is seeing Russia as a nation state because it doesn't think, act, or is motivated like a nation state.
00:07:25.340It is motivated like a oil and gas cartel, really like a mob that makes the majority of its money from oil and gas.
00:07:33.060And when I say the majority of its money, over 50% of the state revenue in Russia comes from oil and gas.
00:07:42.840Like I can't overstate how big that would be if 50% of your state's revenue and the state was a totalitarian state, was a single leader, was coming from one industry.
00:07:54.140Basically, that means that that state leader is basically CEO of a company in that industry with no laws that apply to them, interested in advancing the cause of that industry.
00:08:04.460And we can see this because of how much money Putin has been squirreling away.
00:08:07.560He hasn't been using the money that he's generating to improve Russia's quality of life or anything like that.
00:08:13.200He has been taking huge, huge amounts and squirreling it away for his descendants.
00:08:17.180So the question is, well, where do you see this in foreign policy, right?
00:08:22.540Well, so first, when the Soviet Union broke up, their first goal – and I'm going to put a video here.
00:08:30.420There's a great video if you want to go into this in great detail where they go over this in way more details, but I'm just going to give you the top notes.
00:08:36.000If you find these topics interesting and want to go much deeper on them as well as look into sources, I strongly suggest a video called Russia's Catastrophic Oil and Gas Problem by Real Life Lore, which is one of the best summaries of this particular subject I've seen on the internet.
00:08:50.900There's a huge problem with a lot of oil in Kazakhstan because that could be a competitor to Russia.
00:08:56.460So they made a point of owning 42% of their oil pipelines and industry, and they're basically a client state, so they don't really worry about them.
00:09:04.160And then they ensured that all of the oil that was going out of Kazakhstan was being shipped through Russia, through pipes that go through Russia and out of Russia's port.
00:09:11.720So Azerbaijan also had a lot of oil in the region, but Azerbaijan could only get its oil out without going through a Russian-controlled area or one of their enemy areas by putting a pipeline through Georgia.
00:09:25.080What happened immediately after they put this pipeline through Georgia?
00:09:47.720So then a discovery gets made in the Ukraine.
00:09:51.040The Ukraine controls Europe's second largest known reserves of natural gas.
00:09:56.180And almost 80% of that is east of the Dnipro River, which is important.
00:10:00.380So they were then in talks with, they had a deal signed with Shell, Exxon, and Mobil to come in and produce that gas.
00:10:08.900Well, that was a huge chunk of that that was under those contracts was in the Donbass.
00:10:14.260That was the region that Russia first annexed a while back.
00:10:17.940That ended up invalidating all of the contracts that they had signed to improve this.
00:10:22.760And to give you an idea of how much this would matter to Russia, right now their primary competitor in that space is in Scandinavia.
00:10:30.040But this coming onto the market would represent 3x what Scandinavia is bringing to the market in terms of a competitor.
00:10:36.080This is actually sort of existential for Russia to stop because – and a lot of people are like, yeah, but they're not – like they do the math.
00:10:44.040They're like, okay, but even if they capture all of these reserves and then start selling them, it doesn't – like it doesn't add to their bottom line budget that much.
00:10:53.880And it's like, bro, you're completely misunderstanding their goal here.
00:10:58.860It's to prevent it from entering the market.
00:11:02.400When Russia attacked, they had just gotten – the Ukraine, they had just gotten another pro-Rest president.
00:11:10.120And things were beginning to look stable enough for the oil companies to begin investing and developing these assets, which would have been really catastrophic for Russia.
00:11:19.960And we need to – you know, to get an idea of how much Russia thinks about this sort of stuff.
00:11:24.460For a while, I think it was up until – yeah, as late as 2005, 80% of Russian oil went through the Ukraine Brotherhood Network.
00:11:31.300And this was always causing conflict between Russia and the Ukraine because the Ukraine would ask for, like, charge fees on this.
00:11:37.680And a lot of conservatives are like, well, the Ukraine was just robbing Russia, and so it makes sense that they had to go in to gain control of this network, right?
00:11:46.900Russia had already built, by the time the war had started, the two Nord Stream pipelines and a separate pipeline that went south around the Ukraine,
00:11:55.620and they weren't shipping nearly as much oil through the Brotherhood Network anymore.
00:11:59.300So, no, it was not about access to those pipelines.
00:12:02.620Anyone who is telling you that is lying to you.
00:12:05.000That wasn't what was causing the conflict anymore.
00:12:07.180The conflict was the development of these new natural gas.
00:12:10.260And so being an oil company that also runs a state, you know, they would – something like this makes sense if you fundamentally do not care about your citizens.
00:12:18.920And this is where it gets really interesting and where what Russia did becomes so absolutely insane in the light of what you're hearing.
00:12:27.140Like, oh, are they building – like, I've heard that he really cares about the history and everything like that and blah, blah, blah.
00:12:32.960Russia has a desperately low fertility rate.
00:12:35.140Ukraine has a desperately low fertility rate.
00:12:37.420He's basically killing an entire generation of young men.
00:12:50.520Like, this is the first time in history a nation is essentially genociding itself through something that is really, really interesting about the world.
00:12:57.740What one is, is either, like, two of the most culturally aligned groups in the world, right?
00:13:01.940Like, he's killing his own people with his own people.
00:13:04.860Like, if you care about, like, the Slavic nationality, this is the very last thing you would do if you had an eye to fertility rates.
00:13:11.700I'm – Peter Zaihan's theory, we'll get to it in a second.
00:13:26.020Peter Zaihan thinks that the reason that this war is happening is twofold.
00:13:30.720One is Russia wants additional population, and this is their last chance to really make a play for these resources, demographically speaking, which is true.
00:13:37.980And the second is, is they're trying to capture choke points, which are important for invasions into their territory.
00:13:45.020And they think that by capturing the region of the Ukraine, they can capture more of these choke points, and so they're sort of forced into this war.
00:13:52.860The truth is, is while Russia pretends that NATO wants to attack it all the time, anyone who has the barest context of reality knows that NATO is a bunch of pussies.
00:14:03.100They are not going to wage an aggressive war.
00:14:05.540They may – like, if they were able to loop Ukraine into their dealings, it was because Russia was threatening Ukraine.
00:14:13.660Like, NATO couldn't even get Sweden and Norway in, right, because of Russia's saber-rattling.
00:14:19.540You really think they were going to get the Ukraine in, realistically speaking?
00:14:24.200Like, it's just silly, silly, silly argument there that they were forcing to do this because he had kept Sweden and Norway from even joining NATO, which are, like, hugely culturally aligned with Europe.
00:14:35.740Until he did this, which then gave them the cover to join.
00:14:38.940So, no, that would have – and very obviously that would have been the consequence of this attack.
00:14:43.180You know, so, no, that was stupid as well.
00:14:46.600But then the second thing is to Peter Zyhan's play.
00:14:50.300Okay, so he's going out there and he's trying to capture these choke points.
00:14:52.980But choke points don't matter in the type of war that he needs to defend against.
00:14:57.580The type of war that he needs to defend against are people coming in and assassinating him or people fermenting unrest within his population.
00:15:06.700You know, that's the way the Western world takes people out.
00:15:10.520And it's the way the Western world has taken people out for a while at this point outside of countries that are, you know, that have any way to protect themselves.
00:15:18.520Well, he seems duly afraid of that as well.
00:15:20.780Well, no, I mean, when we go to countries that, like, when we go to war, right, they're often countries that don't have, like, big formal militaries.
00:15:28.100They are multiple levels below us in the tech tree in something like Siv.
00:15:37.280We're not going to go in and attack them in that way.
00:15:40.740And as such, he needs to focus much more on maintaining local support, which he had done pretty well, than he needs to go out and try to capture, like, geographic choke points.
00:15:52.560He needs to focus much more on the international politics, which he was doing very well.
00:16:09.660And it's actually incredibly stupid prioritization, and we can get to why in just a second.
00:16:13.900But, you know, he had won a major victory in turning the U.S. right to become a pro-Russian party and the European right to become a pro-Russian party.
00:16:23.220And I think that he lost that with, like, basically all of the sane thinkers who aren't just, like, conspiracy people who believe all the stuff that's being fed to them.
00:16:31.020And so then we want to talk about, like, the self-genocide of Russia.
00:16:34.920So Russia's in a very unique position from a global history perspective in that they are able to genocide themselves.
00:16:39.820See, historically speaking, if I was a country like Russia and I was just sending all of my young men to another country to die and they were dying at the rates that they're dying right now, I would have some restraint.
00:16:52.200Like, I would keep some men home, right?
00:16:55.660Because I need to be able to defend the homeland.
00:16:58.620The way they are acting isn't like that.
00:17:01.260They are not acting as if they are trying to, it's like that famous scene.
00:17:30.100And they are just dying in numbers that you would.
00:17:35.080And this also shows me that the argument that this is about self-defense for Russia is wrong or that this is about defense against NATO is wrong.
00:17:41.920Yeah, because they're destroying any human capital for self-defense capacity that they have.
00:17:47.260Yeah, if he was actually worried about self-defense, he would have stopped the war a long time ago and just stuck on what he had.
00:17:55.040The moment that he realized this was going to be a long slog or last year or at any point, even now, he should stop because his country is becoming weaker and weaker and weaker in terms of if NATO actually did decide to attack.
00:18:07.880And the rest of the world no longer respects his country as a place to do business.
00:18:12.400Now, a lot of people can be like, oh, but he went into this war thinking it would be a quick war.
00:18:16.620Quick war or long war, it still went against his best interests.
00:18:20.520And he knew it wasn't going to be a quick war.
00:18:22.480It was in the first few months of the war.
00:22:30.900Yeah. What's going to happen is they've already lost, like, basically all of their talent, which is hugely important.
00:22:37.900If you create an action that makes every man who is, like, a competent programmer or a competent worker in any extent, leave the country, which largely happened.
00:22:48.320And the exodus of young men from the country was catastrophically large.
00:22:52.920You have made your country, like, in terms of, like, genetic and cultural selection effects, markedly less competent and less able to compete in where the future of the world is going.
00:23:03.100And so, you know, I'll title this episode something ultra-provocative, like, Putin is more of a – or people who sent for Putin are, like, more pathetic than the people who sent for Biden.
00:23:12.880Because in truth, Biden is a better leader than Putin.
00:23:17.840With as bad as Biden is, at least he's not genociding his own ethnic group, you know.
00:23:23.020And I'd also point out, now, a lot of people are like, why is the U.S. fighting here?
00:23:27.700Like, we should stop sending billions to the Ukraine.
00:23:30.420Like, whoa, don't you know that a lot of it is being, like, funneled back into Democrat politicians' pockets and stuff like it?
00:24:37.340And she's like, look, all of the, like, if you look at the actual, like, probability of war between countries, the probability of war between the United States and Russia is still by far the highest in the world of, like, any major power.
00:24:51.340It has to do with the state control structure, the economic interests that we have, and the lack of economic ties that we have.
00:24:58.980Whereas something like a war with China, unless they, like, literally just go crazy, is much less likely because they are so reliant on imports for, like, basically economically surviving.
00:25:10.260Whereas the same isn't true for Russia.
00:25:12.420I mean, you could see, even with all the sanctions, they, because so much of their state is dependent on oil, they-
00:25:16.480Isn't Iran, then, in a similar, Iran, in a similar position?