TRIGGERnometry - June 02, 2025


Why Americans Don’t Understand Vladimir Putin - Konstantin Kisin

Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Guests
Konstantin Kisin
Mentioned
Vladimir Putin Prompted Beautiful Noise Stalin Sweet Caroline Neil Diamond Trump George W. Bush Mikhail Khorakovsky Igor Gekonstrelkov Yevgeny Prigozhin Gary Kasparov Boris Yeltsin Boris Nemtsov George Kennan Hillary Clinton Khal Drogo Mongols Hitler Khan
The 4 Big Lies We Tell to Parents The Reality of South Africa's Farm Murders - Rob Hersov

Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

170.18

Word count

2,330

Sentence count

125

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

10

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

After a wave of missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian towns and cities, which killed 12 and injured dozens, President Trump expressed his frustrations with Vladimir Putin on Monday. But something has happened to him. He s gone crazy. This is an interesting theory.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.700 Broadway's smash hit, the Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.
00:00:06.520 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,
00:00:11.780 including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.
00:00:15.780 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, the Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.
00:00:22.620 Now through June 7th, 2026 at the Princess of Wales Theatre.
00:00:26.800 Get tickets at murbish.com.
00:00:30.000 Why Americans Don't Understand Vladimir Putin
00:00:32.840 Prompted by a wave of missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian towns and cities,
00:00:42.520 which killed 12 and injured dozens last weekend,
00:00:46.140 President Trump expressed his frustrations with Vladimir Putin on Monday, saying,
00:00:50.180 I've always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him.
00:00:55.740 He's gone absolutely crazy.
00:00:58.380 This is an interesting theory.
00:01:00.460 Before we examine it in detail, it's worth pointing out that numerous U.S. presidents have attempted to believe it.
00:01:06.260 President George W. Bush famously looked into Putin's eyes and saw a soul,
00:01:10.700 while Bill Clinton insisted that Putin could be relied on to stick to their agreements.
00:01:14.840 U.S. presidents prefer, or at least pretend, to believe this because it prevents them from having to face the reality of who Vladimir Putin has always been,
00:01:23.180 and what that means for America and the West.
00:01:25.080 But far more importantly, I think this belief is also a product of the American psyche,
00:01:29.920 which makes even the most cynical U.S. politicians susceptible to manipulation by those who operate within a different moral framework.
00:01:37.280 Regular viewers will know that you will not find a bigger fan of the United States than me.
00:01:41.720 Spending time in the U.S. is always a joy.
00:01:44.800 One cannot help but be inspired by the culture of openness, cooperation, and positivity.
00:01:49.660 The story of America is that anything is possible, especially when good people get together to do business, make money, and thrive.
00:01:57.760 While most Americans take these cultural traits as given, the reality is that they are rare and in no small part the foundation of America's success.
00:02:05.660 Americans are widely regarded around the world as extremely friendly, welcoming, proactive, and constructive.
00:02:12.460 But every coin has two sides.
00:02:15.200 The trade-off of this business-focused, open-minded, good-faith, let's-make-money approach
00:02:19.540 is a consistent failure to contend with the reality that not all cultures and not all people are like this.
00:02:26.240 My Western friends often say that I come across as intense, unsmiling, and even angry in interviews and videos.
00:02:32.120 By American standards, they're certainly right. 0.94
00:02:35.420 Which is why they're always surprised when I tell them the story of showing a Russian family member a school photo of mine. 1.00
00:02:41.700 Why have you all got that idiotic American smile, she asked me. 1.00
00:02:45.120 The open, welcoming, and positive attitude that is the default setting in America 1.00
00:02:48.900 is widely regarded in many parts of the world as evidence of gullibility, unseriousness, and naivete.
00:02:55.580 It is seen, sometimes justifiably, as an attitude that leaves people vulnerable to deception. 0.99
00:03:00.780 Not because Americans are stupid, but because their desire to believe in the good of others 0.99
00:03:05.720 makes it harder for them to recognize when others are not, in fact, good. 1.00
00:03:09.900 To fully grasp the cultural chasm between Russia and America, you need to understand history.
00:03:15.220 The United States is a nation of people who conquered a continent.
00:03:18.820 It is filled with the descendants of those who left their homelands to seek a better life on the other side of the world.
00:03:24.080 Facing immense hardships, they did not just overcome, they triumphed.
00:03:28.220 In a few centuries, successive waves of newcomers banded together to build a nation out of nothing 1.00
00:03:33.660 through hard work, a go-get-it mentality, and a high-trust, collaborative society.
00:03:39.280 Americans have no genetic memory of being invaded by powerful enemies,
00:03:43.340 of being held down and oppressed by foreign conquerors,
00:03:46.200 of mass persecution, of extermination by their governments,
00:03:49.300 of totalitarianism, of famine, of failure.
00:03:51.840 The American ethos is defined by overcoming the challenges the country has faced in its history.
00:03:57.900 The Great Depression was merely the precursor to the country's explosion
00:04:01.500 into an economic and manufacturing superpower.
00:04:04.460 Pearl Harbor was followed not only by overwhelming victory in World War II,
00:04:08.420 but by America emerging as the world's dominant nation and the center of Western civilization.
00:04:13.800 Anything is possible, problems are challenges to be solved, and the future is bright.
00:04:18.100 Now consider the history of Russia.
00:04:20.820 One of the founding experiences of the Russian nation is being occupied by the Mongols. 0.64
00:04:25.540 The descendants of Genghis Khan wiped out anyone who resisted and subjugated everyone else. 0.88
00:04:30.820 If you're struggling to understand what this meant,
00:04:33.340 imagine your country is invaded by ISIS or Khal Drogo from Game of Thrones.
00:04:37.840 They butcher, rape, and torture their way through every major city.
00:04:41.100 They force everyone else to bend the knee. 0.56
00:04:43.660 In Russian, this period is called the Tato-Mongol Yoke,
00:04:46.640 a yoke being a device used to join two work animals such as oxen together to pull a load.
00:04:52.120 This period of time lasted around 240 years, as long as the entire history of the United States.
00:04:59.120 To this day, the Russian language contains many Mongolian words,
00:05:02.440 especially those related to taxation, weaponry, and violence.
00:05:06.320 Another formative period in Russian history is called Smuta, or Times of Trouble.
00:05:10.780 Ivan the Terrible, infamous for killing his only viable heir in a fit of rage,
00:05:14.640 passed on his crown to a feeble and incapable son, Fyodor.
00:05:18.800 When Fyodor died without an heir, Russia was thrust into 15 years of chaos,
00:05:23.120 in which a succession of usurpers and false claimants battled over the throne.
00:05:27.620 Combined with famine, disease, and a series of foreign invasions,
00:05:30.980 the Times of Trouble saw at least a third of Russia's population wiped out in just 15 years.
00:05:36.600 One of the key conclusions Russians drew from this is that whatever else he is, 0.54
00:05:41.760 a ruler must be strong to maintain order.
00:05:44.960 A weak ruler leads to chaos, and chaos is to be avoided at any cost.
00:05:50.420 How poorly this is understood in the West is ironically and perfectly encapsulated in the
00:05:54.580 different names Russians and English speakers have for Ivan the Terrible.
00:05:58.560 The word terrible is a telling mistranslation.
00:06:01.700 His moniker in Russian is much more accurately translated as fearsome.
00:06:05.520 In the centuries since, Russia has been repeatedly invaded by its Western neighbors,
00:06:10.380 including the Swedes, Lithuanians, Poles, Finns, and famously, Napoleon and Hitler.
00:06:15.220 While these attacks were ultimately repelled, they left deep scars in the Russian psyche.
00:06:20.040 There is little triumphalism about defeating Napoleon,
00:06:22.660 whose invasion saw Moscow burn to the ground.
00:06:25.320 And while victory in the Great Patriotic War, the Russian name for World War II,
00:06:29.440 is much celebrated, it came at the cost of around 20 million lives.
00:06:33.960 For contrast, the United States lost just over 400,000 people in the same war.
00:06:38.620 Compare also the revolutions and civil wars which took place in the two countries.
00:06:42.820 The Russian Revolution, which sparked the Russian Civil War,
00:06:45.740 resulted in the installation of a tyrannical, murderous communist regime,
00:06:49.920 which exterminated its enemies, expropriated private property,
00:06:53.540 and instituted a decades-long reign of terror,
00:06:56.360 ending an economic collapse and Cold War defeat in 1991.
00:06:59.720 Meanwhile, the American Revolution is a story of a successful fight for independence,
00:07:05.780 while the American Civil War, although bloody and painful,
00:07:09.140 is seen as the price of progress on the path to ultimate unification.
00:07:13.220 While American baby boomers lived through a period of economic expansion,
00:07:16.860 success, and triumph, the Russian counterparts, like Putin, who was born in 1952,
00:07:22.300 grew up in the aftermath of a devastating war,
00:07:25.180 Stalin's slave labor camps, and economic stagnation.
00:07:28.100 By the time they were in their prime, their country collapsed all around them,
00:07:32.000 creating chaos, instability, and a sense of loss, humiliation, and exploitation.
00:07:37.060 These historical experiences inevitably produce people who see the world through such different lenses
00:07:42.160 that it might as well be a different world.
00:07:45.060 Centuries of pain, poverty, famine, war, brutality, suspicion, and humiliation
00:07:49.440 do not produce happy, smiling, positive go-getters.
00:07:53.040 Which brings us back to the claim that the normally reasonable, rational, and pragmatic Vladimir Putin,
00:07:58.540 with whom we can do business, has suddenly become a different person and gone crazy.
00:08:03.300 This claim is convenient for a number of reasons.
00:08:06.080 First, it absolves those who have been claiming he is reasonable, rational, and pragmatic,
00:08:10.960 while his troops have been butchering civilians,
00:08:13.480 stealing Ukrainian children, and torturing prisoners of war in captivity.
00:08:16.880 Second, it justifies the foreign policy of turning a blind eye to the reality of Putin's Russia
00:08:22.460 and the man himself.
00:08:24.160 On social media, Americans often accuse me of being a Putin-hater,
00:08:28.100 for stating basic facts about his career history and the regime he's set up in Russia.
00:08:32.940 These facts are worth restating here.
00:08:35.200 Vladimir Putin is a former officer of the KGB,
00:08:38.060 the Soviet Union's main intelligence and security agency.
00:08:41.220 The agency was the successor to the Cheka and the NKVD,
00:08:44.440 which were the tools used by Stalin and other Soviet leaders
00:08:47.800 to murder and imprison dissidents, domestic critics, and foreign defectors.
00:08:52.160 He joined the agency long after its crimes under Stalin had been exposed.
00:08:56.420 Vladimir Putin has never been elected in a free and fair election.
00:08:59.840 He was effectively handed the presidency in 1999 by his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin,
00:09:04.780 in exchange for protection,
00:09:06.100 and has held on to power for 26 years,
00:09:09.340 ending Russia's brief experiment with democracy.
00:09:11.580 Every single one of his political opponents,
00:09:14.940 like Mikhail Khorakovsky, Boris Nemtsov, Alexei Navalny,
00:09:17.880 and Garry Kasparov, is dead, imprisoned, or in exile.
00:09:21.240 In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea in Ukraine,
00:09:25.340 Putin lied repeatedly that the soldiers without insignia
00:09:28.280 who'd taken over that peninsula were not his,
00:09:31.140 saying with a cunning grin that you can go to a store
00:09:33.800 and buy any kind of uniform.
00:09:35.620 He later handed out medals to the very Russian soldiers
00:09:38.640 who were involved in that operation.
00:09:40.180 Since the war in Ukraine started,
00:09:42.580 Putin's cleaned house with both liberal and nationalist critics,
00:09:45.960 who have been imprisoned like Igor Gekonstrelkov,
00:09:48.460 or assassinated like Evgeny Prigozhin.
00:09:51.180 My point is, to anyone who understands the reality of Putin's regime, 0.91
00:09:54.820 the idea that he's gone crazy is, well, crazy.
00:09:59.600 Vladimir Putin is in power and retains power 0.58
00:10:02.180 precisely because he's always been 0.98
00:10:04.440 someone who's prepared to lie, manipulate, and kill
00:10:07.280 to achieve his objectives.
00:10:08.640 That is literally what the KGB trained him to do.
00:10:12.760 In his post criticizing Putin,
00:10:14.840 Trump went on to add that,
00:10:16.340 I've always said that he wants all of Ukraine,
00:10:18.700 not just a piece of it.
00:10:19.940 And maybe that's proving to be right.
00:10:22.040 Finally, it seems our American friends are beginning
00:10:24.100 to understand who they're dealing with.
00:10:25.960 In his long telegram,
00:10:27.140 George Kennan famously wrote that Russia was impervious
00:10:29.820 to the logic of reason
00:10:30.980 and highly sensitive to the logic of force.
00:10:33.620 This is why I had high and so far false hopes
00:10:36.840 for Trump's ability to end the war.
00:10:39.280 I assumed he would understand the obvious,
00:10:42.000 that bringing Putin to the negotiating table
00:10:44.120 would require a carrot and a stick. 0.87
00:10:47.080 So far, dangling only the carrot of ending the killing
00:10:50.220 and sending a starry-eyed historically and geographically illiterate lawyer
00:10:54.280 to be bamboozled for hours in the Kremlin
00:10:56.260 has, predictably, produced nothing.
00:10:58.720 The only way Trump will get serious negotiations going
00:11:02.160 is to threaten Putin with ramping up not only sanctions,
00:11:05.560 but high-grade, extensive military aid to Ukraine.
00:11:08.760 As long as that option is not on the table,
00:11:11.300 Putin will keep calling America's bluff.
00:11:13.920 If you enjoy these videos,
00:11:15.660 you should know that they're available on my sub stack
00:11:17.860 at constantinkissen.com,
00:11:19.960 days, weeks, sometimes months ahead of time.
00:11:22.840 Head on over to constantinkissen.com now to subscribe.
00:11:26.500 The world is changing fast,
00:11:28.140 and it's not enough to just know what the news is.
00:11:30.980 You have to know how it's being reported,
00:11:33.260 because the truth often depends on where you're standing.
00:11:36.060 That's why I use Ground News.
00:11:38.260 It's the only website and app that gathers and compares news
00:11:41.460 from over 50,000 sources around the world.
00:11:44.120 It doesn't just show you the headlines,
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00:11:47.820 and who owns the media outlet you're reading or watching.
00:11:51.000 When you know where the money is coming from,
00:11:52.940 you start to understand how power and influence
00:11:55.340 shape the stories we see.
00:11:56.740 Their blind spot feed is my favorite feature.
00:11:59.080 It shows you which stories are being ignored
00:12:00.920 by either the left or the right,
00:12:02.700 so you can actually spot media bias as it's happening
00:12:05.680 and stay ahead of the narrative.
00:12:07.520 They surface around 20 of these a day,
00:12:09.700 and some of them are pretty eye-opening.
00:12:11.800 This story on the UK developing a predictive tool
00:12:14.480 to determine if someone will become a killer
00:12:16.420 barely showed up in left-leaning outlets.
00:12:18.900 It's a major story when you think about
00:12:20.520 how far governments might go with AI and surveillance.
00:12:22.820 And on the other side, this story about how more than 60% of CEOs
00:12:27.880 expect a recession in the next six months
00:12:29.920 currently has no coverage in right-leaning media at all.
00:12:33.260 That's a pretty big blind spot when you're trying to understand
00:12:35.680 where the economy might be headed.
00:12:37.160 If you're someone who values nuance over noise,
00:12:39.460 Ground News is essential.
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00:12:58.900 Broadway's smash hit, the Neil Diamond musical,
00:13:15.740 A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.
00:13:18.580 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more,
00:13:22.100 featuring all the songs you love, including America,
00:13:25.120 Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.
00:13:27.340 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful,
00:13:29.660 the next musical mega hit is here,
00:13:31.920 the Neil Diamond musical, A Beautiful Noise.
00:13:34.720 April 28th through June 7th, 2026,
00:13:37.740 the Princess of Wales Theatre.
00:13:39.640 Get tickets at murvish.com.