TRIGGERnometry - June 02, 2025


Why Americans Don’t Understand Vladimir Putin - Konstantin Kisin


Episode Stats

Length

13 minutes

Words per Minute

170.18065

Word Count

2,330

Sentence Count

135

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

5


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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.
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.
00:02:41.700 Why have you all got that idiotic American smile, she asked me.
00:02:45.120 The open, welcoming, and positive attitude that is the default setting in America
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.
00:03:00.780 Not because Americans are stupid, but because their desire to believe in the good of others
00:03:05.720 makes it harder for them to recognize when others are not, in fact, good.
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
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.
00:04:25.540 The descendants of Genghis Khan wiped out anyone who resisted and subjugated everyone else.
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.
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,
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,
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
00:10:02.180 precisely because he's always been
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.
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.
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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,
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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.
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00:11:56.740 Their blind spot feed is my favorite feature.
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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.
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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.
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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.