2.16 It's The Economy, Stupid!

0:00Love this podcast? Support this show through the A-Cask supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Okay, I have to tell you. I was just looking on eBay where I go for all kinds of things I love, and there it was. That hologram trading card. One of the rarest, the last one I needed for my set. Shiny like this. Designer handbag of my dreams. One of a kind. eBay had it, and now everyone's asking, ooh, where'd you get your... windshield wipers. eBay has all the parts that fit my car. No more annoying. Just beautiful. Millions of finds each with a story. eBay. Things. People. Love. This episode is sponsored by Bumble, and honestly, thank God, because dating out there is a full-time job. I feel like every woman I know has a Bumble story, like either a success story, they found their person on the app, or why is this man holding a fish in every photo situation.

1:00But Bumble is actually the dating app my girlfriend's use and trust, because it doesn't feel chaotic. It feels intentional. And that matters. What I love is that Bumble actually listens to women. They were like, okay, you're tired of guessing, you're tired of decoding vibes, so they built tools to make it easier. Like, their verification tools are huge. With photo verification and ID verification, you can actually feel confident that this person is who they say they are. Plus with so many unique prompt options, it's easy to get the conversation started. For my prompt, I would choose, one thing to know about my friend group is making fun of each other is our love language. It makes profiles feel more real, more confident, and easier to connect with. So if you're tired of the guessing game and want dating to feel easier, download Bumble and make real connections today. Greetings, comrades. And welcome to the Eastern border. It's the economy's stupid. That was Bill Clinton's war cryback in 1992. It was a simple brutal reminder that, no matter how grand your foreign policy is, no matter how many missiles you build

2:01and how many speeches you give about national greatness, if the peasants count to four red, your empire is already dead. You just haven't felt the Rigor Martha's just yet. And out here on the Eastern border, in March 2026, the Russian Federation is in full Rigor Martha's. We need to talk about the macro mutiny. Right now inside the Kremlin walls, there is a bit of a critic war, civil war happening, and it's entirely about math. The Russian Central Bank, led by Elvira Naviyudina, who is essentially the only adult left in the room trying to keep this suicidal system afloat, is in an open public knife fight with Rostat, the state's statistics agency. Why? Because Rostat fed the numbers, and not just a little bit. To hit their fourth quarter GDP quarters for 2025 and make the Zarlo good, Rostat fabricated a massive anomalous spike in precious metals and nuclear fuel production. They literally made up phantom industries out of tin air just to keep the GDP line pointing up on the red folders

3:01they slide across Putin's ridiculously long table. But the Central Bank knows the truth. They know the S&P Global Manufacturing PMI has crashed to 49.4, which is the official mathematical threshold for a recession. They know the threshold is bleeding to death. In just January and February this year, like I mentioned in previous episodes, the Russian state blew through a 3.5 trillion-rubble budget deficit. And that's not even taking into account the regional one, which totals everything into 8 trillion, but let's just put this aside. Think about just that central data. 3.5 trillion in 60 days. That's 90% of their whole yearly deficit. Again, not even including the whole thing about, you know, the 8 trillion that's in total with regions and state-owned enterprises and everything, just great. The red line of the actual economic graph looks like a flatlining heart monitor. Which brings us to our second historical slogan, Ronald Reagan, 1980.

4:02Looking straight into the camera and asking the American public, are you better off than you were four years ago? Let's ask the Russian public, are you better off? Well, if you watched the hardcore ultra-pathiotic Tsargrad TV, the network that is supposed to be cheerleading this imperial suicide, you get your answer. Just this month, regime-friendly economist Mikhail Hajin went on Tsargrad and flat-out predicted that a third massive blow is about to hit the Russian economy. He told the Zed Patriots to brace for the rubble collapsing to 140 or even 150 to the Jaller by the end of this year. And the Russian people? The Serfs? Well, they aren't stupid. They know exactly what 150 rubles to the dollar means. They remember the 1990s. They see the central bank holding the interest rate at a crushing 15.5% just to stop hyperinflation. And they know that the state, desperate to plug that 3.5 trillion in rubble hole, is eyeing the 60-tooled in rubles sitting in citizens' bank accounts, getting ready to forcibly convert them into patriotic war bonds.

5:05So, how did the Russian population answer Reagan's question with their feet and their wallets? In January alone, there was a record net outflow with 1.1 trillion rubles in physical cash from Russian banks. 1.1 trillion rubles. The people are frantically pulling physical paper out of the ATMs. They are hoarding cash under their mattresses because they know the digital gates are about the slam shot. The government is lying about the GDP. The propaganda is toward warning of a currency collapse and the citizens are staging a silent, trillion-drupal bank run right under the Tsar's nose. It's the economy's stupid, and the economy's having a cardiac arrest. Let's get the country moving again. That was John F. Kennedy in 1960, the promise of a kinetic energy. The promise of a modern, functioning machine driving the state forward into a new decade. But if you want to know how the Russian state is moving in 2026, you don't look at the fake GDP spreadsheets. You look at the metal, you look at the pipes. You look at the brilliant terrifying autopsy

6:06provided by the exiled Russian economist Igor Lipsitz. Lipsitz gave us the ultimate metaphor for the physical rotting of the federation. Somewhere in Russia right now, there is a factory keeping the military industrial complex alive. And inside the factory, sits a massive 70-year-old pre-war German hydraulic press. It's a beast of machine. It's the beating heart of the production line. But here's the catch. The press is so old, so degraded and so impossible to replace under modern sanctions, that it only works because that is exactly one guy left, who knows how to keep it from exploding. A retired 70-year-old pensioner. He knows exactly which valve to hit with a wrench, exactly how much scavenged oil it will pour in the gears, and exactly how to caudle this ancient German monster. If the pensioner has a heart attack tomorrow, the press stops. If the press stops, the factory stops. If the factory stops, the supply chain breaks. That is the Russian economy. It's not a modernized superpower. It's a 70-year-old machine, held together by duct tape,

7:06cannibalized parts and an aging workforce that is actively dying off for being sent to the meat grinder. They are literally running out of the 1960s utility pipes they need just to keep the human anthills on the suburbs from freezing solid. And the state knows it. They know the workers are trying to flee before the press finally breaks. Which brings us to William McKinley, very old 1900 election promise. A full dinner pale. A promise of prosperity and a full stomach for the working man. What's the Kremlin's version of the full dinner pale? The velvet iron curtain. Because the peasants are pulling their money out of the banks and looking for the exit, the state Duma is actively panicking. They just proposed an exit tax. They went to charge Russian tourists, hundreds to 300 rubles, just for the privilege of leaving the country. It's a financial ankle monitor. They're literally taxing their own citizens, just to step outside the digital gulag. And let's talk about the digital gulag. The Kremlin is pushing the digital rule, but as we established back in episode 2.14,

8:08this isn't crypto, this isn't financial freedom, this is the modern digital equivalent of the Zavodzka-Lavka. The old Soviet style company store. Hit this company's crypt, programmable money that the state can turn off if you attend the wrong protest or try to buy a train ticket to the border. The dark guns are ironier here. Well, sadly, we have to look across the ocean at Joshua Fluke and the Silicon Valley tech bros. Because right now, American tech companies are sitting in their glass boardrooms trying to figure out how to pay their own software developers in AI compute tokens instead of actual money. Look at the absolute cyber-apungalistopia we're dealing with here. On one side of the world, you have a collapsing irradiated Russian empire, trying to fight a 21st century algorithmic drone war by relying on a single 70-year-old pensioner to hit the rusting pre-war German hydraulic press with a wrench, and on the other side of the ocean, you have American tech bros trying to reinvent 19th century a pelacian coal-town company's crypt using blockchain and AI. It's why techs serve them, being built on both sides of the globe. But in Russia, the digital gulag isn't built on sleek California servers.

9:10It is built on top of rotting Soviet utility pipes that are literally freezing the peasants to death in their own beds. Whether it's the Tsar and the Kremlin or a tech bro in Palo Alto, the goal is exactly the same. Trap the surf in the company town. A warning to all the developers out there. Do not emulate the Russian economy. Unless, of course, you want to end up locked in the digital company town, praying to Steve Jobs, the exact same way that madman Fachko praised Stalin. The machine's rusting. The doors are locking. Return to normalcy. That was War and G Harding's winning pitch to the American public in 1920. After the trauma of the First World War in the Spanish flu, he promised an exhausted nation that they could go back to business as usual. The factories would come, the ledgers would balance, and normal life would resume. If you are a corporate executive in Russia right now, there is no return to normalcy. Normalcy is dead and buried. Let's look at the actual ledgers of the Russian corporate sector. They're bleeding out. We're looking at the record 7.5 trillion rubles in corporate losses.

10:11The mighty Kamaz, the pride of Russian heavy industry, and multiple times winner of the Dakar rally, lost 37 billion rubles all on its own. Sement consumption, the absolute baseline metric for a developing country, has crashed to a 15-year low. And then, then there's the housing market. Oh, the housing market, is a master piece of a scam. The giant developer Somalyot, the people who are supposed to be building the glorious future of the Russian middle class, are currently on their knees, begging the government for a 50 billion rubles bailout. Why? Well, because the entire sector is collapsing Pyramids' scheme. The developers are literally bribing state commissions to fake accept and finish buildings, so they just can unlock and steal the escrow funds. And what are the Russian people getting for this? Well, they're taking out massive, family mortgages at predatory rates to live in 15 square meter macro studios. The state is telling them to breed and raise a new generation of imperial soldiers in a concrete box of the size of a parking space. That is their return,

11:11the normalcy. Which brings us to the military peace and prosperity. That was Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956. But when your entire state is built on a war economy, peace is a threat and prosperity is only for the generals. Let's do an autopsy of the Russian military industrial complex. First, the physical destruction. Again, I have to talk about Breansk. They did not just hit a random factory over there, you know. The Kremlin-L microchip plant is, well, at least its sector 4 is smoking rubble. That plant, I have to remind you, was the only enterprising their entire country, producing the specific diodes and chips needed for the cutting-edge active face-deray radars. Which are used in S-300, S-400, S-400-S, 500 air defense systems. Because of that strike and because parallel imports have completely crashed, Russia, even mathematically, can replace the radars with losing. And they're losing a lot of them. In just the first two months of this year, the Russian military burned through 600 million dollars, worth a irreplaceable radar and anti-aircraft equipment.

12:13The sky is emptying out. But the real rot isn't from Ukrainian drones, it's coming from inside the house. Well, you know, got our hands on an incredible intercept from a prominent Russian UAV developer, and it lays out exactly how the Ministry of Defense is actively destroying its own private defense sector. The Ministry has rigged the state defense order that goes, capping the profit margin for private manufacturers, had a pathetic 7%. 7. It is mathematically impossible to design, yield and innovate high-quality military drones, on a 7% margin. The Ministry of Defense knows this well. So the developers are forced to inflate their costs, just to survive. And that is exactly the trap. As soon as these independent developers sing their own millions into production, the state turns around, accuses them of a mezzlement, bankrupts them, and throws them in a cage. They are deliberately purging the private defense market. Why? Well, so the corrupt Kremlin towers can clear the field, and monopolies over to their crow days and steal the budget,

13:13for themselves. And, what about the soldiers in the front line? The guys begging for those drones, so they don't get blown to pieces in the mud. The elites don't care. So the generals and bureaucrats, the Russian soldier is nothing but a meat conveyor. An exhaustible flow, an exhaustible flow of disposable bodies. The only thing the elites care about is monopolizing the cash flow before the opportunity, finally, slams, shut. Uprage to the 21st century. That was Bill Clinton's promise in 1996. The DONE of the internet age. The promise that technology would liberate information, collect globe, and make walls obsolete. In 2026, the Russian state is taking that bridge and blowing it up with 22 billion rubles worth of taxpayer dynamite. Let's talk about the Cheburnet. A Rusk-Mnozzar, the state sensor, has spent 22 billion rubles trying to build a digital atom dome, and they're finally succeeding in turning the lights out. The Gram is officially failing

14:13across Russia. The internet is being choked to death. Mobile internet doesn't even work in major Russian cities anymore, and the reaction from the liberal elites in Moscow. It's pathetic. We have maximum cuts going online and winding that modern drivers are helpless, because the GPS is being jammed. He's crying. The city boys can't find their way around the block of the screen telling them where to run. South-Hands leap to South-Hair brains. Over here, here, on the actual eastern border where the mud is deep and the swamps are real, we don't cry over broken apps. GPS gets scrambled every single night for national security anyways. You adapt. You navigate the dirt trails by a memory. If some pampered Moscow hipster blindly follows a broken map screen to the Lodgallian forest, he's got to get rough dubbed by cigarette smugglers or old believers, long before the border goes down. The police have absolutely no idea how the real country survives when the grid goes down. The state's war on the internet isn't just an inconvenience for

15:13Moscow drivers. It's a fatal betrayal. But I do have to state that, uh, well, this is one of the reasons why Maxim Katz won't get any votes from the rural country side when he comes back to Moscow. But for one, vote for the man you trust. That was William Harvard Taft in 1908, a simple plea for personal loyalty. For years, Ilya Demyoslov was the ultimate loyalist. He was the regime's attack dog, the man who spent years crusading against the violently in the opposition. And back in 2017, Demyoslov stood up at a media forum looked Vladimir Putin in the eye and asked him about the future of the internet. Putin looked right back at him and promised Russia would never take the Chinese path of total censorship. Ten years later, the attack dog has realized his master is a liar. Demyoslov just published a manifesto of a loyalist suicide note. He's screaming into the void that the desire lied to him. Telegram is 80% blocked, and a total blackout is scheduled for April 1. The system has gone so completely insane

16:13that they are strangling the exact same communication networks that their own frontline soldiers rely on to survive the meat assaults. We'll get back to Demyoslov a bit later, though. What's the alternative, though? The state is hurting everyone. Soldiers bleeding out in the trenches, doctors trying to run into this max. We have spoken a lot about this. It's the state mandated, leaky, heavily monitored messenger app, run by Sergey Krienko. They're just stripping the citizens of their right to basic survival, and forcing them into a digital panopticon, just so the man, the FSB man can read their desperate texts. You vote for the man you trust, and he locks you in in a digital gulag. But now I have to take a bit of a quick shilling break here. Speaking of survival and hostile environment, keeping this broadcast running out here in the swamp steaks resources. If you want to help keep the power banks charged through guns or journalism flowing, head over to patreon.com slash eastern borer. Your support is the only thing keeping

17:13the lights on in this bunker. And if you want to wear the colors, check out the merchant they stood on 4th wall. The links are on the episode description. And, well, in the 4th wall you can also become a member, I think, pay 3 on this per episode. At least until November, 4th wall is over there. You can also just go to our homepage eastern borer.lv. And, you know, click the donate button there. Maybe even send us some crypto. Well, you know, it's all there. But that's how you can support the show if you want to. And, you know, I'm trying to make it so that you actually would want to. But most importantly, most importantly, if you want to make a tangible physical difference in this war, please go to car for Ukraine.com. That's car 4- Ukraine.com. They're doing incredible life-saving work outfitting trucks for the front lines. Just pick any campaign they're running. I don't care about personal glory that I care about supporting the front lines there. So, you know, support them, support us. And, uh, let's get back to the peasant's quiz. First, I do have to take a little sip of beer, though, because mouth does get drived or doing this for

18:13a while. Prosperity is just around the corner. Herbert Hoover said that to the American public in 1932. He said it while the stock market was a smoking crater. While banks were locking their doors, and while desperate families were building shanty towns out of scrapwood that they literally named Hoover Wells. He asked the starving population just to hold on a little longer, because the medical was right around the bend. In 2026, the Russian regime is broadcasting that exact same Hoover Wells delusion, but the service are no longer buying it. We have the internal polling data, and we have the internal polling data, and we have the internal polling data, and we have the internal polling data, and we have the internal polling data, and it's a psychiatric disaster. Right now, 42% of the Russian population is clinically depressed. 83%, 84%, but that numbers really sink in. 84% of the country right now are openly terrified of rising prices. They aren't scared of NATO. They aren't scared of the CIA. They are terrified of the grocery store. Because when the Russian family walks into a supermarket

19:13today, a basic survival level grocery around is hitting 30,000 rubles. Sorry, that's 30 euros, approximately. That's quite a lot for Russia, where the salaries are lower, but the prices have, I would even say, exceeded European levels. A single block of breastly-tops butter, not French brain, not luxury imports, just the standard block of butter to put on your bread has hit 500 rubles. That's five euros, approximately. Even more, even. That's insane. And if you get sick, oh, if the stress and routing infrastructure finally break your immune system. The barcode is there. The barcode is spiked by 41%. Think about that means that the barcode is the classical disease of poverty, of grouting, damn housing and of crowded prisons. The regime has spent a lot of few years emptying its prisons into the meat grinder and the surviveers are bringing the rod back home. And the state's response is to make the medicine 41% more expensive.

20:13Heh. The Kremlin knows the surfers are at the breaking point. They know the So, they have engineered what we are calling the Oktober Trap. You see, there are state doom elections coming up in September. The regime needs the Serfs to quietly walk into the polling stations and cause their fake votes without starting a riot. So the Ministry of Finance and the Regional Governors have artificially delayed the massive necessary utility price hikes. They're freezing the bills right now, letting the infrastructure decay even faster, just to hide the pain. Second, the polls close in September, the Oktober Trap Snap shot, and the utility bills are going to skyrocket. They are sacrificing the physical survival of the country for a smooth election cycle. Which brings us to our next slogan, a square deal. With almost half a million customers and over a trillion dollars of secure payments, Bill isn't new to intelligent finance. It's the proven way to simplify Bill pay and maximize cash flow.

21:14Want to learn more? Visit bill.com slash proven for a special offer. This episode is sponsored by Bumble, and honestly, thank God, because dating out there is a full-time job. I feel like every woman I know has a Bumble story, like either a success story, they found their person on the app, or why is this man holding a fish in every photo situation. But Bumble is actually the dating app my girlfriends use and trust because it doesn't feel chaotic. It feels intentional, and that matters. What I love is that Bumble actually listens to women. They were like, okay, you're tired of guessing, you're tired of decoding vibes, so they built tools to make it easier. Like their verification tools are huge. With photo verification and ID verification, you can actually feel confident that this person is who they say they are. Plus with so many unique prompt options, it's easy to get the conversation started. For my prompt, I would choose, one thing to know about my friend group is making fun of each other is our love language. It makes profiles feel more real, more confident, and easier to connect with. So if you're tired of the guessing game, and want dating to feel easier, download Bumble

22:16and make real connections today. The fundamental premise that the government will treat the working class with basic fairness and dignity. I think it's Teddy Roosevelt on 1904. Let me introduce you to the Russian definition of a square deal. Let me introduce you to Irina Podivilova, a regional utility official in the Urals. See the Urals are freezing. The real wages of the working class there have been devoured by the 15.5% interest rates and the 500 rubles of water. And recently, the state announced the 380 rubles hike in their monthly heating bills. Again, the people are not rich and they naturally panicked. They asked how they were supposed to survive this when they can barely afford to eat. Irina, Podivilova sitting in her warm, bureaucratic office looked at these desperate freezing peasants and publicly told them that to afford the new heating bill they just need to save on two cups of coffee or two packs of cigarettes. It's a breathtaking moment of Marie Antoinette delusion.

23:16And even though that part was actually fake as Marie Antoinette, they were told people to eat cake. Well, Irina Podivilova is telling people to drink less Starbucks or whatever the Russian analog is. The state officially genuinely believes that the rural working class of Russians, the people trying to stretch 3,000 rubles across the week of groceries, are casually sipping caramel machiatos on their way to the factory. She has absolutely no concept of the grinding, hopeless poverty that her own government has so successfully engineered. There is no square deal, there is no prosperity around the corner, there is just an official telling you to give up your imaginary coffee so you don't freeze to death in your own apartment. Read my lips, no new taxes. George A.W. Bush, 1988. He made that promise knowing full well that the math wouldn't let him keep it. The math sometimes just doesn't math. The state always needs its pound of flesh, no matter what the politician's promise on television. Vladimir Putin is currently making a very similar promise, like this one, to the Russian elites.

24:19He's telling them that the war in the Middle East is going to save them. And unfortunately there are a bunch of sterile game theory academics in the West, people like, well, actually a guy that I respect quite a lot, but there, I have to just criticize them a bit, like William Spaniel. Great guy, love his YouTube channel, but again, doing sterile game theory academics here just won't work. These people, you know, look at their spreadsheets and agree, they look at the hormones blockade to see the price of oil spike and they conclude Putin has been rescued by the chaos. But out here on the border, we don't look at sterile game theory. We look at the ledgers, actual physical ledgers. He's bringing Rami Zaytsman, he's into Western academic, he's a Russian investment broker talking directly to his own people, and he's popping the Kremlin's balloon. Just the Iran oil shock is giving Russia a bump, it's giving them maybe an extra 150 million dollars a day, but Zaytsman runs the math board of his audience. That 150 million a day is an absolute drop in the ocean compared to 3.5 trillion rubles deficit the government just blew through in January and February.

25:21The oiled windfall is a mirage, it cannot plug the hole. And because the oil money isn't enough to save them, what is the Russian state doing? Well, they hiked the value added tax 32%, lead my lips, no new taxes, yeah. Tell that to the fucking freezing surfs paying 500 rubles for butter, the state is taxing the poorest people in the country to fund an imperial delusion. Which brings us to the grand Russian energy superpower bluff, and our next historical slogan. In 1978, the UK Conservatives run a famous campaign with the slogan, labor isn't working. Let's update that for 2036, the shadow fleet isn't working. The Spanish financial analyst at Visual Economic just dropped a bombshell report that completely dismantled Putin's energy superpower blackmail. The Kremlin keeps threatening to freeze Europe, but Europe is not the same content it was in 2022. The European grid has completely decoupled from Russian gas. Four years ago, every 1 euro spike in the price of gas translated to a 92% spike in electricity.

26:24Today? Well, because of the massive shift to renewables in industrial efficiency, that same gas spike only adds 25 cents to the electricity bill. The European grid has been vaccinated against Putin's blackmail. And the EU Energy Commissioner just slammed the door shut permanently, officially declaring that Europe will never import, quote, as much as one molecule, and quote, a Russian gas again. So where does the oil go? To the east, right? To the great shadow fleet. The shadow fleet isn't working. Because of the seconder sanctions crushing productivity by up to 70%, India has dropped its imports of Russian crude by over 50% in just three months. And the result? Well, Russia currently has 150 million barrels of oil literally sitting around in ports and floating on tankers, with absolutely no buyers. It's a 6.5 billion dollar dead weight. Interestingly enough, by the way, even though Trump has just stated that he might remove the sanctions and the oil that is out there on the seas can be sold, well, two little things.

27:25Firstly, Europe's not buying any of that stuff, because we're sticking strong to our sanctions. And number two, you know how actually taxes work for Russian oil? Well, first of all, they pay taxes on the moment of, well, place of where they actually dig up the oil. And secondly, at the moment they pay the export tax where they really put in the oil in the tankers. The tax has already been paid by it for the soil that's just sitting out there. They might get some tiny little bit of of money coming in there, because the income doesn't go even straight to the Russian budget, which also Williamspanel tends to think it does, but it doesn't, because one third goes to Gazprom, which is already only nearly bankrupt. One third goes for all the prices. The Kremlin actually might just get one third of what's happening out there, and it's taxed already, like a bunch of it. The fact that they can actually sell that oil going over there, well, they won't get $6.5 billion, which is a dead weight right now, but, you know, might help a bit, but not by much. See, the ultimate beautiful irony here is that the Kremlin is instituted strict capital

28:28controls to stop the bank run we talked about earlier, which artificially propped up the value of the rubble. By Putin, sells that oil in dollars, and he has to pay his soldiers in defense plants in the rubles. That artificially is strong rubble, means he gets fewer rubles for every Petro dollar, and the Kremlin's own currency controls are actively bankrupting the Ministry of Defense. They have all these battles of foil that they can't really sell, and the energy blackmail scheme that you'd up is laughing at, and they currency trap up their own making. A tiny little spike from the oil prices right now, that won't do much, because remember, the sanctions, well, they do hit in if they go over the cap. But then there's something else. A chicken in every pot. That was Herbert Hoover in 1928. The ultimate political promise of basic physical sustenance for the working family. If the state is functioning, the state ensures you can eat. Let's look at how the promises playing out on both sides of the eastern border right now. Because of the Hormuz blockade and the global energy shock we just talked about, here

29:30in Latvia we're facing a 25% spike in fuel prices. That is a real crisis for our agricultural sector. It threatens the rye bread and the potato harvest. But because we actually live in a functional system, we adapt. The government sits down and adjusts the tax policies, cuts the excise due reason, helps the farmers survive the shock. We deal with reality as it happens. Now let's look across the border at Siberia. The Russian state isn't helping its farmers survive. It's actively, like I mentioned in the previous episode, exterminating the livelihoods and what the locals are already calling Holodomor 2.0. Now I do have to state that previously I made fun of the Big Meat. But you know what? It's not even looking that funny anymore since I've gathered more data. Strangely enough, the Big Meat Conspiracy all this nonsense turns out to be actually quite true. Well, one of the very few things, you know, broken clock and all that one. Because you see, from the current data that I have here, it really does seem that under

30:33the guise of a completely unverified, pastoralosis outbreak. The massive, state-back agricultural monopolies, like Minatoorg, well, right now they have actually started using the Omone Riot Police to conduct corporate trading operations against independent farmers. Really? Because turns out they are not taking blood tests, they're not checking the milk. They are literally sending armed thugs and body armor into the villages of Novosibirsk, Ones Canal Tide to drag healthy cows out of the barns and burn them alive in giant trenches and we're talking thousands of them and only the small farmers are affected. I think the total number is like over 5,000 livestock and only from the small farmers, the big ones like the very previously mentioned Minatoorg, well, now they have been completely untouched. Then Minatoorg is tied to the Mitri Medvedev 2. I truly have to give credit to where credit is due. I'm sorry, but Mitri Medvedev's sponsored takeover of this beef business looks like real thing. And you know, another thing that's interesting is the compensation for destroying the family's

31:34entire source of generational wealth, pathetic 171 rubles per kilo. I want you to do the math on that for a second. Think about the grocery store receipts we just looked at. If single standard block of breastly tops butter, like the standard one, 200 grams, half pound that would be. Right now cost 500 rubles. The Russian state values an entire kilogram of a peasant slaughter generational beef, at one third, the price of a 200 gram block of butter. And for those of you who are medically challenged, 200 grams is one fifth of a kilogram. Just saying. They're looking at the rural class, they're looking them dead in the eye and telling them, well, that poor serves that their herds, their livelihoods, their blood and sweat, are mathematically worth less than the spread you put in your morning toast. This is just an insult that's legal, state sanctioned robbery, at gunpoint. And I want to pause here for a second in a personal note, once again, really. I've seen a lot of commentaries who after listening to my show say that I hate the common Russian.

32:34This is false. I despise vatniks for their war criminals and have threatened me personally, and I don't feel much sympathy for the average Russian normally, if they're on Putin's side. But frankly, this situation has made me feel unhonest, humane pity for the Russian country side. I don't personally how much these cows mean to these people. Their whole lives are being destroyed and it's truly horrific. So yet people said all kinds of things about Stalin and Brezhnev, a lot of nasty things as their monsters. But they despised hrushchev the most, because he was the one who took their cattle and pigs away. And now the current regime is doing it worse. Hrushchev was an ideological fanatic, but this, this is just wrong they could greed backed by police batons. Which brings us to the ultimate cynical foundation of the Soviet state. Peace, land, and bread, Vladimir Ilyevich Lenin 1917. The current Tsar has broken all three. There is no peace on the media cells, there is no bread only 500 rubles of water, and the land, how the land and livestock are being stolen by the monopolies.

33:37But the tragedy of the Russian country side is that the propaganda has rotted their brains so thoroughly, they don't even know who to blame. The ultra-patriots and the zed bloggers are watching the Oman burn their cows, and instead of blaming the Kremlin, they're writing schizophrenic petitions to the FSB. They're literally claiming that the Ukrainian intelligence agents infiltrated the agricultural ministry, hacked into the Kiryenko's max messenger app, and are using it to coordinate a holocaust against Russian pigs and cows. I want you to appreciate the absolute terminals, it's a freeing of this system. We just talked about how the Kremlin is burning through 22 billion rubles to Bantelagram, and is forcing its own soldiers, doctors, and teachers to use this exact same max app, because it's supposedly the ultimate sick your patriotic option. And yet their own ultra-patriots out in Siberia genuinely believe that this very same mandatory state messenger is currently being operated by Ukrainian intelligence to murder their livestock. They're forcing the entire country into a digital panapticon that their own loyalists believe is controlled by the enemy.

34:39Glorious clinical paranoia. They would rather believe in a phantom Ukrainian hacker running Sergei Kiryenko's software that admits their own side is robbing them blind. But again, regime's own architects know the truth, they can't hide anymore. And again, we will take a look at the manifesto from Iljenimislop, the ultimate Kremlin attack dog. Even he couldn't stomach the burning trenches in Siberia. He wrote it in black and white, quote, the authorities have lost their minds so completely that they are depriving people of their animals as happen recently in Novosibirsk. When one of the chief propaganda admits the state is robbing the peasants, the illusion is dead. There is no chicken in the pot, there is only a burning counter-trench, and one of the most fanatical supporters whom we've quoted multiple times, at length in these episodes because Iljenimislop was, well, utterly, utterly fratical, when he's going this way, and something is fundamentally broken. Morning again in America, Ronald Reagan 1984, a promise to a renewed strength, don't

35:40break over a confident superpower, ready to flex its muscles. If you ask the FSB, it's morning again in the Empire, right now to distract from the collapsing economy and the burning cows, Russian intelligence services are dusting off the old 2014 Donbass-Splaybook, they're drawing up grand geopolitical fantasies about infiltrating sports activists, so-called sports activists, into the Estonian border city of Narva. They want to test NATO's article 5, they want to prove they are still a terrifying superpower, capable of hybrid warfare. But I sit 22 kilometers from that very border, well, bit south from Narva but still. I can tell you exactly how a Narva people's republic operation actually end. Russian soldiers talk to this invasion, the same soldiers who are being scammed by their own defense ministry, the same soldiers whose families are buying 500 rubles of butter, the same soldiers who GPS doesn't work, would cross the bridge from Ivangorod straight into the Estonian city of Narva. And let's make this even darker, remember that 41 per cent spike in tuberculosis medicine we talked about earlier?

36:42The FSB thinks they're projecting the image of a terrifying superpower vanguard. The reality is they are sending a disease, freezing underclass from modern crumbling hooverwills. They're sending troops who are literally coughing their way to the border. They would walk into the first European supermarket they've seen Narva. They would look at the deli aisle, see actual cheesens instead of band-jpeg images. Look at the previous episode for that one. Sea sausage made from actually healthy, unburned cows, and realized they couldn't actually buy basic antibiotics. They would mass the facts on the spot. You cannot conquer a neighboring country when your vanguard is too busy marveling at a functioning grocery store and trying to cure the round tuberculosis. I actually, you know, I fed all this data to AI because I use AI help to quickly translate a lot of text here. Everything is written by myself, but I do use AI for translation and for thumbnails for this stuff because I am bad at graphics, and two, well, getting someone to draw me one every time would cost me an insane amount of money which I don't have because, well,

37:44look at this, it's an operation 22 kilometers in Russian border. So I do what I can here. Also I doubt anyone could draw me the thumbnails as quickly as I need them to, and I can't wait for two days until I launch them. And I also just feed the Russian text straight to the AI, and you give me a translation, and then I go over it to make sure it's correct. But I fed all this data into it to ask the AI to do what it does best, give me some statistics, and the AI machine, you know, answered that if Putin was a rational agent, any idea that he would try something actually serious or not of them or anyone else for that matter is 1.5% because of how everything is going down. Then I asked him, well, it presumably about how, you know, how it would fare if we take into account that Putin is believing its own propaganda. Well, it gave me a number a bit higher, 12%. Still, that's just the odds of Putin trying something, the success rate. Well, didn't ask it to generate me a Googleplex number of zeros on the screen before it

38:46hits the 0.1, 0.1% here. See, all this mess is very real and the high priests of the regime know this, which brings us to our next slogan. In your heart, you know he's right. That was Betty Goldwater's slogan in 1964. It was an appeal to the dark and spoken ideological court of his base. It meant you might not want to say it out loud at the dinner party, but deep down you know I'm telling the truth. In your heart, Russian elites know the empire is dead. And they're finally starting to say, very much out loud. Let's look at Maxim Kalashnikov. How I like to call him, Max Kal. Kal written in Sederlik, because that literally translates to a maximum pile of shit, a favorite dual-mongering Zed's futurologist. Max Kal just put out the broadcast where he openly compared the current Russian state to the rotting final days of the communist party under Brezhnev. He warned his ultra-patriotic audience to brace for a managerial default. He believes the faction of the Russian elite has decided that the worse, the better, that

39:47they are intentionally running the economy into the ground to force a second Gorbachevism, a desperate attempt to surrender just so they can get their European visas back. But I want you to look at why they want to surrender. It has absolutely nothing to do with a sudden moral awakening or a crisis of conscience. Remember those 150 million unsolved battles of oil we talked about earlier? Remember the artificial rubble trapping their petrile dollars? The elites are in plotting a second Gorbachevism because they suddenly want peace. They're plotting it because the 6.5 billion dollar deadweight of unsolved oil means they're physically running out of cash to steal. The corporate through is completely empty, and the only way out is a white flag. Maxim Kalashnikov knows this and he's literally watching the IDF strike animations in pure jealousy, wishing his own government was capable of targeting generals instead of launching serfs into meat assaults. But Maxim Kalashnikov is just a blogger. Let's talk about the very top of the propaganda food chain. Let's talk about Vladimir Solovyev.

40:49Solovyev is the high priest of the Zedkov. He has spent two decades building Putin's reality distortion field on state television. But this month Solovyev went on a live, unhanged rant. He started screaming that the military industrial complexes broke. He yelled that the defense manufacturers are coming to him in a panic because they have to fire workers. He launched a full frontal assault on Elvira Nabilion, screaming, show me one industry besides banking that is making a profit. They have laid everything on its side with this 15.5% interest rate. And what happened? The Kremlin panicked. The censors struck back. Solovyev's rant aired in the far east, but state TV editors physically chopped it out of the broadcast before it hit Moscow. Because of all the times on difference. And physically censoring that I won't achieve propaganda because he accidentally said the quiet part out loud. The money is gone. This episode is sponsored by Bumble and honestly thank God because dating out there is a full time job. I feel like every woman I know has a Bumble story like either a success story, they found

41:52their person on the app or why is this man holding a fish in every photo situation. But Bumble is actually the dating app my girlfriends use and trust because it doesn't feel chaotic. It feels intentional and that matters. What I love is that Bumble actually listens to women. They were like okay you're tired of guessing, you're tired of decoding vibes so they built tools to make it easier. Like their verification tools are huge. With photo verification and ID verification you can actually feel confident that this person is who they say they are. Plus with so many unique prompt options it's easy to get the conversation started. For my prompt I would choose one thing to know about my friend group is making fun of each other is our love language. It makes profiles feel more real, more confident and easier to connect with. So if you're tired of the guessing game and want dating to feel easier, download Bumble and make real connections today. Over 90 of the top 100 US accounting firms trust Bill to handle bill pay processes. Why? Because our tools are built on over a trillion dollars of secure payments.

42:53We're not just moving money. We're powering financial workflows for half a million customers. It's a level of expertise you just can't fake. Ready to talk with an expert? Visit bill.com slash proven to get started and grab a $250 gift card as a thank you. Terms and conditions apply. See offer page for details. Had enough? That was the simple brutal question of the United States Republican Party which they asked the public in 1946 after years of war to the comic controls. Have you finally had enough? And here we get to the most interesting part of this whole situation. For years there was one man in Russia who seemingly could never get enough. Illyry Meslo. If you don't know who he is, you need to understand his pedigree and again we've quoted him a lot on this show. Illyry Meslo was the state's attack dog. He was the ultimate anti-navalenic crusader. For a decade Illyry Meslo built his entire career on writing hit pieces, filing lawsuits as he was a lawyer and sharing as the opposition was jailed, poisoned or exiled.

43:56He was the guy who called the opposition traitors in political prostitutes. He was a pure unfiltered loyalist. But yesterday, why am I urgently making this Illyry Meslo had enough? He slapped. He snapped completely. He published a manifesto that reads like a political suicide note. I'm going to read you parts of it directly because this is legitimately shocking. He wrote quote, 5 reasons why I stopped supporting Vladimir Putin, someone had to say it. The war in Ukraine has already claimed 1-2 million victims. I supported the annexation of Crimea in 2014 because it was bloodless. But now, it's an absolutely dead end war waged solely for the sake of Putin's complexes. I want you to connect that staggering number of 1-2 million casualties right back to what we talked earlier with the military industrial complex. Remember that rigged 7% profit margin for defense contractors. Remember the generals bankrupting private drone developers and throwing them in cages just to monopolize the cash flow. Those 1-2 million dead, aren't just the tragic accident of war. They are a direct result of a corrupt state that would rather send men and to meet

44:58assaults without their support to let an independent contractor make a profit. The casualties are literally the required fuel for a meat conveyer designed solely so the Kremlin towers can steal the budget. The generals are trading millions of Russian lives for 7% margins. He goes on to attack the economy. He attacks the fact that the state is building palaces for the president while depriving the people of their animals in Novice, Biosk. He attacks the Cheburnet, noting that he personally asked Putin about the Internet freedom in 2017 and Putin led to his face. We mentioned that previously here. This is the important part. And then the man who spent a decade hunting enemies of the state wrote this conclusion, quote, Vladimir Putin is not a legitimate president. Vladimir Putin must resign and face a trial as a war criminal and thief. Putin is literally Shura Bagalanov. Sorry, Balaganov. On the golden calf, great book by the way, the continuation of the 12 chairs, I'm a fan of Osta Bender. I've been to a desen, sad on the monument there.

46:01But uh, carrying on, he's literally Shura Balaganov from the golden calf, who was given a hundred thousand, but still reached with an aunties pocket for 13 rubles. It happened mechanically, as from Yulufan Petrov's book. The Kremlin loyalist is calling Tsar a 13-rubel thief. Which brings us to our final slogan. Clean up the mess in Washington. Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. The mess in Moscow cannot be cleaned up. And Michael Naki, the exiled political analyst, explained exactly while the mess laws break down is so terrifying for the regime. Naki has a theory he calls one step away from the right answer. For two years, two years lately, because that's when the real trouble started. The Zed bloggers, the ultra-patriots and the generals have been screaming about the collapsing economy. And well, you know, they screamed about lack of drones, meat assaults, and everything. Even previously, now we have to have the burning cows and telegram blockheads. But they always start one step away. One step away. And if you've been listening and following this show for a while, you also know this

47:04one step away, situation. They blame corrupt mayors. They blame Ukrainian hackers on the maxap. But I want you to look at what just happened for the Ymir Soloviyov. We talked about him screaming on the state TV, right? Well, Soloviyov did exactly what the system trained him to do. Note that he hasn't really switched over and did a lot of things on max. But the Ymir Soloviyov's social media, well, as you probably understand, may not be all posted by the Ymir Soloviyov personally after all. He has his team with their own, you know, state mandated, instructions after all. But Soloviyov looked exactly at the collapsing defense plans under the 15.5% interest rates and he stopped one step away. He blamed Nubiulian on the central bank. Morox's reward? The Kremlin censored him anyway on state TV. They physically chopped the high priest of the Zed cult off of Moscow airwaves. Nilelemus lost saw that. Every loyalist in the system saw that. They have now realized, at least, how I think and how Nucky puts it, that the unwritten

48:04rules are dead. If you're going to be virgin censored just for pointing out the basic mathematical reality of a bankrupt military, why bother stopping at the boyars? Damn broke. A remislo looked at the censorship of Soloviyov, realized that playing the game doesn't protect you anymore and took the final step. He aimed directly at the Tsar. Now, the system, Russian system, lives in double thing. Soloviyov, Shimonyan, Peskov, the soldiers in the mud, 90% of the country knows that remislo is telling the truth. The boiler is boiling. The control is slipping. When the state's top attack dog suddenly flips 180 degrees and calls his master a war criminal, it's not a prank. It's a system suffering a catastrophic psychological collapse. And it's happening real time. Literally, as I'm recording this broadcast, the telemetry from Moscow went absolutely critical. See, just now, five minutes before I started recording this, remislo didn't just point at the Tsar. He's now actively trying to recruit the rest of Kremlin's media practice for his mutiny.

49:06Literally, I saw this five minutes before I started recording this, remislo published to that ex-message to live near Soloviyov. He told the high priest of the Zed cult to stop following the presidential administration's orders to attack him. Instead, remislo pointed out that Soloviyov's own broadcasts criticizing the Ministry of Defense are being physically cut from the airwaves. And then he dropped the ultimate heresy. Remislo told Soloviyov to come over to the light side. He promised Soloviyov that if he joins the mutiny, he will be able to criticize not just the army by putting himself, because Putin is the one personally responsible for the rot in the military. This hasn't happened before, and I'm quite happy to be the first one in English to actually tell you about this stuff, because oh boy, others are going to catch up soon as well. And it's a piece of journalistic integrity that you know what's going on, because everyone else is going to be pretty much confused. This is so insane, by the way, the fact that regime's top attack dog is openly inviting

50:08the regime's top propaganda and dislodged coup on public television channels, that a bunch of analysts, and while Russian opposition journalists, and this bit of this time, it was Michael Naki, just threw his hands up and published the ultimate guns of theory. Naki wrote that the only logical way to explain this is if Vladimir Putin actually died a week ago. Naki spun a wild scenario where Shogun Kiryanko have secretly seized power, which is why there's suddenly no internet in Moscow, why subjain is faking Ukrainian drone attacks, and why there are machine gunners on the streets. He theorized the elites are preparing a 20th party congress, like the Russian did to denounce Putin's cult of personality and the war. Naki immediately admitted that everything he just wrote is absolute schizophrenia, it's a completely insane conspiracy theory, but here's the terrifying part. Here's the terrifying part. We literally have no other logical explanation for what he did in mislaw is doing. The only other option seems to be that Remesloch has a terminal illness only has a month to live and just decided to burn the entire house down on his way out.

51:08When your top political analyst have resorted to, the czar has been dead for a week, just to make the daily news make sense, yeah, the empire is done. And Naki summed up this entire episode, this entire 3.5 rule will live, sit in this entire collapsing 70 year old hydraulic press, with a joke. Two political scientists meet, one says, what the hell is going on? The other says, hold on, I'll explain everything to you right now. And the first one replies, I can explain it myself, I'm asking you, what the fuck is actually going on? We can explain the math, we can explain the sanctions, but what the fuck is actually going on? It's the economy, stupid. And it's finally taking the czar down with it. This is Krista Psyndrei Sons from the Eastern border, give the power banks charged and your boilers boiling, I'll see you on the other side, and remember happiness is mandatory.

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