https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ggSfZnZMyww
Well, talking of somebody who probably is as demonic as we think he is, Vladimir Putin and Ukraine, as we’re doing this interview, he’s been issuing more bellicose threats about using nuclear weapons. Yeah. Surprise, surprise. Do you think he would actually do that? Yes. What kind of person is he, Putin, do you think? Well, he’s a lot more like everybody else than anyone thinks. The notion that he’s Hitler or Stalin, that’s just foolish. I don’t see any evidence for that at all. First of all, Hitler and Stalin were very singular types. There’s a bit of Hitler and Stalin in everyone, so there’s some truth in that. Maybe there’s more in the typical Russian leader than normal. A bit of Hitler in everyone? Really? There’s more than a bit. Really? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, well, why would have Nazism spread the way it did? People think, well, that’s all top down. It’s not top down. There’s a part of people that are all these people who informed on Kate Birbal Singh. Well, didn’t Birbal say that the way to get vast numbers of people to go along with what you want to do is to terrify them? Yeah, well, that you can do that. You hold a grip of terror over them. Oh, yeah, but… And in a way, that’s what Putin’s now doing with the Russian people, where he’s going back now into a position of they’re all trying to get us, they want to attack us, they want to take us over. He’s terrifying his people to rally support for what at the moment is a conflict he has started which is not going the way he assumed. Well, the most, what would you say, the wisest commentators on totalitarian states like Solzhenitsyn and many psychological commentators, Jung was a good example of that, made a very straightforward case that you can’t have a totalitarian state unless every single person is willing to lie about everything all the time. And you can think about that as top down because the leaders lie too. And they also enforce punishments if you don’t lie. But then you can also think about it, the totalitarian spirit is replicated at every level of the society. And so in a truly totalitarian state, husbands lie to their wives and parents lie to their children. And the totalitarian state is actually the grip of the lie. And so, and people will certainly go along with that. I mean, we’re seeing that emerge here with cancel culture. It’s like lie or else. Yes. It’s like, yeah, well… And the Russian people will be bombarded all the time with state media propaganda and will be buying into a lot of what Putin is saying. Yeah. How does this war end, do you think? We’re going to find out this winter. Well, I know what I would do in his shoes. I’d wait till the first cold snap and shut off the taps. Right. Well, of course he’s going to do that. He’s got the control over the energy. Of course he’s going to do that. He’s already warned the West with his insistence that maintenance problems were necessary and the pipelines had to be shut down. He will use a nuclear weapon. If necessary, he’ll use a tactical battlefield weapon. Even if it starts World War III? It won’t. Probably. Why? Because we wouldn’t respond? What’s in it for us? If you let him do it and get away with it, where does that end? Then you are under a hit and run situation. You can get yourself in a situation, no problem, where there’s no good outcome. We’re trying to do that right now on every front we can possibly imagine. We can easily get ourselves in a situation where it’s hell this way and hell that way. That’s highly probable. Well, should the Ukrainians give the Russians anything? When I was over there recently interviewing President Zelensky, what I was struck by was everybody I met in Kiev, the capital city, were utterly resolute. Don’t give them an inch of our land. Yeah. Well, I can’t speak to that because I don’t know what the preconditions for peace might be. But I do know that naive notions that the Russians are going to lose somehow, or that we’re going to win, I just don’t understand that. Well, what do you mean we’re going to win? What are we going to win here exactly? Well, I guess a victory would be that the Russians retreated from Ukraine. With Ukrainian ruins. Right. Well, that’s a hell of a victory. I think Putin could manage that because I think he could tell his people, and I think they might buy it. It’s like we accomplished our objective. We devastated Ukraine and we kept it out of the hands of the West. And that’s not great. It’s not what we’d hoped for, but it’s better than the alternative. And I think they would buy that. And I think when Putin went into Ukraine, I thought, well, I thought a bunch of things, which I made a YouTube video about that. People criticized like, Matt, I thought, okay, well, what’s happening here? Oh, I see. His endgame for failure is that Ukraine is left in a smoking ruin. Oh, that’s a victory. So then he can lose with impunity. So how can we win? We can’t win against Vladimir Putin anyways because you cannot win against someone you cannot say no to. Period. And we can’t say no to Putin because we sold our soul for his oil and gas. And we did that to elevate our moral stature in relationship to saving the planet. And so here we are facing a very dire winter, hoisted on the petard of our own foolishness and moral presumption. We’re saving the planet. We’ll see. I don’t think so. It doesn’t look like it to me. And this is the most catastrophic issue here, assuming that we’re facing an environmental crisis of planetary proportions, which is not something I buy, by the way, assuming we are. Well, then I would imagine that you would put in place measures that would ameliorate that problem instead of exacerbating it. But all the measures you’re putting in place are actually making the environmental problem worse. So how is that even vaguely acceptable? And I look at that and I think, oh, I see. It’s just like George Orwell said about middle class socialists 50 years ago. It’s not that you love the planet. It’s that you hate humanity. So well, have at her, boys and girls. And we’ll see what happens this winter. And it’s very terrifying to me, especially here, because your energy prices have gone way out of control. And that’s going to hurt a lot of poor people and certainly around the world as well. The World Bank already estimated that we’ve put 350 million people into what they call a food insecurity. 350 million. That’s three times as many as the communists managed to kill. Maybe we can manage that in the winter. But the planet has too many people on it anyway. So you know, that’s just poor people.