Doomed to Fail - Ep 87 - Crossing Putin - Sudden Russian Death Syndrome

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

Fingers crossed, Farz survives the year with the stories he's telling us! Today, he walks through the 'mysterious' deaths of Alexei Navalny, Alexander Litvinenko, and Yevgeny Prigozhin—three men who dared to question the work of Russia's current Tzar-in-training, Vladimir Putin. You know us, and you know we love Russian history - so we're on our way to try to understand the why behind what Russia is currently doing.  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Orenthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Okay. And we're back on to the Fars side of our story. And, Taylor, I hate to this point, but this is going to be kind of a quick one. But we're both, it's late and we're tired. I want to tell you something first when during our 10 minute break when I went before I went to read the kids of story I came back and you weren't here but Miles my son had put my headphones on and he goes do do do hi Uncle Fars I'm going to talk about volcanoes and I was like are you making what I mean and he was like yes I wish I had recorded that I could have been our next intro we switch to what I'm going to talk about volcanoes oh my God

Taylor, I love the idea of, like, Miles doing the intro in, like, some mocking hilarious way. Oh, so funny. That was awesome. But you can do the intro now. Oh, yeah, Doom to Fail. Welcome to Doon to Fail. I'm Fars. This is Taylor.

We are here. We're recording. This is coming out on on Wednesday. It is fairly late for us to be recording. And we are going to maintain our energy, though. We're doing good maintaining our energy. I feel like our energy levels are normal. They're up.

And it's not a normal Sunday. Do you have tomorrow off? I don't have any days off. Well, tomorrow's holiday. Not for me. For the rest of America. For the rest of America. So actually, yeah, really good point there.

So I'm going to dive into my topic. Like I said, let me kind of a quick one. I'll explain why it's going to me a quick one as I get into this. So, Taylor, I'm going to have you guess what my subject is. Okay. Who is the one person on earth? Nobody on earth should. ever fuck with.

Putin. But I'm actually not covering Putin. But I'm covering Putin. But I'm covering the people that did what I just said you shouldn't do to Putin because I realized that if I were to try and cover Putin's life, I mean, that would be a seven-part series on its own. I did listen to a biography about him. And I bought something that I haven't in the other room otherwise I would show you, but I have this book. that's like a thesis, like a business school thesis, that people think that Putin read and, like, plagiarized when he went to school. I can't believe. I kind of get an idea of, like, what he was like.

So what do you think of the guy? I think he's out of his fucking mind. Okay. Like, like, out of his mind. Like, so there's, so that's the conclusion of the book that I read that I can find about him. I read, like, a biography of him was that, like, he is. not someone who can be reasoned with because he is thinking about things in a way that like there's no way he's wrong and he has this thing which he did this week or last week we met with Tucker Carlson

he like wants to talk about the history of Russia in this way and he lives a life like he might as well be an alien he lives a life that's like so different than everybody else is and he believes when he believes so fiercely that like you can't you could never reason with him okay it's like just totally different here's saying I'm not going to actually cover the man himself so your perspective since you already know a lot would be really useful does he like so many narratives around him has to he wants to bring Russia back to a place of like superiority but he believes in like ethnic kind of puberty so like he believes in a weird way like not the normal way like he believes like slavs should be with slavs so Ukraine shouldn't be its own country should be it's a slav country

so it's like a weird ethnic mishmash of it's like a weird ethnic mishmash of of imperialism, like, what is, like, the fundamental belief structure that you think this guy operates on? Well, I think that you're right. It's like Russian superiority. And it's wanting to go back to a time of, like, this happens again and again and again with people like, these like dictators who are like selling the story of going back to a past that is perfect that never really existed, you know? So they're like, I want to go back to like, he like loves Kathy and the Great. I'm about to Katham the Great time. like everyone was Russian and all these things. But you're like, also Catherine Vigrate was like, recognize that Russia is very ethnically diverse, you know? And like she would travel around and meet people of different religions and like all these things. But like in his head is like he has this idea of when it was perfect.

My computer just like did a weird flash. Do you think that we're being recorded now by the Russians? Or the CIA. Oh my God. Someone is reporting us. Oh. But not just you. Not just me.

No. Um, yeah. So I think, I mean, gosh, I read it a couple years ago. But I feel like that was like the big thing was like, you know, he has this idea in his head of this mythical past that never really existed. He's like, want to go back to this like perfection. And you also cannot reason with him because he doesn't, he thinks differently like not in like a good way. But he just like he's not someone who will ever understand your like other people's views. So my take after like having done the research on the things he's done, not himself is. Like, given how divided America is, and given how big and powerful Russia is, like, I could totally see this guy. Like, I could totally see, like, your grandkids one day, like, worshipping at, like, a statue in the middle of, like, New York Times Square, Times Square, to, like, Vladimir Putin. Like, he, he seems, like, crazy calculated. And, like, like, we're so. divided and like he has such sorry that was not to be offensive

as like your kid that was more of like our generation like a generation from now I can see him having taken over the entire world because like he's so crazy calculated his timing is so devious

and he like and he got that way so like he was like in the government for a long time like I remember like his he's like the second child and his family and his brother had died when like salingrad was under siege and there was no food during world war two and so he he had like lived

this like really weird life like we have to stockpile things and we have to like we cannot starve to death so like Russia has tons of food stockpiled and like at one point he was in charge of doing it and he like royally fucked it up and then like learned from it and moved on so he also has no like he just is going to keep going you know yeah yeah yeah he seems like a really interesting, like, character. He seems very, very scary.

Like, I'm... Any world leader, I think, like, he's probably the scariest. Yeah. So, at first, what I was going to do was, I was going to cover people who had crossed Putin,

and I was going to cover, like, what they did, how they crossed him, what happened to them. And so I started to dig it into it. And I was like, okay, I found, like, 12 people or so that were of there listed any major media publication on people who have prosecuting and being killed for it. And then I discovered a thing called sudden Russian death syndrome, which is like literally it's like all in caps. It's a real phrase, which is the name given by the media of just all these Russian people, oligarchs and billionaires, basically not

like traditional, like, media people that get killed, more, or political opposition they get killed, but it's like, people who probably knew a lot, and he didn't want them alive anymore, and these are, all the people who I killed between 2022 and 2020, it was 50 of them. It was

50 people that committed suicide, quote unquote, by throwing themselves off a high-rise building, dabbing themselves in the back, throwing themselves down a flight of stairs. Like, you know, it was just... Yeah, yeah. And so, and so I was like, Yeah. And so I was like, I can't, I can't cover it because it would take like, it would take like 70 episodes to find everyone that he killed. And so I thought I covered like three that were kind of like a cross section of the people that he killed. One being political opposition, one being a military opposition and one being media related sensationalization of what he's done. And I want to kind of talk through that because one of them actually just.

died like four or five days ago and i wanted to kind of dive into a little bit the last one is also one that happened pretty recently but i want to go into like what was going on there and how devious it was and how the more i learned about like what that guy was doing with putin was like man this guy's this guy's like on another level he's he's not just like normal evil he's like doctor doctor what is it dr evil yeah dr evil um anyway so So with the guy who just died like three or four days ago. His name is Alexi Navalny. You've heard of this guy, right?

Yeah, I'm excited because I feel like I knew that stuff. I saw this on the news, but I did not know a lot of the details. Yeah. So I spent more time researching this and I did writing the outline. So just ask questions as you want because I probably know that. So Alexi, he's a lawyer who was born on June 4th, 1976. It's almost my birthday. That's fine.

1976? No, I haven't been 5th. Oh. So he was pretty successful and is a byproduct of his success as an attorney. He would buy shares in certain publicly traded companies in Russia. And as a result, he was able to get access certain information around what was going on with that company financially, who was involved in it, so on and so forth. And he was able to kind of root out a bunch of, like, corrupt activities. where certain officials had tied certain types of industries

and money was being siphoned off in ways that he could identify. He ended up starting a blog and publishing content on YouTube that was basically calling out a lot of the people that ended up being part of the Russian Southern Death Syndrome, all these major oligarchs, all these billionaires, all these people tied to Putin in some way, shape, or form, and all tied to corruption and embezzlement in some way. So at first, it was kind of small-time stuff.

It was like, I mean, small-time. time for where it got to. Like it would be like calling out like a defense secretary or something along those lines. But eventually it moved its way up to, uh, Dmitri Medvedev, who was the prime minister of Russia for a brief, brief interim period between Putin's first reign and his second reign. And then eventually he got all the way up to calling out Vladimir Putin himself directly. He specifically called out that Putin had built a state, I I guess you could call it. That's approximately worth $1.4 billion for a home.

And based on the estimates I read, it was about the landmass of it was about 37 times the entire landmass of Belarus. And so it was a massive, yeah, it was considered a country within a country. It was basically considered a place where Putin could self-isolate. And there's a movie that was actually... created around this called Putin's palace. And in it, Alexi is an un, he's a non-credited producer of the documentary. So he was like, he was really into this. And he was so into this that he was flying drones over this area, which I don't even know how you would do. Like he was getting, he was getting super in his, yeah, he was getting super into Putin's like space. So as a result

of this, he started rising in prominence and he founded a new political party called Russia for the future that was standing on kind of like a non-corruption platform but it was also like like look we've talked about this a million times like take the less of lesser of evils in this case his goal was to unseat Putin and the corruption there they're in who's also like isolationist anti-immigration like pro-slavid like it was very like of that demographic that we would say like okay that's kind of closed-minded but it's like was rather that or Putin like at least this guy was like aiming one step closer to something better so he's he's he's still like a he's still a figure that is like a little bit complicated but he was trying to do the best for the time with the

people of russia so one thing you would do is he would organize he had a huge following he organized protests around russia and against food around the corruption and he would talk about this all this stuff and televise it through his youtube channel on his blog and at that point that's when people kind of sort of noticing higher up in the Kremlin and he eventually ran for mayor of Moscow and he ended up getting 27% of the votes which to us doesn't sound like a big deal but they're all rigged like they're all rigged like the fact that he got more than 0% was like a huge victory for him his party and his supporters so throughout this he was also getting arrested on all these charges for various things basically

the government was trying to create this illusion that he we have an open democracy so this guy can protest against us but we'll also like throw these like trumped up charges at him and like get him locked up because why do you want to trust this guy because he's also getting arrested for random shit

it's like it's like a weird like don't look here look there kind of a thing and one of the things that they arrested him off they they arrested on embezzlement charges like it was very clearly like we're trying to attack him with the thing that he's attacking us for.

And so that's kind of where, where their stance was. So the Kremlin was very well aware of him. He had built up a political movement. He'd organized the movement on his own, and he was getting punished for it, essentially. This all came to a head in August of 2020. So on August 20th of that year, he board a flight to Moscow from a city called Tumps, and he became violently ill. They diverted that flight to a small town called,

umsk which is very small it's a very small town very limited facilities very little limited medical staff and so the care that he needed for how violently ill he was was insufficient and at that point everybody who knows anything in the international community knew what was going on and so the international community kind of asserted um uh some influence over the government of russia saying hey this guy needs real real help we will take care of him for free just transfer him out of Russia. And so they did, Angela Merkel was really the biggest person who helped out here. And

she helped get him transported to Berlin for further treatment. Wait, can I? I love Kate McKinn's impression of Angela Merkel. Have you ever seen it? On Saturday Live, but she like pretends that she's texting people and like kind of flirt. It's just like really really funny because she's

Kate McKinin is hilarious and it's really funny. I'm sure it is. Anything she does is pretty much top notch. So eventually he would recover in Germany and somehow he would find out the contact information of the FSB agents who he thought were responsible for whatever happened to him. He actually, there's a recording of him posing as an aide to the National Security Council talking to the people who actually poisoned him saying, hey, what did you do to this guy? And they explained everything on a recording. So we know exactly what happened to him.

What happened to him was that these agents from the FSB went into his hotel room while he, he was out and then put a strip of what's called Novi-Chuk, which is a nerve agent on its underwear at the hotel so that when he put it on and the nerve agent made contact with his skin, it would poison him. That was the idea. And when I read about what happens, your entire muscle system fails. Like, you go into complete seizures. Like you, it is a horribly painful way to go.

Yeah. So by this point, it was super clear the government has something to do with this. Regardless of that, in January, on. in January of 2021, five months after he'd been poisoned, he gets on a plane from Berlin going to Moscow. The plane is chalkful reporters. And they were saying, like, are you afraid? Like, you know what's happening?

He would say, hey, I'm going to this airport. This is the time I land. Meet me there. Like, he was being super cocky, super confident about it. And he told the reporters, like, I'm never afraid to go back to my home country. like he was like he was actually like a pretty noble dude like despite some of his beliefs being a little bit like not ideal um obviously a second he lands he's arrested he's arrested because they said that on one of those previous embezzlement charges he'd skip parole or something and so they arrested him on that he would end up getting transferred to a penal colony in the arctic circle called polar wolf which was actually the news like today i think about like the conditions there about how it is yeah like it's awful so apparently it gets negative 30 degrees and they still bring prisoners out in the in the morning and make them like do roll call and like basically like

scraps of clothes and like they barely feed them what one thing they said is that he apparently got one loaf of bread a month to eat yeah it's crazy so i okay two things King MacKinnan also does a really good impression of someone in Russia Are you are you like literally just watching Kate McKinnon? No, but I just like that just like that reminded me. She does one where she's like, she's like, we don't have, we don't have windows, we have wolves or something like really, really funny. She's hilarious. But so there's a couple of things that are great about her.

But I read a book, what is the book? The book about the blog in Russia. Yeah, that's what it was. Polar Wolf is basically a gulag. I read One Day in the Life of Ivan de Svanovich is like a short book about

it's by Alexander Solitzen and it's from 1962 and it's about being in a Soviet prisoner camp in the 1950s and it's just like it's rough. Yeah. Yeah.

Everything I've read about it so it just sounds like it is an almost legally justifiable way to torture someone to death, is what it sounds like. So while Alexi was here, he spent 300 days in solitary confinement. Like I said, he was given one breadloaf to eat a month. And on the 15th of February, it was confirmed by the government that he had passed. And nobody knows why. what they know is that the government says that he fell ill that day

and then he went through a coma and died we don't we don't know nobody knows what's going on apparently his body's been submitted for autopsy who knows what that's going to show like it's everybody is obvious that the government killed him and that's why i said like who's like really calculated because like he waited like three years to kill this guy like three years in a month actually and he's like in a place where like nobody can see anything

yeah like no one knows something on there yeah yeah i think i saw like a picture of it of like someone walking into it and i was just like it looks fucking cool to shit and it looks terrible and it just can't of course yeah yeah i mean it's like it's like he he knew that the heat on this guy on him and everything was super high so he was like well we have all these

charges that have been built up we have like a legally justifiable reason to arrest him and send him to this place and then like fuck it wait three years nobody's going to know what's going on by then and then he'll just fall ill and die like he'll die all the time here like it's um it's super super calculated that's why like I don't know like he's just not

he just it's nuts but the next guy that I'm going to cover here is this guy named Alexander Lettvinenko which if you look up Russian poisoning pictures it's the guy who looks like he has cancer he's in a cancer looking bad like bald and

like just looks horrible. We guess this guy. 2006, yeah. Yes, okay. So, uh, this guy was a former FSB agent and he was very critical of the, of the Russian government. He started poking the bear in the 1990s when he accused his superiors of assassinating this specific tycoon, this Russian wall tycoon called, or not, well, I don't know what kind tycoon he was um his name was boris borisovsky and these two were friends and long

story short was that boris ended up in exile after publicly denouncing Putin's constitutional changes uh apparently he wasn't assassinated at this time he just he was attempted to be assassinated he ended up he ended up dying mysteriously of suicide seven years later anyways but they got to him eventually again like yeah one plays a long game so um Lovanko, he was arrested and later acquitted of certain charges and went into exile in the United Kingdom. While he was in exile, he kept criticizing the Russian government and his policies. He wrote articles and gave interviews about corruption and criminal activities within the FSB. He went pretty far with it.

He actually went so far as to say that Putin was a pedophile, which, like, man, like he really, like I don't get how these guys think it's like are they trying to die I mean there's I mean there's probably so much more that like we just like don't know but they're trying to like make it a statement I'm sure you know with their death that they know it's inevitable maybe yeah maybe that's it maybe that's it maybe they know their death's inevitable so they're like whatever just go all the way throw everything you can out there so this guy's staying in exalt in the United Kingdom and in London and on November 1st of 2006, he falls horribly, horribly ill and is hospitalized in London.

At that time before he'd fallen ill, he was meeting with two former FSB agents at a hotel bar, and it was later determined that he was poisoned with a radioactive substance called Polonium 210. Livenko's condition deteriorated pretty rapidly, and he died like two and a half weeks later on November 23rd of that year. it was later found that the hotel room rental car in every place that one of the two former agents had been was one of the guys that this guy lobeko had met his name was dmitri cofton and it was all heavily heavily contaminated with polonium so it was obvious that this guy killed like you mean like you don't need evidence beyond that like it was clear this is what happened so before his death he had accused the but by the Putin of ordering his assassination

and the British government conducted an investigation into his death they included he had been poisoned by this guy, Dimitri Kovtun and the murder was basically at the orders of the FSB approved by Putin basically. What's the FSB?

Do you say that already? I don't know what it stands for actually. It's a former KGB. Got it. I was like how, but there's so like technically is no more KGB but like of course there is. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Yeah. federal security service

we call it FSB Great Yeah it was the FSK It stands for federal security service But for some reason with the acronym Oh it's because it's an acronym for something in Russian probably Yeah but yeah But yeah it's just the it's just a KGB

It's just like the scary It's literally the people that Putin was a part of Yeah But yeah those basically This guy went out and started talking shit but i mean that's the point is like he was living in the uk and like even in the uk they're not afraid to go and just kill you and poison you and do whatever else right i'll find you one of the guys i read about was fucking killed he was again nobody knows what happened to him

he was a russian billionaire he was thrown off the top floor of a hotel in in dc oh my god he committed suicide off the top floor of a hotel in dc is like like and he was somebody that was on the out of Putin it was like of course something was happening there right like don't care where you are like they'll take care of which is probably why your computers are flashed and why we're being recorded right now and why we're both in nature thanks saying uh this this last guy again like i have like about 47 more of these but i'm just going to go to the highlight so this last guy also died fairly recently in 2023 so this is yvgeny for goshen do you remember this guy um i don't know okay i have a name but maybe the story

so long story short this is another one of those guys who knew Putin from when they were a little kids. They grew up together, went to KGB together, all that stuff. As a result, when Putin rose to power, he gave this guy, like, he had a catering service. And so he got all the federal government contracts for catering. The guy was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I read like $168 million dollars in the most recent tally. Like, I'll get another corruption billionaire, millionaire type of situation. So that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is he was, again, being close friends with Putin means you get like high level positions doing nefarious in the federal government. So he was running this agency for the Russian government called the Internet Research Agency, which was

directly involved in spreading disinformation through social media for the 2016 campaign. Great. So, like, this was the guy. And all that being said, the most interesting thing he actually did was create a thing called the Wachter Group. Have you heard of this before? Mm-mm. This is scary. So.

I'm scared already, so great. So this was a private military that Yvgeny funded with the support of the Russian government. So they used Russian munitions and technology along with resources and capital to fund this private military that was basically Putin calling his old buddy saying, send a military here and he would just do it. So all unofficial, all under the table. So he had plausible deniability saying, hey, I don't know what these guys are doing. They're exactly on their own. And like, the guy would disagree with that. Ideologically, it was mostly assert that this group, like, was largely driven by, like, white nationalism.

So one of the divisions within it, which was the assault division, so it's a military group, so they have, like, the, you know, the surveillance side, they have the scouting side, they have the assault. The most aggressive side of it, if you look at their, um, their flag, it almost looks like a swastika. It looks like a swastika with like multiple other swastikas in the middle of it. Right. It's like not hiding. It's not hiding. And actually one of the other founders of it besides Yevgeny is a guy who there's pictures of him shirtless and he has these like, he has like the double lightning

bolt tattoos on his traps. Like these guys are scary. They're so scary. I don't know why I've seen to many Russian politicians shirtless or like Russian people's like I don't know why isn't Putin shirtless at all. I feel like I saw one picture of a book. Bama shirtless and I felt really upset. Yeah, it was like, we don't need that.

Nobody wants that. Like, be a leader. Leaders don't go homeless. They shower with their clothes on. Yeah, please. So this is a gross thing, but like I, like, went out of this, like, YouTube rabbit hole of, like, these, like, brutal deaths videos. They don't show videos, but they just talk about them, right?

Because you can't show that on YouTube. And, like, like, 50% of them were, like, the narco cartels in South America. The other 50% were the Wagner group. Wow. And, like, the shit they would do to people and, like, how they would, like, they were, I mean, it's a group of, like, it's literally the SS. It's like a group of sociopaths. And they're all the command of Putin. It's all unofficial. It's all into the books. And this guy, Yvgeny was the founder of it. Wow. One of the things that they would do is that they would recruit, um, they would recruit people from prison. So what they would do is they go to these penal colonies, like the one I just mentioned and say, hey, look, if you want to get out of jail, you can do it. All you got to do is join Wagner, uh, your, uh, your, sentence is committed. You're on contract with us for a number of years. And that's it. And so basically, they get the craziest fucking people, like the ones who are obvious sociopaths and join the sociopaths that organization. So kind of going back to what I mentioned around Putin in his belief system that, like, Slavs belong with Slavs. Russia and Ukraine, like, I don't, I don't care about the political side of it. Like, ethically they're the same. They're all slabs. They're all, like, one thing, essentially. And that, like, drives part of the incentive to kind of invade, I assume,

and, like, re or annex, annex Crimea, and then further around Ukraine. And so what Putin essentially demands of Wagner and the beginning is, I can't officially declare war on these people yet. I need you to start performing operations in Ukraine to see what's going on there. So the first thing he does is he puts together a force of foreigner people of these fucking lunatics he recruits from prisons and try to assassinate Zelensky. So that's literally

game plan one. I need you to send a tactical team in there to find this guy and kill him and then that'll help open our options to flood the military in there. They fail nothing happens with assassinating Zelensky obviously and so they decide whatever we'll start the invasion

all on our own and so that's what they ended up doing. So probably for a thousand different reasons in the middle of this war with Ukraine, Houn decides that he wants Wagner to become subordinate to his own defense secretary. So it's basically him saying

like, okay, the whole world, like I'm watching CNN. Everybody knows I'm doing this. So I want this to be under my auspices. And so he tries to bring Wagner under his auspices. In Progosion felt that this defense secretary was incompetent. He felt insulted

by this request. And he basically refuses to give Wagner Group up to him. Not only that, he decides that, fuck it, I'm not And I don't want to be a part of any of this anymore. I'm going to rebel against Russia and rebel against Putin. And so that's what he does. He actually takes a Russian city called Rostov, which is where our old buddy, oh, God, that's your like killer. What was his name?

The bad one. But sure of Rostov. Okay, I can't remember him. But anyways, he took that. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I do. I'm going to look up because I'm on the tip of my dog. Chigotillo.

Chigotillo. Chigotillot. Yeah. Good job. So he ended up actually taking that city with Wagner, which is like really the first time another country, any entity had taken a Russian country in like centuries. And he starts marching towards Moscow.

And if you remember the news in like middle of 2023 was there's an armed invasion happening in Moscow right now. Like they were marching towards taking the Kremlin. And obviously Putin puts it down. And one of the ways he puts it down was, A, we can just kill you all right now. That's fine. It's totally cool with that.

But the other option is put that under arms. Either I will grant you immunity from any prosecution as a Wagner troop, or you can flee to Belarus and be living there in freedom. And so his people decide they're going to lay down arms. Progoshin himself, Yvgeny, he decides to his fleet of Belarus. And apparently the president of Belarus was the one who negotiated him saying, you're insane. You obviously can't win this. just I'll let you stay here so he does that anyways he goes away for a while nobody really

hears about him and then all we hear is in august of 2023 that yvgeny was flying on a private plane with 10 people and the plane crashes and it's just like obviously yeah we all it's so weird to me it's like it's like so transparently clear to everyone but I think that's the point point, right? And the point is to do it in a way that, like, you can say, oh, that's a tragedy. I have no idea what happened. But then everybody who needs to know knows exactly what you did. But then, like, you find out that, like, there's, like, 70 other people that keep doing the exact same thing. Like, why do this? Like, yeah. Part of it is, like, I'm kind of, like, impressed. I'm kind of, like, I mean, this guy was horrible. This is a really bad guy. This was, like, this, what he did with Wagner Group, like,

I mean, should they did to people in Ukraine, like, it is, it is crimes against humanity. Like, they're really, really, really bad people. But, like, it's, it's just like, how do you have the wherewithal to, like, stand up and say, I'm going to kill this guy or destroy? It's nuts. It's just the whole thing's nuts. Yeah. But. No, it's, that's, I don't, it's, that's all.

It's just, like, also then, like, that implies that there's, like, spies everywhere. There are spies everywhere, you know, which I'm sure I knew that, I guess. But like, so. Yeah, I didn't cover Boris Nemstov, 2015, Boris Brozovsky, 2013, Staslav, Makalov, 2009, 2009. 2009, like, it's just like, name, name, name, name. And that's why I was like, oh, you know what? When I heard about the Navalny thing, I was like, okay, I'll cover the people that like Putin's till I was like, I can't cover this. it's like it's like three years of content like

yeah it's fascinating like I do think at some point I want to do an episode just on him as a human being more so like like why does this person operate this way like it's so abnormal I can't even see what we find the book that I read no totally and and he's like

he was president and then like not president for a little bit and then president again you know he kind of reminds me of like like the iatollahs on iran except i think he's he is he's the equivalent of the iatollahs if the iatollas had also wished to be accepted by the west and under the auspices of a legitimate government because like they have their elections like russia has federal elections this year and it's like who's going to win like everybody knows he's going to like but they still do it right they still do the democracy part without the actual democracy it's so weird

Mm-hmm. Like, pretend. Oh, I did. I read Mr. Putin operative in the Kremlin by Fiona. By Fiona Hill. It was really good. Yeah, that's, I will add that to my list of books that I will hear you talk to me about because I guarantee you I'm not going to read anything.

But so, anybody who's not me who knows how to read, please read the book. Oh, my goodness. So wild. So, but, like, it also made me think a lot, Taylor, about, like, how. it is it is not beyond like this guy's so long tail thinking he's so like he's so not emotional and not like reactionary where i'm just like he was right like he was like i'll invade ukraine and i'll win because everybody's going to give a shit and then they're going to stop giving a shit and then i'll win and he's right he's right and like like i'll meddle these elections and then

I'll get the guy I want to. And now with a Tucker interview, he said that he hopes some Biden wins re-election. And so all the conservative media is like, I hope Biden wins. It's like, now you believe him? Right. Now you believe him. He's definitely like Americans are stupid. And that's part of his core beliefs.

Yeah, that was like my takeaway was it was like, I was like reading all this. I was like, dude, this guy doesn't think the way we think. Like we have to think in two and four years cycles. like I'm forever if I'm Putin like I don't need to think the way you think like that's true sure I'll invade Ukraine and it might take me 10 years I'll still be here who cares and I fundamentally I think like he will be the reason why like if the U.S. ever like falls the superpower like he will be the reason for it yeah I mean I think I'm right about it being a long game you know like this is going to go on forever in one shape or form i mean yeah think about the long

game think about like he started ceding the the doubt about our like electoral process in like 2015 2016 and like and we're still dealing with it and it is still going to be an issue now we're talking about fake elections and fake votes and fake like yeah like we don't have the foresight to be this thoughtful about things and this guy does and i don't know it's um it's scary it is scary but it is what it is um anyways that's my topic today so i know it's a i mean it's a little bit shorter but whatever it's fine no i thought for like an hour can you send me the names of the people that you talked about so that i can put them in the notes yes i just want like haven't written down yes i know the names are the names are the names are

little thick. Yeah. So yeah, I'll do that right now. And we should have a Russian series. We'll put it all together some time because, like, we love talking about Russia. Oh, I do have,

I do have one thing to talk about. Tell me. That I select you about is that a little thing to We Didn't Start the Fire by Billy Joel. And there are 119 things in that song or something. Oh, yeah. And we covered most of it.

With, not most of it, but we covered a couple of them. We covered, your Crockett, JFK and the Kennedys, which he mentions twice in like different ways, the Edsel, the Berlin Wall, and the Rosenbergs. So, it's huge. Check off more as we go, but that was fun. And then, like, I was also, like, I like having

such a good time on Valentine's Day, reading all of those, like, fake Valentine's on Instagram. They all made be laughing. I sent you one that says, you make my heart implode, and it was that the thing that imploded. Was that called again? Like a year ago. And yeah, the Titan sub. Yeah, the Titan Summarine that made me laugh so hard.

And then there was a bunch of like history hit that we follow that like has really great content. They had like a top couple, like top 10 couples of history and we've covered eight of them. So pretty good. We're doing great. Yeah. We're doing great. Yeah. Please sell your friend.

What's our email address again, Taylor? Doom to Fail pod at gmail.com. Just doomed to fail pod of Gmail.com. email us, let's know what you think. Leave reviews, please. Please leave reviews. More importantly, take your family and your friend's phone and just subscribe them to us. Yeah.

Like, they don't deserve their autonomy. While they're sleeping, you can hold the phone over their face to leave it open. And then you can do it. They won't even know. And while they're sleeping, and if you have a marker, you can draw a mustache on their face. We'll do that after because you would be able to get into the phone if they had a massage. Oh, the sway of the brains of the operation. Cool, thank you.

Yeah, thank you. We'll go ahead and cut things off, and we are.