NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS

Latest Episodes:

Hollywood Refugee w/Joshua Turek Apr 16, 2025

Show notes

We talk to poet and stand-up comedian Joshua Turek about today’s cultural and political crisis and ways to deal with it. We get into Joshua’s journey from child actor to screenwriter to TikTok star and his escape from LA, and wonder how to use this evil internet as a force for good.

—Evgenia

You can get Joshua’s poetry book directly from him here. He’s got an American comedy tour this summer, so get your tickets before they sell out. And of course check him out on TikTok.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefariousrussians.com/subscribe

Trump and Tariffs and Political Taboos w/Joe Costello Apr 10, 2025

Show notes

We talk to our friend Joe Costello about Trump’s tariffs, democracy, deindustrialization, the Yeltsinification of America, and the innate human desire for a communal life… We discuss globalization, why being against it has been such a political taboo until Trump, and why these tariffs will probably ultimately fail. We are not the 1950s anymore, when America was the sole industrial world power. This place can never return to what it was. The world has changed.

Trump thought he could force things — but with typical American arrogance, he didn’t think that America might not be as powerful as it once was, or that its financial system has been teetering on the edge, held up by toxic over-leveraged debt… Now he’s finding out that the system is a lot more fragile than anyone would admit.

Joe has unique insights into American politics. He’s self-taught and naturally brilliant and has in the past helped run some very big American political campaigns — including the presidential runs of Jerry Brown and Howard Dean. As part of that work, he intersected with Peter Nevarro, a big anti-globalist guy who has been shaping Trump’s tariff blitz against China and who used to be an environmentalist NIMBY in San Diego. If you’ve been following the news, Nevarro has been a constant presence on TV, defending Trump’s tariffs. He’s been dunked on by the business press and also had Elon Musk unloading on him on social media, calling Nevarro a retard, a moron, and “dumber than a sack of bricks”… So Nevarro is a man at the center of global, consensus-shattering events.

We last spoke to Joe about three years ago about his work on the politics of technology. And we highly recommend his new newsletter, where he writes about many of the things we talk about in this ep.

—Yasha

Don’t forget to come to our AGAINST NIHILISM LIVE! event in NYC. This Sunday, April 13th!

Some notes…

Wanted to give some links to a couple of things Joe mentioned in the ep: “The Ages of Jackson” by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. And the just-declassified Schlesinger memo to JFK about the need to get rid of the CIA. And some talks by J. Robert Oppenheimer: Lecture at the Princeton Theological Seminary, Lecture at Colorado University, and one on Analogy and Science.

Join the NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS, save the world!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefariousrussians.com/subscribe

Shitcoins for shitocracy w/Jacob Silverman Apr 02, 2025

Show notes

People compare Trump to Hitler or to Putin. But for us the closest historical comparison is Boris Yeltsin.

So today we talk to Jacob Silverman about Trump’s shitcoins and other crypto schemes because they remind us so much of 1990s Russia and Yeltsin’s family corrupt deals.

Back then in Russia, like with America today, corruption and looting happened right out in the open, with regular people scammed in all sorts of ways — ponzi schemes, illegal privatization of public property, looting of institutions, pensions devalued. The scammers at the top did it brazenly and without a care, and enriched Yeltsin’s family in the process. It bred a deep nihilism among regular people and it caused a total collapse of their belief in democracy, which they associated with ruin and corruption. Dermokratiya people called it — shitocracy. Kinda like what’s happening here in America today. Like Evgenia says, we are from your future.

—Yasha

PS: Don’t forget to preorder Jacob’s book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley.

Get access to all episodes, subscribe to NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS today!

Want to know more? Listen to our series on nihilism and America:

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefariousrussians.com/subscribe

Nobody likes being a loser w/Will Menaker Mar 26, 2025

Show notes

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com

Evgenia and I talk to Will Menaker about the left-right whiplash of the post-Bernie years. Nihilism, idealism, optimism, the politics of winning, the cultural unity of America’s bipartisan politics, a psychoanalysis of the American beta-bully mindset…we discuss it all.

Take a listen!

—Yasha

Come to our AGAINST NIHILISM LIVE! event in NYC on April 13th.

Want to know more? Read Evgenia’s hit essay “Against Nihilism” and listen to our ongoing series…

Art Church w/Alexander Melamid Mar 20, 2025

Show notes

We talk with Alexander Melamid, the most famous Soviet-American artist of his generation. He moved to NYC in late 1970s after being an underground artist in Moscow for a decade — part of the creative duo Komar & Melamid.

He was a success in the NY art world overnight and knew Warhol and everyone who is anyone in the art scene back in the day. Since then he’s lost his optimistic naivete about art but has kept his High Priest of the Art Church status and has been trying to destroy the art world from within — denouncing it, calling modern art senile, and saying artists are welfare queens.

He believes it’s not money that corrupted art — it’s the artist who wanted money, and got it. His advice to young artists is to get the hell out of the profession and he suggests creating reeducation camps for them to become plumbers.

Alexander is full of great one liners — “hubris is the definition of our profession,” “trump is the artist in chief”…

Enjoy the show.

—Evgenia

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefariousrussians.com/subscribe

Vibe Shifts w/Mark Ames Mar 15, 2025

Show notes

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com

We talk to our friend Mark Ames about nihilism, cynicism, culture wars, Red Scare, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Russia of the 1990s, and the vibe shifts of America’s political culture — from punk to the podcasts of today.

—Yasha

Want to know more? Read Evgenia’s hit essay “Against Nihilism” and listen to our ongoing series…

Red Scare Bonus Pillow Talk Mar 07, 2025

Show notes

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com

We recorded this in bed over a week ago while we were in Miami — mostly for our ourselves…to talk through some ideas and concepts. We weren’t going to release it. But I gave it a listen and I thought we had a great conversation — genuine pillow talk before going to bed.

Some of the things we discuss: the start of our crusade against Red Scare, Anna K’s ties and similarity to Mike Cernovich, the beta-lib-husband-turned-pick-up-artist-turned-MAGA-boy-turned-trad-dad-influencer. We also talk about the pick up artist self help scene, Roosh…and how a lot of that world went trad and renounced their early whoring. And we discuss how the Red Scare women are the counterpart to the Cernovich and Tate influencer types — but they poison the minds of young women, rather than young men.

One thing that these influencers push, especially the trad types, is that having a family means you naturally adopt The Zone of Interest politics — that this is just how the world works. But this is a lie. There is nothing natural about it. You can be a father or mother without adopting a nihilistic view where nothing and nobody matters outside your immediate family. I know this personally...

Enjoy the ep. Sweet dreams.

—Yasha

Listen to our two previous episodes on Red Scare:

"Anora" and Russians at the Oscars Mar 04, 2025

Show notes

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com

We record an emergency ep to talk about Sean Baker’s sweep at the Oscars with his new film Anora. We talk about Sean Baker’s sentimental style and his “changemaker” interest in stories of marginalized people. He comes from good New Jersey suburb but the only layer of American society he’s interested in are the lower classes — the delivery workers, trans prostitutes, third rate porn stars, strippers, poor immigrants. We discuss our opinion of the film, the reaction that other Russians had to it, and end up talking about Todd Solondz a lot, who like Sean Baker, grew up in upper-middle-class suburban New Jersey but couldn’t be a more different director.

As a bonus, I tell the story of how I tried to score heroin on the LA corner where a lot of the action in Tangerine, Baker’s breakthrough hit film about transgender prostitutes, takes place…and how I ended up going to a gay brothel in West Hollywood.

Do the Anora Oscar wins signal that Hollywood is ready to reset relations with Russia? Only time will tell.

—Yasha

PS: We discuss Evgenia’s short film Changemaker — watch it here.

Red Scared Mar 02, 2025

Show notes

We continue our discussion of Red Scare’s turn into a real red scare platform. We have been doing deconstruction of their rhetoric on Twitter the past week, which has been going viral and has been drawing all the nastiness and poison of the Red Scare universe to the surface for everyone to see. And we’ve come to a very grim conclusion about the nature of this podcast project, and it’s this: What Red Scare promotes as “good” politics is captured by The Zone of Interest — where the happy family of the commander of Auschwitz lives on the other side of the wall from the death camp surrounded by sounds of suffering and not caring. They see themselves as good people. These are the morals that the Red Scare women want to push on people. To them the only thing that makes you a “good” person is treating your family and friends right. That’s it. The pain and suffering of other people doesn’t matter. In fact, it doesn’t even exist. And if you care about anyone outside your little world, you’re fake and manipulative and just projecting your own mental issues onto the world.

Our world is already a series of Zones of Interest. But what Red Scare tries to do is to sell this kind of cynical tribalism as something cool and avant-garde. They’ve become agents of nihilism.

We want to draw the line in the sand and call it what it is, and to remind young (and not so young) people that there is a black and white and good and bad in cases like this. Not everything is gray.

—Evgenia

Listen to part one of our Red Scare saga: Red Scare's Wake…

…and subscribe for more and join us on the chat.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefariousrussians.com/subscribe

Back to the Future Feb 17, 2025

Show notes

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com

We talk about my recent epiphany that the scary and volatile world of Russia that I grew up in post-collapse in the 1990s might be the future of America, rather than a distant, embarrassing past that I used to think was irrelevant to my new life here. Turns out I’m a time traveler of sorts. I am from your future.

—Evgenia

PS: At the end of the ep, Yasha ruminates on how when collapse finally does come, he’s willing to become a peasant at a PMC women-run colony that will surely pop up here in the Hudson Valley…working the land in exchange for protection from the brutish bands of MAGA scavengers.

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