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John Dolan (aka the infamous War Nerd) joins us to talk about Philip K. Dick.

Some of the topics we discuss: what first got John into Russian culture, sci-fi, growing up in California during America’s golden age, PKD as the 20th century Kafka, American decline, how Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner compares to the original Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, drugs, Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance…and more, including John’s top PKD picks. Subscribe and listen!

We talk to novelist Nick McDonell — whose wonderful book Quiet Street recently reviewed — about his life among the most privileged people on the planet: the Park Avenue set.

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While trans rights provide fuel to America’s never-ending culture wars, there’s something in the corner that doesn’t get as much attention: doing medical body modifications and gender-affirming care had gone mainstream long ago. Everyone does it — from RFK Jr to Andrew Tate to beauty influencers to the lonely dad at your local suburban gym.

We talk to Oliver Bateman about how body building culture, with the help of the internet, took over the world and helped forge a path to our century of the modified self.

—Yasha

PS: Read Oliver’s most recent essay on body building culture and gender identity…and subscribe to his Substack. As he writes…

This concept emerged from my research with steroid users, whose narratives often paralleled transition stories but without identifying as transgender. One gay user, “Zander,” told me: “I sometimes see the use of steroids by men as like, being assigned male at birth, but identifying as even more male than your natural physiology would allow." He added, “In a world in which we were truly free to express our gender identity, I wonder if people like me wouldn't be prescribed super-doses of testosterone to fix the persistent feeling that we were not manly enough.”

…Another user, who trained six days a week and had cycled through multiple performance-enhancing drugs, told me: “I don’t even care about competing. I just want to look like a f*****g statue or have people ask me if I’m a Mr. Olympia. That’s the whole thing. That’s the juice.” When I asked him why, he grew quieter. “When I was a kid, I got bullied. I hated myself. I looked like s**t, short and flabby, belly over my little dick. And then I started seeing these pictures — Frank Zane, Arnold, Dorian Yates, Bob Paris, you know — and I thought, what if I could be that? Not just look like that, but be that.” He wasn’t using muscle to gain functional strength or external approval. He was using it to overwrite an earlier self, to become someone else entirely. That someone else was a man — wide, ripped, mythically confident in spite of a lack of height or endowment — whom he loved and longed to become.

These narratives recur again and again. A man dislikes his body, not because it’s unfit by some neutral measure, but because it fails to match an idealized internal standard. That standard is often hypermasculine: jacked, vascular, assertive, hard, "tumescent." And the process of bridging the gap — through steroids, training, self-presentation — takes on ritualistic, even devotional, qualities. These men sculpt themselves as both artists and subjects. They are, in a very real sense, becoming the men they want to desire — or, more precisely, the men they want to be desired as, even if they eventually begin to look so odd that only they still find themselves attractive (as is the case with many heavy site oil injection addicts, who use this substance to cause their muscles to swell like tumors).

We discuss the Twitter scandal I unwittingly caused by talking about the connection between children and art. What was meant as an offhand remark made people angry beyond belief. The thing, as I find out, is that “kids” are a touchy subject in left-liberal creative circles, largely because America is schizophrenic place where the economic reality and culture are very out of sync. As I recently wrote, liberal feminism here liberated women to work and have sex freely, yet motherhood has remained a private matter — there is no subsidized childcare, no maternity leave, no universal healthcare, and all things related to childrearing remain largely unchanged from the 1950s and this has only gotten worse because of how expensive everything has become and how little wages have grown.

I keep saying how I increasingly feel like I come form the future — not just in terms of growing up in post-collapse 90s Russia, but also in terms of having Soviet expectations as a woman that are way beyond what American feminists had won here. I grew up with the idea that you can be a mother and a woman and have a career or an art life and be independent of the earning capability of your husband because of things like socialized childcare, healthcare, and leisure activities for kids. It might sound utopian, but all this existed in the USSR and has remained somewhat in place in Russia today. Where I come from — the future — women were fully liberated in 1917…liberated in ways that America still has not reached today. What I’m learning is that at its core America is a profoundly conservative and backwards place that hides this conservatism by peppering it with various cultural freedoms and psyops, slogans and PR spins.

Yasha and I discuss how this reality is at the core of the backlash against my tweets. Many people have been convinced they don’t want children, but really they were robbed of the chance at being parents or have been forced to delay it indefinitely. They’re touchy about it and are lashing out.

—Evgenia

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We have Branko Milanovic, an economist born in Yugoslavia, on to talk about class and inequality in the USSR. How was power transmitted across generations, if inheritance was abolished? Why did the Soviet Union collapse? One takeaway message: Want more social mobility? Time to do some purges!

—Yasha

Branko probably doesn’t need any introduction. If you’ve never read him, check out his great commentary and essays.

We discuss Evgenia’s essay on Too Hot To Work. Some of the things we talk about are: the crisis of liberal feminism, incels under communism, how socialism is actually good for women and men, the unattractiveness of plastic surgery…and more.

—Yasha

Subscribe to NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS and help yourself thrive in these uncertain times.

As always, check out some of Evgenia’s other essays:

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We recorded this ep on the centennial anniversary of the Great Gatsby but end up having a wide-ranging convo about culture, religion and politics — people’s obsession with the hereditary rich, the difference between religious vs secular values, meeting Todd Solondz and his vision of what life is like in the suburbs, MAGA and the Great Gatsby, Evgenia’s pre-cog abilities and her epiphany that cinema is a form of religion for her, Soviet morality as Christianity without the metaphysics, having children as the ultimate anti-consumerist act…and more.

—Yasha

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As promised here’s the live taping of our AGAINST NIHILISM event at the KGB Bar — as a bonus for our subscribers. Don’t worry if you couldn’t make it this time. We’re planning to have another one sometime in the summer.

Thanks to everyone who came out. It was great to spend the evening with you all in person.

—Yasha

PS: Thank you to Daniel and Rowan for the photos and for helping us run the show.

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.

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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!

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