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amazing community. And with that, please enjoy this week's episode. And the What's up everybody? My guest today is Joshua Yaffa, a Moscow correspondent for the New Yorker who has also

written for The Economist, The New York Times, National Geographic, Bloomberg Business

Week, The New Republic, and Foreign Affairs, where he was also an associate

editor prior to his move to Moscow.

Joshua is out with his first book titled Between Two Fires, Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in

Putin's Russia.

It's a book about life in modern Russia that pulls both from the country's history as well as from a large body

of sociological research into the Soviet and post-Soviet personality type, whose habits, inclinations, and internal moral calculations, according to

Joshua, elevated Vladimir Putin to his current position, and which now performed a small daily work that an aggregate keeps him there.

I loved this book in no small part because I've grown exhausted from all the

tropes and sophisms used in contemporary conversations about Russia.

I've wanted to find someone who can speak critically but honestly about a country that features

prominently in American politics today and which I think has become a political football in a much larger game between Democrats

and Republicans, officiated by a foreign policy establishment that seems committed to escalating tensions with one of the world's largest

military powers. As some of you already know, my old television program ran on the

Russian RT network from 2011 to early 2013 and I share some of my

insights from that experience both during the full episode and in the overtime.

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