If you listen to a lot of his podcasts, this is actually his way of willing the circumstance into being, or that's been my interpretation. He used to talk about it as something he aspires to, but more recently has been referencing as something like an inevitable intersection along his trajectory.
I like Lex but his awe for Putin turns me off big time, Putin is intelligent (to leverage and maintain power), no doubt, but he’s a thug after all, a thug who became one of the world’s richest men by embezzlement pretty much.
Russia was a super power with some of the best engineers in the world. Today it needs to use war to keep another Slav country on its side. Even the UK keeps the commonwealth in place even with very diverse countries that used to be forced colonies.
To not have a conscience does not make you intelligent. Russia should be economically and socially way more developed that it currently is. To sell gas is not high tech.