Wealth & Money Quote by Yakov Smirnoff

Smirnoff smuggles a serious indictment into a plainspoken setup: we’re trained for production, not perception. Coming from a comedian best known for flipping Soviet-American contrasts, the line works like an inverted “In Soviet Russia…” joke without the punchline tag. The target isn’t a foreign regime; it’s the quiet ideology of modern success. “Make money, buy things, build things” is a three-beat rhythm of capitalism-as-curriculum, a list so ordinary it becomes damning. He’s not arguing that these skills are useless; he’s pointing out how totalizing they’ve become, how they crowd out emotional literacy.

The subtext is that schooling doesn’t just transfer knowledge, it manufactures a kind of person: efficient, legible to employers, fluent in metrics. “Teach us how to think, not to feel” sounds like a compliment until you hear the cost: a population trained to rationalize desires rather than interrogate them, to optimize rather than empathize. Smirnoff’s choice of “since we were children” sharpens the accusation; this isn’t an adult failure of character, it’s a long-term conditioning.

Context matters: Smirnoff’s immigrant vantage point gives him authority to critique American priorities without sounding like a scold. His comedy often relied on showing that “freedom” is complicated, sometimes lonely, sometimes transactional. Here, he’s suggesting that even in a society that prides itself on choice, we outsource the inner life. The line lands because it’s both confession and provocation: if we were never taught to feel, who benefits from our emotional illiteracy?