One of the terrible things about workness is that we're at risk of destroying the very thing that we now enjoy.
Freedom. Because other countries see that as weakness, and they capitalize on it.
How do you prove that threat is real?
Because this has already happened.
And we'll get into this in more detail.
Konstantin Kishin is the sharp -witted satirist, podcast host, and social commentator.
Unafraid to discuss some of the most controversial topics in challenging questions that society is struggling with.
Ideology is a very bad thing, because the moment you buy into a pre -packaged set of ideas about what you're supposed to believe, you can very quickly find yourself not interested in the truth.
For example, the ideology of workness creates a very simplistic and frankly ridiculous way of looking at people, not as individuals, but as groups, with the hierarchy of oppression and promotion of victimhood, which is what makes them so dangerous, because when you teach people to be victims, you actually
cause them to suffer in real life.
We're weakening ourselves.
And now we censor it to political labeling, a weapon people use against their opponents.
And political correctness is preventing you from expressing a dissenting opinion.
You can't say that that's hate speech, but as we spend more time arguing about trivial issues instead of real stuff that matters, the dominant civilization becomes more divided, especially from the inside.
And other countries get to make a play for that dominant position.
And it will mean that the values of the West, human rights, equality of treatment, freedom of speech, those values will not be considered values at all.
They don't want to hold hands and sink them by art.
And I'm convinced that the geopolitics we have seen in the last many years would not be happening if we were not signaling weakness in the division.
Is there a way to stop the division?
Here's what you do.
Constantine, who are you and what you do?
And I have to add to that, why do you do it?
My history is, I was born in the late Soviet Union and I grew up in that society, watched the collapse as a young man, young boy, actually.
And then I saw the craziness of the emergence of modern Russia, which was an experience unlike any other.
Really, it was pretty insane what happened.
And then there was a very, very brief window in my family's time when we went from being very poor when I was born to being very rich, to being very poor in the space of like 10 years.
And in the five year period when my family did have money, they sent me to boarding school in the U .K.
And that's how I ended up here.
And then fast forward a bunch of years, I started a podcast with another comedian called Francis Foster called Trigonometry.
We're about to hit a million subscribers today, which is really very exciting.
Yeah. And the reason I do what I do is I have a different perspective to most people.
Most people who were born here, grew up here, who take what we have here as a given, they take it for granted, in my opinion, many people.
I've seen that the world is not like this everywhere.
I've seen also that societies don't necessarily last forever.
Cultures don't necessarily last forever.
Civilizations don't necessarily last forever.
So the reason I do what I do is I'm trying to remind people in the West how privileged and truly lucky we are to live in this society.
And we've talked in the last 10 years in particular so much about different forms of privilege, male privilege, white privilege.
The one form of privilege that we don't ever talk about for some reason is Western privilege.
And actually, I believe that's the one that we really should be talking about and should be talking about from a position of gratitude.
Because we are incredibly lucky to live in the West.
And because we don't know that, I believe we're at risk of destroying the very things that we now enjoy.
An immigrants love letter to the West is the title of your book.
It's I love this title for a variety of reasons.
The word love is really intentional.
Why did you include the word love?
Because how I feel.
When you've come to a place from outside, it's easier to see what makes it special.
And so I'm incredibly grateful for the opportunities that people like me enjoy.
But actually, all of us enjoy the freedom to make of your life what you will.
The freedom to speak your mind, at least until recently.
The freedom to pursue things.
The freedom, you know, one of the bedrocks of our society is capitalism.
Now capitalism is based on the idea of private property.
Private property doesn't really exist in most of the rest of the world.
If you are a billionaire, even in Russia, you might be a billionaire today.
But if you cross Vladimir Putin or whoever else might be in charge, you will go to prison and have all your assets taken away from you.
That's what happened to Mikhail Horakovsky.
Jack Ma in China, he made some comments about, like, banking regulations.
It wasn't even particularly controversial stuff.
And then he disappears for a year and comes back with a completely different set of opinions all of a sudden and loses.
Most of his money. So we have the luxury in the west to do what we want, far more than any human beings have ever had in the history of humanity.
And I love that. I love that freedom.
And I love the opportunities that I've had to build my own life, build my family's life, to give my son now opportunities that he never would have enjoyed in a billion years in another country.
So what is the threat?
Because you love the UK.
It's all going great.
Yeah. What is the threat that you see on the horizon?
And how do you prove that threat is real?
If you look at history, and I'm no historian, but if you read interesting people about history, most civilizations are not destroyed from the outside, they're destroyed through suicide, through cultural suicide.
And I think one of the big threats I've been raising the alarm on for a long time is what people talk about as woke culture or progress and rampant progressivism, whatever you want to call it.
But at the heart of it is the idea that we are bad.
Our society is bad.
It's based, our history is bad.
It's based on slavery and colonialism and exploitation and imperialism and all of this stuff.
And how do you prove that?
Well, there's several ways to think about it.
The first one is, if you thought your society was bad, why would you defend it?
Why would you teach its values to your children?
Why would you want it to persevere and continue to exist?
If you look geopolitically, in the last many years, as I've been predicting now for a long time, look at what happened in Ukraine, look at what happened in Afghanistan with the withdrawal of American forces, look at what China is now doing in terms of how muscular is becoming about Taiwan.
As the West loses confidence, as the West becomes more divided, as the West becomes more distracted, as we spend more time, you know, it's a trite thing to say, but as we spend more time arguing about what a woman is, instead of real stuff that matters, other people around the world see that as weakness
and they capitalize on it.
And I'm convinced that the things we have seen in terms of geopolitics in the last many years would not be happening if we were not signaling weakness and division.
You politically affiliated at all?
Do you consider yourself to be on the left or the right or neither?
Well, here's how I think about it.
Right. My interest is in our society thriving.
Our culture thriving, our culture doing better.
And I don't think the right or the left is always right.
It's contextual, right?
There are times when you want higher taxes and more government spending.
There are times when you want lower taxes and less government spending.
There are times when you need more immigration.
You know, after World War Two, Britain, Australia, Canada, many countries wanted more immigrants to come because they needed to rebuild their society.
There are times when you need less immigration.
And so I think it's about where you are in the moment as opposed to these rigid ideological positions like, you know, I am pro -immigration or I'm anti -immigration.
I think both of those are pretty misguided positions.
What you want is to be in the right place at the right time.
So I don't know if you've noticed this, but it seems to me like political labelling is now mostly a weapon that people use against their opponents.
Right. Like if I don't agree with you, it's convenient for me to label you as a member of the opposite tribe.
So if I am on the right, well, you're a communist.
If I am on the left, well, you are far right.
And this is how we have conversations now.
I have some positions that are currently considered right wing.
I have some positions that are currently considered left wing.
And you know, I just one of the things I really learnt from my history and my family's history.
And I talk about this in the book, as you know, is that ideology is a very bad thing always.
And so the moment you buy into a prepackaged set of ideas about what you're supposed to believe, you very quickly find yourself having to believe things that you don't actually agree with so that you get to stay in the tribe.
I don't care about the tribe.
I care about the truth.
There's a quote you referenced, which I actually sent to my friends earlier on.
I was talking to them.
It is, I have no interest whatsoever in the false dichotomy of right versus left.
If there is one thing my Soviet childhood taught me, it's that subscribing to someone else's ideology will always inevitably inevitably mean having to suspend your own judgment about right and wrong to appease your tribe, which is on Chapter One of your book on page 21.
And it really, you know, as a podcaster, when you really want you genuinely curious and you want to interview lots of people from lots of backgrounds.
The great thing about doing this job is I have to teach myself to always look at the other side.
So if you represent one side, my job in many respects is to try and understand the other side so we can talk about the other side as well to represent the other side.
And that's been really useful for me because it's stopped me falling into the trap of conforming with a tribe.
And also, as you say, like when you talk about the right and left thing being a label and a weapon that people will use.
It's the same when a journalist wants to write about me, what they'll do is they'll find the most right wing person that's ever been on my podcast and they'll say he interviews people like insert name, insert name.
As if to say, I am those two people.
Yes. Or in our case with trigonometry, what happens is we are people who started our show because we were pushing back against the woke progressive dogma in our comedy industry at the time.
And so a lot of our early guests were exploring perspectives that were not ours.
We were two remain voters, and when the remain, when the Brexit vote happened, we were really confused because we were part of that kind of elitist metropolitan.
You know, I don't know anyone who voted Brexit kind of thing, but my perspective was I found it odd that people were saying, well, you know, the reason people voted for Brexit is because half the country is racist.
And I was like, I mean, come on, that's just factually incorrect.
We both know that. That's not to say the bigoted people don't exist.
And that doesn't mean that some Brexit voters weren't racist.
But to explain a complex phenomenon like that by simplistic explanation of that just wasn't accurate.
So we had a lot of people who were pro -Brexit on the show to understand where they're coming from.
Well, one of the things that happens is if you talk to a lot of people from one side, then the people from the other side say what you just said, well, he's talked to this, this and this.
I won't go on his show.
Right. And then they use that against you to say, well, you only talk to these people.
And like I'm like, we've we've invited your Owen Joneses and your Ash Sarkas and all the others, and Ash should come on soon.
And and we've had lots of people from different perspectives.
But if I'm writing an article about you or if I want to tweet something about you, it's very easy to use.
What is wokism as far as you say it?
Because the word kind of sounds like a compliment.
It was initially. It was a self compliment initially.
So Wokeness came along really in around 2014.
And if you're interested, we can talk about why it does around that time, because it's a very interesting thing that I actually think speaks to the moment we're in more broadly.
But it was initially used by people, particularly kind of Black Lives Matter and racial activists in America, about themselves.
And what they were saying is we are awakened to certain realizations, realizations like what they call intersectionality.
Which is the idea that, you know, different racial and sexual and other groups in society are treated differently.
And we're now awake to this.
That's what Wokeness meant.
And now we are aware of these systemic forces that are disadvantaging certain groups.
And now we're going to pursue activism that's designed to address, you know, white privilege, male privilege and all of this other stuff.
But very quickly, what happened is a lot of people looked at some of the ways these people were behaving and other people around them were behaving and started making fun of it, which is what often happens.
And so now the wordwork is kind of an insult that's being used to say these people are somewhat detached from reality and they're obsessed about trivial issues that don't actually have much bearing on reality.
They're not interested in facts.
They're interested in narratives and so on.
But if you're asking me what work culture really is, it's a combination of things.
First and foremost, it's the promotion and celebration of victimhood.
First and foremost, then you take that victimhood and you say different groups are differently victimized.
Some groups are victimized, so black people, ethnic minorities, women.
And by the way, of course, there's a kind of truth to all these things, right?
Certain groups are disadvantaged in society or perhaps a better way of saying is generally speaking, have worse outcomes than others.
And that, you know, we can explore why that is in more detail.
But what we then do is we build a hierarchy of oppression.
Some groups are more oppressed than others, which makes them better, morally superior to others.
And there are some other groups that are suspect because they're doing better.
So this ideology kind of says the way to work out who is oppressed and who is the oppressor, because if you have the oppressed, you have to have someone who's oppressing.
And we can't say, you know, different groups do different in society for all sorts of different reasons.
If someone is not doing as well as someone else, that's because they've been oppressed.
Right. And then you work out this hierarchy.
You know, white people are the evil at the top.
You throw in some other successful minorities, you know, for example, in the U .K.
and in America, Asians from the Far East, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, they do very well.
Right. So they are now seen as part of the kind of more the oppressor groups.
That's why in American colleges, for example, they're discriminated against in admissions because they do better than Hispanics and blacks.
Right. So it's essentially a way of creating a very, very simplistic and frankly ridiculous way of looking at people, not as individuals.
You know, Stephen Constantine, but as groups, black, white, Russian, Jewish, whatever way you want to look at it.
And it's this generalized thing.
And one of the reasons it's so destructive is it's asking all the wrong questions.
It's asking the question of why do why are people struggling?
Right. But it doesn't ask it from the right perspective.
The real poverty is the norm.
The real question is what creates prosperity, what creates success, what creates successful outcomes for different groups?
And if you just focus on, you know, what happened to a certain group 200 years ago, you're really not going to get to the answer of how to uplift people in the present moment.
So it's the elevation of victimhood.
It's obsession about racial and sexual and gender dynamics.
And it's the promotion of a kind of anti -Western, anti -white, anti -male ideology that I believe is very, very dangerous to actually the very great societies that we've created, which are based on the idea that, you know, I have some issues with multiculturalism, but a multiracial society, I think, is a very
healthy thing, provided we are not encouraged to see each other as members of separate and divided tribes.
But that is exactly what this ideology does.
What is the harm of victimhood and how does how is that like really showing up in people's everyday lives from an individual standpoint?
And I really want to know how victimhood is becoming self -harm.
So if I choose to adopt a victimhood mindset, how does that hurt me, Stephen?
Well, I mean, there's 100 different ways, but one of the things we know from psychology is what they call perception is projection.
I don't know if you're familiar with this idea.
OK, you've had Jordan Peterson on the show, right?
So one of the things he talks about is you cannot see unless you have a hierarchy of value in your mind, right?
There is an almost unlimited number of things I could be looking at in this room.
There is a bunch of books behind you.
There's cameras in the room.
Your producer's over there.
There's a wall. There's lights.
There's all kinds of things.
But I'm looking at you.
Why? Because in this moment, you're the most important thing that's happening to me in this room, right?
Our conversation. However, if I walk into this room and I am triggered by books, right?
I wouldn't be able to focus on you.
I would be able to only be able to focus on what's behind you, right?
Now, let's say you walk around thinking that because of your racial background, everyone's out to get you.
Well, what are you going to see out in the world?
You're going to see people look at you funny.
Now, people look at you funny for all sorts of different reasons.
People look at me funny.
People look at women funny.
People look at men funny for all sorts of different reasons.
You might walk past a police officer and you might think, well, I know that my racial background makes me a victim of police brutality.
Therefore, I'm going to be on edge.
What does that mean?
Well, if the police officer says something to me to you, you might interpret it differently than you might have done, as if you were just a normal guy, right?
And on and on it goes.
So you bring your perceptual filters into every situation and therefore the outcomes that you experience are predetermined to a very significant part, not by the other people, but by your own expectations.
And so when you teach people to be victims, you make them victims.
You actually cause them to suffer in real life.
And the people who need to be resilient and strong and to be taught that you may be mistreated sometimes by different people, but you have the capacity to overcome that.
You have the capacity to make that you can be whoever you want.
You live in a free society where no one can stop you.
The people who need that message the most are the people who are actually victims, the people who actually suffer discrimination, the people who actually come from different ways.
They need that message more than anyone.
It reminded me of that video I saw you do featuring where you talk about the SCAR experiment, which made it very real.
For anyone that hasn't seen that video, what was that experiment?
Basically, what they did is they took a bunch of people.
I think it was mostly women, some men, and they said to them, what we're doing today, so they set the frame.
What we're doing today is we are doing an experiment to find out how people with facial disfigurements are treated in society.
And they put scaring on their face in front of a mirror so they could see that they had some really serious facial disfigurements.
And as they were leaving the room, they said, you know what, we just need to touch that scar up a little bit more, and they removed the scarring.
So these people went into what was set up as a job interview, thinking they had scars on their face, but the scarring had been removed without their knowledge.
And when they walked into those interviews, when they came out, they were asked a bunch of questions.
And what people found was they had massively increased levels of discrimination for their facial disfigurements.
They reported specific comments that the interviews had made about their face, even though they had no scarring at all.
They brought their expectation in with them and they came out with the result that they were looking for.
So they believed they were discriminated against?
So I read about something called a stereotype threat, which talks about how if you remind a group of people, whether that's black people or women or whoever it might be, about a stereotype or a factor that relates to a stereotype before they do a test, then they perform worse in the test.
And I guess I don't know if this is a counterpoint to this, but if I'm a black person and there's a stereotype that black people aren't good at maths, just by asking someone on a test to fill in their ethnicity before they do the math test, drops their scores on the math test, which I believe is the crux
of the experiment. And this kind of proves that I guess it's a few things.
I guess it's someone believing that they are a disadvantage, causes a disadvantage in performance.
But it also highlights, if that's like an innate thing, it also points to the power of these stereotypes.
Totally. But it's not the power of the stereotypes.
It's the power of the brainwashing, right?
Because when someone says to you there's the stereotype, it's not just a stereotype alone.
It's also the fact that they've told you that reinforces it for you, right?
Because you might be aware of the stereotype at a peripheral level, but you're like, no, I'm good at maths and that's it.
But it's when other people come in and tell you stuff, that's when that social proof is also reinforcing it.
Sometimes they tell you it in a well -meaning way.
Yeah. Yeah. But that doesn't change it, right?
But you're not saying we shouldn't tell people at all.
Well, I don't know that the stereotype that black people aren't good at maths is true.
I think what we should tell people is you can be whatever the hell you want, and you might be terrible at maths.
That's OK. You might be good at some other things.
But the thing you should really do is do your best and find out the results you get.
I'll tell you why I asked this question.
I flashed back when I was 18 years old and I was thinking of starting my first business, and I discovered that there's this special like loan or grant you could get if you were black.
And as I sat there, I remember being sat there on Facebook typing out this post, which I never posted, where I basically was like seeing that this exists has made me feel like I'm at a disadvantage.
The existence of this thing, but it's well -meaning like they wanted to give grants to people that were black.
But part of me, if you read between the lines of what that says, it says because you are black, you have a disadvantage.
And then when I sort of overlap that with what I know about stereotype threats, I'm like, did the existence of that grant program make me more hopeful and self -believing and therefore increase my probability of being successful?
The existence of the program probably made me feel worse.
And, but it's so well -meaning.
They wanted to give back people money.
Totally. But this is the thing with a lot of progressive ideas.
They are incredibly well -meaning.
They're incredible well -meaning, which is what makes them so dangerous because I always forget this quote, but there's a wonderful quote about this, which is that a tyranny exercised for your own good is much worse than a tyranny that's exercised out of pure evil, because at least the evil person knows
they're being evil.
But when someone is trying to help you by being tyrannical towards you, I mean, this is a different context, but the point is the same.
When someone is doing something to you because they think they're helping, they are not held back by their conscience at all.
And so they will do whatever the hell they think is the right thing in order to help you.
What might be a good way of helping people who come from backgrounds where there is less entrepreneurial success, and maybe that is the case, I don't know what the statistics are, is creating a school of black business excellence.
Like here's 10 guys like you who come in and talk about how you were great, and here's some tips and here's what you do and here's what I did.
Inspiration. Now, look, I don't buy personally into this idea that there's this narrative of you can't be what you can't see.
I think that's one of the most pernicious and dangerous ideas that we've seen in recent years.
But to the extent that there are people who need someone who looks like them, maybe that's the way that you do it.
There is a great writer, American writer, called Thomas Sowell.
I don't know if you're familiar with his work.
Brother, if you read his stuff, you will be hooked.
One of the things he talks about is the fact that over the last 30, 40 years, we have replaced things that work with things that sound good.
And so much of what we now do in our society is things that sound good like that program, but don't actually help anyone.
They don't actually work very well.
And when we talked about why wokeness really takes off in 2014, one of the reasons I believe, and there's a lot of evidence for this, and you can look this up and maybe flash up some graphs about this, when social media comes along, that's when this stuff really takes off because social media is completely
detached from the real world.
And social media, because of that, promotes things that sound good, that make us feel good about how progressive we are.
Virtuous. Virtuous, but don't actually achieve anything.
Because in the isolated context of Twitter or Facebook or whatever, you don't have the feedback mechanism of smashing your head on the floor if you walk the wrong way or whatever it is, right?
So we do a lot of things in our society now that practically don't get the results that we'd like them to get, but they make us feel incredibly good about how progressive we are.
Like the black tile.
The black tile. During the BLM movement, there was the everyone posted a black tile on Tuesday.
And then if you didn't post the black tile, you're attacked for being racist.
Yeah, yeah, I just thought Instagram was broken for a day.
I remember doing a post at the time saying that I thought this was ridiculous.
And really the part of it that was ridiculous was attacking people that hadn't done it, which exists under this assumption that the normal thing to do, the normal response to seeing a horrific video where someone is suffocated to death is to take to social media and post about it.
Like, in fact, that's the most unhuman, unnatural response to seeing something which is quite troubling.
Yeah. But the virtuous thing to do, obviously, that got the likes would be to fall in line.
And if you look at that, Steven, not to get, you know, too far into the weeds of it, but one of the responses to that terrible killing, George Floyd, was that a lot of people decided to take a lot of understandable frustrations out on policing and the police more broadly.
And what happened is that a lot of the police pulled back in several cities in America and a lot of black people have been killed as a result.
Because there's less police to actually keep the peace and protect people from criminals.
So that was another example of where an understandable emotional reaction gets converted into very bad action that's counterproductive for the very community that in that instance we were trying to protect.
You said something a second ago.
You said you don't believe that you need to see it to believe it.
Yeah. Like, I believe that and it speaks to a broader thing, which is I think that you and I, having spoken to you beforehand and, you know, we have big podcasts and whatever.
You and I probably have a better understanding and more similar values around certain things than we would do people of our own background.
And that's because people aren't just these stupid superficial things, right?
So when we talk about, you need to see someone like you succeed, I'm like, well I didn't.
I didn't need to look at someone who looked like me to be successful.
I saw people in America doing podcasts about the stimulus, talking about stuff that I wanted to talk about.
I was like, oh, great.
Maybe I can try that.
And then I did, you know, and I think teaching people that is going to open the doors for way more people from minority backgrounds than teaching them that there's this one guy who looks like them that's been successful.
I just, I don't see it that way.
I think the truth of modern Western society, and this is why where we started the conversation, why we're so lucky, is that if you're talented, if you're driven, if you're willing to work on yourself, if you're willing to read and grow and have a go get a mindset.
The world's your oyster.
It doesn't matter what your skin color is.
It's interesting because I reflect on when I started in business and for whatever reason, I had a lot of role models all around the world, you know, whether it was Sir Richard Branson studying his story or other people.
But I look incredibly similar.
I've met him. He's very, very different.
He's a very kind man.
But Jamal Edwards, who was a young Black man, probably the most famous young Black business person in the UK, I was obsessed with.
Because there was something about him in his story that killed my excuses and it kills your victimhood.
Which is if someone who was a young Black man who has walked up that ladder, you're trying to walk up and they don't come from money and they had a job.
And I think Topshop, normal dude, didn't have like an incredible education at Oxford.
You've got to have an excuse.
Right. And that's and that part of it I've always rated, which is if someone like who's walked in those footsteps before, it helps kill your excuses and it gives you no reason.
Sure. But think about what that meant for you, though.
What you're talking about is undoing the brand, the brainwashing that already existed.
Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. So it's not that like you needed a Black person.
You needed someone who you could look at and say, oh, no, no, all this stuff I've been brainwashed into thinking isn't true.
But on the point of brainwashing, it is objectively true that if I I think if you if you look at studies where they take someone with a name that is associated with a certain race and they like sent a thousand emails for a job application, you're much more likely to get the job if you're called John.
Yes. Then like Le Chanté.
Sure. Or Constantine.
Yeah. Like you're called Stephen.
Yeah, my parents nailed it.
They probably nailed it.
But we could slice this a billion different ways.
Yeah. You could say, look, I'm 5 '9", barely, right?
If you look at the CEOs of the top Fortune 500 companies, they're all over six foot basically.
The tallest presidential candidate in America almost always wins.
Like, heightism, height discrimination is massive, especially against men.
What am I going to do?
I'm going to complain about that.
I'm going to sit there and go, oh, I'm five.
No, no, it's not going to change anything.
Right. So the only thing, the only option I have is do I take this and run with it?
Do I make it a strength of some kind?
Do I compensate for it elsewhere?
Or do I wallow in my victimhood?
Those are the choices, man.
Yeah. No one's going to make you grow.
Can you acknowledge that the brainwashing exists?
That it's in part objectively true.
Sure. But it's also not reason enough to become a victim.
Sure. Okay. But that's all I'm saying.
My point is that, look, of course, different people are treated differently and it's different in different ways.
Right. Like, for example, I'm a first generation immigrant in this country.
Some people will see that as a bad thing.
Other people will see that as a good thing.
Right. There are trade -offs to everything, right?
Being an outsider is often bad, but sometimes good.
So the only thing that you can do is play the cards that life is dealt you.
And so going off, I've been dealt.
You could look, people are free to do whatever they want with their life.
If you want to sit there and say you've been dealt a bad hand of cards, I'll agree with you.
I mean, fine. You have, but it's not going to help you.
It's not going to help you.
And what I want for people is to thrive.
I want them to thrive.
I want them to create the life that they want.
And I know for a fact, you know, I've been the son of very wealthy people.
I've slept in a park in Edinburgh for weeks because I couldn't afford rent.
The only person that is going to change your life is you.
No one's coming to save you.
No one's coming to rescue you.
No one, the cavalry isn't coming.
It's just you. And you have the opportunity to take the cards you've been dealt with and convert them into the best possible outcome.
And for some people, having a job is incredible.
Taking the life that they've been given and just having a job that they can hold down and provide for their family.
That in itself is a massive achievement.
For others, the sky's the limit.
But you only get this one set of cards and you only get to play it once.
Do you want to sit there and complain that you were born with the wrong genitals or the wrong skin color or whatever?
Or do you want to just play the hand to the best of your ability?
That's the choice. It's interesting because you said you want to help them thrive.
Yeah. And I think if you asked some of those people, they'd say they also want to thrive.
And maybe they see the victimhood as their path to thriving.
That's just a cop out, man.
That identity. Because if I become a victim, then I have this group of people and then they're going to be nice to me and we're going to reinforce each other.
And you too, me? Sure.
But it's not going to actually help you.
It makes you feel good, makes you feel understood and everyone gets...
Does it make your life better?
Does it? Do you earn more money?
Does it use your business more successful?
Well, if you're like a diversity consultant, it does, right?
But for everyone else, does it make your life better?
First of all, it makes you feel awful, right?
And we've all been there.
We've all felt victims in certain different situations because we've all been victimized in one way or another.
You know, whether it's a traumatic childhood or things happen to you, you know, all kinds of things happen to people.
But ultimately, you go talk to any good therapist or psychologist and they're going to say to you, yeah, yeah.
Oh, yeah, you're really oppressed.
Yeah. They're going to say, this is your opportunity to grow.
This is your opportunity to overcome.
Yes, we accept the things that happen to you.
We're wrong and bad and whatever, but it's acceptance, and then you move on.
That's how life works.
Do you think there's differences in generations as it relates to this attitude?
What are you seeing when it comes to like generation Z, as they call them, and how does that vary from millennials?
Some of the stuff that we have Gen Z people working for us at Trigonometry, and I'm like, some of the things about them are incredible.
Young people are always amazing because they've had the benefit of learning stuff, like knowing stuff that we had to learn, right?
Like I had to learn this.
They just get given it on YouTube or whatever.
They can watch a video and like for 10 minutes and know stuff that it took me 20 years to unpack, right?
On the one hand, on the other hand, this is a generalization.
You can't generalize about people, but my experience is in the workplace, for example, they they think about their role in such a disproportionately grandiose way.
Like we had, I remember Frances and I, my cousin, Trigonometry, I used to help him run a comedy club.
And there were people who would, who would, they literally just came in to help out.
They were effectively doing an unpaid internship and they'd like pipe up in meetings and be like, I think we should do it like this.
Like for my generation, you know, the idea that I'd like say anything in that meeting would have been completely preposterous.
You know what I mean?
But look, every generation has its own challenges.
I don't envy Gen Z because they grew up with phones from day one.
And we are starting to, to realize, I think probably 20 years from now, we will look at phones like we look at tobacco companies 30 or 40 years ago.
Like the fact that young people were given smartphones from the age of three, four, five, six or whatever, I was just kind of cruelty, really, I think.
And we are starting to find that out.
So it's look, it's very easy always to slag off young people.
We need them. We need them to be the best versions of themselves.
So I'm always thinking about encouraging and lifting them up and mentoring and all of that.
Certainly the people that I know from that generation.
But they do face unique challenges and, and kind of smacking some of that self -centeredness out of them as part of it.
Are you hopeful for them?
I'm very torn about this more generally as well.
I'm someone who's incredibly optimistic personally.
As I look out at the world today, I'm not optimistic about the world.
I am optimistic personally.
So it's a very weird thing.
I think that, as I say, I think Gen Z, they've had some really difficult things imposed on them by their parents and a lack of structure and discipline imposed on them by their parents.
On the other hand, they have tremendous opportunities too.
So I guess it just remains to be seen.
You're not optimistic about the world?
Definitely not. Why?
Well, we started talking about, I think the West undermining itself, whether you think the West is good or bad, it's kind of irrelevant for this part of it.
When the civilisation that is dominant, which is us, there's six great civilisations in the world today.
Western civilisation, who are the descendants of the Western Roman Empire, Eastern Christian civilisation who are descended from Byzantium, the Eastern Christian Roman Empire.
So the centre of that civilisation is Russia now.
The two Islamic civilisations, the Arabs and the Persians, the Persians of Rome, China and India, the Chinese and the Indians, right?
Western civilisation has been dominant around the world for many, many centuries now.
When the dominant civilisation becomes weakened, especially from the inside, whichever one that is, what that opens up is what Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and others are now talking about.
This is what they mean when they talk about the multipolar world.
What they mean is they get to play, they get to make a play for that dominant position.
No one wants to, no one, Vladimir Putin and the Xi Jinping, they don't want to hold hands and sing kumbaya.
That's not what they're into.
They want to be the dominant force like America has been for a very long time.
And so when the king of the hill gets weaker and signals weakness to others, what happens is conflict.
That's what happens.
So even if you don't think Western values are good values, which I happen to think they are for reasons we can get into, the fact that we are increasing the level of conflict around the world by signalling weakness, I think, is a bad thing.
Right? So Ukraine is a very good example of that.
Whether Taiwan happens as some people are predicting or we don't know, that's not a good thing.
If you look at what happened in Israel, the reason Hamas felt comfortable to attack Israel on October 7th as they did is the Iranians who back Hamas feel comfortable in challenging Israel because Israel is America's ally in the Middle East.
Right? So there is this great game being played and it is about throwing the West of its pedestal.
So even if you weren't comfortable with the West's dominance, the fact that it is likely coming to an end is a bad thing for the world in the interim because it means there's more conflict and there's more violence and there's more strife and there's more discord.
And just to be clear, the reason why it's coming to an end in your view is because of the internal division and the internal conflict.
That's part of it. Look, it's a...
the rise and decline of civilisations is a very complicated thing.
Part of it is economic, right?
But even if you look at our economic problems, the biggest problem that Western countries face is our level of debt, right?
Look at debt as a societal issue, national debt.
What does that mean?
Well, one of the things it means is we've broken the intergenerational contract between your generation, your children's generation and the generation before yours and mine, right?
Effectively, our parents are unwilling to sacrifice for their grandchildren.
That's what debt means, because what we're doing is we're borrowing from the future, right?
We are operating in more than 100 % GDP debt at the moment and we're increasing it all the time because we're running deficits.
America is borrowing like crazy.
What does that mean?
You and I are not going to be...
even you and I are not going to be paying it off.
Our children will. Right?
Is that the behaviour of people who feel like they're one, that they're united, that they're looking after the next generation?
Look at GDP per capita.
I mean, one of the reasons we have levels of mass immigration that we do today, politicians will tell you, we need mass immigration to boost our economy and they're only half -lying.
They're telling you that because it's true.
In order that they can pretend our GDP is growing, we need to bring in more people.
But our GDP per capita is falling and has been for some time.
So the Gen Z generation are going to be poorer than you and I.
Is that a reflection of a society that is cohesive?
Is that a reflection of a society that feels like it's one, that we're looking after the next generation, which is our first duty as people?
Right? So even our economic problems, which are significant in my opinion, are partly because of the cultural malaise that we experience.
And then everything flows from that.
As we talked about at the beginning, if you brainwash people for decades now to think that their society is bad and wrong and evil, well, they're not going to be willing to advance its interest.
They're not going to be able to go and fight and defend it in war, etc.
We're weakening ourselves.
Who's doing the brainwashing?
A lot of it has been happening in academia since the 60s.
So educators who were being encouraged and funded and supported by my boys from the Soviet Union at the time to demoralize the West, they encouraged a lot of these Marxists.
And one of the things we haven't yet touched on is the ideology of wokeness is really a new form of Marxism.
It's a kind of race Marxism.
I know this sounds like very abstract and crazy.
I don't know if it does to you, but maybe too many people in your audience.
So perhaps I can lay it out a little bit.
Can you explain what Marxism as well?
Sure. So Marxism was an ideology created obviously by Karl Marx and Engels who funded him and assisted him.
And the idea was very simple.
The idea was that the way to understand human society is through the lens of oppression.
We've talked about this before, right?
There are some people who are the oppressors and some people who are oppressed.
Who are the oppressors and Marx's original idea?
The oppressors were the bourgeois, the capitalists, the people who owned what he called the means of production, the factories, the capital, the stock.
Like you are now a member of the bourgeoisie, a capitalist.
You are in a business, right?
And what he said was that you are oppressing your producer and everyone who works for you because you take their labor and you profit from it without giving them back the right amount of value in exchange.
And by the way, just like with a lot of these other ideas, it was true in the sense that Marxism really is a reaction to the rampant abuse that was caused by the Industrial Revolution in which, you know, you had people sleeping in factories and chimneys, sweeps that were 12 years old up, chimneys, you
know, dying, all of that, right?
So as with all of these ideas, there is a kernel of truth.
But what he said and, you know, the people who really practice this idea the most with the Soviets and the Chinese communists is, well, how do you solve this problem?
Oh, very simple. You've got to take from the oppressors and you've got to give to the oppressed, from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.
However, the problem is it turns out that communism is effectively a great idea at the family level.
Like your family is a communist society.
So is mine. Like I go out to work, I own money, we spend it together on the needs of my wife, my children, blah, blah, blah.
That's communism, right?
We share what one productive person produces.
Other people do other jobs.
They may not be paid as well, blah, blah, blah.
The level of society doesn't really work because people are self -interested.
And to make them not self -interested, to make them all give up everything for the needs of the state and of other people, you have to use a lot of force, right?
Which is why you have to kill 50 million people in Russia, 50 million people in China to even make it happen.
Now, what happened was you got to remember, this is very important.
People forget this.
When the Soviet Union was created, it was not designed to be a countrywide phenomenon.
The communists believed that the only, rightly by the way, that the only way communism would work is if you made everyone in the world communist.
Because if you made everyone communist, then no one could look at over the border and look at these evil capitalists having a great life, everyone would be equally poor and then they'd be happy.
That was the idea, right?
And so the idea of the Russian revolution wasn't about making Russia communists.
It was about making the world communist.
It was the world revolution.
That's why the Soviet Union, the symbolism of the Soviet Union, it never had anything to do with the world revolution.
It had the problem was that when people saw what was actually happening in the Soviet Union, they really didn't want that.
And most of all, people in western societies, including the working class, who were supposed to be the oppressed and to overthrow their oppressive people, they didn't want that.
They just wanted to have a nice life and to have a house and to blah, blah, blah.
And so the Marxist in the West, they very quickly realized that this wasn't going to work.
Western working class people were not going to overthrow the existing regime and have a Soviet style revolution where they slaughter all the bourgeois and the capitalist.
So they had to find a different way to approach it, which is why they invented this form of race Marxism.
They said, no, no, no, you're not really oppressed because you're working class and you don't have capital.
The reason you're oppressed is you're a man, you're gay, you're black, you're this, you're that.
And that really landed with people, particularly multi -ethnic societies like ours, where we have a lot of people from minority backgrounds.
It coincided with the sexual revolution.
I know you've had my friend Louis Perry on the show.
I don't know if you talked about this, but the pill basically changes the relationship between men and women.
Women are liberated.
So now a lot of this stuff also happens.
And so what happened in the 60s is a lot of educators and academia started teaching these ideas to students.
And then you have successive generations of people who are now essentially trained to think that our societies were bad.
What they were was about oppression, racism, bigotry, imperialism, colonialism, slavery, etc., which all of these things have a kernel of truth.
And that kernel of truth is used to tell gigantic lies.
And because often when we talk about this division that's happening internally within the West, we think of it as the other side of doing it.
But a second ago, you really pointed out forces far afield are tinkering.
And actually, there was a story this week, I think, or last week, where a podcaster has been, I think, like, arrested and had her channels deleted because it turns out, I didn't go deep into the story.
She hasn't been arrested, but perhaps I can just summarize it quickly.
So there was a company in America called Tenet Media, who were given $10 million in a very short period of time.
So I'm sure it would have been more by a Russia today affiliated influences and various nefarious actors from Russia, effectively to disseminate certain types of information through right wing influences in America.
And this has been happening for decades.
There's a guy called Yuri Bezmonov.
If you're not familiar with him, this guy's going to blow your mind.
You should look him up.
He was a Soviet defector in the 80s who came from the Soviet Union to India, to Canada, ended up in America.
He gave a series of lectures, which people can watch on YouTube, about what the Soviet intelligence services were actually focusing on, because during the Cold War, you might not remember this, but, you know, people thought about Soviet spies as like stealing microfilms of American nuclear installations
and all of this stuff.
Actually, what he said was almost all of their resources were used on what he called demoralization.
And demoralization is the process whereby you divide society and you activate nefarious forces within that society against the society.
So you encourage forces that are destabilizing.
This is one thing that people don't understand about Russian misinformation, disinformation, influence operations, etc.
They're not designed to get a specific person elected.
This is how British people and Americans think.
They're like, you know, well, I invest 10 million dollars to get this outcome.
It's not what they do.
What they want is to create a cacophony of lies so that you don't know what to believe anymore.
Is this true? Is that true?
And so they were, they are and were and have always been paying people in the West or using people in the West to sow discord, to divide people against each other, to say the Soviet Union, by the way, was very active in funding militant African -American groups in the 60s and 70s and 80s in America.
And in fact, whenever people would say to the Soviets, well, look, you're like starving millions of people and putting them in gulags, but they would say, well, what about black people in America?
They're, you don't treat them well, right?
So who are you to tell us about all of this stuff?
So by the way, this isn't like a unique thing.
Like America does this, too.
America funds liberal organizations in Russia to get Russian liberals to act in their interest.
This is what all civilizations do.
I'm just saying maybe we should protect our civilization from this foreign influence.
So yes, foreign forces are at play, but you can't like, no, I don't know.
I imagine there's no amount of money that people could give you to spread Russian propaganda on this show.
There's no amount of money that people could give me to spread Russian propaganda or Chinese propaganda on my show.
What they do is they find people who already agree with them and then they amplify their voice using money and influence and say, look, we'll give you, you know, we'll give you ten million dollars and you can come to this great conference.
We'll give you an opportunity to interview this guy who's close to Vladimir Putin or this guy who says this or that person or this person.
And they just take the forces within our society that are already destabilizing and they amplify them.
So this podcaster in the United States, it was Tenant Media.
Is that one podcaster or is that a network of podcasts?
So what happened is they had a network of podcasters underneath them who, according to the indictment, they were all being used.
So they didn't know they were being paid by Russia.
Oh, OK. They were just all being used.
And every now and again, again, we don't know the full details, but it would be like, hey, have you seen this news story?
Like the Ukrainians might have been involved in the terrorist attack in Russia.
Maybe you should cover it.
And one of them did stuff like that.
Ah, OK. And they weren't necessarily picking aside, were they?
No, they were picking aside.
Oh, so they were pro -Trump or pro -Kamala or?
Well, they were mostly right wing influences.
But the person in question whose name is Lauren Chen, she actually started agitating people against Donald Trump at one point, which is my point.
They are not trying to get a particular person elected.
They are trying to make you go, who do I vote for?
What's going on? Like just to confuse everybody to the point that they don't know what to believe and they don't know what to think and they don't know what to do.
Looks like it's working.
That's my point, which is why we need in the West to have a very clear idea of who we are, where we're going, how we got here, what makes our society successful, where we've come from and to reject the lies about our history.
Because this is why both the crazy left and the crazy right want to revise our history so that we don't know who we are anymore, so that we can't say, well, actually, Britain is a great country and has done incredible things for the world.
Right. You know, Britain is a country that has the first modern parliament.
It's a country that spread democracy around.
It's a country that actually the first empire in history that ended slavery, it ended slavery.
It didn't invent it.
It ended it. Slavery was the norm.
And then the British came along, practiced slavery just like everybody else and a terrible thing it was.
And then they spent a tremendous amount of blood, money and treasure to end slavery, not only within the British empire.
They spent a huge amount of diplomatic, military and financial capital to force other countries to end slavery in those countries as well.
Right. But that's not what you're being taught in school right now, is it?
No. And that's the problem, because if you think of your society as based on these terrible things, well, why would you want its values to persevere and continue in the future?
It made me wonder if there is any help or any solution to this, because immediately as I was thinking, is there a way to stop the division?
And most of the division actually happens on the internet now.
It's not like we're out on the streets.
And the way the algorithms work is they reinforce an opinion.
So you get literally like coins at the casino for saying something where a big group of people clap and nuance is like the enemy of social media growth, I think.
Like if you express a solution to a problem as complex and nuanced, who the fuck wants to hear a complex and nuanced?
Like really, I think there's much more reward for me to say this is bad or this is amazingly good.
And if you're in either of those camps, you know exactly who's clapping.
Yes. Whereas in the middle, as we've kind of, you've probably experienced it a lot as a podcaster, like you don't get the support, the full support of either side.
Maybe the middle exists.
I don't know. Well, the centre is the place of great attention.
It always is because you're getting fire from both sides.
And picking a tribe is always much more comfortable and more convenient.
But this is where I think actually the beauty of the internet is too.
Like 20 years ago, you and I both would have had some kind of rich funder, not me or you, but someone who actually had loads of money, who would be funding this and telling you what you were supposed to talk about.
I don't have to give a shit what anyone thinks.
There is an audience out there for the nuanced, balanced, here's the thing I think about this, but also about this take.
And, you know, look, yes, absolutely.
You know, if you're Andrew Tay, you're going to get a bigger audience saying what you're saying, or the equivalent of the left, whatever that looks like, then I might.
But I'm very happy with a million subscribers on YouTube.
I'm very happy that 60 ,000 people read my substacks every week.
And that's growing too.
There is a market out there for everybody.
And then ultimately, I think it comes down to is who are you, and who do you want to be?
I didn't get into this to be the richest or the most successful podcaster in the world.
I got into this because I wanted to promote critical thinking.
I wanted to promote the truth and the pursuit of truth.
I don't claim to know the truth, but I'm trying to find out what it is.
And I wanted people in the West to remember what they have, to be grateful for it, to defend it, to stand up for the values that made these societies great.
You said a second ago that we need to remember who we are.
If we are going to be successful as a society.
And one of the things that did sort of anchor us in values was religion.
Yes. And I'm I was born to a very religious Christian family.
Went to church a lot when we were younger.
My mother's still extremely religious.
My father was religious as well.
I believe I still think he's religious.
And about 18 or 19 years old, I discovered like Richard Dawkins books and had this like existential crisis for two.
We all. And then after the existential crisis, which lasted two years and me like, you know, really trying to find answers, I kind of was it just a piece with it?
And I would class myself now as being agnostic.
But in the last six months, I class myself as being agnostic.
But you're bi curious now.
Bi curious. You're God curious.
You can always feel me going back to the beginning again.
But much of that, I think, is what you described, which is because we've become more individualistic, more lonely.
All these kinds of things without searching for purpose again.
Yes. And for values that are anchored in something.
Yes. I wondered what your take was on the impact that us becoming a more atheist society has had on all these things.
Look, I am an agnostic myself.
I that's not to say that I think, you know, I'm not a materialist in the sense that like, this is it.
It's definitely not it.
And I know that experientially.
I know that there are ways that human beings connect that are way beyond, you know, the things that we can see with our eyes and hear with our ears.
There are powerful forces in this world that are spiritual in nature.
These are not things I can prove and I have no intention of trying, but they exist.
But there is no question that the decline of religion has meant that people are lacking meaning and lacking purpose and lacking guidance and lacking discipline and lacking a set of rails in which to live their lives.
The hope is that from that comes something else.
You know, there have been many great religions through our history.
There's no reason to say that the ones we currently have are the last ones we're ever going to have.
God knows what AI is going to do to our sense of who we are and what our purpose is and what our mission is.
And also, you know, there is a purpose to be found in other things.
You know, if if you are fortunate enough like me to become a father at some point, that really changes your perspective on so many different things and gives you a sense of meaning and purpose.
I'm sure your work is very meaningful to you.
But yes, at a societal level, the death of religion has been very impactful in that way for sure.
Do you think we'd be better if we went back to being more religious as a society?
Forgive me, but that's a stupid question because you can't go back.
Really? No, you can't go back to anything.
The part of the reason we are less religious is that the material circumstances of our lives have changed very dramatically.
And you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.
You can go forward.
And that's what I'm alluding to.
I don't think the the religious age is over.
I mean, human beings clearly have a religious instinct that has lasted through through the ages.
And usually, religion has been there to explain to us the things that we do not understand.
I think that with a lot of the technological breakthroughs that we're about to see, there's going to be a whole range of things that I don't even know what they are, that we were not going to understand exactly.
And the spiritual attitude we take to those things may be different yet again, we'll find out.
Or a lot of people will go to religion, but I don't think they're going to go to like the 1960s version of it.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah. And I think I think about read some work that said that a lot of young Western men in particular were choosing Islam.
Obviously, we've seen people like Andrew Tate as well make the decision, but there was this rise in young Western men deciding to come out or convert to Islam.
That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense.
Why? Because Islam is a religion that offers particularly men quite a lot of the things that they really want.
Right? Discipline, structure, reward, community.
The I mean, one of the things about Islam, when you contrast it against Christianity and Western values, today's Western values more broadly is Islam, like very few other things, is is one of the ideologies that still allows men to be strong and confident.
Right? In modern Western society, what is a man supposed to be?
Look at your adverts, look at your movies, look at everything.
A man is supposed to be this pathetic, weak second to his strong female counterpart.
Men are supposed to step back and make space and all of this.
Islam says, no, no, you're the man.
That's always going to be appealing to men who increasingly feel, particularly younger men, who, in many ways, they've got the short end of the stick while being told that they are privileged and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Like young men are not in positions of privilege in our society now.
They do worse in education.
They do worse in all sorts of other things.
And at the same time, they're being demonized, right?
It's very natural that their response to that is going to be things like that.
And, you know, people often talk about Andrew Tay as a very problematic figure, which it certainly is.
But to me, the blame, to me, is the symptom of a much bigger underlying wider problem.
Like my generation's version of that was Jordan Peterson, who I thought was a very constructive force and still is.
I had the privilege of touring with him in America this year and it was incredible.
And he's a very positive, constructive person.
But the more you try to prevent men from being men, the more you're going to get the backlash.
And I think people joining Islam, following these hypermasculine influences going to like one of the reasons, if you notice, loads of guys are like now into going to the gym and being like not just going to the gym to like be healthy, but like they're buff, right?
Because that's one of the very few acceptable ways for men to be men in modern society.
Right. Because the things that we conventionally would associate with masculinity, you know, strength, confidence, aggression, dominance, etc.
They're kind of looked down upon for guys nowadays.
Right. And so, well, at least I can go to the gym and I can look buff.
Right. It's so true.
I was just thinking about the people my father might have looked up to.
He's from Coventry.
And when I from my memory of his idols, they were like rock stars in bands.
Yeah. They were like skinny, like probably smokes.
And we all had long hair.
My dad had long hair as well, like this down to his shoulders.
When I saw some old photos of him and I imagine his version of like The Andrew Tate was that I know the lead singer of like The Beatles or whatever.
Yeah. Or his favorite rock band.
But you're right. All of our people we look up to in society, they probably do Brazilian jujitsu.
Right. We go to the gym.
Yeah. There's something they fight in some way.
Yeah. Boxing, UFC, whatever.
And it's much, you know, because I think that's one of the reasons that the UFC is crushing it as hard as it is.
I mean, Dan White is a brilliant business guy and it's a great product and it's fascinating.
But I think one of the reasons there's such an obsession with combat sports nowadays is that it's like, well, at least I can see like men being men type of thing.
Do you know what I mean?
Because nowhere else am I going to get that.
I think that's it's undoubtedly to me a kind of like misplaced, misplaced masculinity.
Maybe it's not misplaced.
It's just like the one place you can actually see it, you know, and you're allowed to celebrate masculinity in that way.
The hyper masculinity.
It's a very interesting moment that we're in.
Is there is there a solution that you can see to the issues that men are facing in the sort of modern world where suicide rates are through the roof, loneliness, depression?
Look, the solution for men is always going to be the same, which is to be better, to do better, to work harder, to learn skills, to grow, to develop, to look for mentors, to look for guidance and to do things.
It's always going to be the way like, like I said, no one's coming to save you.
And this is this is why victimhood that we talked about earlier, it's especially bad for men because, you know, we feel sorry for women.
We don't really feel sorry for men.
Right. So if a woman is a victim, everyone wants to go and help her and support her.
And it's just natural and understandable.
There's a very good evolutionary reasons for this, I think, which is men are biologically disposable, basically.
You know, if you have a tribe of 10 men, 10 women, you send the men off to war, one comes back, you can replenish the tribe.
And that's one very lucky dude.
If you do it the other way around and you send the women off to war, you're screwed.
Right. And so men are kind of disposable.
We didn't evolve to feel sorry for them.
And so for guys, again, like you just got to do stuff and be better.
And yes, you've been dealt a bad hand.
You have compared to the previous generations where men were in charge and all of that.
You're going to have to find a way.
And work ism and sort of, I guess, political correctness and cancel culture and all these things are much of the weapons that are used to put men in those situations.
Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, I think I always worry when we have these conversations that to say that men, young men, especially younger than me, I think, have a bad deal is often like people trying to immediately shove you in some kind of box, like you have some men's rights, blah, blah, blah.
I just think that's an observable fact.
And the reason I think it's important is that men and women need to work together.
Men and women have had to work together for the entire history of human existence.
One of the terrible things about work in this is that it creates these divisions between men and women, you know, men are this women are that.
And you see the response to that from the aggressive masculine side.
Now, women are all this and women are all that.
Actually, the thing that men and women really need more than anything is each other.
They need to work together that operates at the level of your relationship with your girlfriend, my wife.
But broader society, too, like we have different skill sets.
We are naturally inclined to do different things.
We have to find ways to work together better.
And so when one side suffers, there was a time when women were treated very badly.
A lot of them. That wasn't good.
Treating men badly isn't going to work out well, either.
What you really need is finding ways for men and women to be healthy together in relationships.
And so that's, I think, important to say that that's the objective.
If that's the goal, if that's the objective that we're holding up, then the question is, how do we get there?
And the question, the answer to that is not to point fingers at the other sex and say they are this and they are that, but to go, well, men are naturally aggressive and dominant and status seeking and all of this stuff.
And let's find ways to channel that into effective things.
Like we need guys to like stand on construction sites and hammer into the ground and all of that.
And we need women to do other things that are more natural to them.
I mean, look, once you have a kid and you start taking them to like nursery, you find out that, you know, there is no gender equality in a kindergarten.
It's like mostly women that run that place.
And that's the way it should be.
And that's that makes sense.
So we have different inclinations, different skill sets.
It's not to say there are exceptions of, of course, there are, right.
But generally speaking, we need to work together.
That's the point. And I think even mentioning that there might be biological differences in male and female is where people like the, you know, those that are looking for what about how they come out in full arms.
But I think anyone in their private relationship can very clearly state the differences between men and women.
And as you say, they're not sweeping and there are exceptions.
But how beneficial?
I don't know anything about you.
We've just met. But I imagine your girlfriend's been instrumental in your life.
Would that be fair to say?
Of course. I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am without my wife.
Like, and we both reap the benefits of that.
I'm sure that's the case with you.
That's how it's supposed to work on an individual level and at the level of society.
Holding each other up, filling in gaps, like the first time I remember, you know, something when I was young, when I was about 20, like full of testosterone, I remember watching my mom resolve a conflict with a joke and a smile.
And to me, it was like magic.
I was like, whoa, you can do that?
And then that was a helpful thing for me to learn, you know.
But in my masculine boarding school kind of environment, you'd never do that, right?
It was all about who can, like, win and fight and dominate and whatever.
We're useful to each other.
We can learn from each other.
That's the attitude that we should have towards each other and other sex.
I love the term you used there when you said, hold me up, because that's exactly what my partner does for me.
And I think she'd probably say the same for her, which I think goes to your point about what it should be.
This is what mutual support.
We fill in the blanks in each other's maps of the world, in emotional states.
There's certain emotional states that I find very hard to get out of.
My wife can come in and be like, boom, boom, boom, done and vice versa.
Right. And they're not the same.
We've been told the lie that men and women are the same.
What about problematic men?
Like Harvey Weinstein and stuff?
Yeah, terrible. Of course.
The whole me too movement exposed this wave of like someone on my podcast said it was at the neuroscientist in America.
He said we've called men out, but we need to make sure we call them back in, if that kind of makes sense.
Well, I think the mistake we made was we called men out instead of calling toxic men out in the same way that people who are critical of women now, they will point to certain female traits or certain female people who behave in ways that are very toxic and they will broaden and generalize from that onto
all women. Right. Harvey Weinstein does not represent me.
In fact, throughout history, people like him would have actually been dealt with by good men and prevented from acting in that way.
Right. I guess the argument is that it is all men because you're having those conversations in your group chat and you're not not checking your your friend or your, I don't know, how these friends didn't check him.
What kind of group chats are you reading?
This is what this is what I see online is like.
Right. But that makes absolutely zero sense.
This is this is the thing is like if you want to generalize about an entire group of people, generally speaking, we think that's a bad thing to do.
Like if you were to do that about Pakistanis, people wouldn't be be into that, right?
If it was to do that about black people, nobody would be into that.
But the moment it's men, suddenly that's that's totally cool.
Now we're now we're going to do this doesn't make any sense.
Free speech is at the heart of this, right, because we're talking about social media platforms, the ability to express ideas and not be scared.
Free speech has been on a bit of a journey over the even the last 10 years.
I think if you just looked at where we were 10 years ago and then five years ago and then the pandemic and then now it feels like all four of those moments were in a different place.
What's your observation of that story arc of free speech?
Well, it's all very contextual and depends where you are, what you do, what your opinions are.
One thing people forget, give you one brief example, right, because people, a lot of people make free speech a political issue.
They say, well, this side cares about it because they want to say their stuff and this side doesn't care about it because blah, blah, blah.
During the pandemic, when the vaccine came out in America, the person who was pushing the vaccine was Donald Trump.
And people who were opponents of his on the left said, I'm not taking Trump's vaccine, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Right. The moment the presidency changed, suddenly you couldn't criticize the vaccine.
Right. And suddenly, you know, you wanted to kill people if you had some reservations about some things about it.
Right. So free speech usually, and always has been really, is a weapon that people like to use against the other side, which is why you need people in the middle to kind of be the referee and say, guys, well, I don't care which one of you is in power now.
We always need free speech so that we can criticize the people in power, not the right or the left, but the people in power, whoever that is.
Now, from about 2014 onwards, particularly, I think there was a lot of restriction of speech from the left, from the progressive left.
And that was part of Wokeness.
And by the way, just for for your, your audience, I think it might be helpful.
I always say this because people don't know this.
Where the term political correctness comes from.
People think political correctness is, you know, let's be let's not be mean to people.
Let's not offend minorities.
Let's not make offensive jokes, blah, blah, blah.
Never had anything to do with that.
Political correctness was invented in the Soviet Union by communists so that they could say to critics of the communist regime, well, Comrade, what you're saying may be factually correct, but it's politically incorrect, and therefore you should shut up.
In other words, it's inconvenient to the party line of the day.
And that's how political correctness is used always.
It's about preventing you from expressing a dissenting opinion.
So from 2016 onwards, you saw lots of that, especially on social media, because the kind of progressive left had a lock on all of those institutions.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, we can go down the full list.
They panned it. I'm not saying the people who ran them were themselves necessarily woke, but they pandered and appeased that fringe who said, you can't say that that's hate speech.
You can't say that.
And during the pandemic, we saw real restrictions on it.
I understand why the pandemic killed a hell of a lot of people.
There was a hell of a lot of lies being told by people of all different sides.
I was uncomfortable with the level of censorship we saw, though.
I thought that a lot of very reasonable things were prevented from being talked about.
One of them was where the virus came from.
We now know with almost certainly it came from a lab in China due to almost certainly gain of function research.
Matt Ridley, for example, he's in the House of Lords in the UK.
He's not some fringe random guy, wrote a whole book with a Chinese scientist, Alina Chan, I think her name is.
We've had him on the show to talk about this.
If you'd said that on social media in the early days of the pandemic, he would have been banned.
Now we know that's almost certainly what happened.
And it's really important where the virus came from for obvious reasons, which is if it came from a lab where these people were messing around with viruses.
Don't we want to know that?
Because it could happen again, right?
So free the restriction of free speech is dangerous for all sorts of reasons.
And then Elon Musk bought Twitter.
And I think since then, we've seen that, you know, a friend of mine is very fond of saying that zero is a special number.
And what he means by that is when you control every single media outlet in the world of that type social media, you are able to censor everything.
But the moment one of those outlets is not controlled by you, censorship becomes pointless, because people can go to the other platform and see the things for themselves.
Right. Which is one of the reasons Mark Zuckerberg has come out recently and said that they were wrong.
To ban Donald Trump from Facebook and Instagram and they were wrong to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story and all of that kind of stuff and that they wouldn't do so again.
Because now, now that there is a platform where that censorship is not happening, he looks kind of bad in this whole thing.
Right. So I think Elon buying Twitter and opening up the range of conversations has had some very positive effects.
It's also had some negative effects, undoubtedly.
And that is a thing that, you know, I think a great engineer like Elon will hopefully fine tune over time.
What is the negatives of?
Well, look, the amount of horrific shit that people say on there now has increased exponentially, undoubtedly.
And the answer to that might not be that they need to be banned or censored.
It might be what he said originally.
He talked about freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.
Like, you know, maybe, you know, my view as someone from a Jewish background is I don't want people being banned from social media for being anti -Semitic, but should they be promoted actively on social media for being anti -Semitic?
Should we flood the Internet with that?
Maybe not. Maybe like they can say what they want, but maybe it shouldn't be to the broadest possible audience or whatever it looks like.
Right. Like, I don't think we want a space where people.
People are encouraged to be hateful.
And it sometimes does feel like that on social media.
One of the big problems is, of course, anonymity.
Right. It's like that windscreen effect in the car.
You get in your car, someone is cut you up in traffic.
The things you do and say are not the things you would say to someone face to face.
And if you have complete online anonymity, it encourages people to be the worst version of themselves.
How you resolve that, we don't know.
It's a complicated problem.
I mean, social media is a giant conundrum.
Personally, I am still, despite all that horrible shit, on the side of like the opening up is good.
We don't want people being banned for expressing the wrong opinion about, you know, the pandemic, the vaccine, the whatever, unless they're really being nefarious.
There's a balance to be found.
We haven't found it yet.
When you look at all solutions as just having tradeoffs, I think it makes it a lot easier to accept that we'll never be happy with this.
And if you arrive at that position, then...
That's a Thomas Sowell line, by the way.
I was actually... Yeah.
Man, you would love his books, I promise you.
I've written his name down, so I'm going to have to have to dig in.
And everything you said, I have seen.
So I've seen a rise in commentary that I think has really been beneficial.
And I've also seen the N -word more times on my timeline than like I ever would have seen before.
Or like horrific stuff.
So the idea of freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach, might be the best solution.
And look, it's a terrible thing to say, but maybe, maybe, maybe, you know, the tradeoff of a free society is some people are going to say things you and I both really don't like, you know.
The question is, should they be front and center of the biggest social media platform in the world?
Maybe not. But as I say, I think it's a technical issue.
And as you say, there are tradeoffs to both ways of handling it.
I believe that social media is a very new thing.
We will find the solution is going to take some time.
I just hope it doesn't break our brains in the meantime.
Are you, if we look forward 5, 10, 20 years, do you think the West will still be dominant?
I think in that timeline, yes.
Because the accumulated advantage we have is very significant.
But you know that thing about how did something end gradually and then suddenly?
We're not on a good trajectory.
And, you know, when we talk about, you know, the decline of the West, people imagine like, you know, and then one day everybody died.
It's not what I'm talking about.
But have you been to Rome?
Yes. Have you been to Athens?
No. Okay. Well, they're the same thing.
You walk out of the tube station in central Rome and you see this coliseum.
Incredible. And you think, what an amazing civilization.
And you look around and there's a challenge and then wonderful people and they have a great time and whatever.
But those are not the same thing.
The Roman Empire in Italy are not the same thing.
Great civilizations come to an end and they come to an end when they decide they are no longer willing to fight for their future.
And what does that mean in reality if it comes to an end?
As in if the West becomes, you know, secondary to China or Russia.
What does that mean for me and you?
Decline in living standards.
We are going to be dictated to by other countries in the way that we currently dictate to them what they should do, what they shouldn't do, where they can have their power sentence, where they can't.
It will mean that our children are not as prosperous and not as free as you and I have been.
And it will mean that the values of the West, which are ironically the things that people care about so much, human rights, equality of treatment, all of those, those things will fall to the wayside.
Because, you know, in Russia or China, the attitude to gay people or ethnic minorities is nothing like what we have here.
And so that's what I keep trying to say to people, like, look, I agree with you when you say, you know, we need to treat people of different backgrounds equally and we need to be fair and we need to be kind to people.
If that's what you care about, the thing you should really, really do is do everything you possibly can to save the West because the moment the West is not dominant.
Those values will not be considered values at all.
What could I do to save the West?
Okay, remove the podcast.
Okay. Steven, before the podcast, what could I do as an individual listening to this to save the West?
Teach your children how lucky they are.
Take them abroad. Show them the rest of the world.
Show them what people live like in poor countries around the world and remind them how fortunate they are and then explain to them where it all comes from.
And it comes from the fact that we have developed, designed, invented, found the magic formula for human society, at least the best one that humans have invented so far.
Freedom of expression, freedom of research, freedom of speech, capitalism, private property, the rule of law, and the idea that, you know, we talked about religion.
I think it comes largely from Christianity, that we all have dignity by virtue of being human.
Those are the things that have driven our society to the tremendous success we have, to the technological progress.
People don't realize that, but, you know, without freedom, freedom of research, freedom of expression, you don't have the technological progress that we have.
And then you don't have the dominance that we enjoy because our dominance is almost entirely based on the technological progress.
We're not the most populous civilization in the world.
We don't have the largest number of people.
We are prosperous because of our technological advantages, and they come from the incredible opportunities that people have to research things, to make things, and then to profit from them in a way that they don't have in other societies.
Teach your children that their society is great.
Teach them that they live in one of the best places in the history of the world, that all the bullshit they're being taught at school is not true.
Inoculate them against these ideas.
My parents had to do this with me.
When I was growing up in the Soviet Union, they, before my first day at school, they said two things.
First, do not ever discuss anything we talk about in the home at school because we'll all be in trouble.
And two, they're going to teach you this, this, this, and this.
This is not true. That's fine.
You have to argue with your teacher.
Just know that it's not true.
Here's why it's not true.
If you have any questions, talk to us.
You have to inoculate your children against this stuff, and then they will be good citizens.
Then they will create things of value to the society, and they will spread that message to others.
I was thinking about you telling the story of going to school and your parents basically saying, don't say that, because we'll be in trouble.
And then I had a little flash in my head of some of the recent headlines around people talking on social media and being arrested for it.
Now, I know there's a big spectrum of things people have been arrested for saying on social media, but there are some absurd things as well, which make everyone, I think should give everyone cause for concern.
We don't think of our society as one where we could get in trouble for something we tweet.
Well, the assumption that most people make is, well, you probably got arrested because you said something horrific.
And I understand why they make that assumption, but it's not always true.
A lot of gender critical feminists, for example, women who are concerned about the invasion of women's spaces by trans activists, they've had issues with the police.
There was a girl called Chelsea Russell.
I don't know if you're familiar with this case, but she she posed to her friend who was killed in a car crash.
And she posted the lyrics of his favorite song on her Instagram and contained the N word of the rap song.
And she was prosecuted and found guilty of a hate crime.
And I think it took several years for her to win an appeal against us.
But before that, she was like tagged.
She had a curfew, lots and lots of other things.
Because you put rap lyrics on her Instagram bio.
Chelsea Russell, look her up.
So when you restrict what people can say in this way, you inevitably stray into areas that for some reason currently are controversial, like the trans thing, for example.
And you punish people for expressing, you know, sometimes not very articulately, but not everyone is articulate.
Sometimes people have honest feelings.
And by the way, you know, should it be illegal to be a dick?
I don't think so. Otherwise, they'd be a lot of people getting arrested, you know.
And I just think we should always err on the side of freedom.
We should always err on the side of allowing people to express themselves, even if what they say we really don't like.
I mean, that's what our society is built on.
Can I ask you a question then?
Do you think someone who says a racial slur online should be arrested?
Personally, I don't know.
No, there is a context in which that might be the case.
Like if you're saying all these N words should be killed, that's a different thing because you're inciting violence.
But look, I've been racially abused in my life.
It's not pleasant. But like nothing happens.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, I don't think if someone just said a racial slur, they should be locked in jail.
But obviously, there will be social consequences.
Yeah, they're not going to be able to get a great job, for example.
Like if you walked into a pub and you started, you know, going off about some racial group, much people probably like, be like, who's that dick?
And, you know, the landlord might ask you to leave.
That's normal societal reaction.
Your friends might start being friends with you.
That's perfectly reasonable.
But do we need to criminalize that behavior?
Gosh, a slippery slope there, isn't it?
I think so. I think so.
And I think the most important thing is if you look around at countries in the world where people are prevented from saying things that other people don't like, where people are prevented from making jokes that other people don't like, those are not the sort of societies that we would want to live in or emulate.
Mm. Do you think this election, which is coming up in the US between Trump and Kamala, do you think it matters?
Every election matters in the United States because it's the most powerful country in the world, and it's the leader of the Western world, and also because the gap between those two candidates is so vast.
The gap in terms of their political views and in terms of what they would do with the country in terms of their perspectives, their attitudes.
Yes, I think it's very important.
Do you, for the woke, the eradication of the sort of woke virus that you speak of, do you think one candidate is more likely to achieve that than the other?
It's very hard to say because Kamala has said a lot of things that are woke, and she certainly would allow that side to flourish more.
Then again, if Donald Trump gets elected, does that provoke even more of a woke backlash?
Because, you know, the woke narrative is America is racist and homophobic and sexist and whatever.
And when Donald Trump gets elected, that kind of reinforces their ideas about reality and they double down.
So I don't know the reality.
I'm much more concerned about the war in Ukraine.
I think that that needs to be resolved.
I have a lot of family in Ukraine I really care about, what happens there.
Your wife is Ukrainian?
My wife's Ukraine and my mother's Ukrainian.
I spent my summer as a kid on my granddad's farm in Ukraine.
My grandmother, 95 years old, still alive, lives 100 kilometers from the front line, can't leave.
She lived through the Nazi occupation and now this.
But more importantly for the West, I think it's a real test of the West's resolve.
And that issue needs to be resolved by someone.
I have said from day one, Ukraine would have to give something away for long term security because there's no winning this war.
Which candidate is more likely to end the war?
Well, Kamala, look, there are two ways to play this, right, and both of them have merits.
One way is you give the Ukrainians way more support than we're currently doing so they can actually make advances.
That's one way to handle it.
The other way is you accept where we are and you say to Putin, you've got two choices, my friend.
One is we do a deal that's fair to you and that's fair to the Ukrainians.
And the most important thing is that the Ukrainians get long term security.
That means because you remember in 2014, this has already happened.
Russia already bit a piece off Ukraine in 2014.
And but even at that point, Ukraine had security guarantees from Western countries, which were not executed on, right?
They were not delivered on.
We promised them safety and we didn't give them safety.
So the most important thing in this outcome is that there is a physical barrier between Ukraine and Russia so that this can't happen again.
So either that's membership of NATO, not going to happen.
Or more likely some kind of Korean style demilitarized zone with peacekeeping troops on the border, right?
If you don't want to do that, Vladimir, then we will give Ukraine everything.
That's the threat. That's the deal you have to do.
Out of the two candidates, I think Donald Trump is probably more likely to get that outcome.
That's not to say I like everything about Donald Trump, but on that particular issue, I think it would be the candidate I would put more faith in to sort it out.
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What have you changed your mind about that mattered?
I think one of the things I've changed my mind most about is business as trigonometry has become more successful.
And we start to employ people.
I've understood things that I didn't really used to understand about taxes and incentives and stuff like that.
I mean, I don't know if you know this, but Britain, more millionaires are leaving the UK than any other country in the world at the moment.
Really? And that's because we have a very bad business environment.
We keep talking about, you know, we need to raise taxes on the rich and whatever.
One I never really understood is a tremendous amount of wealth is created by business people.
And when you tax them, what happens is they stay rich.
But they stop employing as many people.
They stop giving jobs to other people.
And so I never really understood wealth creation very well before.
It's really interesting.
Yeah. It's a big topic of conversation at the moment in both the US and the UK that like capital gains tax and corporation tax.
And, you know, it's a raging conversation in society, which is we just need to tax like the rich and the business people more.
And then one side says, no, don't do that because we're creating wealth and opportunities and jobs.
And the other side says, no, you're buying a private jet and a yacht.
Yeah. I think in the UK, it's particularly bad because there's a kind of attitude to money here that's a little bit class warfare -ish in a way.
You know what I mean?
And for good reasons, probably because, you know, this country had a landed gentry.
These were people who were rich because they were rich because their dad was rich, basically.
Right. And so when we think of wealthy people, we don't think of successful people.
We think of privileged people.
But most people who have money are not like that.
Most people have have money because they've created things that are of value to other people.
But we get those two things confused quite often.
And most people I know who are wealthy and successful, they don't buy private jets.
They pour all their money that they have into bigger, better, you know, hiring more people.
You know, when we have more money, the trigonometry, we hire another person because we want there's more shit for us to do that we want to do that we're not yet doing.
Then, on other things, you know, I used to be incredibly libertarian on drug policy.
I used to think that, you know, people should be free to take whatever drugs they want.
I still think that about certain drugs.
But I also think there are certain drugs that are just so incredibly addictive, particularly to people who are already vulnerable, that they shouldn't be criminalized, I think, for taking them.
I think they should be given help.
They should be this should be treated as a mental health issue.
But I've become slightly less, less, less affair about it, I think.
And then with everything else, I've just that point you made earlier, which is Thomas Sowell thing about there are no solutions, only trade offs.
Every time I look at any issue, I just realize that most of the things that we argue about are unsolved because they're difficult to solve.
And there's very difficult things on on both sides of the argument.
And quite often, we look at things from an ideological perspective, and that ruins things taken America, they they're obsessed politically about abortion.
Right. You know, these people argue that it's women should be allowed.
And the very good reasons to argue that these people argue with the sanctity of human life, which I think is a very good valid reason, too.
And we can have those arguments.
And we're going to stay exactly where we stayed for however many decades.
There are countries in the world, Hungary, for example, where they have a very right wing government who didn't want to make abortion a political issue.
What they did instead is they made family a political issue.
They encourage people to have families financially.
They give people all kinds of tax breaks and help them get on the housing ladder if they have kids.
And they've halved the number of abortions in half without banning abortion.
Right. So that's a practical solution to an issue that is not going to get resolved by people arguing about it from an ideological position.
And I just think there's so many like tricks like that that can be found if we're willing to be interested in pragmatism instead of ideology.
It's interesting because when you use the abortion example, I go, you know, I think for a lot of people in politics, this abortion subject is like a political weapon now.
And I think often the same about the border.
I think if I was trying to get you to vote for me and I was.
I need to represent a bunch of things.
And if those things scare the shit out of you or create some kind of disgust, they're probably going to work.
Sure. So if I say there's rapists coming across the border who are taking our daughters or, you know, an ascending that from mental institutions and they're coming for your daughter and I'll stop it.
It's like a compelling that, you know.
Sure. And also that I had Trump talk recently about some of the abortion subjects and talking about ripping live babies out at nine months.
And I just think, God, that language is so tempting.
Well, they're trying to win votes.
Having said that, Trump is actually very moderate by Republican standards on the abortion issue.
He's actually getting attacked from his own side for it.
Look, I think on immigration, we talked before about how different levels of immigration are appropriate to different times.
America in particular has a very rich history of welcoming people from all over the world.
The problem that both Britain and America and other European countries have is illegal immigration.
There is no reason that should be happening.
There's literally zero reason that people should be walking into this country without being checked, without knowing who they are.
And it's happening on a fast scale.
And I'll give you an example.
This is just anecdotal, of course, but it's representative of a bigger issue.
When I was in the last time I was in L .A., all the taxi drivers, the Lyft drivers in L .A.
are Armenian. OK, yeah.
Armenians speak Russian.
Armenians know that Konstantin is a Russian name.
So I'd get in a Lyft, they'd go, oh, Konstantin, start speaking Russian to me.
None of them know who I am.
So we'd get chatting, whatever.
Basically, the ones that came to America in the 80s and 90s, they all came by applying for a visa following the rules.
The guys who've come since then, they've all come through the southern border.
Really? Yeah, it's not Mexicans fleeing cartel oppression, mostly.
It's people from all over the world.
And this guy was telling me, he was like, oh, yeah, yeah, I brought my cousins over, I brought my dad over, he's 83, he's in a wheelchair.
No problem. We just got him over.
What's the harm? What's the harm of illegal immigration?
Of him coming over and taking that job as a Lyft driver?
There's no harm of him coming over and taking that job as a Lyft driver, other than there's lots of people who are following the law, and applying and not coming in, because that person has jumped the queue.
You can't have people coming in illegally.
It's against the law.
It's like saying, what's the harm of someone committing a crime?
Well, the harm is they're breaking the law.
First and foremost.
Secondly, people break the law on purpose.
The reason they break the law is that we probably wouldn't let them in otherwise.
So that means we've thought about what kind of immigration system we want to have.
We've voted for people who put in the laws that we wanted.
It's an idealized version of reality, but you get where I'm going with this.
And then we say, well, we want these people to come in, but we don't want everyone to come in.
We want only these people because they have the right skills, the right qualifications, the right whatever.
And what's happening is we're not letting them in, some of them, and we're letting people in that we never wanted in the country in the first place.
Then a lot of them are coming.
For example, this country, I don't know the latest figures, but under the Conservatives, we were spending eight million pounds a day every day in Britain on housing for illegal immigrants who were coming over from other countries.
Why should the British taxpayer be spending eight million pounds a day to put people up in hotels?
What's the rationale for that?
I'm open to hearing.
I still don't know if I'm clear on the harm that if lots of people like that cab driver came in through the Southern border.
I know it breaks the law.
I want to get really clear on the macro impact.
Do you want a large population of people whose first act of coming to your countries to break the law?
How likely do you think those people are to pay taxes to contribute to society more broadly?
Less likely than someone who was from that country.
And especially less likely than someone who would have come legally by applying for a visa and getting that visa and getting a job.
So if they all abided by the law and paid taxes, would there be no other harm?
Well, we were getting to the harm.
So the harm is not all of them are like the Lyft driver and we have no way of sorting them one from the other.
Right. So when you have large levels of illegal immigration, one of the things that happen is nefarious actors abuse that.
So people come in who are some of them are criminals, some of them are terrorists, some of them are just violent.
You know, Abdul Azidi, who threw acid over that woman and her children recently in the UK, he was an illegal immigrant.
He came in here on a lorry.
He was supposed to have been deported twice and then suddenly decided, you know what, I'm a Christian.
He converted and then we let him stay.
And then he attacked the woman and two children with acid.
Are people crossing the borders more statistically committing crime than people who are there legally?
We don't know. Interesting.
Because we don't know how many of those people there are.
People will say, well, you know, actually, immigrants commit crime.
And how do you know?
How do you know how many illegal immigrants there are?
Because this is what I always think, because I watched all of the commentary around the elections and I watch every debate and I know it's on tonight.
And I watch everything and I always hear about, like, the acid attack.
Now, that's horrific.
It makes me get goosebumps when I think about it.
But there's also acid attacks going on from people that were born here.
So I'm trying to really understand if I'm being brainwashed by like an extreme, oh, my God, it's awful in that emotional feeling you get when you hear that story.
Or statistically, there's significance here.
And that's why I asked the question.
I'm like, is this an anomaly which is being used to look over here or is it the norm that illegal immigrants are criminals?
Sure. But why would we take the risk of having people come here who are deliberately breaking the law?
Is that a signal of good intent on their path?
Do you know what part of it is?
I go, oh, God, if I was in, you know, insert country, I'd give it a go.
If my life was bad, I'd give it a fucking go.
Would you? Sure. Well, I'm a first generation.
Yeah, I was born in Botswana.
Yeah. Oh, yeah, I was born in Botswana.
So half of my siblings were born in Manchester, but me and the youngest were born in Botswana, my mom's Nigerian.
So and I think if I was in Botswana and I heard this, you know, Disneyland of the UK, portrayed me on a TV or whatever, I'd give it a shot.
I interviewed Francis Ingane.
Yeah. Or did you? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He was an amazing guy.
Yeah, amazing guy. I speak to him on WhatsApp sometimes and hearing his story that he was in, was it Cameroon?
And he walked out of Africa.
Yeah, yeah. Swam to like tried swimming, got a boat, tried climbing the walls, etcetera, for years and years, walk through the desert and then makes his way to, I think it was Spain and then gets to France becomes the greatest of all time.
And UFC, you go... I wouldn't agree with that.
No, okay. Charles Johns is the greatest of all time.
He is the greatest of all time.
I meant to say the heavyweight champion of the world in the USA.
He was an incredible fighter.
Just the most incredible story.
The fact that that fight didn't happen is the worst thing.
It was just a crime.
Yeah. Anyway, your point is some...
You would do it. Yes.
And you're a valuable member of our society that we need.
Sure. But the point I'm trying to make to you is, first and foremost, people act like that's the choice, right?
Either we let Francis Ingane drown in the Mediterranean or we let him in illegally.
That's not what I'm advocating for.
This is where a lot of this conversation breaks down.
The actual solution to this, like with the abortion thing that we talked about, there are practical solutions to this that actually make sense.
What you do is you set up refugee processing centers in the local areas where there are conflicts, where there's all sorts of turmoil going on.
People can apply there and then be selected or not selected based on their circumstances because, like you said, there are no solutions on the trade offs.
We can't let everyone in the world who is poorer than us into our country.
Can we? No. Can we agree on that?
Yeah, I'm not. No, I'm just saying I'm just taking you through the argument.
I'm not saying you're saying that.
So that means we have to limit the number of people we allow in.
Is that fair? Yes. Okay.
Therefore, we then have to choose who we let in.
Is that fair? Yeah.
Okay. Therefore, illegal immigration is unacceptable.
Does that make sense?
Yeah. Okay, because if we want to help people from poor parts of the world where they're being mistreated and oppressed, we have to get them to form an orderly line in those areas, give them an opportunity to apply for asylum, then pick the ones that we think are the most likely to not be terrorists,
not be criminals. They have a genuine case that they need our help, that they're most likely to contribute to our society.
If they break out of the queue and run and jump the wall and get in, do you have empathy for them?
Of course. And can you blame them?
No. No. And I think this is the kind of nuanced initiative, which some people sometimes don't highlight, which is, and I mean, if you think about what's happened on the streets of the UK recently, it's been attacking them, like going to the hotels where they've been put and trying to burn the hotel
back. Burning down asylum centers and hotels is moronic and people shouldn't do it and they should go to prison for doing it.
People can't see the difference.
No, they can't. You know what I mean?
It's like, you stole my job.
Yes. Well, yes. And I don't think, I think sadly what happens is when people lived in deprived communities where they don't have jobs, and it's not because someone stole them.
It's just because those communities were de -industrialized or whatever, they get deprived and people lash out.
And it's terrible and it shouldn't happen.
And they always look for a scapegoat and that scapegoat is always going to be somebody like that.
That does not mean that we should have an open border for legal immigration, right?
So the question is, can we let everybody in that would want to come here?
The answer is no, as we agree.
That means we have to be selective.
That means we have to choose who comes and who doesn't.
That means we are going to have to reject some people.
We can still have empathy for them and understanding for them, but it's like you have a front door on your house and there are thousands of homeless people in London.
What if one of them broke into your house and started stealing stuff to sell?
You would have empathy, wouldn't you?
Not a law, judging by your face, but you would have some.
OK, let me try and add some more color to this analogy.
What if I needed people in my house to make it function?
OK, good analogy. So let's say you needed someone to build you an extension.
Like I need like a cleaner, a chef.
You need a cleaner, you need a chef and you need someone to build an extension.
So you need a bunch of people.
Yeah. And you put out a job advert, right.
And some people reply and you're like, cool, I'll pay you this much.
You come in and you sort out my extension, you do my cleaning, you do my cooking, blah, blah, blah, OK.
Their schedule to turn up on Monday.
And then on Sunday, a bunch of people break into your house and start doing all that stuff.
You don't know who they are.
You don't know what their qualifications are.
They break down the front door and walk in.
Would you be cool with that?
No. Right. So in the same way that we have a front door on our houses, because we want to decide who comes in and out of our houses, we have a front door on our countries.
I agree. I think illegal immigration for all the reasons you've said is not acceptable.
And the part that I where I get pulled a little bit is where I see the illegal immigrants being demonized.
Whereas want to do with that.
Yeah, which is what but it's almost impossible.
And there's so many issues in society like this where if you talk about the issue and you really talk about the issue, there will be some important conversation happening here.
Then you'll have some people come to the issue and see it as an opportunity to fan the embers.
And the people that fan the embers cause people downstream to misunderstand the issue and then start wars below.
So the point the conversation having about immigration is that I think is a productive conversation.
But then if if someone, you know, uses that as a as a way to get into power by saying that someone is coming to rape your children or they're stealing from you or all these things, they've taken your job.
They're the reason you're unemployed.
You know, they're the reason she she broke up with you because you don't have a job.
Now, it's the illegals that then causes all of this horrible division and fighting below.
And lots of people get caught in the crossfire that we're just getting on with their lives and good people 100 percent.
And that's that's why it's so unfortunate we can't.
Well, we can. We're doing it now.
Yeah, I think you and I, I don't know what you actually think, but certainly in terms of your argument, you're putting to me, you're coming from a different place.
Yeah. And I think we've got to the place that we understand that not anti -immigrants.
Yeah. And I'm actually pro -immigration in the sense that, well, I'm not pro anti -immigration since it depends on the time that you're in.
But generally speaking, I think when you choose the people who come when they're culturally a good fit for that society, when they're driven and talented and ambitious and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
That is going to be hugely beneficial to your country.
And I am for having legal immigration at the level that is beneficial to our society, which is not zero.
Legal immigration, I think, can be very conducive.
So not anti -immigrant.
Otherwise, I'd have to be anti -me.
But at the same time, I think illegal immigration, it just shouldn't be happening.
Yeah, we agree. And that's quite rare, actually, the ability to say that immigrants aren't bad people.
They're not the bad ones, necessarily.
They're not the ones to demonize.
Although, of course, there's exceptions.
And that legal immigration is good, illegal immigration is bad.
Well, again, legal immigration can be good.
Yeah. Right. If it's very large numbers of people in a very short period of time, that becomes very difficult to digest for the whole society.
And then tensions arise of the kind that you're talking about.
So my view is you want to bring in the right number of people, you want to make sure that they're able to integrate, make themselves at home, learn the language, adapt.
And then you can bring more people if that's what your society needs at that time.
What's the most important thing we didn't talk about that we should have talked about?
Good question. Trade -off denialism.
Interesting. Trade -off denialism.
Trade -off denialism is people who deny the very thing that we've been discussing most of this conversation, which is you can't solve every problem.
You can choose which trade -off you get.
And in a lot of our conversations, we talk about them as if there are no trade -offs.
Climate change, which I talked about in my Oxford speech, is a very good example of this.
People say the planet is about to burn.
Therefore, we must do everything that we possibly can.
The problem is that when you do the things that they're suggesting, you do a terrible amount of damage to people.
You make people poor, especially in the third world, in the poor parts of the world.
And in our countries too, the reason that people are living longer and healthier lives is because we burn fossil fuels.
In 1947, the average life expectancy in India was 32.
32. That's mostly because...
Jesus, I just turned 32.
Yeah. So on average, you would have died by now.
Mostly in infancy, actually.
A lot of it was infant mortality.
Today, it's 71. Why?
Because they're burning a hell of a lot of fossil fuels and getting rich as a result.
Right? Energy is what makes our societies run.
It's why we are living longer, eating better, all of that.
When you pursue this idea called net zero, which is when we outsource our own emissions to other countries so we can pretend that we're green, we actually create more CO2 around the world because we're outsourcing manufacturing to other countries where they make things dirtier.
And then we're shipping them back.
Right? That doesn't make the world better.
It makes us feel better.
But if your thing is, well, you know, climate change is the only thing that's the only variable that we're optimising for, then you do a lot of damage.
And it's the same with almost everything else that we do.
So what's the solution with the climate change challenge?
How would you approach it if we...
And presumably you believe in the idea that in global warming and climate change, I guess.
Yeah. Well, the world is warming and there's human beings to contribute to that as far as I understand.
It's not nearly the catastrophe that we are being told that it is, not even remotely the catastrophe that we're being told that is for a number of reasons.
One of them is when the climate gets warmer, it's actually much better for human beings within a certain range.
We... It's beneficial to human society.
We know that from history.
It doesn't mean that we won't run away climate change.
But more people die from the cold than die from warm weather and from warm weather related events.
One of the things that we actually know is that far fewer people are dying from climate related disasters every year.
And that's because our technology and coping with them is getting better.
My view is the answer is technological.
We've got to use way more nuclear power than we use because it's carbon neutral to not entirely, but it's you need a lot less of it.
You build a power station basically, then it kind of runs itself.
There's nuclear waste.
We'll find a solution to that.
But the solution is very simple.
We have to find a way to make energy cheaper.
That's clean. It's really interesting, actually, I was just thinking as you were speaking about the call that Trump had with Elon, where Trump's making his point about climate change.
And then Elon's kind of saying, well, actually, like climate change is a real thing.
And the case, we're not going to the planet isn't going to burn in five years or 10 years.
But you know, and with sort of a medium time horizon, we do need to get carbon levels down.
And I was just thinking as you were speaking, I was thinking, God, if if Elon wasn't running Tesla, I think that the right who I think have now kind of adopted Elon in some respects would think about climate change very, very differently.
I think the right do think about it very differently.
But he's still on climate is quite unpopular on the right.
But his presence there means that people are open minded, open minded subjects.
And look, the answer to that issue, like with every other issue is to think about it as a pragmatic issue, not as a religious issue, which is increasingly what it's become.
People gluing themselves to roads and throwing soup on paintings is not going to stop climate change is my point.
We have a closing tradition on this podcast with last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for.
And the question that's been left for you.
No, in the diary of a CEO.
I didn't know that is what is one unfulfilled dream in your life?
Huh? It's a good question.
To have a large family.
Oh, interesting. So you've got one child.
Yeah. And we'll probably squeeze another hour, if we're lucky.
But apart from that, that will that will remain unfulfilled, I suspect.
Interesting. Yeah. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for the work that you do.
Your your podcast has an absolute cult trigonometry, an absolute cult.
Somebody my team members are really, really big fans of the show.
And I've watched so many episodes, predominantly clips that I've seen.
And then I've got drawn in and then tried to find the longer form episode.
But it's it's an important.
Last refuge for sense.
And I and I really respect people like you, because I do think that you do a really good job of navigating complex issues in a way where I still have faith in your process.
I still believe that you when you approach these issues, you're not doing it because you're ideologically contaminated in some way.
You're still trying to approach them despite the temptation and the external pressure with the intention of pursuing truth and truth to the means of making things better.
And those are the people that I really want to because it's difficult.
I appreciate that, man.
I feel seen as they say.
I'll get that. That's that's the goal.
You know, it's one of the things that we're very proud of is that, as we discussed in the main conversation, you know, it's very, very easy to make lots of money and get lots of attention by appealing to people's base instincts and worst instincts to by pretending to have more extreme views that you
have. And we've really done our best.
We are all susceptible to it, but we've really done our best to operate from that place.
Bad faith changes everything, and so does good faith.
When you act in bad faith, it changes everything like this conversation.
If you were acting in bad faith, we wouldn't have had the conversation we would have had.
Good faith changes everything as well.
And that's what we try to do.
It's what you're clearly doing.
So anyway, thank you for having me and enjoy the hate you're going to get.
Thank you so much. Isn't this cool?
Every single conversation I have here on the diary of a CEO, at the very end of it, you'll know, I asked the guest to leave a question in the diary of a CEO.
And what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home.
So you've got every guest we've ever had their question.
And on the back of it, if you scan that QR code, you get to watch the person who answered that question.
We're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question.
The brand new version two updated conversation cards are out right now at theconversationcards .com.
They sold out twice instantaneously.
So if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards, I really, really recommend acting quickly.
