Read the full transcript of political thinker Konstantin Kisin’s interview: “The Man Warning The West: Trump Is Changing The World Behind The Scenes”, on The Diary Of A CEO Podcast, January 22, 2026.
Brief Notes: Political commentator Konstantin Kisin joins Steven Bartlett to unpack why the post-war, rules-based order is collapsing and what a new age of raw power politics means for ordinary people in the West. From Trump’s bold moves in Venezuela and talk of “taking” Greenland, to Iran’s nuclear reckoning and China’s ambitions over Taiwan, he explains why nuclear weapons and hard power now trump international law. Kisin also argues that Europe’s economic complacency, net zero policies, and deindustrialisation have turned Britain and the continent into fading powers in a far more dangerous world. If you’ve been watching the headlines and wondering “what the hell is going on?”, this conversation offers a sharp, unsettling but essential big-picture briefing.
Introduction
STEVEN BARTLETT: Konstantin, there is so much going on in the world right now that it is incredibly confusing to somebody like me who doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about geopolitics or the bigger picture. I’m very, very heads down, as I imagine a lot of people in my audience are. We kind of get on with our lives. But every time we look at the news, there’s Trump has snatched Maduro from Venezuela, there’s the war with Russia and Ukraine, there’s something going on with Iran, there’s mention of Greenland being invaded by the United States, there’s talk of China taking back Taiwan.
I wanted to speak to you today to understand your perspective on the bigger picture here. What the hell is going on?
The End of the Rules-Based Order
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, what you’re seeing is the final collapse of what people described as a post-World War II order, which then became the post-Soviet collapse order. So if you think about 1945, World War II finishes and the Cold War begins. So you go from World War II to two big major players in the world competing for dominance, and that lasts until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapses, at which point you get the unipolar world in which there’s only one hegemony, only one country that’s really setting the terms of what’s happening in the world.
The West lost its focus and its sense of purpose in 1991 because we were like, “Well, we defeated our great rival communism, Soviet Russia,” and then we kind of didn’t really know what to do and we took our eye off the ball. And what’s happening now is that entire framework that we have had since World War II is disintegrating very rapidly.
This is why, you know, in light of recent events and the Maduro situation, you hear a lot of people talk about international law. International law was—I don’t know if you’ve ever had Yuval Harari on your show.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I have, yeah.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: He wrote the book called Sapiens in which he talks about the fact that almost everything that we live in, the world in which we exist, is a kind of shared myth that we have. And laws and money and all these things, they’re agreements that we have between us to make things real that are not real. Money isn’t real. That piece of paper has no value in your pocket, really, outside of the fact that other people have got together and agreed that it’s money, right?
Well, international law really was that. But even weaker than that, because if you think about what a law is, a law is something that has to be backed by not only the consent of the people who are involved, but also ultimately, it’s about the use of force, the legitimate use of force.
Now, for international law, there’s never been anything that could enforce that law other than the most powerful country in the world, right? So if China invades Taiwan, no one’s going to do anything about it, because there is no overarching authority with the military to be able to do anything about it.
And so that shared fiction that we had, which we were living in a structured world in which everything is done according to the rules, the rules-based order—you might have heard that term being used—that is now gone. And Trump is acting in recognition of that reality. And he’s saying, “Well, given that it’s sort of every man for himself now, I’m going to do what’s in the interest of the United States.”
Is it in the interest of the United States, for example, to have an openly hostile leader of a country close to the US which is so destabilized that 7 million people have fled as refugees?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Venezuela.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Venezuela. Is it in our interest to have this person cozying up to Russia? And is it in our interest to allow him to have Hezbollah training camps on the island of Margarita? Is it in our interest? It’s going back to the Monroe Doctrine, the idea that America does not allow foreign nations to meddle in its backyard, so to speak. And so what he’s doing now is going, “Well, look, this is the world we live in. I’m going to do what’s best for my country.” And I think that’s what you’re seeing.
The Risks of Raw Power Politics
STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there a risk with this strategy?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Of course there’s a risk with every strategy. Of course, there’s a risk with this strategy. The big risk is inevitably with this strategy. And I think, you know, as I talked about in my book, the West becoming weaker and emboldening our enemies, which is what we have done for a long time now, is creating an environment where we are opening ourselves up to challenge from other forces.
Russia invading Ukraine was not an accident. It was not an accident. It was a consequence of the fact that Putin and other people in his leadership team felt this was the moment to test the waters.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And they felt they could do that under Biden, in your view?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes, but see, I wouldn’t personalize it down to that level. I think far too many people get carried away with, you know, Republican, Democrat, left, right, Biden, Trump. It’s an ongoing process that’s been going on for decades. And the culmination of it was first the invasion of Ukraine, then October 7th.
October 7th was not an accident either. Hamas, backed by Iran, felt that this was their moment to act. Because again, is the West going to be able to respond morally, militarily and in other ways powerfully to that? They felt that they were able to test it.
The fact that China now is openly talking about taking Taiwan is again, another symptom of this same thing. So the risk is there. And of course the risk as well is that, you know, the crumbling Western alliance—we can talk about the reasons for it. I think it’s really important too, particularly we’re recording this in Britain and in Europe more broadly. I think that’s an important conversation. The Western alliance is falling apart and that is always going to be a risk. It’s particularly big risk for Europe, I feel.
Nuclear Weapons and the New World Order
STEVEN BARTLETT: How much of this is linked to nuclear weapons? Because I was thinking I can’t really—all of these superpowers are going for countries that aren’t armed with nuclear weapons. And it somewhat feels to me that the reason why the US wouldn’t get involved if China took Taiwan is because they have nukes. And the reason why the US is a little bit intimidated by Russia is because they have nukes.
So is it really? The world is splitting into nuclear powers and anyone with nukes can do what the f* they want because they can basically wipe out planet Earth if they get angry.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: And that has always been the case, except we’ve been constrained by the framework of the rules-based order. But that got taken apart. And this is where I think the West and the United States, including, needs to take responsibility, because the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, even more so, completely undermined our moral credibility.
How can you say, “Well, Russia isn’t allowed to invade Ukraine” if you go around invading countries on a whim, making up excuses and reasons to do that? So we have eroded our moral authority, and we’ve also eroded our military strength and the potential that we have to inflict damage on people who misbehave, so to speak. So both of those things have come together.
STEVEN BARTLETT: It seems so crazy to me that in my lifetime I’m seeing—because it’s really never happened in the 33 years that I’ve been alive—I’m hearing a US president talk about kidnapping another president and then going in and taking the oil. And then, do you know what? We might take Greenland as well. We might have that big country over there as well, even though it belongs to a NATO ally in Denmark. It feels like something has fundamentally changed.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: It has.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And I’m scared of the precedent this is going to set. Because do we then all just get to start taking countries we want to?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, this is what happens when there is a shifting of the balance of power. This is why I always said maintaining the unipolar moment as it was and not allowing the West to weaken itself was a really important thing, because the moment you have a power vacuum, you always have a power struggle.
Mexico’s a very good example of this. If you look at what’s been happening, there’s been a gigantic drug war in Mexico for the last 20 years because there are different cartels vying for power. And the moment you take out the leader of one cartel or something happens, there’s a bloodbath, because this is what happens.
When the central authority, the central power, the current system breaks down, you inevitably end up in a much more violent, much more unstable, much more unpredictable place. And all Trump really is doing is reflecting the reality that has been already there for years. Except he’s reflecting it in American foreign policy. He’s saying, “Well, look, if Russia is going to do what it wants to do and we can’t stop them, and if China is going to do what they want to do and we can’t stop them, well, we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do and no one’s going to stop us.” And that’s the world you’ve ended up in.
And by the way, just on the nuclear point, I think it’s important to say you’re 100% right. And this is one of the things I’ve always said about not supporting Ukraine properly, which we haven’t done. We have not supported them enough to be able to actually fully repel the aggression from Russia. It would inevitably lead to lots of other small countries pursuing nuclear weapons because it is the only guarantee of security in this world.
That is a huge danger for the world in terms of nuclear proliferation, because if the precedent is like you say, the people with nuclear weapons can do what they want and they can never be attacked, and the people with no nuclear weapons are vulnerable and weak, what would be the most rational thing for you to do if you’re a smaller country?
The Nuclear Powers Divide
STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s a big danger because, you know, you were talking about a unipolar world and a multipolar world. But I wonder if it’s going to be—how many nuclear powers are there? There’s like nine or ten. If the world is actually going to split into these ten nuclear powers and these ten nuclear powers can basically do what they want.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, nuclear powers are different. I don’t see Pakistan likely to be rampaging through its neighbors, not least because they’re all nuclear powers themselves. I think you’re talking about Russia, China and the US primarily. I don’t see Britain, you know, reinvading France. So there’s something obviously I’m in favor of.
STEVEN BARTLETT: If Pakistan decided to take a neighboring country, though, nobody can really come for them because—
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Having one nuke is not the same as having a gigantic nuclear arsenal. I think Pakistan is relatively constrained in its behavior, but the big superpowers are not. And by the way, retaking France was a joke. I just want to make that clear.
STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s nine nuclear powers.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: United States, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel, although I don’t think they admit it.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, Israel’s policy on nuclear weapons is very funny. Do you know what their official position is? “We don’t have nuclear weapons, but if the state of Israel is at risk of being destroyed, we will definitely use them.”
STEVEN BARTLETT: So how did we get here? What are the factors at play that brought us to this particular situation? You talked about the crumbling of the Western alliance and other things. What do we need to know about what happened for us to get to this state where it seems like it’s everywhere, big power for themselves?
Europe’s Decline: From Comfort to Irrelevance
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, partly. We’ve already talked about it. So it’s after 1991 in particular, the West loses its not only its sense of purpose, but it loses its sense of danger and sense of risk. So we get very comfortable.
I don’t know if you know this: Europe is 12% of the world’s population, 25% of the world’s GDP and 60% of the world’s welfare spending. So if you do that, that is a sign that you’ve got very comfortable, you’ve got very lazy, you have lost the ability to realize you live in a dangerous world.
You know, this is a bit of a sidetrack, but it is an important addendum to this conversation. This is why European countries have pursued economic suicide that we call net zero as vigorously as we have, because we have felt so safe and so comfortable. We’ve engaged in all this luxury obsessions to the point where, as you know, Germany destroyed its nuclear facilities, thereby making itself reliant on Russian gas.
So that when Russia invaded Ukraine, the first thing that they said is, “Oh, we were going to support Ukraine, we’re going to give them 5,000 helmets” because they were so dependent on Russian gas because they refused to produce their own energy.
This is exactly the same thing we’ve done in Britain. Britain has the highest industrial electricity prices in the world, in the developed world, which means we basically destroyed all our manufacturing industry, which is now produced elsewhere. We’re getting to the point where we can’t make our own virgin steel. Steel is kind of important if you want to have a military.
So in Europe in particular, this has happened because we’ve just felt so safe and so comfortable and also so rudderless that we’ve been able to engage in all these loony ideas because there’s been no consequence. Well, the consequences are here.
Britain’s Plummeting Global Status
STEVEN BARTLETT: Where does Britain and Europe sit in the sort of rankings of importance in the world and power?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s plummeting. I mean, look at Trump’s 12 day war in Iran, destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities. No one even asked the British what we thought about anymore. And that’s not because, you know, a lot of people like to say, “Oh, you know, the Americans, they hate the British.” Americans love Britain.
As you know, you live in America now, you have a British accent. I’m sure people come up to you all the time and talk to you about their connections with our country, the shared history, all of that stuff. The problem is we have made ourselves irrelevant because everything that Trump is looking at is strength.
Is Britain strong now in the world? No. Is Europe strong now in the world? No. And so if you’re not strong, you will not be taken seriously. And unfortunately, because of what our leaders have done over successive, and it’s left, right, every political party that we have that’s been in power, they have overseen a decline in our status in the world, in our power in the world, and our influence in the world, to the point now where the Americans are looking at Europe and they’re going, “Why would we be allied with people who are not useful to us?”
An alliance is kind of like a marriage. Both people have to bring something to the table. What do we bring to the table? From an American perspective, this is a…
STEVEN BARTLETT: Fairly new thing, isn’t it? Because I remember growing up, I repeatedly hear the Prime Minister of the UK talking about how he had spoken to his US counterpart and they had made a decision. And then even with the Venezuela situation, I think Keir Starmer came out the next day and said, like, “I had no idea this was happening.”
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Of course. But why would you consult with people who don’t matter?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why don’t we matter?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: We don’t matter because we have nothing to bring to the table. Despite the extremely high level of professionalism, our technological superiority, the courage of our soldiers and our sailors and our airmen, despite the immense military tradition Britain has, we have cut… I mean, our debt interest repayments annually, 1.5 times, heading towards being twice our defense budget. We spent more on paying off the debt, the national debt, every year, than we spend on defense.
How Britain Got Here
STEVEN BARTLETT: How did the UK get here?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, our debt to GDP is over 100%. We keep borrowing money. We talked about the disproportionate amount of welfare spending and social spending and so on. We got here by forgetting that we live in the real world and engaging in lots of luxury beliefs about what we ought to do.
So we have the highest tax burden in peacetime history in this country. And we do that not because we want to have a robust military or to do other things like that. We do it so that we can continue to pay ourselves money we don’t have, borrowing it from our children and our grandchildren. And this is the case across Europe, really.
America also has a high level of debt, but they have a growing economy unlike ours. Britain’s GDP per capita is lower today than it was in 2006. We have per capita, which is what matters per person, we have less money today than we did 20 years ago. So our economy’s declined, we’ve destroyed our manufacturing, we’ve run down our armed forces.
And also, I mean, look, President Trump, I think, is fair to say, is quite sensitive about what people say about him. We have a government now that very imprudently and unwisely spent the time they were in opposition shitting on him on a daily basis. David Lammy, who’s our Foreign Secretary, if you take some of his comments about President Trump, they were just deeply irresponsible.
Whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of what he said, someone who has the potential to be this country’s Foreign Secretary in charge of our relationship with the United States, cannot be so imprudent as to make those kinds of comments. And then you’re going, “Well, you’ve just been calling this guy every name under the sun and now you want to be relevant, you want to be taken seriously, you want to be engaged with as he makes huge decisions about geopolitics.”
Actions have consequences. And the actions we have been taken have produced the consequences that we’ve got now. Look, I am not all doom and gloom about that. If we change our strategy and if we change our behavior, we can change the end product of that. We can do that. But that’s going to require a massive…
STEVEN BARTLETT: Readjustment with the current direction of travel. Where does the UK end up?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: We’re already there. We are irrelevant. We are irrelevant when these, like you said, Venezuela happens. No one cares about us. When Iran gets bombed, no one cares about us. All the future big decisions about geopolitics are going to be made without Britain even being considered, because it’s going to be made by the major powers of which Britain is no longer one.
Choosing to Stay and Fight
STEVEN BARTLETT: You choose to live in the UK, despite your views that the UK is a bit of a sinking ship, I guess.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because of my views, actually.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because of your views, yeah.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Like, look, you’ve moved to the United States, which I’m grateful for, because it’s made us the biggest UK podcast in our space. I appreciate that. But as you can imagine, we get offers to do the same in all sorts of different ways, and we could have done the same.
I love this country. I’m very grateful to it, and I feel to stay and fight for it and to articulate my views and try and persuade people to my point of view so that we can have a British renaissance, so that we can have a British recovery, is my duty for as long as I can do that. And if at some point, you know, I feel it’s completely futile, which I do not…
STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’re hopeful?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’m not despondent to the point of giving up is where I am.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Are you hopeful?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: No. No. But I’m also not at the point where I feel it’s futile. I think there is an opportunity to turn things around if everything comes together and we’re very fortunate. And that’s what I’m hopefully trying to contribute to through history.
STEVEN BARTLETT: When companies pursue the strategy that the UK is currently pursuing, where does it end up economically?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Steven, you’re the business guy, you tell me.
The Inconceivable Decline
STEVEN BARTLETT: No, but I don’t have the greatest view of history. And so I’m wondering if there’s… Because, you know, in the UK, I was born 33 years ago in Botswana and I moved to the UK when I was young and I’ve always known the UK to be important and consequential and the economy to be, you know, much better than where I’m from in Botswana. So it’s almost inconceivable for a British person of my age to think that the UK could ever not be that.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because it’s always been in my lifetime.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes. But that is in many ways, I’m not pinning the blame on you, obviously, but that is in many ways how we got here. Because what we thought collectively was, “Well, look, no matter what we do, we’re always going to be Great Britain. We’re going to have a great economy, we’re going to have a strong military, we’re going to have this, we’re going to have influence in the world.” And then we started doing lots of stupid shit. And that’s how we’ve ended up in the place that we’ve ended up.
So this country has every potential to be great. The people are incredible. The level of education, the scientific and technological advances that this country has produced, the cultural… Look at the greatest bands in human history. About half of them are British comedians. I mean, stand up comedy is not a British invention, it was actually invented in America. But look at some of the greatest comedians in human history. Again, lots and lots of British people.
So culturally, scientifically, technologically, economically, we have the potential. We have to have the correct leadership and the right strategy. And those two things have been lacking for a long time. That’s how we’ve ended up here. Can we turn it around? It’s going to be very, very, very difficult. But we’ve got to try.
The Personal Impact
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why would these issues impact us on a individual level? So I’m thinking about the average person listening now, whether they are in the United States or here in Britain. You know, this stuff happens kind of up above us and we get on with our lives. But what are the symptoms we’ll begin to see of this multipolar world or the fall of Britain?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: You are already poorer today than you were 20 years ago per capita in the UK. In the UK, yeah. That seems to me quite important. And in fact, many of our conversations about domestic issues, whether it’s mass immigration and all these other things, they’re really proxies for that conversation. Because if the economy was growing and people felt richer, all of this stuff would become less important. I think we’d agree with that. So that’s one aspect of it.
The other aspect of it is, as I talked about, the multipolar world being by necessity more violent and unstable. So we are… you know, I don’t know when this will go out, but we are recording this in the middle of January. It’s been like two weeks since the year started, and we’ve already seen crazy amounts of instability geopolitically already. Is that fair to say?
So this will continue and that will bleed through to domestic politics, because if you have to spend more of your resources worrying about things abroad, it means you can do less at home, and so on and so on and so on. So the ramifications of this will be very impactful on everybody around the world. More on non-Western countries, because a lot of them are going to be in the front line of this in the way that I doubt we will be. But still the consequences for us will be very significant.
The Rise of Socialism
STEVEN BARTLETT: And we’re seeing adjacent to this, this rise in socialism. Yeah, the conversation around socialism. Obviously, Mandani has been elected mayor, but do you think this is at all linked to the bigger picture, this rise in socialism?
The Coming Age of AI Disruption
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, in fact, I think, you know, I wrote an article a long time ago called “Why I Fear the Future,” and I did a video based on it in which I talked about something. It’s interesting. I did a live show here in London just before Christmas and I did a book signing and one of the guys came up to me and said, I’ve got two kids, they’re both teenagers, daughter and a son, and I’m trying to pull the daughter in from the far left, and I’m trying to pull the son in from the far right.
That’s going to be the big challenge going forward because the amount of chaos and instability and cultural kind of cultural upheaval that we’ve seen has produced a craving for order. And on the social, that’s the right side. You know, we must, you know, get this. And on the other side, it’s produced a sense of injustice and the pursuit of inequality.
That’s why you hear people talk so much about the rich. The rich, the rich, the rich and, you know, eat the rich. We’ve got to redistribute all of this stuff because particularly in the big cities, young people rightly feel that they can’t really get on the housing ladder, they can’t establish a family. Life is more difficult.
So they reach for these very disproven, discredited and completely unworkable solutions of the kind Madani will of course deliver. But it’s because their sense is that the future has been taken away from them. And in many ways they’re correct because as I said earlier, we have been borrowing from our children and our grandchildren. We’ve been saddling with crippling debts our entire economy that will come to an end. And it’s going to be them that is left to foot the bill. And it’s going to be very painful.
And partly they see that, and already they see that they just can’t afford the life that they want. I do think in the United States it’s a much more contained phenomenon, I think Madani. And if you look at the American socialists, they all tend to cluster around New York and one or two other big cities. It’s not like the entirety of America is going socialist.
But I think housing unaffordability is one. Another explanation which I think is also powerful is what’s called elite overproduction, which is if you have, as Tony Blair did, this idea that 50% of the public should go to university, well, they do. And then it turns out there’s not enough jobs for them, particularly in the age of AI, where they are the jobs that are being eliminated very rapidly. You then get a lot of people whose entitlement is up here and whose prospects are down here. That produces a tremendous amount of social disease as well.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I think this is a really important connected point on the subject of socialism and the rise of socialism that we will see is this point of AI. And when I listen to very, very smart people who are considered to be the godfathers of AI or CEOs who are building these technology companies, there seems to be a consensus that socialism will only increase because the job losses associated with AI are going to be pretty quick and pretty extreme.
And I mean, one of them that most Brits won’t understand is something we understand now, living in America, which is my car drives itself.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And I’ve said this a few times because I’m really trying to. It’s like the first moment, eureka moment I think you have is in America when I get in my car. I don’t touch the steering wheel or the pedals and it can drive me to Joshua Tree, which is like two and a half, three hours away, uninterrupted.
And I say this because driving is like one of the biggest employees in the world. I think it is the biggest profession in the world. And London just announced that Waymos are here. And soon, surely Teslas will be allowed to do full self driving here as well. And in such a world, delivery drivers, taxi drivers, Uber drivers are going to be without jobs.
And we’re seeing this huge rise in autonomous humanoid robots as well. And Elon’s pay packet says that he will make a million of these autonomous robots and get them out into the world. And Jason Calacanis, who just visited Elon’s factory, said there’ll be a billion of these. And he thinks that we won’t even remember Tesla for making cars, will only remember them for the robots they’re made, because these Optimus robots which are coming are going to be so consequential.
And the last point here is a very good friend of mine who runs this big innovation accelerator in San Francisco. I visited the accelerator a couple of weeks back and I said to him, why is everybody here, all these young founders, these 40, 50 young founders in your building, all working on robotics. And he goes, well, you know, we’ve had all the parts for like 20, 30 years, but the expensive part was the intelligence.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: The brain.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, the brain. He goes, now we have the brain. He said it used to. He showed me this arm, this robotic arm that had a frying pan on it that would cook for you in a box. It just cooks whatever you want in a box. And he goes, we’ve had all these parts for the last 30 years that they were cheap. He goes, the intelligence part of the brain would cost 20 or $30,000 just for this little robot arm. He goes, now it’s like 2 cents. And he says, you’re seeing this huge explosion in robotics and I don’t think people understand what’s coming.
The Reality of Autonomous Technology
KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, going to San Francisco is eye opening on two levels. Number one is like a quarter to a third of the cars on the road don’t have drivers. And just visually seeing that is so striking. But the other thing is talking to some of the people involved, there are some people who are fairly sensible about it, fairly responsible among the founders, although they will still say, and I think they’re right, that like, if we don’t do this, China will. And so we’ve got to do this.
But there’s also a lot, and I’m sure you’ve encountered there’s a kind of, you know, that famous Facebook mantra of move fast and break things. There’s a lot of that going on in the AI space. And so it’s going to be hugely impactful. I don’t claim to know all the little details of how that will play out, other than to say it’s going to be very disruptive.
And disruptiveness has happened throughout human history. It’s always produced a backlash, it’s always caused a lot of disease, but then humanity has managed to recover. This is different level and we will see how it plays out. But yeah, of course it’s going to be. And yeah, a world in which millions of people, in which millions of people no longer have jobs and most of them are disproportionately young people who are more prone to extremism anyway. Yeah, that’s not a pretty picture.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And one would assume that the wealth will accrue to a few. Yes, in such a scenario.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: And what’s funny is I have said, really, only half jokingly, I mean, I wrote a whole book about my opposition to communism and socialism based on experience, but in a world in which no one has a job, I’m like 100% on board with communism.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think that’s the world we’re heading towards?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Possibly, yeah. But it makes sense. I mean, like, if you think about it from the perspective of 50 people in the world have all the money in the world and everyone else has no job, I think a little bit of wealth redistribution is going to be unavoidable in that situation. And it can either happen voluntarily or it’s going to happen at the end. That’s the choice.
STEVEN BARTLETT: When you say communism would be the only choice in such a scenario, what does that mean?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: It means everybody gets paid for existing. Right. Well, I mean, what else is there? You’re going to create fake jobs for people. That’s not going to work. So if all the wealth in the world is going to be created by robots, a world in which the products of their labor only accrues to 50 people who had the idea or did the work 20 years ago, that’s not going to sustain itself. And so it would be very, very unwise of those people to attempt to hold onto all that wealth, it would not end well for them, in my opinion.
Planning for an Uncertain Future
STEVEN BARTLETT: On a personal level, this disruption is going to happen in your lifetime. Are you thinking much about it or planning for it? At all. Has it changed any of the decisions you make on a day to day basis or month to month basis?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, I’m very fortunate that I am probably a little harder to replace with a robot just because people don’t really want to hear robots opinions. I would imagine we might get to that point, but I think it’s unlikely. So on my own level I’m probably, you know, the timescale I’m working to in the next 10 years that I imagine I’ll get myself to a point where I’m going to be reasonably comfortable no matter what happens for my children.
STEVEN BARTLETT: That was just cutting forward 10 years.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, yeah, totally. Me just unemployed, long way of I can’t believe what happened for my children. It’s a very different conversation. So a lot of people are like, well, you know, what should I teach my children and people, oh yeah, this should be a plumber. I don’t think you’re going to need plumbers 15, 20 years from now either.
So I honestly don’t know what that future looks like. And in many ways that’s always been the reality of life for most people. We are living through one of those great transitions in human history in which all you can do is equip your children with the basic skill sets of life as opposed to what might have been done 20, 30 years ago, where like you go to school to develop a skill, to go to university to build a career.
Now you’re going to have to show a lot of flex in this modern world. So you’re going to have to be personable, you’re going to have to be resourceful, you’re going to have to be creative, you’re going to have to have a positive go getter mindset. You’re going to have to have those basics nailed down as opposed to here’s the career that you’ve been predetermined to have. Unless of course, you go into AI and robotics, in which case you probably won’t be replaced for at least five years.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I think there’s something to the fact that there’s an angst with AI and when, you know, people listen to podcasts all the time. Everyone who has a job in a big corporate environment now is being told by their CEO that you better learn AI or it’s going to replace you. So we’re living in this moment of there’s like aliens coming over the horizon and we’ve spotted them. They’re not quite here yet, but it’s like saying to the general public, look, there’s aliens coming and they’re coming for your job and everything you value. That angst in and of itself, I think can drive people towards ideas like socialism. Understandably.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because, you know, it’s a deep existential angst.
The Irresponsible Messaging of AI Companies
KONSTANTIN KISIN: And also a lot of the AI people, not all of them, a lot of them are being. But a lot of them are being deeply irresponsible and very unwise with their messaging. Last time I was in New York, I was walking through Times Square. There was this giant billboard which said it was the name of the company, which I don’t remember. “Stop hiring humans. The age of the AI employees.” Here I’m going, have you really thought about this? Have you thought about putting your company’s name on this poster? Do you understand the impact this is going to have on a normal person looking at that?
But they are. So the thing is with AI is the positive upsides of it are limitless, literally limitless. And so a lot of the people who are in that space, that’s what they focus on. And they’re like, we can solve cancer, we can solve medical problems. We can have AI that’s better than any physicist that’s ever lived, that can give us the, you know, the eternal engine or whatever. We don’t need energy anymore. Like, there are all sorts of crazy things that come out of AI that are potentially beneficial. And that is exciting. But the angst that you talk about I think is there, and I think it’s also quite rational.
STEVEN BARTLETT: You just reminded me of a video that came out this week from Elon where he says this, I’ll play it for you. I think it’s this one’s. So he’s talking about. Elon’s talking about the robots that are about to be released from Tesla, which are called Optimus. And someone’s asking him how good they will be at surgery. What do you think Optimus would be a better surgeon than the best surgeons. How long for that? Three years. Three years.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay. Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And by the way, that’s a three years at scale.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Probably be more Optimus robots that are great surgeons than there are all surgeons on Earth. And the cost of that. But that’s an important statement in three years time.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because I mean, absolutely. I think what I’d say is four years. If it’s four or five years, who cares? It’s still an extreme precision.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Three years. Yes. Better than any product. I’d say that if you’re like, put a little margin on it. Better than any human in four years. Who’s in plastic surgery by five years.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s not even close.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And I think your point was medicine is going to be effectively free, the best medicine in the world, everyone will have access to medical care that is better than what the president receives right now. So don’t go into medical school. Yes. Pointless. Pointless going to medical school.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Look, he knows way more about this than I do. I would also say that I think both the incentive structure and his personal talent temperament lean towards a kind of optimism. And there’s a sales dimension to this as well, obviously, because he’s one of the people producing the stuff.
So his optimism may be a product of the incentive structure that he’s subject to. But even if it’s not three years, I don’t think it’s more than 10 years. So that’s the time frame. And given how long it takes to train to become a doctor. Yeah.
Iran’s Counter-Revolution
STEVEN BARTLETT: I want to talk about the situation in Iran. We’re seeing what one might call an uprising at the moment, where protesters are on the street in a country where it is very, very dangerous and also very brave to protest against the leadership there. Where does this fit in the broader context? What the hell is going on?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: I am not an expert on Iran, but effectively what’s happening in Iran is an attempted counter-revolution. So they had a revolution in 1979. They overthrew the ruler, the Shah, and they replaced him with an Islamic dictatorship, which is what you’ve had since 1979.
And the people of Iran have attempted to overthrow this Islamic dictatorship repeatedly. They’ve always been brutally suppressed. And that’s basically what’s happening now again.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And does this fit somewhere into the broader conflict of geopolitics in the US, the multipolar world?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, only in the sense that you can see that even President Trump, who’s talked quite brashly about what he might do if this sort of gets out of hand, is still not, as we speak, doing anything about it on a kinetic level.
And that’s partly for the reasons that we talked about earlier, which is the United States is deeply, deeply… The United States public are deeply, deeply skeptical about foreign interventions. And so the idea that we, the West, would support a regime change in Iran is not something that you can sell to the American people right now.
And so he has to be much more careful about what he might otherwise have done in Iran. And so because of that, the leaders of Iran probably feel like they’re in a better position to crack down and survive versus what might have happened in the past.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, Trump’s been quite vocal in what he might do in his threats. He said that the US would come to the protesters’ rescue, that “we are locked, loaded and ready to go.” He announced that countries doing business with Iran faced a 25% tariff on their trade with the US, ramping up pressure.
And he called for Iranians to keep protesting. And then more recently, he said, “I’ve canceled all meetings with Iranian officials until the senseless killing of protest stops. Help is on the way.”
KONSTANTIN KISIN: “MAGA, Make Iran Great Again.” Well, Iran, you know, I mean, one thing that should be said is the Persian Empire and the Persian people are a great people with a very rich history. And what’s interesting is in attempting to… I don’t know if you’ve ever seen pictures from Tehran from before 1979. It’s like women walking around in miniskirts and all the rest of it.
So they have a very long history of freedom in a way that we don’t tend to think of the Middle East as having today. And that’s an example of how it’s perhaps different from other parts of the Middle East.
But you can see the reluctance to actually do anything about it. Because the question is, well, let’s say you do remove the current leadership. Let’s say you bring back the son of the former Shah, Reza Pahlavi. He oversees a transition to some kind of democratic thing. Who is there protecting that process from being disrupted by the remnants of the old regime?
Who’s going to do that? Is there American boots on the ground? Because there’s literally zero appetite for that in America. That’s the challenge that I think he faces, which is probably why he hasn’t done anything.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And how do you think this story plays out?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: No idea, mate. No idea. I have no idea what’s going to happen here. I fear, unfortunately, that’s what the regime will do. I’m not saying this is what will happen, but my fear is, and it’s one of the reasons that I sympathize so deeply with the Iranian people that are rising up against their oppression, but I am wary of encouraging them unless we are willing to back them fully.
This is exactly in the way that what happened with Ukraine. There was a lot of rah, rah, rah, and there was not nearly enough support to actually help them defend their country. My fear is there will be a lot of rah, rah, rah, “we support the Iranian people, we stand with them,” blah, blah, blah.
But ultimately the regime will kill more of them, and it will kill enough of them for this to go away. That’s my worry.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, I hope the world does come to the support of the Iranians. I really do.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Me too.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because for all the reasons you’ve said, beautiful country, beautiful people. And it’s horrific to see what’s going on. There’s varying estimates. Unfortunately, we don’t have accurate numbers because, I mean, the Internet is down, and it’s always hard to get accurate numbers in this situation. But I’ve heard estimates ranging from 2,000 to 18,000 people being killed. And it’s inconceivable, I think, for Westerners like us to understand what it is to live in an environment like that.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Which is why they’re protesting as courageously as they are. I just hope that the geopolitical realities allow us to support them in the way that we keep saying we would. Do you see what I’m saying?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, of course.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And this is…
KONSTANTIN KISIN: And this is my big worry. We have done a lot of this. “We stand with you, we support you.” And then when push comes to shove, the realities of the thing come into play, and suddenly we’re a lot more careful about it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Trump seems to walk the walk more so than others.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Absolutely.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And he seems to… It’s funny because I think it was Biden that said to China that if they took back Taiwan, he would get involved. Trump didn’t say that. He’s kind of… I was looking at some quotes from Trump, and it seems like he’s basically like, well, if they take Taiwan back, I get off.
But in other instances where he warns countries that he’ll bomb them or take action, like Venezuela or like Iran with the nuclear weapons situation, he does seem to follow through. And Marco Rubio and Hegseth were saying the other day in the interview I was watching that, “Listen, when is the world going to learn? If Trump says something, he’s going to do it.” And him saying that, “We will come to your rescue.”
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, hopefully they come through on that, but also, hopefully, they have a plan for what happens after that.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: And this is the mistake we’ve obviously made in a number of countries. Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, which is now basically headed by a jihadi, where we go, “Oh, yeah, we’ve got to remove this terrible guy.” And, yeah, he’s a terrible guy, and we’re right to remove him. But then what do you end up with afterwards?
So if they do help the Iranian people, which I hope they have the plans to do, then I hope they have a plan for what happens after that. And how you get Iran to a position where the people of Iran get to choose their own leaders, and those leaders stay in power. And those leaders are the sorts of people that you might want to see in charge.
Because, you know, this happened in Egypt. They have the Arab Spring, they overthrow the evil dictator. And what they do, they elect the Muslim Brotherhood, and then the people go, “No, no, we need the military back,” et cetera. So these are not easy problems to solve, which is why people are being careful about it. So I hope they have a plan and a solution for what comes after if they, in fact, act.
Trump’s Greenland Ambitions
STEVEN BARTLETT: And Trump’s also talking about taking Greenland, which is the first time I heard him say that. I thought he was joking. I thought, this is just a funny Trump, you know, when he was talking about taking Canada. Yeah, it was. He was calling it “the great state of Canada.” I thought this was him just joking. But in more recent times, in the last week, I heard him say in an interview, “We’re going to do it the easy way or the hard way.” Words to that effect. What’s going on?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, we talked about they’re trying to protect their sphere of influence in North America and South America, and they want to have the military basis there that they want to have there. They want to have the resources and access to that.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Are we returning to empires?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: We never left them. But this is the great thing that we’ve been living in the dream world. We’ve been pretending these things haven’t been going on the entire time. They have. The world’s always been like this.
There was a brief moment after World War II when it wasn’t like this, because we were fighting the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union, the battle in the Cold War was very similar. There was proxy wars all over the place between those two great powers.
Right now, there’s two different great powers, and a third smaller power in Russia and India is rising as well, who are all trying to make their moves. And all Trump is doing is saying, “Well, we are not going to play by the fake rules anymore that no one else is playing by anyway.”
STEVEN BARTLETT: And so is Trump endeavoring to take that part of the world, take control of that?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Take control? Yeah. In many ways, it’s what every great power seeks to do, is to control its neighbors so that they don’t have foreign influence in their backyards or that they have the strategic advantage in that area. It’s the way of the world.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, I didn’t hear this rhetoric for the other 30 years of my life.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: As explicitly. Yeah. And when you say multipolar, what are the poles?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, it’s the US and China are the two. Russia wants to claim it’s a third one. And then you will see the rise of India, I think, over time as well. India’s a lot more sensible about these things, about the way that they’re developing.
The Multipolar World Order
STEVEN BARTLETT: And is the multipolar world a good thing or a bad thing, or is it just indifferent?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: For whom?
STEVEN BARTLETT: For, let’s do people living in Europe.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: I think it’s likely to be a very bad thing for people living in Europe because we become less powerful, less wealthy, less relevant for the reasons we’ve already discussed. We could change it if we wanted to.
STEVEN BARTLETT: How?
The Path Forward for Britain
KONSTANTIN KISIN: We could abandon our suicidal economic policy so we could have economic growth again, which would increase our share of GDP. We would make our people more prosperous. It would help to quell domestic unease, part of which has been created by mass immigration. People care about that more because they’re poorer. Right. If we were growing, then everybody’s a little bit happier.
It’s like you move to LA, the sunshine is nice. Everybody’s a little bit happier. When you’re getting richer, everybody’s a little bit happier. So that’s one of them.
The second one is you’ve got to recognize that the huge waves of immigration we have had have brought some positives. They’ve also brought a tremendous amount of cultural instability. People feel like their country is changing. They never voted for it. In fact, they repeatedly voted against it.
So you have to arrest the sense that our country is ceasing to be one place, and instead we’re becoming different communities. Right? The this community, the that community. Instead, we’ve got to go to a place where we’re all British or we’re all American or we’re all French or whatever it is. We’ve got to integrate fully the people who’ve already arrived.
And to do that, you have to make sure you don’t continue to have the same scale of inflows that we’ve had. You have to deal with illegal immigration. You have to stop that from happening, because that really affects how people feel about sense of fairness and a commitment and loyalty to their country.
One of the reasons, if you talk to young people, they’ll say they’re disillusioned, they won’t fight for their country, et cetera, is they feel like, well, their country doesn’t care about them, is bringing in people that it’s paying to have a house. And so all the rest of it, while they can’t get on the property ladder. So you’ve got to deal with immigration as a whole package.
Then you have to rebuild your military, you have to rebuild your military capacity. And then you have to understand the new world in which we live and really pick a team and say, which alliances are we going to nurture?
In my opinion, the best thing Britain could do is to nurture the alliance with the United States to make itself relevant within that alliance in the ways that I’ve already talked about, and then join forces with the US and recognize that we have very similar interests in a lot of things. And if we were prepared to act like it, then we’d be in a much better place.
And also, you got to have more kids, a lot more kids.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?
The Demographic Crisis
KONSTANTIN KISIN: If you look at, forget about the moral kind of sensibilities and politically correct stuff about it, the more people you have, the more powerful you are compared to all other things being equal, right? A country with more people is more powerful than a country with fewer people. Just if everything else is the same.
But more importantly, we’re in a demographic death spiral and this is one of the reasons we have had mass immigration. Politicians won’t tell you the honest truth of it, but the real reason is they keep bringing in hundreds of thousands of people is if they don’t, we will see the reality, which is that we’re getting poorer all the time.
But if they bring in a mass of people from outside, they can say that the economy is growing not because it’s growing on a per capita basis, but because you’ve simply added more people to the population.
And if this seems abstract, think about it like this. Let’s say you have, you have a family, you, your girlfriend and you’ve got two kids, right? And your total household income is £100,000 a year. Let’s say for the four of you. Now, let’s say you bring in your in-laws, they live in the same house, right? They don’t earn anything. Let’s say they own ten grand a year each.
So now your household income is 120,000. So you’ve got richer, haven’t you? No. You’ve now got six people to spread that money over. And now you’re per person a lot poorer. That’s what British and European leaders have done so that they could pretend that we’re not getting poorer all the time. That’s why they’ve done it.
This is what they say. “We need people to come and do the jobs.” That’s what they mean. They mean we need to bring in more people. So we can tell you the economy’s grown by 0.3% while you’ve been getting poorer. So you’ve got to address the economic side of this as well, of the demographic thing.
And the third thing actually is societies with lots of kids are just much more dynamic than societies without them. You know, you get very stale when you’ve got too many older people. You need that young energy, that young blood, you need young people, you need children around, and then they will, of course, be the next generation that drive things forward. So you’ve got to have loads more, loads more kids.
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And what do you think of Keir Starmer and the way he’s leading the UK?
Britain’s Business Climate Crisis
KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s very tempting. Always. We come back to the Biden Trump left right thing to put the blame on one specific person. I don’t think he’s doing a good job for the reasons that I told you. We’ve got the highest tax burden in peacetime history. So he’s driving business through the floor.
I know that you will. You and I have never spoken about this, but I bet you could name 50 people off the top of your head who’ve left the UK to go to other places who run businesses. You’re nodding, right? For people listening. Well, why does that happen? Happening because the business climate here is not good. The taxes here are very high and also the quality of life here has declined.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And generally, you know, I think maybe the first point you said about climate, there’s a pessimism.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes. Why is that? Why is that?
STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s self-fulfilling.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s like a self-fulfilling pessimism where founders who are in my portfolio that I’ve invested in will come to me and say, hi, you know, we’ve just sold 10% of the business for 20 million and then the next sentence will be their escape plan. And that didn’t used to happen in 10 years ago.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: And that’s because of government policy. That’s the only way that this happens. Right? Because if the government, A, keeps taxing you up to your eyeballs and B, keeps telling you that you are evil, which is what it does. Right. If you’re rich in Britain, you are evil. That’s the algorithm we have.
And we treat successful people. We immediately assume that they’re privileged people. My pet theory is that this goes back to the landed gentry. The idea that in this country, if you were rich, there was a time when that was almost certainly because your dad was rich, or at least people thought that.
And so this sense that if someone is successful economically, financially, it’s probably because they’ve benefited from some sort of ill-gotten privilege. It permeates everything.
In America, people don’t feel that way. They go, “You’ve been successful because you’ve worked really hard and you’ve had a great idea. I’d love to learn from you. I’d love to be more like you.” In Britain we go, “You’ve been successful, you know, we got to tax you.”
So if the government keeps taxing you and then telling you you’re a bad person while you pay the overwhelming share of the taxes in the country, it’s not a great place to be. You know, if I come home tonight and my wife says, “Yeah, you owe all the money but you’re a dick and I don’t like you.” And after a while you sort of go, “Well, if this isn’t working, I’ll go somewhere where I’m wanted.” Do you know what I mean?
And I think that’s what’s happening to a lot of the most driven, the most talented, the most successful, the most creative people. And so we’re driving out the business, we’re driving out the entrepreneurs.
Then on the industrial side of it, we talked about it before, net zero basically means that any energy-intensive business is completely unviable in Britain. And I’m sure you’ve seen this with AI and lots of other things. You go to where you can do your business, then on top of that you add regulation, particularly in Europe, which restrict your ability to do things again.
So there’s this and it doesn’t have to be like that, it wasn’t like that in the 90s in this country there was a positive go-get-a business climate and you can do that again. You just have to have a leader who is willing to do that. And Starmer is the opposite of that.
And part of the reason is that they simply can’t do anything about the fact that we are spending huge amounts of money keeping lots and lots of people trapped in welfare against, in many ways against their interests. And actually in some ways I would argue even against their will because, and I’ve made this point before, if you said you’re a very driven person, I’m a very driven person.
But when I was in my early 20s, if you’d said to me, “You don’t need to work, you know, I know you’re feeling a bit depressed.” As I was in my early 20s, I wasn’t sure what I was doing with life. “You’re a bit depressed, you’re a bit anxious. I remember going to apply for a job and just sweating buckets because I was so anxious. Right, well, you’ve got anxiety, you’ve got depression, you can’t work. We’ll give you 20 grand a year and you can just, you know, we’ll write you off and you just sit home playing the PlayStation, smoke.”
I would have taken that. Most people would have taken that. And that’s the position we have put a lot of our young people in. We just write them off, we give them benefits and we forget about them.
And that welfare bill has become unsustainable, but it’s also uncuttable. The Labour government tried to cut it, they tried to reform welfare and their own backbenchers revolted and they caved and they said, “No, no, no, we’re not going to reform welfare, we’re going to tax the rich because the rich don’t pay enough tax.”
When in the reality, I think maybe look this up, 10%. The top 10% of taxpayers in this country pay, I think more than half of all the tax. Probably significantly more than half of all the tax. But look it up. I think the top 1% pay 33% of all the tax. Fact check me on this.
The Tax Burden Reality
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so the top 10% of taxpayers pay 60% of all income tax.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. And also, what’s the other one? The capital gains as well? Well, if you look up capital gains, it’s basically the same. So if you put those two together, which is basically what we pay on earning, the top 10% pay 60% of it.
So what happens when you chase out those people, which is what we’re doing, what happens to your tax base? You get less and less tax. That means you have to tax the people who haven’t left yet more and more in order to pay people who are not, who are net consumers of tax revenues.
STEVEN BARTLETT: According to HM Revenue and Customs data in the UK, the top 1% pay 30% of all income.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: I said 33, so. 30. Yeah, yeah. So what happens when you say that 1% are evil and they must pay more? 1% pay 30% of all the tax.
The Cost of Losing Wealth Creators
STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s funny, I’m quite a torn person on this subject because I represent kind of two sides of this argument. The first side of the argument, I just have this sort of visceral memory of being sat at my desk in Moss Side with these bailiff letters on my right, the smashed up laptop on my left, knowing that I had no way of eating that day and thinking, oh, I need, you know what I need to do? There’s this thing called job seekers allowance and I was messing with the art. Do I join it? Because right now I’m scavenging for pound coins to see if I can buy some Chinese from Yong Dar takeaway.
And I printed off the forms and the forms were there in front of me on the desk to apply for job seekers allowance when I was maybe 18 years old, roughly that age, 18, 19 years old. And because I got so close, I have this huge amount of empathy for people that get to that point.
And then on the other side, because I’m now in a different world and I am around entrepreneurs so much who are so, so frequently telling me their escape plan from the UK that I feel the need to let the average, the normal person that’s listening to this podcast that maybe doesn’t have access to entrepreneurs or the inside conversations that I have with entrepreneurs know that when people come on the show and tell you that rich people will leave, it is my experience that rich people leave.
And because there is an argument, ongoing argument, no, they won’t leave. And that people point at different things. No, no, they leave, they leave. I mean, we just saw Revolut, which is one of the most successful companies emerge from the UK in recent times. It’s probably going to be worth 100 billion. The founder left. Yeah, I think it’s Dubai or something. It’s gone to.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: And people say, well, Britain can’t compete with a zero tax environment. We don’t need to compete with the zero tax environment. People want to live in Britain still. You just have to stop clobbering over them over the head and calling them evil. Right, yeah.
Now look, you know, I can give you a sob story as well. When I was at university, I had to stop university because I couldn’t pay for it. I slept on the street in a park, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Empathy for days for people who are in that position. And there are lots of people, by the way, and this is important to say, Steven, who are not in your position. They’re not super talented, they’re not predisposed to success, they’re not as hard working and motivated as you. For whatever reason, many people are disabled. Many people have all sorts of other issues and of course we’ve got to help them.
But what we have done is trapped now hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who could be working and have meaning and purpose in their life on welfare. And we’re not helping them get off it because it’s much easier to give them a payout and forget about them. That’s what’s happening. And so, you know, I’ve had these views since before I was in any way successful. I just looked at what works.
And when we talk about rich people leaving, the thing is, I don’t care about rich people leaving. People who have a lot of money leaving is not really an issue for me. What’s an issue for me is people who are going to create wealth leaving.
The Three Billion Pound Question
STEVEN BARTLETT: On that point, the founder of Revolut leaving UK, Nik Storonsky I think his name is, estimates say, credible reports say that because he’s leaving, there’s going to be a 3 billion pound potential loss of capital gains tax that he would have paid had he not absconded to the UAE.
Now, to put this into more stark terms, what that means, I then did some research and I was looking at how many people it would take to pay that 3 billion, how many average taxpayers it would take to pay that 3 billion that we lose by him leaving. And it says roughly 450,000 average UK taxpayers. Because the average UK taxpayer pays about 7,000 to 7,500 pounds a year.
So very simple math, 3 billion divided by 7,000 equals 430,000 people. So in plain English, that billionaire’s potential tax bill is equal to the entire income tax of a mid-sized UK city for one year because that person decided to leave.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Congratulations, you taxed the rich. Congratulations. Now half a million people have to pay more tax. Well done. That’s what we’re doing. And because it’s become a moral argument, because the rich are evil in our mentality, people don’t hear this point at all. It just totally goes over their head. They go, you know, but the rich are evil, they must pay more tax. And you go, even if I agreed with you, it still doesn’t work in practice. So if something is not working in practice, why would you keep doing it?
STEVEN BARTLETT: I think as well, you know, one of your other points was around what the UK has to offer them. And I think if the UK was really growth focused and you know, the energy point you made, energy was cheaper here, then that equation that these founders are making, whether to stay or to leave would tilt a little bit further in our direction. So it’s super, it’s so difficult.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: And no disrespect to Dubai, but most people don’t want to have to live in Dubai.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I think the UK is a lovely—
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Honestly, that’s what I mean. And I say this with, there’s lots of great, appealing things about Dubai, but if you dealt with prime in the UK and you had a growth focused mindset, you had a tax climate that encouraged people to start businesses and employ people, we wouldn’t be losing these people and we shouldn’t be losing these people.
They are the people who will create the wealth of the future and they should be doing it here. They should be founding and keeping their businesses here. And if you did that, then you start to turn the whole thing we’ve been talking about around. Because ultimately everything is about economics in this sense. The military is about economics. It’s about, do you have the resources to have a strong military? We don’t. So we don’t.
What Kind of Leader Does Britain Need?
STEVEN BARTLETT: So which leader do we need again?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t like getting into the personalities side of things, but what you need is someone who understands how the economy works.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why don’t you like getting into the personality side of things?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because what happens when, if I give you a name, then immediately people say, oh, he’s one of them. Right. I am not one of them, of any them. I’m just telling you what the policies are that I think would work for our country.
If Keir Starmer tomorrow came on your show and said, “Steven, I’m here to announce a great British transformation. We’re going to cut business taxes, we’re going to get rid of net zero, we’re going to make sure that we have the cheapest energy in the world for our businesses to grow and thrive. We’re going to have a strong, capable military. And by the way, I’ve just hired 50,000 new police officers to deal with all the ridiculous amounts of street crime we’ve got in London.” Sign me up. I’m all, Keir Starmer, ride or die. Right.
But that’s probably not going to happen. That’s probably not going to happen with any of the other leaders that we have. So I’m here telling you what I think the right policies are. And if there’s a leader who advocates for those policies, that’s the sort of leader that I will support.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Only 18% of Britons view Keir Starmer positively.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: With around 65 to 72% holding an unfavourable opinion.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: You’re desperate for me to slag off Keir Starmer. I’m happy to do it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: No, no, I’m actually not. I’m actually not. Do you know what, do you know what my opinion of Keir Starmer? Probably a really nice person.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Probably.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Probably a really nice person.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. I don’t really care how nice he is. And that’s my attitude to all politicians. Yes. I care about whether they’re going to do things that are good and good for our country. From what I know, he’s probably, he strikes me as a very well intentioned, probably fairly competent person. But what he’s doing is completely wrong.
The only reason I don’t like to go in on him is I think he’s useless. I do. I also don’t think it’s fair to lay the blame for everything that’s happening at his feet. The Conservatives were useless before that. The Lib Dems and the Conservatives were useless before that. The Labour Party under Blair were actually not useless. They were really, really good at doing terrible things to the country. They were very competent at doing that.
So what we have had, for now onto three decades, is terrible leadership that’s taken us in completely the wrong direction.
The Unpopularity Problem
STEVEN BARTLETT: I have to cite the statistics around his favorability or popularity because it puts everything you’re saying in context, which is these ideas aren’t popular. No polling has shown that Starmer’s approval among the British public is the weakest of any recent UK Prime Minister, with dissatisfaction levels on some trackers showing him to be below most predecessors, even in the Labour government. So that’s the weird part, because it doesn’t seem to be working to drive favorability either.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, but this is why I’m saying focusing on him individually isn’t helpful, actually, and this is not to argue with you unnecessarily. If you put Kemi Badenoch in his place, you’d have the same favorability ratings.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Really? Even though she has different ideas?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Does she?
STEVEN BARTLETT: I don’t know. You tell me.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: She has some different ideas. I mean, the Conservative Party’s gone a long way to changing their policy on things like net zero, right? But while they were in power, they were doing all the same stuff. They were arresting people for tweets. They were driving the economy into the ground with this green lunacy. They were the ones that oversaw the decline of our military.
So in some ways, the personality conversation is really not that important here. What’s important is a gigantic paradigm shift needs to happen to our attitude, to everything. And one of them is dealing with unaffordable welfare. The Tories didn’t do that. Labour aren’t doing it. I actually thought Labour had the better shot because at least people wouldn’t say Labour are evil and they hate poor people. That’s what they say.
When the Tories tried to cut welfare, when Labour tried to cut welfare, I didn’t think that would happen, but they just caved to their own backbench. And maybe they had to for political reasons, but you just have to. The shift that needs to happen in Britain is not political, ethical, it’s cultural. We have to change the mindset that we have as a country around these things.
The Challenge of Cultural Change
STEVEN BARTLETT: Cultural transitions are very, very, very hard. And I say that from the perspective as a business owner. Yeah, if you tried to get me to change when I had a lot of people so say, you know, I remember in my German office back in the day in social change, German office, we had 100, 150 people, very, very different culture to the UK. So I thought naively, as a 23, 24 year old, I could fly there and change the culture of the Berlin office. How dumb was I?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: This is not how we do things.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I could not change, I could not change the culture of the German, the Berlin office. So I think about a country changing the culture of a country.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s why I’m what I call an accelerationist.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What does that mean?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: It means that I believe that the only thing, the only way that these things will truly fundamentally get better is when they get really, really bad first.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So you think it’s going to get really, really bad.
The Culture Shift and Net Zero Reality
KONSTANTIN KISIN: The only way to change the culture is for people to understand what’s actually happening so that they can’t pretend the things that are happening are not happening. And that’s what’s happening at the moment.
Most people don’t yet quite know that they’re poorer today than they were 20 years ago. Most people still think that we are saving the planet when we reduce Britain’s carbon emissions from 2% to 1.9% of global carbon emissions.
While in fact we’re not even doing that. We’re taking our carbon emissions and we’re sending them to India and China and then shipping back the stuff they make for us in a dirtier way on big tankers which actually consume more dirty fuel. And we’re actually ending up increasing our CO2 output, not reducing it.
Most people don’t know that, but when they feel it in their pocket, when they feel like we’re having a fiscal crisis, when they feel like they really can’t afford their life anymore, that’s when they’re going to start to ask some of these questions.
Actually, the narrative on net zero is shifting. Almost nobody other than the government in this country still believes in the idea of net zero, right? Because it’s moving quite quickly in that direction. And on lots of other things it will happen when things get much more difficult for ordinary people. Sadly, I don’t want that to happen, but I think it’s the only way things get better.
STEVEN BARTLETT: But on the subject of global warming, it’s scientific fact that the climate is changing unfavourably.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: What do you mean by unfavourably?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, you know, scientists talk about the poles melting and how that will have big impact on third world nations and how that’ll be a net negative for the planet because then you’ll see more migration, you’ll see more sort of natural disasters and those kinds of things.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, let’s not argue about that because neither of us is a climate scientist, but let’s accept that for the sake of argument. How is outsourcing our carbon emissions to other countries while destroying our economy making that better?
STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s not.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s not, right. And that’s all I’m saying. All I’m saying is we are pretending to be saving the planet when we’re not saving the planet, while also destroying our economy, while also making sure that pensioners in this country die every winter because they can’t afford to pay the heating bills that they need to pay to stay warm in what is a first world country.
That’s what’s happening, and it’s happening because of government policy. So we are not saving the planet by killing pensioners. I’m not in favour of killing pensioners.
Politics and Influence
STEVEN BARTLETT: Have you ever thought about going into politics? Are you eligible?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Eligible? Yes. Have I ever thought about it? No. People offer me to go into politics regularly, but it’s not my game.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why? You know, when you talked about your mission, it seems very aligned with going into politics.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: I feel I have way more influence doing what I do now than being, I don’t know, Prime Minister.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, that’s extremely unlikely.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Than being the MP for the whatever-on-sea who gets one chance to ask a question of Prime Minister? No, no, no, no, no. I get to speak to way more people and to persuade more people and to articulate ideas in a much more unfiltered sense. And I think that’s really important in the modern climate.
What happens when you become a politician is you start having to talk the party line and then you suddenly don’t quite follow what you actually believe. Now you have to adjust and you have to say, well, you know, the party believes this. Well, I’m not interested in speaking for the party. I’m interested in describing things in reality as I see them. And then if there are politicians who want to take that on, that’s their job.
I just don’t have the temperament for it either. I’m much more interested in the truth than I am in getting along with people, coalition building, caring about potholes, you know, all of this other stuff.
Winners in a Multipolar World
STEVEN BARTLETT: In this multipolar world, this is how we got to the subject. I asked you who would benefit and is it a good thing?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And then I asked you, is it a good thing for Europe? And you said no.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Who is it a good thing for?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: China. Because they get to do whatever that is, they’re much less restrained by the US. It’s good for India, same reasons. Is it good for Russia? We’ll find out. Possibly.
For America, yes and no. I think that is more complicated. I think America will be able to get what it wants in that world, but it’s probably going to find itself in a lot more confrontations internationally and that will obviously be a drain on its resources and its energy.
Historical Patterns of Multipolarity
STEVEN BARTLETT: Have we ever been in a multipolar world through history?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, yeah, loads of times.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What happened next?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: A friend of mine, very good friend of mine, gave me “The History of the English Speaking Peoples” by Winston Churchill and it talks about the history of this country of England in particular. And basically you go from strong ruler and then he has no heir, you have a period of weakness and what happens? There’s a big power struggle over the throne, over power.
This is what’s going to happen. You are going to see more instability, more violence, more attempts to fight for dominance in the world. It’s going to be a much more unstable period of time, unfortunately. It’s one of the reasons I’ve been so passionate about trying to say let’s not allow this to happen.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Instability in terms of war, in terms of…
KONSTANTIN KISIN: In terms of war, in terms of conflict, in terms of people trying to redraw maps, in terms of people trying to get access to resources that otherwise would have been considered unchallengeable, etc. Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I was looking back through history and I was asking the question, has there been a multipolar world before? And there’s these moments through history: 5th century BC with ancient Greece, 19th century Europe between 1815 and 1914, the Warring States of China in 475 BC.
And then my next question was, what happens next? And the short answer is more friction, less restraint, higher risk. Realistically, the first thing that happens is rules weaken, which I guess is kind of what we’re seeing at the moment with this whole idea of international law.
Regional wars begin, not one big war. Arms races accelerate, some alliances harden, economic fragmentation, domestic pressure rises. So higher defence spending, higher taxes, etc., lower growth. And the three end games history keeps showing that we have: manage chaos, major war and reset, and then a new hegemon emerges.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What the heck does that mean?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Hegemon is the one dominant power that in the same way that the US had that moment between 1991 and recently when it was the only undisputed power in the world.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you agree with that pattern of events?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, I was going to say you sort of make it look like I’ve got all my ideas from AI but yeah. But this is the thing, before we started, I said to you, Steven, do me one favour, don’t present me as an expert because I’m just a guy thinking from first principles and explaining the basics as I understand them.
All of this is common sense because ultimately it comes back to human nature, right? We are a tribal, competitive species. That’s what we are. So when there isn’t a dominant force that everyone respects and accepts as the leader, what happens every single time when you have a power vacuum, you have a power struggle.
That’s what we are seeing and that’s what you’re going to see. It’s human nature. It’s not about knowing geopolitics and having studied international theory for 40 years, it’s just basic human nature. When there is a dispute about who the leader is, that always creates the thing that AI just told you.
Nuclear Weapons and the Future
STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, the next step in that is a power struggle. There’s never been a nuclear…
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right. And nuclear weapons have been the great force for peace. We had the great historian from “The Rest is History,” Dominic Sandbrook, on the show and I asked him about this and he said, yeah, I mean, nuclear weapons is why we haven’t had a major war. And it’s maybe the one thing that will constrain our ability to have a major war. It’s one possibility. It’s also the great risk.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Maybe this is where the cycle ends because of nuclear weapons is what you’re saying.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, I am hopeful on that front, actually. I am hopeful that human beings, ultimately the instinct for self-preservation is so strong that we do not go there. I think that’s by far and away the most likely scenario. But of course it is something that humans have to reckon with and we have to be very, very careful.
Things more. And by the way, nuclear weapons may not be the most powerful weapons that exist in the world 20 years from now.
Leadership and Weakness
STEVEN BARTLETT: In such a world, and I know you don’t like it being about individuals, but Trump is a certain type of leader, you know, quite unapologetic in what he says. I think he’s got even more unapologetic because he only has a couple of years left and he can’t be reelected because of the laws.
Are you concerned that if a different type of leader arrived into power in the US, maybe someone who China and Russia thought was less likely to send the jets in at night-time and bomb nuclear bunkers or snatch a president from their house, would that be a risk for the West, in your view?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Massive.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So do you think…
KONSTANTIN KISIN: But that’s how we got here. This is why that withdrawal from Afghanistan, embarrassing as it was, is exactly how you get everything else. It’s just one symptom of people thinking. We talked about October 7th. We talked about the invasion of Ukraine, right? That’s what happens when they see weakness. This is what happens.
I remember, you know, it’s kind of funny. It shows the cultural differences between the Russian mindset and the Western mindset, because “The Jungle Book” that we had in the Soviet Union is very different to the one that you see that you guys had here. Did you see “The Jungle Book”? You know, the original “Jungle Book”?
STEVEN BARTLETT: The Disney one?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it’s all… You should probably say where you come from.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because I’m from the Soviet Union. I was born there.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: And your father, you’ve got mother and father that are Ukrainian and Russian.
The Soviet Jungle Book and Leadership
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, basically, yeah. So the Soviet Jungle Book adaptation, very different. And there’s this one of the opening scenes is Akela, who is the lead wolf. He’s the wolf, the leader of the wolf pack. They’re on a hunt and he, they’re hunting and he’s supposed to grab the animal and he misses.
And suddenly the cry goes around the jungle: “Akela missed.” And everybody knows what that means. Everybody knows when the leader shows weakness and fails, that’s the moment when everything goes to shit. And there’s a power struggle for his role because he’s no longer top dog. It’s really as simple as that.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So do you think Trump’s a good thing for the West?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Trump is a good thing for America. I think what he’s done by virtue of his behavior is he’s exposed the weakness of Europe, and there is a cleave now happening between Europe and America. And to that extent, I think it could be a good thing for Europe.
If Europe gets its act together and says, actually, we’ve got to wake up from the nightmare that we’ve created for ourselves and start acting differently. If that happens, it will also be a good thing for the West. That is not what’s happening right now. It’s going in the exact opposite direction.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What would it take for you to leave the UK?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, look, everybody gets job opportunities and stuff goes for a year or two somewhere. That could happen in any circumstance. If you mean, like, for me to say I’m leaving Britain, never coming back, I think it would have to be clear at the next election that Britain is actually going further down the path that we’re on.
So two or three years from now, I’d have to conclude that there’s actually no, there’s no way we’re coming back. It’s over. And that’s happened to great countries and great civilizations in history. If that’s what happens, then I don’t see why I should doom my children to living here.
If we can rescue it and make this, sounding like Trump, make Britain great again, but you know what I mean, then I would love to fight for that and I’d love to have my children be part of that.
What Works vs. What Feels Good
STEVEN BARTLETT: What is the most important thing that we didn’t talk about that we should have talked about?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: This point I keep coming back to, Steven, which is we can’t live in a world in which we care more about how things make us feel than about the consequences of the actions that we take.
This is the Thomas Sowell line. Last time you had me on, I mentioned to you what a great writer and thinker Thomas Sowell is. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to check out any of his work, but I recommend it thoroughly to everyone watching and listening.
He talks about the fact that the last several decades have been spent replacing what works with what feels good. That’s the one thing we’re not talking about. All the policies you and I have been talking about are all about what makes us feel good as opposed to what actually works in practice.
And our conversation about chasing out entrepreneurs, it’s exactly about that. It’s exactly what it’s about. It’s about fulfilling your ideological emotional needs as opposed to doing things that practically work. If we can make that adjustment and get back to reality, the world’s our oyster.
STEVEN BARTLETT: “An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West,” the book that you wrote, it was a smash hit Sunday Times bestseller.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. Unfortunately, it gets more accurate every day, which is really worrying because I was very pessimistic about a lot of the things I said.
STEVEN BARTLETT: That is absolutely right. You wrote this, was it 2022?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: 2022.
STEVEN BARTLETT: 2022. And it appears to be a prediction as the days go on. A prediction that is being validated, unfortunately. I highly recommend everybody reads this book. I’m going to link it below for anyone that hasn’t read it.
What’s unique about you is you do appear to be very wedded to objective truth as you see it, versus being ideologically captured by either side. And I’ve seen you, I’ve seen you both attack the right at times, and I’ve also seen you attack the left at times, which is, it’s a unique position to be in, in a world with algorithms that try and push you into a particular echo chamber, I guess.
On that point, what is it about the right that you take most issue with at the moment?
The Woke Right
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Oh, there’s a thing that I’ve, other people have at a similar time, so I’m not claiming authorship of it, but there’s something that I call the “woke right,” which is essentially an identitarian, resentment, victimhood-based movement on the right represented by the sort of extreme characters like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens in the United States.
You know, their worldview is that they’ve been oppressed. You know, the woke narrative was “we are oppressed.” Well, now they say we’ve been oppressed and it’s all the fault of various groups, the Jews, the whoevers. So it’s a kind of, there’s almost, you know, I think it’s fair to say that there are elements of it that are just openly fascistic and reminiscent of the Nazis that we saw in the 1930s, ideologically speaking.
And the mainstream right has utterly rejected these people, which I think is really reassuring. But there are some people who say, well, actually no, no, we need to include them. We shouldn’t divide the conservative movement, which I think is a huge mistake for conservatives to make because their movement and their reputation with normal people will be very, very badly polluted in the eyes of independents and moderate people who actually represent the overwhelming majority of the public.
Even in America, which is so divided and so partisan, the normal average person will vote for this party or for that party, depending on what they see. And in Britain that’s even more the case.
And so to the extent that the right, so basically there’s a risk of the right repeating the mistakes of the left. What happened on the left, woke people came along and they said, “we are the left. Our crazy woke ideas is actually the left.” And the sensible people on the left were terrified of challenging them.
And so over time, most people began to associate the left with blue-haired, nose-piercing, you know, Greta Thunberg kind of ideology. And they went, oh, I don’t want any of that.
Well, on the right, if the right allows its extremist fringe to do the same thing, then lots of people are going to distance themselves from that. So I think the right has a tremendous opportunity to, you know, we’ve had this great tension. I know you’ve had Jordan Peterson on your show, and I’m sure he talked about chaos and order.
And that relationship is a very fragile thing in society. We have had so much chaos that there is a lot of craving for order now. There’s a craving to deal with crime, there’s a craving to deal with illegal immigration. There’s a craving to deal with cultural disruption that we’ve had. Right. There’s a craving for that sense of order to come back.
And if the right is reasonable and sensible about addressing those issues, they could be in charge for a very long time and have an opportunity to put some of their views into public policy, which they haven’t had the opportunity to do for a long time.
If they allow the extremists to take over, they will be painted. The entire movement will be painted as the extremists, and then they will not have the opportunity to actually implement their agenda.
On Happiness and Family
STEVEN BARTLETT: Are you happy?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Very.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What makes you happy?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: My family.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What about your family makes you happy?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Having children is a blessing. It’s the best thing ever. I banged on about this to you last time, but it is.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Why are children the best thing ever?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Can’t explain it. It’s not one of the, like, I can find some words to give you, but it’s just one of those things. It’s like you don’t know it until you have that experience. I could give you some nice sound bites. You know, one of the things I’ve said in the past is that the future is no longer an abstraction.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What does that mean?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: It means that in the past, I cared about this country or this civilization from a fairly theoretical perspective. Now the future of this country is one person and maybe other people coming along. Right. Little people that I have. They are the future in my mind, right?
So I’m much more attached. I’m much more attached to the people who came before me. I have much more understanding of my, when you have kids, you have a much better understanding of your parents because you go, oh, wow. So the reason they did this stupid thing is I’m also doing it now for some reason.
And also they were really dealing with all of the things that I’m now dealing. I’ve got a job and I’ve got a relationship and I’ve got a this and I’ve got a that. So of course, they sometimes behaved in ways that I didn’t understand or like or whatever.
So you have more empathy for your parents. You also have much, much more concern about where your country is going, your nation’s going, your community is going, your immediate environment, because that’s where your children live.
And then they’re just joy. I mean it’s, there’s nothing like it. There’s really, really nothing like it. It’s the most wonderful thing. It’s f*ing hard. You don’t sleep a lot and it’s stressful at times, but it’s the best. It’s absolutely the best.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And you’ve got two kids.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’ve got one, but maybe more on the way.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, okay. Congratulations.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Thank you.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And what is your primary concern for the world they’re coming into?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, we’ve talked about all of this, right? I think my primary concern for my kids is that my wife and I do the best job we can in raising them well. And then ultimately they’re going to be their own people and they’re going to have to deal with the world in front of them in exactly the same way that others before have done.
My grandfather, my great grandfather, he was younger than me now when he was sent to the Eastern front while he had a baby son at home and he never came back. Human beings have had to deal with all of this throughout history. We always have to deal with the reality of the terrible world that we face at that moment in time.
They’re going to have to do the same. I can’t protect them from that. What I can do is set them up in the best possible way. And that’s the only thing I can do as a parent. That’s why I’m trying to.
STEVEN BARTLETT: We have a closing tradition by the last guest leaves a question for the next.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yep.
STEVEN BARTLETT: The question that’s been left for you is who was the biggest non-family member influence in your life and how did they make you a better person?
The Power of Mentorship and Living with Integrity
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. Not fair to boil it down to one. I think I had a teacher once who basically made me realize that it’s very, very important to give people an opportunity to prove themselves. And he did that by giving me an opportunity when I really didn’t deserve it. But he gave it to me and I took it.
I’ve also just intellectually Thomas Sowell, I mentioned him. Reading his books is just completely transformational for me and it really helped me think about the world.
I think on a kind of personal behavior level, I got a huge opportunity to tour with Jordan Peterson for three weeks a couple of years back. And that was completely transformational. Seeing him up close, spending time with him, seeing that this is a man who, the way he is in public is exactly the way that he is in private. And so he really one of those very, very rare people who preaches what he practices.
I remember, I think it was El Paso. We arrived right on the south on the border, and we arrived. We were late from the airport. Starving, starving. And one of the things that tends to happen is everyone who goes to his live shows works out that he might be at the best steak restaurant in town on the day.
So we turn up to the steak restaurant because he only eats steak. We’re starving. We sit down, the waiter brings the menus. The moment we start looking at the menus, this group of guys comes, guys and girls comes over, stands up, forgets about the menu. We’re starving.
Gives them, you know, all the attention in the world, selfies, has a little chat, asks them what they do, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Sits down, places the order. Another group of people come over, gives them the same amount of attention. And by this point, we’re dying of hunger.
Finally, our steaks arrive. And you know, they do in America. They say, please check that it’s been cooked properly. So he cuts in, he cuts off a piece, he puts it on a fork, and as he’s about to place it in his mouth, a group of literally 20 people shows up saying, “Dr. Peterson, I’m so sorry.”
He puts the fork down, stands up and gives them all the exact same amount of attention that he’d given the previous people. And just in everyone that he interacted with, that’s what I saw. A guy who talks about living in a certain way actually practices it. And that was incredibly inspiring for me, really educational, gave me a lot of thoughts about my relationships, how I live my life.
He’s a great man, Konstantin.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Staying in the pursuit of truth, and I highly recommend people check out Trigonometry, your podcast. I’m going to link it below and also the book is going to be linked below. Is there anything else?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes. Steven, when are you coming on Trigonometry? That’s the question.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve just finished my book.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Oh. Comes out in UK exclusive is what I’m hearing.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Deal? Deal.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Fine.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
A Warning About World War III
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Thanks, mate. I appreciate you having me. I believe that we are already at the early stages, if not in World War 3. We are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away, or even one AI generated viral video from nuclear annihilation. So here’s a terrifying detail that the public does not know. So, wow.
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