The Forces Behind Britain’s Downfall: Konstantin Kisin on Modern Wisdom (Transcript)

So by definition, it’s about excluding some people.

Now, who are the… If someone is breaking through a window into your house, are they likely to be the sort of people that you want in your country? Probably not.

The Crime Data They Didn’t Want to Release

And what happens as well is, you know, for years now, the government refused to release the data on crime committed by people that are coming from certain parts of the world. We now have that data and now we know why it is that they didn’t want to release it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because people are not the same. Not all cultures are the same. And if you have people who come from areas of the world where women are considered something akin to cattle, then when you have lots of those people coming to your country, they don’t treat women very well. I know it’s a shocker, but they might commit sexual assault at a very different rate.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Does that mean that there is maybe a crime blast radius around some of the places that these people are being housed?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t know that I have the data to say that exactly. But what we do know is that there are very high profile cases of people who have been put in one of these hotels or multiple occupancy buildings, et cetera, who have sexually assaulted 12-year-old girls, people, et cetera.

So what you have is just ordinary people now going, “I don’t want this next to my house because my daughter’s got to walk to school tomorrow.” And if you don’t address those concerns, I don’t mean you specifically, I mean the government, then you are really stirring up a lot of trouble. If you find a way to deal with this, then that’s actually the system working as intended, which is you’ve done this ridiculous, extreme thing, you’ve got pushback, you adjust.

The Hope for Government Action

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This only works. This is only a good thing if the government actually steps in and makes some changes, though. This is all predicated on a very hopeful vision of what might happen top down in the future.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yep. Or what might happen electorally, which would…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Then bring in a new organization that would do that top down.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, I mean, if you think about what happened in the US and why you have a Trump administration now, the illegal immigration was a huge part of it. And that’s one of the reasons that I think a lot of people across Europe as well are kind of going, “Wait, wait, this is actually fixable.” Because in America it is fixable. Like we see that it was always fixable.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And they didn’t have 23 miles of water.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, exactly. And they have a giant border that’s quite difficult to police and so on.

The Perception of Asylum Seekers vs. Economic Migrants

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is there a different sense to the way that people see immigrants coming to the UK than Mexicans going to the US? The difference between asylum seeker, war torn country on a boat, there’s this sort of vision of deprivation, of poverty, of need. It’s almost like a charity that needs to be given to these people.

Whereas you, you don’t have quite the same disparity between Mexico and the US, or at least supposed disparity between quality of life in Mexico and in the US. So I don’t know, it seems less philanthropic to give that stuff away. Does that make sense?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I know what you mean. I mean, I always say, you know, and it’s important to make this point, right. It’s like I understand why people are coming across the Channel, you know, in search of a better life. Like, I wouldn’t want to stay in France either. Joke I’ve made many times.

And my point being, by the time these people have got here, they’ve been through quite a lot of countries where they are perfectly safe if they are in fact genuine asylum seekers as opposed to just economic migrants. And again, don’t blame people for wanting a better life in the same way that I don’t blame people for wanting a bigger house. I just don’t want them breaking into my house because my house is better than theirs. Is that quite a reasonable point?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think so.

America vs. Britain: Two Countries Divided by Immigration

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But can I say some stuff about Britain and America? It’s actually very important to address, particularly given that both of our audiences are kind of mixed around those two things. So America and Britain, because we speak the same language, we think that we are the same. I think you’d agree with me that we’re really, really not on so many different things.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Correct.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You know that saying about Britain, America, two countries divided by a common language. So America, and this is something that actually very few people really understand, particularly those who haven’t been to America. America is an incredibly pro-immigration country. It’s probably in my experience, the most pro-immigration country that I’ve ever been to in the world.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I would agree.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right. However, Americans don’t like illegal immigration, particularly when it gets to the levels that it had got to for a period of time. So the American attitude, broadly speaking, there are of course you know, there’s a spectrum of opinion, but if you were to kind of go, “What is the broad consensus in the US?” I would put it based on my experience.

Americans are broadly like, “We are a country of immigrants. That’s how this country came into being. And as long as you want to come here and buy into the American dream, respect the flag, respect the Constitution, respect the way of doing things, contribute, you know, set up your own business, do whatever, then that’s great.”

And I know that you’ve, I’m sure you’ve experienced this. Like, I remember there was a point like people were saying to us, “Oh, you guys should move to America.” And we were kind of thinking about it. And anyone that I ever mentioned the possibility of that, who was American, they were like, “We’d love to have you.” And they didn’t mean me or Francis, they just meant people like you, people who are going to come here with their own thing and contribute. Right.

Britain Is Not a Nation of Immigrants

Britain is not a nation of immigrants. It has never been a nation of immigrants. I wrote a whole article and there’s a video on our channel if people want to watch it, basically breaking down immigration to this country. And until basically the late, actually the 2000s, the number of people coming to Britain and the number of foreign born people in Britain was negligible. It was 1, 2, 3% total of the population.

And then what you had under the Blair government was so much immigration in about, in a short period of time, around a decade, that in that decade more people came than had come in the entire history of this country in like a thousand years.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I didn’t know that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay, more people came under the Blair government that had come since the battle of Hastings in 1066, right? Now, if you think about what that represents, like, people go, “Well, you know, the people are concerned about levels of immigration. They are extreme.” And you go, “Well, no, no, no. You did this extreme thing. You brought more people in in 10 years than you had in a thousand years.” And then you were surprised that that…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Has been noticed, that’s been noticed, and…

The Impact of Immigration on British Society

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That not everybody’s happy about it. And of course, what that was followed by is 10, 13, 14 years of a Conservative government that was even worse. And look, when we had a large wave of Polish people come in the 2000s, it was disruptive to people’s wages, particularly in the kind of the sparkies, the builders, et cetera. But broadly speaking, it was not disruptive to the cultural fabric of this country because they had a similar religion, similar values, et cetera.

When you have people come from very disparate cultures, that becomes much more difficult to digest. And when the numbers are such, it’s just impossible to assimilate people that quickly. So where you are now, as I said when we started this bit, we now have more same numbers of illegal immigrants coming as we did legal immigrants within my lifetime. That’s crazy.

And so when people are pushing back against that, they’ve got legitimate concerns that have to be addressed. And if they’re not, you will see a political revolution, inevitably. And I hope it’s a political revolution, because if you keep storing these frustrations up, it could spill out into worse things, which none of us want.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ve heard you say the most important thing is to not allow immigration to become moral issue.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why?

Immigration as a Practical Issue

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because it’s a practical issue. It’s a practical issue. Of course, we would want to provide refuge to people who genuinely flee in persecution, but that has to be on the terms that the people of this country have voted for, because we live in a democracy. Right.

So in the same way that you decide who comes into your house, you might well say, there’s someone fleeing persecution by the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong, or there’s someone fleeing war in Ukraine, or there’s someone fleeing war in Sudan or whatever. And you go, I’ll actually house a family in my home while they get on their feet. Right.

But I don’t think there’s a single person in the world who would appreciate just tens of thousands of people coming and breaking into their house without their permission, no matter how destitute they were, actually. Right. So it’s about balancing the interests of British people, French people, American people, whatever, with other concerns.

And if you just take it as a moral issue, you cease to be pragmatic and practical about it, which is how you get to where we’ve got to. And then reality strikes back. And my favorite Thomas Sowell quote is “you can ignore reality, you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.” And that’s where we are.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How does that apply to this situation?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, the reality is you cannot have these levels of immigration without creating very serious problems. So you can have your head in the sand about it and go, anyone who cares about this is a racist, blah, blah, blah. But eventually the consequences start to bear fruit, and then you end up in a position where you get protests just by ordinary people outside of every migrant hotel in the country.

Asylum Seekers vs Economic Migrants

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Beyond the obvious, why are people not staying in France? Why are they coming to the UK? I’m interested in the difference between asylum seeker and economic migrant.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, the difference. An asylum seeker is someone who’s, look, I’m not a lawyer, but basically the broad picture is someone who is fleeing persecution, they’re going to get killed, they’re going to get tortured, et cetera. Because they are of the wrong religion in their country or they’re gay or they are fearing political persecution, whatever.

An economic migrant is someone who isn’t being persecuted, but that lives in what some controversial people might describe as a shthole country. Right. And they don’t want to live in a shthole country. And I don’t blame them. I don’t blame them. But that does not mean that they get to circumvent the rules that we’ve instituted for our country. Right?

And until you get the perfect communist utopia globalized across the world where every country is the same, those pressures will be there. And the main thing that’s actually happened in the last hundred years and the reason that mass immigration has become the issue that it has isn’t actually anything to do with the rules that we have about it or global inequality or the poverty of the global south or any of this other bullsh*t. It’s technology.

Travel has become much easier. It’s much easier, it’s much safer, it’s much more comfortable to travel across the world. So these mass waves of people seeking a better life, if you think about the way that the modern world around the globe has been created, waves of immigration from Europe into Australia, into New Zealand, into South America, into North America, those were very, very dangerous. Many, many people died on the journey. Many people died when they got there.

It’s not the case anymore. You can get there much quicker, much cheaper, much safer. And so you get these massive pressures. You have to update the way that you do things, otherwise the whole system becomes overwhelmed and people are going to be very angry about it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why the UK? What is it about the UK specifically that is so attractive?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t know how comparatively attractive we are. I know that in France, for example, and many other Germany, many other European countries also have these issues.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Do you know if they’re at the rates that the UK’s got?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t know what the comparative rate would be. But the thing is that Germany had, Germany has this, they’ve got some guilt for understandable reasons, but still.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Repaying that debt, reparations.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I mean, if you actually speak to a lot of Germans, I don’t know if it’s the case with the generation below ours, but our generation, they’re still infused with World War II guilt for understandable reasons. Right. I just don’t see the connection between, like, we killed tens of millions of people, and now we’ve got to let people from Somalia in because I don’t.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Debt that we need to repay.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That doesn’t make much sense to me. But that was their approach. Yeah. So when the Syrian, when there was a civil war in Syria, they let in loads of people without really being very careful about who it was they’re letting in because of that. Right.

My point is there’s an illegal problem across Europe, but the reason people might want to come to Britain is we are incredibly generous to people who come, I would consider, illegally. And that’s a pull factor. That’s a pull factor.

The UK’s Generosity Problem

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What does that generosity look like?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: We’re going to put you in a hotel, we almost certainly will not deport you. There’s a possibility that you actually like, if you, I don’t know if you’ve, in the time that you’ve been here, if you’ve ordered an Uber Eats, rather not Uber, Uber Eats, or yes, you’re right. Have you noticed that quite a lot of the time the person on the app, whose name is on the app is not the person that turns up?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You haven’t seen that?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That is a very common occurrence now. And the reason is that people are basically selling their identity to be used by illegal immigrants who then actually do the work. So there’s a possibility you will effectively disappear into the black economy and you’ll basically be allowed to stay here to the point where even if you commit crimes, you probably won’t get deported.

And we will look after you. We will make sure that, like, if you go to Somalia as an illegal immigrant, the Somalian government is not going to make sure you stay alive. If you come to Britain as a Somalian illegal immigrant, we will make sure you have somewhere to live, food to eat, you’re, broadly speaking, comfortable, and as I say, you probably won’t be deported. So if you get here, you’ve made it, so to speak. Right. That’s the pull factor.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s happening with the phone contract thing, is that true?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t know the details of that. There’s a lot of debate about this, about whether it’s actually happening. Some of them have been given phones, some haven’t. I don’t know the details of that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right. That’s interesting. One thing I did notice in New York, I spent the last month in New York and I don’t think that there was a single English speaking Uber Eats delivery person. I also noticed when I was here last year that a lot of the Uber Eats guys and just a lot of people in general on 50cc mopeds had learner plates on.

I get the sense that that’s something to do with, you don’t need to register for a license if you’ve got the learner plate on. Because any 16 year old that was, look, I’m learning to drive on that. Is that, what is that some fugazi that’s happening?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t know the exact legal details, but that is basically, it’s something like that whereby if you make an application but you don’t actually get the, it’s a way of driving without having.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Seemed to be some f*ckery or one of the E bikes that doesn’t require any sort of a license at all, nothing needs to be registered. So again, I know it’s not on the same scale you were talking about before, but technology enabling travel, also unlocking some opportunities for people to stay.

The Labor Shortage Myth

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And one of the interesting things, I don’t know if Eric Weinstein has ever said this on your show, but he made a very good point. We were just having conversation over dinner the other day, which is a lot of the time we’re told that, well, we’ve got to import the slave class, basically people who are going to work for peanuts because otherwise no one’s going to do these jobs. We’ve got labor shortages. Right. And he went, you can’t have a labor shortage in the market economy. It’s not possible.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How so?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The way the market works is if there’s a shortage of something, what happens? The price of that thing goes up until there’s a sufficient supply of that thing. Not demand. Well, demand comes back down and supply goes back up. Right.

So if you’ve, I mean, the way he illustrated this point might be a bit extreme, but he said, at the right price, I will come to your house and lick your toilet clean with my own tongue. Right. And there is a price point at which most people will do that. So the point being is this idea that we have to have all of these people who are effectively being used as slave labor come in to do these jobs. Just it’s a way of effectively depriving British people of the opportunity to be well paid for doing that job.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right, Understood. Understood. Yep.

The Rylan Clark Controversy

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Rylan Clark got in bother for an anti immigrant rant. I don’t know what’s happened since I left the country. When I was here, Rylan Clark was not the vanguard of culture wars and I’ve come back for the Americans that are listening. Rylan Clark was on X Factor.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: This is not an area of expertise.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Really?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay. Rylan Clark did reality TV some sort of. He pivoted that, as many British people do, into presenting and commentary and a fluffy morning TV show type stuff and said at least from what I saw, which may not have been the entire clip, but at least what I saw as close to a heavily caveated, highly equivocating, very gentle approach of actually not even commenting about immigration, but saying if immigration continues, people will get upset.

And this is what people are saying, not what I’m saying. This is what some people are saying. And they seemed to be upset. And the issue of reporting on reporting was sufficient to get Rylan Clark tip of the spear of the culture wars.

Cultural Integration and British Values

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, right. And he also, he was so heavily caveated in that clip, as you say, to the point where he said the thing that I just debunked five minutes earlier, which is he said, “Oh, Britain has always been a nation of immigrants,” which it hasn’t. But what he’s doing is he’s basically saying, “I’m not a British, I’m not a bad person. Here’s some things that some people, not me. Here’s some things that some people, not me are saying.” Right. Which is how you kind of dip your toe into the waters.

And what I think is probably happening is like most people in the country now, when you speak to normal people, like ordinary people who are not on TV every day, there’s a kind of like to the point where the Lib Dems are privately acknowledging that illegal immigration is a massive problem. Right. So basically the point is the overwhelming majority of people in this country think this is a big deal and everybody knows it. It’s just that in the media you’re still not supposed to say it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And you’ve got to do the hand wringing in this weird land acknowledgment thing beforehand.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes. Well, it’s interesting because if you did, imagine if you did land acknowledgements in Britain, they’d look very different.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: “I acknowledge that we stand here on indigenous land.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: 22% of Brits think immigration levels should remain where they are. 69% think that most illegal immigrants do not share the same values. So, yeah, I mean, when was that? Was it Newsnight? This was forever ago that Newsnight did a phone in survey, a text in survey or something. And it was, “How many people think that multiculturalism has failed?” And it was, this must have been at least five years ago. It was like 89% of respondents thought that multiculturalism had failed. And I have to assume that if you did the same thing again, that did seem kind of high to me at the time.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It might seem kind of low nowadays. Yeah. And look, again, I think it’s important to delve into the nuance of it because a lot of people who haven’t looked into this properly, they sort of what they think multiculturalism means is like black people and brown people being in the country.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Correct.

The Problem with Multiculturalism

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s not multiculturalism. That’s a multi ethnic society, which can work. Absolutely can work. Multiculturalism is the idea that actually there’s no such thing as British culture, there’s no such thing as British identity, there’s no such thing as British values. And what we really need to do is just bring people from all over the world and say, “Oh, you know, you want to practice your religion, your culture, you’re this.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s great.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Everybody live in their own ghetto, and we’re all living this beautiful multicultural utopia. And diversity is our greatest strength. Diversity is not a strength. Why? Because I remember this great scene from Game of Thrones. Have you seen Game of Thrones? Do you remember when Cersei and King Robert, they’re discussing the potential Dothraki invasion, and she goes, “Yeah, but we’ve got five times as many. We’ve got five kingdoms, they’ve got just the one.” And he goes, “What’s a bigger number, five or one?” And she goes, “Five.” And he goes, “Five. One.”

Unity is a strength when you’re attempting to do things. Common purpose, common values, a sense of shared identity. These are things that allow you to overcome difficulties. One of the reasons the concern about immigration is as high as it is is not just the levels of immigration. It’s also the fact that Britain has become poorer. Our GDP per capita is lower today than it was in 2008. In other words, people’s living standards are being eroded for reasons we can get into.

So addressing that requires quite a lot of difficult challenges. We’ve got a bloated welfare sector, so you’re going to have to deal with the fact that far too many people are not working and being paid not to work. You’re going to have to deal with the national debt, which is way too high, the deficit. You’ve got big, big challenges, right?

And those challenges are quite easy to overcome, comparatively speaking, when we all feel like we are ultimately, at the end of the day, this is our country and we’re going to sort it out. But if we have become multicultural in that everyone really only cares, you know, we keep hearing from politicians, “We need to look at the concerns of the British XYZ community,” you know, British Jewish community, British Muslim community, British Pakistani community, British Hindu, all of this stuff, right? Then we’re no longer British people trying to sort the same thing out. We’re people who are looking out for our own community. Our own community is Britain. That’s what we should be looking out for.

So diversity can be a strength in one sense, which is when you bring in people of talent and drive and ambition from around the world and they all buy into the values of that place and then pull together in one direction, that’s a strength. Just bringing lots of people from around the world and then not integrating them and not encouraging them to become British, and also bringing people who are probably not easily integratable into our society, that’s not a strength, that’s a weakness.

So that’s a big part of the problem that we have is multiculturalism is essentially an ideology of divisiveness and disparity instead of an ideology of cohesion and unity. And if you want to solve problems like, you’ve got a big team working on your show, we’ve got a team working on our show. Imagine you just had 15 people working for you who all had the exact opposite ideas to each other of what’s right and wrong, what direction the show should be moving in, you know, who should be presenting the show, et cetera, et cetera. That would never work.

So diversity is a strength in that you’ve got some variance of opinion. You don’t have only one opinion about things. But there’s a limit to everything, and we’ve gone way, way past that limit. So multiethnic society is fine. No one’s got a problem with people with different skin colors per se. The problem is ideology and worldview, and those have to be aligned for people to be able to work together.

British Values and Fairness

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, are Britain’s core values at risk of disappearing? Is that a real concern?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, what I would say is Britain’s core values are actually kind of become quite impossible to define in public. So that, to me, seems like a problem. I keep every guest we have on Trigonometry, I’m like, you know, “What are British values?” And I don’t blame them because I’m not sitting here with a coherent vision of what it means to be British.

But one of those things, and it’s interesting because this is what you asked about, is you talk about people’s concern about illegal immigration, 69%, whatever, and they’re not compatible with British values. Well, as you well know, one of the, I would say probably the core British value is a sense of fairness and orderliness and which has manifest itself in the idea of queuing properly.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Love a queue.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Love a queue. Yeah. And Britain, and, you know, this is, it’s like a hack joke that everybody does about Britain. British people love queuing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if you think about what queuing is fundamentally, queuing is civilization, queuing is civilization. It’s a process by which we go from the law of the jungle, who’s got the sharpest elbows, who is going to get to the front of that line by being the biggest, strongest, roughest, most violent, et cetera.

And it’s a way of saying, we’re actually going to have a civilized society, we’re going to do things in order, we’re going to respect each other, we’re going to be tolerant of each other. And by the way, in that process of spending time together, waiting collectively for something, we can all chat about how terrible it is. And through that we actually bond and connect and we kind of connect with the people around us. So illegal immigration is fundamentally antithetical to what it means to be British because it’s about respecting the law and it’s about fairness.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: As opposed to jumping the queue.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: As opposed to jumping queue. And I’ll give you an example. My mother applied for a visa to come here two or three years ago to spend time with me and my family. Right. And despite, I don’t know, maybe there was something imperfect about her application. My mother’s been to the UK dozens of times. She’s got plenty of things to do back home. No intention of staying and working in the Uber Eats economy, I assure you. Right. Her application was denied and I’m having to spend quite a lot of time and money to get that sorted so that she can come, while at the same time tens of thousands of people are getting on a boat in France and coming here illegally. I just don’t think that’s where the British people think the system should be at.

Immigration from an Immigrant’s Perspective

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How does being an immigrant shape your views on immigration?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I just think I don’t have the political correctness BS approach to it. So I can be honest and say I think some immigration is good if it’s carefully selective and if we’re bringing people who have the potential to contribute. So I’m just not constrained by this. Well, I like, because no one can accuse me of hating immigrants, right. So then I don’t have to deal with that before I say my actual opinion.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s a very slippery argument because it goes from, “You’re exclusionary, you don’t know what you’ve got. You’ve never needed to go through this” to “You’ve pulled the ladder up after you.” It just continues to sort of move down the predictable stack.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, but the other thing about it is that every immigrant will tell you, some of them will tell you this in private rather than in public. But I know the Russian society, there’s some amazing people in Russia and in Ukraine and all of Eastern Europe. Talented, creative, driven, ambitious, you know, really, really resilient in ways that are hard for people actually in the west to even comprehend. Brilliant people.

But there are also some awful people in Russia. Now, if we are going to allow people to come from that country or any other country, which of those groups of people do we want? Right. We’d all acknowledge that every country has within it the types of people that you’d want more of and the types of people you might want less of if you wanted a cohesive, dynamic society.

So I can say without being called the bigot, I do not want the dregs of Russian society or the dregs of Ukrainian society, or the dregs of Armenian society or the dregs of the Pakistani society in our country. But I do want some of the best people who might want to come from all of those countries to come here and contribute.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And I suppose the less desirable that you make the country, the less likely it is to get those upper echelons of the people that you really do want to come in.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And that’s the great tragedy of where Britain’s got to. And I think we talked about this last time, where when we talk about net figures on immigration, what that conceals is you’re getting a lot of people from, let’s be charitable and say the bottom end of the jobs market, many of them might not be working at all. And you are losing all the people who actually want to live in a nice country because they go, “Well, why would I come here, pay 50% tax, be unsafe and watch a country deteriorate where I could go somewhere else?”

So if you want good, a good immigration policy, you have to not welcome the worst people from around the world, and you have to create the conditions that attract the best people around the world. That’s what you want.

Navigating the Immigration Debate

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s kind of a morphing argument. You know, the economic implications for supporting people, the cultural absorption and integration of them, the concerns that British people have for their quality of life outside of that, this brain drain thing that’s happening. What does this mean overall in terms of trajectory?

And at each one of these points, there is five or ten accusations of bigotry that can be thrown at you, which you need to sort of wipe off all of the slime and go, “Okay, it’s not that. And it’s not that. It’s not that. I’m actually trying to say something which hopefully real people would actually be really, really concerned about.” And then again, not to use Rylan Clark as, you know, the light bringer of all of this sort of issues. You can say the most milquetoast thing in the world and still get castigated and destroyed for it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I also think, though, that is a very kind of what we call Westminster bubble type of thing. Like in the, this argument does not wash even remotely in…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The majority of the people in Newcastle are too concerned about Rylan Clark.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I think we’ve got to the point now where you just, like I said, that lid is not going to go back on the pressure cooker unless you really try and force it, in which case you’re going to get serious disorder in the streets.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is the UK doing enough to culturally assimilate immigrants? Should it be doing more? Is there such a thing as that?

The Need for Cultural Assimilation

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, I actually think we should be doing a hell of a lot more, and historically speaking especially. But that requires us to not have all of this conversation about identity.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That there is a difference. Because if you deny that there’s a difference, then assimilation isn’t needed.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: How can you. Are you saying cultures are different? Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, if diversity is our strength, then there is no such thing as a British culture. Then assimilation doesn’t exist.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right. Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, no, no, no. The job is to have this pick and mix of things that are all disparate and separate inside. It’s not to have a bag of different colored sand that you turn over to turn into like a mostly the current color with a little bit of new color in it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. Well, if you think about the insistence on assimilation or integration.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It presupposed within that is that there’s a difference between cultures, which is something that we pretend isn’t true. And then it also implied within that is that there’s a difference. There’s a superiority of one culture over another. One culture is better than another for this country at least.

Right now, I’m not saying people in Afghanistan need to adopt British culture. That’s up to them. But for our country, people should be adopting British culture, which means that we are implicitly making the claim that it is better. And you can’t say that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And without. I mean, even if you’ve had this challenge of asking your guests on your show, what is British culture? If you struggle to identify it, it’s going to be very hard to enforce it, encourage it, provide a roadmap for people to assimilate into it. Yeah, it’s this ouroboros of non culturalism.

Defining British Culture

KONSTANTIN KISIN: If we lifted the cultural restrictions on actually talking about these things, I believe we would get to an answer very quickly on what British culture actually is. And I’m not saying I have all of those answers, but if we had a conversation as a country about it, then we get there.

The problem is we’ve got to a point where people are ashamed, frankly, and embarrassed to actually talk about what that might be. And there’s a lot of discussion to be had about it. I certainly wouldn’t pretend, particularly as an immigrant myself, to have every single part of it.

But I think fairness, orderliness, and a sense of respect for each other is a big, big part of it. And a lot of people in Britain and the west more broadly don’t realize how unusual that is.

So one of the things Francis and I always talk about on Trigonometry, when him and I are just doing a conversation, like his background in Venezuela, my background in Russia, teaches me that it’s not actually that normal. Like in Russia and Venezuela, we discovered this just talking is like, if you screw someone over that has allowed themselves to be screwed over, the general consensus is, well, they’re the dickhead. They let themselves get screwed over, and you’re right to screw them over.

Of course, we even have this phrase in Russian, which means that something is lying in the wrong way. Like if you left your phone in the wrong place and someone took it, that it was. Yeah, it was not lying in the right way, as in, you left it there. Of course someone’s going to steal it. Right.

So not everywhere in the world has these cultures. I mean, if you go to Japan, right, you discover that cultures are very different when it comes to these things. Like, if you can leave valuables on a table, they’re not going to go anywhere.

And so there’s lots of conversations to be had about what it means to be British, whether it’s our attitudes to women relations, all sorts of things that are an important part of it. Speaking English is going to be a very important part of it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, that would. Is that not the most basic approach to this?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, you can’t connect with other people unless you speak the same language, basically. So all of these things should be hashed out, and we should be very muscular about forcing people who are already here to comply with those basic requirements.

The Language Challenge

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Just rolling the clock forward a little bit. I have to assume that if you have an ever increasing number of migrants coming across the channel that don’t speak the English language, eventually they’re going to have children, and those children are going to need educating, and those children will only speak the language of their parents if they’re not doing a cultural assimilation thing.

So we’re going to end up with schools, or the requirement for schools that are going to be in different language, an increasing number of different languages in and around these areas.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because diversity is our strength. Right. So we can’t say to them, you need to learn English. Your kids should learn English.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And look, the children of even of illegal immigrants do tend to assimilate and pick up the language. Kids are very good at that. But there are schools in this country where English is not the most common language already.

So, yeah, all of these things just need to be like. They just need to be forced to be. Or everything in our country has to be angled towards cohesiveness and cohesion because we’ve been angling towards disparity and difference for far too long, I suppose.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So one other way to look at it is that it’s kind of a fake cohesion that it’s been angling toward, that we don’t need to make a big deal about this, where we are cohesed around our mutual acceptance of anything that happened.

Like some Brazilian jiu jitsu thing that’s going on where you flip it upside down, you go, well, actually, there’s nothing to even cohese against. You went to a migrant protest.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

Inside the Migrant Hotel Protests

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And again, this is another. This is an entire content niche, whether you’re streamer on Twitch or Russell Brand or whatever, like, covering these things is a big deal. And I know that you did. What did you learn from being at these migrant hotel protest things?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, it’s interesting. So I went there and as I go to, I’ve been to a number of different kinds of protests and document them as, you know, Palestine ones, pro Israel ones, all kinds. And I always go there with a genuine open mind because I think that’s the only way that you’re actually going to learn anything. If you go there to validate your priors, you’re not really actually learning anything.

So one of the things I found is that what’s happening now is you tend to have protesters against illegal immigration and then you have a bunch of counter protesters.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Protesters against protesters against illegal immigration.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s right. And what’s interesting is that what seems to be happening is the protests against illegal immigration are, broadly speaking, organic in the sense that people know it’s happening, they pop along and, you know, it’s a mixture of people as a protest.

I mean, protests by definition usually attract quite unusual people. And this is not a disparaging comment, but most people are busy doing other things. So to get British people out, normal British people out onto the streets.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Selection effect going on here.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: There is. But I’m also. What I’m also saying is the point we’re at now is things have got so bad that you are getting normal people going out to a protest and that is.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s telling you quite a lot. So what you’ve got on the anti illegal immigration side of things is a mixture of people who are, you know, angry about illegal immigration. The one I went to, he was kind of close to the Isle of Dogs, which is an area that there’s a lot of kind of football supporters there who might be up for a bit of a ruckus, who were very peaceful by the way. But you know, they did look.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Peaceful but handy.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Peaceful but handy. You wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of that. And on the other hand, and this was something that I found very, very interesting is you had a highly organized counter protest.

So you get a bunch of people turning up who’ve all got the same placard, it’s professionally printed, they’ve got songs that they all sing, they’ve got. It’s all organized. And I didn’t know it’s an organization called I think Stand Up to Racism or something like that, which I didn’t know anything about.

So I went over and I tried to talk to them and the main organizer said we only talk to professional journalists, we don’t talk to incels in their bedrooms.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, he knew who you were.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, exactly. I’m a famous incel in my bedroom. And so you wouldn’t talk to us and lots of other people there wouldn’t talk to us. And you’re going, isn’t the point of a protest to get your message out? And yet none of these people would talk to you.

But what you have is you have this hard organized core and then you have a few stragglers who’ve come along because they actually think this is about, you know, they’re against racism or whatever. Right.

But what was interesting is when we posted the video of that guy saying that to me, people very quickly found out who he was. And he is a self identified revolutionary Marxist, I think, or communist. Same thing basically. And the entire organization comes from the Socialist Workers Party, which is a communist organization.

So what you’ve basically got is the far left organizing in a very, very kind of meticulous way to be at every protest, to act as if it’s an organic protest against the organic protest. When what actually is happening is you’ve got organic protests of ordinary people coming to a place and then you’ve got these people coming there to try and shut them down.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Contrived protests.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Contrived protests, probably well funded. I don’t know where their funding comes from, but they’re well funded, you can tell.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because they’re very emotional placards. They spent time in singing class learning the chants.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And those people, a lot of them go from protest to protest to protest to protest. So it’s the same people around the country acting as if the entire country’s risen up in opposition to the evil racist far right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay, so now look, both, as I say, you know, the people who are attracted to protests are quite unusual, atypical people generally speaking. But I think broadly speaking, that is my experience of what I saw is mostly normal people against mostly organized counter protesters showing up at these places.

Class Disdain and Democratic Discourse

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Are there any arguments against rebuttals to the migrant protesters that doesn’t just boil down to some sort of disdain of class or intelligence? Because it seems to me like a lot of the time it’s this sort of tongue wagging, these racist, you know, these bigoted people, they don’t understand what they’re doing here. We’re more elevated than that. Have we not transcended our need for exclusion.

It seems like anyone protesting outside of an immigrant hotel just means that person is racist. But also probably a bit poor, stupid and uneducated.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, but the thing is, you know, I’ve always found this a very strange way of arguing things. If you live in a democracy, you have to accept that there’s a spectrum of people’s informedness and intelligence. So why is a guy.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Even if it’s true, even if it’s.

The Dismissal of Working-Class Concerns

KONSTANTIN KISIN: True, why is a guy who drives a white van and maybe isn’t intellectually that smart and maybe doesn’t have a first in PPE from Oxford, why is his opinion by definition less important? Like, if you live in a democracy, his opinion is just as important as yours. And you ought to try and persuade him if you genuinely think he’s wrong to your way of argument.

But the problem is that just because you can dismiss someone for not making their argument in the most articulate way doesn’t mean that their core concern is incorrect. If you have 50,000 people a year coming into this country illegally, being put up in hotels, causing an increase in sexual offenses, et cetera, just because a guy with a face tattoo is there talking about it doesn’t mean that the concern isn’t valid.

So my interest in all of this is always, is the claim, the core of the claim that’s being made, is it true or false? Is it true that there’s a problem with illegal immigration? Okay, then I don’t really care if there’s a guy you can demonstrate is actually racist complaining about that because it’s about the problem, not that particular person.

There is extensive concern in the country about this issue because the problem is real. The fact that you can find a handful of people who don’t look good on TV to make the case that they’re all stupid or bad doesn’t invalidate the claim.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, it’s the same thing as you’re having an argument with your wife and you happen to be a good debater, you win the argument, but ultimately you’re in the wrong.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, yeah, you win the battle, you lose the war on that one, believe me.

The Immigration Paradox

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Okay. It seems to me there’s a bunch of, I mean, there’s an awful lot of not hypocrisy, but blindness going on here. So if we say that it’s mostly people on the left that are pro immigration, asylum seeker, informal immigration we can call it. Well, one of the things that they would be pushing for presumably is increases in living standards for particularly people from underprivileged backgrounds and the working class or the underclass. But the pot of money that is being shared around is now being diluted down by all of the people that are coming from overseas. Presumably that’s not…

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, you’re speaking like an evil right winger. What we actually need to do, Chris, is tax the rich.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But even if you were to do that, it would still be diluted down more regardless of how much.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, no, no. It’s all about tax evasion by the super rich. Okay. And you’re falling into the right wing rhetoric of the right wing media.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Who are telling you…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I do watch a lot of Trigonometry.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, exactly. Who are blaming the poor, innocent asylum seekers when it’s actually the super rich who are…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Thank you. Let me give you another one.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’ve been watching a lot of Gary’s Economics.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You can tell. On a similar vein to that, a lot of these people from the left would probably care about women’s rights. Believe all women. We need to protect women. We’d be concerned about women walking alone through parks at night and concerns like that. This seems a little anathema to that as well.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, no, no. Again, I think you’ve just been buying the racist tropes of the right wing media. The real problem, Chris, is men. Who is it that does all the raping and the sexual… It’s men, isn’t it? Okay, so what we need to deal with is that problem is men.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because there’s no immigrant men.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, no, no. Men, men. Because there’s no difference between cultures. Remember, it’s very important that you remember this. There’s no difference between cultures. There’s no difference between cultural values. The problem is men. Okay, to the point when…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How long can you keep this up?

Understanding Both Sides of the Debate

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, I can. I’ve studied these arguments very well so I can play this. This is the difference, right? The people on my side of the argument, mostly speaking, have actually explored both sides of the debate. And I can argue with it all day from that progressive position. They don’t know anything about the other side of the argument because their argument is based on moralizing, which is why we talked about the problem with making immigration a moral issue.

But to the point, when you had a Labour MP after the last election who was heckled by Muslim men in her community during her election victory speech, she then was asked, well, isn’t there a problem? She said, well, yeah, men are… Misogyny is a big problem in this country. So I can play this game all day long and I enjoy it. So carry on. Have you got any other questions? What else have you heard from the evil right wing media?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, I guess the main question I have, which is above that, what is it that the left is trying to achieve or why is it… Again, I hate… I actually would really love to have something around this conversation to point my finger at the right about. And there may be many things that we’re not, but I hate it always being this, like it’s… This seems to be honest, like an evolution of woke, like a new version of this, like the British version of that.

Because that word’s sort of been and gone, especially in our side of the Internet. It was cringe before it was even cool. And I don’t want to bring it back, I do not intend on Lazarus-ing that f*ing thing from the dead. But maybe we need a new word for it. But this feels like a very sort of British brand of woke, of that toxic empathy, sort of denial of real world implications, purposeful subverting of the facts, all coming from it seems sort of a left leaning side.

Luxury Beliefs and Progressive Worldviews

KONSTANTIN KISIN: There are also, we should say this, a hell of a lot of people who are on the left that are not remotely on board with this. So I would say it’s a very progressive thing. And Maurice Glassman, who’s a Labour peer in the House of Lords, he has this great line, he says if you go to the doctor and they say it’s progressive, it’s not good.

So it’s a progressive worldview and it’s what our mutual friend Rob Henderson calls luxury beliefs. My experience, if you look at the demographics of the people who are the counter protesters, you go, how many of those people are married? How many of those people are parents? How many of those people have a business? And you strip out those categories of people and you go, well, that’s where all these ideas are coming from.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because…

KONSTANTIN KISIN: If you’re a parent, like the first thing that happens when you’re a parent is all your fake bullshit ideas about how things are supposed to work just disappear. Because you go, here’s this thing and it doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. It works the way it works and you have to roll.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Idealism comes into contact with reality number one.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The second thing that happens is you experience an intense vulnerability of a kind that you’ve never experienced before, which is you go the illusion that you are in control of your life and the things that matter to you, it vanishes. The moment your child is born and probably before. So the concern about security of the environment, safety, et cetera. All of these things have become much more important to you because there’s a part of you that’s no longer even within your body that matters to you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Much more than you of this thing.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s out there, which is the environment, right, that you care about. So when you run a business, as you well know, you don’t have the luxury of having beliefs that don’t match reality because every time you are wrong, you lose money. Every time you’re wrong, it hurts you, it costs you something, it means you can’t employ another person or you’re losing things that really matter to you.

So a lot of the people that take this worldview, they simply usually insulated from the consequences of the things that they actually advocate for. And that is a large part of why this is happening. It’s just people who don’t reckon with the reality of what they’re advocating for.

The Roots of These Beliefs

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They’re not having to come into contact with the real world consequences of this because of the luxury beliefs thing. Does that explain it sort of exclusively or is there something else going on? Is there a reason beyond fear of being called racist, sort of misplaced toxic empathy and luxury beliefs? I don’t need to deal with the implications of this like that seem… Does seems like kind of small motivations in order to have maybe the fear, the fear of being called racist actually scales quite a lot.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: There’s also a lot of ideological things that people have. If you adopt the central tenets of the worldview that’s dominant in these circles, which is there are no differences between people, there are no differences between cultures, et cetera. Then all of this is a logical consequence of that because how can you say that this person shouldn’t be allowed into our country when we’re all the same? They are us, we were all the same, there’s no difference, right? So imagine there’s no borders. It’s easy if you try.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is there something in Britain’s past, is there something to do with having a landed gentry and this sort of exclusion top down of the aristocracy? Is there some kind of karmic debt sense that we shouldn’t be walling off people in the way that this happened in the past? Is there still a class system?

Britain’s Historical Guilt and Class System

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s something I have talked about, but in relation to a different issue. I think the hatred of successful people and wealthy people comes from that. Because in Britain we conflate success with privilege, we think that if someone has wealth or a business or money, that’s because they are privileged. They have been privileged because 200 years ago someone with money probably was privileged. They almost certainly would have been rich because they were the grandson of somebody, as opposed to because they’ve created something that isn’t really true anymore.

But that is, I think, why there’s this disdain for people who are successful. And that’s why these narratives about tax the rich, tax the rich, tax the rich, which doesn’t work in practice, but nonetheless it’s really appealing to people.

The reason I think the ideological part exists is partly to do with World War II, because it’s not just Germany that’s guilt ridden after World War II, because much of Europe reacted to what was happening in Germany in terms of dealing with people who were being persecuted in Germany in a way that when they looked back on it, they were very ashamed of, right? Not allowing people to flee Germany and come here, et cetera.

So there was this genuine sense that like we watched the worst catastrophe in human history be perpetrated right on our doorstep and we didn’t do enough. And so that’s when you get these mechanisms that Britain was a pioneer in bringing through the ECHR and all of these mechanisms that we’re now talking about because they were like, okay, well what we need to do, right, is… Well, the problem was we had these nationalists, right, like in Germany, who looked at things at the national level and they would do whatever they wanted within their country because they were allowed and we can’t allow that anymore.

What we need is a more globalized approach where you have globalized supervision, or at least EU level supervision of these things so that we collectively make sure that none of us goes too far. Which in and of itself is a well intentioned and reasonable idea. The problem is that once you give those people that power, they don’t stop until they’re legislating the shape of bananas across the European Union. So that’s kind of where I think a lot of this comes from. It’s the sense that in the wake of World War II, mistakes were made and they had to be corrected.

Britain vs. America: Heritage and Class

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What about this sort of culture around productivity? I think that’s interesting that if you look at America, great country, I very much like it. There’s not much heritage, right? Not a massive amount of heritage, which means that you haven’t had time to accumulate. First off, class hasn’t ossified in quite the same way. Posh is just a word that when I use it, most Americans understand it, but look at me like it’s something they haven’t heard for a decade or so. Class hasn’t sort of stratified out in that same sort of way.

But importantly, if you’re wealthy at most you’re only like five generations away from the person that made it. So yeah, like maybe you were privileged but you were probably still working on the business at that, whatever. The same isn’t true in the UK. And yeah, when I was growing up, I would say the country felt a little negative in the micro but proud in the macro. And now it feels negative in the micro and negative in the macro as well. Does that make sense?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It makes perfect sense, yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is that something that you’ve sensed as well?

The Psychology of National Decline

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Absolutely. Well, it’s one of the reasons I talk about the things that I talk about because within our lifetimes I’ve watched this great country go from that to what we have now. And I think it’s a tragedy, it’s a terrible tragedy because, you know, I have weird interests. So I’m watching a lecture by this Russian, Ukrainian actually, well, Russian, Ukraine, both historian who talks about the way the Manhattan Project, the nuclear, the way it was made.

And it turns out I didn’t know this, but the Germans at the early stages, the Germans and the Americans and the Brits were basically at the same point of the development. But what the Germans and the Americans did is they looked at what it was likely to take to get to a nuclear weapon. And I don’t remember the exact particular factoid but basically the Germans overestimated the difficulty by a factor of 100 and the Americans underestimate by a factor of 100.

But that false positivity and false optimism is often how you get things done. So when you have a negative mindset, it’s self fulfilling. It causes you not to go for things that actually you might have been able to do. They may well have been more difficult than they, you know, than people would have thought, but they might not have been as difficult as you thought. And so if you actually go and attempt things, you’ll get somewhere much more often than if you just have a negative mindset. So it’s a self fulfilling prophecy.

And so when you have a country that’s engaged in this kind of constant negativity and this down, this is why I’ve opposed this, all this stuff about British history as much as I have, because there’s been so many lies told about the history of this country. And then I go well, okay, if you’re teaching children school all this nonsense about how their country was like the worst slave owning empire in history and all of this other stuff, when in…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Fact it was the one that started the stopping event, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Then you go, well, then why would they feel proud to be British? Why would they fight to defend this country? If you think this country is a piece of shit, like, why would you lay down your life for it? It doesn’t make any sense. So likewise, when it comes to starting a business here or contributing in some other way, why would you do that if you don’t believe in this thing?

And the reality is, and I think this doesn’t get said often enough, is Britain is a great country with a great history. Actually we have some of the most intelligent, driven, passionate, creative, sensible people in Britain, you know, and if we harness their skills and talents and took the boot off their neck and stopped blaming them for the problems actually created by the government, you’d have a revival, you’d have a national revival because partly of the heritage of the accumulated capital over the centuries this country’s had. But you’ve got to actually be willing to do that.

Tax the Rich vs. Become the Rich

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Unlocking that potential requires a culture that fosters it. And it’s the difference between tax the rich and become the rich, like own the Ferrari and scratch the Ferrari, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And I think you’re a good example of this, right? Like you’ve gone to America. Now, that should not be happening. That shouldn’t be happening because I imagine moving to a different country. I know from my experience, it’s dislocating. It causes you to, you have to make new friendships, you’re far from family. These are all inconveniences that many people would rather avoid.

Like, I love America, but at the moment I have no interest in moving there. And partly because I actually love Britain. I love this country, I love the culture in so many ways. So if you’re forcing people like you and me to think about that tells you something, that tells you what you are doing to this country. And if you keep doing that, more and more people will leave. And then you’re going to be left with people who are not contributing as much. And why would you want that?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, this sort of psychology of decline thing, I’ve really reflected on it a lot because it is easy, as is shown by all of the US streamers that are doing it, to sort of point at previously glorious country that now appears to be in decline. Here are all of the problems implicit in that is sort of this standing on the shoulder. Oh, I would never. You know, it’s good for me to comment on this because it’s not an issue of mine or the grassroots version of this that we need to fight back, but all of that has sort of psychology of decline baked into it, whereas it does feel a lot like just latent untapped potential.

In the UK, you know, we have as many. I think we have as many universities in the top 10 globally as America does. But we produce five times fewer entrepreneurs in terms of education, in terms of heritage, in terms of history, cultural impact. Until so recently, we were the goats. It really should be a dip in the market as opposed to an actual decline. But, yeah, I…

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, we’re about to be overtaken by Poland in GDP per capita.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s not great.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s great for Poland and I love Polish people. It’s a great country. But if you think about Britain historically, it’s punched so far above its weight, Even in the 20th century, when it was declining from its true glory days. And it can still do that. It can still do that if it chooses to.

The UK: Second Most Depressed Country in the World

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I saw this stat. The UK is the second most depressed country in the world. The 2023 Mental State of the World Report collected answers from 500,000 respondents across 71 countries. Countries are then given a mental health quotient. The UK came second last, just above Uzbekistan and below South Africa.

Ukraine came in comfortably high with a score of 60, despite battling Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invading forces. While Yemen, which is also suffering one of the largest humanity crisis in history, also fared better. In addition to the UK ranking second lowest, it also scored the highest in respondents who are distressed and struggling, had low driving motivation scores and struggled heavily with adaptability and resilience.

F, dude, I look, I don’t like the bashing on the UK thing and I really battled with it, especially after our last conversation. And every time I see these stats there’s this bit of me that wants to highlight them to galvanize people, but I’m aware it also sounds like I fed off and now I’m like sort being of sticking my middle finger up where I was.

I spent 15 years in this country. I employed 30, 18 to 25 year olds during that time. I personally coached 150 young entrepreneurs through the business that we had that ended up being an accelerator. And these guys went on to go to London to do finance, to move to Singapore to do all of these sort of things. F*ing brilliant.

But every British person understands this. Oh my God, like it’s so fatiguing to try and sort of lift this up. And I think that’s part of the beauty of the Brits that we do have this sort of stoic feet on the ground thing. That’s good. There’s a humbleness to it. I am concerned that the weight of overcoming that which does create a competitive advantage and drives you to do great things in many ways in a different way than the Americans do with blue sky vision.

And you can become whatever you want victimhood mentality, which is downstream from that immediately. The UK does not have that in the same way. There is a little bit of a heavier gravity here for overcoming certain things. And I think that’s fine until you start piling additional weights on people’s backs. Right.

And I think that my concern is we had a challenging but relatively overcomeable, stable sort of system. And then when you add in the stats around the economy. I loved your episode with Daniel Priestley. I thought that was brilliant. I think he’s fantastic. These difficulties that people need to overcome, those are raw, objective difficulties that people need to overcome.

And then we’re going to have these problems and concerns that we have to do with multiculturalism. And then there’s going to be some issues in the education system as well. And then we’re going to be talking about what it actually means to be a culture and whether you should have some sense of belonging or pride. Then we’ve got all of the issues to do with the British Flag, the English flag.

I go, these are heavy weights to bear when it was already a little bit of an uphill battle to kind of reach escape velocity. And I’m going to believe in myself and I’m going to do a thing like, this is really good. It’s become increasingly tough to watch.

Accelerationism: Making Things Worse to Make Them Better

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It has. But I’m always optimistic. Weirdly enough, maybe it’s because I’m not really British. I don’t know. My sense is, I can’t remember whose quote this is, but something that can’t go on won’t. And we are getting to that point. I mean, a lot of people have written that. Liam Halligan, who I really respect him with his economic analysis. He’s brilliant. He keeps writing that we’re about to have a financial meltdown.

And in some ways, if you look at the last time we had one thing in 1976, that’s almost immediately followed by a period of great revival because. And the 70s, I didn’t live through them, but as I understand them, they were kind of similar to where we are now in terms of many of the problems we face. So in many ways, I’ve become a bit of an accelerationist. I think the worse things get, the better it is.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So e acc is England accelerationist?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes. I just think that we’ve got to a point where it’s actually something you explained to me very well, which is that 6 out of 10 relationship where it’s quite bad but not bad enough to leave and so you end up stuck. That’s where Britain is. It’s in that place where things are tolerable and they’re not bad enough for a real revolt.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Comfortable complacency is very difficult place to be in.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And the way you get out of it is you have make it worse, make it worse. And that’s where I think we’re headed.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Someone asked me that at a live show. They said, “I’m stuck in region beta. Do you think it would be an idea for me to purposefully torpedo my own life to motivate myself to get out of it?” That’s a bold strategy. But if it’s happening already, I mean, that is a counterintuitive, but second order interesting way to look at this situation with positivity that, look, you can have a long period of misery if nothing happens, or you can have a short period of pain. And that hopefully spurs some sort of reaction.

The Flag Controversy

Speaking of that, the flag thing again, another niche of content. British flag on roundabouts is horrific, but the pride flag on crosswalks and the Palestinian flag on campuses is somehow, like, enlightened. Does this row about the English flag actually matter? Or is it just window dressing for other shit?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I think it’s symbolic of the broader things going on. First of all, all the hypocrisies of the ideology that we’ve all been living under, being exposed. It’s amazing to me, I was just. I said this on Twitter. It’s like, it’s amazing that all the people with flags in their bio are now very upset about people flying the English or the British flag. It’s incredible.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s a wrong flag. Flags are…

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s that flag.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And it’s one of the things I actually love about just literally physically arriving in the US you go, every building’s got a giant American flag on it, right? And it’s the flag of the country. That’s great. I think I’m all down for that. But it’s a proxy for these tensions that are bubbling under the surface.

And so to the elite class, the appearance of England flags everywhere is like, “Oh, the racists are now trying to blah, blah, blah.” When I think the reality is it’s a reassertion of Britain’s national identity and an attempt to say, actually, there is such a thing as British culture and there is such a thing as Britain.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s the flag argument really about then? If the people…

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The flag argument is really about the idea that you’re not supposed to be proud of your country.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And why is that?

Freedom of Speech and National Identity

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because your country’s a piece of shit. It did slavery, it did colonialism, it did this, it does that. And so you’re supposed to apologize for the rest of eternity. And that’s why you must have the Palestinian, Ukrainian. And as you know, I’m a big supporter of Ukraine, but nonetheless, that is not the flag of this country.

You’ve got to have the Palestinian, Ukrainian, trans, et cetera, flags everywhere. As long as it’s not the flag of your country, because your country is a piece of shit. That’s what this is really about.

And the reason people are now using it in an act of defiance is saying, actually, no, f* you. My country is not a piece of shit. I love my country. I should love my country. You should love our country. And if you don’t love our country, maybe you should go to another country.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s a good microcosm for your idea of the bad situation. Galvanizes people to change because there will be more English flags than there would have been had this not have been a situation that occurred. So that’s a perfect example of people are actually going against this. It’s an act of rebellion to put this flag out there.

The Importance of Peaceful Protest

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And the most important thing, and I said this right at the time, is that movement carries on. It’s very important that people continue to protest about things that they’re not happy about. They continue to make their voices known, they continue to put pressure on their MPs, they continue to just discuss this.

But it’s got to be done in a peaceful way because the moment this becomes in any way violent, it’ll just get dismissed and then all of this stuff is going to get worse. So it’s got to be the most positive, constructive, non-violent movement.

And as long as that carries on, I mean, of all people, we had Tommy Robinson on our show a while back. This was his point. It’s not me saying Tommy Robinson is saying this has got to be non-violent. And he’s someone who obviously has a history of getting fisty with people. So, and I think he’s totally right about that.

To the extent that there’s pushback against what the elite class has been doing, it’s got to be channeled in that very constructive civil way, the British way. Actually, if that carries on, there’s actually nothing they can do to stop it. They will have to change.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because as soon as the protests become aggressive and handsy, it’s much easier to dismiss them as just thuggery from—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: They’ll do what they did when the riots happened last year, which is they’ll say, this is the far right. We’re going to send in the police, we’re going to give them, we’re going to—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Make examples of people, delegitimizes people’s real concerns.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. And then what happens is all this sting gets taken out. Best case scenario. I mean, there’s a worst case scenario than that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s that?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, what if you can’t take this thing out by locking people up? What if you respond to violence with police violence? And then there’s another response to that. What do you do then?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, that’s not good. One of my friends brought up when India and Pakistan were, and I think in some way, many ways still are at loggerheads. What an interesting situation that would have caused for the very diverse Great Britain.

Given that you have lots of Indian and Pakistani communities living side by side. I don’t know what it means to have two countries at war with each other who have huge populations next to each other in a third nation.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I mean, you already see it with Israel and Palestine to a lesser extent. But you see it, right? The fact that that conflict is happening quite far away from here has caused very significant impact on Britain. So I think it’s a Douglas Murray line: when you import the rest of the world, you import the problems of the rest of the world.

Tommy Robinson and Being Ahead of His Time

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What did you learn from speaking to Tommy Robinson?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, lots of things, really. One was about him, which I don’t think he’s the same guy that he was 20 years ago in the sense that I think he’s grown up quite a bit, which happens with people over time. I think that he, I think he’d be the first to acknowledge it. I think he made a lot of mistakes in the past when it comes to certain things, but I also think the scrutiny that he received was completely disproportionate to those errors that he might have made.

I think he’s a good example of somebody who was just kind of ahead of his time on some things. And the mechanism of suppression, particularly in the absence of new media at that time, was very powerful. And so you could—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because he couldn’t directly get a message out.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No. And so you could demonize someone very easily, which is what happened to him. And it’s easier to demonize people who are football hooligans who have that background.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Who present in the way that he—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Does, who present by which you mean working class.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right, et cetera. So I think, I’m trying to straddle two things personally. I thought everything he said on our show, pretty much there was one or two areas where we disagreed, but broadly speaking, was sensible. I think his intentions are good. Doesn’t mean I agree with every single thing that he says or does.

But broadly speaking, I think his heart is in the right place. And that’s one of the reasons that I think a lot of people, I feel very grateful actually for him trying to get some of those messages out there.

That said, I think there’s questions about some of the documentaries he’s made and all this other stuff. And he’s an impulsive guy, you can tell, right? So he’ll jump on a tweet and retweet it without necessarily always checking. There’s questions people can, and people have criticisms of me and say I’ve made mistakes, which I’m sure I have.

But as I said to you before, my main interest with people is: is the broad thrust of what they’re saying correct? And with him, I think it is.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Does the modern migrant situation in the UK make Tommy Robinson’s last two decades feel more prescient? Does he look more like a Cassandra?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I think so. I think so.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s strange with that when, because you never know. This is the thing. You don’t know if that person actually saw the future or if they blindly threw their dart at the dartboard and it hit the bullseye.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t think Tommy saw the future. What I think is he saw what was happening in his town. And Luton, by his account at least, was quite an outlier. It was already the spear. Well, it was the future, but in that time, right? It was the future now. So he just saw the reality on the ground and he was like, well, this is going to be the future of the rest of the country.

The State of Freedom of Speech in Britain

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. The freedom of speech thing, I think, in the UK is also another interesting angle. There was a joke about freedom of speech in the Soviet Union, which you’re probably going to be familiar with. An American tells a Russian, “I can stand outside the White House and yell, ‘To hell with Ronald Reagan.'” And the Russian replies, “That’s nothing. I too can stand outside of the Kremlin and yell, ‘To hell with Ronald Reagan.'”

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What is happening with freedom of speech in the UK? I’m aware that freedom of speech, those three words mean an awful lot in the US. I never heard it growing up in the UK, but whatever that means over here, it feels like that is being flexed and is under pressure.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, we don’t actually have freedom of speech. As we were sitting down, I took out my phone. I got a message from Graham Linehan, who’s just been arrested at Heathrow Airport for three tweets.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’re kidding me.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right now?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right now.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Are the tweets recent? Do you know what they’re about?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s Graham Linehan. The tweets are about trans people. It’s an issue he’s taken quite seriously. With good reason, by the way.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: He’s trying to leave or he’s coming back in?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: He was coming back from the US. And he’s just been arrested at Heathrow for three tweets, which are basically about trans people and women’s bathrooms, et cetera, et cetera.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Great.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And this is what’s happening. Thirty people a day are being arrested for things that they say. Now, Lucy Connolly, who was one of the, she tweeted something very silly during the—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Riots about, “Burn the migrant hotels. We should get these bastards out.”

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. But again, this is partly a technological issue, right? Because if you, 40 years ago, if you were sitting in a pub and you said things, “You should burn these—”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Hotels and get the bastards out.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No one would give a shit, right? But now, and the government clearly were very keen to make an example of somebody, and they did with her and with others. But no, you don’t have freedom of speech in Britain.

And one of the things that really pisses me off about it is you and I have freedom of speech in Britain. Mostly. I mean, Graham is a good counterexample to what I’m about to say. But broadly speaking, someone who has a—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Platform can’t be shut down because they get to counter the narrative against—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, yeah. Whereas the ordinary person who tweets something to three people and makes no impact on anything, they can’t defend themselves. They can’t defend themselves. So this is a mechanism of keeping the plebs in. This is how these people would see it who are doing this. The plebs down.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So what you’re saying is this is an argument for everybody to have a podcast.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, they’re most welcome to try.

The Lucy Connolly and Ricky Jones Cases

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. It’s a long road. Lucy Connolly thing.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Lady who posts about burning the migrant people should get them out. “I don’t give a f*,” something like that. Ricky Jones does something very similar at a protest, saying, “These are far right Nazis and we should kill them all. We’d slit their throats. Slit their throats.” And he draws his thumb across his neck. He gets found not guilty by a jury.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Lucy Connolly gets 30 months in prison. Going to serve at least a year-ish. Something.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: She’s out already.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But she served the year. So Ricky Jones was found innocent by a jury. Correctly. Correctly. Because people shouldn’t go to prison unless they’re actually inciting violence in that moment, saying, “Go and slit those people’s throats.”

As far as I could tell, he was using the metaphor of we’re going to destroy racism or whatever by slitting his throat. The heat of the moment, blah, blah, blah. But that is also what should have happened with Lucy Connolly and everything else.

Which is interesting, because I watched her interview with Alison Pearson in which Lucy makes that very point herself. She says, “I am relieved he hasn’t been sent to jail like me, because that is actually what should be happening.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Should be more precedents of Ricky’s, not of Lucy.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, but see, this is one of the things that happens when you have a society that isn’t cohesive and it isn’t—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You can’t agree on what the fundamental—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Principles are because then you have to start passing laws about everything. Because in order to maintain the pretenses of this multicultural society, you have to start arresting people for things that they say that are counter to that question.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: On that, it’s easy to say, well, this is obvious ideological bias. Had this have been somebody tweeting about something that is anti-right and somebody talking about something which is anti-right, the same thing would have occurred.

But I get the sense that the medium of communication makes for a massive difference here. That first off, things that you say online are concretized for the rest of time, can be screenshotted and reshared. I suppose videos can too. And if something’s not videoed then it’s not the same.

But still it feels like more of an act of commission and sort of an editorial decision about yourself, to write something out or to take a video yourself. Then the heat of the moment as a tweet doesn’t feel the same as the heat of moment as an expression.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But why not? What if you’ve had seven pints and then you tweet something?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I don’t disagree. The question I have for you is do you think that the situation would have been different if Lucy had said it and Ricky had tweeted it?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t think so. I think part of what happened with Lucy, she was very badly advised by her duty solicitor and she pled guilty.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So that I think is part of the reason that she ended up getting the sentence. It’s very hard to say. I think if she had pleaded innocent, we might have seen a different result. I would hope, but I don’t know. But there are a lot of questions about two tier justice in this country.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What do people mean when they talk about that?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What they mean is, for example, during COVID, we saw anti-lockdown protesters being brutally treated by the police. The police would kneel on them and then there were BLM protesters and the police would kneel in front of them. That’s what they mean. And the same with the criminal justice system.

And look, I talk to a lot of people within that system. I was talking to a judge at an event that I was at and they all kind of go, “The profession has become very constrained by the work directives that we get from above.” So now I think I always try and be fair. My experience with police officers, including in the protest, is they’re just trying to keep the peace, man. And I guarantee you the people who arrested Graham Linehan at the airport, they’re all deeply embarrassed.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’m saying that the police aren’t themselves ideologically captured.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The grunts on the ground, not only are they not ideologically captured, but if you think stereotypically of the sorts of people that are likely to go into policing, they’re generally not woke progressives.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They’re doing it with their eyes down.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right. They’re kind of embarrassed. But these are the rules and they signed up to enforce the rules. So it’s all about what’s happening at the top, I think.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How would you describe it?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s also about the fact that “two tier” rhymes with “Keir.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Anything that rhymes is going to be more catchy.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

Restrictions on Speech in the UK

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What do restrictions on speech look like in the UK if you don’t have a podcast?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, we see it. There’s the way the law is written and then there’s what actually happens. What actually happens is if you say something that is considered grossly offensive or…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Hateful or just grossly offensive, saying something.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Is grossly offensive is liable to get you prosecuted in this country. Yeah, but that’s what happened to Dankula, remember?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes. He made his dog. He trained his girlfriend’s dog to be able to do a Nazi salute for a joke. And this was eight years ago.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Eight years ago. Yeah, yeah. And he was prosecuted for being grossly offensive.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And this is the hate speech.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I can’t remember which section. I think it’s 127 of the Malicious Communications Act, something like that. But anyway, the broader point is basically if you say things that can be, someone can say a hateful incitement, etc. in a very defined, in a very loose way, you can be prosecuted for it.

To say nothing of the fact that people are routinely getting non-crime hate incidents, which is when you haven’t committed a crime but you’ve still been visited by the police and you get what is effectively a stain on your character which might prevent you from finding employment and other things like that. For the things that you said, especially online.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: She doesn’t have to go to trial.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, it’s not a criminal offense. You’re not even found guilty of anything. You’re just labeled as someone who’s committed a wrong-think offense and then that’s what you get.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is this just the progeny of us not having a freedom of speech clause in our sort of founding document or is there something else going on here? Is this to do with where we’re at and sort of progress that we’re making?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, it’s both. I mean having a First Amendment would…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Preclude all of this would be.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The vaccine against all of this. But when you don’t have a First Amendment and you have all the social tensions that we’ve been talking about where you have to make certain, you have to pretend certain things, then the people who refuse to pretend certain things and the people who’ve had a couple of glasses of wine and said the wrong thing about immigrants on Twitter and whatever, they all have to be shut down because they’re disrupting the fake cohesion that you talked about.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right. Okay. So this is the fact that you have tension happening between what is existing on the ground and what people want to have be broadcast, especially on social media, means that you need some sort of prophylactic or breakwater against that. Even if you’re not going to, and it seems like it is being, you said 30 people a day. Even if it is going to be implemented this weird panopticon thing where everyone’s got a sword of Damocles hanging over their head.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Where they think, well, I’d better not. Shouldn’t bring up that criticism that I’m going to do.

The Bacon Incident

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. And I don’t know if you saw this. Rogan actually sent this to me because I think Joe is part of this, watching what’s happening in the UK with horror. He probably won’t mind me saying this. He sent me a video of a guy being arrested in Britain at a protest outside a migrant hotel saying “I love bacon.” And then he sent me another one of a British guy who went over to I think Morocco where he bought a bacon product which you’re allowed to buy and then said on the street “I love bacon.” Didn’t get arrested.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But a guy at a protest in the UK gets arrested for saying, and now bacon is a big part of British culture.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It is a massive part of British culture. I remember that there was a, and this is the Britain that I remember growing up.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Newcastle and Sunderland football teams for a very long time were in the same league. They are 10 miles apart, something like that. And they have a very fierce rivalry. It is Liverpool, Everton for the Northeast.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And the Mackams and the Geordies.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Correct. There was a Newcastle supporter who I remember saying hated Sunderland so much that he refused to eat bacon because it’s red and white. I remember thinking that is a man who is prepared to stand on his principles.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s someone who should be running for office in northeast of the UK.

The Accumulation of Laws

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But yeah. Is there, it seems to me like this sort of legislative f*ery always tends to be locked in. I mean there’s even, I remember reading this theory that I can’t recall where it comes from that over time because you really mostly accumulate laws rather than getting rid of them. If you run society for long enough without checks on this, it ends up getting to the point where everything is illegal and no one can do anything anymore because you’ve just accumulated so many laws that the Venn diagram of what is illegal to do and what you can do is now just a single circle.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I think that the saying is that a sick society accumulates laws like an old man accumulates medicines. Right. Over time you just accumulate all these things and try and box it in. Yeah. And this is where Elon, actually, I don’t know why it didn’t happen. Maybe there’s some practical reason why it’s difficult or maybe politically it’s impossible. But he had this great idea that he used to talk about which is every law should have a clause in it that it expires after a certain point and it has to be revised, legislated again.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We’ll just make sure that this is still applicable.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And I think there’s something to do with, you’re allowed to bring sheep across Tower Bridge on the morning of the 13th of May, if it’s a full moon or something.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. And a lot of these laws just should be getting reviewed every 20 years and I appreciate that creates an increasing workload and whatever but the idea is that a law is passed and then remains in power in perpetuity without any revision. It just doesn’t seem to me to be on the right side of the trade-offs of that situation. Laws should be reviewable after a period of time. Necessarily so.

And then if we still think 30 years later that we do want this sheep to Tower Bridge whatever thing, great. And I think if you had that, a lot of the problems of why we are where we are were actually created under the Blair government towards the end of that government. So the Equal Rights Act, there’s lots of the stuff about the independent civil service which now basically means the civil service is not independent, it’s now actually how government is administrated, etc. They were all created then.

Well we wouldn’t be having them now if we actually had those things under review all the time. So I think that’s a great idea and I don’t know why countries aren’t doing it. There may be a good reason by the way, it may be just being practical in some way but theoretically that would be very interesting proposal.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I don’t know what happens with this ability to speak freely problem in the UK because if that stuff’s not going to get repealed and it doesn’t seem like it is, it’s not going to get turned around. There are going to be increasing numbers of examples, precedent set where that thing was unspeakable. So we’ll creep it forward another inch and we’ll creep it forward another inch and we’ll creep it forward another inch.

And when it comes to culture this thing is malleable and it can sort of wax and wane and flex, ebb and flow forward and back but you’ve got something that’s very hard and fast that’s sort of written down. There is a bright line about what you can and can’t do and actually here are a bunch of precedents that have creeped it even further and then.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You have no choice. So to the point where, look, as you can imagine I’m not a big fan of this moronic far left Palestine Action Organization, but they’ve been classified as a terrorist organization. So the police are basically now going around arresting who are Palestine and climate change and all that. Right. Because you have to then enforce these stupid laws that are passed and then you end up basically criminalizing loads of people whose only crime is ignorance and stupidity. And that’s not a good outcome.

So to the extent that you care about free speech, it’s important to care about the free speech of those stupid people as well. But this is the truth. Of those 30 people who are getting arrested every day, most of them are not writing articulate essays about the complexities of geopolitics and mass immigration. Most of them are saying stupid shit that we’d probably rather people didn’t say.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, also most of them are probably not real kinetic actual world threats that are going to cause some sort of uprising that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s my point.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is going to upend the country.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s my point.

The Pothole Exploit and British Malicious Compliance

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I suppose this. What are you focusing on? Questions. But again, people in America may not have seen people in the UK have some issues with our public services, as you would say, and infrastructure. We’re a country where it’s very wet and quite cold a lot of the time and the roads are old. And what that means is you get potholes.

Now, they’re not the size of the ones that you get in America, because the size of the ones you get in America, their entire postcode of holes. But they’re very common and the roads in the UK can be damaged. What people realized was that there was kind of a cheat code. They managed to find an exploit in the England video game, which was if you painted the English flag on a pothole, the local council would tend to come and remove it and also fix the pothole while they did that. Or if your bin bags hadn’t been taken away, you could also try and do some sort of a similar approach with that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s that joke, isn’t it, playing out in real life. The joke was something like, you know, hi, the police. Can you come to my house? I’m being burgled. No, sorry, we were too busy. Okay. Well, it’s a trans. You know, you just misgendered. He just misgendered me.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Turn up the next day. It’s kind of like that, but in real life.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But yeah, this gaming of the system, this sort of weird identification with these rules are so ludicrous. Look at how I’m going to play them.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is actually part of the British spirit, like the orderliness that we have. There’s a fantastic subreddit. Have you heard of r/Malicious compliance?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, I haven’t seen.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: F*ing awesome. So it’s stories of people like my boss said. My boss said that he didn’t want to speak to me. So like every time that he rings me, I don’t say anything on the phone and I just let him talk like stuff like that. And yeah, the Brits will hold onto a resentment and the malicious compliance thing is definitely there.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: If we had a second amendment, we still wouldn’t go around shooting people because just not in the British psyche really, I don’t think.

The Economy and Living Standards

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. How much of this discontent is explained by the economy not being where it’s supposed to be?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I think it’s a big part of it, man. It’s like, look, I think people’s concerns about mass immigration are incredibly legitimate, as we’ve discussed ad nauseam with you today, and illegal immigration especially. But it’s also infinitely true that when things are going great, the problems that do exist become less significant.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You hide an awful lot.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s right. So we’ve got, yeah, the economy is really struggling and people’s living standards are not growing, in many cases, I would argue are declining. Because when your wages are stagnant and infrastructure, as you say, is crumbling and things are not being worked on and improved, you got a big problem.

And the reason for that is, I mean, there’s lots of reasons for that, but one of the big ones is this is something that people fundamentally don’t understand. But if you look at countries that do well versus countries that don’t do well ultimately strip away everything else. It’s about how much energy they consume.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay.

Energy Consumption and Prosperity

KONSTANTIN KISIN: GDP is energy transformed. The more energy you consume, the more prosperity you have. Because everything comes from energy. Everything in this room was created, including me and you, through the consumption of energy. Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Newtonic. Yes.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, again, consumption of energy. So the point being that when you create a system where the cost of, we have the highest industrial electricity prices in the world. Or energy. Electricity or energy. And we have the fourth highest retail consumer energy prices in the world. If you have that. And the reason for that is green levies and subsidies, et cetera. It’s all net zero, basically because the price of energy has become completely divorced from the price of energy at the point of purchase.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The cost of energy. Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So when the people who distribute energy buy it, it’s one price and then there’s a huge markup now to the point where even when the price of energy goes up, yeah, those prices go. But when it goes down, our prices don’t go down.

Right now, if you have the highest energy prices in the world or one of the highest, that makes it far more difficult to run a business, especially industry and so on. And the idea behind Net zero is very clear about this. There’s no controversy about this. If we make energy expensive, people will consume less of it. That’s part of it, right?

So nowhere on the Net zero agenda is let’s make clean energy that’s really cheap for people. Part of it is about inhibiting demand through making it more expensive. Like, if you think about it, this is what we do with cigarettes, it’s what we do with alcohol, with fuel as well. You whack a massive excise duty on all those things to disincentivize people from doing it. It’s the same thing that’s happened with energy.

So we’ve basically deliberately, purposefully destroyed our own prosperity. And the reason we’ve done this, I think we just had Catherine Porter on the show, who’s an energy analyst and expert, and she talked about this, and I’ve talked about this for a long time in a broader context as well. If you take what you have for granted and think that if you f* around with the variables that make it what it is, it’s not going to change, you will ruin what you have. Right?

It’s like imagine you’ve obviously spent a lot of time focusing on health and physique, et cetera. Imagine you stopped doing all the things you did to get into good shape and, well, I’m still going to be in good shape. Well, you might last for a little bit and for that little bit you’ll be like, oh, yeah, I didn’t need to go to the gym, I didn’t need to eat right. I didn’t need to get my sleep. But eventually we’ll catch up with you. And that’s where the country’s at at the moment.

So the first order of business for me is you have to get rid of this suicidal idea that we call Net zero, because not only is it making us poorer and energy insecure, it’s also not helping the climate at all. Because all that’s mainly happened is we’ve outsourced the things that we make in this country to other countries which make them in dirtier ways, and then we put them on big ships and sail.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Them back over here, which also isn’t that efficient.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No. So we’ve actually globally probably increased emissions by doing this so that we can pretend to be green, so that a granny at Palestine Action can feel like she’s done something.

The Carbon Emissions Paradox

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I saw a stat around the amount of carbon emissions that a person living in Sudan or Syria has compared with when they move to the UK. There’s five times more, I think around about five times more carbon emissions put out by an individual who is living in the UK than the same individual who’s living in Syria or in the Sudan.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So again, we care about the working class, but what we have to be able to distribute between people who are in need is diluted down. Yeah, we care about women’s rights, but there is a blast radius around some of these hotels where people from different cultures don’t necessarily adhere to our slightly more elevated understanding of what it means to treat a woman in the modern world.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You Rylan Clarked that very well. That might be a blast.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Have you ever Slackline? It’s kind of like Slackline. And then the same thing with the climate change, you know. And I’m very fascinated by how people sort of square circles of beliefs that don’t necessarily comport with each other when you give them these sorts of examples. It’s very interesting to me. And this is another one that you think, well, we care about climate change. Net zero is something that’s very important. I don’t have a particularly strong opinion on Net zero.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s because you don’t have it where.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You live most of. Well, yeah, I mean Texas is definitely interesting on that. Most of my stuff about Net zero has come from you. Most of my understanding of that’s come from you. I’ve had Richard Betts, director of the IPCC on the show, had Hannah Ritchie on as well, from our world in data. So I’m not only Rutger Bregman on. Right. The guy that called out all of the billionaires at Davos. I’m not right coded when it comes to this.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Me neither. I’m just, I’ve explored this issue and I’ve come to the conclusion that even if you really care about climate change and you think it’s a major problem, et cetera, what we’re doing is the opposite of what you’d want to do to fix that problem.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s kind of, it’s toxic empathy at a sort of global climate level.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And also it’s ignorance.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. And wanting to be able to stand proselytizing that self pedestalizing look at how you are so green. We’re doing all this, we might have outsourced this, if what you’re saying is accurate, to just some other place that does it with lower wages, for lower living standards, with more emissions, less clean, and then we’ve got to transport the f*ing thing back.

Incompatible Beliefs and Moral Crusades

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And look, there’s obviously the obvious point that you made as well, which is about the moralizing aspect of this, which is why, you know, little Greta, she gets involved in this now, she’s onto the next big moral crusade of Palestine, she’s moved on from climate change because that’s not as important anymore.

But the reality is as well, and Francis always makes this point. I think he’s right, particularly when it comes to your point about incompatibility of beliefs that people hold. At the same time, it’s hard having beliefs that are compatible with each other because that requires thinking through things. It requires studying and knowing things and talking to people and listening to things. But it’s so much easier to just go, well, I really care about the planet and I really care about working class people and I really care about immigrants and I really care about this. And that is often what most people’s positions actually are when you talk to them.

So I remember last time I was in DC, I was talking to a guy who was an immigrant, like 40 years ago. I think he’d come, I can’t remember where exactly was he came from. I think it was Ethiopia, Eritrea, somewhere like that, that lovely man. And he told me that I was staying in the hotel where Ronald Reagan was assassinated, the attempt was made on his life where he was shot. And I said, oh, yeah, that’s interesting. What did you think of Ronald Reagan? He said, oh, he was a great American, I loved him. And I said, oh, really? Did you vote for him? And he went, no, I voted for the other guy. And I was, oh, really? That’s why. And he was like, yeah, because he was better for me. Right.

Like people will have ideas about things, but then they will also do things that are counter to that when it comes to their own pockets. And there’s a lot of people have incompatible beliefs. I think we all do to some extent. And our journey at trigonometry has been an attempt to educate ourselves on the issues so that we are not in.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That position blindly ununified.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, but those positions are very often unpopular because if you are saying to people, well, you can’t have everything that you want, you can’t have this belief and also this belief when both of those beliefs make you feel good about yourself. That that’s more difficult and it’s uncomfortable.

It’s much easier just to go, well, you know, the reason the country’s f*ed is we hate the Tories and rich people are stealing everyone’s money. And whatever it is, it’s just not true. I wish it was true because then the solution would be a lot easier than what the actual solution is, which is you have to create a country where businesses create wealth, and then you have the tax revenues from it and you have to reform government, have reform the service. Lots and lots of difficult things.

The Benefits System: Safety Net or Hammock?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Beyond net zero and the cost of energy. 25% of people under 35 are on benefits. And 52% of households receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This feels a lot like the difference between a safety net and a hammock.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What does that say about the. Because again, it’s very easy to be like these benefit fraudster people. They don’t really have seen some scheme where you can get. The cheapest way to get a new BMW is to get it through the disability Allowance fund or whatever it is, and it gets. And you can upgrade it every two years or something like that.

The Welfare Trap

KONSTANTIN KISIN: If you create a system that incentivizes people to say that they’re mentally unwell and then to be rewarded with whatever it is that people want, which is money, housing, et cetera, for that, people will take advantage of it. I don’t blame them. I blame the terrible system.

I mean, we had a great interview with Fraser Nelson in which we talked about this. And that was basically his entire argument is like, you’ve created a system that traps people in welfare. And I guarantee you, even as driven, as passionate as you and I are, if we found ourselves in our early twenties a little bit depressed as I was. I don’t know about you, I was certainly depressed in my early twenties because I had lots of difficult things in my life. If you’d given me 25 grand a year and a house to live in, wouldn’t I take it?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Just follow the incentives.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s very difficult to see yourself, and I think it’s probably fair to say you and I both have established that we have quite a lot of ambition and drive in our lives. Nonetheless, I would put it to you, I think, would struggle to get out of that situation. So if you create a trap for people, a lot of them are going to fall into it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, that’s a better way to put it. The difference between a safety net, a hammock and a trap.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, it’s a trap.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And it’s a trap with no incentive to get out. Like, look, I’ll be honest with you, right? If I wasn’t doing what I do now, my dream job would be to be a video game streamer.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay, yeah, I can see you doing that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. I love video games. I really enjoy them. I’m not good enough at them to do it, but if I could be.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’re good enough at s* talking to do it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: If I could be an amateur video game streamer while the government paid me 25 grand a year and I had a house and I was relatively comfortable, how many people wouldn’t take that? So if you make a trap for people, they will fall into it, and part of it is you have to take the trap away and a lot of people aren’t going to like it.

Gary’s Economics and the Appeal of Blaming the Rich

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How much of this explains the rise of Gary’s Economics and that wing of talking?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Look, I think Gary. So I feel bad about saying anything about Gary because before he got as big as he did, he was booked to come on Trigonometry and the person who was responsible for our bookings left and forgot to do a proper handover. So we were in America filming.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: He turned up at the studio.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Gary turned up at the train station.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Sorry, Gary.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And I actually saw him at that migrant protest. And I apologize to him, but I got a very clear sense that he’s not coming back on the show. I don’t think it’s because of that. I just think he’s got some. He doesn’t want to talk to people who probably don’t agree with him.

But anyway, Gary’s Economics and the fact that he is as successful as he is is a symptom of the fact that ordinary people are really struggling. And when people are struggling, they will look for an explanation of what’s going on. And “the rich have screwed you” is the most appealing explanation that you are ever going to get. It’s very appealing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How much accuracy do you think is in that?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I think it’s true that the very, very rich have got very, very, very, very, very rich. I don’t think it’s true that the fact that they’ve got very, very, very rich is the reason that people’s living standards have fallen.

The reason people’s living standards have fallen is that we do not have a dynamic economy. If you look at America, the fact about America that I told you about Britain just isn’t there. America’s GDP is way higher today per capita than it was in 2008. But in Britain it’s not right. We have the same levels of debt. America’s hugely indebted. America just has a much more dynamic economy.

And the reason we don’t have one is partly the culture we’ve talked about is partly the benefit system that we’ve talked about. And it’s a lot of it is about net zero. And if we strip all of those things away and actually start going, how do we grow the economy fast? How do we build businesses in this country? How do we encourage our people to work hard, create things, have the sort of vision that, you know, there were a lot of problems with Thatcherism, but under Thatcher there was that drive and ambition and celebration for success and aspiration.

If we did that, we’d grow our economy very quickly. So I don’t think the issue is that there is an elite class of the super rich, because that elite class of the super rich also exists in America where living standards are going up.

Abundance vs. Scarcity Mindset

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah. It seems to me the difference in the UK between an abundance and a scarcity mindset of we need to tax people more as opposed to create more, tax the people who already have it as opposed to generate a bigger pie.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There’s this idea. I read Bill Perkins book “Die With Zero” and he’s got this interesting idea from economics called consumption smoothing. Have you come across this really cool. I’m probably going to butcher it, but I’ll get close.

Consumption smoothing basically allows you in the moment to anticipate your future economic position. So it means that if you anticipate that things are going to grow, you can borrow against your own future. And in the same way, if you can anticipate that things are going to decline, you can save against your own future.

His justification that one of the biggest predictors of what wealth is age across people’s lives. For the most part, assuming that you don’t get into any trouble, you are going to have more money in future than you’re going to have now. But most people who are frugally minded tend to underspend their current earning when they should be spending at their future earning. And that allows you to capture most of the gains. He’s got a.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Sorry, I’m slightly skeptical, but carry on.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: He’s basically applying consumption smoothing to your own life.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Life, yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: For a particular cohort of people, I would put myself in that class, grew up super not rich. Spending money is something that I’ve. It’s a skill I’ve had to learn and it’s one of the ways that he justifies people in learning how to spend money. Hey, you’re going to have a little bit more money in future. Maybe you should be less scared about spending it now.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, look, there’s a contextualized truthness to that in that if you’re someone whose ingrained mentality is not to spend any money, you might need that advice. Broadly speaking, though, if you look at the central. Look, there’s a lot of claims that this study has been debunked, you know, the marshmallow test thing. But broadly speaking, I think it’s undeniable that people who are willing to forego immediate gratification for benefits later do better.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Across, regardless of whether it’s built around a marshmallow or not.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Exactly. And so I think, and it’s culturally true as well, cultures that teach people to save and accumulate tend to do better over time as well, work hard, et cetera.

But see, where I would say about Gary and where he’s absolutely right is I think there’s undeniable evidence that the more inequality there is in society, the worse it is for everybody, including the super rich. This is something that’s talked about a lot in “The Spirit Level.” And if you plot the kind of the markers of social disease, like percentage of the population in prison, teenage pregnancy, violent crime, etc. After you get. Once you get to like a moderately wealthy country, any gains in GDP beyond that, if the inequality, they don’t really matter, what matters is the level of inequality.

So if society is very unequal, it’s bad for everybody and it makes sense, right? Because even if you’re the super rich, you’re living in a society where everyone hates you and probably wants to rob you. Right. It’s not a good place to be. So he’s right about that.

The problem with a lot of his analysis, I think, in my opinion, I’d love to discuss it with him because I may have blind spots that I haven’t considered is maybe he’s so British that he’s just built in zero growth into his model. So whenever I’ve watched a video of his, it’s always about how do you divide the pie? Which is always the left wave of looking at economics.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There is not going to be a.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Bigger pie, there’s not going to be a bigger piece. And if you look at the world the way that a lot of people look at that world, and if you live in Britain the way it’s currently constituted, that actually is true.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That was why I was bringing up the consumption smoothing thing.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: When you apply it to an entire country.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s right, that’s right. So. But what I’m always. And that is an important conversation. Inequality is a very important conversation. The reason that there are social tensions in the UK is partly about that. But just like we talked about immigration, if everybody’s feeling of prosperity and wellbeing was rising, we wouldn’t be having the conversation about that.

I don’t care that there’s so many people who are so much richer than me. It never bothers me because I’m doing pretty well. Right. The moment I’m not doing well, that’s a problem. So what we need to do is lift everybody up and then I don’t think people are going to care that someone’s got a yacht. I don’t care if someone’s got a super yacht. It doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t change my life in any way. And in fact, them having that yacht built in the UK is probably a good thing for the UK economy.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. It’s a difference between one person with abundance, another person with lack, and two people with abundance. Just one having more.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, I think that in terms of how human psychology works, that seems to make an awful lot of sense.

Inequality and Human Behavior

KONSTANTIN KISIN: We compare ourselves to others. I mean, if you think about how we define inequality, like we’re all incredibly prosperous compared to people 100 years ago.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But there are bigger inequalities today.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Another thing that’s interesting, if you have areas of high inequality, you get more sexy selfies from women. So Candice Blake University in Australia did this great study where like millions and millions of selfie photos that were uploaded and they were looking for one of the correlates of what’s called self objectification and also beautification too. And the biggest predictor was levels of inequality and the.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Are you saying you’re in favor of inequality?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, look, there is a scarcity of sexy selfies online.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, clearly.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, certainly from me.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: If you look at. But is the logic behind that, basically, that when there’s a bigger reward for success and a bigger punishment for failure, then you’re going to amp up the precisely correct.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: When, again, very reductive stakes are higher?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Basically.

The Impact of Local Environment on Behavior

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes, correct. It’s a reductive way to look at it. But basically when women are shown how high they could climb and how low they could fall, they use that, one of their primary tools in order to be able to get themselves away from what they feel like would be a bad future and toward one that they think would be a good one.

What I’m saying is human behavioral ecology would suggest that your behavior, your psychology can be highly impacted by what’s happening around you in your environment. You might think that this would be mitigated because we’re part of a globally connected information system. Why would the local inequality impact something which is being broadcast around the world? Well, because locally, still, your environment still does have an influence on you.

So for everybody that thinks it doesn’t really matter, I can work from home with my Internet business, it doesn’t. No, no, no. This still has very much real world implications for how you behave, for the way that you see yourself, for the way that you see your future. And when you scale this across an entire country, the UK is in many ways unified around certain principles. Just some of those principles are not so great.

And yeah, I’m kind of fascinated by Gary, too. He was supposed to be on last year, he was supposed to be on this week, but he is a very vertical commentator on this. I do want to know where he goes for three months at a time. He sort of, I don’t know, he’s like Sleep Token. He comes and releases an album and then f*s off for two years and then comes back with another album. So he’s definitely sort of like goes abroad somewhere, it seems like.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Oh, maybe man of the people, maybe just take the break. I’m only kidding, Gary. No, I genuinely, I’d love to have a conversation with him because I think what he is doing very well is capturing people’s concerns and then it’s about what is, once you’ve identified the problem, diagnosed the problem, what is it that you’re prescribing? And that’s where I think a lot of the conversation is to be had.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, I mean, people did say the same thing about Andrew Tate. Correctly identifies the problem, wrongly prescribes the solution.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think he is much less accurate in his diagnosis than Gary.

The Need for Left-Leaning Content Creators

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But yeah, it’s been fascinating to watch that unfold. I know I didn’t get a chance to say this to Jimmy the Giant, but I think, and I genuinely hope that the interaction that you had with him, so it puts sort of Jimmy and Gary and that sort of left lean content creator online, regular video essay, slightly different. I really think that there is a lot of important stuff for those guys to be talking about.

And I think that there is a dearth of good, reasonable content creators from the left in the UK that I would watch. And it’s not like I don’t watch any other stuff that comes out of the U.S., but yeah, I’m like, okay, I understand that there are shows like yours, I would certainly watch Lotus Eaters thing. And I’m like, right, okay, well what if we’ve got this? What’s that? Where’s the other leg of this triangle, so to speak.

Yeah, and yeah, I look forward to. I saw Jimmy’s thing about immigration that he did the other day, this big video essay about you’re being lied to. It is sometimes predictable in terms of its angle, but often seems to be insightful. I’m like, oh wow, that’s really cool.

So if there’s a burgeoning left leaning content creator thing that’s young and engaged and actually is able to use the platform correctly and doesn’t get captured and doesn’t start saying things in a stupid way, f*ing like, let’s go for it. Because interestingly enough, I know that Gary kind of discounts his own ability. If he is making an example, he is the exception to the rule that he is trying to prove, which is you can’t make something of yourself if you come from a background where you haven’t inherited something.

Something Daniel pointed out on his debate with him, he’s like, well you’re not a living breeding. He’s like, oh no Daniel, you don’t understand, that’s not. But if you have more people from the left who are by virtue of their own existence given an example of success and of sort of upward mobility and I’m able to do something. Unless you continue to sort of derogate your own exceptionalness, you do become an example for other people to sort of take and run with. Does that make sense?

The Importance of Moral Framing in Debate

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, it does, it does. No, the interaction with Jimmy was very interesting in all sorts of ways. But one of them is that thing we talked about in connection with immigration about making things a moral issue. And I think that, so for people who didn’t follow it, basically he made a video calling a bunch of people, I being one of them, grifters.

I invited him to talk to me on our show and it kind of derailed into him having a go at me which he then apologized for because he got a lot of backlash for the way that it happened. And ultimately what I think he took away from that is he came in with such a strong moral sense of this is a bad person when talking to me, that the way he behaved was really terrible and unacceptable.

And he kind of had to reckon with that, which is full credit to him for doing that. Because it’s hard to make a mistake, admit that you’re wrong. But this is what I mean. And one of the things I hope that comes out of it is he actually goes into investigating the counter arguments a lot more. Because the problem with a lot of the people, and we talked about this, when I was giving you the example of the progressive arguments that challenge what you’re saying, a lot of it is if you’re in that kind of worldview, you read a book from somebody that agrees with you and then you got, now this explains everything, and then you make a video about it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Everybody does that, though, right? Confirmation by everybody that hasn’t decided to purposefully expose themselves to things that make them uncomfortable.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Unless you have an unpopular opinion, which I often do, and you are constantly confronted with the fact that it’s unpopular and people give you the counter argument to what you’re saying, in which case you actually sharpen your argument and then you kind of hopefully do actually know what you’re saying.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So anti echo chamber by being constantly exposed to doses of what the opposition is.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But don’t you think that’s exactly what happened when I invited him on and he suddenly had to deal with the reality that all these ideas that he had about people like me, whatever.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: As a young guy, I think it was a formative event.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s what I’m saying.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Sometimes those formative events happen in public and sometimes they happen in private.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s what I’m saying. It can be a heartbreak, it can be.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It can be a bankruptcy, it can be the loss of a loved one, it can be a professional failure getting fired from a job. Or it can be a debate that goes wrong on the Internet. Just usually it’s not watched by half a million people.

The Pursuit of Truth in Public Discourse

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s right. But my point is, if you’re going to make arguments about things in public, it’s very, very important that you recognize two things at once. On the one hand, there are a lot of clicks to be had and money to be made by regurgitating arguments that your audience wants to hear, irrespective of how true they are. But that will lead you to bad places quickly, in my opinion. You might still get the clicks and the money, but you’re still going to be in a bad place.

Another way, the other option is you actually explore the argument and you go, where is the truth of this? And you explore the counter arguments in detail. And that’s what I hope that he takes away from and more people just in general do, because this happens on the right as well. There are loads of people on the right in podcasting who are not remotely interested in the truth.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’ve been making friends with Tucker Carlson.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’ve always been friends with Tucker Carlson. In fact, I’ve been on Tucker Carlson’s show a couple of times when he was on Fox.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What happened recently?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’m trying to think what exactly happened? Oh, what happened was the last time he had me on his show, I said to his producer, why don’t we have a discussion about Ukraine? Because I don’t agree with Tucker and I think it would be great and we’d have a great discussion because what Tucker was doing at that point is just putting out blatant lies about Ukraine. Just outright complete, just the opposite of the truth on a number of issues.

And I was like, why don’t we have a debate? It’ll be great. And they were like, no, no, no. Basically it was communicated to me that if we had a debate in which we disagreed, I’d be banned from the show, basically.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This was when he was on Fox. Yeah, right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. And since then I wrote an article after he went to Russia called “Tucker Carlson and the Woke Right” in which I basically made a fairly complex but I think important argument that there’s a fringe of the right that is becoming like the woke left in some ways. An obsession with identity. Obsession with identity based victimhood, the desire to destroy people that don’t agree instead of engaging in genuine debate, all of these things.

And I don’t think he took well to that. And particularly, he’s into Daryl Cooper and describing him as the most honest and best historian in America. I just thought was irresponsible, stupid. But apparently he’s called me out. I’m just, I’m not interested in ego games. I criticize people for things that they do and I praise people for things that they do, whether people like me or I like him. Just irrelevant to me.

The Fracturing of the Right

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is the right, especially sort of cultural commentary right, fracturing in a novel or interesting way at the moment?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, I think so. I think, well, look, every big discussion topic that comes along splits people in new ways, right? I don’t know if you’ve noticed this. So there was, broadly speaking an anti woke coalition and.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, that was a large umbrella, right? That was a big sort of.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And it sort of held. Right?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, that was a big global organization. That’s right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And then the war in Ukraine came along and before that there was Covid. They came along kind of simultaneously. Right. You had Covid, then you had Ukraine and they.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think, just to interject, I think most people that were probably anti woke would have also had the same sort of opinion around Covid. So that might have ossified.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: There’s slivers to that. Right. Because there was the, my position, which is if you are really vulnerable, you probably should get vaccinated. And I don’t think vaccines are the root of all evil, generally speaking, but government authoritarianism really is a big problem. And by the way, all the evidence shows the virus came from a lab.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Unnecessarily complex.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right. That’s one position. The other position, this is what they call it, the hoax demic or whatever. What was it called?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I don’t know. I missed this. Or deleted.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: There’s a lot of people think that it was. Anyway, there’s that. Then Ukraine came along and that’s when the really big split happened. Then you have Israel and Gaza and you’re going to have the next thing going along yet again. So every single time something happens, it splits left and right along different lines.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I mean, even with this Trump’s success or failure that we’ve seen in whatever eight months of his term so far.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The strikes on Iran were very interesting in terms of the splitting.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is it warmongering, is it defending, is it supporting Israel? Is it.

The Right’s Internal Divisions

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, it’s not even about Israel. I just think there’s a section of the right, for very understandable reasons, especially in America, which is following Iraq, Afghanistan and probably even Vietnam, is like any conflict is automatically something to be avoided, which if you want to run a global empire, isn’t really going to work.

But it is a very like, it appeals to the heart, kind of like war is bad. Well, of course war is bad. Everyone agrees on that. The question is, do you want the mullahs in Iran to have access to a nuclear weapon? I think not. Right.

And what was interesting, what happened there was a lot of these people had a panic attack. Basically the Tucker Carlson’s, the Dave Smith. Smith called for Trump to be impeached. Ultimately, Trump basically styled it out and was proven completely right by all the events.

So that was another one. Then there’s Epstein, you know, and then you just. So my point is all the different issues are going to come and go and people are going to split in all their different ways. And what I think is really important to do for everybody within that, I hope, is to actually seek the truth of each issue on its own merits, as opposed to going, what’s the tribe that I belong to?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Especially given that the right accuses the left of doing this, this sort of absolutionist, puritanical, exclusionary group think, where if you don’t adhere to 100% of the things that we agree with, then you’re not even a part of the tribe anymore.

So, yeah, I mean, how much of this is just when you’re inside of the tent pissing out, it’s way less sort of revolutionary and it doesn’t feel like there’s much attention on you, and you need to come up with ways to be a little bit more relevant, maybe.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t know. For me, the reason I criticize people on left and right for saying and doing things that I don’t agree with is I think that’s what a healthy society and a healthy debate looks like. I don’t have to agree with Tucker and everything. I thought during the summer of BLM, he was the funniest comedian on TV. The way he was satirizing what was happening was amazing. Right.

But when he says dumb shit about Ukraine, I’m not going to sit here and pretend that it’s true while my family are 30 km from the front line being bombed. Right. I’m not going to sit here and go, oh, yeah. Well, I agree with Tucker Carlson on this, and he’s had me on his show and he’s a big personality. He’ll probably criticize me, therefore I’ll pretend it’s all true. Well, it’s not going to happen.

And it’s the same on every other issue. So if Tucker Carlson starts saying things that I think are really important and valid, I will be the first to praise him. And that applies to everybody. And vice versa.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Not even specifically around Tucker. I just, I have found it interesting to observe what’s happened to the right, you know, the Internet right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Over the last 12 months. And also, you’re right. Ukraine, Russia, Gaza, Trump, Trump wobbles, big wobbles, some small wobbles, some big wobbles. Since he’s been in Epstein.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s starting to.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And there’s more to come.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s like pizza slice cutter.

The Post-Election Media Landscape

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The other thing is, once you’ve won the election, particularly in the overwhelming fashion that they did in America. And he’s covering in quite a swashbuckling style when it comes to dealing with a lot of things for the right wing media. Like they really are struggling to get the numbers that they’d got used to because it’s like, well, you’re going to beat up on the Democrat. I mean, he’s already dead. You know that meme? Stop, stop. He’s already dead. Stop, stop. Yeah, like that’s where the Democrats are.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What I mean about the piss inside of the tent pissing out, it’s just way less cool. It doesn’t, it doesn’t seem punk, which.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Is why I just would. I always try and encourage people in new media not to become what the legacy media became, which then necessitated the creation of new media.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Predictable, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Predictable. Obsessed about personality, Tucker Carlson calls out like, who gives a shit, right? All of this stuff is irrelevant. What I’m interested in is what is the truth of this? What is the truth of Ukraine and Russia? What is the truth of Israel and Palestine? How does that get solved? How can we bring on someone to talk about the reality?

We had Benjamin Netanyahu on, very controversial, but we actually pushed him more than any interview he’s done since the war started. Because we’re trying to get to the truth of things. That’s what we should be doing. That’s the unique opportunity we have in the new media. That’s the point. Right.

And it’s frustrating that to watch this medium that I thought was the antidote to all that bullshit become the bullshit. Oh, you think I naively thought that this was going to be the antidote? Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Do you think that that is likely to be a trajectory that it follows? I’m aware that you’re not, you don’t have a crystal ball. But what do you think the future of sort of new media in that way looks like?

The Dangers of Audience Capture

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Look, I am always very skeptical whenever anyone accuses of being audience captured. Like people say, oh, this person has been captured by their audience. But we also can’t pretend as content creators on the Internet that there are not pressures if you want to get more clicks, make more money, etc. To produce particular types of content that the person who is producing it might not even at the outset necessarily agree with.

And I think it takes a strong focus on something else other than clicks and money to avoid that. And so what I’m saying is like, did you become a content creator to be famous and make money? Because I didn’t. Right. I thought there was important conversations to be had. I thought there were people to interview that had things to offer the world. I thought that political debates were becoming 3 seconds here, 10 seconds there, and you never learn anything. So why don’t we do that?

That is what I think new media has the opportunity to do in a way that that legacy media has simply ceased doing. And if we spend all our time just discussing these fringe moronic things because it’s like the fastest way to the bottom of the brainstem, what are we doing? What are we doing?

It’s like, you know, and people always go, well, you know, don’t criticize other people. Just make different contact. Okay, well, some things are just not good for people, right? So if you turn every political discussion into a kind of Jerry Springer, I don’t think you are doing a service to humanity.

And I don’t think people will still click on it, a lot of them, but they’ll walk away from it the way they walk away from having a fast food meal. Like, you eat it and then you feel bad, you know? So I just hope more people recognize they have an opportunity to either do something good or to do something very bad at scale and actually, actually think about that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Heck, yeah. Konstantin, I appreciate you, man.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Thanks for having me.

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