Transcript: Zohran Mamdani and The Truth About Democratic Socialism: Kaizen Asiedu

Politics is still an issue. Of course it is, but it’s far less of an issue than it was three to five or even six years ago. But you’ve just seen the language being used about left and right being ratcheted on both sides, and that’s got to be a real concern.

KAIZEN ASIEDU: It is. I mean, all sorts of tribalism are severe concerns. Frankly, even nationalistic tribalism can go too far.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

KAIZEN ASIEDU: If you get to a point where, I think people, they look at what Trump is doing with the America first and MAGA movement and they’re saying it’s giving Hitlerian fascist vibes. And what if this becomes about invading other nations or totalitarian control here? It can go too far. I don’t think that’s where we are with the America first movement. I actually think it’s just a reaction to the globalism and the denigration of national identity and the national spirit.

But yeah, I agree, this polarization that we see between the left and the right is also really unhealthy because what it’s doing is it’s causing each side to demonize each other. And rather than viewing people as individuals who have different values that they can filter the same information through and arrive at different conclusions, it’s like, no, these people are crazy, these people are evil, these people are idiots, and there’s no merit to what they say. And it’s a battle of good versus evil. And the only conclusion is domination. You have to just dominate the other side.

And that just doesn’t work. That’s never been what the American Project has been about. And there’s also a lot of intellectual hubris that I’m seeing exhibited. And, yeah, it bothers me. Obviously I’m someone, if anyone sees my work, who is more aligned with the right right now. But part of my journey is that I voted for Democrats every presidential election since I could vote. I voted for Obama, I voted against Trump, I voted for Biden, I voted against Trump a lot.

A Low Information Voter’s Journey

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Why did you do that?

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Well, I was honestly a low information voter. Not to imply that everyone who voted against Trump was low information, but I didn’t really have a strong thesis for why I did it. I just looked at Trump. I saw what he was saying, or rather what people told me he was saying, and I thought, yeah, this guy is hostile, maybe even racist, misogynist. I just bought all the narratives around it, and I just didn’t like how he was coming across.

And when I started paying attention to the state of discourse in 2024, I started to realize that people didn’t actually have very deep convictions about why they thought Trump was the wrong choice for the 2024 election. And then I started looking a little bit deeper and inspecting my own beliefs about him. And I realized, oh, a lot of what I believe, I believe because someone else told me so.

When I started looking at some of the things that were objectively problems, like the open border between the US and Mexico, and I realized that the current administration had been complicit in that issue only getting bigger, that was kind of one of the gateways into just trying to view things a little bit more objectively. And I still had my concerns about him, I still do, but I thought he was a better choice last year.

Zohran Mamdani: Trump’s Populist Foil

FRANCIS FOSTER: And it’s a really good way of looking at the world, essentially putting aside what people think and making up your own mind. And you did a really good video actually where you were analyzing Zohran Mamdani and comparing him to Trump because there are kind of similarities on there, believe it or not.

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Absolutely. I mean, I think that’s why he’s so triggering to a lot of people on the right, because he is Trump’s foil. He’s a populist. That’s why Trump was ascendant to begin with, because he had an instinct or an ability to actually listen to and understand the issues of the common person.

And what’s going on in New York? Well, you have this multi ethnic, multi religious coalition building around Zohran because he’s able to say, yeah, affordability is a big issue and corporatized capitalism in New York is not actually serving people there. And he’s even able to speak with specificity about stuff like people having concerns about noise or illegal parking on their streets. That’s something that you can only point out if you’re actually in touch with the will and the issues of the people.

So he’s the populist left, whereas Trump was the populist right. And then you can layer on these other identities like socialists versus capitalists and so on. But I don’t think most people are that attached to any economic system, frankly. I don’t think people think, “Oh yeah, socialism’s the solution.” They just hear a guy who talks about the things that they’re actually experiencing and they resonate with that.

And he’s also a really smart strategic politician because he’s counter positioned himself against Trump. And if you’re a Democrat, that’s one of the smartest things you can do right now.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Absolutely. And also what’s really interesting about Zohran is that he’s talking about the things that really motivate people. And this is what people on the right I don’t think understand is that New York is experiencing real difficulties around affordability. And whether you think he’s going to do it or if he can’t deliver, it’s kind of irrelevant. He looks like he could to a lot of people who feel that they’ve been ignored by the system, which is again quite Trumpian, isn’t it?

Understanding Rather Than Demonizing

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Yeah. And what’s the alternative? Right. It’s basically a one party state. You have Andrew Cuomo who resigned, you have Curtis Sliwa who’s a Republican and Andrew Cuomo even lost the primary. So think from a New Yorker’s shoes. If you’re a New Yorker and you see that you’re paying $4,500 a month for rent and you see that the field is composed of a bunch of people who are either Republican or disgraced former governors, and then you have Zohran Mamdani, who’s talking about the stuff that you experience on a day to day basis, what are you going to choose?

So I have my concerns about what he opens up the Overton window to allow, like even more far left policies. And people have complained or been concerned about Islamic extremism. I think there’s a healthy discussion to have about some of Zohran’s associations there. But the solution is not to name call and demonize him further. The solution is to understand him, speak in the way that he is speaking to his audience, but offer a different solution.

But if you just demonize him and then you demonize anyone who follows him, or you dismiss them as stupid, well, they’re going to be polarized against you even further. So I think there’s a massive strategic error that I see the right committing in their prosecution of Zohran and everything he stands for.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And this is so interesting because these people made the exact same mistake with Trump.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And you’re just going, dude, you’re using the same tactics the left used against Trump. And it only made it worse. Because the thing that Zohran has, whether you, I said, I don’t agree with his economic policies. I think ultimately they’re going to lead to a disaster. But he’s a great communicator. He’s charismatic and he’s funny, just like Trump. You saw him on Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant podcast. He smashed it.

The Challenge of Political Labels

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Yeah, he was impressive. And I like that you said that people are committing the same error that was committed against Trump. Let’s look at what Trump was called: a fascist, a white supremacist. All these labels that are pretty much just political swear words.

I think the average person when they say fascist, they don’t actually have a way of defining what fascist is. And I think a better term is he’s a nationalist Trump. But you can always take something that you consider bad and make it sound even worse.

Same thing with Zoran. He’s an avowed democratic socialist. Maybe he’s secretly a communist. I don’t know what is in his mind. I can’t read minds. I can read words. He said he’s a democratic socialist. Engage him there. Show why democratic socialism is an untenable economic model as opposed to calling him a communist.

And if you have concerns about Islamism or radical extremism or Sharia law being brought to New York, then yeah, you should be specific about it. Okay, I don’t like how he’s associated with this imam that he took a picture with, for example. That specifically is my issue. Not say something like, well, he’s Muslim and that’s bad, and all Muslims are extremists who want to take over America. It just doesn’t resonate with people who are certainly in the Team Zoran camp or people who are more moderates and open to a variety of different viewpoints.

Trump’s Plans vs. Zoran’s Solutions

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, the one area I don’t kind of agree with the discussion you guys are having is I think, and this isn’t evidence of my right leaning bias, just a factual matter. When you look at President Trump, the things that people said about him, the mistakes they made are exactly the same.

But the difference I think is, yes, he was speaking to people’s concerns, but he had a credible plan for addressing those concerns. So, for example, if you are concerned about the open border, he had a plan which he’s now implementing. We can argue about the way that it’s being done, but in terms of effectiveness, it’s that, right?

If you talk about offshoring of jobs, he is now doing a lot to try and bring jobs back to America. With Zoran Mamdani, he is addressing people’s concerns, but the solutions that he’s offering verifiably do not work. And that to me is a big difference.

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Which specific policies?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So if your policy effectively is to give people free stuff as a solution to affordability, that is not a sustainable model for running anything. Right. You have to, for example, if it’s housing, you have to create more housing. Giving people a rent freeze doesn’t work because there’ll be some other way to hike up prices in a place where demand massively outstrips supply. Do you see what I’m saying?

Steel-Manning Democratic Socialist Policies

KAIZEN ASIEDU: I see what you’re saying. And now I have to be the guy who takes the devil’s advocacy position. Yeah, it’s not fun because I do fundamentally disagree with Zoran’s worldview. But just to steel man him for a second, you know, I think a lot of the time people see socialists and then they see the headlines for what he’s proposing and they say this is unworkable.

And I disagree with the worldview. There’s no successful socialist country on earth. People say Scandinavian nations. No, those are capitalist systems with strong social safety nets. They’re not the same thing.

But if I look at some of the specific policies that he’s proposing, like, for example, he wants to have a rent freeze while also reducing the cost on the landlord side by addressing why is insurance so high? What are all these building codes and housing laws that are making it expensive and difficult to build housing? How do we incentivize both public housing, but also private industry to create more housing? There’s a logic there. There’s an internally consistent logic there.

And part of it is just he needs to raise like 9 to 11 billion dollars to fund this. So if he gets the governor on board and they just raise taxes on the rich and they find a point in the curve where they can raise taxes enough to make more money but not scare them all away, it can work in theory.

So there are certain individual policies that he has that I think there’s a part of the spectrum where they actually can work. My concern is more of the democratic socialist worldview in general, because the whole idea of democratic socialism is they’re going to try to control the means of production. That’s the end goal.

And you can say it’s democratically, like, people vote on nationalized health care or nationalized energy systems or whatever, but I just think that centralizing control of private industry is inefficient. And it consistently has been shown not to work, especially in the Western system.

So I agree with that. But even here, what I challenge people to do who are critical of Zoran is say, let’s talk about specific policies, assess whether they work, give credit where credit is due. Like, I think he has some reasonable ideas. Maybe we need some mental health workers in the mix to deal with a guy who’s muttering on the subway as opposed to sending a cop there. It’s like, okay, I’m open to that, but please also be willing to increase the police force if that’s needed. But I’m open to some of this.

But the overall worldview that he represents, I don’t think works. And I think so much is asking the simple question, can you give me an example of a democratic socialist country that exists today that’s been successful and he can’t produce that? And there you would probably get into some sort of very theoretical description of why it should work.

And I think that’s actually where he’d be most vulnerable, because I don’t think his association with the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, has been scrutinized enough, actually. Like, why is this guy giving part of his salary to these people? What does that reflect about his worldview?

You go to the DSA website, it’s extreme. They have a very racialized worldview. It’s a very hostile, grievance based agenda. And I think if people focus strategically on that, that would actually be a much more vulnerable point where I think he’ll be much more likely to show that, yeah, he might have some policies that could work in the short term, but he’s introducing a worldview that doesn’t work in the long term.

The Democratic Socialist Label

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Isn’t that somewhat contradictory to the conversation we had so far? Because ultimately it’s about addressing the concerns that people have, whereas saying he’s a Democratic socialist is not that far off saying he’s a communist, because those two things are not far off from each other, just in terms of the policies of those two groups advocate. Right. You see what I’m saying?

KAIZEN ASIEDU: I see what you’re saying.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Do you think a significant portion of Zoran’s audience would be horrified to find out that he believes in the redistribution of wealth at a higher level than they currently do or whatever?

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Well, if you looked at the DSA’s platform, I think people would be horrified to see some of the excerpts from that platform.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Really? Like what?

KAIZEN ASIEDU: So one thing they talk about is ending white supremacy, like that’s a big part of their platform. And I remember when I read that, I was like, oh, wow, these people, like they’re fomenting more racial division.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But isn’t that a mainstream left wing position in this country, that that’s what needs to happen? Am I wrong? I’m not American, so I don’t know.

KAIZEN ASIEDU: I don’t think it’s as mainstream as you think, at least not in such explicit terms. I mean, this is literally in their website. They constantly talk about this. And maybe you guys, I don’t know if you heard the headline where Zoran talks about attaching richer, whiter neighborhoods. Like that’s literally a part of his platform, I believe, still. You can go to the PDF and check it out.

I think that’s a product of the democratic socialist worldview. It very much views things from an oppressor, oppressed lens and explicitly views things in terms of racial dynamics, which I think is unhealthy.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, I agree, but I guess what I’m saying is, as far as I could tell as an outside observer, the Democratic Party has been saying those things for the last 10 years.

KAIZEN ASIEDU: I don’t think that’s wrong. I think the woke left, which is still relatively, it’s a relative minority, does talk about that stuff a lot. I don’t think the moderate Democrats and like the Andrew Cuomo’s of the world talk about that. You’re not going to hear Gavin Newsom talking about racial dynamics. I think they tend to avoid it.

And I think now when we talk about the slippery slope concern, it’s that Zoran and, you know, again, it’s in his platform talking about richer, wider neighborhoods, is now shifting the Overton window toward racializing the problems that we have. And that along with I think the socialist worldview more generally is stuff that people should apply pressure on.

Concerns About Anti-Semitism

FRANCIS FOSTER: And what’s interesting about Zoran is that it’s opened up the discussion to talk about anti-Semitism now related to Israel. I don’t really want to focus on Israel particularly, but what I do want to focus on is how Jewish people in New York say they’re now worried about Zoran and the election of Zoran, that they’re going to become targets, et cetera.

Do you think that there’s any credible basis to these worries? Or do you think it’s akin to people worrying about that Trump’s going to come in and all of a sudden, you know, black people. I saw one of your videos, your hairdresser said that they worried that she was going to be in chains, for example.

Immigration, ICE, and the Deportation Debate

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Yeah, 100%. I think it’s a concern not because of what Zoran is saying, but because of who he’s affiliated with. Because again, there was that picture of him with that imam. Right. This was an imam who literally has defended multiple terrorists, one in court and one by raising a legal defense fund for him.

So whether Zoran is sympathetic to the views of that terrorist individual is one thing, but what we know is that he’s comfortable aligning himself with people who actually defend extremists. So if I see that, again, if we talk about, like, what are you not open to? Well, you’re open to taking a picture with an imam and calling him a pillar of the community without explicitly acknowledging the really messed up things that he’s done in the past.

So I don’t think that’s an irrational concern that Jewish New Yorkers have. And I think it’s something that Zoran should have to explicitly answer for because he gets kind of evasive when he’s pressured on these things. For example, in the Andrew Scholz interview that I forgot who brought it up. Andrew Scholz brings up that topic and he says, well, Eric Adams and Bill de Blasio campaigned with that same imam, like, what’s the big deal?

And that’s actually misleading. It’s highly misleading because what happened was, I think it was Bloomberg actually met that imam and he didn’t realize what his background was. And then after he said he regretted the meeting, Eric Adams met that imam alongside a Jewish community leader and a Christian community leader. Neither of those interactions were like taking a picture arm in arm with a guy who defended terrorists.

So look, I get that Zoran, as a Muslim, probably he wants to show solidarity with the Muslim community in New York. And it’s a tricky thread, needle to thread. But at the same time, when you bring extremists into the tent, there’s concerns from other people in the tent that now you’re going to allow in more extremist views.

So if people were to say just because he’s Muslim, this is a problem, I would say, hey, that’s actually not being fair. But when you look at the people he’s actually associating himself with, yeah, there’s a reasonable concern. I mean, same thing with Hasan Piker, right? Hasan Piker said that America deserved 9/11. And yeah, afterward he said, kind of apologize for it was like, okay, if you’re going to align yourself with someone like that, then people are going to have concerns.

Hey, do you actually agree with this guy, or is this someone who you’re friends with and you agree with some of what they said and not others? At least in the case of Hasan, he’s denounced those comments by Hasan, but in the case of the imam, he kind of just deflected. And that’s not what we need a leader doing when positioning yourself with people who are explicitly sympathizing with terrorists.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, and that’s the real concern, because you look at America, and I’m a foreigner here, and all the rest of it, but I do worry that this current polarization is just going to continue happening. And now that you see it in New York, with Jewish people being, saying that they’re openly scared, they’re openly talking about leaving, and you’re kind of thinking to yourself, where will this end? Where will this end? And how will this end? Because we can’t keep going on this trajectory without something significant happening.

Finding a Path Forward

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Yeah. You know, I had actually hoped that it would end when Trump nearly got assassinated. It didn’t end there. I hoped it would end when Charlie Kirk got assassinated. Didn’t end there either. And I think there’s two paths we can take.

One is the more pessimistic path where there’s sufficient violence that causes the leaders on both sides to find the courage to say, hey, enough, and critique their side directly, which is what I think people need to be doing. Followers take cues from leaders. And if leaders are never critiquing their followers, their followers are not going to change.

The optimistic path is that some people realize that the temperature has been turned up way too high, and they start turning it down. And I’m trying to do that to the extent that I can. That’s kind of why I try to do stuff like Steel Man, Zoran Mamdani’s position, just to humanize the sides to one another. And I think that can work. And I don’t think you need everyone to do it at once.

I think you just need the most visible leaders with the biggest followings to start doing that and be willing to take the heat for it. Because, look, if I make a video Steel Manning Zoran Mamdani, I do not go viral. It just doesn’t end up as well. And it’s like, yeah, it sucks. And I also get criticism and people misunderstand me.

But I also think it’s really important. And I also think there’s a core of my audience and any influencer or leader’s audience who does see that and respects you when you do it. So, yeah, the applause is not going to be loud, but there are going to be people who’s like, yeah, you know, politics aside, this is kind of crazy. And I’m glad that someone is calling this out and just trying to not have some continuous moral crusade against everyone they disagree with.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s one of the things we tried to do on the show as well. And I wanted to ask you about immigration and ICE and all the rest of it, because this is one of the things, as an outsider again, very difficult to judge. I don’t know when in relation to the other episodes this one goes out, but we’ve talked to people on the show and off the show about it, and you get the full range from, this is brilliant.

And the only reason the riots are happening is that the local officials are interfering with ICE enforcing the law through to this is tyranny, you know, authoritarianism, et cetera. Where do you come down on it?

The Case for Enforcing Immigration Law

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Yeah, I think it’s important to deport people who are here in the country illegally. And I think, in principle, what people have lost touch with is the fact that America is not just a piece of land. It’s not just an idea, it’s a community. And the value of the community is exclusivity.

Actually, any community that people desire to be in, people desire to be in because the community is cultivated with rules and principles and boundaries that make everyone in the community get along. Unfortunately, the idea of America being something special and something worth holding onto has been eroded over time. Where people don’t love America, they don’t love what it stands for. They think it’s just some evil, racist, white supremacist place that’s just defined by slavery.

When it’s like, no, people live here, people love living here because we have rules and norms that people follow, and they work pretty well relative to other places in the world. And if you just allow people to violate the fundamental principle of what makes a nation state upon entry, then every other rule becomes kind of optional. And if you see people entering the southern border because they just want to, makes you wonder, well, why am I even paying taxes then?

That said, I think there’s better and worse ways to execute the deportation effort. And my critiques of the Trump administration are, I think that they’re doing things in a very brute force way that doesn’t actually scale. Because if you truly think that there’s 10 to 30 million people in the country illegally, you’re not going to deport them all through ICE. You need to fix the incentives here.

And the incentive is, if you come here, you’re going to get at least a limited degree of health care. Your kids are going to get to go to school, you’ll be able to get a job. The employer that you get a job from is not going to go to prison for breaking employment law. And yet you get to experience a lot of the benefits that come with being in America.

Whereas if we said, hey, employers, if we find out that you’re employing someone illegally, you’re going to go to prison, all of a sudden, employers would stop employing people illegally and you remove one of the chief incentives for people coming here. But instead of there being a crackdown on illegal employments, we’re seeing, yeah, ICE raids. And there’s going to be a need for that no matter what. But I think it’s a higher proportion of the overall pie than it actually needs to be, and I’d like to see them focus on the incentives.

So, no, it’s not fair to say that the only reason people are protesting is because local law enforcement is interfering or not complying with ICE. I live here. I mean, I interact with illegal immigrants regularly. I have friends who go to these protests in support of, you know, in solidarity with illegal immigrants. It’s not all manufactured. I think that’s a massive straw man of the position.

And actually, when I’ve spoken to some of my friends who are trying to defend illegal immigrants or standing up to what Trump is doing, and I explained my position of, hey, look, these people are not, many of them are not bad people. They just came here to follow the American dream. But the thing that makes the American dream, the American dream is supported by rules. And when people are breaking the rules, the American dream kind of collapses for everyone.

And there’s a way to deport people more compassionately. We can pay them to leave, which the Trump administration has done to a degree. I think we should be paying them more because it’s so expensive to forcibly deport them. So why not just give them money? You preserve some goodwill. It’s not so noisy. You don’t see crying mothers on TV.

And, yeah, if you remove the jobs, you don’t allow them to avail themselves of health care unless it’s a truly lifesaving situation, then, yeah, a lot of these people are just going to leave voluntarily, and it’s still not going to feel good, but it’ll probably feel better than for the next three years watching ICE forcibly arrest people and deport them, and eventually political capital runs out.

So, look, I think it’s just really important in principle to enforce the law. And the law is, if you’re here, you have to be here legally. I’m open to doing things like if the agricultural industry, for example, relies on illegal immigrant labor, cool. Let’s make the legal immigration process faster and more efficient so that they can get seasonal worker visas and things that they need to augment their workforce.

But no, I’m not open to amnesty and these things outside of maybe some cases if someone’s really a senior citizen or something like that. Because, look, we’re in a state right now where we actually did that in the 80s. In the 80s, Ronald Reagan signed a bill giving people amnesty, and we’re back in the same situation.

So at some point, a boundary needs to be set. A boundary needs to be set that’s so strong that people won’t allow this open border situation ever again. But because we haven’t been willing to do that, it’s continued to perpetuate. And before it was actually the Republicans being in favor of this kind of stuff. It was more to support the corporate reliance on a world war.

The Political Capital Problem

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Very much on that. Do you think one of the reasons that the fairly obvious solution that you’ve outlined, which is you deal with this at the point of employment, and you introduce fairly draconian punishments for employers who employ illegal immigrants, one of the reasons that hasn’t happened is you talk about political capital. That’s actually how you spend a lot of political capital. Because it’s not going to be, you know, Juanita, who’s complaining about what’s happening. It’s going to be somebody with power, with donations to your campaign, et cetera.

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Yeah, you’re right. And I think that’s probably why they haven’t addressed it. But look, I think Trump is serious about solving the illegal immigration problem. I wasn’t convinced that he was serious until I saw that. I was like, wow, he means everyone. He’s actually trying to deport everyone, not just violent criminals. And then I saw he’s doubling down with $150 billion to ICE. So it’s like, okay, I think he’s actually serious.

I think he’s willing to take heat. Why not take heat by dealing with the corporations who are employing these people, which I actually think can be a lot more unifying. I think there’s a part of most Americans who hate it when they see the rules being broken by corporations. I think the corporations who provide money to the MAGA movement and political causes, yeah, they’re going to be a lot more resistant, but I think Trump can rally the base against those people. And Trump is in his last term anyway, so what does he have to lose?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Well, absolutely. And let’s be fair, he’s never been someone who’s been afraid to tackle the difficult issues.

Wealth Inequality and Social Division

FRANCIS FOSTER: One of the most difficult issues that needs to be addressed, and it’s a really tough one, is wealth inequality. I came here 20 odd years ago and there was still a huge difference between rich and poor. But in the 20 or so years I’ve been visiting your country it seems to have grown wider and wider and wider.

And we talk about radicalization, Kaizen, that will radicalize people. Especially when you got access to Instagram. Let’s say you’re dirt poor. 20 odd years ago you didn’t really know how the other half lived. Now all you do is go on Instagram and it gets rubbed in your face.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You can watch Cribs on MTV. I remember that.

FRANCIS FOSTER: I kind of liked Cribs even when I was broke.

KAIZEN ASIEDU: It was fun. I don’t know if that show’s still around. Yeah, I agree, I agree. And man, this is one of those issues where I actually think there have been some Democrats who have correctly identify the problem, which is, yeah, corporate influence. Like Bernie Sanders. He talks constantly about the oligarchy. The oligarchy. And you know, he does it to the point where almost it feels like a bit of a meme. But I think he’s right.

Like I’m pro capitalism. I think capitalism is the best system that has ever been invented, or at least the least bad of all the other economic systems, empirically speaking. But there’s a point at which capitalism can be co-opted by corporate interests who are influencing the laws and basically engaging in regulatory capture where they basically rig the rules in their favor.

And I think that’s also what’s probably been going on in New York too. Hence the rise of Zohran. So yes, wealth inequality is an actual issue. And I don’t think the issue is inherent to capitalism. I think the issue is corporate influence and centralization of power among the few as opposed to distributed among the many. And that’s what I think hopefully the right and the left can both get on board with. But that seems to not be happening yet.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Well, yeah, exactly, because the left are far better placed to actually exploit that. Because that’s one of, you know, that’s one of the things of being on the left. You are concerned about that. What worries me is that the right seem more interested in demonizing the politicians that talk about it than actually addressing the problems.

It’s not everyone on the right, but it seems to be a lot of them. And I’m thinking to myself, if you don’t actually deal with the problems, we are going to get a lot more left wing populists because, you know, problems aren’t being addressed, people’s concerns aren’t being addressed.

The Rise of Populism

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Absolutely. And that’s why it’s not important to people whether it’s a socialist or a capitalist. They want populists first. So if I was running the RNC or whatever, I would say, hey, we need to find a populist capitalist as a foil to the populist socialists and communists and we need to meet them there and extol the virtues of capitalism when it’s well structured.

Because if you continue to just demonize the populists of any color, what happens is people just feel, oh well, you don’t actually care about my problems. So at least this guy’s talking about my problems. Most people are not thinking deeply about the economic ramifications. They don’t really know how to assess these things, nor should they really have to. But if there’s only one person who’s actually speaking about the problems, they’re going to go along with what they say, no matter what their solution is.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, well, the thing with that, though, is it really fundamentally depends. No matter how important you think wealth inequality is, it fundamentally depends on where you think it comes from. And I think the corporate capture argument is obviously partially true. I also think to a large extent it’s probably something that’s been driven by technology.

I mean, most of the wealth that’s being created in this state, I would venture, is in one city called San Francisco, where people are doing AI, and you don’t need a lot of people to do that. What you need is a lot of money and a lot of energy and a lot of chips. So I wonder whether we’re just going to live in this long age of populism because the wealth is accumulating in fewer and fewer hands just by the nature of the technological structures of the society we now live in.

The Bottom vs. The Gap

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Yeah, yeah. You raise an interesting point, because now that I think about it more, I think there’s kind of two issues. There’s what’s the condition of the people who are the worst off in society? And then there’s what’s the gap between the people who are the worst off and the people who are the best off, which is the wealth inequality question.

I don’t think it would get us all the way there to just address the situation of the people who are worse off if you still had wealth inequality. But I think it would get us a lot of the way there. And I mean, if you look at California, I mean, you literally see homelessness everywhere. Many people who are not homeless are one paycheck away from being homeless. And that’s just an awful existence. Like, it’s bare subsistence.

And I think if you’re that kind of person and you look at the situation of a billionaire or some San Francisco AI guy, you look at your situation as like, man, I can’t even be happy with what I have, because what I have sucks. Whereas at least if their situation didn’t suck, it would probably be easier to accept the fact that we’re going to have trillionaires in relatively short order.

So, yeah, I mean, it’s hard. I think there’s going to be more extreme poles, I think, in the future just because that’s what technology does. It allows exponential transformations of the physical world. And yeah, you’re just going to have some people who are way, way, way, way richer. But I think if we can at least take care of the position of the bottom of society, it’ll feel better for people.

And I think there’s actually a deeper conversation to have about the relationship between the rich and the poor in this country for sure. But maybe in the west in general, where I’ve been thinking about the term aristocrat and the etymology of aristocrat is “the most excellent” or “the best among us.”

And there used to be this relationship between the rich and the poor where if you were one of the wealthy ones, it would almost be like instead of being at the top of the pyramid, you’re at the bottom of the pyramid supporting everyone in service. And at some point the social contract kind of broke down.

And I think people who became wealthy became more selfish, honestly. And I think people who were poor became resentful of the rich. And if you’re rich and you see people who are poor and resentful, you’re not going to want to take care of them. And if people who are poor don’t see rich people doing things for everyone else, they’re going to become resentful. And it’s just this vicious cycle.

So I remember a few years ago Mark Zuckerberg, he tried to donate to this hospital and you know, I don’t know why he did it. I assume it’s out of the goodness of his heart and maybe it’s for social status, but it’s a good thing to do. And people rejected that. They didn’t even want his donation. And that shows me there’s something really broken about the relationship between the best off and the worst off.

And I think, look, I’m not one of these people. I think we kind of have this fallacy of everyone’s equally capable. Not everyone’s equally capable. Right? Not everyone’s going to be a billionaire, not everyone’s going to make a world changing technology. So there’s kind of a natural aristocracy and if we can get honest about that, then we can have a conversation about, okay, well what should the aristocrats be doing and what do we give them in reward for doing what is good for the collective?

And we should be celebrating people who are doing things that benefit all of humanity. Mark Zuckerberg should have been celebrated when he generated enough funds to create a hospital wing. But yeah, there’s this right-left divide, there’s this poor-rich divide. And there have always been rich and poor, but I don’t think it’s always been this level of animosity.

The Broken Social Contract

KONSTANTIN KISIN: There’s a really interesting point. I think it was during certain periods of ancient Greece, the rich and powerful were expected to almost dedicate their entire lives to actually doing things for their community and for society. And yeah, you’re right. You could be a billionaire now who pledges to give away 99% of his wealth and people will still hate you.

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Yeah, because you’re a billionaire, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. Which is interesting, your point about inequality, by the way. Look, I haven’t seen the latest research, but I remember reading “The Spirit Level” and the argument they basically made is actually, once you get past a certain basic point, which this country is way past, it doesn’t actually matter how well off the people at the bottom are. What matters is the gap between the rich and the poor.

And that ruins everything for everybody, including the super rich, weirdly enough, because all of the metrics of social disease, population in prison, teenage pregnancy, interpersonal violence, those things go up as inequality goes up. So it’s actually going to be, you’re going to get this wave of populism from both sides, and I suspect both of them are going to struggle to actually fix the problem.

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Well, if that isn’t depressing. Well, that’s what we do here at Trigonometry. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s just a difficult problem to solve.

And you know, there’s kind of this hedonic treadmill effect. I think that maybe is going on too, to be fair, because, I mean, if you were to talk to the average person who’s working a 9 to 5 or they’re making $15 an hour and say, well, you’re actually at the point past which there’s diminishing returns and you actually have enough. I don’t think they would feel that way. I think they would feel, no, if you doubled my salary, it would make my life tangibly better.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And they’d be right.

KAIZEN ASIEDU: I think they’d be right. Right. I think it’d be nice if you didn’t have to worry about if you get fired, you’re going to be homeless the next month. I think many people are below that threshold. So, yeah, I don’t know. The research. I’ve heard these stories, like, past $80,000, you know, more money doesn’t make you more happy.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s all bullsh*t, man.

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Okay, cool. I’m like, it sounds like BS to me.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s terrible. The idea that money doesn’t make you happy is a story that rich people tell poor people so they don’t feel jealous. That’s it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Money and Happiness

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Yeah. I actually heard a good quote from Tony Robbins actually. I went to one of his events recently and he said, “If you think that money doesn’t make you happy, you haven’t given enough away.” I was like, oh, that’s actually really interesting framing which kind of goes back to the whole natural aristocracy idea. You get to a point where you have so much wealth that the fun part is giving it to good causes.

So I think again, we need to address this at the bottom and also the gap. But I think we can at least start with what’s going on at the bottom. And a lot of people are just in conditions where it’s like, yeah, resentment’s natural.

De-radicalization and Social Connection

FRANCIS FOSTER: The more we talk about these issues, the more time I spend in America, I kind of think that the Americans and maybe the west in general needs to go through a de-radicalization program.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Except they don’t work.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, yeah. I mean, kind of true. But if we were to, let’s play a little thought experiment. If we were to kind of design a de-radicalization program for the average American, the average person in the west, what do you think it would mean? What do you think we should do in order to just ratchet everything down?

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Well, I think a lot of this, a lot of the division is because instead of socializing, we have social media. And you even see this along racial lines. Pre-2013, 2014, perceptions of Black people, of white-Black race relations was at a high. Those are high 60s perceptions of white people, of Black-white relations was at a high too. It was also in the 70s.

What happened after that? Well, people would say it was events like Trayvon Martin and then eventually George Floyd. But the rates of police brutality against minority groups didn’t radically spike. What happened was people’s awareness of it radically spiked because we all have instant access to view any extremely negative event in our pockets at all times.

So the rise of social media in combination with the fact that the pandemic led to everyone being in their houses and we have this whole generation of kids who didn’t go to college or they missed out on school in their key developmental years, has meant that people don’t even know how to talk to each other anymore. And because of that, when you don’t talk to people who disagree with you, it’s easy to form a demonic avatar of them in your head where it’s actually dehumanizing.

So if we were to start de-radicalizing people, it would start by just as corny as it sounds. But I’m a hippie, right? Talk to each other. We need to get people talking to people who disagree with them. But instead of that, I mean, not only are, I think people are just interacting less in person in general these days, but people are interacting online in algorithmic echo chambers where you’re fed views that feed into your confirmation bias. And the only representation of the opposite side that you ever see is the worst examples of it.

We saw this with Charlie Kirk right after Charlie Kirk passed away. I wasn’t even that familiar with his views until after he died. And people started talking about his views in a way that was grossly exaggerated and cherry picking clips out of context and saying that he believes that black people shouldn’t have the right to vote or that he believed that people should be stoning gays. All massive distortions of his view.

But then I realized, oh, wow, that’s literally the only exposure they’ve ever gotten to him. These five second clips that have been selectively edited and they might not have even met someone who was a conservative. I mean, here in LA, if you’re a conservative, you have to be quiet. It’s socially dangerous, if not honestly physically dangerous too.

And as a result, people think that conservatives are like this weird thing that only exists in Nebraska when no, there’s people who have different views from you, but because we’re not socializing, you don’t actually get exposed to that. And it’s kind of like, I believe they had these de-radicalization experiments I think maybe coming out of maybe the mid 20th century. I forget who exactly had literal white racists talk to black people and pair them. And yeah, what happened was when you get exposed to someone long enough, you get to see their humanity and you stop demonizing so much. So that’s how I would try to approach de-radicalization.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right. And especially if you are solving a problem together, that’s one of the other things. Right. It’s like if you get people who are predisposed to dislike each other in a room where they have to solve a common problem, that’s when you actually get proper kind of de-radicalization, if you like.

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And that’s, I think, really comes back to the beginning of our conversation, which is if you don’t all feel like this is one country and you ultimately, at the end of the day, you’re all British or you’re all American. That’s where you actually start to see this break down completely.

Finding Common Purpose

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Exactly. And you know, that’s why the space race was actually so healthy.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right, for America and the Cold War.

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Yeah, honestly. Yeah. It’s like, it was the best war you could possibly have. No one actually got, no countries got nuked and everyone got a little bit more tribal in a way that is actually kind of positive. And we need something that gets us beyond our tribal identities and focuses on a hard problem that if we solve, we’ll all benefit from.

And unfortunately, we don’t really have that right now in America. And I think in the west more generally, there’s not a collective project that everyone can feel inspired by. And I think we’ve got to find that. We need to look, I think there’s humans, there’s always going to be war. But the war should not be man against man. It should be man against ideas and man against restrictions and man against the limitations of the physical world.

That’s why I think Elon trying to get us to Mars is a tremendously healthy thing. And I was actually excited when the President, President Trump, during the inauguration said we’re going to get to Mars. I was like, oh, cool. Actually make that a bigger piece of the platform because that’s something that elevates us beyond whatever quibbles we have as individuals and gets us on board with doing something as a generation that would be truly epic.

The Problem with Monetized Misinformation

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. Well, the other thing, coming back to what you were saying as well, about how social media works, and you mentioned Charlie Kirk, what was interesting is you say this is people’s only exposure to this guy. There was a guy in our country called Alistair Campbell who you’re probably not familiar with. He was Tony Blair’s spin doctor. Well, I didn’t want to use a load of, Tony Blair, like media relations guy, let’s say.

He tweeted a thing about Charlie Kirk making those kind of completely inaccurate allegations, and then he took it down. And a lot of people are now, I’m a big fan of the fact that online content is monetized. It’s how we make a living. It’s how we do what we do. It’s great. Once you create monetization of content, now the incentive structure is, well, let me just say this thing that my tribe is going to agree with and my people are going to share without checking anything at all.

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Yeah. Yep. And look, I’m going to say something unpopular. We as individuals have to change our consumption patterns because why is there media bias? Because they’re supplying a demand for biased content. There’s always going to be BS that we’re fed if people keep eating BS.

So we can complain that people are incentivized financially to spread misinformation. But if we all take it upon ourselves to slow down, verify information for ourselves, unfollow people who are spreading garbage, call it out when someone’s spreading garbage, and vote with our wallets and our attention, this problem can get solved very quickly, overnight, literally.

If we all just raised our standard for the information that enters our mind, instantly, the industry would disappear. But that requires a level of personal responsibility that is very hard to have. And that’s, I think that would actually create the tectonic shift that people are looking for. It’s not tweaking the algorithm. It’s not regulating the companies. None of that stuff is going to work.

We all have to just get fed up enough that we take it upon ourselves and say, look, I’m tired of hostility. I’m tired of nonsense. Anyone who is rage baiting and sensationalizing and spreading garbage, I’m literally just not going to pay attention to them anymore. And if you don’t pay them attention, then they don’t get paid money.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, that’s actually a really good point. I did a video recently in which I had addressed that point with a couple of people that I think are really out there on that stuff. And that was my point is like, the great thing about the Internet, the way it’s developed is it’s ended gatekeeping. The terrible thing about the Internet is it’s ended gatekeeping. And now ultimately the only way of gatekeeping that I think exists and some gatekeeping is necessary is you gatekeeping yourself.

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Yes.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You are your own gatekeeper now. And you have to go, okay, this stuff is, it’s like eating that junk food, right? Like you can eat it, but at some point, if you want to have a healthy life, you go, I’m going to have to resist the urge that I have to eat this stuff.

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Yeah. And we’re eating mental junk food.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s right.

Taking Responsibility for Content Quality

KAIZEN ASIEDU: And then we’re getting constipated from eating all this mental junk food and not processing it. And then we’re sharing it with other people. So it’s like, of course, we’re in this situation where there’s so much garbage out there and we’re wondering why we keep getting more garbage. Because we keep on consuming it.

So I think this actually can be an empowering message because, look, not to hold myself up as some sort of paragon, but it takes me like six hours to make that three minute video that you see on your X feed in passing. Every single time. It takes me hours and hours and hours. And most of that time is spent refining and researching what I say because I take it really seriously.

Because I know if I’m going to reach millions of people, I want to be saying things that are correct. And even if I’m giving an opinion, I want to make sure it’s substantiated. And if we all held ourselves to a high standard for when we say something, when we comment on something, when we share something, everyone who is providing this information to us would be forced to step it up because they’d be like, oh, this is not working anymore.

Rights and Responsibilities

FRANCIS FOSTER: Kaizen, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. The final question is always the same. What’s the one thing we’re not talking about that we really should be?

KAIZEN ASIEDU: You know, often I think people are talking about rights, but we’re not talking about responsibility in a commensurate amount. And just like we talked about, it’s important for you to take responsibility for the information you consume. I think that’s important in every single part of life.

And anytime there’s a conversation about what you deserve, there needs to be a conversation about what you’ll give in exchange for what you want. And if we take that approach as individuals, then society itself transforms because we are society. Society is not this thing imposed on us. It’s a thing that we’re reinforcing or revolutionizing with every single thought, word, or action.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: There we go. Thanks for coming on, man.

KAIZEN ASIEDU: Thanks for having me, guys.

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