Why Are We Glorifying Insanity? - Konstantin Kisin (4K)

One of the things that we've spoken about privately, that we haven't yet spoken about publicly, is victimhood. And James Cantor came on the show, he's a sex researcher. He gave me this really interesting quote I wanted you to react to: "Shifting from aiding victims to aiding everyone who claims victimhood has led to an awful lot of charlatanism. Shifting from doing good to looking good has led to an awful lot of virtue signaling. Their interaction is now Western culture, at least online." What do you think about that?

I think it's true. And if you think about, you know, I believe people respond to incentives. That's fundamentally the driving force of all human behavior. We respond to incentives. If you incentivize victimhood, you're going to get victims. And I think online is really the shift that happens because the online world rewards it. And it also allows people to fake victimhood in a way that in person you can't really. Like, if you see someone living in a massive house, you go, "Well, you may be in some ways, but you're actually well taken care of here." But online, you can create any avatar you want, and that avatar can be projected onto the online space from a mansion. That's kind of where we are.

Yeah, the fact that our opinions are more important than our deeds, and our words are scrutinized while our actions are done in private. You know, how many people have we seen over the last few years? Ellen DeGeneres, Lizzo, uh, who's that late-night host that just got popped for apparently being Jimmy Fallon, I think, allegedly? These people that outwardly are supposed to be champions for the underclass, like, "I'm supporting women of all sizes," or "I'm supporting people that have different sexual orientations," or "I do the whatever." And then you find out behind the scenes that they can't even treat a PA with dignity. I don't know. It seems to me like being someone who out front professes about standing up for the for the underclass is almost becoming a red flag to go, "I probably should scrutinize what's actually going on behind the scenes here."

When I was a stand-up comedian, in the comedy world, there's a golden rule of this: the more a comedian talks about how he's a male feminist on stage, the sleazier he is backstage. That's it. It's like a golden rule. Never fails. Always the same. So anyone who goes on stage and talks about how brilliant they are, they're always, always, always sleazy and evil behind the scenes. It's just how it works. And I think it's actually a kind of compensatory mechanism. People who are hiding a bunch of [ __ ] have to go out and then pretend to be something they're not. The morality sort of stands on the shoulders of this performative [ __ ].

Is there a solution to this? Is there a way that we can scrutinize, given that people's deeds and their actions and their words and their opinions are always going to be far apart?

I think that we are living through a digital revolution for which we're not prepared. Naturally, that's what revolution is, right? It's a change in the paradigm of how we exist. So I think that 10, 15, 20 years from now, we will look back at the way we use social media now and be horrified by it. You'll be a little bit like, you know, tobacco companies promoting cigarettes as a healthy thing to do. And then we'll be like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, this was actually causing a lot of damage." So I think the answer to this is a healthier relationship with the online world in particular. My hope is that we get past this stage and work out how to use all of that stuff better.

I see it in myself. Like, the way I use social media now is very different to the way I would have used it even two years ago. So, I'm much more responsible with the way I use it. And I mean, in terms of my own life, in terms of how much time I spend on there and what I do, but also in terms of the way I act on social media, because I am trying to be more responsible in what I say. You know, it's very easy, and I think especially on X or Twitter, whatever you want to call it, to get clicks. And I know exactly how to do that, which is dunk on somebody. And I spend less and less of my time doing that now because I just, I don't think that makes the world better. I don't think it makes me better.

There's very rare, it's very rare on Twitter to have someone break the fourth wall and say, "That was out of order. You're not allowed to say that." Everybody plays this sort of permanent game of sardonic tennis. "Here's some blasé comment about how you suck," or "Some smart snipe back at what you said." And, "Oh, I hit it back across the net with something else." No one actually says what they should say, which is, "That's [ __ ] out of order." And then you're approved. If you do this, this is why this is why it's disincentivized. This is coming back to the point about incentives. Social media rewards certain types of behavior and punishes others. So if you're the guy that says, "Maybe we shouldn't, you know, pile on this person," if your team is doing the piling on, you're like the one who's not willing, do you know what I mean? Not willing to join in with stoning somebody. And that's why you're a loser. That's the model that we operate in. So being responsible is disincentivized.

Yeah, the, I love this idea that an absurd ideological belief or an extreme ideological belief is a show of fealty to your own side and a threat display to the other. Right? And the more absurd or extreme the belief, the more likely it is that your own side can trust you and that the other side should fear you. Do you know what I mean? That if it's, if you have to put reason and sensibility and common decency to one side in order to, like, "Here I am, holding my hand in the air for whatever the current thing is," your own side sees you as a reliable ally, and the other side sees you as a formidable foe.

Mhm. It's tribal mechanics, but multiplied by a thousand. Correct. Because it's online with everyone scrutinizing you. Yeah. And so you have these weird pathologies. Like, you've got, and it's not a comment on him personally, but you've got like a guy who lives in Malaysia commenting on American culture war issues and getting like millions and millions of views for his commentary and whatever. And you just go, "I see what you're doing there, but are you actually contributing to anything?" Do you know what I mean? Because it's just flaming, fanning the flames of whatever is going on. And I see that as a, like I say, it's a period, it's a transitional period. I hope that we get to a point where we start to use social media in a different way. And actually, you know, this is an unpopular thing to say, but I don't envy the big tech executives because it's a really hard job because on the one hand, you're incentivized to encourage engagement, and on the other hand, the engagement is achieved by amplifying anger and division and all of these things. So I, I hope we can work that out as a, as a society.

How do we move forward with social media? What about the victimhood side of things then? You know, like, it's kind of, it's almost like an old trope to talk about snowflakes and all this sort of [ __ ]. It feels, you know, five-year-ago culture warrior [ __ ]. But the underlying dynamic is still there. That we've got this sort of tyranny of the minority in some regards. That fragility is something to aspire toward, or at least it's something which is rewarded in a variety of different ways. What's your sort of conception and framework of this with a little bit more perspective that we've got now?

Well, I'm going to be speaking at ARC, Jordan, Jordan's thing later this year. And one of the things I want to talk about is that I think everyone's embraced this now. We all now do it. I feel like those of us who've been concerned about wokeness have sort of got into that place where we are like, "I'm a victim. I've been canceled. I've been this, and I've been that." And I think it's time, actually, for us to step into our power now and go, "Okay, well, we've created these new media organizations, we've created alliances, we've created community, we've created things." And the question really for us is now, "We know what we're against, but not enough people are willing to say, what are we for?" Exactly. And that's because it's much harder to do. But that is the mission now. How do you get past woke, anti-woke, into the future? And the future has to be about offering people a better alternative to that victimhood. Because it's more rewarding for the individual to see themselves in that way. I think. And this is, you know, this is why Jordan Peterson was so successful when he broke through, because he was saying to people, "Take responsibility." And I think we all actually now are in a position where we have to say it to ourselves.

Yes, the right-wing snowflake sphere that nobody really ever talks about. I'm pretty sure that you hate that even more than you hate left-wing snowflake sphere. Like, it's so. Yeah, the using the call-out culture to say this is something that shouldn't be happening. This is pedestalized about that remain extremely unanswered. Like, where do you get meaning and purpose in your life now? In a society that has fewer and fewer children, in which young people are delaying adulthood longer and longer and longer? Where do you get meaning and purpose? Exactly. For now, for some people, that's, you know, online activism. But actually, how fulfilling that is, I don't know. So the big questions remain unanswered. And perhaps increasingly so, actually. I think there may be, there could well be an argument that 80 years ago, people had way more meaning and purpose readily available to them at, you know, just through the course of normal life. You know, get married, have kids, whatever. Now, obviously, that wasn't universally available to everybody, etc. But I think in the modern world, actually, way more people are lost. They don't know what they're supposed to do. Exactly. In the past, we had a kind of like set trajectory you're supposed to follow, which hurt some people because it wasn't the trajectory for them. Well, when you take away all trajectory, then everybody's lost. And I think a lot of people are in that position now. So we, and as I say, I think it's way harder to think about what the positive vision of the future is. But that, I think, is the task now. That's the mission. That's, you know, what is it that if you think wokeness is stupid and dangerous and harmful, which I do, well, what do you think in addition to that? What do you think beyond that? What is it that you think people ought to do? If they ought not to be victims, what ought they to think about with their lives? Right. And that's a very difficult question. I have more questions than answers about, actually.

It's way easier to identify problems than propose solutions. Right? And you almost see this on the internet. That if somebody identifies a problem, it's kind of hard to criticize a criticism. It's possible, right? But it's way easier to criticize a proposal. And it's almost like a defense mechanism that people have to frontload or front-run avoiding the criticism that they know will become will be incoming. You know, it's the caveat. It's like, "I'm not saying that we don't need to care about such and such," and "I'm not saying that this isn't a big deal," but "Maybe we need to think about this thing." It's almost like a conceptual equivalent of that. Yes. And I find myself doing that all the time, fortifying with caveats all the time, man. Because I think the, the other aspect of the online, the way the communication happens online is like, if you make a statement, a generalized statement, you might say, "Exercise is good for you." And somebody will be like, "Yeah, but what if you've got an injury?" And before you know it, like, "You hate disabled people." Like, that's kind of how the conversation happens. But we, I think, when we stop being able to make normative statements, everything else breaks down. Right? We have to be able to say, "For most people, most of the time, pairing up with some of the sex that they are attracted to and building a life together is better than not doing that." We have to be able to say that without the one person who was in an abusive relationship, "What about me?" Yes, we understand you, but we're talking about the 95% of people, right? And you feel free not to go along with whatever we're putting on the table. It's like, if we put a menu of things on the table, you don't have to eat everything. No one is making you eat the gluten. It's the Ricky Gervais guitar lessons thing, right? No one wants guitar lessons. So I think we have to be able to say, "All other things being equal, family is good."

Well, this is the tyranny of the minority. I [ __ ] love that phrase. I think it's so smart to optimize for the edges of the bell curve rather than the middle. And as you said before, there is, it is important to recognize that there are people who fall outside of the norms of normality, and that they need some care as well. And if you didn't have that sufficiently broad perspective view, these people would just fall through the cracks. That's [ __ ] [ __ ] and nobody wants that to happen. But when you optimize for that, you actually end up, if you were to net out what happens, you end up with more suffering because you neglect all of the [ __ ] fat bit of the middle of the distribution. That's right. And we've, we've stopped being able to make that point. Because we, and also, I think a phrase that I came across, and I didn't come up with this, but somebody was saying to me the other day, that we live in a world of trade-off denialism.

What's that mean? Every decision has trade-offs. It has positives and negatives. And if you go, "Well, we should do this," and someone goes, "Yeah, but what about the thing that..." and then you can never really acknowledge it. It's like the climate catastrophe. Right? No one wants to talk about the fact that many of the solutions that are being proposed would be worse than the problem. So it's like, if you say anything about how we're approaching that issue, you are denying that climate change is real, or you are denying that it's a problem, or you're denying that we should address it. No, I just think your idea how to fix it is stupid. Right? And we've lost the ability to have that conversation as well. And I think we really need to reintroduce that. It's one of the things I talked about in my Ox speech, which I think is why it did well, is because people want, "Oh yeah, all right." Because if we just do the stuff that we're being told we need to do, that's actually worse. And that sort of opened it up. I think we've totally forgotten that every, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. My favorite quote ever from Thomas Sowell. Yeah, it's lovely.

And the difference between maximizing and satisficing from behavioral economics is an interesting one. So maximizing is everything must be 100, 100, 100, 100. Satisficing is hitting an acceptable level across everything. And what the satisficing allows you to do is allows you to iterate much more quickly. And as you say, you can imagine, you can do it in your own life. It's like, how many times have you done it? Going to go away on holiday with the misses, and we're going to have a [ __ ] Airbnb or booking.com favorite list with 30 hotels or 30 places in. And by the time that you get down to choosing them, the choice has been made for you because all of the nice ones have gone, and you're now two days before you leave. Right? That's maximizing. Yeah. And you're so stressed. You need the holiday. [ __ ]. Yeah, it was awful. You didn't even enjoy the experience of it as well. Yeah, yeah.

I understand, man. Like, you know, people feel like they're being left behind. They feel like life is happening to them or happening for other people, and they're not a part of it. And I, I get that. Like, I, you know, [ __ ]. It's disquieting. Life is going on. My friends are moving on. The world is changing, and I'm all confused. But I suppose this sort of information ecosystem conversation, which you guys have had a good bit, and I've had twice over the last few weeks, first with Sam Harris and then with Eric Weinstein. What do you make of this? Like, the heterodox sphere has its problems, the legacy media sphere has its problems, independent creators that just get to [ __ ] post anonymously on Twitter and Reddit also, like, very unreliable. What's the, do you think about this? Like, how all of this comes together and how you move forward through it?

I see a lot of problems with new media too. I mean, and I've said this from day one in terms of what we do at Trigonometry. It's, we don't have a budget to employ a bunch of people to do extensive research on things or to do fact-checking for us. So we can't do certain things that the mainstream media can do and should do. The problem is the mainstream media isn't doing it either, right? But there's a, there's a really important role for the mainstream media. I just wish they'd play that role. But, you know, I, I think where I agree with Sam, even though I disagree with him on COVID and, and to some extent, well, to a large extent, Trump and all those things, is that not everything can be fixed on a podcast. That is absolutely true. There are certain things that are a matter of research and deeper study. And it's not, not everything can be sorted out in a three-hour conversation between two podcasters. That's not how that works. And I think new media has its own problems. It over-rewards charisma, it over-rewards passion, it it massively under-rewards any attempts to, uh, cling to truth. It encourages people to go off in the pursuit of the most, uh, exciting take. And truth isn't always exciting, you know? So, I, I think the truth is we need a vibrant ecosystem in which all of these different pieces play their own different roles. Which is why I'm in favor of maximum freedom because that's where you get everybody doing their thing. And then, you know, over time, people, this people who want wholesome content, if you like, when it comes to facts or information or whatever, can seek it out because people aren't stupid. They, they can see through, um, they will eventually see through someone being super charismatic or whatever. They'll get to a point where they go, "Actually, what I'd like to do is have a look at what different sources are saying about this and make up my own mind." You saw with COVID, you know, the mainstream media really suppressed a lot of very legitimate points of view, a lot of important information. But then you get the response to that, which is to go quite far off the other end. And I've ended up somewhere, what I hope is a kind of reasonable middle ground between those two positions.

There's a really great blog post by Will O'Brien, goes substack.com, one of my favorite writers, "Why You Are Probably an NPC." And he frames out five different types of NPC. And the most obvious two, you know, like sort of the mainstream NPC and the contrarian NPC. He makes this really great point, which is that the contrarian NPC is no deeper thinking than the mainstream NPC. They're just the inversion of it. Yes. And he uses the line of, um, "Being a black sheep might make you different, but you're still a sheep." And that allure, this sort of romance of being the independent thought leader, maker, sense-maker person. I understand why it happens. But yeah, reflexive contrarianism is no more nuanced than reflexive belief of the hegemony. Yes. And, you know, I don't judge people for that because I, I think that's an element of my thinking. You know, a kind of, I think it's very understandable the disillusionment with the way the institutions have been captured or have been corrupted or perverted, or whatever it is that's happened to them. It is natural that that would produce an equal and opposite reaction. I encourage myself and other people to go beyond that. I try as best I can, and to go, "Okay, well, we're reacting to this. This is how we're behaving. What's the actual, what's the actual truth?" Because that's where we started. We started from the position that we cared about the truth. That's why we're so annoyed with the mainstream. Can we, can we find somewhere in between those two positions that actually is an attempt to find that truth? And it's, it's the case with everything. You know, we've had a bunch of, we just had the co-founder of Novara Media on Trigonometry, the far-left YouTube, no, maybe not far-left, is it? Corista-supporting kind of people. And others because we're trying to speak to different people from different, uh, places and really get to what the bottom of is of different issues, because those perspectives are valuable too.

One of the things that Sam brought up on the episode with me was his infamous Twitter clip with you. What was the experience of that particular 180 seconds catching fire like?

You know, I felt terrible when that happened. Really, really terrible. Because I've never been on the end of a Twitter [ __ ] storm to that extent. But it's not pleasant, no matter how strong-minded you are. Whatever. There's a reason that Rogan always says, "Don't read the comments." Like, like the great man Joseph Stalin says, "Quantity has a quality all of its own." So there's only a certain number of negative comments you can ignore until just the volume of [ __ ] becomes overwhelming. So my primary concern, actually, not, I don't know Sam well, but was for his well-being, actually. I just, I just worry how he would experience that more than anything. That was my concern. Because our approach is always about giving a guest an opportunity to reveal themselves in the best light possible. And for some people, that light shines very brightly and can burn. But that's not our intention. We never go into an interview with a desire to out somebody or expose somebody. It's not a gotcha. It's not a gotcha. So I was worried about him. And I emailed him straight away just to, you know, check up on him. And, and, you know, also, we didn't put that clip out. We could have done because we obviously understood that it was a controversial thing he said. And actually, most people don't know this, but that was not the most controversial thing he said in that interview, in my opinion. We talked about COVID on Locals, which was the paywall section of the interview. And what he said there, I found quite...

What did he say? I don't remember the wording. And people have to go and watch it. But it was, you know, I came away from that thinking that, you know, he's overestimating the threat. And as a result of that, is prepared to do some pretty drastic things or or demand drastic things to be done. So, first and foremost, as somebody who interviews people for a living, I was concerned for him. But I also felt that, you know, what he said was wrong. I didn't agree with it. And I, my view on it is that if you overestimate the nature of the threat, all else follows. And I think on Trump and COVID, that that is where Sam, in my opinion, is, that's why he's doing what he's doing and saying what he's saying. Because if I thought Trump was as bad as Sam thinks, it'd be very tempting to think along the lines that Sam thinks along. And likewise with COVID, if I thought this was like Ebola that spreads, I'd also be, you know, we should also be honest. You know, the conversation, people like, "Well, there's never, ever, ever any reason for for the government to mandate vaccines." And I broadly agree with that, unless the disease is really like dangerous and deadly. I said this at the beginning of COVID, like, imagine that the disease had 100% mortality rate for all women, or it was 100% mortality rate for all people under the age of 10. There'd be some people who'd support it. Well, yeah, but I think that the, fundamentally, it came down to a risk and reward equation. And most people considered that the risk of getting COVID was not greater than the risk of either getting the vaccine or of opening up mandated vaccines as a pathway overall. Right? And it's just where do you sit on this equation? There's lots of other things, but broadly, I think it's where do you sit on this equation? And Sam, I completely agree with him that I think COVID as an event was like the worst kind of vaccine that we could have given our epidemiology, our medical system, the view of vaccines overall, vaccine skepticism at large. I bet has gone through the [ __ ] roof. It has. It has. Have you had a look at this? Yeah, of course it has. I know anecdotally, just speaking to people, how much that's that's the case. Yeah. So if we are to have something that comes around the next time and it does kill [ __ ] all children under 10, or all women, or whatever the [ __ ]. It's got some incubation period of 28 days and a mortality of 40%. It's just a scope. It's another scope. This is Klaus Schwab doing it again. This is the WEF. And it's like, "Oh God, God." Like, that's it. Literally would have been better if COVID hadn't happened, right? Yeah. Sure enough, we can get masks out of the way more quickly, and we've got like some, some inefficiency in in the system. We're opened up. But if you were to look at COVID as a, like, operational logistical vaccine, our response to it failed us way worse than if we'd never got it at all. And we got a vaccine injury from COVID. Yes. Yes, we did.

And I also think the one thing that is sort of inexplicably neglected in all of this is I'd really like to know where COVID came from. I'd really like to know. Don't you think that's important? Don't you think we should know where it came from? Because there are some credible assertions about its origins that would suggest that we may have another pandemic soon. Is that right? Haven't seen this. Well, if this came from a lab in Wuhan because of gain-of-function research, and we are not willing to be honest about that, and gain-of-function research continues, why wouldn't we have another pandemic?

I never looked into this much. I know that, uh, Sam had Matt Ridley and somebody else, somebody else on his show. We've had Matt on to talk about this as well. Yeah. And the truth is, we don't know. Yeah. But I'm using the kind of the smell test here because I grew up in a, in a, in a communist society. And what communist societies do when there is something, and all societies do this to a large extent because people don't like to expose their own flaws, and no one wants to be like, "Oh, I was responsible for killing millions of people." You know, but they will cover it up in a way that, you know, that is proper. And Matt actually gave this example of there was a leak somewhere in the Soviet Union, which was a radioactive leak, I think, or maybe it was a biological. And they covered it up for ages. And then, you know, when the Soviet Union collapsed, we finally find out, "No, no, it was actually a leak." So if this is a product of, uh, gain-of-function research getting out into the real world, which is credible, that there's there's very credible assertions about that, the world needs to know. And this type of research needs to end. But if we are unwilling to have that conversation honestly and do the proper investigations, which would be difficult because the CCP wouldn't want that, and on top of that, you've got all this other [ __ ] about how it's racist and all of that, we've got a problem. So the, I, I think my worry with everything that's happened with COVID is not only have we not learned the lessons, I feel like, like you said, we've got a vaccine injury from the experience. And everyone is sort of stuck in their corner. And like Sam said to you, everyone's got their own facts about it now. Correct. Yeah. That's that's a problem.

It's interesting what you said about the felt sense of being in the blast radius of Sam's online experience. I noticed it is someone called it Sam Harris's World Embarrassment Tour. Because he did my show, he did Steven's show, and he did Tom Billy's show. And I don't know, man, like there seems to be something. It's almost like there was resentment sat on the internet, latent resentment sat on the internet, waiting for Sam to [ __ ] up. And then he did a thing. Oh, maybe, maybe it's right. I don't think it was personal. That was my, the reason I paused there. I don't think it was personal to Sam. I think particularly on his Trump comments, there are a lot of people who were like, "This is what we always knew the Trump haters think deep inside." And Sam was willing to vocalize it, which is, "I don't care how big the transgressions are on the other side. I don't care what Hunter Biden has done. I don't care what Joe Biden's done. No matter what they do, it can never be as bad as Orange Man Bad." And that's sort of how he came across. And so the people who, who felt gaslit this entire time about, um, you know, the overestimation of the threat of Trump, they were vindicated in that moment. And I think Sam just caught him, was caught in the rage of people feeling like the kind of like the perfect timed storm with the perfect pebble in the perfect river that directed it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's so interesting, man. You know, we, I had this conversation with, uh, a fitness influencer called Sarah Safari in LA a couple of weeks ago. I'd be interested to get your thoughts on this. I think it's analogous to the Sam situation. A lot of people, especially right of center, say things like, "You can't judge somebody on just one thing that they say." Yet when it came to a six-pack of Bud Light being sent to Dylan Mulvaney by some marketing intern somewhere deep in the annals of the Anheuser-Busch thing, or Miller Lite released one video. The Miller Lite thing felt a little bit more produced. It's probably gone through a few more layers. But largely, I just wondered, I thought it was interesting that the charity that a lot of people right of center ask to be given to their commentators or, you know, their champions that are canceled for taking out of context points. There was that, uh, Roseanne Barr bit with the ovon where she made a joke about the Jews, which was the most egregious clipping that I've ever seen from anything ever. The end of a three-minute long bit. And they took the final 30 seconds and put it up as if it was representative of the whole thing. It was so [ __ ] bad. But I did notice nobody decided to use that same idea about, "Well, hang on a second, maybe maybe this is just one small department in one small corner of one small brand's marketing push." And they gave this person who is very unpopular on the internet a six-pack of Bud Light. And before you know it, Kid Rock's got an AR-15 pointed at a few cases of your drink. What do you think about?

So, so I think I would separate those two out. So Sam, I think is that point applies very much. And this is what the angle I'm coming from. And by the way, we're about to go back to America and we'll interview Sam, the sequel. We'll see how that works out. I'm looking forward to it. But with Sam, what I felt was, for me, I don't know if it's true of other people, but for me, Sam has a lot of credit in the bank with me. And so, and so I felt that while I strongly disagree with what he said, I think that was clear in the interview, he has enough credit in the bank with me that I'm willing to have a lot of understanding and a lot of grace with him. And I, I like, and what I would say as well, is, you know, we were having a lot of tech issues on the day that we interviewed Sam, and he sat there for like a good hour while we were trying to scramble to get the microphones to work. And he was the most decent human being that we've had on the show, who someone really is when the cameras aren't rolling. That seemed to me like a really important thing that other people obviously wouldn't have seen. So, I have a lot of time for Sam and respect for him. I don't have the same relationship with Dylan Mulvaney. And I also think you haven't taken a world of wisdom from Dylan Mulvaney over the last. You'll be surprised, man. You'll be surprised. And so, I think, look, Dylan Mulvaney is a symbol to many people, like Sam is a symbol to many people for different things. But I, I think it's a slightly different issue because you, I don't know if you saw, but immediately after the, the Dylan Mulvaney controversy, the marketing executive who was responsible for this, there was, there was a video of her talking to, I think, a reporter about the thinking behind what the idea. There was, it seemed a little bit more thought out. It was thought out. And her her angle was, "Our customers are [ __ ]." That was her angle. "Are [ __ ]?"

Well, it was just, it's just these guys who've got like a, you know, old-fashioned sense of humor and they don't, you know what I mean? Like, "We're going to educate our customers." And I'm like, "You sell beer. That's not your job. Sell them the [ __ ] beer and shut up." Right? And look, the trans issue, for reasons I actually think are quite understandable and obvious, is the lightning rod of our time. So I'm not surprised that that caused the reaction that it did. And I understand it. I do think, and I said, I wrote a Substack on this at the time, that perhaps the giving so much attention to it is what prompts these brands to to go down this route. Obviously, with Dylan Mulvaney, it had backfired for sure. It's a role of the dice for attention. It's a role of the dice for attention that I don't think they'd considered. And I think that executive ended up being fired. I do understand why people got as fired up about as they did, because you're rewarding behavior that a lot of people would feel is the wrong behavior to reward. In the public guy, Dylan Mulvaney. But that woman is one lady. Maybe, maybe in her interview with the reporter, she said this went all the way up. And the director, CEO, the [ __ ] Chief Marketing Officer, or whatever, was involved in this. But if it wasn't the case, I don't think, if it turned out that it was one small group in in the corner, as I like guessed, or whatever, I don't think that the internet would have given Bud Light any more leeway. I don't think they would have said, "We need to separate the art and the artist here." You know, they've made beer for three decades, for however [ __ ] long it's been around. And maybe, maybe it shows their woke bonafides. It shows that they're the man-hating, like, left-leaning blue-haired cucks that they always were. But I don't know. Like, it seems like a lot of the time people want, it's a, it's a smart idea to be able to say, Rogan has been in a few controversies over the last few years. Most people said, "I have faith that you're telling me this is the tip of the iceberg. I've seen the whole iceberg." Right? "I know that there is nothing lurking deep down in the depths." Massive advantage he has is he's published like 5,000 hours of content over the last decade, which means that you have a pretty good body of evidence that sits on the other side of the scale. But light, you don't know much about what's going on inside of the marketing department. But I just thought it was interesting. I thought that maybe this is a time where it would be illustrative, and you should be careful about transgressing rules that you want to be enforced. So if you want the "don't judge somebody by one single occurrence" rule to be enforced, and then you don't enforce it, that, as you said before, that tit-for-tat game, it opens up.

What they did. So this is playground mentality. I understand what you mean, but I think I disagree, actually. I think the reason that people were as upset about as they are is, while it's, these are different companies, the sense is, imagine it wasn't just Rogan who said something, but it was Chris Williamson, and Trigonometry, and all the other podcasters who do what we do, all at one point said the same thing. And then there was yet another example of a podcast saying it. So when you look at the Gillette "toxic masculinity" ad, if you look at all the other instances where corporations put Pride flags, all they replace their brand with, not in the Middle East, not, well, obviously not. Yeah. Did they do it in Russia? They can't do it in Russia. I doubt it. I doubt it. I can't imagine why in Mother Russia, gay has you. Yeah, exactly. So I think what people felt was, here again, we've got a corporation just absolutely taking the piss, lecturing the ordinary public, and thrusting these very niche issues onto what is a very, very like, normal household beer. And you just can't escape this [ __ ]. That's what I think people feel. It's kind of a straw that broke the camel's back.

Corporation overall. That's interesting, because what I was doing was I was taking Bud Light as an individual instance on its own. What you're saying is this is more endemic of a broader trend among big corporations?

Well, broadly speaking, if you think about what the anti-woke narrative is, the anti-woke narrative is, and I agree with very large part of it, is that most of the major institutions, whether that be media, whether that be the civil service, whether that be, uh, the political systems, the parties, the, uh, the corporations, the education system, they've all been captured or corrupted or through some other mechanism become, uh, the projectors of a certain worldview onto the public who do not share that worldview. And so when you see the toxic masculinity Gillette ad, which is like, "Hey, you know, you're a man, you're a piece of [ __ ], buy a razor." You know, "Hey, you're a piece of [ __ ], buy our beer." Yeah, etc. It sort of builds up to a point like, "Why is everyone telling me I'm a piece of [ __ ]?" And it gets old. And, you know, and I actually, you know, particularly this anti-masculine, anti-masculinity narrative that you see everywhere in movies, in advertising, in all sorts of different genres, I think it's really, really dangerous. Because if you think about Gillette ads in the '90s, you were a bit younger than me, I don't know if you remember them, but they were "Best a man can get." And it's like some blonde hot chick in like a, whatever she's like on shoulder. Actually, actually, that wasn't the '90s. Gillette ads. The '90s Gillette ads were a bunch of men being healthy masculinity. It was a man putting his tie on as he holds his baby up before he's going to work. He was a man, uh, hugging his son on his way to his wedding. He was a man protecting his wife, or, you know, it was a, it was a healthy view of men and relationships, and men and women, and so on. And I, I sort of say, you know, healthy masculinity is the '90s Gillette ads. That's what it looks like. Men being responsible men in relationships with women, being respectful, being kind, but also being strong, looking after their children, teaching younger versions of men how to be men, etc. Right? And I understand why people, men and women, are [ __ ] tired, really, really tired of this idea that men are bad and evil. My wife, who's completely, I always say my wife is completely apolitical, and as a result of that, extremely based, right? Like, she hates this [ __ ]. And I can't tell you how many women I speak to who are very, very tired of men being demonized in this way. And so am I. Well, especially given that a lot of those women will have sons, and they want their partner to be good and healthy. They don't want them to be feeble, you know? So I actually, I understand the pushback against that. I really do. And I think it's necessary.

Yeah, yeah. The, I mean, I've spent a lot of time talking about modern masculinity and the challenges that everybody is facing. What do you think, like, looking at it from your perspective, growing up where you did in a communist country, coming here, remembered it, coming here at 13, what's, what do you think the conversation around modern masculinity from both sides of the fence is missing? Like, what, what don't they understand about being a man in 2023 and the challenges and the way that the culture sees them?

I think we should zoom out more, even more than that, and ask the question, "What is it that we want as a society?" And I piss both sides of the spectrum off by saying what I'm about to say, which is, any ideology, and I mean any ideology, that pits men against women or women against men is toxic and damaging and dangerous and unhealthy. And that includes some forms of feminism, and that includes, you know, the incel worldview and all sorts of things. So the thing that we're really missing is a reminder of the fact that, I'm going to do the caveat thing we talked about. Yes, some people are not heterosexual, but for the vast majority of people, the single most meaningful thing in your life is going to be the relationship you have with your intimate partner, almost always of the opposite sex. Right? And we need each other. Men and women need each other. We've been working together for millennia. And any, anyone who tells you that your enemy is the opposite sex, that person is your enemy. That person is your enemy. That person is our society's enemy. They are destroying or attempting to destroy the very building block of our society. That comes from both sides of the advice as well. The red pill sphere teaches men that women are adversaries to be avoided or resources to be used and discarded. Those are the only two ways. And, you know, that's black, that's the entire manosphere, actually. That's black pill, MGTOW, incels, pickup artistry, Sigma male, all the way, like the full, that's the entire gamut for anyone that doesn't know the memes, that's the entire manosphere of the [ __ ] manosphere. And, yeah, there's no one in there, very, very few people in there who say, "You're supposed to be a collaborator with the opposite sex." Most of your competition is intrasexual, not intersexual. Men and women have worked together for eons. You need each other to survive. Just because you've outsourced protecting and provisioning to the police department and the local supermarket, and you, women have outsourced the resources and, uh, the company to your ability to gain education and employment and Netflix, like, still broadly, like, we're not going to be able to out-technology ourselves from the last 120,000 years of humans being the way that we are. So there's more to relationship than dildo, right? You're not a dildo to your partner. There's more that you bring to the table. Sometimes, well, I'm speaking for myself, maybe I'm, I'm not sufficient in that department. But my point is.

Let's frame this in a positive way. What is it that we're trying to say? What we're trying to say is men and women need each other. Men and women need to work together. Uh, men and women are not enemies. That the most powerful you are ever going to be is with a good woman by your side.

What do you say to the people that go, "This is Trad pill nonsense, like Tradcon talking point 101, like this is just another NPC meme, but coming from like someone that's steeped in a type of relationship that men or women don't need anymore"?

Well, you know how Bitcoin is. Say, "Have fun staying poor." Have fun being a loser. You, you want to spend your life, uh, being unhappy with the opposite sex, whether you are a feminist or one of these people, go, go for it. I'm not going to tell you how to live your life, but I don't think it's going to lead you to a good place.

Um, you know, I have male friends who've recently found their like soulmate or their partner, and they blossom. They blossom the moment that it happens, uh, because we evolved to be together. We evolved to work together. We evolved to drive each other forward in really powerful ways. I would not, I wouldn't be a tenth of the man I am without my wife.

Did you read the post I put up a couple of weeks ago about the F you family? No, I didn't see that. So F you money, right? You're able to become, oh, I did see that. Yes, sufficiently financially independent that money, you, you don't need to do things you don't want to do. F you freedom. You don't need to do things that you don't want to do. But then the final stage I see amongst my male friends who are, you know, 30s and 40s, is the F you family, which is, all that I fundamentally care about in the end is me and the people that are a part of this nuclear pod, and everything else can go to hell. Everything else can fall apart.

Jimmy Carl has just sat in that seat. He's been through his fair share of like roller coasters, and he's been with his partner like a decade and a bit, like F forever, maybe even 20, like something years. And now he's got a son and a daughter. And yeah, the coming home to know that as long as that's okay, as long as that's set, I'm presuming that you've stacked the F you money with the F you freedom, and then you had the family on top. It must be kind of similar to being indestructible.

I'm still working on the F you money. Yep. Still a long way to go on the F you money. The freedom and the family. The freedom and the family. Yes. Uh, and my wife and I, we, we met by complete accident when we were 18, married by 20, and been together ever since. And the, just on a very practical, like, what did I get out of it level, it's, it's been the single most beneficial source of inspiration, comfort, you know, pick each other up when you're down, all of that. I, I, I, I mean, I admire people who don't have that and still do lots of stuff in the world, but it would be so much harder, so, so much harder.

Um, so again, I'm not telling other people how to live their life. I'm just saying this has been one of the most tried and tested solutions to various problems that human beings experience throughout history. We evolved to be together. Uh, and if it's a Trad talking point, then maybe that's right. Maybe, maybe some Trad talking points are correct.

Getting back to the masculinity conversation, why do you think it's so difficult for people to publicly advocate for the problems of men and boys?

Because victimhood doesn't work for men the way it works for women. We don't feel sorry for men. And rightly so, by the way. Rightly so. I mean, biologically, men are disposable the way that women aren't, for the obvious reasons. If you have a tribe of 10 men, 10 women, you send the women off to war, you're screwed. You send the men off to war, one comes back, you can still replenish the population. So men are disposable, always will be, much more than women. Uh, and so we are, we don't feel sorry for men in the same way. And I'm not advocating that we feel sorry for men, because I don't believe that's a solution to men's problems. Uh, the solution to men's problems is for men to be better.

What's that mean? Uh, it means, uh, you know what I mean? Look at you. This is what your entire life is spent on: bettering yourself physically, emotionally, psychologically, mentally. You're obsessed with performance. You're obsessed with being better. You're obsessed with being happier, more fulfilled, all of these things. It's a pursuit of your own greatness.

There are structural disadvantages that are faced by men as well, right? That very few people are willing to accept at the moment. Socioeconomically, men are falling behind. Education, employment, mental health, work. Currently, Suicide Awareness, Suicide Prevention Week in the UK. According to one of the guys I was literally talking to half an hour ago, if you are a man, the single biggest threat to your own life is yourself. You are more likely to die by your own hand than by any other way.

Are you? Am I? I've got suicide, I've got suicide in my family. So I know. But I don't think you are the greatest threat to you. That's true. But, and I'm not, the greatest threat to me. And why is that? Not everybody has the same genetic predisposition. Sure. But you just said you do. And yet you are not the greatest threat to you. Why is that?

Because you're fulfilled. Because you're successful. Because you're striving and achieving. Because you have in life what you should have in life: uh, the meaning and purpose and the pursuit of a goal, right? And for men, this is one of the problems with, you know, this mental health conversation. One of the reasons that men's mental health is not as good as it could be is that, um, a, we do live in a society which discourages them from being men and being the way that men are supposed to be. Um, but the other reason is that most of the personal development, um, and psychology fields are geared towards female ways of being. And most of the, the ways that we treat, for example, depression, men don't need the same thing as women do when it comes to that.

What men need is to feel powerful, uh, and capable, right? The reason you don't, you are not the greatest threat to you is that you feel in charge of your life, right? And that's what men need to pursue with every fiber of their being. That's what I mean when I say better. You need to struggle, and you need to fight, and you need to achieve, and then all of this other [ __ ] falls by the wayside. And it's always been like this. You know, I'm someone who's been depressed at points in my life, and it's not because I was having a mental health problem, it's because my life was [ __ ] and I was [ __ ]. That's why. Right? So what men need is to pursue their dreams, to fight and struggle, and to achieve.

There was a, a point that you brought up earlier on about how no guidelines is liberating and terrifying altogether. And I think it's, it's interesting to talk about how there isn't only one way to be a good man, but there aren't an unlimited number of ways either. And the problem of breaking open the expectations around men means that guidance for men and boys also largely dissipates.

I had this conversation in Qatar, and the guy I was debating had this conception of the man box. And he said, if you're inside of the man box, it can be constraining. Because he was a, a member of the LGBT community, Kuwaiti, American, grew up in the Middle East, and wanted to be a dancer as a boy. I'm like, I imagine it's pretty [ __ ] difficult for you to find a man box that fits that conception of you in it. Sure. But if you completely blast it open, and you can be anything that you want to be, there's no guidelines at all. There's no guidance. So how [ __ ] hard is this going to be? You got to, you got to reinvent from first principles what it means to be a man.

And Ian, you've heard this from Mary Harrington and Lise Perry, but a lot of the guidance that was given to men previously around chivalry, it is simply a difference of degree, not a difference of kind. To go from men should hold the door open for women and make sure that she gets to the front door safe at night, to you shouldn't hit your wife. It is one, one single thread between those, which is women are more vulnerable and should be protected. Right? Lovely conception. That Mary, in classic Mary style, said the boudoir rules that benefited women who had had a partner, that grew up in a two-parent household, that went to some high-falutin institution, was around people that had good, good male role models. Yeah, sure. You can break open the doors of chivalry and maybe pay for the first date, or maybe you can drive yourself home, or get the taxi on your own, or whatever it is, because the environment that you're in is largely very different.

The guy that grew up, or the, the woman that grew up in a relationship with a man who comes from a single-parent household, whose mom or dad was addicted to alcohol or drugs, or there was multiple partners coming through the house, they never got taught not to beat your wife, let alone not to hold the door open. And like the rules for thee, but not for me. It's like the rules for us, protecting everybody, not just me. And yeah, I, I think it's a really interesting frame to think about where the cultural changes come from. A lot of the time they come top down, but the environment can be so different that getting rid of something that seems quite innocuous up here can actually cascade down to the bottom. And the same thing goes for this tyranny of the minority, again. Absolutely. There are people that will be outside of the man box, and maybe we should expand it so that they can fit in it. But if you blow the doors open, where's the guidance? Like, what does it mean?

And this is also a consequence of luxury beliefs, which is Rob Henderson's term. I'm sure you've had him on the show. Um, and the, the principal luxury belief of our time is there's no difference between men and women. That's a luxury belief. There are people who can afford to have it, but most people can't afford to have that belief. And then all else follows from this. Uh, because if you accept that there are differences between men and women, then men and women should act differently. And that also means that it's okay for men to be men, and it's okay for women to be women.

One of the things that I find really [ __ ] weird, man, since we had our son, is people will go to my wife, "Oh, you're just, you're just at, you're just at home." And I'm like, "What do you mean, just at home?" Are you [ __ ] insane? She's she's raising our son and providing everything that we need as a family. And you're calling that just a thing? So, but, but a lot of women will judge other women for just being at home. Yeah. And actually, I think it doesn't apply to everybody. Caveat. But for most women, the greatest gift their partner can give them is opportunity. If they want to be at home with the children, to do that. About 80, 85% of women say that being a stay-at-home mom is an opportunity that an option that they aspire to have. Yes. And financially, for most people, it's very difficult. Yeah. Right now. So it's, it's, it's the greatest gift. And so it's not just like men are treated badly or women. It's, it's this whole dynamic hurts everybody. Um, and so men and women need to work together. Dads need to be involved in their kids' lives. These are some, yeah, look, their Trad points, one, one, if that's what you want to call them, but it's what works. It's what works for the kids. It's what works for the family.

Did you read the, "Men Are Lost: Can We Find a Way Out of the Wilderness" article by Christine Ember, who was in The Washington Post a couple of months ago? Was Washington Post in there? Something anyway. She had this beautiful conception in it that said, um, many young men feel their difficulties are often dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that they don't feel a part of. It seems like a lot of modern men are being made to pay for the sins and advantages of their fathers and grandfathers. And I thought that that was very interesting. That, um, kind of like in comedy, right? You're allowed to punch up, but you can't punch down. And because men have had it good for so long, you have this, this concern in giving them any sympathy. And even though largely, pick most of the extreme negative outcomes that you want in life, apart from sexual assault, and it's, you're going to find a man on the receiving end, whether it's homelessness, drug addiction, violent crime, mental health, being in jail, suicide, like all of it.

And there was this video of, um, uh, I think it was a trans, so a woman who became a man, or looked like a man, or whatever, who was absolutely horrified by the lack of attention. Oh, people crossed the street when they were walking towards it. It wasn't even just that. It's just like, people ignore you when you're a woman, you get attention. And people just ignore a guy most of the time, for most intents and purposes. But that's, you know, those are, in my opinion, in a radical differences between the sexes. The way that our biological roles are, when women are going to get more attention. I think you can definitely see, like listening to your, like, pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of mentality, especially when it comes to men, you can definitely see that sort of Soviet like, man beard, man lift, thing, man protect woman. Like, that was actually money and a thr. But that's, that's the best Russ you're getting out with me.

Um, yeah, I, I think that you can see that. And this is why, you know, there's a multiplicity of opinions about how to do this. And I think it's why it's interesting that everybody can contribute, you know, in it. Okay, give me a critique of what I'm saying. I'd love to explore that with you. No, but there's nothing that I would disagree with massively. I think that it's important to recognize the structural disadvantages faced by men and boys at the moment. Going from a brain-based to a brain-based economy, when you have a disposition to be less conscientious, where you are put into an education system that doesn't suit the disposition of boys, but you're graded in the same manner as an entire sex who does. Boys are going to fall behind. And I think that you're seeing the outcomes of this in the way that schooling. And between the ages of 21 and 29, women earn a grand and a bit more than men do. Right? The, the gender pay gap isn't a gender pay gap, it's a mother pay gap. Right? That's the, the penalization comes to mothers.

I don't disagree with any of that. But the question is, what's the answer? What's the solution to that? I think that creating a positive view for masculinity, creating, and this is again, why, you know, Peterson and Andrew Tate, as well, have been so successful because they said, you can be something. You can actually step out there and wrangle the world. And I believe in you, and I'm proud of you. And it's not wrong for you to try and want to get mastery, or conquer something, or achieve something, have ambition, to be able to make decisions easily, and stand up well under pressure. Like, you know, these are all [ __ ] good things that are not only good for you, but they're good for the world as well. I think that there needs to be a positive vision. That would be one. I think that that creates a positive feedback loop for men. I do think that there's some manning up in the most transcendent, including, uh, like Wilbur and Way that we can. But I also think that, you know, we need to look at structural initiatives that can help boys and men. Because there's no other group on the planet who, when they fall behind, are pointed at and said, "This is your problem, you need to sort it out." Every other group, we would spend billions in taxpayer funded money to create committees and charities and initiatives that actually work out what's going on and help them, boots on the ground, to be able to do this. I don't think, like, if a man has a problem, or if a woman has a problem, we say, "What can we do to fix society?" If a man has a problem, we say, "What can a man do to fix himself?" Now, maybe that's the fundamental asymmetry at the heart of the sex difference. But in a society that has surplus resources that can help, I don't see why we wouldn't afford the, why we would make men unnecessarily swim upstream, if that makes sense.

It does make sense. However, I think that my view is what you said earlier, it's the fundamental asymmetry between the sexes. Now, it's true that all groups face various structural inequalities. For example, I'm 5'9, barely. And you play basketball, not very well, I should say. For, for that reason alone, actually, if you look at the evidence, heightism is one of the biggest openly available forms of discrimination that isn't condemned or dealt with in any way. And one of your team is Scouse, so that must be, he's even shorter than me. Awful. Yeah, yeah. So what's the answer to that? My answer to that has not been to get leg extensions, or to complain about structural heightism. Do you know that, like, structural heightism? You, you joke, but if you want to play this [ __ ] game. This is my point. I'm not laughing at that. I'm just, it's structural heightism as a term that I haven't heard before. So if you look at the CEOs of the top Fortune 500 companies, like 90%, or something, don't quote me on it, you can look it up, like a very, very, very significant portion of them are over six foot tall. Almost always the taller president wins, I think, as well, right? Now, is the answer to that? Not in Russia, by the way. In Russia, you don't need height. So, is do we complain about that? Should we complain about that? Should I sit here and be like, "Oh, because I'm 5'9, I don't get the..." That doesn't help anything. It doesn't change anything, right? And I remember, it's so funny because I have a, a friend of mine who's like a Green Party voter, voter, the most woke person that you could possibly imagine, and he's like 5'5. And I made this point to him. I said, "Yeah, but you, you know, you talk about these structural issues with like, this group and that group and whatever, and you're five..." Did you know about, you know, heightism and whatever? And he was like, "Yeah, but being 5'5 has just made me who I am." I like, "Yes, yes, you are what you are. The world isn't going to change to you."

My favorite scene in Game of Thrones, have you seen Game of Thrones? Is Tyrion when he's talking to Jon Snow and he calls him a bastard. And Jon Snow takes offense. And he goes, "Have I offended you, bastard?" He goes, "Let me give you some advice, bastard. Never forget what you are. The world won't wear it like armor, and it can never be used to hurt you." That's the answer to all of this, right? And you're right about Peterson and Tate, who I think very different figures, but nonetheless, their success is based on the fact that they're telling men what men do need to hear in that respect, which is: it's okay to be a man. It's okay to have drive. It's okay to have ambition. It's okay to have aggression. It's okay to want things. It's okay to want status. It's okay to want money. It's okay to want power. These are all things that are okay. They have pathological side effects when not handled properly, but the drive to achieve, the drive to succeed, the drive to dominate, the drive to win, these are good things. And pursue them. And by the way, here's the interesting bit: those woke women, they love that [ __ ]. This is what I'm going to teach my son. Right? Whatever the society tells you about how it's wrong to be a man, at the end of the day, they're all going to reward you for being a real man. This is the best time, in some ways, to be a real man, because you clean up. The competition is outing itself, is taking itself out of the picture. If you act like a man, you clean up. That's the position we're in.

Well, there's a number of, uh, left-leaning women who are lamenting the fact that they can't find a man who meets both their political preference and also will woo them appropriately on the, on the date. Right? It's like, why are all of the men who do the things that I want from the other political party? I think it's 30% or 40% of Democrats and Republicans fear that their son or daughter will marry somebody of the opposite political belief. So, you know, this tribalism that we spoke about earlier on.

Speaking about toxic masculinity, as part of that debate, I did a little bit of preparation and I found some of my favorite headlines of things that are toxic masculinity: mass shootings, gang violence, climate change, the financial crisis, is toxic masculinity. Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, not wearing a mask, eating meat, physical fitness, fast food, capitalism is toxic masculinity. And communism is toxic masculinity. Hip hop, smelling of Axe Body Spray, which is Lynx for the British people, being stoic, risk-taking, religion, but also secularism and atheism, playing board games, being interested in cars, and saying "hello" or "have a nice day." All toxic masculinity.

Man, say hello. Is [ __ ] atrocious, mate. Is it? Yeah. The, that's sort of, I think that's part of the male gaze. You know, there was this, I think it was a rule, wasn't it, put on the London Underground for a while that like the men's like wandering eyes are something that was a concern. But here's another thing, right? I'd be interested to get your take on this. I brought this up with that same, uh, fitness influencer a couple of weeks ago. Sarah, really good response as well. Internet incidents, big ones. People in the real world use the response of the internet. They crowdsource their sense-making to how other people responded. So you'll have seen these gym TikToks of girls videoing themselves working out, and sometimes there's a guy in the background. And if the guy looks over a bit much, because for whatever reason, he's looking at her, he's looking at the camera, he's looking at himself, he's doing whatever, sometimes they make a big song and dance about it. The first big one of those that happened, it could have gone either way. You could have tossed a coin, and I would have said, "I don't know, the internet may say that this is reprehensible." I didn't. I thought it was fine. But I could have seen the internet going on the other side of the fence and saying, "Yeah, sure, should fine this guy, like, dock him, shoot him, blah, blah, blah." It didn't. And that now has created a new, uh, bar of behavior, expected behavior, both for men and for women. The interesting thing that it made me realize is the women who saw that TikTok had it have gone the other way. And had it have been completely reprehensible and totally not allowed, would then have reset their worldview expectation. Way more sensitive. Their radar is now looking for, "Did that guy glance over three times or more in the space of 90 seconds?" If so, this equals a dangerous situation, because the internet told me so. And it's a, a very sort of slippery slope in one direction only. It only moves towards more sensitivity, not more robustness, right? I thought that was interesting.

Perception is projection. What's that mean? It means that you see what you expect to see. You perceive your own projections of the world. Uh, you had that [ __ ] hyperviral moment about the scar makeup. Tell, tell it again for the people that don't. So they did an experiment where they told a group of women that they're going to put scarring on their faces, or visual disfigurement of some kind, and then they would go in into an interview. And the purpose of the experiment is to work out whether the interviewer is going to treat them differently because of their physical facial disfigurement. What they didn't tell the women is as they were leaving to go for the interview, they touched up their makeup and without showing them the facial disfigurement, removed the scarring. So they went into the interview thinking they're facially scarred, but they weren't. And they came back reporting massive levels of discrimination, specific comments that the interviewer had made about them that they perceived. So you, you see what you expect to see. This is why teaching people victimhood is so dangerous because it makes them victims. It makes them expect certain things, and then they will react differently. I mean, you know, police interactions are a good example of this. If you expect that the police are going to treat you badly because of who you are, you're going to act in a different way, and therefore cause more problems. And I say this to somebody, you know, I was a very angry young man. And I, and my wife used to piss me off so much. She would constantly say, like, I'd get into an argument with somebody and I'd be like, "That guy's a prick, he did this." And she'd be like, "You're creating those situations, you know that, right?" And I was like, "No." And it took me like a good 10 years to work out, absolutely, I was, abso-[ __ ]-lutely, I was right. So we, we perceive the things that we put out into the world. And this is, you know, Peterson talks about this, is you can't see without hierarchy because your brain has to know what to focus on. And what you focus on is a function of the filter that you project onto the world. I'm focusing on you now, instead of the bookshelf behind you. I could have been sitting here picking out a good book this entire time. It's been a waste. But so that's, that's what's happening there.

But it's interesting. I mean, I said something at the time, I was like, "Look, these creepy men need to stop staring at women in gyms, otherwise they're going to stop wearing lingerie to go there." And then when everybody loses. And what I'm, the point I'm trying to make is that like, you know, this is a very, I'm going to say something very controversial here, Chris. You ready? Men are attracted to women. I've heard about it. Let's sit with that for a moment. I've heard about that. So, you know, this idea that you're going to be barely clad and men aren't going to notice that. Yeah, sorry, that's not what our brains are for. Learned. Our brains are for looking at your ass. That's what they're for. That's what they evolved for. I know it's crudely put. I learned the term for this new style of gym short. It's got what's called a butt scrunch. Have you seen the butt scrunch? Yes. Right. Yeah. You're a married man. Online, of course. Yeah. Someone showed me a photo. I tried to look away. Um, yeah, which is for the people that haven't seen it and aren't training in gyms with like 20-year-olds in it. It's like a normal pair of shorts, training shorts for a girl, like kind of tight, but then it's got kind of like a thong bit that separates the ass cheeks out. Um, which has been normalized very quick. Do you remember when, do you remember the first time that wearing just leggings became a thing? Because I do. Because it wasn't when I went to uni. So it was after 2006. It was after, maybe it happened while I was at uni. So maybe before 2010. But I remember thinking, "Wow, that's like, that's like everything on display. That's kind of like, like no pants." Yeah. But then also kind of not. And then now it's like, "Oh, that's kind of like no pants." Well, like, that's kind of like just a thong, but blue, or like purple, or lilac.

I feel you've dedicated a lot of time to describing this accurately, which I appreciate. I'm a casual orthologist on the side. Um, I wanted to tell you about this. Can I, can I say something just on that before you move on? Because I think we sort of like, we're, we're trying to pretend things all the time, which, yes, men shouldn't be pigs. We can all agree on that. But in order to not be a pig, I first have to see your ass that you've shoved in my face, right? So I see it. I am then, after that, not a pig. But I see it, and it's there. And there's my brain isn't calibrated or designed or evolved. I mean, the sole purpose of our genes is to reproduce, right? How is that? You see what I'm saying?

Well, there is a female frame that's placed around this conversation specifically that I don't think fully, maybe go as far as to say, like sympathizes with the male brain reward system. There is an inbuilt reward system that men have for looking at sexually gratifying objects, even things like two rocks that look a bit like boobs, right? Right. What's the first thing a boy does when he gets a calculator? Boobs. Yep. Now, is that because of toxic masculinity, or is that because men evolved for millions of years throughout evolutionary history, including pre-mammalian animals, to seek the opposite sex? And the drive in males is just overwhelmingly strong. Now, once you have noticed that, how you act is where culture and society and civilizing men comes in, right? Just because you saw someone's eyes doesn't mean that you're allowed to go and stare at it or grab it or whatever. But you saw it. And you're not, it's, it's almost like it happens, and then you're like, "Okay, I need to [ __ ]." Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's how it works. Now, what do you want me to do about that? What are you supposed to do about that?

I'm open to suggestions. Blinkers. Blinders. Men. Big. Some people would be in favor of that. Big veil that goes over the top, right? Little bit of inside baseball for people who aren't familiar with what's going on in the podcasting world. And apparently, this one's slipped by you as well. Theo Von and other significant podcasters allegedly defrauded of approximately $4 million. And then calls out the fraudster in a video. In an unexpected turn of events, Colin Thompson, the man who was working under Cast Media and with Theo Von, is accused of orchestrating a fraud operation that cost Theo Von's podcast this past weekend, and potentially other podcasts, an estimated $4 million. Theo Von and his crew detected inconsistencies in their payments, which is when trouble started. Advertisers allegedly paid Colin Thompson and Cast Media directly, leaving Theo with less money than anticipated. And I know from my side of the fence that there are quite a few other podcasts that were with this particular company. And it seems like this gentleman has been living a good life, meanwhile, he's been robbing Peter to pay Paul to keep on cycling this through. Photos of Lamborghinis and nice houses, allegedly. And people aren't happy. And then Theo did a 10-minute video that said, "Sorry, brother, you messed with the wrong rat." And this video, I think within 24 hours, hit a million plays. Photos of the guy, all the rest of it. So ructions, ructions in the podcasting world.

I can't wait to be able to be defrauded of $4 million. That's my dream goal. To get to that position. [ __ ] yeah. You got to be careful, man. You got to be careful. That's why what we're building, Trigonometry, and we've got some big plans beyond just Trigonometry itself, is, you know, bringing cool people together, but doing it under our own steam, under our own umbrella, having everything managed by us with the right values and the right team. Uh, it's really important.

Yeah, for the people that don't know how podcast advertising works, it's, I handle almost all of my big partners as well directly. But a lot of the time, there'll be an agency that sits in between you and them. Invoicing is kind of hard. Oh, there's an IO, and did the deliverables get done? And how many numbers did that podcast hit? And so on and so forth. And also, who's advertising at the moment? Oh, there's a new company in town. Maybe we can increase the, the cost or the, the price that we're charging for this. All that, like, it's messy, and it's back and forth, and whatever, whatever, especially if you're doing a lot of little deals as opposed to how I have it, which is a small number of larger partners. And, yeah, you have these guys that sit in between you and them. Classic agency model. It's like a modeling agency, right? Like you have a model, there's your talent, you have clients that want models, and you take a bit off the top, take somewhere between 10 and 25%, depending on who the partner is and how big the deals are. But they hold the money. Like they get paid the money from the advertiser, and then less their cut, they'll pass it down to the podcaster. These podcasts are largely run, I mean, you'll get your YouTube AdSense revenue, which is not nothing, but [ __ ] hell, it's not what you're making from your proper partners. And, yeah, if I don't know, man. I mean, it's such a, it's obviously you can chase these people down for, like, "We're going to [ __ ] get in for fraud," but he's just going to declare bankruptcy or [ __ ] move to the Cayman Islands or whatever. So, yeah, I feel this is the first time that we've seen a big case like this, which is slap bang in the bullseye of the anal of of our world, right? It's the first time that this has happened, and it's kind of surprising it hasn't done before. But hopefully, it's a formative experience.

That's one other thing. If you want to [ __ ] some people over for $4 million, don't [ __ ] people over that have a combined reach of 20 million YouTube subscribers, you know what I mean? Absolutely. No, it's not a smart move. Uh, but look, I, I, I think we're sort of living through a wild, wild west of of the internet. I mean, actually, the wild, wild west of the internet is over. But the podcasting world, it's, it's very new. So there's going to be a lot of this [ __ ] going on. I imagine this isn't an isolated incident, actually. Um, so, yeah, I think we all got to be careful and smart about how the way we build, we build things that we build.

Rule Britannia, rule Britannia, rule Britannia. On, you're actually British, unlike me. I'm trying. Rule Britannia. At last night of the proms, hijacked by activists waving EU flags. The sight of hundreds of European Union flags has prompted an outrage from Brexiteers and a call for the BBC to investigate. Those waving the EU flag in the Royal Albert Hall appeared to outnumber those waving the Union flag at the event, which is usually a patriotic display. Following a campaign by pro-Europeans, the spectacle of so many EU flags being waved as the whole belted out Rule Britannia provoked disgust from leading Eurosceptics. What's going on?

I, I voted from the Guardian. I voted Remain in the referendum. And I've largely, I don't know if I've changed my view of that, how I would vote, but my view of that issue has evolved so much precisely by seeing these [ __ ] morons who just completely incapable of understanding what democracy means. Democracy means that when you lose, you accept it. There's some other parallels for that particular statement. When you lose, you accept it. And we've had for the last seven years, these just absolute [ __ ] lunatics running around acting like what democracy means is they always get their way. And they have to insert this into everything. They've just become obsessed. Uh, and it's, it's mind-boggling to me how, how we're still talking about Brexit. It's mind-boggling to me. I, I, I don't get it.

Yeah, that's insane. It's insane. That's like a 10-year-old's talking point now. I think if you were still talking about Brexit, your brain is broken.

When do you think that rule gets applied to COVID?

I think that with COVID, I actually said this before COVID was over, and it, in this instance, I get things wrong all the time, but this was something I turned out to be right, that people will want to forget very quickly, and they have done. Even, even I want to move on from COVID. We talked about it earlier, but I don't have any great desire to talk about it. Most people have moved on without learning the lessons of the thing. So I think the reason to still talk about COVID is that there is a future pandemic coming, and we ought to learn the lessons of this one while we still can. With Brexit, it's a political decision that is not reversible unless you have another referendum, which in which case you're free to campaign to have another referendum if that's what you'd like. I'm not sure showing up with EU flags at the proms is the way to achieve a second referendum. Just, I'm not a political expert. But there is a like a resurgence of activism occurring at the moment, but it's always in criticism of stuff. Yeah. So George Mack, one of my friends, highlighted that the last time that there was a ticker-tape parade for someone that wasn't healthcare professionals in America, for something not against something, was Nelson Mandela in the '90s. So you have a culture of activism and of public displays of passion. However, can only be against something, or people are only choosing to do it against something. And people respond to incentives. What, what's that, uh, saying? "Every great, every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." And there are many people in this country who made a career out of being prominent Remainers. And when Brexit was over, what are you going to do? So they just carry on. And the people they feed this crap, like having this crap fed to them, so they just, they keep going. It's, it's a, it's a reward incentive-based system because it's a pointless conversation. You're not going to change the result of the referendum. Even if you succeeded in proving the Brexit was a bad idea, it's already happened. So you can argue for a second referendum or another referendum if you want, but that's it, right? But talking about how [ __ ] Brexit is isn't about achieving a result beyond your own personal enrichment, satisfaction, status, etc. And, and, you know, Femi, this Marina Purkiss woman, there's a [ __ ] ton of these people on Twitter whose only thing that they do is talk about Brexit and get, you know, thousands and thousands of views.

It makes me sad to think about people who I know. There's like one incident that occurs, especially like public stuff, like some catastrophe or news story. Like people that are still talking about Madeleine McCann, do you know what I mean? Like, I understand [ __ ] terrible situation, but there are people whose entire lives, I mean, they are her parents. Uh, I once stepped [Laughter] into [ __ ] sake, constant. You were there. You left an open goal. It had to be. Yeah. You can take the comedian out of comedy. Um, I once descended, I got hit with the [ __ ] like blast radius of, um, these two investigative journalists. I had them on the show when The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann came out on Netflix. And these were the two main people, husband and wife. And I brought them on. I thought, [ __ ] hell, like, these are the two, these are the [ __ ] experts. These are the guys that Netflix went to. They must be like, [ __ ] legit. You, you brought them on. Turns out there is an ardent [ __ ] group of people who really do not like them on the internet. And I was a part of like, Madeleine McCann law for a couple of weeks because this guy has platformed these people that we know they're a part of the, like, whatever the [ __ ] cover-up scheme. And they didn't know the thing that went on. Do you haven't read the original police report from Portugal or wherever she was from? And it's, there's part of me that thinks, like, noble cause, you're chasing after it. There's part of me that thinks, holy [ __ ], you've been captured by this one thing. Like, this one incident has just completely controlled your life for forever. I mean, the one thing that doesn't get said often enough is, you know, there's a certain proportion of society that's not mentally well, massively overrepresented online. So I think a lot of people are just, you know, it's, it's an obsession of theirs or whatever. You don't get to see what's driving this. This is what I often think when I'm reading Twitter replies, 'cause I'm like, well, these people are like, you know, normal and right, and most of them are, of course they are. But like, you read something weird, and then I sort of like, go, "Okay, let's imagine what sort of circumstances I would have to be sitting in to write this." And then I see that picture and I go, "Okay, this makes sense." You know what I mean? Like when I see people saying really crazy [ __ ], I'm like, "So this, I, I just think what we forget sometimes is a lot of people are, you know, in that situation."

I was telling you about this preventative medicine place that I've been to in America. It's called Fountain Life. And I did a podcast with the founder forever ago and thought that sounds [ __ ] cool. Didn't really know what preventative medicine was, although it's kind of encapsulated in the name. And I ended up getting like everything done. Full body MRI, CT scan, heart angiogram, brain angiogram.

I need to do that, man. Full works. Yes. I will 100% link you in with them. One of the things they do, I think it's called contrast. Uh, so you're hooked up to an IV, which is like a mechanical IV. So when they press a button, just [ __ ] goes into you. So they've got you in the [ __ ] cannula or whatever it is, they've got the, the thing in there. And then there's this, this huge big wheel spinning around you unbelievably quickly. So you're kind of in an MRI machine, it's a little bit more open than this. Huge [ __ ] wheel that's obviously like scanning [ __ ]. And then this, they pump stuff from this machine into your vein, and it lights up your heart. It goes into the, um, ventricles of the heart while this thing's in a very specific position over you, blah, blah, blah. But the felt sense of it is heat starting in your neck and going only through your torso. Doesn't touch any of your limbs. Going only through your torso and finishing in like your bladder. And then it cools off around your bladder for about 20 seconds. It is one of the strangest [ __ ] experiences. It's not unpleasant. Strange. Not, I would definitely wouldn't even say it's that unpleasant, to be honest. [ __ ] it's like, must be what feeling like a dragon is like, just [ __ ] heat moving around inside of you. So yeah, that was very interesting. I can't wait. Preventative medicine, though. We were saying it before, playing a game where you try to catch up to a disease that's already happened by design is a losing fight, right?

Absolutely. No, I, I think that that seems to me to be the future of the direction that we're going. It's like looking into genetic predispositions. I know people who are having procedures because they know they have a certain risk, etc. You know, Chris Hemsworth found out on that Discovery documentary that he's got, I think he's got, um, genetic predisposition to Alzheimer's. So he's spending way more time with like his family and he's doing other things. He adjusted his entire life because I might not be able to remember this. Should learn.

A second language that's protective against Alzheimer's. People who speak multiple languages are much less likely to have it. Oh, I wonder which way the causal effect works. I don't know, but I imagine exercising your brain in multiple ways is helpful to protecting yourself against, like that.

Yeah, I, I don't know, man. You know, there's a multiplicity of, of, um, ideas about how we're supposed to live our lives. And in some regards, it's amazing, you know, the promise of free access to information, 24 hours a day, all of human civilization's knowledge at your fingertips. That combined with the falling away of the gatekeepers and this loss of trust in institutions actually makes for a really disquieting journey for a lot of people. Because who do I trust? "Do your own research." I've got a life to live. I've got to try and to the family and the kids and the house and the dog and the me. And you want me to, I've got to go and do my own, give me the medical journal. I'm going to go through this. Whether it's about health, are carbs good? Is sugar good? What about, should we be eating more butter? What about meat? Is meat killing me, or should I go vegan? What about paleo? Liver King says I need more testicle. Like, you know, and it's everything. And I'll see you and I'll raise you. Which is, what if the way for you to live your life that's optimal is different to mine? Right? My wife's very into aerobic medicine, and that's the entire concept of it. Is the different types of people that need different food, different, uh, different times that they eat. They all sorts of different things. Um, so a lot of it is experiential. Like, um, I, when I found out that you could just eat protein and greens, I was like, whoa, this is amazing. And that's what I do. I have carbs every now and again, but it, it fits how I am wired. And my wife's the exact opposite. She's water. She's wind. Wind. Yeah. You're fire. I'm fire. I'm, yeah, I'm fire. Is the lead for me. Anton. Anton's wind. Francis, water. Knew it. Bloody water. Pretty obvious. Bloody water. Yeah. Water is great if you can get it off the sofa. Then it, it's like a ball rolling down the hill. You can't stop it. It becomes unstoppable. But it's a hard. It takes a lot of fire to get water off the sofa. Yeah. I was fascinated. He taught me about this in, uh, in Austin when we, when we were hanging last time. I thought it was really fascinating. You taught me as well. Ambient water. Ambient, not refrigerated water. Should avoid drinking cold water. Yeah. Too much. Yeah. Yeah. Well, just that's, that's their way. Way. That's how they say it. And I'm by no means an expert. But generally, ingesting cold things is not good for you. Is, is what? Yogurt. Love yogurts so much though. They, you also not great, as I understand. I mean, look, I'm not supposed to eat red meat, and I eat mostly red meat. So, you know, you break the rules sometimes. Yeah. But no, I, I understand what you mean that different, different sort of strokes for different folks. But hell, like, even if there can be different strokes for different folks, I should be able to find a source that can. I'm this kind of a person, therefore I can do this kind of a thing. And this is where, if I was more conspiratorial, I would say that the goal of a messy information landscape is not to convince you of any one narrative, but to convince you that no narrative can be trusted. And it seems to me that if I was, maybe even a nefarious domestic actor wanting to make a sort of nihilistic, fatalistic, placid, not compliant, but just like surrendered populace. Well, you know, the rat electrification experiment, right? Where they put a rat in a, in a cell where the floor gives them an electric shock. And what they found was, um, in psychology, this is called, what's the term? Learned helplessness. Yes. This is the learned helplessness experiment. Where if the rat is able to end the electric shock by pressing a button, then the rat will continue to do that. If the rat has no control over the electric shock, it will just lie down and take it, right? So I think this, um, you, what you're talking about is a system that creates learned helplessness in people. Um, which is one of the reasons while, of course, it's super tempting to bash the mainstream media, and they deserve a lot of the bashing. We need an immediate ecosystem that's trusted. We do need politicians who can be trusted. I'm not happy with the status quo that we've got at the moment, where we trust no one, and with good reason. But the solution to that isn't to trust the mainstream. The solution is for the mainstream to become trustworthy. Yeah. Um, do you think that's even possible? I think it's very difficult in the modern environment. It's very, very difficult because, um, I just see that, us, we're running a small media organization. To you, you are too, right? It's like, do you get everything right? Do you, is your research always on point? You know, so it's very, very difficult. Interesting what you said earlier about, um, there are certain things that they're able to do that we're not, you know, like fact-checking and stuff. They're also, because of how they're incentivized and subsidized and the expectations, like non-sexy stories, you know, digging into weather and accounts and stuff. Tell me, which YouTube channel is going to predict tomorrow's weather? No one. Right? Not sexy enough. Too much of a cost to be able to do. And no one's saying the Met Office, they're captured by the woke. Although there was that thing this year, right? Where they made most of Europe look like it had turned to ash, because anything over 35 degrees Celsius meant that it was like the blackened end of a cigarette. So maybe there is a little bit of incredible, I mean, going on. Yeah. Well, there is a lot of going on. What's interesting is there's no, I find the climate issue absolutely fascinating. It's genuinely fascinating to me because the, the historical ignorance on that issue that is being deliberately spread is, is like mind-blowing to me. Do you know the Romans, when they occupied Britain, they grew grapes on Hadrian's Wall? Hadrian's Wall, for people listening, is what used to protect England from Scot, from what is now Scot, what is now England from what is now Scotland, right? One of the northernmost points on the British Isles. Um, now, if you don't know, Scotland's cold. It's average weather in, I used to live in Edinburgh for seven years. Average weather in Scotland in in August is like 18 degrees and rain at best, right? So, uh, the, what we are being told about that issue is absolutely mind-blowingly incredibly unhelpful and inaccurate. Wasn't the, I think it's still around somewhere in London or somewhere on the South Coast, 40 miles inland from the coast, there's ports, Pevy Castle? Yeah, Pevy Castle. You go there and they're like, yeah, the sea used to be here. I don't see the sea. 200,000 years ago. Yeah. So this whole conversation is very, very odd to me. And, uh, after my Oxford speech went viral, I, I had a lot of invitations to go and speak to different people. And I, I was talking to this guy who works for the Indian government at a high level. And he told me, when, when India became independent in 1947, average life expectancy was 37 years old in India. And today, it's, I think, 82. And that's because they burn fossil fuels. Now, are we saying to a billion-plus Indian people, they're not allowed to do that anymore? Do you know what I mean? Like, the way we talk about this issue, just, it, it, it's a cult. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any logical sense. The things that are being suggested that we do don't make any sense. The way we're approaching it doesn't make any sense. It's, it's incredible to me the way this conversation is being had. Um, and I, and I'd love to understand, you know, Eric, who you just had on, he always says this, like, we're lying about the climate for the wrong reasons. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's like, his point is, climate change is happening, and it's a serious issue, but we're lying about the way to deal with it. And lots of other things around it. Um, that's one of the most weird things to me about what's happening. Like Bjorn Lomborg, during that, oh my God, heatwave, we're all going to die, kept posting stuff about, you know, like, actually, the number of forest fires is the lowest it's ever been. Then the number of hurricanes in America is, etc., etc., etc. And I would love to know what's going on with that. I would love to know. Do you have any theories? Um, well, one thing that's interested me a lot is, obviously, people are familiar with the concept of groupthink. But there's another thing, which is, um, the Abilene Paradox. I don't know if you're familiar with it. It's basically the idea that people will often do things because they think other people want them done. Um, and you combine that with mass panic, indoctrinating kids into being terrified, etc. And I also think human beings love a doomsday narrative. And a portion of the sort of side that I've been arguing on, which is this anti-woke side, is like, the barbarians at the gates. Now, I genuinely think that's true. I think we are undermining the founding pillars of our civilization. But there is an appeal to that worldview. And if you look back, neither of us are old enough, but in the 1970s, the planet was cooling, and everybody was terrified of global cooling, terrified, terrified of the population bomb. Absolutely. Now we're terrified of the depopulation. It's, it's what we love. We love to think. And I think there's a kind of, like, we live in special times. Oh, like a mass solipsism. Yeah. Like, look, look, you know, the last 2,000 years, you know, has happened. And you know, you had Jesus and you had World War II and whatever. But now is the real time when has happened. You know, and who knows, maybe it is happening. Not on this issue, I don't think. But yeah, the idea that we are living through a climate catastrophe seems highly suspect to me. Highly suspect. But also somehow very sexy. Very sexy. Now, that's not to say the climate isn't changing. The climate is changing. But the question I think we also ought to be asking is, is the climate changing a bad thing? Well, climate-related deaths have decreased by 50 times over the last 100 years. That's Alex Epstein. Has he been on your? Yeah, we haven't had him on, but yes. Oh, dude, you, I mean, you guys would love him. I'm sure. Uh, he's an interesting dude. Yeah. Uh, climate-related deaths have decreased by 50 times. More people are killed by cold weather than hot weather. Yes. Way, way, way, way more. And we know that because this is the thing about the idea of pursuing net zero. It makes energy more expensive. That's the method by which you achieve this, to some extent. And, you know, pensioners freeze to death every winter in this country. Now, that doesn't seem like a good thing to me. I don't think making energy more expensive for poor elderly people and them freezing to death on their own in their homes in the winter. I don't think that's what, I don't think if we were setting out to improve the world, that would be one of the ways that we do that. But because we're trade-off denialists, because we refuse to understand that actions have consequences, good and bad, um, we ignore that. And this hysteria, it's cult-like. And it, it, I find it very strange. I find it very strange. Whatever you think about the climate issue in and of itself, our response to it is is strange. People are just looking for a cause. Yeah. Right. And this is why COVID was so captivating on both sides, because it gave us a righteous war to wage. Um, and again, when you've got a multiplicity of ways that you can go with your life, the man box has been blown open. Nobody says that you should be this to for masculinity. Maybe I don't even need to get into a relationship. I can just boss my way through the next however many decades of my life. Do all this sort of stuff. Ah, he's a single vector along which I can move. I'm no longer in an open field. I'm on a set of railway tracks. And yeah, you know, Peterson had the ordering chaos like paradigm out there. It feels like there's a hell of a lot of chaos and not a massive amount of order for people. And then the people that live in chaos land and prefer that, look at the people in order land as tyrants. And the people in order land look at the people in chaos land as vigilantes. And yeah, it doesn't surprise me, man. You know, and this is where I said to Eric, I wish that I'd got Eric to watch the Sam episode before he sat down with me, because it was difficult for me to portray a three-hour conversation in 20 seconds. But I don't think that those guys are too far apart. Like Eric's saying, we've lost faith in our institutions, but we can't get rid of them. Independent media is both advantageous and not going away. But we can't, like, outsource our sense-making to them as well. How do we live in this new world? What does success look like in this regard? I thought it was interesting. Look, I think we, we're living in this, this is a metaphor that is overused, but it's sort of the invention of the printing press kind of situation. That, I mean, that caused two centuries of religious war. So I think what, what the social media in particular and the internet more broadly has done, it has broken our ability to make sense of the world, and we are all reaching for a way to do that. I think it's going to take some time, um, and it's not going to be without consequence. Um, you know, and I, it's, it's interesting because the argument about free speech is made very complicated by the existence of social media. Because there are people who say they're free speech absolutists. I've never called myself that because I don't believe anyone is a free speech absolutist. What, what's your conception on free speech? Give me the, give me the framework. Well, think about this. So Elon Musk says he's a free speech absolutist. He buys Twitter, and then the moment people trigger his personal preferences, he shuts that particular form of conversation down. Right? When it was about children or something like that, right? Spreading something. It was, I think he said it about Alex Jones or whatever, right? Anyway, my point is, X, Twitter, whatever, has a moderation policy because it has to. It has to, because the technology is so powerful. This is the, I'll give you both sides of the argument, right? But the argument for moderation as content moderation is that the technology is so powerful. If you can start an assault on the capital, or an undermining of an election, or whatever it is, or a riot, or a mass shooting, or whatever, if you can start that from your phone, the technology is too powerful to be left uncontrolled. Um, and I have a lot of sympathy with that argument. However, let's flip it the other way around. You live in the United States now, a country for which I have a tremendous regard. The history and the formation of the country is very interesting because it, it, it creates a country that is fundamentally very different to every other country that's existed before. Do you get 1776 if there is Twitter and it's moderated? I don't think you do. Because who would allow a revolution to happen? You think King George would allow the spreading of misinformation, right? So we are stuck in this place where, on the one hand, yes, free speech is absolute and is really super important. On the other hand, actually, most people, it's very easy to be a free speech absolutist until you are in the hot seat making the decision. And imagine you are in the hot seat, and you've got the CIA, the FBI, the heads of government, whoever's your friends, coming to you and going, if you don't do something, people are going to get killed, and they are going to get killed, and that's on your conscience. It's up to you, right? So it's a very, very difficult thing with the power of the technology that we have, that has the ability to multiply information, narratives, opinions, whatever, to such an extent. So we have not worked out how to handle that at all. And everybody who says they have, they have a solution to it. I'd love to see them be in the hot seat for a day, and then we'll see how absolutist they are about free speech, or how pro-censorship they are. Because there's a flip side to the coin, which is, you do moderation, you're going to get accused of bias from both sides, right? So I don't have, no envy for those people. Now, I do think they've made a ton of mistakes. I'm just saying, I suspect I probably would have done too. Sam had an interesting analogy where he was saying, if I spend five years building up the Waking Up social media platform, and I want only Nazis to be allowed on it, I should be allowed to only have Nazis on my social media platform, or the inverse. I should be allowed to kick Nazis off. It's not my job to have people I don't want on my social media platform. And this comes back to the, like, is it the pipeline versus public service argument? I mean, there's a very strong counterargument to that argument, which is the one you've just made, which is once you've captured the entire market, you're a monopoly, and we regulate monopolies for a reason. Which is, uh, to be kicked off, to be kicked out of the local pub does not prevent you from going and having a drink in a pub. To be kicked off Twitter prevents you from communicating in that element of the public square. Has there been any, you know, there's usually concerns around monopoly. Has there been any of that to do with online platforms? Is there such a big, as such a thing as too big of an online platform? Like Facebook and TikTok and YouTube, of like, you know, large portions of the planet as users? So this is a new category in that regard. Absolutely. The banks got so big that they needed to be split up. You take large things and make them into smaller things, right? But you can't, not with this, because no one wants to be on the third best Twitter. Nobody wants to use the third best Google, right? You do it, you split them off, and then everyone just converges back on, which the monopoly is what makes it valuable. The fact that it's on there is what makes it valuable. That's why Elon Musk bought Twitter rather than building his own from scratch, because he has the money to build his own Twitter, but you just can't drag people over enough. So the monopoly is the point. This is why it's such a tricky thing. A new category, yeah, of business. That's it. That's why it's the point with sort of frictionless gravitation toward whichever thing you want to choose to use. People will always converge on the biggest, the best, the whatever one. Whereas, yeah, if Gymshark gets two and a half billion users or customers, they say you need to split up into Jim and Shark, right? Or Lloyds and TSB. It's not quite the same. You don't have, not everyone's going to converge on this particular one. It's interesting. Um, one of the analogies I used to use from my nightclub days, and Twitter's kind of like this in nightlife events, is one of the only industries where the other users of the product are the primary value of the product itself. So if you ask one of your friends, on you, in your 20s, mate, how was last night? And they'll say, mate, it was amazing, so many girls in that club. Go, hang on, I asked you how your night was. I didn't ask who were the other people that went to the event. You know, you don't say, why do I use an iPhone? I use an iPhone because David Beckham's got an iPhone. So I use an iPhone because the camera and the apps and battery life and stuff like that. But nightlife was very, very interesting in that way, which is why it was so mimetic. The same reason why, like, I'll open this up to you, internet. Some industry secrets here. Sometimes nightclubs hold queues, and sometimes they make their queues thinner than they need to be, so they look really long, and then they take a photo because it looks like it was busy. And we did that. We did that all the time. We still do. Freshers' Week next week in Newcastle. It's exactly what every single nightclub will do. But you have that same thing with regards to the social media as well. The other users of social media largely determine your experience on it. Which is why, you know, Rumble is this, and Truth Social is whatever. Is there a left-leaning? Is there a left? Well, they had one, Mastodon, didn't they? I don't know what's happened to it, which tells you quite a lot. Speaking of Mastodon, I had a guy called Ben Lamb on the show. He's the CEO of this company called Colossal. He is using ancient genetic information to bring the woolly mammoth back to life. Within 20 years, we will have actual woolly mammoths walking on this planet. So they've found in the Arctic, very good for preserving DNA, they found bones and all sorts of other stuff, mammoth carcass remains. From that, they've taken, I think it's maybe 40 or 50 different, because you don't get a full DNA sequence in any one of them. Then they've brought them all together, used AI to fill in the little gaps. They're then going to implant a, whatever it's called, stem cell, pluripotent stem cell, inside of the Asian elephant. So an Asian elephant will give birth to a woolly mammoth. And then after a sufficiently long amount of time, they'll get placed up north, and they can do all sorts of awesome stuff for helping to fertilize the Arctic. And he also wants to bring back the dodo bird. The interesting reason he wanted to bring back the dodo bird was the reason that the dodo bird was killed off was because of unsustainable hunting practices. So you'd think that the mammoth has like a real function, right? The dodo bird, kind people laugh at it for being this stupid pigeon that couldn't fly away. But maybe it was because of the introduction of a particular, a particular like predator or whatever. Yeah, it might have been like ecological imbalance that was done by man-made. And his point is, mammoth does a thing. It's like the farmer of the Arctic. Dodo bird is like a symbolic representation of, do you see all of the work that we had to go to to bring this thing back to life? Be more careful when you introduce invasive species into different, different ecologies. I was like, hell. And he's super fired up about it. I found him really charming. So I had a conversation with him the other day. I thought that was cool. So they're going to bring back prehistoric animals. I think I remember seeing a movie about that. Yeah. I did say, you know, how far back can we go? Real problem. Bones, bones and teeth don't hold much genetic information, which is a massive shame. But we can do stuff like saber-tooth tigers, like particular types of saber-tooth cats. Um, I was asking him what else did he want to bring back. There was this huge sloth, this massive thing. It was like the largest marsupial or some. They lived like on an island where there were no predators, I think. So yeah, this gigantic sloth. So there's like a laundry list of different ridiculous megafauna, prehistoric animals, extinct animals that he wants to bring back. I just thought like, between that and preventative medicine and AI, and what are your thoughts on AI? How are you feeling? Are you, scared that you're going to lose your job to GPT-6? Or I'm not scared I'm going to lose my job. No. Um, it's going to make a very significant impact on the world. But what that's going to end up looking like, I don't think anyone really knows. Um, I think there's probably, there's a lot of fear porn about it, and it may be justified. It may be. I don't have any profound thoughts about it. I think, um, if you look at human history, people always use technology for basically the same things, right? Getting laid, killing each other, etc. Right? So you'll produce amazing porn, you'll produce amazing weapons, you'll produce amazing everything. And then human beings are going to do what they always do, I think, is the truth. Right? Um, like I remember, I think it was Desmond Morris. I used to read a lot of his books. I don't know if you're familiar with them. But it's one of the things he talked about. He said, like, when you dig up a clay tablet in Egypt from, you know, 4,000 years ago, you read it, it's basically the same shit that we talk about now. You know, my son doesn't call, doesn't write to me, or doesn't visit me, or whatever. It's, you know, the human condition doesn't change. The tools we use to express it do. I saw a report from an ancient stone tablet from, I think Egypt or ancient Rome, that was a justification for why this employee hadn't turned up to work. It was a sick note that he'd written, and it's this elaborate story about what happened, and the wife, and there was the catastrophe, and all this stuff. And yeah, you do realize that human nature is pretty resilient over a long enough period of time. But coming back, here's another thing I'll say about the free speech conversation, which is that we haven't made nearly an honest enough case about free speech, which is why we're having a stupid debate about it. Because no one wants to say the truth, which is, free speech has consequences that are bad. But like, there are people who say atrocious, horrific shit. There are people who will use the opportunity to be on a social platform to mobilize and do terrible things. Um, now, there's a big conversation now about whether there's a lot of anti-Semitism on X. And actually, there is. There is. I have to block more people than I used to have to block on Twitter. But I am still in favor of that being allowed out. Because I'd much rather these people were in the open, and people could see what they are, and they can have their conversation, instead of going off into a kind of like a private place where it's just them and the arguments are never challenged. So I think one of the things people don't say enough about free speech is, yes, it causes harm, but the harm's worth it. And, uh, we don't make that argument because it's too honest and, you know, complicated and unpleasant and whatever. But the other side of the argument is terrifying to me. I don't think I've told the story publicly, but last time I did Question Time, Question Time is this big discussion, political discussion program here in the UK. Before they do the show, they do a warm-up question that's not recorded and it's not released, so it's like a warm-up. And the conversation at that time was, Donald Trump had just been unbanned on Facebook, and they were asking whether that was okay. And they went to me first, and I was like, look, not that I'm his biggest fan, but I do think the former or sitting president of the United States should be able to speak in public. Yeah, I do. Controversial as that is. And then they went around the table and whatever. And then they went to the Labour woman who was there, very nice woman. And she, without batting an eyelid, went, I think we should have the safest internet in the world. And what's safer than North Korea? Right? This is coming back to this point about trade-off denialism. Like they think safety doesn't have a price. And the other argument is freedom doesn't have a price. And the truth is, they both have a price. And what we're trying to find is the right point in the middle between those two. We want enough freedom and enough safety. And that line is somewhere in the middle. Because if you think about it, that's true of any issue. I can end murder outside of the prison system today. I can stop murder. Wouldn't do you and rape. Do you want to stop murder and rape? Yes. Okay, let's lock up all men between the ages of 15 and 40 until they age out of it. You've ended murder, right? But we don't do that. Why not? Because there's a trade-off between safety and freedom. And so it's the same of everything. And it's the same with free speech. You mentioned Trump. What do you think happens in 2024? I, I'm not an expert on it. But, um, it looks like they're going to try and put him in prison. And it also looks like he might win. Is that possible? Yeah. Can both things happen? Can you be president from prison? Yeah. You can be president from prison. Yeah. Off you can't be president from prison. Look it up. You can be president from prison. Oh my God. And you can run from prison. More interestingly, I wonder, maybe, maybe if you are, I don't know, maybe you can't be president. You can definitely run from prison. Maybe you get elected and pardon yourself, right? So you're okay. Let's say, let's say that there's no prison. What, what happens? Presuming that everybody is a. But why would we presume that? I mean, I think it's pretty clear that that's what's going to happen. Okay. It's the path that they're on. It looks to me like they're going after him. We just had Scott Adams on the show. And this is, he said Trump needs to win to stay out of prison. That's what he thinks. And I also think the other thing he said is like, he actually, interestingly, said that he thinks Trump started this because when he talked about Hillary and he said, I'm going to lock you up, they were like, oh, oh, you want to play? Let's play. So I think they're going after him now, and they want to put him in prison, and I think they will. But you also think that he, I think he'll win the nomination for the Republicans. Yeah. And then it's, I mean, who the hell? Look at the last election. Who the hell knows what's going to happen? But he can run from prison. That much I know. That's insane. Vivek Ramaswamy playing tennis with his top off whilst Trump's in prison as the Trump-Ramaswamy 2024 thing. Looks like what it's going to be, right? I think that's what Vivek's going for. Yeah, he's angling for it, for sure. Yeah. And who do you think gets nominated for the Democrats? Well, he's got, he's going to be Biden, isn't it? I mean, they're not going to abandon him unless what, he falls down a flight of stairs. Yeah. And in his case, it wouldn't even be a conspiracy. It's just, who do you think is the running mate? Any idea? No, man. Look, let's be honest, neither of us is an, well, although you are now an adopted American, so you probably an immigrant to that great nation. I know even less than you. Yeah. Uh, you know, I try, the more I, the more people listen to what I say, the less I try and talk about things I don't know enough about. I mean, that was a Douglas Murray thing. He was someone had asked him about two years ago, had asked him why he hadn't written many articles. He writes like four or five columns a week, it's like 3,000, 4,000 words every week, and then his books, and then his speaking on top. Someone had asked him something along the lines of, why haven't you commented that much on COVID? He says, I'm going to do something which is very rare in the modern world, which is to not comment on something which I know nothing about. And I thought, what a beautiful and outlier philosophy to have. But this is, you know, I see this, I see this allure in myself, and, you know, I have to check myself, and probably fail almost all the time at doing it. Uh, people start to listen to you about a thing or for a thing, and you go, well, why shouldn't I comment on the Ukraine? Maybe my, maybe my take on the Ukraine is useful. Maybe, maybe the world does deserve to hear what my thoughts are about immigration crossing the channel. And then you realize, I mean, I've commented on both those things. But you are from the region of the Ukraine, and immigrants to the UK. Yeah, right. That's a lived experience. Yes, exactly. I know exactly what you mean. Your point is very, very, very valid. It happens with comedians, incidentally, which is why comedians' political opinions, generally speaking, are so demented. Because you stand on stage all day making other people throw their head back and admire you, right? Or be enthralled by you, or whatever. And you're like, oh, maybe I do know something. Let me give you my opinion about Brexit. It's like, no, no, just be the clown. Shut the up. Now, that's why I don't do comedy, actually. It's one of the reasons. It's like, I always was, I was more interested in making a point than I was in being artificially funny, you know what I mean? Um, and I always thought of myself more as a satirist anyway, which was a different thing. But yeah, uh, being in front of a microphone use you with a level of confidence that is very often inappropriate. It's like permanently being on, uh, oratorial Viagra. If everyone's listening to me, I must be worth listening to. That's what happens in your brain, regardless of what it is that I'm talking about, regardless of the format or the, yeah. I've got these live shows coming up toward the end of the year, mid-November. That's awesome. Thank you. What's your advice for someone who's touring comic, played thousands of shows across your career? What do people who haven't put that time in on stage not know about how being on stage works? This is going to sound like a shit answer, but actually, it's stage time is just like air miles on the clock. Like with a pilot, you have to fly a certain number of miles. Um, but you know, I always think about, you know, whatever charisma, whatever else it is, is really about a comfort with yourself in front of other people. If you're, and not everyone is equally charismatic naturally, but if you're comfortable with who you are, and you are able to do that while you're on stage or in front of a camera or wherever, that's, that's the magic ingredient. It's like my favorite quote is, the most important thing in show business is authenticity. If you can fake that, you can do anything, right? Authenticity is the key ingredient, which is why I think you've been successful. I think it's why Joe's successful. I think it's why Francis and I have had the success we've had. It's, I almost feel, I don't know if you feel this, but the longer we go, it's like the more layers of the onion we peel off to reveal more of who we truly are. Yeah, I would say so. Because you become more comfortable with things that you masked over before. Yes. There's, you know, uncertainty or like nerdiness, I suppose, like unnecessary rabbit holes that you want to go down. And I've never had this before, obviously you had this, and you may have had it before comedy, I don't know. But I never had a single pursuit that I got to go as narrow and deep on as I have on having conversations with people. And when you really, really start to drill down into, okay, what does mastery begin to look like, which I'm not at, but I can glimpse. I'm like, okay, what does that actually look like? What does that feel like? What does it look like to make rules and then break rules and then put them back in again and do things? I'm talking to some of the guys now, I want to start doing slightly more scripted bits as a part of maybe some of our ad reads, as a part of maybe some of the intros. And that's like, if you actually look at that, that's a very inauthentic way of doing what is supposed to be an unbelievably authentic, relatable medium. We're taking the rules from, you know, like sitcom legacy media to try and apply that to this. But I actually think that that's breaking rules that have been made. And the reason you can is because you've learned them unbelievably well, right? It's not not knowing the rules, it's disregarding them purposefully. Yes. And I'm just excited by all of the different options and opportunities and and ways that there's stuff to do. And it's awesome to see what you guys are doing at Trigonometry. The, what I know about what's coming that more people will find out at some point over the next however long is amazing. I think that the UK needs a nice movement, a good conglomeration headed by people who understand this industry, that can be a platform for others who have amazing and interesting things to say but don't yet have the platform that they deserve to be able to say them on. Well, this is what we've been working on for a long time. And I, I can't quite say exactly the people involved other than to say they're going to be awesome. Uh, but we want to use the platform that we've built, uh, to make it so that Trigonometry is the main show on that platform. But there will be other shows with other people, and me and Francis interspersed with other interesting, funny, hilarious, clever commentators, etc. So rather than, you know, two Trigonometry interviews a week and some raw shows and a bunch of, we've started doing a lot of scripted stuff ourselves, comedy. You know, my, I often record my Substack pieces now, and we put them out as videos. We had a couple of really viral ones. One I did about communism and fascism. That you do one about Jordan Peterson recently. Did you? Yeah, yeah, that one's done very well, surprisingly. Um, yeah, so, but also we want to start thinking about how, you know, I'm thinking about us now as a media organization. That's my frame for what we're doing. Want to bring other people through, help them make exciting content that fits with the values of what we do, that's going to be entertaining for our audience, that's going to be informative, and grow it over time into a real hub for awesome content. Uh, that to me is super exciting next phase with this, because I think the media industry, that we are in, the new media industry, is going to change rapidly. And one of the things I see coming down the pipe quite quickly, actually, is consolidation. This idea that you're going to give five quid a month to your favorite 70 creators, it's not going to happen. The admin alone will kill you. So people are going to want a place. And, you know, obviously our politics are very different, but the model of The Daily Wire is, I mean, they've executed it incredibly well. Went to go and see them, I filmed on Brett Cooper's show four or five months ago, something like that. Yeah. And, dude, it's a, it's a machine workshop for creating content. Over there's the merch team, all they do is make tumblers and designs for t-shirts. Here's an entire 3x10 row of editors, all working away, millions of meeting rooms. And here's an entire different building with everyone's studio. And, oh, here's a control center that allows us to edit anything at any time. And I found this out, I'll check that this is okay to say. Shapiro has got some special landline thing, some special type of connection that runs from where he is in Florida to where the hub is in Nashville, that allows them to cut his show live as if they were on site. Wow. I didn't know that. And I've been in that studio a couple of times now in Florida. Well, I've, so I haven't been to that one, but I've been to the pipeline where that ends up at. Yeah, yeah, been there too. It's impressive. It's very impressive. What they build. Say what you want, say what you want. But here's, here's an interesting thing for you. Two, two analogous stories that I'm sure that you've thought about before. The sort of slow dilution or explosion of The Young Turks and Crowder, Daily Wire. That in a, you know, you're talking about congealing or bringing together. Meanwhile, a lot of the groups and affiliations and organizations, you know, IDW largely disbanded. That was like a loose affiliation, that wasn't an organization, though. Loose affiliation of people. Young Turks, you know, you say the wrong thing slightly, and downstream from that, some people on the network don't agree with other things that you've said. You know, like Ben Shapiro was Crowder's first ever lawyer or something. And then, you know, they've split off. And the big conservative, and it turns out that he bought the URL only a couple of months after they spoke, but months before he announced that he recorded these phone calls and all this sort of shit. So I think that sometimes we're too quick to try and patent match stuff. And it's like, oh, all organizations devolve into, you know, fractured individual like groups or whatever. Or all, you know, power becomes centralized into one thing. It's like, maybe it's just flux. Maybe it's just tides. You know, maybe there's like ebb and flows and stuff happening. Well, look, I think you're going to be able to continue to do what you do, uh, whichever way you want to do it. I'm interested in bringing, uh, people through who are very talented, but who basically, what we had to do with Trigonometry, and one of the reasons I haven't made their few money, is that we have a big team, as you do. But we have, we've always had a big team because we wanted to create the foundation for what we're about to do. Um, and so Francis and I really don't make a lot of money from it because we're investing in the future. And what I want to do is, we've kind of created a factory for making content. I want to bring people in who don't want to build their own factory, but who are very good as creators of making content. Yes, exactly. I mean, Carl Benjamin, Lo, he's done that. Spanked it. He's doing very well. They're playing a game of Monopoly around the transport police somewhere in the country. And it's like they're slowly taking up the, the transport people have got the corner office and got all of the ones on either side. Apparently, one of the guys was telling me that he had some incident that had occurred at the railway line. He had some sort of stalker that followed him at the railway line. And because it happened at the train station, the transport police had to pick up on it. And he rang them, and the guy rang him back, and he could hear him through the wall. He said, mate, should I just come through? Opened the door and was talking to the guy that was dealing with his case. Like, hell, that's interesting. But yeah, you know, this, it's cool, man. It's cool. And feels way more cool to see it happen from grassroots where you can watch episode one of some show.

You with terrible lighting and [ __ ] audio all over the place and no one knows what they're doing. Ugly host, ugly H. Yeah, that hasn't changed. And then you work to the stage where you're like, holy [ __ ]! Like, I can actually see the full trajectory of this entire thing laid out in front of me. As opposed to like, oh [ __ ], Rupert Murdoch and is it Shady M, shade face, invested a nameless [ __ ] like hooded figures drinking Adrena Chrome dancing around a pentagram. Yeah, yeah, that's where we want to go. I understand.

No, but closing, uh, closing the loop on all of that. I, I just think this is the next phase in terms of what we started with, which is, let's stop whining about how we've been canceled. You know, I think it's, it's a thing of mine was like, we keep saying, well, the mainstream media isn't doing this, then, well, let's [ __ ] do it then. Make your own mainstream media. If, if you think that they're doing it wrong, let's [ __ ] do it right. Let's do it, uh, and let's see who wins. That's the thing for me is like, I love the competition. I love, uh, attempting to build new things. The creating, the challenge of that, working out how to run a business with [ __ ] immigrant mentality, man. Man, to me, this is the most exciting thing. You know, we were talking with good friends of mine last night about how much money you need to be happy. And I was like, and, and somebody said that the statistic are $70,000 a year, maybe it's in like $29, but whatever, beyond that point, it doesn't really make any difference. And I was like, well, for me, it does make a big difference. And then I thought, you know what? What if I made a million dollars a year, which is way more than I make now, but I wasn't having the experience of growing, working with my friends, all of that? And then I was like, actually, yeah, I don't think it is the money. It's the, it's the doing it. It's the creating. It's the building. This is why of all the people that I love to watch, I love Dana White interviews. I was about to bring up Dana White. [ __ ] I just, I cannot wait to interview him. It's, you got him in America. Uh, we are working on it. So he's basically, he's open to it, but it's just about finding the right time, as you can imagine, he's a busy guy. Yeah.

Um, I [ __ ] love that guy. I love listening to that guy. I love the way he dealt with COVID. I love everything about it. You've seen that clip, it went super viral a couple of times where he says, bet against me. [ __ ] can bet against me. Tell me it's not going to work. I love that [ __ ]. Every single time, man. Like that energy. I'm the same. I really, really enjoy it. And I think that it's missing. I think that there's not enough like conquerors in the world of personal development and business. There is from a performative level, but I don't look at Dana White and think that he's saying what he thinks sounds cool for people to hear. No, I think he's speaking his philosophy forward. Yes, which is one of, stand on this hill, come and have a swing. Yes. Yes. And, uh, I've always been like incredibly competitive. I thrive on it. I love it. Um, and look, one of the things, by the way, you've taught me, I will say this, is you were the first British podcaster who was in our space who, when I've met, has been from a who had a growth mindset. Which is why I said when we first started, how unsurprised I am by the amazing success you're having, because you've always had that attitude and it shows. And that's why you're successful. And that's why you're friends with everyone in the industry. You know, I, I just, um, I think it's a natural con. Your success is not an accident, is what I'm saying at all. It's a natural consequence of the person that you are. And Dana White inspires me in the way that I'm inspired by your success as well, because it's just like, this is a guy who got his friends together, they bought this thing for $2 million or whatever it was, at some point there were 30 something million in the hole, and they just kept going until they crushed. And there's a lot of other things that they do very well. I think as a, if you just switch on the G, the fights on a Saturday night, you wouldn't see, but they, they make it entertainment. They make reality TV shows out of the content. They, the, the way they present the fights is like very well organized and it's beautifully sharp. Think about it this way. Think about what if you watch boxing now, how [ __ ] pedestrian, unnecessarily ceremonial it seems. This [ __ ] guy carries out a and does' cap and [ __ ] a list of 50 people who've donated money to this thing. We are here in the presence of the, the by the Nevada state and the, this, this, this. You're like, no [ __ ], just tell me the fight. Yeah, show me the fight. Give me the tail of the tape. Get me amped up. Let them punch each other. And also, uh, what they've done incredibly well is with boxing, no one gives a [ __ ] about anyone on the undercard or the card. They just care about the headline fight. Yep. Uh, UFC, the headline fight may very often isn't the best fight that actually happens on the night. They will be the best fighters on the night, but it won't be the best fight. So fight of the night will, I would guess, only maybe 30% of the time go to the main car. Yeah. And it's just, they, they, and therefore they are building up other talent. This is what we're talking about with what we're doing. They're building up talent who are not the headline fighters, but you're seeing them from an early start and you follow them and you're like, oh, this person is getting better and they're fighting this guy and whatever. So just from a business perspective, I am so inspired by that attitude. I think it, I love it. And I think we're probably going down very different paths in that you've gone to America where that attitude is prevalent. I'd love to take it. Every time I go to America, I come away buzzing, but I'd love to bring more of that [ __ ] here. That's how I see our future. Sat next to opposite Steven Bartlett yesterday and said, if I could gift the UK anything, it would be enthusiasm. Yeah. You know, there's just so much enthusiasm in America. And there's [ __ ], there's also stuff that they're super [ __ ] at and I wish has, I wish that I wish I could take some of Britain to America as well.

I went to LA, man. I spent three days in LA sort of in the kind of like entertainment world, you know, doing Bill Maher and stuff around that. That is a different [ __ ] world, my friend. How so? Oh, it's, I am not a religious person, not yet anyway, but when I was there, I was like, I can see why people need religion. This place needs God. It [ __ ] does. I'm serious, man. Like the way people think about other people, like if all you have is your success, if your value derives from your status and success, whoo, that gets dark quickly. Woah, that gets dark quickly. [ __ ] disposable objects. Every, oh man, it's [ __ ]. The way the way see people see each other is there's no humanity there. It's just like, you're an object for, for what I'm trying to get to. Um, and that was eye-opening to me. It made it, Hollywood makes sense to me now. The movies they put out make sense to me now that I've been there. A lot of it makes sense in a way that I'd never realized. See, I never realized how powerful Hollywood is at shaping our idea of what reality is because the movies, like we, in Britain, we think we understand America, right? Because we watch their their content. That's why. But that's not the reality of America at all. And the more you travel around America, the more you are confronted by that fact. You know, the more time I spend in the US, it, it makes it, makes me more right-wing in the, in the American conception of like states rights, because I'm going, there's no, I, I had a fly from Salt Lake City to LA and you get on the plane in Salt Lake City and you arrive in LA, which is not that far, and you go, these are different [ __ ]. These aren't just different countries, these are different worlds. Different religion, different people, different way of thinking, different philosophy, different culture, different everything. And the values are completely different. Um, you know, America is an incredible place. Um, I'm really enthused by it. And there's also tradeoffs to, to some of the way that people are there as well. So it's, and it's actually, you know, we talked about masculinity and femininity, and I think, um, I actually know what people mean when they talk about toxic masculinity and toxic femininity, which is you need both. You want to be thinking about it as raising both bars at the same time. If you want to be a good leader, for example, right? You need to be strong and you need to be able to say the thing that people don't want to hear and make yourself say the thing that you don't want to say because you don't want to upset people. And other hand, you also need empathy and compassion too. Like you want to be raising both up. And I see that in the same way as culturally, I want to take the best of the US stuff and the best of the British stuff and meld it together into into something really exciting. [ __ ] yeah.

Constantin, kissing ladies and gentlemen, where should people go? They want to keep up to date with your stuff. Uh, the, the best place to find my work is Trigonometry, of course, on YouTube and the podcast. And I write on Substack, which has got really blown up at the moment. Uh, I'm excited about that as well. So on Twitter, you know, Constantin Kitchen everywhere. Hell yeah.

Constantin, I appreciate you. Appreciate you, my brother. Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode with Constantin, then press here for the full length, three-hour conversation I had with Eric Weinstein.