The Political Earthquake That No One Is Ready For - Konstantin Kisin (4K)

so are you right-wing no I'm still not rightwing I think you're referring to an article in in a video I did saying the title of which was fine call me rightwing and it's basically just me saying I'm tired of like defending myself against this allegation um still not rightwing but if if it's it's really important for people to frame me in that way that's that's fine they can do it why is rightwing a disparaging uh marker I think we the political realm in which we operate is the framing is I think deep down if people are honest it's like the the caricature of the left is that they're wrong but well-meaning and of the right is that they're like factually more correct but evil callous callous and evil and cruel and nasty um and so even if you're right you're still wrong kind of that that's kind of the the way people seem toally morally wrong exactly um and I think that that's why that's what I not right because my journey into all of this world as you know was like Hey guys maybe free speech is quite important oh right wing I was like what and and then I just gradually discovered that you know thinking that you should be allowed to speak freely makes you rightwing which when I was in my early 20s you know George Carlin and Bill Hicks these were my heroes when I was growing up these great comedians who were getting arrested like George Carlin for routine like the seven words you can't say on TV or whatever whatever it was so um that flipped without me realizing that it happened it was a leftwing thing or maybe Universal thing um and then it became a right-wing thing then you know thinking your country is not all bad became right-wing uh and we can go down the list of all of those things so I just I think that it's basically what a lot of people call you if what they want to do is discredit the things that you're saying because they don't actually have a counterargument to what it is that you're saying and we can't really be fully aware of somebody's intentions so castigating lambasting the uh moral Foundation that it's based on saying oh it's coming from a place of judgment or impoliteness or uncouthness or callousness or whatever is kind of a easy slime to throw at someone maybe yeah and and it it makes people question people's motives and we a lot of people find people's motives more interesting than the results of the things that they're advocating so if you go and you know try to create this beautiful Utopia in which everyone's equal and you end up killing 50 million people in the process well you know that wasn't real communism you you were just you were well intentioned but you didn't quite live up to the ideals of this great philosophy whereas if you actually do things that work but you have the wrong intentions or you're bad person then people don't seem as interested in that and I find that quite an interesting thing because I was in hunger earlier this year and they have a very actually right-wing government uh under Victor Orban and one of the things that I I found out is they were very keen to deal with abortion in some way uh they wanted to reduce the number of abortions in Hungary but they looked around the world and they realized that abortion as a political issue doesn't work it's it's an issue that actually loses votes for the right even if people tend to agree with the position somehow it still ends up being a vote loser and it's a bad thing to do so what they've been doing you probably know is pursuing very pro- family policies more generally if you have X number of kids you get this tax break if you have this number of kids if you have three kids the woman never pays income tax again for the rest of her life exactly and what they've found is without actually legislating much about abortion they've reduced the number of abortions in half simply by pursuing policies that make families more appealing for people to have isn't that interesting uh creating a posit vision for the thing you want as opposed to a negative Vision against the thing you don't want exactly that's like that's seems a very upside down sort of world we just come out of the uh US presidential election campaign and in that so many you know whatever the most effective political ad of the last few decades was we are not that it was mostly about we are not that yeah Donald Trump is for you but the entire thing was Kamala Harris is doing this trans surgeries for immigrants and documented etc etc we are not that the identifi the The Binding Together of an ingroup over the mutual othering of an out group and um I understand that it's effective it's maybe even more Salient to humans to go like well that's a threat that's something that's not right something to avoid maybe it even does bind us together more effectively but it doesn't feel like a particularly hopeful View for the world and uh yeah I wonder if I wonder if that can be adjusted a little bit and we can have a little bit more sort of upward Vision as opposed to kind of backward defense against other things well I think if you look at the two campaigns that we just saw I actually thought that you know we went to the na Nazi rally in in Madison yeah uh well we were kind of there in just like let's see what's going on here capacity rather than joining in with the with the salutes um I would say actually if you dig down into the core of the of the Trump campaign its me message is actually very positive I would argue uh which were the make America great again thing and and what we saw at the rally too it was really about um people who love their country and wanted to be successful that's what I saw there when I looked at the Harris campaign or the way that she conducted interviews or the way she responded to challenging questions that was all entirely pivoting to how evil and wrong and bad Trump is so by the end of the campaign I didn't think many people knew what she stood for for whereas with Trump at least look the the political side of like these are the bad guys we're not like them that's always going to be part of politics but actually I did think I came away from the to my great surprise actually very relieved that Trump did win um and very hopeful for the world as a result which uh is not a position I thought I would be in before the election actually but I think going to that rally really changed my mind about a a lot of this you introduced me a long time ago not introduced me to Thomas soul but certainly kind of uh repop popularized some of those ideas uh and one of the ones I wanted to bring up is something I heard you say recently we've replaced things that work with things that sound good uh this sort of optimizing for Optics over outcomes maybe you could say something like that dig into that a little bit more for me why is that a Salient quote in the modern world well he what his quote about that Thomas s's quote about that is that's the history of of the modern west of the last 30 or 40 years and I think it's universally true I mean we're sitting here in London for example where the Mantra is you know diversity is our strength and and the more it's evident that that has flaws in it the more we double down on on the statement right so um a lot of this is uh sloganeering versus reality and I think it's really been Amplified by social media to a great extent because I think um things that are not possible in the real world are possible online online you're an avatar which can change its sex it can change it's uh everything about it you can be effectively whoever you want to be on not you make statements that are never stress tested correct uh they're they're tested only by whether they get likes or they don't get likes and you see this on the left and the right there there are things both the far left and the far right will say that are absolutely not in any way related to the truth but they are very appealing to people's uh feelings and so uh they'll do that look the reality is the truth is very unpopular and always has been because the truth is messy unpleasant complicated the truth probably doesn't agree with you on a lot of things uh just necessarily because um it's not going to fit exactly to the worldview that you have uh so it's very unpleasant uh and it's much easier to engage and sloganeering for for yourself as well as for society there's a HL Ming quote something about uh simple answers to complex problems are often wrong that it would be nice if we could constrain down a lot of the issues that we're seeing to something that kind of wrangles the chaos into order but I don't know uh the chasing for Simplicity to me just a lot of the time seems to be retrofitting a new problem to an old solution that you've had for a long time everything is because of dot dot dot and this again happens on both sides yeah and I and I think U usually the the easiest Telltale sign of uh working out that someone's full of is if they have a simple single explanation for all the problems that they identify um and they're not willing to recognize the trade-offs in in in these situations so I think um in answer to your question why is this happening even more so now I just think we live in a world where we're much more governed by emotion and feeling than we are by the hard you know I'm reading um Churchill's Diaries of World War II right now and it's funny to the extent to which the stuff that he clearly takes for granted in describing things um is now would now be completely abhorent to our to our sensibilities well for example one thing I actually didn't know was you know the evacuation of the British expeditionary force from Dunkirk people would have seen the movie that only was possible because uh there was a a unit at Cal which is further south of dunker um which was basically ordered to stand to the death so we like we're going to sacrifice all these people they're going to die so we can save these people and they did and they did wow do you know how many people died I don't know but they they fought almost to the death then they pulled out the commanding officer they gave him a direct order you have to get on this boat and leave and leave your men behind cuz we're going to need you later and then they allowed the the small remnants of the British unit to to surrender right um if you look at the way we talk about many conflicts that are happening at the moment there is no recognition that casualties are part of conflict for example right this has now become completely abnormal to our way of thinking uh and so there lots of things in which uh we've moved on to this illusion illusory world that exists in our heads in which everything is supposed to be perfect therefore it's if it's not perfect it's someone else's fault that's the there are no Solutions only tradeoffs Insight from Soul again why I've been thinking I've been pretty obsessed with that quote over the last couple of months actually why is this need compulsion for Perfection or hatred of uh small flaws what's the driving force or dynamic behind that do you think is there something that's is it so here's my theory here's my pet Theory before maybe you give um if we can predict the weather in Venezuela tomorrow uh if we have been able to get planes to fly in the sky and put them out on the moon why is it that I need to encounter traffic why is it that civilians need to be caught in a crossfire during war why is it that we can't fully control a global pandemic etc etc um it seems like we have Mastery in so many areas and yet not in all which gives us a disproportionate impression of our ability of Master over everything that's my like bro I totally agree with that I think that that that is really it and then if you drill down a little bit further into that one other thing that's worth adding is that we're living through the era of mass customization we have been for some time especially if you live in America what that what I mean by that is um if you go to a drinks machine or vending machine in the US right you can have first of all you've got eight choices you can have Fanta Co and then you can have each one of them in like eight different flavors you can have lemon Fant or orange Fant or raspberry all of that right so you can not only do we control most of the things around us we get to choose exactly how we want it you can at your fingertips you have I don't know 100,000 pairs of different shoes that you could buy y same with t-shirt same so everything that we Now consume we have a level of choice that's completely unprecedented which gives us an illusion of really high levels of control over everything it's not just that like we've really kind of got on top of infant mortality and all of these other things we not only that like you can design your baby you can have your baby exactly the way you want or you will be to able to very soon so in many ways we are masters of our environment so why can't we deal with this or with this or with that and and look that that's a it's a noble and worthy thought it just can't be taken to extremes when the reality is telling you this isn't working um and also I think part of the other reason is as I say I think social media um I don't know if we we've talked about this before I think we haven't social media fundamentally changed the way politics is conducted in a profound way that I I don't think anyone's aware of especially if they're on the younger side of things because um I remember uh a few months ago maybe a year ago I was uh bored in the evening sitting around and I was on YouTube and this debate popped up between two people most of your audience have never heard of uh William heg who was the leader of the conservative party in the UK at the time or the deputy leader perhaps and John Prescott who was the deputy leader of the labor party at the time and John Prescott was this blue collar workingclass guy couldn't put a proper sentence together to save his life and whatever and William ha who actually is also workingclass but he he went to like a I think he went to a grammar school so he had this very Posh well spoken accent and it was um the Ultimate Clash but what happened was because um there was no social media they were not pandering to to to to that they were not trying to Pander to their audence yeah they were in the room together and the way that that whole um like standoff that debate was conducted is William hag would make fun of John Prescott for not being able to talk basically the late John Prescott I should say but John Prescott to his great credit he didn't feel like oh I'm going to get offended here and then I can get 10,000 retweets and talk about workingclass people and the snobbery he was like well on this side of the house we may get the words wrong but we get the Judgment right right in other words it was a fight conducted on a kind of gentleman understanding that there are certain things that we don't do like a boxing match you don't punch the other guy in the balls and politics to a larger extent until first the 24- hour news cycle and then the social media environment was really conducted in in a somewhat different way I'm not saying it was not nasty occasionally or there wasn't that going on but the incentive structure was different and incentives are everything the incentive structure now is to do whatever it is that gets you the most attention that is not necessarily the thing that gets the most constructive progress being being outcomes at all and that's one of the uh fascinating things if you meet a lot of politic as I now do you see them in environment outside of the House of Commons or outside of Congress or whatever they're not nearly as antagonistic towards each other as they pretend online so they're tuning that up in order to Garner support to get attention to get look at how I own the the libs or the the the the right or whatever you know the you can you can insert your even I suppose from an individual perspective without how it impacts the other side look at how passionately I fought for our own cause and look how much of a Vicor which is increasingly a thing that's adopted across a political Spectrum yeah I uh I read this great article by ginda a couple of months ago called the rise of neot todis you read this I haven't so I mean it's kind of contained in the name that um he talks about modern social campaigns uh being like adult toddlers he says if every time that a toddler threw a tantrum they got front page news and a ton of attention online they would continue to do it you know uh even if a lot of the time they're being I don't know many people that supported throwing paint over a Vango painting or whatever throwing soup over a Vango painting uh but they definitely generated a lot of headlines and attention is kind of akin to well there's something's going on like they're paying attention to me maybe uh this could be good this could this could end up to people paying more more care to the problem that I think is very Salient and uh I kind of get the sense that our inability to distinguish good attention from Bad attention and just be able to like attention at all cost in an attention economy is always positive for the most part unless it's like unbelievably negative comments that you're getting back for the most part people are just going to like yay my side Boo the other side uh so yeah I think it reinforces uh focus on garnering drama using drama to Garner attention pretty much at all costs uh and I think that's why a lot of the time politics to me especially in the UK when I listen to the debates that are going on I just think like what are you talking about what what what is this discussion it's nothing it's nothing it's it's there's no substance to it there doesn't seem to be anything that's like a hardcore deliverable it's always surface level issues it's never actually getting to the root of anything there's never any sort of definable um concrete falsifiable uh statements claims um demands that are being made even if it's not you that's imp hour or I don't know it just it's it's rhetoric a lot of it is rhetoric it is sleep isn't just about how long you rest but also how well your body stays in its optimal temperature zone throughout the night and this is where eight sleep comes in just add their brand new pod 4 ultra to your mattress like a fitted sheet and it automatically cools down or warms up each side of your bed it's got integrated sensors that track your sleep time sleep phases HRV snoring and your heart rate with 99% accuracy it even starts cooling or heating your bed an hour before bedtime and that's why it's been clinically proven to increase Total Sleep Time by up to 1 hour every night I've been using my eight sleep mattress for years and I literally can't imagine life without it I'm on the road at the moment in London and uh it feels medieval to not have an actively cooled and heated mattress topper it is a total Game Changer best of all they have a 30- night sleep trial so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 days if you don't like it they'll give you your money back plus they ship internationally right now you can get $350 off the Pod 4 ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to 8sleep.com wisdom using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's EIG ghts sleep.com wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout Trump Victory do you think that a trump Victory can inspire a broader movement across the world I think places like the US and Argentina have got their mojo back a little bit at least it feels like that they've kind of got confidence back uh is this is is that just the post kitle glow of a uh uh election Victory or is there something more going on well what's interesting to me was that so we were in the US before the election during the election and after the election and on the day of the election we flew from Austin in Texas to LA and all the people that we know in in Austin were like what are you doing you're going to La for the riots for when Trump wins you know there's going to be and when we got to LA and we were there on the night of the election and then we were there for a week after literally like there was nothing nobody there was no reaction of any kind and I think that was because the scale of the victory was very very important it's like nobody can pretend that America didn't vote in this direction anymore it wasn't Russia collusion it wasn't blah blah blah it was like Americans looked at this and went on balance we prefer this I thought that was very important um as for whether that has a chance to spread well look America is the place where we all download our memes right so I I always think of the example of during the summer of BLM when we had protesters in this country in London in front of police officers saying hands up don't shoot in front of cops that don't carry guns yeah go like that's not a real thing you've just downloaded the meme yeah and you're misapplying it here about something that really doesn't affect British people in anything like the same way and I think that possibility is there I hope it's there and by the way I'm not someone who who's um who thinks that the Trump presidency is nailed on to be a positive thing for the world it's not guaranteed it's an opportunity and it really fundamentally depends on whether he's able to govern and deliver the things that he promised to the American people one of the fascinating things as well and this is actually something Paran my co-host on trigonometry pointed out is if you look at the the the kind of the lineup of the of the Trump campaign the people at the very top of that are all Democrats former Democrats Trump Elon VC uh Tulsi RFK they're all former Democrats um and so what you're looking at is is is is not a uh this super right-wing coalition actually it was really a broad movement that won people over on the promise of a number of things improving the economy uh cutting government waste uh closing the Border dealing with illegal immigration and uh sorting out the geopolitical situation that none of those things are particularly rightwing actually and um he stayed away on the campaign trail from a lot of the more controversial issues like abortion for example he was actually you know very um Centrist about that now if he can deliver on those things if he can close the border and deal with illegal immigration if America's economy is booming and if you know Elon and V take an a to the government bureaucracy and it's still standing and able to function in the same way the x is still standing after he fired 80% of the people I don't see how that doesn't inspire people around the world I don't see it because if you look at all of the western world I would say there are two problems they're not unrelated entirely but they're they're very big problems in their own right uh it's the demographic issue and the government debt issue right uh almost every country in the Western World there are some exceptions is running close to 100% of GDP levels of debt right we are so indebted we actually I don't think there is a way to solve that problem without growing your way out of it you just can't inflict that much pain on the public and survive electorally there would be so many restrictions placed that it would be be there would be social unrest to the point where the country gets destroyed well look at what happened in the UK the conservatives came in and said we needed some austerity they cut the government like expenditure I don't remember what the number was but I think it was like 1% or something and everyone when the Tories are killing people so so how do you cut it you know I mean we just saw this in France right right yeah um so the only way to probably to deal with it at this point if you can deal with it is to grow your way out of it right the UK economy uh on a per capita basis is smaller now than it was in 2007 people in this country are poorer perhe head of population than they were before the financial crisis we still haven't recovered the only reason our economy is actually growing I use inverted commas for people who are listening is that we import lots of people who they don't increase they reduce our uh income per head per head because they're low-wage people but the politicians say well our economy is grown because look we've added this person who earns a 12 Grand a year or something right um so if Trump can actually unleash the talents and Ingenuity of the American people and allow them to start businesses to grow the economy real growth of the economy which I suspect he will because um all you really have to do is make energy cheap and then the economy will grow that I mean this is what people don't understand about Net Zero and all of this other nonsense that we've got going on here is energy is included in the price of everything we our electricity prices are way higher than most other countries I think they're four times the the the ones in America so you tweet that yeah uh it's beyond Lor's tweet that I tweeted so basically when you make energy more expensive you make everything more expensive that's why all manufacturing everything needs energy everything needs energy so um uh GDP is energy transformed is the is the line right so if Trump's policy of drill baby drill means that energy in America is cheaper that alone will make a big difference then you add to that cutting of government regulation and waste if that can happen um then you put those two things together and you've got real economic growth amazing you close the border all I'm not talking about like mass deportations or any of that because none of that I don't think is realistic or is going to happen and you already see people close to the administration rolling all of that back uh actually you know I heard an interview on Winston Marshall show with the head of the Heritage Foundation saying well you know we're going to be able to get rid of 100,000 criminal illegal aliens but everyone else is going to be voluntary or something and you're just going okay so we're talking more realistically now but if you close the border which is a big problem in all of the western world as we know right illegal immigration on a large scale that nobody voted for if you do that you destroy Dei and all of this woke crap in the institutions who wouldn't sign up up for that when they given the option so it can Inspire that sort of Renaissance or Revival in the western world and I hope it that it does if he's able to govern properly um and I hope that he does that and one of the things that I really hope that Trump administration's able to do is not do not make the mistakes they had to perhaps make the first time which was to actually consider the opinion of the mainstream media as important because what this election really showed that we just had this was the first podcast election everyone's talked about this to death right but what I think that means is that this could be the first podcast Administration god well I'm not saying that's universally positive by the way but what I'm saying is if the New York Times writes yet another piece about how Trump is Hitler for improving relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia or something right he doesn't actually have to give a he could just govern he's got the mandate he's not going to run for another term he's got the Congress he's got the Senate he's got the Judiciary he's got everything under his control if he could just resist the natural inclination to go after people who go after him in the same way as in the same way as you wouldn't necessarily go after an independent student newspaper that said it too because it's such small fry low impact that you probably it's not worthy of a response we shouldn't overdo we shouldn't like overpraise ourselves the New York Times has a huge audience of course but if it's um um from reputation perhaps or uh relevance to the people that you care about I remember this is funny um I don't use Tik Tok but stuff like clips and stuff get repurposed onto that and uh I think I checked it after I hadn't been on the desktop thing for like six weeks and it turned out that five weeks ago I'd been involved in some like brewhaha on some video I remember looking at it and going H how silly like you know this platform that I don't use had a bit of drama around something that I said I still stand by uh like isn't that and then huh I don't care about the potential impact and what people said because it's in a domain that I don't really care about yes but then obviously the next step is well why do you care about what YouTube says or what Instagram says or what people that reply to your on newsletter say or what people on Twitter say like you know it kind I'm aware it's a Insight but sort of opened my eyes a little bit like that and I wonder whether it's the same if uh Legacy Media has derated its credibility so much that now most people just think I don't really care about what you say yeah maybe it gets a lot of circulation maybe even gets a lot of clicks but it's kind of I don't know the the medor equivalent of the boy who cried wolf it is I I again I try to caution people too against being too um convinced of this because the New York Times I don't know the exact numbers but I think it has like 10 th 10 million paying subscribers paying subscribers right so there's clearly a lot of people in America who read the New York Times and think it's good and believe it uh what I the point I'm making about Trump is I think it's fair to say I don't think I'm going out on the limb here to say that the New York Times doesn't like Donald Trump I think it's fair to say that CNN and MSNBC do not like Donald Trump right so why would he care that they have said the same thing they've said about him 10,000 times already instead of just governing he's got the Mandate he's got everything he needs to actually govern just ignore those people just ignore them and govern and do the things when I say ignore them I don't mean do crazy just cuz you've got all the power now I mean deliver the things you promised to the American people and that was the thing that irritated me about his first presidency he was like you can dislike Donald Trump you can dislike the policies that he Advocates but if he's been elected it is his duty to implement the policies that he ran for cuz that's what people voted on and you are now criticizing him for doing that that doesn't make any sense to me in the same way like if Kia stama in this country who's a left-wing leader implements the policies on which he was elected I don't know what they are because he didn't articulate any during the campaign but if that were to happen then I'd be like well I can't complain I can say I don't like these policies but I can't criticize him for doing it because that's what people elected him to do so my point with Trump just to finish the answer to your question is if he can govern well and deliver the things that he promised which is a strong economy closer of the Border dealing with the woke Etc I don't see how that wouldn't be inspirational however there are two factors that I would say that make me less optimistic about the UK in particular than than than the us so we can download the meme but we have a parliamentary system which means that you know Donald Trump really he he had to win primaries as one man and then he could build his team after that and none of them had to get elected Elon Musk V Tuli RFK they didn't have to get elected with him right in this country you know the closest thing we have to Trump is Nigel farage Nigel farage has a party which has five MPS and has a lot of the popular vote in this country but in order to win you know there's 650 seats in the House of Commons you're probably going to need 300 plus seats to actually win out right that means you have to have 300 people who get elected in the local area as the local MP so that means you kind of need 300 little Nigel fares if if that's the metaphor that's very difficult the other thing is for all the talk about you know the American election being the podcast election I don't know that the podcasting breakdown in this country is necessarily favorable to the center right or the Center or the well who do we know in this country uh Boris went on Steven's show yeah uh but Steven isn't he's not a political operator dire of a CEO correct yeah uh who else have we seen you had um the lady that did that budget and was briefly PM uh list trust yes you had list trust you did yeah we had her on um and we had sella bravman on yep I mean except for except for you guys I imagine James O'Brien probably has some people on every so often well there's a couple that you're missing so Rory Stuart and alista Campbell we've had Rory on the show I like Rory's a person I don't know if you followed their coverage pre-election I followed it uh with great interest yeah yeah so they were I I and again I I I this is not an attack on them as individuals but they were wrong about everything not only were they wrong about everything they massively double down after being wrong about everything so in the in the days before before the election Rory Stewart was saying um well you know these polls showing that it's neck and neck they're completely wrong people are afraid to say the truth which is that caral is going to smash this and then on the night of the election when he was clearly proven completely wrong he was like well I was wrong on the facts but I was not wrong to be optimistic or whatever it was and you're just going okay well just take all that aside these people have no idea what's going on in reality in America they were just completely wrong they are probably the most popular podcast when it comes to politics in this country I think it's go hanger that does uh the network that that's a part of I think in in the top 10 for the Americans listening the top 10 podcasts on Apple podcast which givs a little bit older um in the UK Rory Stewart is in maybe two or three of them regularly uh and goalhanger has maybe four or five that one network and again I like Rory's a person he's a lovely man he's been on the show I found him I found him been on our show and we happily have him back and I'd happily have alist back although I I rate him less but um not back rather have Al I'd happily have alist on my point though is that quite a lot of people in Britain are living in a in this imaginary world which is reinforced for them by people that they instinctively lean towards um and they're not as aware as you are because you live in the US or as I am because I get a chance to travel there of actually what's going on and I I only realized this you know this year because this year is the F I've been to America loads of times before but this year was the year that I actually went to like real America I've been in Utah uh and you know Oklahoma City me that's real America and talsa and El Paso in Texas and Fort Worth and Sugarland and all all these other places um as well as you and new DCS and New York and Nashville's and all of that I really had a chance to Colorado I was in and and I travel around it so I got a chance to actually meet like real American human beings and I realized that the reason that people in the West in in Western Europe don't understand what's happening in America is because they've never been there so if you are a BBC journalist what what is America to you well America is what people like you I.E the media Elite tell you that it is right and then if you go to America you go to New York DC or La these are all places that are massively Democrat they're super dominated you know I think Washington DC voted like 92% for carela Harris in this election something like that so you end up in these places that are not whether you think you know Democrats are the best or the worst or whatever it doesn't really matter my point is they spend a lot of time among people and in places whose views are not representative of the country and so when you are a British citizen watching the news you're really watching people who are deeply embedded into an echo chamber whose Echo chamber also tells them that their opinions are The Virtuous ones to have and so that to me it's there not not surprising to me that you even have prominent Tories in this country who who who were saying they're Pro carala right very difficult to stress test that you you mentioned sort of trump has the opportunity very clear set of objectives um uh also I can't even remember what it is the house the Senate the popular vote the blah blah the blah blah the money the technology the talent what happens if Trump fails to deliver change that's an interesting question uh I I think uh all of the things that many of us have been saying about the decline of the West are going to come back a 100 times because what you what you then see is there's literally no way out it's unfixable there's no way out there's no way out so the the reason I think a lot of people were relieved as I was was at least in this election Trump one yeah the the the the feeling for me was well at least there's Choice like in the UK you don't have choice in on on the issues that I care about right which is our country being prosperous uh immigration being uh beneficial to the country I I'm Pro lots and lots of immigration if as an immigrant it's beneficial to the country I'm against even small levels of immigration that are detrimental to the country and I'm completely against illegal immigration for that reason um and as you know again the woke you know grinds my gear so on all of that stuff we don't have a choice in this country we haven't had a choice for 14 years the the the conservative government that's just left is virtually indistinguishable from the labor party that just come in to the point where the labor leader is attacking the conservative for their failure on mass immigration and every's going he's got a point I mean he's going to make it worse but he's got a point do you know what I mean so in America at least the feeling was well okay they actually have choice they can choose if like if you don't want this continued SL into slide into manag decline you can vote for something else pivot if you vote for that something else and you don't actually end up having that choice then you're in deep trouble and as you probably know you know in the fringes of of right-wing discourse the Curtis Yavin of the world not super fam I've met Curtis but I'm not super familiar with interesting guy but but it's not even about him specifically there are a lot of people who up until this point were increasing in profile because they were saying something that I don't necessarily agree with but I see the logic of and that is what good is democracy if you can't vote for the things that you want if you can't vote your way out of this is that democracy or is that a fake democracy and therefore if it's a fake democracy then you're not living in a place of choice you're living in a place where there's a tyrannical authoritarian structure that's telling you you must have Ned zero you must have woke you must have dii it's just got a much more sophisticated delivery mechanism that makes you feel like you're playing the game you're living in The Matrix right you are being given this s whatever you want to call you're being given this drug that makes you feel like you're living in some on a piece of ballot paper yes but actually you're living in a Hell in which you're stuck with the things that you hate and even if the majority of you get together and vote against this it will still happen the same outcome occurs so their argument is democracy is not working why don't we look at Alternatives and alternatives are you know that's why that explains the the fascination that as I say fringes of the right increasingly have with the putins of the world cuz it's like well this is like a strong man who actually fixed his country you know um and if Trump fails I don't see why those voices wouldn't get louder that's very interesting I I can't see a logical reason why that wouldn't be the case do you no I mean I you can continue to sort of play the game I'm sure that uh people that don't like Trump would say yeah but that's he was inefficient he was unable to do this thing it's because the policies were pointing in the wrong direction we can fix it through a different pathway etc etc but given that there was a majority of people that voted for him uh it not being disheartening and disenchanting to the Democratic process especially with all of the power of the smartest guid in the world the companies and the rockets and the dance moves on stage and stuff what else did you want but yeah I I I'm fascinated by that question what happens in four years time if if change hasn't been delivered if you can't fix it when you've got the Senate the Congress the popular vote the tech bro oligarchs David sax now David saxs you've got a lot of the new media on your side which is so powerful Now in America you you've got literally everything you could possibly have you as president independently wealthy it's your last term you don't have to Panda to anybody a good successor sat in the same if you can't fix it then well how do you fix it that's that would be the question a lot of people ask in that situation so Trump must not fail because if he does you know that in many ways was the last chance that that the West had of turning things around what happens if it goes well you mentioned about Trump has the OB to to hard reset sort of the the Western World I think if he he does well if he if the economy grows rapidly and sustainably uh if he closes the border and deals with uh illegal immigration and crime if he ends Dei and all of this neoism in the institutions um if he uh makes energy cheap if he ends the foreign conflicts that he promised to end um I think that is something that is an unden is that's undeniable proof that what that that movement offers is better than what we had that that's why people voted for him the way that they did and that means that will give massive inspiration to people around the world especially the Western World I I think that's undeniably the case do you think it would give inspiration to the UK I think it will that does not mean for the reasons that we already discussed that that will necessarily that does not mean that that will necessarily result in a political Victory uh but that will give inspiration to to people around the world for sure something that I was I actually thought about this uh I was in Brisbane on the day of the election so I was moving seamlessly from my workout playlist to the Daily wise live stream like just switching between the you know it's one in the afternoon or something on Wednesday for me as I'm watching results come in slowly and uh as it became increasingly likely that it seemed like a republican victory was a fot uh I actually thought about uh you and your position your particular distaste for right-wing snowflakes uh and I wondered being on the outside for the last four years or so um allows you to have this sort of anarchistic rebellious sort of sexy problem identifying but not needing to be solution proposing sort of group I wondered whether you thought there's an opportunity for that right-wing snowflak ISM energy to appear more or less now that that side is in power I wonder if you considered that yeah I think actually what what Trump's election will do uh and I I really realized this particularly when we went to to the Trump rally uh in Madison Square Garden is I think it uh if he's successful in particular it has the power to entirely deflate that Fringe of the right that has become very much like the woke left in the way that it operates the cancel culture the identity Politics the grievance um mongering I Trump uh one of the things that those people are obsessed about is Israel and Jews and Trump is the most philosemitic president the United States has had for decades so um TR and and he doesn't need them and I I I don't think he he's ever really particularly wasn't it interesting that on October 7th he was with Ben was he yes I know that he was I can't remember where they went Ben and him some sort of ceremony type memorial thing and I remember thinking at the time like I see a lot of loud voices on Twitter that have a problem a big problem on the right from the right it's like fantes adjacent K sort of type people and uh I thought holy like that might have damaged part of the the campaign maybe that's lost a significant number of votes yeah and that's what happened when I went to the m the rally in Madison Square Garden cuz full of Jews full of Israel Flags um and every time anyone mentioned Israel or like I mean one guy was on stage and just went we're going to crush Jihad and I was like and every and and everyone was just loving it so I think one of the reasons I actually talk less about that Fringe of the right now even though I just find them intellectually very irritating because they're not very bright is that I don't think they're relevant truthfully and so I don't really talk about it too much I you know James Lindsay is trolling them and I enjoy that and I like trolling these idiots but generally speaking I what I saw in America was they have no purchase in the Trump movement whatsoever um and if Trump is successful these people will become utterly irrelevant and uh you and by the way quite a lot of those people you know I don't know if you remember the Lauren Chen situation but there was the Revelation that some of these people were being funded from Russia um and you know when you see the some of these people like a week before the election saying Trump's not my guy or whatever you got uh I those likes on Twitter really organic are they really everyone's had these are they really I don't CU I don't see this reflected in real life no you know I I think there's when it comes to social media our realities being distorted in a hundred different ways and one of them is undoubtedly foreign operations undoubtedly yeah I uh in other news this episode is brought to you by function did you know that your annual physical only screens for around 20 biomarkers that leaves a lot of gaps when it comes to understanding your health which is why I partnered with function they run lab tests twice a year that monitor over a 100 biomarkers they even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one they've got a team of expert Physicians that takes that data puts into a simple dashboard and gives you actionable recommendations to improve your health and lifespan they track everything from your heart health to your hormone levels thyroid function plus Dr Andrew hubin is their scientific adviser and Dr Mark Heyman is their chief medical officer so you can trust that the data and insights you receive are scientifically sound and practical getting your blood workout like this would usually cost thousands but with function it's only $500 and right now you can get the exact same panels I get plus by pass their 400,000 person weight list by going to the link in the description below or heading to function health.com slod wisdom that's function health.com slod wisdom so okay the the opposite side of this like it's almost kind of done to death but I wonder if there's something novel to talk about here around Trump's Victory being a a death blow for overreaching progressivism and stuff like that we've been saying in one form or another Peak woke there was it was it was summer of 2020 or whatever it might be uh I again bro science theory I have this idea that uh you have this sort of conceptual inertia that maybe even if things on the internet have moved on if these ideas have caught hold in the real world there's this momentum this big Juggernaut this lumbering Behemoth which is like Boomers and my parents I had this idea that uh a new story hasn't reached full mainstream significance when it's on the front page of the New York Times or when it Trends on Twitter but when your dad messages you about it on Facebook Messenger like that's when you know it's happened two or three times I think over the last few years one being uh Rogan's CNN debacle during Co where he messaged me and said I see your friend Mr Rogan is in the news again I'm like wow like that's hit a you know year Olde of the UK father and then uh mid 22 B mess said that Andrew Tate's a nasty piece of work isn't it t AI T I was like Tate you have reached full mainstream significance because my dad is talking about you um but all of that together to say there are many worlds that you inhabit and if you're an agile online Degen xuser power user type thing uh I think you have a skewed perspective of how sort of nimbly uh things are moving along so what's how how have you come to sort of conceptualize this in the trajectory of of the sort of progressive over I think the geography is very important here so uh I don't think in in the UK or Australia or in Canada we've remotely reached P woke because Dei and all of this other stuff is so deeply embedded in the institutions uh and in politics uh you look I mean look at London London is run by a guy who who's who's painted the The Crossings rainbow colors and the police rainbow cut and all of the stuff right um and that I know those are trivial things but they're symbolic of very strong underlying things where people are being hired or fired based on their demographic characteristics and so on um in the US yes Trump and people like Chris rufo and Elon and V they have an opportunity to absolutely dismantle from the ground up uh all of these um ideological introductions that have occurred over the last 10 even if structurally they can't get into Yale or into Harvard or into Netflix or whatever yes they can uh go a little bit more Upstream from that but most of the stuff is in government so if you can strip affirmative action hiring from the government institutions uh then everything else will naturally follow the corporations never wanted to be woke they just felt they had to yeah that's interesting incentives as opposed to like ideology yeah and you know the Jaguars of this world they're not going to benefit from from from that from what's coming so I think that there's a big opportunity for reset in America but even so it's like you've got the virus and it's infected you and you are still sick but you have the potential to start recovering that's kind of how I see it um in in in in the rest of the western world I don't think we're I think woke is going to run and run for a long time you're down stream hopefully from the US though if that is but I I really don't until the political leadership changes I don't see how it changes because if even if you know you you could tell me well look gen Z men are are not work great what are they ruling what are they deciding what who who gives a what they think you know what I mean um other than me and you so uh the the political power to change the things that are embedded in the institutions uh that's what this is about that's why Trump has a chance to reset it in the US then hopefully it's inspirational to the rest of us what's your assessment on the state of the UK at the moment um at the moment I think it's I really do um I you know I I love this country I really do but at the moment I feel like have you ever heard that Mickey Flanigan joke about going to Brighton so Mickey Flanigan's a very famous very successful British comedian um and I remember he did a show in Brighton and um he talked about you know coming the contrast between London the big city and Brighton the seaside town that he comes in he when you know you you get on the train in London you're really stressed and you just you get on the train it's full it's packed it's uncomfortable and then you just you get off at the station and bright and you you smell the sea and you can feel the ambition just draining out of you it's kind of how I feel about the UK and I know that and the reason I say that is that all the bright and talented people that I know are leaving anyone who can is uh all the rich people are leaving this country has lost more millionaires than any other country except China now if you compare the populations that tells you 3% right so we're losing the people who have created the jobs who are going who are creating the jobs and who are going to create the jobs and one of the reasons is they look at the environment that we're operating in we've talked about high energy prices but this government has decided that the people who it needs to tax are the businesses basically particularly the smaller side businesses which is where so much creativity really happens um uh and then there's all sorts of other things about infrastructure housing uh demographics uh that are going on that I I don't you know we talk about net immigration figures and what no one really talks about is the fact that what we're actually doing is we're chasing out all the people who create wealth and have wealth who pay the taxes and we're replacing them with people coming in towards the bottom of the jobs Market at best if they're actually working at all uh and so youve your net immigration figure of 900,000 that includes you having lost some of your best people and replace them with people who are not contributing that's very interesting yeah net doesn't account for the cohorts that have gone and the cohorts that have come in and it's probably not not like for like yeah and so everyone I know who who actually had a a a successful business that's portable they're moving to Dubai they're moving to America they're moving to all sorts of other places uh because and what they say is very simple well look I want my kids to go to a school where they're not taught that they're trans I want to pay reasonable taxes which in some places is like 0% um I I want uh clean Safe Streets which you do not have mhm you know I went um I don't go on the tube very much these days just from a you know um I'm not on London that often actually uh and I went on the tube the other day during daytime it was like I know 5 6 o00 and there was kids running absolutely rampant all over it jumping over barriers not paying pushing each other on on the escalators smashing the stop button like really causing genuine nuisance and I I watched the staff watch them jump over barriers and do nothing cor I got some data recent data reveals a 56% increase in tube crime with thefts up by 83% and robbery's doubling in 23 24 and this extends more broadly I saw the the labor government's talking about you know they're going to reduce crime um well Street crime is up very significantly and one of the reasons it's up is that it's not really being dealt with by the police I mean anyone who I had my car broken into a few years ago window smashed there was a CCTV camera right above it I called the police you can't call I had to email the police because they don't answer the phone unless it's like you know someone someone's been misgendered or something you know um and they they emailed me back saying we've investigated we can't find anything right under the CCTV camera here's your crime reference number there was a viral video uh that you probably would have been seen of a guy who deliberately left a bike on the street with with a uh geolocator in directly outside of Scotland Yard yeah you got nicked uh they tracked her down to the house where it was being stored they gave the police the information the police said we've looked into it here's your crime reference number we can't do anything and then once the video caught sufficient fire they got an email back from the police saying we've reopened your case great news exactly now by the way I I don't want this to come across as if I'm criticizing police officers because I know police officers and I know that a lot of them really are working very very hard uh but the priorities and the resources they have set from above don't seem to manifest themselves in this kind of low-level crime being addressed now you might say well you know there's some kids not paying for the tube who cares well actually the broken window series is entirely correct if you are observing people engage in low-level criminal Behavior Uh it makes people feel much less safe about the the the overall experience because they know that well if they're not going to en Force this well what reason do I have to think that if my phone gets stolen the subtext is that more serious things also won't be looked at with care and they aren't and they aren't uh I know people who've left because of s single incidents I know a really wealthy guy who left the UK uh because he was walking out of a restaurant in Mayfair with a nice watch on his wrist and his pregnant wife uh three guys jumped out of a van with B clavas on smashed him to the floor uh punched him a few times pushed his pregnant wife aside got the watch off him got back in their van police don't give a no no real investigation nothing why why are these crimes in the UK why is this sort of social fabric disintegrating like that uh I think it's partly because the economy isn't growing and so there's not a lot of money to be put into policing um and when you think that Ned zero is the way to Prosperity IE driving up Energy prices CU you want to feel green or whatever you want to reduce Britain's contribution to global climate change from 2% to 1% you know that's the great ambition well then you're not going to have money and when you don't have money you can't pay police officers and when you don't have police officers people engage in crime um I mean this is just to add additional context for the northerner in the room uh this is in London yeah I think the UK has the sixth biggest economy in the world I heard this really phenomenal explanation which is the UK is not the sixth biggest economy in the world the UK is a very poor country attached to a very rich city London has the sixth biggest economy in the world no one gives a about Newcastle no one cares about carile or rexam except for Ryan Reynolds Manchester Manchester like a a little bit like a tiny teeny tiny little bit Birmingham a teeny tiny little bit everywhere else can go and get like anything basically north of Birmingham can just fall off a map and you know I wrote this thing after the uh riots that occurred few months ago uh I read it yeah if you can remember that I basically my thesis was I saw some videos of my old Hometown Middlesboro and there were Street marches these people hadn't joined it looked like they were maybe walking to the place where the main March was going to go on but it's kind of classic sort of British Larry louy behavior um these people weren't carrying slogans they weren't chanting anything it didn't seem like they were there for a particular purpose and there were houses that look like they've been recently built a classic workingclass British Street you know Terrace Terrace Terrace Terrace Terrace all the way along this was a house that had those pieces of um stickers still on the windows that look like they were they were sort of freshly created you see one of the people pick up a big brick just throw it through the window of this house that doesn't have anybody in it's not like it's the house of an immigrant or the house of an enemy or the house of somebody from the other political party and it's very difficult to describe this to somebody that didn't spend half of their life 18 years in a Northern workingclass Town at a State primary State secondary State sixth form college that was me I spent 11 years no 13 years in full-time education right around these people I know these people I know the way that they feel and it's this ambient malevolence they're disgruntled they're unhappy they feel stuck and they don't know why and they're mean they're mean about it and the synopsis that I came up with was that uh immigration wasn't the reason it was the excuse for this kind of antisocial and we don't remember asbos I Haven heard asbos in ages antisocial Behavior order for the Americans and it was the the youths on street corners that would sort of you know push and jumble granny as she tries to go to the corner shop to get milk and stuff like that they'd be issued with an antisocial Behavior order which meant they sort of couldn't leave the house and they shouldn't go to certain areas kind of like a weird sort of curfew type thing and um that culture in the UK and I'm sure it's everywhere I'm sure that workingclass towns and all the rest of it people don't necessarily have much in way of good Mobility they don't have much to distract them maybe they're a little bit despondent maybe they haven't had the right Role Models fatherless homes all of these things I understand but that culture in the UK is so self-defeating because it is a gravitational well that keeps people stuck to the floor as much as possible that this is as good as things are going to be and the best use of your agency and self authorship is to break things not to build things and I know that intimately well this ambient malevolence it's like the air before a thunderstorm starts and that was what I saw in that video really got to me it's the first time that I've seen something on the Internet that really got to me and that really got to me so yeah well I know what you mean and I think the answer to that and I know I keep banging on about nzero in this conversation but the answer to that is to scrap Ned zero because um what those people need is meaning and purpose and for the vast majority of workingclass men the primary source of meaning and purpose is going to be a job and when you have a job that is a meaningful job that you're making something you're building something that you're making good money that you're providing for your family that you feel like you have upward mobility and upward Mobility doesn't have to look like I grew up in Newcastle and then I started a YouTube channel now I live in Austin Texas up Mobility might be you know I made 30 grand a year for 10 years and now I'm making 35 and now I've got a promotion at work and now I own a home I own a home right most people really don't need very much to be happy to be honest and it's a tragedy that in most of uh the Western World and especially in the UK the thing that we used to consider like them what is the American dream the American dream is you arrive with nothing but the shirt on your back and your kids go to university you have a house uh maybe a small business you pass it on to them and their children are you know better off really better off well if those people that you're talking about where I agree with you there's that underlying malevolence um and it's not malevolence it's anger really it's frustration it's frustration and anger and what is that anger about well it's the anger is about the feeling that um you're not going to be able to do the things that you thought you would and what are they well you get a job you get a house you you have some kids uh they're going to be slightly better off than you you're going to have dignity you're going to have Community you're going to be respected meaning Mastery right now if you have a society which has effectively said we're going to do a green accounting trick we're going to take your jobs we're going to put them in India we're going to put them in China where they're going to make the same steel or the same cars or the same whatever they used to make they're going to do it dirtier of course they are because it's a it's a much less developed country and then we're going to import that steel and we're going to import those cars back into the UK so we can pretend that we're green well you combine that with this person no longer having a job and our economy as I said we're poorer now than we were in 2007 what did you expect just gruntled there's this feeling there was always this feeling but I can never put my finger on it of kind of being forgotten in the northeast of the UK it's like like on the outside a little bit even within a a community on the outside of culture yeah um even even little things like um the way that you were represented in media like a story about Newcastle that hit the national press was like a uh um Whimsical cottage industry piece or something like that I said I was going to show you uh this can we can we do one more thing on just that absolutely um so one of the the things that we've talked about in the UK is like oh we need to build infrastructure we need to build transport links and it's like why do you need a better train line to knowwhere yeah um and and so what you really have to do is you have to and that's why you know I was talking to Mary Harrington who I know you're a fan of too at our Christmas party actually and she was saying something I really have been thinking about as well which is I think if we're in the offering Solutions space the solution for the UK is to accept the reality that's always part the first bit of the solution is to accept the reality that you know the slogan of make Britain Great again isn't going to work because we're not going to we're not going to recolonize India do you know what I mean we're not going to rebuild the British Empire what I think we could do if we really wanted to but this would require both a political and a cultural shift on a on a level that would be extremely significant would be to recognize that over the 20th century the Britain went from being the Center of Western Civilization to being the provincial part of it we're on the periphery now the Center of Western Civilization after World War II during World War II I would say shifted from Britain to America we are now effectively a a the European Outpost of American civilization that's a great Point that's what we are now what does that mean well what that means is we have to lean in to that that means we have to download the right memes from America instead of downloading the hands up don't shoot meme what we should be downloading is okay we want economic growth memes how do you do that well you're going to have to make energy cheap SL regulation Etc you're going to have to do the right trade deals with that world right uh what that means all sorts of other things that we borrow from them and apply to ourselves as opposed to thinking that we know best we clearly don't otherwise our society wouldn't be as screwed up as it is um and part of that is you're going to have to give people in uh deprived parts of the country work yeah and they you're going to have to find ways of employing them and actually creating things that are of value and that means yes we in the UK may end up paying more for some of the things that they make but that money is going to go to your neighbor instead of a perfectly nice guy in India doing the same job right but if we want our society to hold cohesively together some of the extremes of the globalization process that is the reason why those people in Newcastle are angry and malevolent and mean and nasty uh we're going to have to find ways to actually give them jobs and employment and that means not chasing out the people who are job creators and that means not pricing them out of the country by making business impossible I think uh those of us in podcast toan maybe over index on what nice words and inspirational memes can do that I'm not convinced you can self-development Mantra your way out of structural problems you can't um you know it's all well and good trying to give people some upward aiming sense of hope and all the rest of it but when there really sort of structural problems the physics of the system that this these people are sort of involved in uh is very difficult I don't I'm not convinced that that reframing you just need to sort of think more positively or do whatever like that's off well they're both true in the sense that if you are a teenager in Newcastle listening to this conversation the world is your Royster correct look at Chris right look at Chris look at other people who inspire you you have the opportunity you have access to the global economy with the internet and everything you can make it you can that but at a structural level at the level of society not everyone who's who went to your school had the ability to become Chris Williamson a lot of them just needed to have a great job in the local Factory that would have been the right solution trust really is everything when it comes to supplements a lot of Brands may say they're top quality but few can actually prove it which 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can get 20% off all of the products and that 30-day money back guarantee by going to link in the description below are heading to liv.com Modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom checkout that's L IV m n us.com modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout I had this idea so my my housemate said for the first time in his life his sis his sister had a a a baby recently and he held this kid and for the first time he realized why men went to war for their family because it was the first like new blood relative maybe that he'd ever held something like that and we came up with this idea and I think that it's true uh that kind of relates to declining birth rates that there's a a mimetic sense to Motherhood like a mimetic desire for motherhood if there's fewer mothers it begets less people being mothers around you which makes you less like to see the beauty of motherhood which makes you less likely to want to be a mother and the same thing goes for sort of this this situation that he had and I wonder whether there's something similar with this Talent exit uh you know the most agentic people the most self-authoring people uh the ones who would break the mold that would uh push back against the tall poppy syndrome you are losing ever more of PR there is a dir of precisely the countervailing force that you want to the worst parts of some of British culture the bottom up stuff not the top down stuff and um it seems like a recursive cycle and I appreciate that I have perhaps contributed to that after 15 years of coaching maybe a th 18 to 25 year olds in a desperate attempt to try and move culture I'm like pull the rip cord like I'm going to go somewhere else anyway I was going to show you this video so this is a Tik Tok of an American guy who uh spent six months in the UK in London and he's describing his experience cut a little bit into this but he's basically said his grandparents were British he sees himself a little bit as British and this isn't meant to be as a dig at at British people so we'll have a we'll have a watch of this the people there don't seem like they're having fun they seem like they're constantly trying to escape misery they seem like their work is just so depressing and that the joke is that everything is depressing and bad and like that's the entire sense of humor it's like this all sucks um let's just make jokes about it the class system is so obvious and weird like there are just upper class people lower class people and you're just born into it and the accents you can tell based on people's accents and that's weird in America it's pretty much like you have to give it to us or To America that you just earn your way and I know there's lots of you know people you you get born into things you're lucky but if you get rich if you move up in your class you're just able to in England it's like you're never going to really be upper class if you're born lower class they'll always know that you're not CU it's about culture it's not just about money it's about like the way you act and there's a lot of like inner or interclass um like anger and like weird feelings and also I just want to say there's a lot of anger in the culture I was uh at a lot of games soccer games Premier League games things like that um and the fans are so angry like it's not like America where people get mad or whatever and you know but it's like normal it's like they're a little mad in England they're like so pissed the whole time they're just looking for for like reasons to let their anger out and there's so much anger there's so much swearing there'll be a six-year-old just yelling the seword it's like what the hell what's going on here it's like borderline I'm I'm looking around thinking like this is uncivilized six-year-old yelling the Seaway that's what makes Britain Great make Britain Great again uh no he's bang on man he's bang on um I look I I do think part of it is the weather to be honest dude it's huge it's a huge massive influence you know what it's like you come out to Austin Texas when was the first time you came out this year February something February March maybe March time I actually don't like the weather in Austin to be honest March fine March is fine the rest yeah well you only came in March and then you came back in October yeah between November and March the weather and Austin is fine beautiful but if you go if you spend a week in LA and you just look around I can see why these people are happy because the weather is really nice I think that's part of it but that is the country okay unless we're going to get to the stage where we can terraform the ozone layer above the UK this isn't going to change so what do you need to do compensate yes exactly you have to compensate for it and the compensation for it is like if you go to Central London the nice part of it it's a beautiful place it's a beautiful place and when uh on those three days a year when Britain is sunny it's the most beautiful country in the world you know um but what you have to do is make the other things in this country so good that it it trumps it trumps that um and that means people have to have a better quality of life life than they otherwise do correct and that means they have to be able to afford a home that means they have to be able to raise their kids and all the rest of it you know I I I was very persuaded by a book uh by a guy called Desmond Morris called the human zoo in which he talked about the fact that essentially all the uh problems that we see in modern Human Society are exactly the problems you get if you put animals into those exact conditions so in a zoo the animals that are there they have much less space than they need uh they may be surrounded by other animals that they don't necessarily want to be surrounded by uh and all sorts of other things and they have the exact same outcomes in terms of interpersonal violence mental health failure to reproduce and on and on and on so partly this is just a problem of the fact that we have a a very very broken housing market which prices people out of it and you know the houses here are very small uh so most people end up flat sharing in central London or whatever living for to a flat well were you going to expect those people to to be happy are you going to expect them to have kids all that's personal space that's personal space uh and then you know all of the other things that build on top of it so you have to have a fundamental shift in the way that this country operates and in order for that to happen maybe we need to hit that you know alcoholic Rock button what do you make you mentioned it earlier on what do you make of uh st's recent comments on immigration well he's saying the Tories failed which we all know is true but I don't think he's going to make things any better so I think this situation is going to continue the way it's been going because as I say we know this from having people like swel bravman on our show you basically said you know the reason I as Home Secretary the person in charge could not reduce immigration was not actually the thing that most other people are saying which is you know the Civil Service doesn't letay you although I'm sure parts of that true it's that our own government didn't want it happen and the reason is they know that if we reduce Mass immigration uh we are going to have a problem with the economy because the headline figure will be well we're no longer growing by the amazing figure of 0.7% Y we're actually not growing we're going to have to be honest with the British people about that um so yeah um I I think that uh until people are prepared to be very honest that's not going to happen this why I use the metaphor of you know hitting rock bottom that's as you well know that's when you actually confront the reality of where you are have you had have you reached out to Dominic Cummings to yeah he's coming on the show soon unreal I mean the most recent episode that I saw him I can't remember who the the podcast was but he was talking about how uh would you say curated and uh fabricated a lot of the press um governmental sort of press opportunities are people sort of walk down and they get the photo outside of 10 Downing Street and they're going this is very very important and there's a script that's followed it's fake meetings everything there's very much a uh House of Cards style Optics management thing who's talking about how basically most of the MPS consider that all they're doing is looking for their feature within the newspaper for that particular week that's considered a win not impact on the country not doing good things for the electorate and um it's even more scary in the UK because in America you kind of think about the sort of vanity and I'm aware that that's just a stereotype in the UK you would think well no one even cares evidently you do within the small bubble of whiteall or Westminster or wherever it is that you are but yeah um this over concern and maybe this is fed into by the British predisposition pre uh sort of uh obsession with class with what is my place within Society how can I ensure that I maintain how's my Optics management thing going on in image image control uh it we are not attracting the best talent any talent that does get there is being perverted by bizarre incentives and any change that does need to be made is ciled by ACC combination of those two things by the fact that there's nobody competent around you to deploy it and anybody that is competent is distracted by other things in the same way as Americans rail against the fact that whatever percentage some absurd percentage of uh time is spent doing uh fundraising like more than 50% of the time is spent doing fundraising I would guess something not too dissimilar happens in the UK but around this image management the going to the right meetings and Rory Stuart said this Rory st's book said this too he describes in like Exquisite detail the smell of these people says sort of like stale beer and cheap cologne covered over with cheap cologne and um I don't know these are the people that are running the country that me and you have spent most of our lives in this is the the thing that a lot of people will say in response to this which is you know you those that do remember remember the 70s I don't remember the 70s I wasn't born neither were you but what they will tell you is the reason Thatcher ended up being so popular is she came in at a time when literally the dead weren't being buried and rubbish was piling up in the streets or shortly after that and she created an a country full of aspiration and drive and a willingness to do business and cut regulation and all of this other stuff um and this is why we talk about you know the the Trump victory has the potential but as we've been discussing there's a long long way to go and a lot of things need to get turned around uh my my view on it is that it's my duty as someone who's an immigrant to this country to whom this country has given a lot uh it's given the opportunity to be who I am uh to give it my best shot in terms with the tiny amount of influence that I have to do everything that I can but I'm not I'm not I'm not wedded to the idea of going down with the ship and and this is the point I would make about you know there's a lot of sneering about this idea of the talented and the wealthy and the successful leaving oh these These are mercenary people we didn't want them anyway a lot of them really aren't mercenary at all a lot of them would have much rather St in the UK a lot of would have much rather had their business in the UK a lot of them would have much rather created jobs in the UK than in Dubai or in in in Texas or somewhere else a lot of them would love to be here but the problem is the only people who who do end up staying are people who are either too rich to care in other words they they don't mind paying 50% tax because they got so much money they've got their children in a nice school or whatever they're protected from most of the trap that the rest of us have to deal with and so they just you know enjoy going from the club in Mayfair to the house and in wherever and and they have a great life and there's no reason for them to to leave and then everyone else who can't physically leave because they just don't have the opportunity to do that but the the the slice of people in the middle a lot of them really don't want to leave I don't want to leave the UK I really like it here what do you think you're going to do I'm going to wait and see but the the point I'm making to you is people who are by the fortune of the opportunities they have not wedded to this country but not rich enough or successful enough to to be able to cope with what's happening Lial space of that that space of people are not mercenary at all they are just being forced out and if I'm one of them I will I will hate and regret that but I'm not going to stay forever in a country that I think is De is is declining and and and going into degradation why would I and and particularly as a father my wife and I you know I'm 40 something years old by the by the end of my you know I will live out my life in this country comfortably even if the you know the crime and the whatever continues to go that I'll be able to afford to live in a part of the country or move further and out from the big cities or whatever that I can live the next 40 or 50 years without really things being terrible but why would I condemn my children to that when I have the opportunity to to offer them a better life and that's really the question that people will be asking and the people who run our country and the people who make these decisions have to ask themselves what are they offering to the Next Generation that's going to make them want to be here as opposed to seeing this country like many other countries have been seen in the past as a sinking ship from which you want to escape what are you doing to prevent that that's the question we'll get back to talking to Constantine in one minute but first I need to tell you about element for the last three years every single day I have started my morning with element it's a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need need a nothing that you don't you might not be tired you might not need more caffeine you might just be dehydrated proper hydration is not just about drinking sufficient water it's having the right amount of electrolytes in your body to let yourself use those fluids element contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium pottassium and magnesium with no sugar no coloring no artificial ingredients or any other junk it's a game changer this orange salt first thing in the morning tastes phenomenal and they have a no questions asked unlimited duration refund policy so you can buy it try the entire box and if you don't like it for any reason they'll give you your money back and you don't even need to return it that's how confident they are that you love it right now you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with any Box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drink LM nt.com slod wisdom that's drink LM nt.com modern wisdom we have touched on it a couple of times already give me your assessment of the state of Legacy Media at the moment maybe the post morm post election uh their level of credibility I think msnbc's ratings recently uh collapsed to its lowest since July 19th 2004 38,000 total viewers in the 24 to 54 age group 30y year age bracket look there's a lot of uh I have an article in my substack which is also a video uh called the the real reason the mainstream media is dying and I think there's actually a lot of Economic and other drivers of this it's you know people in npace like to go oh they've been discredited they well actually if you apply the same standards to New Media most of the New Media is equally discreditable correct it's not exactly showering itself in glory no and it's you know the amount of factchecking that happens which just held to away less rigorous standards right that's basically all the difference is it's like people on a podcast who will have some crazy guy on who's talking completely what did you expect it's just you know it's me we're just shooting the right have a bigger audience than MSNBC or CNN who then then go look at how they got this tiny fact wrong so there's a lot of this going on I think agreed um but the real reason is that I think the real shift is less about that actually and I think a lot of it is to do with the economics of how media Works um what is h if you think about what a news channel is or a newspaper is it's basically they are buying individual creators packaging them together and offering it to people as a package you no longer need to do that because algorithms exist and you're able to curate your own stuff uh and it also doesn't really make Financial sense for the content creators nobody could put you on TV now and it's not because um of of the because you think TV is discredit it is because they don't have the audience to offer you or the money to offer you or whatever because it makes more sense for you to cut out the middleman and go straight to your audience the same for me with my substack it's the same for me with trigonometry on on YouTube so uh what's happening is the mainstream institutions are simply losing the ability to maintain the top talent and over time you will see that mus customization that we talked about with drinks applied to content as well and probably you know the next big thing is going to be some sort of thing on your phone which curates on an algorithm basis all the content that you like from different platforms as opposed to being like hey I'm going on YouTube and I'm seeing this if you had a thing on on on an app on your phone that when well here's the the newspaper article you really want to going to read the substack from whoever the video from whoever Etc coup tweets that are yeah exactly um so the the economics of the whole thing are changing uh and uh there's just a lot more competition now so people have way more choice and so you can you can go to wherever your particular preferences are being panded to in the best possible way and and you can get exactly the thing or outrage or outrage or whatever um and uh you know as I say For Better or Worse you're going to get exactly what you want what's your thoughts on this uh I guess bifa trifecting of uh social media networks a lot of uh liberal type people leaving X over the last month or so some going to Blue Sky some just swearing off of this altogether the guardian made a uh Hefty exit note I wonder whether they'll be back at some point um what are the implications of not only people being within their own Echo Chambers on the same platform but being within their own Echo Chambers now that are uh entire universe is apart yeah I don't think that's really happened in in the sense that people think it's happened I think what's happened is a lot of people have made loud exits uh I don't think that the vast majority of those left-wing people have left to X um some have some have they post more on Instagram now or whatever but broadly speaking um nobody wants to be on the third best social media platform the network effect is very real um and so uh I I don't think we're actually going to split off into our own political commentary websites because the interaction is quite valuable with with different sides uh but we will see how that evolves I mean one of the things I I I am hopeful with X is that I was in incredibly um grateful to Elon for buying it and for the changes that he's made but I do think there's more work to do things that he himself identified when he took over uh like dealing with the bot issue and it has become a bit of a cesspit it really has the posting is uh real yeah and so do you think Trump would have got in if El hadn't bought x uh nobody knows I suspect not but maybe he would have done I don't think anybody really knows um I think On's support uh and X was was a big factor cool thought experiment but I just I really hope that over time what happens is uh Elon continues to improve X and there are improvements that could be made and certainly finding a way like I don't need to see the nword in every reply threat that do you know what I mean do you see what I'm saying like that that would be quite nice um and and I'm sure there's there's ways of dealing with that um you know Eric Weinstein when we had him on we had him kind of back and forth and I sort of accused him of not having Solutions and I don't have Solutions exactly but I think the problem Jordan Peterson put his finger on a long time ago is that online anonymity causes a lot of issues online anonymity is also extremely valuable but there's got to be some way of finding some kind of no Solutions only tradeoffs that yeah it what was it that he once said um anonymity online has driven the proximate price of being a prick down zero mhm and so my and and so my point is I'm not a snowflake who is triggered by some unpleasant word in the thing I just recognize that if we're going to have a Public Square the most person ever shouting the most offensive word that he can think of the loudest is probably not conducive to a healthy discussion and also is it an enjoyable environment to be in you want to go on to social media you know everybody's seen this it was Tristan Harris or the the Litany of uh lyic hijack techniques that we've seen from intermittent schedule rewards to designs being taken from gambling and casinos and stuff all of that stuff um even if that is all happening at least trying to restrict down to make it an enjoyable experience if you're going to hack my fundamental psychology to get me addicted to this app at least have the thing that I'm addicted to the content that I'm addicted to be something that wants I finish up I go so I I went to this um Spotify event in La a couple of weeks ago they announced this new uh creative partner program thing and I went there and I got to sit down with Alex Nordstrom who's President and he told me Roman won Muller as well who's like the head of podcasting told me the same thing he said we want the hour that people spend on Spotify every day no matter what it is but they're specifically talking about podcasting we want that to be the best hour of their day that they spend on their screens they look back at it and they have no regrets and they think that made my life better when we leave and I don't know how many other apps membership services and sites and stuff like that can say the same thing how much do they pay you to say that uh nothing yet uh but I I think it's I think it's genuinely true when I when I reflect on my own experience when I reflect on my own use of these sorts of platforms uh I can't always say the same thing for YouTube I need to be more disciplined on YouTube it's like a a a a tool that can be used for good or evil on YouTube and then as we get more toward Instagram it sort of skews a little bit darker the five times a year that I go on Tik Tok I'm like oh my God uh it's a potent fuel um substack I would say for me is even more reliably uh better oh sub's amazing hour spent than uh on Spotify but more effortful yes you have to read exactly even if I listen you voiceovers and stuff like that um but yeah I'm just I I really really hope that that can that energy can kind of be a little bit more in infused and I'm aware that that is going to damage time on site that that's going to reduce interaction that's going to reduce engagement that's going to make companies less profitable in some ways or whatever but I wonder whether uh the post content Clarity that people have after they've spent a bit of time on something can end up winning over outrage triggering porn at all costs and um yeah I I I that makes sense to me around like does every other reply it is there is a lot of posting on X now because it's like the shiny new toe where people can say whatever pretty much whatever they want and uh not that it's just not a superbly enjoyable experience as much of the time as I would like it to be should be able to be easily fixed should it I would hope so I think that if you can curate your algorithm in a manner where you can say hey I want to step in I'm not limiting free speech at all just like that's that's not the sort of stuff I want to see I don't see music from very many jazz bands on Spotify uh you know the YouTube algorithm tends to show me stuff for the most part that I actually agree with YouTube doesn't outrage upon you all that much with opposing point of view now maybe that's Echo chambery and obviously lots of content creators that you like may find something not that you with but something they disagree with which you will also disagree with um but I get the sense that there could be more work to be done that being said I follow 101 people on Twitter which is a very good way to just constrain down reality to the point where most of what you see is fine but I'm aware that that's a and you can mute people who are rude or whatever or block even that the muting and the blocking thing Elon like announced an update to that relatively recently I think yeah the blocking thing people who you've blocked still see your stuff yeah odd I didn't know I I think it would be good you tweeted about something actually that I missed I've been largely offline for the last month uh so check in briefly see what's going on and then the off again you tweeted about people removing pronouns from their ex bio what have I missed here is that a thing is that a trend that's going on yeah a lot after the election a lot of people AOC did it among other people um and uh you know I I what I said about that is they were sheep when they put them in there Biers and they sheep now when they're removing them and I think that's true and and the point I was trying to make is is not that I don't welcome people doing that I the point I was trying to make is that um a lot of people make decisions not on the basis of what they think is right or true or moral or whatever but on the basis of what other people are doing um and so and it's an important thing to keep in mind when we talk about a lot of these social movements because they're really driven by a very small number of people uh who seem to have currency or power in that environment um and that's a kind of reassuring thing in many ways about the possibility of change you know we talked about the UK and the how stuck it feels at the moment well all it takes is a significant number of high status people to have a different perspective and that perspective then then becomes the dominant one as we saw in America with with the Trump elections so um but yeah there is a Readjustment happening in response to the the the landslide that Trump managed to secure yeah I mean we saw this I think uh my favorite examples of this are how quickly the word politically correct became uh sort of impossible to use on ironically and then the word woke the feedback mechanism on woke was what felt like to me within six months that it was a word nobody used a word that certain people used in an unironic way almost immediately alchemized into a word that could not be used unironically and now there needs to be something else socially where or whatever I'm I'm not sure what it is and um that's one of the situ I always question a little bit the power of ridicule for creating social change I think part of that is just that the UK's tried to sort of piss take its way out of many problems without much profit or success um but that is one of those examples where you think it was a word that uh people didn't like and very quickly had push back against and was that was it was it was here and gone before you even knew it you know what I mean yeah yeah yeah well that can happen especially when the underlying concepts are as ridiculous as they are people will then use and and and it was you're right it was very funny because you literally had people writing articles in the guardian about why they're woke and then like six months later saying all these right-wing people are calling us woke yeah uh you had this interesting perspective about lesson that societies don't last forever societies and cultures and Empires uh providing additional perspective when thinking about cultural issues obviously something pretty Salient to you given where you were born what is that additional uh perspective or Insight or what's the lesson that should be taken away from that I can't remember who said this but um there's this very famous line that things that can't last forever won't if something can't go on forever it won't and so when we look at the direction of Western Society um over the last 10 15 years we've talked about it in the UK we've talked about it in Europe and to some extent in the United States unless Trump really is able to turn it around um if you run very high levels of debt if you have high levels of crime if you have high levels of illegal and legal immigration that fundamentally change the values and culture of a country if you uh refuse to prioritize the citizens of your own country and say we want to take care of our people if you refuse to pursue economic growth at the cost of other things which that's what you have to do because everything is trade-off so if you want more economic growth you might have less climate Obsession or whatever um if you um have a situation where young people can't Advance as we've talked about if we have a situation where large communities of people don't have access to meaningful work on and on and on if that goes on for a period of time I know from my Soviet experience that societies don't always last forever and then if you actually look at history you know that no Society lasted forever ever um so when things are bad and continually so and keep getting worse and this is maintained over a period of time and on top of that you're told actually this is the right way to go go it's it's not unreasonable in that situation to say well if we carry on going in this direction this is going to end badly um now at the same time people like me who make this point often get accused of like scare monger and whatever you know and it's true like I remember in the 90s when I was talking to my dad about my job prospects he was like look definitely don't be a lawyer because on current trends by the year 2000 everyone in the world is going to be a lawyer now surprise surprise not everyone in the world is a lawyer and so societies do change track over time and people change track over time but it's the job I feel of people like me who've had that experience of knowing that Society doesn't last forever to remind people that like it's all all our civilization is is like a big Jenga block like you can pull some out and it will stay standing but if you pull all of the cause bit out yeah it is actually capable of collapse this isn't guaranteed to last forever it's one of those people that uh takes their relationship their significant other for granted over and over again and they don't do the things that need to keep the relationship on track and then one day the relationship breaks down and that person leaves them and I get it you know the the vast majority of of Western citizens are uh com historically speaking very passive very very unwilling to revolt very unwilling to engage in violence very unwilling willing to overthrow the government very comfortable by comparative standards uh to to previous gen you know centuries ago where it's literally like well I could like die tomorrow of disease and hunger starvation because you're not looking after me or I could try and overthrow you like what do I really have to lose most people in the west are not like that and so the people in charge are very insulated and protected there's a level of comfort that uh s the popul from doing that yes I get it but you got to recognize that that's that can change over time uh and I would really like us not to push as far as we possibly can to find out where that line is where you piss people off enough you see what I mean why why don't we just like is that a risk do you think uh not right now but it was in the summer in this country we had riots in this country from people who as you rightly say you know the media and other people tried to call them far right I thought the vast majority of them were not remotely political at all correct um so what does that tell you it tells you that there's a significant body of the population uh who are very very very frustrated there's some kindling there the kindling is undoubtedly there and by the way not just among those people you saw from the Muslim Community the feeling that like well we got to go and tou up and be in the streets to defend ourselves now you have those two forces rising at once it's not a good outcome um and so no I'm not not I'm not saying again like when I had this I don't know if you saw my conversation with this journalist about Elon Musk it's a it's a it's a recorded conversation uh with him trying to interrogate me about why I agree with Elon that Civil War it's a video on our channel it's done crazy numbers because he's trying to it shows you all the sleazy old school approaches that was it for your Channel or for somebody else for our Channel who is it it's an it's like NBC journalist versus Constantine kissing about musk or something like that and he tries to catch me out and it really doesn't end well for him but the the broader point is Elon said looking at the riots in the UK The Logical conclusion of this or something like that is Civil War and I think he's right that doesn't mean that I think we're there now it doesn't mean that I think we're guaranteed to get there and that we can't intervene and it certainly doesn't mean that we can't intervene I think the reason that Elon and I are both saying this is a possibility is we'd like it not to happen but for it not to happen things have to be improved and my invitation to the people who who have the the ability to change things to the extent that they do is to recognize that yes we're not there right now but you carry the on for another 20 years you have no idea what the situation is going to be like strange that that that sort of rhetoric is sometimes interpreted as a threat it's like I'm not this isn't me saying that this is an outcome that I'm looking for but just like head in sand this isn't an option this isn't going to happen you're being overblown uh I don't know man you're right but it happens in everything you know this like uh I I actually know personally somebody whose mother went to the hospital because she had diabetes and the doctor said if you keep up the diet that you have you will die and have very serious complications as a result of your diabetes CU you're obese and that person who's my my friend's relative reported the doctor for being offensive or whatever and this is what people often do like you say if you only eat ice cream you're actually going to get fat and and be unhealthy people sort of like they they blame you for telling them that truth and this is the same thing it's like nobody who's predicting that we're heading in the wrong direction wants us to be heading in the wrong direction on the contrary but you get blamed for warning about the things that end up happening and it doesn't make any sense to me so I just to be clear I want the West to be prosperous successful I want it absolutely unashamedly to be the dominant civilization in the world I don't want any of this multi-polar bollocks our civilization is the best civilization on the planet its values such as they were classically not a lot of all this other rainbow um are the right values uh they're the best values human beings have ever come up with freedom uh in every form Liberty uh the the capitalist mod model which has areas that need managing carefully but broadly speaking is about unleashing the talent of human beings and rewarding them for cooperation um and uh and all of these other things that we've developed over time uh they are the best values I'm not saying we have to go and impose them on anybody else in fact that's not how Freedom Works people have to buy into it um and so you know I'm not into going and bombing Iraq into democracy bombing Afghanistan into freedom clearly doesn't work but our civilization is the best our civilization needs to be strong confident prosperous um and United and that is very far from where we are and that's the goal I'd like us to be working with so when I say we're heading in the wrong direction what I mean is let's head in this direction instead yes yes yes yes I'm interested in how your uh worldviews changed since becoming a dad you know somebody that spent a good bit of time sort of thinking about this stuff how are my position within Society within culture with you know uh broad perspective on different cultures different backgrounds the directions that things can go in the time that you spend professionally doing this stuff but then you have a very visceral experience which is Mini Me in the world what have you what have you learned what's has much changed were you surp have you been surprised by anything uh I first of all it changes you in a way that isn't conscious first and foremost so I remember literally like a week after finding out that my wife was pregnant I was driving into the studio someone cut in front of me and I in and I later realized I hadn't reacted in the way that I used to react so in in the past I would have been like what are you doing and I was just like you know what I just got I've got somewhere to be I haven't got time for this you know so it changes you in that way it's a very humbling experience um for a number of reasons one of them is my firm belief is that you can never be happy until you've forgiven your parents I don't think it's possible I don't think a human being can be happy until they've forgiven their parents forgiven isn't the same as condone accept the that what they did was right in every way you just can't be happy and fulfilled until you've let go of the resentments that everyone has towards their parents one way or another everybody has them even the people who had the best childhood there was still you know when they put the the egg on your silver plate you know there was something imperfect about it or whatever so one of the things that really helps with that I found is that you've got the mini me as you say and you suddenly recognize oh wait I am doing the best with the resources that I have and I'm not perfect and then I look back at my parents so my parents had me when my mother had been 18 for 4 days my dad was 20 I was an accident there were two deeply impoverished students in Moscow in the Soviet Union in the 1980s there were no books about raising kids there was no internet there was no can I Google this can I Google that um my mom you know tells the story to this day of how one day when I was a toddler she came home and discovered me as as a toddler maybe not even came home maybe she was in the other room or something and I had this triangular pack of milk uh that I was glugging this Cardon of milk that we had in the Soviet Union uh drinking it and she was horrified because she was using that milk to make the porridge or whatever and that was the only milk that we could afford that day so when I look at that versus the opportunity I have with my son and compare it gives me a lot more compassion for them and the way that they were versus uh the way that I am now so you found in some ways uh reflection healing of your own childhood in fatherhood yeah now to be honest with you I don't think that that like having a child isn't going to solve all those problems but it's certainly a helpful factor in understanding the context of that and it's just very humbling in understanding your own imperfections you know recognizing that you don't always be behave in the best way and then actually taking action to to remedy that and realizing this I've gone to the next level now I have to be at the next level I have to be better I have to be U you know I have to deal with the that I still haven't dealt with that I didn't realize I had and all of that stuff so on a personal development perspective amazing then uh it connects you fundamentally I believe with the past and the future in a way that nothing else does it connects you with the past in the sense that you recognize that you are just passing on some things that happened for centuries before you got here and also that you're the custodian of the future uh and that your child is going to be the custodian of the future too so to that extent it makes me think much more um inclusively about the country that I live in it makes me want to contribute more to be a more positive influence in the world to improve the society that I live in or as we talked about earlier to find one that matches my values and creates the opportunities I want for my children going forward so it makes me really really care about the place that I live in because know that I will be living here even after I'm dead you see what I mean um so that's another one it it also uh it it puts a lot of strain on the relationship you have with your wife because you've suddenly got less time less time together more things are difficult blah blah blah blah blah and so that means you have to go to the next level as a couple you really have to up your game together um and that's that's been really did your background I'm interested people might not know this but you've done quite a bit of sort of emotional work things uh courses so on and so forth that we've spoken about um two elements that I'm interested in whether or not your inner work emotional personal development side stuff uh you think that that contributed to You Me Maybe being a bit more robust uh as a parent for the these and also your time in the business uh building up the business like operationally effective as a person managing spinning plates like having to deploy orders you know oh there's none of the nappies that we need from this store we you know like just that kind of logistical uh uh competence yeah and and the management of human beings too right I heard this great thing just as on a side I want I was wanted to share with you Warren Buffett's um three things that you need in is in in people that you employ um it was Integrity intelligence and energy and he was like and people think that the worst you could possibly have is someone who's low Integrity low energy low intelligence and he's like that is not true the worst thing you can have is someone who's high energy High Intelligence low Integrity yeah working incredibly hard at making things worse yeah or stealing company money or whatever it is um but but anyway yeah of course uh Jordan said this to me actually um I remember talking about this and he asked me uh about you know what difference running trigonometry had made and I talked about managing people and he was like oh yeah running a business is like fatherhood by proxy which I think to some extent it is hopefully your employees are not boiling their eyes out their pants every two hours but nonetheless depends how many episodes we try to do in a day yeah um but yeah of course you're more prepared I mean the more I the one thing I say to everybody who asked me this is like whatever it is that you know is lacking in your skill set get it sorted before you become a parent like if you don't know how to ride a bike learn to ride a bike before you become a parent if you don't have to drive a car learn how to drive if you don't have to manage your emotions learn to do that before you what was the thing or was there anything that uh in retrospect uh like potential father Constantin you'd have been like hey man you've got nine months like that's a good area that you could focus on so you don't need to do it once he's arrived the most important thing is um I think it's a mistake most people made my wife and I definitely made it which is once the child has born you totally forget about your relationship and you're just like how do how do we like actually like keep this baby alive and you don't go out on dates and you don't spend time together with each other romance can suffer it it's not just romance it's it's the connection it's fundamentally the connection and so you you it's it's there's a danger that you become business partners who are dealing with a difficult problem as opposed to a couple who's like a couple and then the baby's kind of there you know what I mean and so there was definitely a period where we didn't do enough of that so now we're like having a day every week making sure that we spending time together you know having lots of conversations lots of flowers lots of all of that just really making sure that the relationship is first the parenting is second in the sense that you can't really be a good parent if your relationship is not working optimally um so that's definitely definitely very important and then you know I believe that all performance in every area ultimately comes down to how psychologically aligned you are with who you want to be you know so if you whatever psychological issues you have they are going to be the thing that affects whether you're a good boss or not whether you're a good dad or not whether you're a good husband or not all of those things so that feeling of continually working on yourself I'm reading a book now that somebody in La L gave me about how to be a good husband um the next one is how to raise boys the next one is you know so that's what that's where my focus is now is how do you improve in those areas and one of the reasons I'm so obsessed with that is it's like the impact is the greatest you know a 2-year world really takes on the lessons of whatever it is that you're very permeable sponge yeah uh but but perhaps irreversibly so so you really want to make sure that you're like um you can't squeeze the the crap out of the the sponge again so you want to make sure that you're at your best M um is that a motivating force for you already somebody who you know like maybe lots of the people that are listening who don't yet have kids upward aiming self-authoring agency intentionality all of those things and then you think oh you know I'm the RPM limiter is already bouncing off the top and then you realize that there's five more gears that you could step into from a uh Obsession intensity intentionality standpoint now that you're doing something for somebody else yeah it's interesting I don't mean to be picky with the metaphor but it's not like there's five more gears vertically it's not like there's a six and the seventh and an eighth gear it's more like when you are one of the driven people like us and you're obsessed with your work and you love what you do and blah blah blah blah blah it can be tempting to just go well there's this other area of life which is personal relationships where it's like well as long as I'm making enough money and being successful out here need to worry about that I don't really need to worry too much about that I fundamentally don't believe that which is why you know in some ways I really admire people who don't have an amazing woman by their side as I've been lucky to have who is still able to be successful cuz I know that for me like there's no way that would have happened you know so the I really needed to be pulled back into like as the success of our channel has happened and everything else I've really had to be dragged back into okay this is a time to go back to the thing you did 10 15 years ago where you go okay the relationship isn't exactly how I want it let's focus on this let's work on this um and so it's I find life as like those five bars that you're trying to balance at the same time and as this one goes up this one is slipping and and whatever so I'm just trying to raise all of them at the same time as much as I can and that means you know uh I look at you traveling around the world way more than I could possibly do and doing things that I might not be able to do and like I'm I'm spending that time with my son to me that's a worthwhile tradeoff and then you'll get to that stage at some point where you'll be I can't wait I can't wait and um you know my friend a few years ago in Austin said to me successful guy big business boted smitten with his new partner and they're starting to talk about engagements and kids and all the rest of this stuff and uh he said I realized I spent most of my 20s and half of my 30s making myself into the person I wanted to be as a father and uh I thought how like how beautiful way to alchemize all of the stuff you do CU there is a kind of sterile uh isolation to doing things just for yourself uh even if they're Grand even if they are you enacting your logos forward you know actualizing your purpose and stuff and they can still give you meaning but I there is especially if you've got to some degree of success which is maybe why people that reach success uh struggle even more so because they realized that success wasn't filling the ho that they thought it would do um and there is a little bit of me that thinks well how great if you kind of get to you get to benefit twice from this thing you did all of this work because you wanted to fix yourself and maybe the reason you wanted to fix yourself was to become successful so you can be validated and have social recognition and stuff like that maybe that's not like the most superbly virtuous alignment but it sort of put you in the right direction and then later on you realize that all of that work has this additional second benefit that somebody who wasn't obsessed to do that regardless of what the motivation was you now have this beautiful Foundation that you can then pay forward and uh I know I think like it that's a really a really lovely type of alchemy I think well it's you know that quote I'll I'll butcher it but what does a profit a man to to uh gain the world and lose a soul or something like that and the way I look at success is what does it profit you to have millions in the bank if the people around you are miserable or don't exist what what what have you you know the the Fulfillment you get from family is incomparable now if you're living in bedsit and struggling to pay the bills it puts so much strain on your life that it's very difficult to enjoy and some people you know are Saints and are able to actually enjoy that in in difficult circumstances you know people always go well money can't buy you happiness it can make it a lot easier to be happy that's for sure there poverty can make you miserable yes and and you money is all money is is a tool so if you use that tool to solve problems that get in the way of your happiness it can make you happy my friend George talks about people that say money doesn't buy you happiness never met P Diddy's neighbors the different you buy this expensive house you realize it's next to py you spend a tiny bit more money now you have earplugs uh that it's very much how you deploy it yes um and so um I think success for especially for a man is a great thing to pursue uh and one of the reasons is is that if you want to be more successful you're going to have to be better to work on yourself you have to get better as a human being um hopefully hopefully not everybody does but once you've got that success and you are making good money and you're you know whatever something Jordan said to me when we were on tour together um he said the best place to store excess resources is in your reputation that's interesting what's that mean to you what it means is once you're doing well the best thing that you can possibly do with the extra resources that you have is to help other people is to make opportunities for other people is to be somebody to other people benefit from knowing is to be good to your family too you know in some respects so the resources that you have whether it's money or connections or whatever are really best deployed into other people around you because that's how you're going to have the best possible life uh and I think that's fundamentally true it gives me way more joy to buy my wife something than to spend that money on myself correct and the same for you know seeing my son's eyes light up when he something happens that we now can afford that we couldn't before think about this you know I imagine as the uh recovering workaholic or maybe still recovering workaholic um that you may be and I almost certainly will have to be that I'm not recovering I I love work I will always love work but think about think about it this way there's this lovely Insight from James Clear where he says that uh if you're already at a level of material comfort trading uh quality of life for more money is a bad deal and uh the level of success the level of material comfort so on and so forth one of the best gifts that you can give which is totally non-obvious is to say I'm going to leave additional revenue on the table or I'm going to leave additional life experiences travel the world less do fewer live events which all of this stuff you could do more in order to do that and how much does son's eyes light up from new toy truck versus from Daddy being at home for an additional five hours a week uh and that's one of those sort of hidden metrics it's never going to appear on a balance sheet somewhere not objectively uh but very much is something that you need to dedicate a good bit of time to yes and uh I remember I had a very interesting conversation with Bill acman it was a private one but I don't I don't imagine he would mind he probably has talked about this elsewhere in public he him and I were just having lunch and he his wife is who's amazing in her own right ner oh yeah she's like a super genius like xod PhD like Interstellar person right she's incredible lovely human being just wonderful they they both are great people actually um but Bill was saying to me Bill is one of the most successful investors in the history of capitalism and he he showed me a graph where there was like a massive dip in the company valuation and then it just goes massively back up and he went right at the bottom and he said this is when we got together and he said this is not an accident he said when your personal life is good good you inevitably succeed in everything else because it's the foundation from which you operate and so that that happiness and joy that he has from being married to a woman he is clearly just passionate and passionately in love with who is great for him he's he says that that is a big part of his business success and I have no doubt that that's true uh you know when when when the foundation of everything that you're doing is strong it's so much easier to do everything else it's probably you I mean I'm hardly an expert on bodybuilding but but I imagine if you've got a weak core and you do lots of really heavy lifting is probably not that good for you right and so to me family and your the relationships you have with the people around you are really that core that you build everything El very interesting constant and kissing ladies and gentlemen dudes I appreciate the heck out of you I always love having a chat where should your people go going to keep up to date with everything you're doing my suback Constantin kiss.com and trigonometry the YouTube channel uh and podcast highly recommend it also I think that you have done a great job of uh writing a book and selling it by the sentence we do the article then you get Early Access on that that's monetized then that gets put into a spoken script that people can watch on the YouTube then that'll get everyone's copying that now have you noticed I have some words it is a price that you're going to pay for finding anything that's I love it I love it this is one of the things that people get very U upset in our space about like stealing ideas and I'm like they're not stealing they are take they're proof of concepting what I've done precisely correct that's great I want more great people to be doing exactly the thing that and this is I was not always like this this is one of the things I've learned and actually the person I've learned that from positive sum equan Equanimity the person I've learned that from is Rogan undoubtedly cuz he's like you should have a podcast you should have a everyone gets a podcast where most people mentality when they're ahead of everybody else is like yeah Titan shut it down and Joe is like there's enough in this there's more for every and that lets grow the pie instead of obsess about how we divide the pie it's much it's a much nicer way to operate as well it's the best it's the best it's it's it's awesome man I I really I really think that the the stuff that you're putting out this sort of position that you guys have carved for yourselves is is super interesting and uh long mate continue well I appreciate you as well man and you've had amazing success this year so congratulations you're going to cut this out like last time last time I said Well Done congratulations and you cut it out of the episode don't do it again okay Dean did you listen to that stop it all right appreciate you man until next time thanks brother appreciate it hello everybody thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode with Constantine my fulllength conversation with the one and only Dr Jordan Peterson is waiting for you right here very good come on