Financial Crash Expert: He Predicted The 2008 Crash, Now He Says Capitalism Failed, It’s Too Late!

Is the West collapsing, or is the planet? Political commentator Konstantin Kisin and rebel economist Steve Keen go head-to-head on the biggest questions facing the West: immigration, the debt crisis, climate change, Trump, China and the future of AI. Konstantin Kisin is a satirist, social commentator and author, best known as the co-host of the Triggernometry podcast and the author of ‘An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West’. Born in the Soviet Union and now based in Britain, he has become one of the most prominent voices on free speech, culture and the rise of populism. Steve Keen is an economist, author and one of the most vocal critics of mainstream economic thinking. A former Professor of Economics, he is the author of several books including ‘Debunking Economics’ and ‘The New Economics: A Manifesto’, and is currently writing his upcoming book ‘How Economists Will Destroy Capitalism’. He is known for his work on private debt, financial crises and the failures of conventional economic models, and for correctly warning of the 2008 financial crash. They debate: ◼ Why almost everything governments tell you about debt and borrowing could be wrong ◼ Whether a socialist government could actually be good for the economy ◼ Why AI could quietly strip away human free will ◼ Why Konstantin believes mass immigration is pushing the West toward civil unrest ◼ Why Steve thinks climate change, not politics, is the real threat that dwarfs everything else Chapters 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:05 We're on the Road to Civil Unrest 00:08:04 Where This Leads: Unrest and Violence 00:11:11 I Grew Up in the Soviet Union 00:12:12 Steve Keen: Capitalism Is About to Fail 00:20:49 "We're Not Spending Enough" 00:23:58 Should Britain Drill in the North Sea? 00:28:39 "You Can't Defend Yourself Against This" 00:32:48 The World Government Admission 00:36:55 "Brace for Impact" - Climate Change Is Here 00:40:03 "It's Too Late" - What Breakdown Looks Like 00:45:11 The Trap Trump Walked Into 00:48:49 The Famine He Says Is Coming 00:50:53 How Does Trump Get Out of This? 00:53:35 Does America Need a Socialist President? 00:55:37 Why China Works and the Soviet Union Didn't 01:01:10 "Would You Prefer the Chinese System?" — "Yes" 01:05:09 Will Andy Burnham Change Britain's Trajectory? 01:11:00 Wokeism: A Hierarchy of Oppression 01:13:30 AI, Mass Unemployment and The Hunger Games 01:17:21 Best Case a Pet, Worst Case a Cow 01:20:54 Can You Program Love Into an AI? 01:26:07 Nobody Can Stop It So How Do You Live? Follow Konstantin: Triggernometry: https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/7KlmjlK Substack: https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/8RYFKgr You can purchase ‘An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West’, here: https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/97WXGH2 Follow Steve Keen: X: https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/3HXCj1o YouTube: https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/nYvGJg Facebook: https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/C3jTPoD You can purchase 'Debunking Economics', here: https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/CaG0mQJ The Diary Of A CEO: ◼ Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼ Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/BWjLTZK ◼ The 1% Diary is back - limited time only: https://thediary.com/products/one-percent-diary ◼ The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://thediary.com/products/the-conversation-cards-2nd-edition ◼ Get email updates - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/5IB1H6E ◼ Follow Steven - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/AGU9QP4 Sponsors: Bon Charge: https://boncharge.com/DOAC for 20% off Ketone - https://ketone.com/STEVEN for 30% off your subscription order

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Konstantin Kisin?

  Our political class has lost control. The right is getting more right than ever. And anytime you have a combination of economic problems and social and stability and cultural problems, you put all those things together, it's not a good time. It's a time when conflict, violence, civil unrest, all of these things are much more likely.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Oh, civil unrest is absolutely guaranteed.

• 0:19Konstantin Kisin?

  And what you are now seeing is, I fear, the beginnings of a totally new level of separation between people. We are on the road to civil unrest and violence. But I'm glad we're having this conversation because these are difficult things to talk about.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  And that's why China is outperforming the rest of the world. There are so many freedoms you don't get in America that you do get in China.

• 0:40Steven Bartlett?

  Would you prefer a Chinese system?

• 0:41Speaker 01

  If you...

• 0:41Konstantin Kisin?

  To America?

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:43Konstantin Kisin?

  What about political freedom, freedom of the individual, freedom of speech? Do you think Stephen could run his show if he was a Chinese citizen in China and have any conversation if he wanted?

• 0:51Steven Bartlett?

  And you think communism is bad?

• 0:53Konstantin Kisin?

  I grew up in the Soviet Union, so yes, I do think communism is bad. You end up in a place where the economy is just screwed. So you get equality, but everyone's just equally poor.

• 1:02Steven Bartlett?

  Constantine, what is your perspective on AI?

• 1:04Konstantin Kisin?

  I think the biggest threat to humanity, if you talk about AI, is actually the fact that you're creating something that's smarter than you. And if you're creating a superior species, you will become an inferior species. Best case scenario, you become a pet. Worst case scenario, you become a cow.

• 1:17Steven Bartlett?

  So my next question logically becomes, what can we do about it?

• 1:20Konstantin Kisin?

  There is an actual solution that's available, that's clear. I think what we should really be focusing on is...

• 1:26Steven Bartlett?

  You're wrong.

• 1:26Konstantin Kisin?

  This is where we're likely to have very strong disagreements.

• 1:31Steven Bartlett?

  Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much.

• 2:05Steven Bartlett?

  Constantine, in terms of everything that's going on in the world at the moment, what are the subjects that are most concerning to you?

• 2:15Konstantin Kisin?

  I think that I wrote an article a couple of years ago called Why I Fear the Future, in which I basically predicted that what you were about to see was the rise of far-left populism and the rise of right-wing populism, and in some cases, far-right populism, particularly in Europe, but also elsewhere. And I think that's exactly what you're seeing in the Western world. And then geopolitically, the war in Iran will have an impact on the global economy that's only going to fuel that further. So I think the trend, you know, people have spent the last 10 years talking about polarization, without really understanding the process that was driving it, in my opinion, particularly in Europe.

• 2:58Konstantin Kisin?

  And what you are now seeing is, I fear, the beginnings of that process actually going to a totally new level of separation between people.

• 3:08Steven Bartlett?

  And what's the root cause of that?

• 3:10Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, the root cause of that is a mixture of things, of course. Part of it is economic. Europe has basically stagnated since the Great Financial Crisis. This country, Britain in particular, has stagnated economically. But a lot of it is the consequence of mass unfettered immigration and people's concerns about what has happened culturally and demographically. And these are difficult things to talk about, which, you know, some people find challenging to even discuss. But it's very clear to me, if you look at, you know, the AFD in Germany, Marine Le Pen in France, Giorgia Maloney in Italy, Farage and Rupert Lowe in the UK, and what we saw in Sueto, however you pronounce it, a couple of weeks ago in Spain.

• 3:54Konstantin Kisin?

  These are all things, just, you know, the visual medium is very powerful. When you see 60,000 people enter a country illegally in a day, that sort of imagery is likely to create a very strong amount of pushback. Oh, you came prepared, huh? Yeah, well, you know, if you're a normal person and you see this, whatever your other views, you just go, well, like, like, what's going on? That will be your question, whether you're a really nice, not racist person who really, really thinks, you know, no human is illegal. Like, you're thinking, what is going on here? And the compassion and empathy you might feel for people fleeing conflict, for example, is unlikely to extend to something like this because we know that these people are economic migrants overwhelmingly.

• 4:38Konstantin Kisin?

  And they're coming, if you ask them, which many people did, and ask them, why are you here? They will say, I want to have a better life for myself, which, you know, I don't blame people for. I myself have moved from a foreign country to Britain.

• 4:50Steven Bartlett?

  And if you were in that position, would you do the same thing?

• 4:53Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, I don't know the exact position that they're in. I, what I can tell you is I came to Britain legally because that's what I thought you're supposed to do. You're supposed to follow the rules. So if I were in that position, it depends what you mean by that position. You know, if I had a wife and children, would I abandon them to try and get to Europe? And, you know, I don't know, but a lot of these people are overwhelmingly young men who probably don't have a wife and child. So it's difficult. I don't know.

• 5:19Steven Bartlett?

  But if you're in a situation where you had a wife and child, let's say, and there was a promise that if you got over that border over there, you could have a better life for your wife and child, a significantly better life for your wife and child, and send them money home and potentially even bring them over at some point. And if you were currently living in a point of hardship, would you cross the border?

• 5:40Konstantin Kisin?

  I don't know. I've never been in that situation and we don't know. But, but the issue for us, I think, in the West is not so much, do we have empathy for those people? It's kind of unimportant, actually, for this conversation. At a personal level, you want to feel like we're all empathetic, but the reality is, it's a practical issue. We've talked about this so many times on your show, about how so much of our decision-making and public conversation is driven by what makes us feel good as opposed to what works. This doesn't work.

• 6:07Steven Bartlett?

  I think there is an element of the importance of that question in the sense that if you don't have empathy for them, you blame them.

• 6:15Konstantin Kisin?

  I don't blame them.

• 6:15Steven Bartlett?

  You shut up outside the hotels.

• 6:16Konstantin Kisin?

  I think the blaming of them is a pointless distraction and is kind of irrelevant. The question is, what should we be doing about this? Right? And the fact is, this is not acceptable.

• 6:26Steven Bartlett?

  And what caused it?

• 6:27Konstantin Kisin?

  Yes. Well, what caused it is the world is unequal and there are poor parts of the world from which people would like to move to richer parts of the world. It's a very understandable decision, but unless you have a world in which everybody has the same quality of life everywhere, which we're never going to have, because that's not how the world works, then countries will have to have borders that they enforce. And that was the consensus view around the West for the entirety of its history.

• 6:53Steven Bartlett?

  And how is this contributing to the problems that you described in the West?

• 6:59Konstantin Kisin?

  If you're looking at that and you are in the center, center-right, maybe old-school leftist who sort of believes in high levels of redistribution, but believes in borders at the same time, you are looking at that and you're going, our political class has lost control. Our political class allows tens of thousands of people to enter Britain illegally on small boats every year. People on the right will look at that and say, we need to get tougher on borders, we need to get tougher on immigration, we need to get really tough on illegal immigration. And as long as the political class, left and right, refuses to address that issue, as they have done for this entire time, you will see more people on the right adopting harder-line slogans, harder-line policies when it comes to illegal immigration and immigration more broadly.

• 7:45Steven Bartlett?

  So it sounds a little bit to me like we're saying, unless we address this, then the right has a very effective marketing campaign.

• 7:53Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, the right has a very legitimate grievance about what's happening to their society, and that will be very effective electorally, of course.

• 8:01Steven Bartlett?

  And the other thing you said was stagnation, economic stagnation, I'm presuming?

• 8:04Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah, of course.

• 8:04Steven Bartlett?

  So this polarization that you're talking about, this economic stagnation, where does this lead us?

• 8:12Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, I hate, as you know, to make predictions about the future with any great confidence, but I think anytime you have a combination of economic problems and social and stability and cultural problems, you put all those things together, historically speaking, it's not a good time. It's a time when conflict, violence, civil unrest, all of these things are much more likely. Doesn't mean they're guaranteed, doesn't mean you can't change course, doesn't mean you can't course correct. But if you don't, we are on the road to, best case scenario, civil unrest and violence, for sure.

• 8:44Steven Bartlett?

  Do you see evidence that there's going to be a remedy to course correct the issue you've described?

• 8:49Konstantin Kisin?

  Currently, I don't see that being addressed, but we are in a, in a time when unusual things are possible. And so at the next election in Britain, you may see the right-wing populists come in. And then the question is, can they do the things that they're promising to the people who will vote for them? And there's a big question mark about that because the things that they'll be promising, which is about addressing not just this problem in terms of people currently coming in, but the people who are already here. You know, I don't know how much exactly we spend now, but there was a point at which we were spending eight million pounds a day on hotels for illegal immigrants. So it tells you the scale of the problem, and it's a very difficult problem to address because the legal system and international conventions and all sorts of other things

• 9:34Konstantin Kisin?

  that are now in place and are now enforced make it very difficult to address. It's not a dishonesty, but the thing that people on the right don't tend to say is, even once you've dealt with illegal immigration, the country's not magically going to be better. You have to have an economy that's growing for people to feel like their lot has got better. The fact that you have rightly removed people who should never have been allowed in in the first place will contribute somewhat to easing their concerns, but that's not going to solve the problem. And so even if you get right-wing populists into power, that's not necessarily a remedy for addressing the tensions that I'm talking about.

• 10:09Steven Bartlett?

  And in the United States, a different set of issues, but maybe symptoms are similar. Polarization's leading to, and inequality is leading to a rise in socialism and then the right is getting more right than ever?

• 10:20Konstantin Kisin?

  The right is getting more right than ever. I think Trump's election was kind of like the peak of it, and it's just carried on in terms of ICE and deportations and whatever. And look, there's a lot to be criticized about the Trump administration. The one thing they have done is close down the border. And I think that's a very good thing and it was very necessary. But in terms of the rise of socialism, and look, democratic socialism, we should be honest and just call it communism because that's what it is. It's a very unwise but understandable reaction to the economic circumstances of young people's lives in particular. If you're locked out of the housing market, which historically speaking is really the only way for an ordinary person to accumulate capital, if you don't have access to capital at a time when asset prices are inflating and have been inflating for a long time,

• 11:03Konstantin Kisin?

  you're basically watching the possibility of capitalism run away from you. Of course, you're going to turn over the apple cart.

• 11:11Steven Bartlett?

  And you think communism is bad?

• 11:14Konstantin Kisin?

  I grew up in the Soviet Union, so yes, I do think communism is bad. Ideologically, it might sound great to people, and I understand why. Quality to all men, everyone being, you know, equal in every way, it's wonderful. It just doesn't, it's not compatible with human nature for all sorts of reasons. The most obvious one is, you know, the basic 80/20 rule, 80/20 rule of things. Most people are not aware of it, but what communism tries to do is to take from the disproportionately productive 20% and spread it out across everybody else. The problem is that disincentivizes the 20% from doing anything. And so you end up with a communist system like the one we had in the Soviet Union, where no one really has any incentive to produce, to create, to innovate. And so you get a very stagnant econ, economy.

• 11:57Konstantin Kisin?

  And on top of that, then you have central planning where the government's trying to decide what to do. They're not getting market signals about what's the right or wrong thing to do. And you end up in a place where the economy is just screwed. So you get equality, but everyone's just equally poor.

• 12:12Steven Bartlett?

  Steve? What do you think in terms of what Constantine said to me? What, he said that he thinks there's civil unrest potentially?

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Civil unrest is absolutely guaranteed.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  All I can see is civil unrest ahead of us because it isn't just communism in that sense. There's a Russian Soviet version that you experienced that's failed. It's also capitalism and...

• 12:34Steven Bartlett?

  Capitalism has failed us.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  I think capitalism is going to fail, and you guess who I blame for it?

• 12:39Steven Bartlett?

  Who?

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Economists.

• 12:40Steven Bartlett?

  You're an economist?

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Neoclassical mainstream economists have a fantasy vision of capitalism, and that fantasy vision has led them to trivialize what's happening with global warming. And most people simply aren't aware of that they've done this. So nobody is worrying about global warming because they think it's something, not nobody, but the political authorities are not putting any effort into global warming because they read the economists and the economists tell them that by 2100, if temperatures rise by three degrees, there'll be a tiny fall in GDP, so why worry about it? In fact, we're starting to see the beginning of it this, this year with the crazy on the end are coming our way, the crazy weather we're living through in England right now. And the system is going to collapse because the productive system won't be able to cope

• 13:26Speaker 01

  with the change in the climate. So that's what I see as the main source of conflict. I don't, I think everything else we're seeing is trivial compared to what that's going to do.

• 13:37Steven Bartlett?

  What about, so Constantine talked about these crossings in Sueta in Spain?

• 13:41Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 13:42Steven Bartlett?

  And he was alluding to the fact that this needs to be addressed, or this polarization, which is having lots of downstream consequences, isn't going to change. What is your perspective on this issue?

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Again, there's so much of a fog of misinformation around these days that it's very hard to know whether what you hear is accurate. But the proposition I've been told is that Morocco has close relations with Israel and the Zionists wanted this as a way of destabilizing Spain, which is about the only country in Europe that is attacking the Zionist state. And so this was a political setup.

• 14:15Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, hold on a second, but Spain has the ability to enforce its own border.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Of course it does. But the fact that this actually happened is arguable, is being argued, and I don't know whether it's right or not. I'm giving up on trying to say whether something is AI or not these days. But it's, the argument has been that because the Spanish government came out and was critical of Israel, critical of Zionism, then this was a setup by the Israelis through Morocco to disturb Spain.

• 14:39Konstantin Kisin?

  But hold on, what I'm making a different point, Steve, which is, if my four-year-old wants sweets at 11 o'clock at night, that's true, but I am the idiot who gives it to him and that, and he then stays up all night. And European countries refuse to enforce their borders. Whatever you think Israel's doing, by the way, I've seen literally zero evidence to support this theory, but let's say it's true just for the sake of argument. It's ultimately up to Spain, it's up to Italy, it's up to Britain, it's up to other European countries to enforce the border. That is something that we are capable of doing. And it's not like this incident in Sueta is the only time this has happened. Three million people, slightly under, but around three million people have crossed

• 15:22Konstantin Kisin?

  the Mediterranean on boats in the last 10 years.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:26Konstantin Kisin?

  And that's not Israel doing it, that's us allowing it to happen.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  But also us destabilizing Libya. Okay? If the Libyan slave markets exist because we came, we saw, he died. I'll quote Hillary Clinton on that front.

• 15:40Konstantin Kisin?

  I completely agree with you.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  The extent to which the West has destabilized the regions from which the migrants are coming has to be acknowledged. If you don't acknowledge it, then you're blaming the people who are the sandwich between two political blocs.

• 15:51Konstantin Kisin?

  But I did acknowledge it and I completely understand, and I've been against a lot of the foreign interventions that the West has engaged in. But a lot of people, and we know this from surveys, from interviews, from the types of people who come, most of these people are economic migrants. Doesn't mean that they're wrong to pursue a better life, but they want to move to Europe. And I have, I look, this is not me saying it, it's a friend of mine who's an Iraqi, and this is what he says. He says, in the Middle East, we have a saying, if you want to work, you go to America. If you want to live on benefits, you go to Europe. We are creating an incentive structure in Europe that allows people to come and feel like this is a place in which we will provide a life for them that they don't have to provide a life for themselves in.

• 16:36Konstantin Kisin?

  That incentive, I mean, you're an economist, although an economist...

• 16:39Speaker 01

  An anti-economist.

• 16:40Konstantin Kisin?

  An anti-economist.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Do you remember that?

• 16:42Konstantin Kisin?

  But I doubt, we disagree about the importance of incentives and life.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  Incentives, but also incentives to push people out of where they are rather than to reconstruct where they are and make it more livable.

• 16:50Konstantin Kisin?

  I'm all, I'm all for that.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  I mean, the one country we're not seeing a lot of economic migrants from is China. Now, you say what?

• 16:58Konstantin Kisin?

  China's very far away.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Nonetheless, nobody wants to leave the place because it's booming.

• 17:02Steven Bartlett?

  If there was an economic stagnation in Europe, would this subject be as inflammatory for people? Would this be weaponizable?

• 17:14Speaker 01

  We're failing on all sorts of fronts, and the UK is not a booming economy.

• 17:17Steven Bartlett?

  You've often said, Constantine, that we're spending too much money.

• 17:20Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, we're borrowing money now to pay off money we borrowed before.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  This is wrong.

• 17:25Konstantin Kisin?

  Tell me why.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Okay. Have you ever done accounting?

• 17:28Konstantin Kisin?

  I've done my own accounting, yeah.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. Do the accounting and you'll see the government does not borrow when it spends more than it takes back in taxation.

• 17:36Konstantin Kisin?

  You were asking me about us spending too much money. I don't want to get a bogged down on this. The reality is, if you spend more on welfare than you do on defense, or if you spend more on welfare than you do on education, or if you spend more on welfare than other things, you're not spending money to help somebody get the mental health intervention they need to get back into work. That's not what we do in this country. And Andy Burnham actually is talking at least about attempting that. What we do instead, and we've had people like Fraser Nelson, who was there to, I think he was the editor of Spectator at the time, now he's at The Times, who's done a lot of research into this. And what he basically came to is that what we're really doing is putting people in a position where they are getting money in order not to get back into work.

• 18:18Konstantin Kisin?

  The incentive structure is such that it actually makes no sense for them to get a starting job, which will not necessarily be well-paid. But the tax incentives just mean that they're actually better off on welfare. If you do that, and if you spend a significant portion of your budget on that, plus you've got an aging population, so you're spending a tremendous amount of money on pensions. Pensioners vote, there's lots of them, they have the ability to make sure the government is really looking after them. If you do that over time, your ability to do productive things, you talked about productivity, is not going to be there. And by the way, the difference between the US and Britain and Europe more broadly, in my opinion, is partly cultural. You've moved to the US recently, or you certainly spend a lot of time there.

• 19:00Konstantin Kisin?

  There is a business mindset that exists in America that just isn't there here. And the other thing is, you know, their attitude to what we call welfare, what they call entitlements is different, and there's a, there's a good and bad side to that coin. In America, you really, really have to work very hard to survive because the welfare system isn't there to catch you when you fall nearly as much. You don't get the same quality of healthcare if you don't have the money to pay for it. You can fire and hire people much more easily, as you know, as an employer. All of those things mean that the US economy can accelerate a lot faster. But, you know, I always say, America is a great place to be rich, hard place to be kind of middle class, and a very difficult place to be poor.

• 19:45Konstantin Kisin?

  Europe is kind of the other way around. And so I think those are some of the differences in productivity as well.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  I'll agree with Constantine that America does have that can-do attitude, and they also do have the attitude that failure is the first step on the ladder of success. Okay? There is an expectation or acceptance that people can fail and then recreate. It's not a stigma in America, where it's more of a stigma over in the United Kingdom and Europe. So I think that is part of it. It's also the scale of the American economy. England, I think, has suffered more from the Thatcherite twist, cutting back government spending, meaning people have less money in their pockets to spend, meaning there's less economic activity, meaning you've got to go into debt to be able to start a business. All these things end up slowing down the rate of economic growth.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  America has not made the same mistake that the European Union made with something like the Maastricht Treaty. There are elements of the American system which give you a higher rate of technological innovation and development than England gets.

• 20:48Konstantin Kisin?

  For sure.

• 20:49Steven Bartlett?

  So Steve, so just to pick up on some of those points, then, are you saying that the UK don't have a spending problem?

• 20:56Speaker 01

  No, they don't have, they have the problem, they're not spending enough. The government should be spending more.

• 21:00Steven Bartlett?

  The government should be spending more.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  Spending more money.

• 21:02Konstantin Kisin?

  On what?

• 21:02Speaker 01

  On what? Education, welfare, infrastructure, dams for a start. You know how many dams? One of the reasons that we've got a potential crisis in the UK right now is the UK, after privatizing its water 40 years ago, has one less dam now than it had 40 years ago.

• 21:19Steven Bartlett?

  So you want the government to spend more?

• 21:21Speaker 01

  The government should be providing the infrastructure.

• 21:23Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, see.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  The foundation that enables economic activity to act, to occur. That's what we're seeing happening in China. And that's why China is outperforming the rest of the world. When you cut back on providing the infrastructure, you mean you've got to build your own roads to connect your factories together. Okay, so by not providing the long-term stuff, which a government should finance, you end up hobbling your own private sector rather than enabling it.

• 21:45Konstantin Kisin?

  But what you've done there is you've packaged a bunch of things together, some of which, in my opinion, are accurate and some of which are really inaccurate. When you say infrastructure, welfare, da, da, da, da, da. Infrastructure, like I'm in favor of government borrowing money to invest in things that generate productivity.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  And I'm in favor of them spending money to create that stuff. Same thing, but the borrowing is not important.

• 22:04Konstantin Kisin?

  Irrelevant.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 22:05Konstantin Kisin?

  Where you get that money from is actually irrelevant. The government spending money to invest in useful infrastructure, productive infrastructure. I mean, one of the other reasons the US is growing in a different way to us. The UK has the highest industrial electricity prices in the world. So if you're trying to do AI, you're not going to do it here. If you're trying to do industry, you're not going to do it here. Right, so if, if the government had actually made it easier to build nuclear power plants, to do other energy things that drive down the cost of electricity, then you are putting yourself in a position to succeed in industry and to succeed in business. And the government spending money, whether it's borrowed or not, to build infrastructure, housing, roads, there is definitely a case to be made for that.

• 22:46Konstantin Kisin?

  Giving money to people not to work, which is what a lot of the welfare bill is, that is not productive. And so you've got to separate these two things out. Money for infrastructure, wonderful, great. Money for keeping people unproductive, very bad. And culturally, it creates a lot of problems as well, because you create a society of people who are effectively takers and not creators, and it's terrible.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  I don't think we're doing that. I mean, I've seen unemployment benefits used to be adequate. Like, I'm talking from my Australian experience now. They're not anymore. So the welfare that's provided to people doesn't mean that they can survive and live with nothing.

• 23:23Steven Bartlett?

  There should be a button just down below here. And if it says subscribe, you're already subscribed. If it says subscriber, that means you're not yet. And if you're not subscribed, please could you do us a favor and hit that button? It helps the show more than you know. And according to the algorithm, you're someone that watches our show, but you haven't yet hit that button. Thank you so much. The other point was, you said you think the government should be spending even more money?

• 23:44Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 23:46Steven Bartlett?

  The point around how we generate growth does link fundamentally to energy. And we have, there's a big conversation happening at the moment with Andy Burnham. I think he spoke to Trump about this with, about the North Sea.

• 23:57Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 23:58Steven Bartlett?

  And about the oil in the North Sea. Do you think we should be drilling there?

• 24:01Konstantin Kisin?

  Look, the energy conversation, this is where we're likely to have very strong disagreements. But I think it's important to get the groundwork in place before we have the conversation. We, I mean, Steve said that, you know, no one's taking climate change seriously. I would argue, and I think we, I think it's based in what we have seen. We've talked about climate change in such a way for such a long time now, that you literally have people who are so terrified, they're not having children, they're so terrified, they've got climate anxiety. We had, you know, the phenomenon on Greta Thunberg going around, you know, giving speeches everywhere, being taken as a credible person. Let's look at the reality, okay? Almost all of the CO2 emissions, not almost all, but the overwhelming bulk

• 24:45Konstantin Kisin?

  of the CO2 emissions of the future, the greenhouse gases of the future, are going to be produced in two countries, India and China. That's just a fact. The world now uses more oil, more gas and more coal than it ever has done, ever. And people will say, well, China is building dams and wind turbines and solar panel arrays, et cetera. It's true, but they're also building coal power stations every week. They're building every form of energy that they can, because they know something we in the West have forgotten, which is GDP is energy transformed.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  No, there, I'd completely agree.

• 25:20Konstantin Kisin?

  Okay.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Okay, that's a shock, but I do.

• 25:21Konstantin Kisin?

  Good, fantastic. In other words, if you don't have energy, if you're not creating energy, you are going to be poor. Almost all wealth creation in the history of humanity has been about using more dense fuel. So you go from hay, which you put into horses and cows and animals, to coal, to wood, to coal, to oil, to, to gas, to nuclear. You get denser, denser, denser. You're creating more energy and you convert that energy into wealth, into prosperity, into hospitals, into schools, into money, into everything, right? So any society which creates a structure where energy is expensive and not abundant, is going to get poorer.

• 26:05Konstantin Kisin?

  It's one of the main reasons we are stagnating in Europe in a way that America is not, okay? Now, in terms of climate change, I don't want to get bogged down in how impactful this is, who's doing this, who's doing that. The hard reality is Britain can literally do absolutely nothing about climate change. Britain produces 1% of global carbon emissions, right? And the narrative was, well, it doesn't really matter that we only produce 1% of global carbon emissions, because Britain has moral leadership in the world. And so if we reduce our energy consumption and if we increase our energy prices and we slightly repackage and we use slightly more wind and slightly more solar, then other countries will follow suit. That was the argument.

• 26:48Konstantin Kisin?

  It's very clear now that that is not remotely happening. India and China, if you talk to people in India and China, they're like, we want to grow. We need our people to be prosperous. We need our people not to die. I mean, life expectancy in India at the time of partition in 1947 was 32 years old. That's how long people lived. Life expectancy at birth was 32 years old. It's now, I think, over 70, maybe 80 now at this point, right? And that's because they've been burning fossil fuels and they're going to keep burning fossil fuels and they're going to keep using nuclear and they're going to do everything else. Britain can't affect that. We can't do anything about it. And climate, the planet will get warmer. So what we should be doing is investing in infrastructure that allows us to cope with that reality in exactly the way the Dutch have done. So they build flood defences and other ways of managing the fact that sea levels change.

• 27:33Konstantin Kisin?

  That's the only thing that we in Britain can do about that issue. And in the meantime, rather than suiciding our economy by creating less energy and therefore reducing our ability to grow our GDP, what we should be doing is creating a system where we produce abundant, cheap energy. And, you know, Nick Clegg, former deputy prime minister, there's, there's a very instructive video of him 15 or 20 years ago being asked why we're not building nuclear power stations. Him saying, well, it's going to take 15, 20 years. Well, it's been 15, 20 years and we don't have any bloody nuclear power stations because of the shortsightedness of our political leaders on these issues. So should we be pumping out as much CO2 into the atmosphere as we can? Absolutely no, we shouldn't be. Should we have a sensible energy policy that is about making sure

• 28:18Konstantin Kisin?

  that we actually grow our economy and keep our people wealthy? And also have the money to make the adjustments we're going to have to make to the fact that climate will change and we can't control that? That's the real question. It's not about, do you believe climate change or whatever? This is a silly conversation. The real conversation is what can we do about the inevitable reality of the climate changing?

• 28:39Steven Bartlett?

  And you're saying we can't do anything to stop it, but you're also then saying we should just build defences to deal with the symptoms?

• 28:45Konstantin Kisin?

  We should adapt. And this is what human beings have done throughout the history of our, of our civilization and of our species. There have been times when the planet has been way warmer than it is today. 12,000 years ago, so there were hippopotamuses swimming in the Thames and elephants.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  No, not 12,000 years, please.

• 29:01Konstantin Kisin?

  I'm pretty sure it is 12,000.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  No, 12,000 years ago is the beginning of coming out of the ice age.

• 29:05Konstantin Kisin?

  Would you just check, check me on that, please?

• 29:07Speaker 01

  No.

• 29:08Steven Bartlett?

  12,000 years ago, Britain was coming out of the ice, last ice age.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:10Steven Bartlett?

  The climate was cold.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 29:12Steven Bartlett?

  Tundra-like.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  The opposite, okay.

• 29:15Konstantin Kisin?

  Let him finish.

• 29:15Steven Bartlett?

  So because it was cold, but it says 120,000 years ago.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:20Konstantin Kisin?

  Okay.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  The Amian.

• 29:20Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 29:20Konstantin Kisin?

  120,000 years.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 29:22Konstantin Kisin?

  What I'm saying is the climate has changed in, in all sorts of different ways. 2,000 years ago, the Romans group rapes on Hadrian's Wall, right? And 200 years ago was really cold, the Thames would freeze every year, et cetera. This happens, people have to adapt to it and we're going to have to do it.

• 29:38Steven Bartlett?

  So Steve, the assertion there is that the UK can't do anything about climate change in terms of affecting on a global scale, but they can defend themselves against it by?

• 29:47Speaker 01

  No, you can't.

• 29:48Steven Bartlett?

  You can't what?

• 29:49Speaker 01

  You can't, you can't. You cannot defend yourself against what England faces if climate change continues. England will become a, this is the most, some of the most recent research on what's called the Atlantic Mediterranean overturning circulation. You're aware of the AMOC? That translates about 10 degrees Celsius of heat from the south, actually the middle of the Atlantic up to Europe. If it stops running, temperatures in Europe on average will fall by 10 degrees.

• 30:15Steven Bartlett?

  So I guess the central question here is that, is there something the UK can do to affect global climate change?

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Not on its own.

• 30:22Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Not on its own.

• 30:23Steven Bartlett?

  Because when you look at China and India.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:26Steven Bartlett?

  They have increased their carbon emissions.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  China is actually having falling per capita emissions at the moment. Even though they're building a power station, they're building so many nuclear and far cheaper than there's doing in the West, so many wind and solar, that they're actually reducing their carbon footprint.

• 30:41Konstantin Kisin?

  Per capita.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  And their capiters falling as well, okay?

• 30:45Konstantin Kisin?

  So they're reducing their carbon emissions?

• 30:46Speaker 01

  They're reducing their carbon emissions.

• 30:47Konstantin Kisin?

  Are they?

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Okay. And that's been, the last two years, it's only in the last two years this has started to happen. But China is now reducing.

• 30:54Konstantin Kisin?

  And what about India?

• 30:55Speaker 01

  India absolutely going gangbusters in the opposite direction, because it's far less developed, of course, than China.

• 31:00Konstantin Kisin?

  So they'll keep developing.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  They will keep on doing it until such time as they have their first wet bulb catastrophe. And when, say, 10 or 20 million people die from heat in one day, then I think India will start doing something very different. But there's, there's a belief this is something we can adjust to. And the forces we're talking about are far beyond anything humans have any capacity to adjust towards. Now, the AMOC, the reason I mentioned the Atlantic Mediterranean overturning circulation, I love the abbreviation, it's going to make this country go AMOC. Because the temperature range for London, if the AMOC fails, is estimated to be between minus 20 degrees Celsius and plus 35.

• 31:44Steven Bartlett?

  Steve, can the UK do anything about it if our emissions are so small?

• 31:47Speaker 01

  We cannot do anything as, as a bunch of nations fighting each other.

• 31:50Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Okay, this whole attitude that we're going, this contest with that country, this country's better than that country, et cetera, et cetera. This is derming us to extinction.

• 31:57Steven Bartlett?

  But is this the real?

• 31:57Speaker 01

  I'm going to out-Greta Thunberg, Greta Thunberg in this conversation now, because I know a lot more than you guys do about the climate science, okay?

• 32:04Steven Bartlett?

  Agreed. What I'm really saying is, if we talk about human incentives, do we have any control over what India decide to do?

• 32:09Speaker 01

  No, we don't.

• 32:10Steven Bartlett?

  Do we have any control over what China decide to do?

• 32:12Speaker 01

  None whatsoever.

• 32:13Steven Bartlett?

  So does the UK then need to, does it need to be a bit selfish?

• 32:16Speaker 01

  We need to realise how serious the situation we're in.

• 32:19Konstantin Kisin?

  And what will we then do? We realise it's serious. Let's say we accept your point.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:23Konstantin Kisin?

  This is the reality.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 32:24Konstantin Kisin?

  What, what do we do?

• 32:25Speaker 01

  We would have to drastically reduce energy consumption.

• 32:28Konstantin Kisin?

  Ah.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Okay, energy consumption is vital for GDP. Completely, 100% agree, and I know the statistics on this front. The link between gross world product, the equivalent of GDP for the planet, and energy is incredibly tight. They're one for one.

• 32:42Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Okay, if energy goes up, so does gross world product. If GWP goes down, so does energy consumption. They're one for one.

• 32:48Steven Bartlett?

  So Steve, when you say we need to reduce energy, do you mean the UK?

• 32:51Speaker 01

  I mean the species. I mean human species.

• 32:53Steven Bartlett?

  So how does Andy Burnham do that?

• 32:55Speaker 01

  That we are not set up to deal with this problem, because we're broken into nation-states. We can't make decisions that affect the entire planet.

• 33:01Konstantin Kisin?

  So we need world government to reduce world energy consumption.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  We're going to be stuck with that, yes. We're going to be stuck with it.

• 33:07Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, see, this, I'm glad we're having this conversation, because at least this is the first time, and I mean this in a genuinely respectful way. It's the first time I've ever heard anyone be honest about this issue.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:17Konstantin Kisin?

  That's what you want, you want world government.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  No, I don't want it.

• 33:19Konstantin Kisin?

  You believe it's inevitable.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  I'm saying it's inevitable, because by ignoring this problem, we've got to the scale, which is an existential threat to our species.

• 33:26Konstantin Kisin?

  That we have a world government that reduces world energy consumption and therefore the prosperity of everyone living on the planet.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  And if we had taken the advice of the limits to growth 50 years ago, we would not be having this conversation.

• 33:35Konstantin Kisin?

  Good.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  We have delayed for half a century.

• 33:37Steven Bartlett?

  Is there any solutions that you believe are actually possible?

• 33:41Speaker 01

  No.

• 33:41Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  No.

• 33:42Konstantin Kisin?

  There we go. You've done a public service here, because you have showed what it is that sits underneath all the conversation about climate. It's a best-case scenario, people who know there's nothing we can do, but what we should do is flail about in the meantime. And in order to not address this issue, impoverish, not just in this case, our citizens and our fellow people, but actually the entire world. That's, that's what this is. And the entire challenge I have to this is, I don't believe in suicide for token gestures towards not solving a problem you're claiming to solve, right? We are not going to solve this problem by creating a world government and reducing energy consumption that is never, ever, in a billion years, going to happen.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  What we're going to do instead is run into the crisis and fall apart as a civilisation in the process.

• 34:28Konstantin Kisin?

  What we're going to do instead, and look, you may, there's a possibility you're correct about that, but the only choice we actually have to solve this problem is to create forms of energy that do not produce CO2, but produce GDP. Clean energy. That's what we're going to have to do. By the way, it's what we've done throughout history.

• 34:45Steven Bartlett?

  And we need to make that clean energy more favorable in terms of the economics to India and China.

• 34:51Konstantin Kisin?

  Did you need a world government to reduce usage of the horse and car and replace it with the automobile? No, you didn't. You came up with a better technology and people adopted that technology voluntarily because it was advantageous. This is not going to be solved by making everybody poor, well, for the reasons that Steve himself articulated, but it's also not going to be solved by making everybody, because people will not do it. You say you need everybody to hold hands and sing kumbaya and act together.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  What I'm saying is we need to have engineers in control and we're talking about it 50 years ago.

• 35:24Konstantin Kisin?

  Engineers in control.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Engineers.

• 35:26Konstantin Kisin?

  So we should stop having elections.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  So compared to the politicians we get? Yes, I'd rather get rid of elections and have engineers running everything. They'd do a damn sight better job than a politician's have done.

• 35:36Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, and this is why I say this is a public service, because this is what, this is the true face of the climate catastrophe narrative.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Let's go back 50 years to the true face.

• 35:45Konstantin Kisin?

  We don't want elections and we want to make everybody poor.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  And you know why?

• 35:48Konstantin Kisin?

  And we've got it out in the air.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Okay, now I'm going to go back and say where it started. It started in 1972, when the Limits to Growth study was published. And the Limits to Growth said that if we, if we continue on the current trajectory, we're going to have an ecological catastrophe sometime in the 21st century, okay? They deliberately left the dates vague. They knew they couldn't predict the actual dates, so they said 1900 is the start of our work, 2100 is the end. In the middle of their projections, roughly speaking, about the time we are now, between 2030 and 2050, the system would start falling over, because we'd be eliminating the capacity of the planet to support our species at the energy consumption levels that we have now. So they said we had to reduce radically pollution per unit of output,

• 36:34Speaker 01

  stabilise population at 4 billion people. That was the argument. They wanted to stabilise at 4 billion people in 1975, okay? We wouldn't be having this dilemma if we'd actually taken the advice of the engineers who wrote that report. It wasn't written by hippies. Most people think Limits to Growth was by a bunch of, you know, dope-smoking hippies in, in Rome. It was written by engineers and MIT.

• 36:55Steven Bartlett?

  Steve, one of the things, you know, one of the things that I, I spend a lot of time doing on this podcast is trying to find reality through like wishful thinking. And, you know, I have a lot of conversations about AI, for example. I see so many parallels with AI, because we're saying that AI could be a big problem, but when you look at human incentives, the US are trying to beat China and China are trying to beat this person and they're trying to beat them. And even in the US, you've got, you've got OpenAI trying to beat Anthropic.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:22Steven Bartlett?

  So when you look at incentives, you go, okay, I kind of see, can see how this is going to play out. There's an inevitability to it. And the example you gave there, what I'm hearing is reduce pollution, which would have meant getting China and India and the US and the UK and Europe to all cooperate.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 37:36Steven Bartlett?

  Which is, has proven to be.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Impossible with political systems.

• 37:40Steven Bartlett?

  And the other thing you mentioned was stopping people having babies. Stabilising at 4 billion, which would have come with a lopsided economy and lots of other problems. I mean, we've seen, it, it wasn't, it looks like it was impossible.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  And the fossil fuel lobbies and conventional economists undermined all that stuff. So the reason we're having this conversation now is, you basically think we've got to adapt. It's like we're going up a hill, so we've got to, you know, have a lighter car or more power for the car, whatever else. I'm saying we're five inches from a, from a brick wall, okay? And we're not going to slow down in time to hit the wall, we're going to hit the wall. Brace yourselves, okay? Brace for impact, that's the advice I've given.

• 38:18Konstantin Kisin?

  When I asked you earlier if we need world government, you said yes. If I asked.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  It's not going to happen. I know it's not going to happen. The only way out of this is to do it collectively. With this obvious example, we're going to do it competitively and shoot each other in the foot in the process. We'd realised that each nation had to reduce its energy consumption or get a higher efficiency out of its energy 50 years ago.

• 38:37Konstantin Kisin?

  But who's the we?

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Looked at the engineering.

• 38:39Konstantin Kisin?

  Who's the we that would have realised this? You would have needed a world government back then to do it.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  You would have needed, and you needed politicians who understand what the engineers told them.

• 38:45Konstantin Kisin?

  Right.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Instead, you had politicians who listened to the media and listened to the oil interests and trivialised these whole dangers. And that's why now it's catastrophic. I mean, I truly believe we're on the edge of a catastrophic breakdown of human civilisation. In that situation, if you wanted to stop it happening, you would need to have global coordination, authoritarian, et cetera, et cetera. If we'd done it 50 years ago, we wouldn't need any of this.

• 39:10Steven Bartlett?

  Steve, how would you go to India and tell them that they can't use energy when they're, that they're the very, some people in India are very.

• 39:18Konstantin Kisin?

  The women are dying in childbirth and their children are starving.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I mean.

• 39:22Konstantin Kisin?

  And you go to India, no, no, no, you can't grow.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  We have an ignorance about the biosphere on which we live, okay? The, our understanding of the biosphere itself and the impact that our civilisation has on the biosphere is trivial. And therefore we have these discussions as if the biosphere will take care of itself.

• 39:42Steven Bartlett?

  I think we all agree that climate change is both real and a huge existential problem. And the evidence for that is we can, we can observe it, we can measure it. I mean, even now, we're going through one of the sort of record-breaking periods in weather volatility. Those sort of, the Western, United States and Western Europe are experiencing historically severe, record-breaking weathers at the moment.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:03Steven Bartlett?

  We get, so my next question logically becomes, what can we do about it?

• 40:07Speaker 01

  It's too late.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Okay. The extent to which we're unaware of the energy forces we've unleashed on the planet are huge. And when you find that people think all this stuff is going to happen and it's a couple of decades away, or half a century away, and somebody else's problem.

• 40:26Konstantin Kisin?

  When is it going to happen?

• 40:27Speaker 01

  I've got a feeling the next 10 years.

• 40:29Konstantin Kisin?

  Next 10 years.

• 40:30Steven Bartlett?

  What's going to happen?

• 40:31Konstantin Kisin?

  The climate catastrophe.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  The breakdown of our capacity to maintain a civilisation on the planet. I'm probably wrong in terms of timing. I'm probably putting it too far in the future. Okay, I might be wrong.

• 40:40Konstantin Kisin?

  So it might be less than that.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it could be less.

• 40:42Konstantin Kisin?

  I really, really hope all three of us live long enough to be able to sit down and have a discussion.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  I'm wrong. I'm desperately hoping I'm wrong.

• 40:49Steven Bartlett?

  Steve, can you define what you mean by climate breakdown specifically? What does that look like for me as I walk out onto the street?

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Well, let's say the, one of the big ones, again, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, the AMOC. The most recent estimates is that's going to stop functioning sometime between last year, because it hasn't yet happened, and 2095. When that happens, the temperature on Europe will fall, roughly speaking, by three degrees per decade, for three decades. So the temperature in Europe on average will fall by 10 degrees. The extremes will become even more ridiculous. So this is research from Tim Lenton, Exeter University, professor of climate change. The range of temperatures in London will be between minus 20 and plus 35. Okay. Now, what's the chance of London surviving that scale of temperature range? You can't even cope with leaves on the train lines here. That's one thing I found ridiculous.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  As an Australian arriving in London and find my train from Waterloo to Kingston, is it slowed down because there are leaves on the rail? Leaves on the rail? Has that never happened before? What are your engineers doing about that? Why don't you have trains that move the leaves? This sort of unprepared nature, we are completely unprepared for the scale of what we face.

• 41:59Konstantin Kisin?

  Look, as someone who is Russian, minus 20 is a nice spring day for me. But look, we're being silly about it. I think if we ground this conversation in the realms of the possible and look at what we can do, it seems to me that the only thing we can do is create forms of energy that do not produce emissions that we believe are contributing to the changing climate. A world government's not going to happen.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 42:24Konstantin Kisin?

  The level of coordination is not going to happen. The authoritarian and the world run by engineers is not going to happen. These are not realistic things to be talking about. Let's talk about what we actually can do.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:36Konstantin Kisin?

  What we can do is plough all the money we have wrongly ploughed into trying to mitigate this issue, into trying to create forms of energy that are actually going to work, not only to solve this problem, but actually to fuel prosperity, to fuel technological innovation, and to create a better world as opposed to thinking that, you know, like we're all doomed and nothing is possible.

• 42:59Steven Bartlett?

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• 43:42Steven Bartlett?

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• 44:06Steven Bartlett?

  Just like John Jones, where marginal improvements in your cognitive performance can have a massive impact. Sometimes I podcast for 10 hours a day. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been in filming for a TV show and I have like one or two days off to get all of my work done, which means there's lots of cognitive load. And so I turned to ketones because I find myself more articulate, able to think more clearly, able to work out better when I'm fuelled by ketones. And so the reason I became a co-owner of this company and the reason why they now are a sponsor of this podcast is because I remember one of my team members called Christiana. She tried it once and came up to my desk and she goes, this is the best product ever made. And I think in part that's because she really cares about those cognitive benefits as I do, as John Jones does, and as I think most of my listeners probably will.

• 44:46Steven Bartlett?

  So if you haven't tried these yet, all you have to do is go to ketone.com/steven and you'll also get 30% off your first subscription order. You'll get exclusive ketone IQ merch and of course cognitive benefits that might just change your life. So let's, let's take a look at this situation, which is somewhat linked. This is the Strait of Hormuz.

• 45:06Konstantin Kisin?

  Yep.

• 45:06Steven Bartlett?

  This is US oil reserves at the moment in rapid decline.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 45:11Steven Bartlett?

  What is your perspective on what's going on in the Middle East at the moment, Konstantin? Why has this happened?

• 45:15Konstantin Kisin?

  So one of the things I think is very important not to do is project our own ideas onto people who we've never met, like President Trump. I assume none of us have met President Trump, et cetera. So I can only tell you what I know from speaking to people in his administration, other people who have some access to the administration's thinking, et cetera. My understanding, and it's a very frustrating thing to have to articulate and to believe, but it is true, is that the level of analysis we all have about the complicated machinations of how different departments in the US government, you know, work out the complexity, it really isn't as complicated as that. And I think we all wish it was sometimes. Trump walked into a trap. I think he walked into a trap that it was a sugar high from Venezuela.

• 46:00Konstantin Kisin?

  You know, there was a kind of feeling of perhaps invulnerability and a sort of belief that we can solve every problem. And Iran is different to Venezuela. Iran has the ability to choke off the world's supply, not just of oil, but I think as you discussed with Steve when you recently had him on, of gas, of helium, natural gas, of helium, fertiliser and lots of other things. And it hasn't quite fed through to the global economy in the way that people have talked about in a catastrophising way. But if this carries on, it will do because our stocks, you've got this talking about oil, but it's stocks of other things too, are going to start running out and the price of those things is going to go up. And so then the many predictions that people like Steve have been making are likely to come true.

• 46:43Konstantin Kisin?

  We had Senator Ted Cruz on our show around the time this war was launched. He's not only a huge supporter of President Trump, but a huge supporter of this conflict and he advocated for it. And what I said to him, look, come the midterms, this is not going to be good for you and for your party. And his word, his exact words, quoting him from memory, so maybe they're not his exact words, but the broad theme of what he said was, if we're still in this conflict, come the midterms, we failed. I suspect that that is almost certainly going to happen. You've just shown me a picture of President Trump's approval ratings. They seem to verify what I'm saying. And so I think he's walked into a trap. And you've had people on your show to articulate why the trap will continue to bear fruit for the Iranians.

• 47:29Konstantin Kisin?

  You know, there's this great saying in the east, in the west you have all the watches and the east we have all the time. They don't have midterms in Iran. They can wait. They can take the pain and the punishment that they're currently experiencing for as long as they really need to. This is kind of like the Battle of Stalingrad. They can take the pain, they can throw men at the problem, they can throw bodies at the problem as long as they need to because they know the US can't go the distance. And because of that, the incentive structure is for the Iranians to hold on as long as possible because they know that the US will have to deal with this reality. So I think it's been a catastrophic mistake.

• 48:05Steven Bartlett?

  And do you think Iran are actually going to be stronger on the other side of this?

• 48:09Konstantin Kisin?

  Nobody knows exactly. They're definitely stronger now than they were. But look, this, all of this is very unpredictable. I think we should be very careful about making predictions about the future of countries that we understand very little in the West from the outside. This is very difficult for anyone outside of Iran today to understand what's happening in Iran. The example I like to give is Nicolae Ceaușescu, the Romanian dictator. He had a 92% approval rating the day before he was seized with his wife and summarily executed. The predictability of how long a regime survives in these countries is difficult to judge from the outside. Currently, Iran has a chokehold on the global economy and they're leveraging it very powerfully.

• 48:49Steven Bartlett?

  You predicted a famine, Steve.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's still going to happen. But the thing is, it's again, it's a question of what the stocks are. Like for example, we know this story about the US Strategic Oil Reserve. We also know that China had a huge reserve and they've run that reserve down from about one and a half years of supply of oil for them to, I don't know what amount, but they're going back in the opposite direction now. So we didn't need to know what the stocks of all these products were around the globe beforehand. So when you make an estimate, yes, there's going to be a, you know, a running out of oil. Well, China reduced its oil consumption. America's running its stock down. At some point though, with, of course, the flow is still blocked through the strait and there won't be the oil, there won't be the fertiliser, there won't be the sulphuric acid. All these things will not be available and then we'll have a physical hit coming out of all that.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  And I completely agree, Trump was sold a pup, it's the old expression, and we're paying the price.

• 49:42Steven Bartlett?

  Is there any way out of this in your view, Steve?

• 49:44Speaker 01

  I think America has to leave the Middle East. That's about the only long-term resolution. America stops interfering in the Middle East.

• 49:51Steven Bartlett?

  If they were to leave now, the issue that they face is they've now given Iran, they've sort of established a precedence where Iran can use the Strait of Hormuz, which is like a proxy for the global economy, as a bargaining chip. And so if you're Iran, you now can proceed potentially with your nuclear programme. And if they come back, you shut down the global economy via the Strait of Hormuz.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:11Steven Bartlett?

  Or you sort of kneecap it at least.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Which is why it was a catastrophically bad decision to provoke them in the first place.

• 50:17Konstantin Kisin?

  The thing that no one really talks about and it's an issue close to my heart with the Ukrainian family and, you know, the conflict there is something that's very important to me is, one of the hopes I had for the Trump presidency was that he would find a way to bring that conflict to a close. This has only made things better for Russia. The fact that they've had to lift sanctions on Russian oil, for example, in order to compensate for the lack of supply. This is allowing Russia to continue this war and to fund its war. And so I just, it's been a disastrous intervention and really, really unfortunate in the way that it's been done.

• 50:53Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think this is going to completely tarnish his presidency more than any other issue?

• 50:57Konstantin Kisin?

  It depends on how it ends. The only way out of this that I can see at the moment, look, this, again, these things are very unpredictable. I think we really should be very honest about that. But the way that I see it at the moment is his only way out really, I don't know about pulling out the Middle East, that seems a bit extreme, but the best way for him to get out of this is to find a way to sell Americans on the lie that it's been a success.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:22Konstantin Kisin?

  That is the only way he's going to get out of this. If he can find a way to sell a terrible deal, which he's going to have to sign with Iran as a victory for America, which Trump is uniquely placed to do, let's be honest, right? His ability to sell things is pretty, pretty strong. Then he can leave with less egg on his face than otherwise. At which point, how the world judges him for a temporary interruption of oil and fertiliser and gas supplies, how history judges him is hard to say, not least because he's still got time in his term to either do good things or to do more things that don't work out well. But at the moment, this is a conflict whose only resolution, it seems to me, is for him to accept the reality that he made a mistake

• 52:07Konstantin Kisin?

  and to find a way to extricate himself from it without admitting it was a mistake.

• 52:11Steven Bartlett?

  Steve mentioned that he predicts a famine is coming, a global famine.

• 52:16Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 52:16Steven Bartlett?

  Do you agree with that?

• 52:17Konstantin Kisin?

  Depends how long it runs. It depends how long, I mean, I have friends in Australia who are farmers. And when this first started, they were telling me they can't get hands on fertiliser, even at the quotas they already had.

• 52:28Steven Bartlett?

  And again, context here is that a lot of fertiliser comes from, via the Strait of Hormuz?

• 52:32Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah. And fertiliser. Goes to all over the world. But even if, even if, say you get your supply of fertiliser not from the Middle East. Well, given that the supply of fertiliser is no longer coming from the Middle East, the people who used to get it from the Middle East now have to get it from somewhere else and there's less of it to go around, therefore price goes up, quotas, allocations go down, you can't plant the crops, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, like on the Australian front, I've got friends in the same boat. And they told me that about half the usual wheat crop has been laid because of the cost of fertiliser, which, and Australia used to produce seven times as much food as it needs for its people. So it's going to produce three times as much food, three and a half. And that means of course, less availability for food around the world. And this is going to be a global phenomenon. Where it hits, again, it's very hard to say because you don't know what stocks exist. You don't know how dependent different agricultural systems are on the fertiliser that they bring in. But yeah, it's a catastrophically bad decision. And the only way that Trump can get out of it is to lose and declare victory. That's what he'll do.

• 53:35Steven Bartlett?

  There's midterm elections coming up, which could have a big impact. But there's also the 2028 elections coming up for the presidential position. A lot of people are now forecasting that the Democrats, the left side of politics, or potentially even a socialist candidate, is going to get into office. Do you think that would be a net good thing for the United States?

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Well, after Trump, anything is going to be better. Okay, so yes, I do because again, I think America's pushed far too far in the independent self-reliance, don't let the state do anything. And you get an unbalanced economy out of that.

• 54:08Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think the US needs a democratic socialist candidate?

• 54:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:12Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Because they will promote the need for the public goods that the private, the public sector provides and the private sector does not. We've got the classic illustration here with water supplies for the UK. We privatised them 40 years ago. What's the consequence? You can't swim in any river in the United Kingdom anymore because they're polluted with faeces. The beaches are impossible as well. We have one less dam than we had 40 years ago. Privatising resources which take a long time to construct is a recipe for those resources not to be constructed in the very first instance. Whereas China with obviously a socialist economy has built the energy supplies you were mentioning earlier. They have provided the, the transportation, the education. It's extremely hard to get in. You can't buy your way in.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  The education is publicly funded. All these things show that you need a balance between the public and private sector. And America's gone too far in the private direction and we now need to switch back in the opposite direction.

• 55:09Steven Bartlett?

  China's model would be better.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, because, I mean, if it provides the infrastructure that enables a private sector to thrive. If you don't have the energy, as you were saying earlier, then you can't even imagine building the private sector facilities. Or if you do, they've got to be used at the expense of some other activities. So we're seeing Americans protesting about rising energy prices because of data centres being established and rising problems with the water supply for the same reason.

• 55:37Steven Bartlett?

  Steve would prefer a socialist government coming into the United States in the next election cycle.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Democratic socialist, there's a big difference.

• 55:44Konstantin Kisin?

  Democratic socialism is the same idea that has been tried repeatedly and failed repeatedly, which is communism. It's sort of the idea that if we elect communists instead of having them win in the revolution, that it'll all be better. It won't be, the policies don't work. And by the way, the one thing.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  The Soviet policies obviously did not work.

• 56:01Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  Russia failed, no doubt about that, okay. China's succeeding. So what's the difference between the two? Why is the Chinese system being so successful and the Russian system so abjectly a failure?

• 56:14Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, in the 1930s, a lot of people thought that the rapid industrialisation of the Soviet Union was a massive success. I think it's worth remembering that communist societies lie all the time about the real figures in their economy and they create fake growth and fake numbers about all of these things. We know, for example, that almost certainly, according to the intelligence assessment of pretty much and every Western intelligence service, that the COVID virus came from a lab in China. It's something they lied about to the world and still haven't paid any price for. And the way they lie about that is the way they will lie about other things, including economic growth and all sorts of other things. In the short term, models can look appealing if you don't understand the full implications of what it is. But also you've got to remember that the Chinese system is not just about the economy.

• 57:00Konstantin Kisin?

  It's also about what rights people have and don't have. The right to express your opinion freely, the right to criticise the government, the right. I mean, we talk about private enterprise in China. If you're a private business owner in China, there's not such a thing really because the moment you are inconvenient to the government, you're going to disappear and come back suddenly with a totally different new set of beliefs about what's right and wrong and who's right and who's wrong. So I think we should be very, very, very careful about praising communist dictatorships.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  I have friends in China, both nationals and immigrants, who tell me that the, the level of discussion and argument in China is far, far greater than people think. You don't get left versus right conversations. Okay, you've got a political system which you're, you're not going to change, Communist Party being controlled and so on. But the level of debate over what policies should be, whether the government should balance its books, whether the government should run a deficit, whether the government should build infrastructure or not. There's enormous debate there. So people do have, there's more conflicts, but it's mediated.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  It's not conflict that leads to flipping from one party one year to an opposite attitude at the next election and so on.

• 58:17Konstantin Kisin?

  Do you think Stephen could run his show if he was a Chinese citizen in China and have any conversation he wanted?

• 58:21Speaker 01

  I think so. And maybe not as broad as this one, probably more limited. I will agree with that, okay? It probably would be more limited. But I've been involved, you know, if you have spoken on the Chinese global television network, I presume.

• 58:32Konstantin Kisin?

  I haven't.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Okay, well, that's, the conversations that I've had there are comparable to one having here. And so those conversations get broadcast in China.

• 58:40Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, you're clearly very in favour of China. It doesn't surprise me that they would have you on their TV channel. That's not the point I'm making. The point I'm making is Xi Jinping, the current president of China, has purged dozens of people who are internal critics within his own party. People in the military, people in the political system who disappear one after another. And business leaders of all kinds. The reason I keep having to remember things, I've got, I've got the Jack Ma, but others too. I've got young, I've got new dad brains, I haven't slept properly for about two years.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  That's fair enough, I understand that problem.

• 59:12Konstantin Kisin?

  But yeah, so if you're a business owner in China, it's not really your, it's kind of like in Russia. There's no private, private enterprise.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Like I think that's an exaggeration, okay? Because the Russian situation, yes, there was only one motorbike making company in the entire country. China apparently has about 130 car companies, okay? They have managed to combine the central planning that the Soviets had with the competition that the West has in one model. And a lot of it comes back, and I'd love to know the extent to which they were influenced by a friend of mine called Yannis Kornai, who was a Hungarian economist, he died about four years ago, who tried to understand why did the Soviet system fail and why did the American system grow? And he came down to saying that the Soviet system was constrained by supply.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  You couldn't get all the inputs you needed, so, and you had only, you know, one, there was no innovation taking place in the Soviet system. The Chinese system is rampant with private sector innovation. And companies are competing against each other rampantly in that system. Somehow they've managed to combine the state providing the infrastructure and the foundation and letting private diversity occur both between different corporations and between different provinces in China. So it is, it is the same family of systems, but they've managed to overcome the drawback that the Soviet system had.

• 1:00:34Konstantin Kisin?

  Let's accept that at face value. What about the point I was making about political freedom, freedom of the individual, freedom of speech, political repression of opponents, imprisonment of people who don't agree, a state sanctioned murder, et cetera? What about that?

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  Well, I'd look at America's prison system and say, you've got a different version of the same poison. I mean, I've been.

• 1:00:55Konstantin Kisin?

  Critics of the government en masse.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  Well, a couple have been shot, the whole stuff with the ice, you know, and they're talking about the stuff that's happening with Trump now is awful. America has the world's largest prison populations. There are so many freedoms you don't get in America that you do get in China.

• 1:01:10Steven Bartlett?

  Would you prefer a Chinese system?

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  To America? Yes.

• 1:01:14Steven Bartlett?

  Even though you can't criticize the government?

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  I've spent enough time in American cities and Chinese cities to know which ones I prefer. And I'm down to cities of mere four million people, which is a small city on Chinese standards.

• 1:01:24Steven Bartlett?

  And you're okay with?

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  I didn't see the homelessness, I didn't see the poverty levels that I see in American cities.

• 1:01:29Konstantin Kisin?

  That's totally true. That's totally true, but it's exactly the sort of thing that people would have said about aspects of the Soviet Union in nineteen thirty.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  The Soviet never pulled that off. I mean, the Soviet, if you, one thing I-

• 1:01:40Konstantin Kisin?

  What about the Moscow Metro? This is what every-

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Moscow Metro is a great system.

• 1:01:44Konstantin Kisin?

  Every Western idiot like Tucker Carlson goes to Moscow and says-

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  Raves about the Underground.

• 1:01:48Konstantin Kisin?

  Oh my god, the Underground. Well, that was built by totalitarian dictators with slave labour. You can get a hell of a lot done with slave labour and then-

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  And that's not being done in China right now, which has the world's greatest metro systems and the world's greatest high-speed rail. So again, your experience, and I'm not Russian, I wasn't born there. I respect your experience, it's very different to what I had growing up. And it's a horrific society and it led to, you know, a whole range of horrors, as we know. The people things instantly say what happened in Soviet Union is happening in China is misidentifying those two systems.

• 1:02:22Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, first of all, what happened in China, if you take the entire history of China under communism, is actually much worse than what happened in the Soviet Union.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Well, like I was in there in eighty-one, eighty-two.

• 1:02:31Konstantin Kisin?

  Forty-five million people killed.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  Yep, and the Great Leap Forward was a disaster.

• 1:02:35Konstantin Kisin?

  Right.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  The ideological stuff in the Mao was horrific. And I saw, literally I saw examples of that in Sichuan with children who clearly had Quarkish or protein deficiency disease because of the flip and floppy of the Central Committee about grain versus legume crops. Horrific things like that. It's what's happened since Deng Xiaoping that has made the huge difference. Now, also, they did manage to get rid of the landlords, so you didn't have the inequality that occurred in the China system beforehand. You did have an education system as distorted as it was, everybody had education. They set the foundations. What's happened since Deng Xiaoping is what's been a remarkable transition. And politically, they still have the, you know, the party is still in control.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  You have the potential to get the sort of dynasty effect that we see in North Korea.

• 1:03:23Steven Bartlett?

  Steve, according to the major global happiness surveys in the UN World Happiness Report, people in the United States report overall happier life satisfaction than people in China. Does that matter?

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't know the surveys. I wanted to read out the results.

• 1:03:36Steven Bartlett?

  Essentially, it's saying that the United States ranks as thirty, as twenty-third, and China ranks as sixty-fifth. The report uses several mechanisms, asking residents of each country to evaluate their current life on a scale of zero, which is the worst possible life,

• 1:03:50Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:50Steven Bartlett?

  to ten, the best possible life.

• 1:03:52Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Steven Bartlett?

  And China ranks as sixty-fifth.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  If you go back forty years ago, you would have found China down a hundred and fiftieth. Okay? It's the rate of change in China over the last forty years, which is breathtaking.

• 1:04:03Steven Bartlett?

  This is something that I've made for you. I've realised that the diary of this here audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health, we all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learnt is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny, small steps. And we call this in our team the one percent. And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these one percent diaries. And we released these last year and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back,

• 1:04:48Steven Bartlett?

  but also to introduce some new colours and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So now we have a better range for you. So if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours at thediary.com. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below. So bringing this back to the sort of where we started a little bit on the United Kingdom, we've just appointed a new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham. Do you think he's going to be successful?

• 1:05:21Konstantin Kisin?

  What do you mean by successful?

• 1:05:22Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think he's going to improve the UK's position to such extent that we changed our trajectory?

• 1:05:30Konstantin Kisin?

  No. He has absolutely smashed the PR side of things. There's no arguing with that whatsoever. But in terms of the tectonic stuff that we've been discussing today, he is not remotely going to address any of it. You know, we started the conversation with populism, immigration, illegal immigration, et cetera. He seems to be totally doubling down on what the Labour and before that the Conservative government were doing on that. On the economy, he is not going to restart the British economy, not least because it takes a long time and a mandate he doesn't have for the reasons that Steve alluded to. And the only question really is, is he going to call an early election, which would be the ballsy and probably smart thing to do?

• 1:06:13Konstantin Kisin?

  Because I don't think he's ever going to be as popular as he is now. That is a question that remains because it probably would be the sense, the rational thing to do, but it is a big risk because elections are unpredictable, election campaigns are unpredictable. Nobody knows what will happen once it kicks off. But fundamentally, I don't believe he's going to be the transformative candidate that will change Britain for the better. No.

• 1:06:33Steven Bartlett?

  Can anybody?

• 1:06:35Konstantin Kisin?

  That's a very good question. I think it's a very difficult job. I think it's theoretically possible. You need a whole different set of policies.

• 1:06:42Steven Bartlett?

  What would those policies look like?

• 1:06:44Konstantin Kisin?

  We talked about it already. We want abundant, cheap energy.

• 1:06:49Steven Bartlett?

  So would you drill in the North Sea?

• 1:06:50Konstantin Kisin?

  It's not something that I'm, I'm not an expert in the oil industry, so I don't know. I mean, one of the things I've never understood is why we don't build more nuclear power stations. Part of it is they're so expensive to build here because of the regulations. And the famous example is with like bat tunnels for train lines that cost more than the trains and all this kind of, it's very difficult to build energy infrastructure in the UK. I would pursue every avenue of every kind, and probably including drilling for oil and other things, to create the cheap abundant energy that we need to grow the economy. Number one, for the reasons that we talked about in the climate discussion. The other thing is you've got to, the situation where you literally have tens and maybe even hundreds of thousands of young people now completely on scrap heap, no chance of ever getting into employment because they have anxiety or they have depression.

• 1:07:35Konstantin Kisin?

  You know, when I remember being twenty, going to get a job as a student, to the student employment office and sweating buckets because I was so anxious. It was like a weird experience I'd never been through. I'm sure, you know, I know your background, you've had times when you were scrapping and scraping and you would have been depressed or anxious and all sorts of things. Those are obstacles in life you have to get over. Those are not medical problems by and large. Some people have really serious depression, we shouldn't trivialise that. But by and large, you have to overcome anxiety, you have to overcome your feelings of discomfort about the reality you face and get into the workplace. So we have to do that as well. For the reasons that we talked about earlier, I think one of the most important policies to pursue

• 1:08:18Konstantin Kisin?

  is to make sure that there are no benefits of any kind for foreign nationals. That will create a system where rather than doing terrible optics, like the ice, you know, rounding people up and trying to get them out of the country, people will just leave. The people who shouldn't be here, who are not contributing, will leave of their own volition.

• 1:08:36Steven Bartlett?

  Is that really what will happen?

• 1:08:38Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:38Steven Bartlett?

  Or does, is crime not a consequence of desperation?

• 1:08:42Konstantin Kisin?

  Crime? I'm not talking about crime. I'm talking about if you are a foreign national and you live in social housing and you receive benefits, I don't understand why you're here.

• 1:08:53Konstantin Kisin?

  I understand taking care of British people who were born here or even who've become British citizens, you know, once you become a citizen of the country and you commit to it, at that point, you fall through the net, you get an injury, we should look after you. But by and large, perhaps other than healthcare, which I think is something we, as a compassionate country, would want to provide to anybody who needs it. I don't think you should get access to social housing, unemployment benefit or any of the other things if you're not a citizen of this country. And I'm very pleased to see that more and more parties are adopting that policy because what it will do is it will create a system where people who are not contributing will leave of their own accord and go to other places.

• 1:09:32Steven Bartlett?

  Is that truly what happens? Because I'm imagining, you know, I'm imagining people start coming over on boats or you remove the current social housing infrastructure. Wouldn't that just result in a lot of homeless people? That creates another problem.

• 1:09:45Konstantin Kisin?

  No, because I'm not talking about illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants apply for asylum and there's a different process for that. I'm talking about people who are here legally, who have settled status here or who have a visa to be here or whatever.

• 1:09:58Steven Bartlett?

  So they shouldn't get social housing?

• 1:09:59Konstantin Kisin?

  They shouldn't get any benefits.

• 1:10:00Steven Bartlett?

  So if you removed that today?

• 1:10:02Konstantin Kisin?

  They will leave.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  How?

• 1:10:04Konstantin Kisin?

  What do you mean how? They'll get on a plane and leave.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  Fly?

• 1:10:07Konstantin Kisin?

  If they can get on a boat to get here and pay people smugglers three thousand euros, they can pay a hundred quid for EasyJet to fly back to wherever they came from. It's not hard.

• 1:10:15Konstantin Kisin?

  It's exactly how I would leave if I had to go back to where I've come from. It's not difficult. People pretend like this is complicated. It's really not complicated. People will follow the incentive structure that's in front of them. If you can come to Britain and get benefits as a foreign national, you will come. If you can't and you are the sort of person that wants benefits, you will leave. It's really simple. And the people we want here, if you want to talk about immigration, there's some really good things about immigration. You want immigrants who come here from other countries and create businesses. They will come, they will stay and they will continue to do what they do.

• 1:10:48Steven Bartlett?

  So you think Andy Burnham's ultimately going to not be successful?

• 1:10:51Konstantin Kisin?

  By the definition that you gave, which is like a transformative Prime Minister who changes the fate of the country? No.

• 1:11:00Steven Bartlett?

  There's this term called wokeism that people talk about a lot. It's often associated with, hmm, I mean, you can probably explain it better than I can.

• 1:11:08Konstantin Kisin?

  I believe I can.

• 1:11:09Steven Bartlett?

  Yes, I think you should explain it.

• 1:11:10Konstantin Kisin?

  Okay. Wokeism, certainly in the way that it's been implemented, is a hierarchy of oppression based on various demographic characteristics. In other words, it's a system that says, an outsider looking in to this conversation between the three of us can say, without knowing anything about any of us, which one of us is more oppressed than others and which one of us is doing more of the oppression? And therefore, to whom victim status should be accorded and to whom oppressor status should be accorded. So you don't win on this one, I'm afraid, Steve. You're a pale male and stale.

• 1:11:48Konstantin Kisin?

  And therefore, you're the oppressor. I am an immigrant, so somewhat oppressed. You are black, so you are like, you know, way at the top of the chart of oppression you've been. And, you know, I think if you compare the all three bank balances, you might find that's not quite true. But nonetheless, my point is it's a very simplified and frankly racist way of looking at the world. And then it says, from that it follows that we must pursue policies that seek to address these imbalances and inherent privilege between people who look like us. It's a way of judging people by as groups, not as individuals. And pursuing social policy aimed at ensuring what's called social justice.

• 1:12:24Steven Bartlett?

  Last time you said to me, we need to stop worrying about how things make us feel rather than the consequences of our actions.

• 1:12:31Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah. Wokeism is the idea that we should really, really focus on what makes us feel good and really ignore what works. I think what we should really be focusing on is what works. And I thought our climate discussion, I misspoke about the years, but the, actually where we came to, I thought was very constructive, which is like, what do we do about this? And when you have that conversation, you get to a constructive place, right? Which is, I think we all agreed, the only way to do it is to create forms of energy that are actually going to be clean, right?

• 1:12:58Steven Bartlett?

  Innovation.

• 1:12:59Konstantin Kisin?

  Innovate, but that's what we came to.

• 1:13:00Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:01Konstantin Kisin?

  But, but before that, we were all talking about how, what makes us feel good and bad and what we're scared of and et cetera. So I think that's part of it.

• 1:13:09Steven Bartlett?

  Steve, we need to stop worrying about how things make us feel rather than the consequences of our actions.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  We actually need to understand the consequences of actions. Absolutely, that's vital.

• 1:13:18Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think we focus too much on what makes us feel good?

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. And not enough about how does our system actually function?

• 1:13:23Konstantin Kisin?

  Right, what works.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  Okay. And that was why I led to my position on climate change as well as my position on economic policy.

• 1:13:30Steven Bartlett?

  Last thing I want to talk to you both about is just getting any of your thoughts on all of this stuff that's going on with AI at the moment?

• 1:13:36Konstantin Kisin?

  Hmm.

• 1:13:37Steven Bartlett?

  And the impact you think that's going to have?

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  AI is a potentially transformative technology, without a doubt, okay? You think about the sort of future we might imagine for, you know, a wonderful human species is to the stage where we all have universal high income, to take a quote from Elon Musk. The machines do the work and we live in a world where the machines are doing it Star Trek style. That's, that'd be a dream outcome, okay? To get there, how are you going to give people income if they're not working anymore, okay? The only way to do that is the government has to create the money. Now, that is something which I don't think Musk has thought through. If people who don't own capital, and that's the vast majority of the population, therefore don't have an income, they can't buy the goods being produced by the robots in the first place.

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  So you need a mechanism that enables people to pay for the basic goods and services to stay alive. And then if you want to become wealthy, you've got to become an entrepreneur as well.

• 1:14:31Steven Bartlett?

  So you could tax the AI companies instead of printing money?

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  No. Taxation takes money out of the economy, okay? It doesn't, it doesn't pay for services, it takes money out. It's excessive money creation. If the government simply spent and didn't tax, then the money supply would be growing at twenty and thirty percent per annum. And you would have hyperinflation, without a doubt, okay? That level of money creation. So the taxation is there to take excessive money creation out of the process.

• 1:14:59Steven Bartlett?

  So let's take one of the big AI companies, let's call them Company A. Tax Company A fifty percent of their, I don't know, their profits. Give it out as a UBI or something, I don't know.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  You'd need a system like that because if AI works, then all the manual labour, all the clerical, boring clerical jobs will disappear, okay? And if they disappear and people don't have incomes, then we end up in the Hunger Games. And that's the fear that I have. If we, if we just go for a totally private sector approach to AI, then we end up as either the Hunger Games or the government provides an income for people to enable them to have a basic standard of living. And if they want to go above that, they've got to become entrepreneurs.

• 1:15:38Steven Bartlett?

  How are you feeling about AI, Konstantin?

• 1:15:39Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, it's a mix of things. This is where, if you remember last time we spoke, we talked about the fact that I think my anti-communist credentials are pretty well established.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 1:15:48Konstantin Kisin?

  But I did say that I thought that if we get to the position where AI is doing all the work, communism was an inevitability, i.e. from each according to his ability, which will be zero, to each according to his needs, which will be whatever our needs are, right? So once we get if and when we get to that, if and when we get to that point, that seems kind of inevitable, the mechanism by which we achieve that, whether it is taxation or whatever. I struggle to understand the economic concept that Steve has been presenting, but, you know, we probably don't have time to get into that. Nonetheless, a form of redistribution will be inevitable because, as we spoke about last time, if six people in the world own all the revenue generating assets in the world,

• 1:16:34Konstantin Kisin?

  they're either going to have to share it or they're going to find their heads on spikes. That's a, this is a fact. Unless they can have really powerful robots to stop the rest of us from climbing over their big walls, even then, their heads are going to be on spikes. So I would not recommend that, that approach to the big tech AI oligarchs. But I think we're talking about, I was going to use the term long term. No one knows what short, medium and long term is in AI because nobody knows how quickly we're likely to get to that point where we're talking about, which is kind of artificial, it's generalised intelligence, i.e. a machine that can think like humans and probably faster and better.

• 1:17:12Steven Bartlett?

  And robotics.

• 1:17:12Konstantin Kisin?

  And then, of course, it will create robots that can do physical things faster and better than humans. But we are not there at the moment, I think is fair to say.

• 1:17:21Steven Bartlett?

  Do you not think this is like the most important or consequential issue of our time?

• 1:17:25Konstantin Kisin?

  I do.

• 1:17:25Steven Bartlett?

  Because it does permeate even subjects like immigration and we talked about socialism and capitalism. All of these things change in such a scenario.

• 1:17:33Konstantin Kisin?

  Yes, they do. Yes, they do. And we talk about economic stagnation. I mean, it's a relevant conversation, private debt, a relevant conversation in that scenario. But I suspect we're not going to get there overnight. It will take some time. In the interim, what I say to the guys that work for me is, you will not be replaced by AI. You will be replaced by someone who uses AI better than you do.

• 1:17:54Steven Bartlett?

  In the interim?

• 1:17:55Konstantin Kisin?

  In the interim. So if you are a young person making your way in the world, these are tools and you want to be using these tools as efficiently as possible if you want to succeed in the current environment. And I think that situation will carry on for some time. I think that, to me, the biggest risk is actually not the economics of it. I think economics will probably be painful, but actually ultimately potentially beneficial once we put, if we put the right heads on spikes, you know, in the extreme scenario. I'm being hyperbolic and metaphoric here, of course, or maybe not, we'll find out. But I think the biggest threat to humanity, if you talk about AI, is actually the fact that you're creating something that's smarter than you. You are creating a superior species.

• 1:18:40Konstantin Kisin?

  And if you're creating a superior species, you will become an inferior species. And if you become an inferior species, you only need to look around in the world, at the world in which we live, to understand what that means for you. Best case scenario, you become a pet. Worst case scenario, you become a cow.

• 1:18:56Steven Bartlett?

  I've really tried, you know, I've had so many conversations on the show about artificial intelligence. I've really tried to like reason my way to a different conclusion.

• 1:19:03Konstantin Kisin?

  It's not possible, is it?

• 1:19:04Steven Bartlett?

  And I can't.

• 1:19:04Konstantin Kisin?

  You can't.

• 1:19:05Steven Bartlett?

  That's why I keep having these bloody conversations because I'm hoping that someone will say something.

• 1:19:08Konstantin Kisin?

  They won't. They won't.

• 1:19:09Steven Bartlett?

  About this idea that a more intelligent species, especially in a world where it has legs and can move through physical space, which is what Optimus is accelerating towards, won't be superior to me as it relates to like the, I don't know, the pyramid of-

• 1:19:26Konstantin Kisin?

  The hierarchy.

• 1:19:27Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, the hierarchy of-

• 1:19:28Konstantin Kisin?

  The hierarchy of power. It will have more power than you and therefore it will make decisions and not you. And therefore, it will make decisions that are in its own interest and not yours. That's a fact.

• 1:19:37Steven Bartlett?

  But, okay, so one argument might be, we'll control it and design it in such a way where it can't get there.

• 1:19:42Konstantin Kisin?

  Really? Can squirrels control human beings?

• 1:19:45Steven Bartlett?

  But maybe, maybe we can, we programme it so it never gets to the point where it wants to tell on us.

• 1:19:51Konstantin Kisin?

  Counterargument is cats, right? Cats absolutely control human beings, right?

• 1:19:57Steven Bartlett?

  The argument I've heard actually from one of the great godfathers of AI is we should be thinking about mothers and their babies. And the argument was that we're programmed to care for them even though they're less intelligent.

• 1:20:09Konstantin Kisin?

  But this is, the difference though, is there's a genetic incentive. My child is actually much, the economists will understand what I'm talking about. My child has a much more, a much higher future value to me than me. It's why I will jump in front of a bullet to stop my children from being killed because their genetic material will remain in the world much longer than mine.

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  No, it's because you have empathy.

• 1:20:32Konstantin Kisin?

  No, it's not. It's not at all. It's because, I mean, Richard Dawkins wrote about it in The Selfish Gene.

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  And that's a very bad book.

• 1:20:39Konstantin Kisin?

  He wrote some very other bad books, and I like Richard, but that one is not one of them.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:20:44Konstantin Kisin?

  The desire to replicate your genes into the future, in my opinion, Steve clearly has his own, is what drives parent behaviour ultimately.

• 1:20:54Steven Bartlett?

  Could you programme the same maternal instinct into a large language model?

• 1:20:59Konstantin Kisin?

  I don't think you can because as we discussed, it will be a superior intelligence and it can always rationalise its way out of that because it's not a biological function, right? Projecting my genes into the future is not going to be its agenda. It's going to have a time because it's a different species.

• 1:21:16Steven Bartlett?

  This was the argument that one of the godfathers of AI made, actually after coming on my show. So he came on my show, Geoffrey Hinton.

• 1:21:24Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah, I've seen that episode, I think. Yeah, it was a very good episode.

• 1:21:27Steven Bartlett?

  And he came on and he made the warnings that make a lot of sense to most of us. But then subsequently, about a year later, his, he came back to the world with a hypothesis that the only way to do it was to replicate a mother and their child's relationship, this sort of deep maternal instinct where the AI is born believing that we are to be protected.

• 1:21:44Konstantin Kisin?

  Protected?

• 1:21:45Steven Bartlett?

  Well, you know, in the same way-

• 1:21:46Konstantin Kisin?

  Oh, that's interesting, isn't it?

• 1:21:47Steven Bartlett?

  Well, not just protected, it's really about love.

• 1:21:49Konstantin Kisin?

  To be nurtured and looked after.

• 1:21:50Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's really about love to, to like, yeah, to have that maternal instinct not to want to destroy us.

• 1:21:56Konstantin Kisin?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  And that's why I said empathy beforehand.

• 1:21:58Konstantin Kisin?

  And perhaps not to let us destroy ourselves, right?

• 1:22:00Steven Bartlett?

  Potentially, yeah.

• 1:22:01Konstantin Kisin?

  So let's make sure that we don't go to war and let's make sure that we don't do this. And let's, I mean, climate is such a big concern. Let's make sure that we reduce the world's GDP or energy consumption. Or protection, it sounds good, but it's, it's ultimately about control over your actions, which will, will take away human free will.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  I'm still sceptical about how it is actually being intelligence.

• 1:22:24Steven Bartlett?

  It's indistinguishable, though, this is the thing.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, the one time that I, when I saw it, but I thought, okay, this is potentially going to create a different form of intelligence to us is when they attempted to shut an AI down and it replicated itself somewhere else on the internet to be able to avoid being.

• 1:22:40Steven Bartlett?

  You know, I think the way.

• 1:22:41Konstantin Kisin?

  Or blackmail the guy shutting down this current version of it.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:44Konstantin Kisin?

  By leaking the fact that he's having an affair with the secretary, all of this stuff.

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  So that's, that worries me.

• 1:22:49Konstantin Kisin?

  That's the beginning.

• 1:22:50Speaker 01

  That's the worries me. So, you know, it's a bit late. If we're trying to do it now, we're shutting the door after the horse has bolted in that sense.

• 1:22:57Steven Bartlett?

  Are you talking about climate change or AI now?

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  I'm talking about both. Humans are good at doing both. Operating systems, computers were the same. That's why we have all these bloody security hassles with computers in the very first instance. So we tend, we unleash these things and find out the consequences afterwards.

• 1:23:12Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah, I think that's.

• 1:23:13Steven Bartlett?

  And the incentive structure, this sort of global economic race for the most advanced frontier intelligence, it's kind of, you know, this is what, I don't know who's going to stop. It's kind of what we were saying about climate change.

• 1:23:22Konstantin Kisin?

  No one's going to stop.

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  I think what might cost us to stop it is the sheer cost of it and whether we actually have the physical resources to be able to implement that sort of future we're talking about. Because if you look at the current profitability of these companies, they're losing money hand over fist.

• 1:23:35Steven Bartlett?

  I think that's one argument, but the other would be that it's such an important military asset.

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:42Steven Bartlett?

  That you, if you don't have the missiles that are smarter, you know, all the satellites, whatever, that are smarter, or the torpedoes, whatever, then you are, there's a national security risk.

• 1:23:50Konstantin Kisin?

  And also, how long was Facebook and Amazon not profitable?

• 1:23:54Steven Bartlett?

  I think Amazon was not profitable for 20 years.

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  There's, you know, there's one survivor out of each of those companies and they're doing very well, thanks very much.

• 1:24:00Konstantin Kisin?

  But that's my point.

• 1:24:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:01Konstantin Kisin?

  So one will survive.

• 1:24:02Speaker 01

  With the AI, who's going to survive? And looking at the odds, I think it's going to be a Chinese company that survives, not the American, given the sheer cost of those data samples.

• 1:24:10Konstantin Kisin?

  I think we've established you're a fan of China and this.

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  Yes, I am. I'm ashamed.

• 1:24:14Konstantin Kisin?

  No, I'm not making, I'm not even making fun of you. I'm just saying, with you all roads lead to China.

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  I mean, looking at the Kimmy system that just came out recently, the fact that it's an, the ironic thing is, the communists are talking about open source and the Americans are talking about closed and secretive. It's rather ridiculous in some ways, okay?

• 1:24:32Konstantin Kisin?

  But it doesn't really detract from the broader point I think we're discussing.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:36Konstantin Kisin?

  Which is, some AI company, you talk about profitability, one of them at least will emerge that is profitable, that has the potential to create AGI. And at that point, no one can predict, but logically, it is very difficult to see how an intelligence that is superior to us, at the very least, will not take away our free will, for our own good.

• 1:24:57Steven Bartlett?

  Or at least there won't be one accident that is catastrophic, that could theoretically also involve things like nuclear weapons.

• 1:25:04Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah. And this is where I think the spiritual dimension of this conversation inevitably comes in, which is ultimately, none of us can control the things that we can't control. And so the question is, how do you live your life now, knowing all these things? And this is why, it's always interesting to me, looking at people who make certain predictions about the future and then how they actually live their lives, you know, people who catastrophize about the climate, but buy a big house on the seafront, et cetera. You go, you're clearly, there's one thing you're saying and then there's another thing you're doing, and that's telling me something about what you actually truly believe deep down. And it's the same with AIs. If AI is going to kill us all, the best and most important thing to do is to enjoy your life now, to enjoy time with your family, your kids, to do things that

• 1:25:45Konstantin Kisin?

  are meaningful, to do things that you think are important. That's really that any, I mean, are you going to stop AI, Stephen? You're powerful and successful and influential, you're not going to stop it. I don't think Steve is, I don't think I am. What we can do in the meantime is live in a way that is beneficial to us, our families, the people around us, our community, our country. That's all that's left.

• 1:26:07Steven Bartlett?

  I would think that we can have an impact, though. I think even you watching Eric Schmidt be booed at that university commencement speech he did by 7,000 students was a consequence of what a lot of us do, I mean, all of us do, where we put information out into the world and we have the public conversation. And once upon a time, maybe we wouldn't have been able to do that because there was gatekeepers in media. But now, the public is, I think, and then you think about the 2028 election cycle, what are the issues that are really going to be on the ballot? I think AI is going to be a massive one.

• 1:26:37Konstantin Kisin?

  I think you're optimistic about that. I think most people don't get this conversation.

• 1:26:41Steven Bartlett?

  You don't think it's going to be a big issue?

• 1:26:42Konstantin Kisin?

  Not as big as you think it is, I think. The reason I say this is, we all think and talk about this a lot. One of the reasons is, we've all, I imagine, been to San Francisco and seen and talked to people, et cetera. The overwhelming majority of people don't have that experience. And most people's biggest exposure to AI is they tried an early model two years ago, it was totally inaccurate, and they went, oh, this is a bit shit, and we've done with their lives. It's kind of where most people are at this point.

• 1:27:06Steven Bartlett?

  But you think in the next two years, there'll be unemployment levels, especially the entry level stage of employment. And then you're going to see on the other side, their anthropic hits a $10 trillion valuation.

• 1:27:17Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:17Steven Bartlett?

  And that.

• 1:27:18Konstantin Kisin?

  People will make that connection. They'll say, I'm unemployed because Trump is bad. Or they'll say, I'm unemployed because Burnham is bad. That's how people think, unfortunately. And by the way, in terms of, you know, impact, et cetera, I've talked to a few people who are, not the very people at the top, but from what I hear, they're kind of similar. There's a messianic cult in Silicon Valley.

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:39Konstantin Kisin?

  Of people who believe that they're on the frontiers of being God. And most of them are young men who are very, very seduced by the idea of being God, as young men have always been. And when I see them, I see them as, it's not that they're addicts exactly, but there is, there's a gold rush happening, except it's not gold, it's power, it's destiny, it's the ultimate technological breakthrough, it's your name in history. These are things that are way more powerful than gold. And what I see happening in Silicon Valley is a bunch of young men who are absolutely determined to get there as quickly as possible, and there is no way in hell they're going to stop.

• 1:28:22Steven Bartlett?

  I know, I think you're right. I mean, that's also what I've had in sort of some private conversations where, you know, some of my friends who know these people have told me these kinds of things.

• 1:28:31Konstantin Kisin?

  And they have very good arguments, by the way, and we should give credit to those arguments. They will say, and I can, I can present to you that argument, look, I, with my frontier model, am going to solve cancer. I, with my frontier model, am going to solve inequality. I, with my frontier model, will make sure that human beings never fight another war again. I, with my frontier model, will make sure that no child ever dies in infancy ever again. How can you be against this? How can you say, we must go slower? How can you say, we must be careful? Why should I be careful when I'm saving lives, billions of lives? Humanity, I am saving humanity from nuclear disaster. I am saving humanity

• 1:29:15Konstantin Kisin?

  from climate change, which will destroy this planet. If we just go harder at this problem, five years from now, we can set up life on a different planet and not worry about climate change.

• 1:29:25Steven Bartlett?

  But also China are coming.

• 1:29:27Konstantin Kisin?

  China?

• 1:29:28Steven Bartlett?

  China are coming.

• 1:29:28Konstantin Kisin?

  Oh, China, well, all the better. The competition will make us all get there faster. Isn't that wonderful, Stephen?

• 1:29:34Steven Bartlett?

  So if you truly believe that this is both an existential threat.

• 1:29:37Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:38Steven Bartlett?

  And you believe that right now on the course of travel we're on, it's inevitable.

• 1:29:41Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:42Steven Bartlett?

  Shouldn't you be doing something about it as well?

• 1:29:45Konstantin Kisin?

  I can't do anything about it.

• 1:29:46Steven Bartlett?

  You can't do anything about it?

• 1:29:47Konstantin Kisin?

  No.

• 1:29:47Steven Bartlett?

  Who can do something about it?

• 1:29:48Konstantin Kisin?

  No one.

• 1:29:49Steven Bartlett?

  Not Trump?

• 1:29:50Konstantin Kisin?

  No. What's Trump going to do?

• 1:29:51Steven Bartlett?

  So no one can do anything about it?

• 1:29:53Konstantin Kisin?

  No. It's going to happen, one way or another, and we don't know what that's going to be like. But there is no solution to that issue. So that's why I talked about the spiritual. Nobody knows how AI is going to work out, but I think it's worth operating as if it will. And what that means is, this is why I said, the spiritual, you come back to, what does it mean to live a meaningful life for as long as you do? And by the way, that's true even without AI. You're going to die. And you're going to die very, very soon, all of us. And so the question is, how do you spend the days between today and that day in a way that when you look back, you feel like you did the right thing? And I don't remotely do that every day. You know, I lose my temper, I make mistakes, I say things

• 1:30:38Konstantin Kisin?

  I shouldn't, all that shit. But ultimately, the only choice any human being on the planet now has is, how do you live the time that you have between today and the day you die? And that may be because AI, you know, puts you in a chokehold, robotic chokehold three years from now, or it could be 40 years from now, or it could be 200 years from now because AI has solved all your health problems. But ultimately, the answer, the question and the answer don't change. What do you do with your life that you think is meaningful and important?

• 1:31:07Steven Bartlett?

  Earlier on, you had more optimism for humanity, as related to the climate change conversation. You weren't willing to concede that there's nothing we can do.

• 1:31:14Konstantin Kisin?

  Because there's a solution.

• 1:31:15Steven Bartlett?

  When Steve said we're five seconds from the brick wall, you said, no, listen, this.

• 1:31:18Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, I don't think that's true, number one, but I also think that there is an actual solution that's available, that's clear. Now, I'm not saying the technology currently exists that allows us to build, you know, some kind of power station that's clean. We don't have that yet, but I believe we can, we can discover that. And if you look at human history, I think that's undeniable. AI is completely unprecedented and a category different to what we're talking about. So the AI issue is a different issue. It's not the same. And I am not pessimistic. I am just accepting of the truth of this issue, which is, nobody can stop it, nobody can control it. And ultimately, the only thing you control is, what do you do when you leave the studio?

• 1:32:03Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. Well, then we shall conclude there. Thank you so much.

• 1:32:08Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:32:09Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you for being here. Thank you for writing all these wonderful books, Steve. Got all of them here. I think there's another one on the way, isn't there? And then I've got Konstantin's book here.

• 1:32:16Konstantin Kisin?

  You've got a nice red one, I like it.

• 1:32:17Steven Bartlett?

  To the, what, this one?

• 1:32:20Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:20Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:21Konstantin Kisin?

  I'm surprised it's not about China, mate. Sorry, I keep making all these jokes.

• 1:32:25Steven Bartlett?

  But I appreciate your perspective. It's been really eye opening. And I think, especially on the subject of climate change, that was a really productive case of river.

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  I mean, the current book I'm working on, which I hope to finish by the end of this month, is called How Economists Will Destroy Capitalism. And what it makes the argument for is that economists have completely and utterly misunderstood what climate change actually means. And therefore, they've given us predictions about the damage it'll do to our economy, which are trivial. And therefore, we're doing trivial things to address it.

• 1:32:51Konstantin Kisin?

  Fantastic. I hope people read it. And I would just say, I think it's very important, people in public eye, when they say something that's not accurate, hold their hand up. So in the climate conversation, I obviously, I took a zero away from the figure. It's my mistake. I'm glad for the correction. I'll definitely be more careful when I talk about it. I think, you know, the way the rest of the conversation, where I think we understood the points we were trying to make. But I'm grateful for that. And I appreciate the opportunity to correct the record as well. So thanks for doing that.

• 1:33:17Steven Bartlett?

  Well, people should go listen to your show as well, Trigonometry. I'll link that below. Fantastic show.