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

Konstantin Kisin is a podcaster, a speaker and an author. Despite living in objectively the best time ever, there is a common trend of people believing that the world is getting worse. Is this an accurate assessment of the existentially unfulfilling modern world, or is it fragile victims whining about nothing? Expect to learn the danger of pedestalising victimhood, Konstantin's thoughts on Theo Von being screwed out of thousands of dollars, his reaction to Sam Harris' viral clip on Triggernometry, why people still won't shut up talking about Brexit, the problem with climate change discourse and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #psychology #politics #triggernometry - 00:00 How the Online World Rewards Victimhood 16:04 Overcoming the Challenges & Limitations of New Media 21:01 Konstantin’s Thoughts on His Viral Sam Harris Clip 32:40 Bud Light’s Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back 40:29 What People Are Misunderstanding About Being a Man in 2023 47:09 Why People Struggle to Advocate for Men 57:18 The Solution to the Masculinity Crisis 1:05:02 Society Thinks Shocking Internet Videos Are How Everyone Acts 1:13:04 Theo Von & Other Podcasters Defrauded $4 Million Dollars 1:17:13 EU Flags Hijack ‘Rule Britannia’ at the BBC Proms 1:24:41 Our Loss of Trust in Traditional Institutions 1:33:17 Historical Ignorance in Radical Climate Alarmism 1:39:06 Sense-making in a Confusing World 1:48:05 Using Ancient DNA to Bring Back Ancient Species 1:50:53 Konstantin’s Thoughts on AI’s Advancement 1:55:36 Predicting the US 2024 Election 2:00:43 Live Shows & the Future of TRIGGERnometry 2:18:55 Where to Find Konstantin - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

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

• 0:27Konstantin Kisin?

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

• 1:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the fact that our opinions are more important than our deeds and our words are scrutinized while our actions are done in private. You know, how many people have we seen over the last few years? Ellen DeGeneres, Lizzo, who's that late night host that just got popped for apparently being a Jimmy Fallon, I think, allegedly has these people that outwardly are supposed to be champion for the underclass, like I'm supporting women of all sizes, or I'm supporting people that have different sexual orientations, or I do the whatever. And then you find out behind the scenes that they can't even treat a P A with dignity. I don't know. It seems to me like.

• 1:52Chris Williamson?

  Being someone who out front proselytizes about standing up for the for the underclass is almost becoming a red flag to go, I probably should scrutinize what's actually going on behind the scenes here.

• 2:06Konstantin Kisin?

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

• 2:37Chris Williamson?

  Their morality sort of stands on the shoulders of this performative bullshit. Is there a solution to this? Is there a way that we can scrutinize, given that people's deeds and their actions and their words and their opinions are always going to be far apart?

• 2:53Konstantin Kisin?

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

• 3:38Chris Williamson?

  Also.

• 3:40Konstantin Kisin?

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

• 4:12Chris Williamson?

  There's very rare, it's very rare on Twitter to have someone uh break the fourth wall and say, that was out of order. You're not allowed to say that. Everybody plays this sort of permanent game of sardonic tennis, right? Here's some blasé comment about how you suck or some smart snipe back at what you said. And oh, I hit it back across the net with something else. No one actually says what they should say, which is that's fucking out of order.

• 4:38Konstantin Kisin?

  And then you're a prude if you do. This is why, this is why it's disincentivized. This is coming back to the point about incentives. Social media rewards certain types of behavior and punishes others. So if you are the guy that says, maybe we shouldn't, you know, pile on this person. If your team is doing the piling on, you're like the, the one who's not willing. Do you know what I mean? You're not willing to join in with stoning somebody and that's why you're a loser. That's the, the model that we operate in. So being responsible is disincentivized.

• 5:09Chris Williamson?

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

• 5:50Konstantin Kisin?

  It's tribal mechanics, but multiplied by a thousand.

• 5:52Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 5:53Konstantin Kisin?

  Because it's online.

• 5:54Chris Williamson?

  With everyone scrutinizing you.

• 5:55Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah. And so you have these weird pathologies, like you've got, and it's not a comment on him personally, but you've got like a guy who lives in Malaysia commenting on American culture war issues and getting like millions and millions of views for his commentary and whatever. And you just go, and I see what you're doing there, but are you act- Actually contributing to anything, do you know what I mean? Uh, because it's just flaming, fanning the flames of whatever is going on. Um, and I see that as a, you know, like I say, it's a period, it's a transitionary period. I hope that we get to a point where we start to use social media in a different way. And actually, you know, this is an unpopular thing to say, but I don't envy the big tech executives. Uh, because it's a really hard job because on the one hand you incentivize to encourage engagement. And on the other hand,

• 6:42Konstantin Kisin?

  the engagement is achieved by amplifying anger and division and all of these things. So I, I hope we can work that out as a, as a society, how do we move forward with social media?

• 6:52Chris Williamson?

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

• 7:25Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, I'm going to be speaking at ARC, Jordan, Jordan's thing later this year. And one of the things I want to talk about is that I think everyone's embraced this now. We all now do it. I feel like those of us who've been concerned about wokeness have sort of got into that place where we are like, oh, I'm a victim, I've been cancelled, I've been this and I've been that. And I think it's time actually for us to step into our power now and go, okay, well, we've created these new media organizations. We've created alliances, we've created community, we've created things. And the question really for us is now, we know what we're against, but not enough people are willing to say, what are we for exactly? And that's because it's much harder to do, but that is the mission now.

• 8:08Konstantin Kisin?

  It's how do you get past woke, anti-woke into the future? And the future has to be about offering people a better alternative to that victimhood. Uh, because it's, it's more rewarding for the individual to, to see themselves in that way, I think. And this is, you know, this is why Jordan Peterson was so successful when he broke through because he was saying to people, take responsibility. And I think we all actually now are in a position where we have to say it to ourselves.

• 8:37Chris Williamson?

  Yes, the right wing snowflake sphere that nobody really ever talks about. I'm pretty sure that you hate that even more than you hate left wing snowflake sphere. Like it's, it's so.

• 8:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the, using the call out culture to say, this is something that shouldn't be happening. This is pedestalizing victimhood, so on and so forth. Whilst some people waving that exact same identity flag themselves, it's like, I don't know, man. Like, that doesn't seem like the way to go.

• 9:10Konstantin Kisin?

  No, it doesn't. I understand it though, and I think people on the right could quite credibly say that, well, they did this and now. Tiff a tat. Now we're using the weapons that they forged against them. It's understandable, but I'm interested in how do we move forward? How do we move forward? And I think there's a hell of a lot of questions in modern society about that that remain extremely unanswered.

• 9:31Chris Williamson?

  Well, like.

• 9:32Konstantin Kisin?

  Where do you get meaning and purpose in your life now? In a society that has fewer and fewer children, in which young people are delaying adulthood longer and longer and longer.

• 9:46Konstantin Kisin?

  Where do you get meaning and purpose exactly? Now, for some people, that's, you know, online activism, but actually how fulfilling that is, I don't know. So the big questions remain unanswered and perhaps increasingly so, actually. I think there may be, there could well be an argument that 80 years ago, people had way more meaning and purpose readily available to them at, you know, just through the course of normal life, you know, get married, have kids, whatever. Now, obviously that wasn't universally and available to everybody, et cetera. But I think in the modern world, actually, way more people are lost. They don't know what they're supposed to do exactly. So in the past, we had a kind of like set trajectory you're supposed to follow, which hurt some people because it wasn't the trajectory for them.

• 10:31Konstantin Kisin?

  But when you take away all trajectory, then everybody's lost. And I think a lot of people are in that position now. So we, and, and as I say, I think it's way harder. To think about what the positive vision of the future is, but that I think is the task now. That's the mission. That's, you know, what is it that if you think wokeness is stupid and dangerous and harmful, which I do. Well, what do you think in addition to that? What do you think beyond that? What is it that you think people ought to do? If they ought not to be victims, what ought they to think about with their lives? Right? And that's a very difficult question that I have more questions than answers about, actually.

• 11:11Chris Williamson?

  It's way easier to identify problems than propose solutions, right? And you almost see this on the internet that if somebody identifies a problem, it's kind of hard to criticize a criticism. It's possible, right? But it's way easier to criticize a proposal. And it's almost like a defense mechanism that people have to front load or front run, avoiding the criticism that they know will become, will be incoming. You know, it's the caveat. It's like, I'm not saying that we don't need to care about such and such. And I'm not saying that this isn't a big deal, but maybe we need to think about this thing. It's almost like a conceptual equivalent of that.

• 11:51Konstantin Kisin?

  Yes, and I find myself doing that all the time.

• 11:54Chris Williamson?

  Fortifying with caveats.

• 11:55Konstantin Kisin?

  All the time, man, because I think the other aspect of the online, the way the communication happens online is like, if you make a statement, a generalized statement, you might say, exercise is good for you. And somebody will be like, yeah, but what if you've got an injury? And before you know it, like you hate disabled people. Like, that's kind of how the conversation happens. But we, I think when, when we stop being able to make normative statements, everything else breaks down, right? We have to be able to say, for most people, most of the time, pairing up with someone of the sex that they are attracted to and, and building a life together is better than not doing that. We have to be able to say that without the one person who was in an abusive relationship, but what about me?

• 12:40Konstantin Kisin?

  Right? Yes, we understand you, but we're talking about the 95% of people, right? Uh, and you feel free not to go along with whatever we're putting on the table. It's like if we put a menu of things on the table, you don't have to eat everything. No one is making you eat the gluten.

• 12:53Chris Williamson?

  It's the Ricky Gervais guitar lessons thing, right?

• 12:56Konstantin Kisin?

  Exactly.

• 12:56Chris Williamson?

  I don't want guitar lessons.

• 12:58Konstantin Kisin?

  So I think we have to be able to say. All other things being equal, family is good.

• 13:04Chris Williamson?

  Well, this is the tyranny of the minority. I fucking love that phrase. I think it's so smart to optimize for the edges of the bell curve rather than the middle. And as you said before, there is a, it is important to recognize that there are people who fall outside of the norms of normality and that they need some care as well. And if you didn't have that sufficiently broad perspective view, these people would just fall through the cracks. And that's fucking shit and nobody wants that to happen. But when you optimize for that, you actually end up, if you were to net out what happens, you end up with more suffering because you neglect all of the fucking fat bit of the middle of the distribution.

• 13:41Konstantin Kisin?

  That's right. And we've, we've stopped being able to make that point because we, and also I think the phrase that I came across, and I didn't come up with this, but somebody was saying to me the other day that we live in a world of trade-off denialism.

• 13:55Chris Williamson?

  What's that mean?

• 13:56Konstantin Kisin?

  Every decision has trade-offs. It has positives and negatives. And if you go, well, we should do this. And someone goes, yeah, but what about the thing that, and then you can never really acknowledge, it's like the climate catastrophe, right? No one wants to talk about the fact that many of the solutions that are being proposed would be worse than the problem. So it's like, if you say anything about how we're approaching that issue, you are denying that climate change is real, or you are denying that it's a problem, or you're denying that we should address it. No, I just think your idea of how to fix it is stupid. Right? And we've lost the ability to have that conversation as well. And I think we really need to reintroduce that. It's one of the things I talked about in my Oxford

• 14:37Konstantin Kisin?

  speech, which I think is why it did well, is because people went, oh yeah, all right. Cause, cause if we just do the stuff that we're being told we need to do, that's actually worse. And that sort of opened it up. I think we've totally forgotten that every, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. My favorite quote ever from Thomas Sowell.

• 14:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's lovely. And that.

• 14:59Chris Williamson?

  The difference between maximizing and satisficing from behavioral economics is an interesting one. So maximizing is everything must be 100, 100, 100, 100. Satisficing is hitting an acceptable level across everything. And what the satisficing allows you to do is it allows you to iterate much more quickly. And as you say, you can imagine, you can do it in your own life. It's like, how many times have you done it? Going to go away on holiday with the misses and we're going to have a fucking Airbnb or booking.com favorite list with 30 hotels or 30 places in. And by the time that you get down to choosing them, the choice has been made for you because all of the nice ones have gone and you're now two days before you leave. Right? That's maximizing.

• 15:38Konstantin Kisin?

  And you're so stressed, you need the holiday.

• 15:40Chris Williamson?

  It was fucking, yeah, it was awful. You didn't even enjoy the experience of it as well.

• 15:43Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 15:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I understand, man. Like, you know, people feel like they're being left behind. They feel like life is happening to them or happening for other people and they're not a part of it. And I get that. Like, you know, fucking, it's disquieting. Life is going on. My friends are moving on. The world is changing and I'm all confused. But I suppose this sort of information ecosystem conversation, which you guys have had a good bit, and I've had twice over the last few weeks, first with Sam Harris and then with Eric Weinstein.

• 16:13Konstantin Kisin?

  Hmm.

• 16:15Chris Williamson?

  What do you make of this? Like, the heterodoxia sphere has its problems. The legacy media sphere has its problems. Independent creators that just get to shitpost anonymously on Twitter and Reddit. Also, I like, very unreliable. What's the, do you think about this? Like, how all of this comes together and how you move forward through it?

• 16:37Konstantin Kisin?

  I see a lot of problems with new media too. I mean, and I've said this from day one in terms of what we do at Trigonometry. It's, we don't have a budget to employ a bunch of people to do extensive research on things or to do fact checking for us. So we can't do certain things that the mainstream media can do and should do. The problem is that mainstream media isn't doing it either. Right? But there's a, there's a really important role for the mainstream media. I just wish they'd play that role. But, you know, I think where I agree with Sam, even though I disagree with him on COVID and to some extent, well, to a large extent, Trump and all those things is there, not everything can be fixed on a podcast.

• 17:21Konstantin Kisin?

  That is absolutely true. There are certain things that are a matter of research and deeper study and it's not, not everything can be sorted out in a three hour conversation between two podcasters. It's not how that works. And I think new media has its own problems. It over rewards charisma, it over rewards passion, it massively under rewards any attempts to cling to truth. It encourages people to go off in the pursuit of the most exciting take. And truth isn't always exciting, you know. So I think the truth is we need a vibrant ecosystem

• 18:05Konstantin Kisin?

  in which all of these different pieces play their own different roles. Which is why I'm in favor of maximum freedom, because that's where you get everybody doing their thing. And then, you know, over time, people, the people who want wholesome content, if you like, when it comes to facts or information or whatever, can seek it out because people aren't stupid. They, they can see through. They will eventually see through someone being super charismatic or whatever. They'll get to a point where they go, actually, what I'd like to do is have a look at what different sources are saying about this and make up my own mind. You saw with COVID, you know, the mainstream media really suppressed a lot of very legitimate points of view. A lot of important information. But then you get the response to that, which is to go

• 18:48Konstantin Kisin?

  quite far off the other end. And I've ended up somewhere what I hope is a kind of reasonable middle ground between those two positions.

• 18:56Chris Williamson?

  There's a really great blog post by Gwinder Bogle, gowinder.substack.com, one of my favorite writers, Why You Are Probably An NPC. And he frames out five different types of NPC. And the most obvious two, you know, like sort of the mainstream NPC and the contrarian NPC. He makes this really great point, which is that the contrarian NPC is no deeper thinking than the mainstream NPC. They're just the inversion of it.

• 19:20Konstantin Kisin?

  Yes.

• 19:20Chris Williamson?

  And he uses the line of being a black sheep might make you different, but you're still a sheep. And that

• 19:30Chris Williamson?

  Allure, this sort of romance of being the independent thought leader, maker, sense maker person. I understand why it happens, but yeah, reflexive contrarianism is no more nuanced than reflexive belief of the hegemony.

• 19:46Konstantin Kisin?

  Yes, and you know, I don't judge people for that because I think that's an element of my thinking, you know, a kind of, I think it's very understandable, the disillusionment with the way the institutions have been captured, or have been corrupted, or perverted, or whatever it is that's happened to them. It is natural that that would produce an equal and opposite reaction.

• 20:12Konstantin Kisin?

  I encourage myself and other people to go beyond that. I try as best I can and to go, okay, well, we're reacting to this, this is how we're behaving. What's the actual, what's the actual truth? Because that's where we started. We started from the position that we cared about the truth. That's why we're so annoyed with the mainstream. Can we, can we find somewhere in between those two positions that actually is an attempt to find that truth? And it's, it's the case with everything, you know, we've had a bunch of, we just had the co-founder of Navara Media on trigonometry, the far-left YouTube, well, maybe not far-left, is it kind of Corbynista-supporting kind of people and others, because we're trying to speak

• 20:53Konstantin Kisin?

  to different people from different places and really get to what the bottom of is of different issues, because those perspectives are valuable too.

• 21:01Chris Williamson?

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

• 21:14Konstantin Kisin?

  You know, I felt terrible when that happened, really, really terrible, because I've never been on the end of a Twitter shitstorm to that extent, but it's not pleasant, no matter how strong-minded you are, whatever. There's a reason that Rogan always says, don't read the comments, right? Like, like the great man Joseph Stalin says, quantity has a quality all of its own.

• 21:42Konstantin Kisin?

  So there's only certain number of negative comments you can ignore until just the volume of shit becomes overwhelming. So my primary concern, actually, not, I don't know Sam well, but was for his well-being, actually. I just, I just worried how he would experience that more than anything. That was my concern because our approach is always about giving a guest an opportunity to reveal themselves in the best light possible. And for some people, that light shines very brightly and can burn. But that's not our intention. We never go into an interview with the desire to out somebody or expose somebody. It's not a gotcha. It's not a gotcha. So I was worried about him and I emailed him straight away just to,

• 22:27Konstantin Kisin?

  you know, check up on him and, and, you know, also, we didn't put that clip out. We could have done because we obviously understood that it was a controversial thing he said. And actually, most people don't know this, but that was not the most controversial thing he said in that interview, in my opinion. We talked about COVID on Locals, which was the paywall section of the interview. And what he said there, I found quite. What did he say? I don't remember the wording and people will have to go and watch it, but it was, you know, I came away from that thinking that, you know, he's overestimating the threat. And as a result of that, is prepared to do some pretty drastic things or, or demand drastic things to be done. So first and foremost, as somebody who interviews people for a

• 23:07Konstantin Kisin?

  living, I was concerned for him. But I also felt that, you know, what he said was wrong. I didn't agree with it. And

• 23:21Konstantin Kisin?

  I, I, my view on it is that if you overestimate the nature of the threat, all else follows. And I think on Trump and COVID, that, that is where Sam, in my opinion, is, is, well, that's why he's doing what he's doing and saying what he's saying. Because if I thought Trump was as bad as Sam thinks, it'd be very tempting to think along the lines that Sam thinks along. And likewise with COVID, if I thought this was like Ebola. That spreads. I'd also be, you know, we should also be honest, you know, the conversation, people like, well, there's never, ever, ever any reason for the government to mandate vaccines. And I broadly agree with that unless the disease is really like dangerous and deadly.

• 24:05Chris Williamson?

  I said this at the beginning of COVID, like, imagine that the disease had a hundred percent mortality rate for all women. Or it was a hundred percent mortality rate for all people under the age of 10.

• 24:16Konstantin Kisin?

  There'd be some people who'd support it.

• 24:18Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, but I think that the fundamentally, it came down to a risk and reward

• 24:23Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 24:24Chris Williamson?

  equation. And most people considered that the risk of getting COVID was not greater than the risk of either getting the vaccine or of opening up mandated vaccines as a pathway overall. Right. And it's just, where do you sit on this equation? There's lots of other things, but broadly, I think it's where do you sit on this equation? And Sam, I completely agree with him that I think COVID as an event was like the worst kind of vaccine that we could have given our epidemiology, our medical system, the view of vaccines overall. Vaccine skepticism at large, I bet, has gone through the fucking roof.

• 25:03Konstantin Kisin?

  It has.

• 25:04Chris Williamson?

  Have you had a look at this?

• 25:05Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah, of course it has. I know anecdotally, just speaking to people, how much that's, that's the case. Yeah.

• 25:10Chris Williamson?

  So if we are to have something that comes around the next time and it does kill fucking all children under 10 or all women or whatever the fuck, it's got some incubation period of 28 days and a mortality of 40%.

• 25:22Chris Williamson?

  It's just a psyop. It's another psyop. This is Klaus Schwab doing it again. This is the WEF. And it's like, oh, God, like, that's, that's, it literally would have been better if COVID hadn't happened. Right? Yeah, sure enough, we can get masks out of the way more quickly and we've got like some, some inefficiency in the, in the system. We're opened up. But if you were to look at COVID as a like operational logistical vaccine, our response to it failed us way worse than if we'd never got it at all. And we got a vaccine injury from COVID.

• 25:53Konstantin Kisin?

  Yes, yes, we did. And, and I also think the one thing that is sort of inexplicably neglected in all of this is.

• 26:01Konstantin Kisin?

  I'd really like to know where Covid came from.

• 26:04Konstantin Kisin?

  I'd really like to know. Don't you think that's important? Don't you think we should know where it came from? Because there are some credible assertions about its origins that would suggest that we may have another pandemic soon.

• 26:18Chris Williamson?

  Is that right? I haven't seen this.

• 26:19Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, if this came from a lab in Wuhan because of gain-of-function research, and we are not willing to be honest about that, and gain-of-function research continues, why wouldn't we have another pandemic?

• 26:34Chris Williamson?

  I never looked into this much. I know that Sam had Matt Ridley and somebody else, somebody else on his show.

• 26:39Konstantin Kisin?

  We've had Matt on to talk about this as well.

• 26:40Chris Williamson?

  Okay, cool.

• 26:41Konstantin Kisin?

  And the truth is, we don't know.

• 26:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 26:44Konstantin Kisin?

  But I'm using the kind of the smell test here because I grew up in a communist society. And what communist societies do when there is something, and all societies do this to a large extent, because people don't like to expose their own flaws. And no one wants to be like, oh, I was responsible for killing millions of people, you know. But they will cover it up in a way that, you know, that is proper. And Matt actually gave this example of there was a leak somewhere in the Soviet Union, which was a radioactive leak, I think, or maybe it was a biological. And they covered it up for ages. And then, you know, when the Soviet Union collapsed, we finally found out, no, no, it was actually a leak.

• 27:26Konstantin Kisin?

  So if this is a product of gain-of-function research getting out into the real world, which is credible, that there's very credible assertions about that, the world needs to know, and this type of research needs to end. But if we are unwilling to have that conversation, honestly, and do the proper investigations, which would be difficult because the CCP wouldn't want that. And on top of that, you've got all this other bullshit about how it's racist and all of that. We've got a problem. So I think my worry with everything that's happened with Covid is not only have we not learned the lessons, I feel like, like you said, we've got a vaccine injury from the experience, and everyone is sort of stuck in their corner. And like Sam said to you,

• 28:11Konstantin Kisin?

  everyone's got their own facts about it now.

• 28:12Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 28:13Konstantin Kisin?

  That's a problem.

• 28:18Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting what you said about the felt sense of being in the blast radius of Sam's online experience. I noticed that someone called it Sam Harris's world embarrassment tour because he did my show, he did Stephen's show, and he did Tom Bilyeu's show. And I don't know, man, like, there seems to be something, it's almost like there was resentment sat on the internet, latent resentment sat on the internet, waiting for Sam to fuck up. And then he did a thing, or maybe, maybe it's

• 28:50Konstantin Kisin?

  I don't think it was personal. That was my, the reason I paused there. I don't think it was personal to Sam. I think particularly on his Trump comments, there are a lot of people who were like, this is what we always knew the Trump haters think deep inside. And Sam was willing to vocalize it, which is, I don't care how big the transgressions are on the other side. I don't care what Hunter Biden has done. I don't care what Joe Biden has done. No matter what they do, it can never be as bad as orange man bad. And that's sort of how he came across. And so the people who, who felt gaslit this entire time about,

• 29:30Konstantin Kisin?

  you know, the overestimation of the threat of Trump, they, they were vindicated in that moment. And I think Sam just caught him, was caught in the rage of people feeling like

• 29:40Chris Williamson?

  the kind of like the perfect timed storm.

• 29:42Konstantin Kisin?

  Yes.

• 29:43Chris Williamson?

  With the perfect pebble in the perfect river that directed it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's so interesting, man. You know, we, I had this conversation with a fitness influencer called Sarah Safari in LA a couple of weeks ago. I'd be interested to get your thoughts on this. I think it's analogous to Sam's situation. A lot of people, especially right of center, say things like, you can't judge somebody on just one thing that they say.

• 30:10Chris Williamson?

  Yet, when it came to a six pack of Bud Light being sent to Dylan Mulvaney by some marketing intern somewhere deep in the annals of the Anheuser-Busch thing, or Miller Lite released one video, the Miller Lite thing felt a little bit more produced, it's probably gone through a few more layers. But largely, I just wondered, I thought it was interesting that the charity that a lot of people right of centre ask to be given to their commentators or, you know, their champions that are cancelled for taking out of context points, there was that Roseanne Barr bit with Theo Von where she made a joke about the Jews, which was

• 30:50Chris Williamson?

  the most egregious clipping that I've ever seen from anything ever, the end of a three-minute-long bit. And they took the final 30 seconds and put it up as if it was representative of the whole thing, it was so fucking bad. But I did notice, nobody decided to use that same idea about, well, hang on a second, maybe, maybe this is just one small department in one small corner of one small brand's marketing push, and they gave this person who is very unpopular on the internet, a six pack of Bud Light. And before you know it, Kid Rock's got an AR-15 pointed at a few cases of your drink. What do you think about?

• 31:27Konstantin Kisin?

  So I would separate those two out. So Sam, I think, is, that point applies very much, and this is the angle I'm coming from. And by the way, we're about to go back to America and we'll interview Sam, the sequel, so we'll see how that works out. I'm looking forward to it. But with Sam, what I felt was, for me, I don't know if it's true of other people, but for me, Sam has a lot of credit in the bank with me. And so, and so I felt that while I strongly disagree with what he said, I think that was clear in the interview, he has enough credit in the bank with me that I'm willing to have a lot of understanding and a lot of grace with him. And I like, and what I would say as well

• 32:12Konstantin Kisin?

  is, you know, we were having a lot of tech issues on the day that we interviewed Sam, and he sat there for like a good hour while we were trying to scrambling to get the microphones to work. And he was the most decent human being. That we've had on the show.

• 32:27Chris Williamson?

  You see who someone really is when the cameras aren't rolling.

• 32:29Konstantin Kisin?

  That seemed to me like a really important thing that other people obviously wouldn't have seen. So I have a lot of time for Sam and respect for him. I don't have the same relationship with Dylan Mulvaney.

• 32:44Konstantin Kisin?

  And I also think.

• 32:45Chris Williamson?

  You haven't taken a world of wisdom from Dylan Mulvaney over the last few.

• 32:48Konstantin Kisin?

  You'd be surprised, man, you'd be surprised. And so I think, look, Dylan Mulvaney is a symbol to many people, like Sam is a symbol to many people for different things. But I think it's a slightly different issue because I don't know if you saw, but immediately after the Dylan Mulvaney controversy, the marketing executive who was responsible for this, there was a video of her talking to, I think, a reporter about the thinking behind what the idea there was.

• 33:19Chris Williamson?

  It seemed a little bit more thought out.

• 33:20Konstantin Kisin?

  It was thought out and her angle was, are our customers are shit? That was her angle.

• 33:27Chris Williamson?

  Are shit?

• 33:28Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 33:29Chris Williamson?

  What's a shit customer?

• 33:30Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, it was just, it's just these guys who've got like a, you know, old fashioned sense of humor and they don't, you know what I mean? Like, we're going to educate our customers. And I'm like, you sell beer, that's not your job, sell them the fucking beer and shut up. Right? And look, the trans issue, for reasons I actually think are quite understandable and obvious, is the lightening rod of our time. So I'm not surprised that that caused the reaction that it did. And I understand it. I do think, and I said, I wrote a sub stack on this at the time, that perhaps the giving so much attention to it is what prompts these brands to go down this route. Obviously with Dylan Mulvaney, it backfired for sure.

• 34:12Chris Williamson?

  It's a roll of the dice for attention.

• 34:14Konstantin Kisin?

  It's a roll of the dice for attention that I don't think they'd consider. And I think that executive ended up being fired. I do understand why people got as fired up about it as they did because you're rewarding behavior that a lot of people would feel is the wrong behavior to reward in the public eye. Dylan Mulvaney.

• 34:30Chris Williamson?

  But that woman is one lady, maybe in her interview with the reporter, she said this went all the way up and the director, CEO, the fucking chief marketing officer or whatever was involved in this. But if it wasn't the case. I don't thi- if it turned out that it was one small group in the corner, as I guessed or whatever, I don't think that the internet would have given Bud Light any more leeway. I don't think they would have said, we need to separate the art and the artist here. You know, they've made beer for three decades, for however fucking long it's been around. And maybe, maybe it's right, maybe it shows they're woke bona fides, it shows that they're the man-hating, like, left-leaning, blue-haired cocks that they always were.

• 35:14Chris Williamson?

  But, I don't know, like, it seems like a lot of the time, people want, it's a, it's a smart idea to be able to say, Rogan has been in a few controversies over the last few years, most people said, I have faith that you're telling me this is the tip of the iceberg. I've seen the whole iceberg, right? I know that there is nothing lurking deep down in the depths. Massive advantage he has is he's published like 5,000 hours of content over the last decade, which means that you have a pretty good body of evidence that sits on the other side of the scale. Bud Light, you don't know much about what's going on inside of the marketing department. But I just thought it was interesting. I thought that maybe this is a time where it would be illustrative, and you should

• 35:57Chris Williamson?

  be careful about transgressing rules that you want to be enforced. So if you want the, don't judge somebody by one single occurrence rule to be enforced, and then you don't enforce it, that, as you said before, that's hit-for-tat game, it opens up, well, they did it, so it's this playground mentality.

• 36:16Konstantin Kisin?

  I understand what you mean, but I think I disagree, actually. I think the reason that people were as upset about as they are is, while it's, these are different companies, the sense is, imagine it wasn't just Rogan who said something, but it was Chris Williamson and Trigonometry and all the other podcasters who do what we do, all at one point said the same thing, and then there was yet another example of a podcaster saying it. So when you look at the Gillette-

• 36:45Konstantin Kisin?

  Toxic masculinity ad. If you look at all the other instances where corporations put pride flags, they've replaced their brand with pride.

• 36:53Chris Williamson?

  But not in the Middle East.

• 36:54Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, obviously not. Yeah.

• 36:56Chris Williamson?

  Do they do it in Russia? They can't do it in Russia.

• 36:57Konstantin Kisin?

  I doubt it. I doubt it. I can't imagine why.

• 37:00Chris Williamson?

  Mother Russia, gay has you.

• 37:01Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah, exactly. So I think what people felt was here again, we've got a corporation just absolutely taking the piss, lecturing the ordinary public and thrusting these very niche issues onto what is a very, very like normal household beer. And you just can't escape this shit. That's what I think people feel.

• 37:24Chris Williamson?

  Kind of a straw that broke the camel's back.

• 37:26Konstantin Kisin?

  I agree.

• 37:27Chris Williamson?

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

• 37:40Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, broadly speaking, if you think about what the anti-woke narrative is, the anti-woke narrative is, and I agree with very large parts of it, is that most of the major institutions, whether that be media, whether that be the civil service, whether that be the political systems, the parties, the corporations, the education system, they've all been captured or corrupted or through some other mechanism become the projectors of a certain worldview onto the public who do not share that worldview. And so when you see the toxic masculinity Gillette ad, which is like, hey, you know, you're a man, you're a piece of shit, buy our razor.

• 38:23Konstantin Kisin?

  You know, hey, you're a piece of shit, buy our beer, et cetera. It sort of builds up to a point like, why is everyone telling me I'm a piece of shit? And it gets old. And you know, and I actually You know, particularly this anti-masculinity narrative that you see everywhere, in movies, in advertising, in all sorts of different genres. I think it's really, really dangerous because if you think about Gillette ads in the 90s, you're a bit younger than me, I don't know if you remember them. But they were-

• 38:56Chris Williamson?

  The best a man can get. And it's like some blonde hot chick in like a whatever, she's like draped on her shoulder.

• 39:03Konstantin Kisin?

  Actually, that wasn't the 90s Gillette ads. The 90s Gillette ads were a bunch of men being healthy masculinity. It was a man putting this tie on as he holds his baby up before he's going to work. It was a man hugging his son on his way to his wedding. It was a man protecting his wife or, you know, it was a, it was a healthy view of men and relationships and men and women and so on. And I always, I sort of say, you know, healthy masculinity is the 90s Gillette ads. That's what it looks like. Men being responsible, men in relationships with women being respectful, being kind, but also being strong, looking after their children, teaching younger versions of men have to be

• 39:47Konstantin Kisin?

  men, et cetera, right? And I understand why people, men and women, are fucking tired, really, really tired of this idea that men are bad and evil. Like, my wife, who's completely, I always say my wife is completely apolitical and as a result of that, extremely based. Right? Like, she hates this shit. And I can't tell you how many women I speak to who are very, very tired of men being demonized in this way, and so am I.

• 40:13Chris Williamson?

  Especially given that a lot of those women will have sons.

• 40:16Konstantin Kisin?

  And they want their partner to be good and healthy. They don't want them to be feeble, you know? So I actually, I understand the pushback against that, I really do, and I think it's necessary.

• 40:27Chris Williamson?

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

• 40:58Konstantin Kisin?

  I think we should zoom out more, even more than that, and ask the question-

• 41:04Konstantin Kisin?

  What is it that we want as a society? And I pissed both sides of the spectrum off by saying what I'm about to say, which is any ideology, and I mean any ideology, that pits men against women or women against men is toxic and damaging and dangerous and unhealthy. And that includes some forms of feminism and that includes, you know, the incel worldview and all sorts of things. So the thing that we're really missing is a reminder of the fact that I'm going to do the caveat thing. We talked about, yes, some people are not heterosexual, but for the vast majority of people, the single most meaningful thing in your life is going to be the relationship you have with your intimate

• 41:45Konstantin Kisin?

  partner, almost always of the opposite sex, right? And we need each other. Men and women need each other. We've been working together for millennia. And anyone who tells you that your enemy is the opposite sex, that person is your enemy. That person is your enemy, that person is my enemy, and that person is our society's enemy. They are destroying or attempting to destroy the very building block of our society.

• 42:13Chris Williamson?

  That comes from both sides of the advice as well. The red pillar sphere teaches men that women are adversaries to be avoided or resources to be used and discarded. Those are the only two ways. And, you know, that's black, that's the entire manosphere, actually. That's black pill, MGTOW, incels, pick up artistry, red pill, sigma male, all the way, like the full, that's the entire gamut. For anyone that doesn't know the memes, that's the entire memosphere of the fucking manosphere. And, uh, yeah, there's no one in there, very, very few people in there who say. You're supposed to be a collaborator with the opposite sex.

• 42:58Chris Williamson?

  Most of your competition is intra-sexual, not inter-sexual. Men and women have worked together for eons. You need each other to survive just because you've outsourced protecting and provisioning to the police department and the local supermarket. And you, women, have outsourced the resources and the company to your ability to gain education and employment and Netflix. Like, still, broadly, like, we're not going to be able to out-technology ourselves from the last 120,000 years of humans being the way that we are.

• 43:35Konstantin Kisin?

  So there's more to relationships than dildo, right? Like, you're not a dildo to your partner. There's more that you bring to the table.

• 43:41Chris Williamson?

  Sometimes, sometimes.

• 43:42Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, I'm speaking for myself, maybe. I'm not sufficient in that department. But my point is, let's frame this in a positive way. What is it that we're trying to say? Well, what we're trying to say is, men and women need each other. Men and women need to work together. Men and women are not enemies. The most powerful you are ever going to be is with a good woman by your side.

• 44:03Chris Williamson?

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

• 44:18Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, you know how Bitcoiners say, "Have fun staying poor? Have fun being a loser." You want to spend your life being unhappy with the opposite sex? Whether you are a feminist or one of these people, go for it. I'm not going to tell you how to live your life, but I don't think it's going to lead you to a good place. You know, I have male friends who've recently found their, like, soulmate or their partner, and they blossom. They blossom the moment that it happens, because we evolved to be together. We evolved to work together. We evolved to drive each other forward in really powerful ways. I would not, I wouldn't be a tenth of the man I am without my wife.

• 45:00Chris Williamson?

  Did you read the post I put up a couple of weeks ago about the fuck you family?

• 45:04Konstantin Kisin?

  No, I didn't see that.

• 45:05Chris Williamson?

  So... Fuck you money, right? You're able to become-

• 45:08Konstantin Kisin?

  Oh, I did see that, yes.

• 45:10Chris Williamson?

  Sufficiently financially independent that money, you don't need to do things you don't want to do. Fuck you, freedom. You don't need to do things that you don't want to do. But then the final stage I see amongst my male friends who are, you know, 30s and 40s is the fuck you family, which is a, all that I fundamentally care about in the end is me and the people that are a part of this nuclear pod. And everything else can go to hell. Everything else can fall apart. Jimmy Carr was just sat in that seat. He's been through his fair share of like roller coasters and he's been with his partner like a decade and a bit like fucking forever. But maybe even 20, like 20 something years. And now he's got a son and a daughter.

• 45:50Chris Williamson?

  And yeah, the coming home to know that as long as that's okay, as long as that's set. I'm presuming that you've stacked the fuck you money with the fuck you freedom and then you add the family on top. It must be kind of similar to being indestructible.

• 46:04Konstantin Kisin?

  I'm still working on the fuck you money.

• 46:05Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 46:06Konstantin Kisin?

  Still a long way to go on the fuck you money.

• 46:08Chris Williamson?

  The freedom and the family.

• 46:09Konstantin Kisin?

  The freedom and the family, yes. Uh, my wife and I, we, we met by complete accident when we were 18, married by 20 and been together ever since. And the, just on a very practical, like what did I get out of it? Level. It's, it's been the single most beneficial source of inspiration, comfort, you know, pick each other up when you're down, all of that. I, I, I mean, I admire people who don't have that and still do lots of stuff in the world, but it would be so much harder, so, so much harder. Um, so again, I'm not telling other people how to live their life.

• 46:49Konstantin Kisin?

  I'm just saying, this has been one of the most tried and tested solutions to various problems that human beings experience throughout history. We evolved to be together. Uh, and if it's a trap talking point, then maybe, maybe that's right. Maybe, maybe that some trap talking points are correct.

• 47:07Chris Williamson?

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

• 47:15Konstantin Kisin?

  Uh, because victimhood doesn't work for men the way it works for women. We don't feel sorry for men.

• 47:22Konstantin Kisin?

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

• 47:54Chris Williamson?

  What's that mean?

• 47:55Konstantin Kisin?

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

• 48:14Chris Williamson?

  There are structural disadvantages that are faced by men as well.

• 48:17Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 48:17Chris Williamson?

  Right? That very few people are willing to accept at the moment. Socioeconomically, men are falling behind. Education, employment, uh, mental health, we're currently suicide awareness, suicide prevention week in the UK. The, according to one of the guys I was literally talking to half an hour ago. If you are a man, the single biggest threat to your own life is yourself. You are more likely to die by your own hands than by any other way.

• 48:42Konstantin Kisin?

  Are you?

• 48:44Chris Williamson?

  Am I?

• 48:45Konstantin Kisin?

  I don't think you are.

• 48:46Chris Williamson?

  I've got suicide in my family, so.

• 48:47Konstantin Kisin?

  I know, but I don't think you are the greatest threat to you.

• 48:50Chris Williamson?

  That's true.

• 48:51Konstantin Kisin?

  And I'm not the greatest threat to me, and why is that?

• 48:54Chris Williamson?

  Not everybody has the same genetic predisposition.

• 48:56Konstantin Kisin?

  Sure. But you just said you do. And yet you are not the greatest threat to you. Why is that? Because you're fulfilled? Because you are successful, because you're striving and achieving. Because you have in life what you should have in life. Uh, the meaning and purpose and the pursuit of a goal, right? And for men, this is one of the problems with, you know, this mental health conversation. One of the reasons that men's mental health is not as good as it could be is that, um. A, we do live in a society which discourages them from being men and being the way that men are supposed to be. Uh, but the other reason is that most of the personal development, um, and psychology fields are geared towards

• 49:40Konstantin Kisin?

  female ways of being. And most of the. The ways that we treat, for example, depression. Men don't need the same thing as women do when it comes to that. What men need is to feel powerful and capable, right? The reason you don't, you are not the greatest threat to you is that you feel in charge of your life. Right? And that's what men need to pursue with every fiber of the being. That's what I mean when I say better. Uh, you need to struggle and you need to fight and you need to achieve. And then all of this other shit falls by the wayside. And it's always been like this. You know, I'm someone who's been depressed at points in my life. And it's not because I was having a mental health problem. It's because my life was shit and I was shit. That's why, right?

• 50:25Konstantin Kisin?

  So what men need is to pursue their dreams, to fight and struggle and to achieve.

• 50:32Chris Williamson?

  There was a, a point that you brought up earlier on about how no guidelines is liberating and terrifying altogether. And I think it's, it's interesting to talk about how there isn't only one way to be a good man.

• 50:48Konstantin Kisin?

  Hmm.

• 50:49Chris Williamson?

  But there aren't an unlimited number of ways either.

• 50:51Konstantin Kisin?

  Hmm.

• 50:52Chris Williamson?

  And the problem of breaking open the expectations around men means that guidance for men and boys also largely dissipates. I had this conversation in Qatar and the guy I was debating had this conception of the man box. And he said, if you're inside of the man box, it can be constraining because he was a, a member of the LGBT community. Kuwaiti American grew up in the Middle East and wanted to be a dancer as a boy. Like, I imagine it's pretty fucking difficult for you to find a man box that fits that conception of you in it.

• 51:22Konstantin Kisin?

  Sure.

• 51:23Chris Williamson?

  But if you completely blast it open and you can be anything that you want to be, there's no guidelines at all. There's no guidance. So how fucking hard is this going to be? You've got to, you've got to reinvent from first principles what it means to be a man. And I mean, you've heard this from Mary Harrington and Louise Perry, but.

• 51:41Chris Williamson?

  A lot of the guidance that was given to men previously around chivalry, it is simply a difference of degree, not a difference of kind, to go from men should hold the door open for women and make sure that she gets to the front door safe at night to you shouldn't hit your wife. It is one single thread between those, which is women are more vulnerable and should be protected. Right? Lovely conception there. Mary, in classic Mary's style, said, the bourgeois rules that benefited women who had had a partner that grew up in a two-parent household, that went to some highfalutin institution, was around people that had good male role models.

• 52:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, sure, you can break open the doors of chivalry and maybe pay for the first date, or maybe you can drive yourself home or get the taxi on your own or whatever it is, because the environment that you're in is largely very different. The guy that grew up or the woman that grew up in a relationship with a man who comes from a single parent household, whose mum or dad was addicted to alcohol or drugs, or there was multiple partners coming through the house, they never got taught not to beat your wife, let alone not to hold the door open. And like the rules for the, but not for me, it's like the rules for us protect everybody, not just me. And yeah, I think it's a really interesting frame to think about where the cultural changes come from. A lot of the time they come top down,

• 53:07Chris Williamson?

  but the environment can be so different that getting rid of something that seems quite innocuous up here can actually cascade down to the bottom. And the same thing goes for this tyranny of the minority again. Absolutely. There are people that will be outside of the man box and maybe we should expand it so that they can fit in it. But if you blow the doors open,

• 53:25Chris Williamson?

  where's the guidance? Like, what does it mean?

• 53:27Konstantin Kisin?

  And this is also a consequence of luxury beliefs, which is Rob Henderson's term. I'm sure you've had him on the show. And the principal luxury belief of our time is there's no difference between men and women.

• 53:39Konstantin Kisin?

  That's a luxury belief. There are people who can afford to have it, but most people can't afford to have that belief. And then all else follows from this, uh, because if you accept that there are differences between men and women, then men and women should act differently. Uh, and that also means that it's okay for men to be men. And it's okay for women to be women. One of the things that I find really fucking weird, man, since we had our son, is people will go to my wife, oh, you're just, you're just, you're just, you're just at home. And I'm like, what do you mean just at home? Are you fucking insane? She's, she's raising our son.

• 54:18Konstantin Kisin?

  And, and providing everything that we need as a family and that you're calling that just a thing. So, but, but a lot of women will judge other women for just being at home.

• 54:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 54:32Konstantin Kisin?

  And actually, I think, and it doesn't apply to everybody, caveat, but for most women, the greatest gift their partner can give them is opportunity if they want to be at home with the children to do that.

• 54:45Chris Williamson?

  About eighty, eighty-five percent of women say that being a stay-at-home mom is an opportunity that, an option that they aspire to have.

• 54:52Konstantin Kisin?

  Yes, and financially for most people, it's very difficult.

• 54:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 54:55Konstantin Kisin?

  Right now. So it's, it's, it's the greatest gift. And so it's not just like men are treated badly or women, it's, it's this whole dynamic hurts everybody. Um, and so men and women need to work together. Uh, dads need to be involved in their kids' lives. These are some, yeah, they look, they're tried points one-on-one, if that's what you want to call them, but it's what works. It's what works for the kids. It's what works for the family.

• 55:17Chris Williamson?

  Did you read the, uh, men are lost, can we find a way out of the wilderness article by Christine Amber, who's in the Washington Post a couple of months ago? Was it Washington Post? It's in the something. Anyway, she had this beautiful conception in it that said, um, many young men feel their difficulties are often dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that they don't feel a part of.

• 55:41Chris Williamson?

  It seems like a lot of modern men are being made to pay for the sins and advantages of their fathers and grandfathers. And I thought that that was very interesting, that kind of like in comedy, right? You're allowed to punch up, but you can't punch down. And because men have had it good for so long, you have this this concern in giving them any sympathy. And even though largely pick most of the extreme negative outcomes that you want in life, apart from sexual assault, and it's you're going to find a man on the receiving end, whether it's homelessness, drug addiction, violent crime, mental health, being in jail, suicide, like, all of it.

• 56:20Konstantin Kisin?

  And there was this video of, I think it was a trans man, so a woman who became a man, or looked like a man or whatever, who was absolutely horrified by the lack of attention.

• 56:36Chris Williamson?

  Oh, people cross the street when they were walking towards them.

• 56:39Konstantin Kisin?

  It wasn't even just that. It's just like, people ignore you. When you're a woman, you get attention. And people just ignore a guy, most of the time, to most intents and purposes. But that's, you know, those are, in my opinion, in radical differences between the sexes, the way our biological roles are, when women are going to get more attention.

• 56:58Chris Williamson?

  I think you can definitely see, like, listening to your, like, pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of mentality, especially when it comes to men, you can definitely see that sort of Soviet, like, man be hard, man lift thing, man protect woman. Like, that was actually money and a throw, but that's the best Russian you're getting at me. Yeah, I think that you can see that. And this is why, you know, there's a multiplicity of opinions about how to do this. And I think it's why it's interesting that everybody can contribute, you know, in a

• 57:27Konstantin Kisin?

  Give me a critique of what I'm saying. I'd love to explore that with you.

• 57:30Chris Williamson?

  No, but there's nothing that I would disagree with massively. I think that it's important to recognize the structural disadvantages faced by men and boys at the moment, going from a brawn-based to a brain-based economy, when you have a disposition to be less conscientious, where you are put into an education system that doesn't suit the disposition of boys, but you're graded in the same manner as an entire sex who does.

• 57:55Chris Williamson?

  Boys are naturally going to fall behind. And I think that you're seeing the outcomes of this in the way that schooling and between the ages of 21 and 29, women earn a grand and a bit more than men do, right? The gender pay gap isn't a gender pay gap, it's a mother pay gap, right? That's the penalization comes to mothers.

• 58:15Konstantin Kisin?

  I don't disagree with any of that, but the question is, what's the answer? What's the solution to that?

• 58:19Chris Williamson?

  I think that creating a positive view for masculinity, creating, and this is again, why Peterson and Andrew Tate as well have been so successful, because they said, you can be something. You can actually step out there and wrangle the world, and I believe in you, and I'm proud of you, and it's not wrong for you to try and want to get mastery or conquer something or achieve something, have ambition to be able to make decisions easily and stand up well under pressure. Like, you know, these are all fucking good things that are not only good for you, but they're good for the world as well. I think that there needs to be a positive vision. That would be one. I think that that creates a positive feedback loop for men. I do think that there's some manning up in the most

• 58:59Chris Williamson?

  transcend and include, like Wilburian way that we can. But I also think that, you know, we need to look at structural initiatives that can help boys and men, because there's no other group on the planet who, when they fall behind, are pointed at and said, this is your problem, you need to sort it out. Every other group, we would spend billions in taxpayer funded money to create committees and charities and initiatives that actually work out what's going on and help them, boots on the ground, to be able to do this. I don't think, like, if a man has a problem, or if a woman has a problem, we say, what can we do to fix society? If a man has a problem, we say, what can a man do to fix himself? Now, maybe that's the fundamental asymmetry at the heart of the sex difference. But in

• 59:44Chris Williamson?

  a society that has surplus resources that can help, I don't see why we wouldn't afford the, why we would make men unnecessarily swim upstream, if that makes sense.

• 59:56Konstantin Kisin?

  It does make sense. However, I think that

• 1:00:01Konstantin Kisin?

  My view is what you said earlier, it's the fundamental asymmetry between the sexes. Now, it's true that all groups face various structural inequalities. For example, I'm five nine, barely.

• 1:00:17Chris Williamson?

  How do you play basketball?

• 1:00:18Konstantin Kisin?

  Not very well, I should say, for that reason alone. Actually, if you look at the evidence, heightism is one of the biggest openly available forms of discrimination that isn't condemned or dealt with in any way.

• 1:00:33Chris Williamson?

  And one of your team is Scouse, so that must be.

• 1:00:37Konstantin Kisin?

  He's even shorter than me, believe it or not. Yeah. So what's the answer to that? My answer to that has not been to get leg extensions or to complain about structural heightism. Do you know that?

• 1:00:52Chris Williamson?

  Structural heightism.

• 1:00:55Konstantin Kisin?

  You joke, but if you want to play this fucking game, this is my point.

• 1:00:58Chris Williamson?

  I'm not laughing at that, I'm just, it's structural heightism is a term that I haven't heard before.

• 1:01:03Konstantin Kisin?

  So if you look at the CEOs of the top Fortune 500 companies, like 90% or something like, don't quote me on it, you can look it up, like a very, very, very significant portion of them are over six foot tall.

• 1:01:14Chris Williamson?

  Almost always the taller president wins, I think, as well.

• 1:01:17Konstantin Kisin?

  Right. Now, is the answer to that, not in Russia, by the way.

• 1:01:24Konstantin Kisin?

  In Russia, you don't need height. So is, do we complain about that? Should we complain about that? Should I sit here and be like, oh, because I'm five foot nine, I don't get the, the? It doesn't help anything, it doesn't change anything, right? And I remember, it's so funny, because I have a friend of mine, he was like a Green Party voter, voter, the most woke person that you could possibly imagine, and he's like five five. And I made this point to him, I said, yeah, but you know, you talk about all these structural issues with like this group and that group and whatever, and you're five five, did you know about, you know, heightism or whatever? And he was like, yeah, but being five five has just made me who I am. I was like, yes, yes, you are what you are. The world isn't going to change to you, right?

• 1:02:08Konstantin Kisin?

  My favorite scene in Game of Thrones, have you seen Game of Thrones? Is Tyrion, when he's talking to Jon Snow, and he calls him a bastard, and Jon Snow takes offense, and he goes, have I offended you bastard? He goes, let me give you some advice, bastard, never forget what you are, the world won't, wear it like armor and it can never be used to hurt you.

• 1:02:30Konstantin Kisin?

  That's the answer to all of this, right? And you're right about Peterson and Tate, who I think are very different figures. But nonetheless, their success is based on the fact that they're telling men what men do need to hear in that respect, which is it's okay to be a man. It's okay to have drive. It's okay to have ambition. It's okay to have aggression. It's okay to want things. It's okay to want status. It's okay to want money. It's okay to want power. These are all things that are okay. They have pathological side effects when not handled properly. But the drive to achieve, the drive to succeed, the drive to dominate, the drive to win. These are good things and pursue them. And by the way, here's the interesting bit. Those woke women, they love that shit. This is what I'm going to teach my son, right?

• 1:03:14Konstantin Kisin?

  Whatever the society tells you about how it's wrong to be a man, at the end of the day, they're all going to reward you for being a real man. This is the best time in some ways to be a real man because you clean up. The competition is outing itself, is taking itself out of the picture. If you act like a man, you clean up. That's the position we're in.

• 1:03:34Chris Williamson?

  Well, there's a number of left-leaning women who are lamenting the fact that they can't find a man who meets both their political preference and also will woo them appropriately on the date, right? It's like, why are all of the men who do the things that I want from the other political party? I think it's like 30% or 40% of Democrats and Republicans fear that their son or daughter will marry somebody of the opposite political belief. So, you know, this tribalism that we spoke about earlier on. Speaking about toxic masculinity as part of that debate, I did a little bit of preparation and I found some of my favorite headlines of things that are toxic masculinity. Mass shootings, gang violence, climate change, the financial crisis is toxic masculinity,

• 1:04:19Chris Williamson?

  Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, not wearing a mask, eating meat, physical fitness, fast food, capitalism is toxic masculinity and communism is toxic masculinity, hip hop, smelling of Axe body spray, which is lynx for the British people, being stoic, risk-taking, religion, but also secularism and atheism, playing board games, being interested in cars and saying hello or have a nice day. All toxic masculinity.

• 1:04:45Konstantin Kisin?

  Saying hello is fucking atrocious, mate, isn't it?

• 1:04:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's sort of, I think that's part of the male gaze, you know, there was this, um... I think it was a rule, was it not, put on the London Underground for a while that like the men's like wandering eyes or something that was a concern. But here's another thing, right? I'd be interested to get your take on this. I brought this up with that same fitness influencer a couple of weeks ago. Sarah, you had a really good response as well.

• 1:05:14Chris Williamson?

  Internet incidents, big ones.

• 1:05:19Chris Williamson?

  People in the real world use the response of the internet. They crowdsourced their sense making to how other people responded. So you'll have seen these gym TikToks of girls videoing themselves, working out. And sometimes there's a guy in the background. And if the guy looks over a bit much, because for whatever reason, he's looking at her, he's looking at the camera, he's looking at himself, he's doing whatever. Sometimes they make a big song and dance about it. The first big one of those that happened, it could have gone either way. You could have tossed a coin and I would have said, I don't know. The internet may say that this is reprehensible. I didn't, I thought it was fine, but I could have seen the internet going on the other side of the fence and saying, yeah, sure, find this guy, like, dox him, shoot him, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:05:59Chris Williamson?

  It didn't. And that now has created a new bar of behavior, expected behavior, both for men and for women. The interesting thing that it made me realize is the women who saw that TikTok, had it have gone the other way and had it have been completely reprehensible and totally not allowed, would then have reset their worldview expectation way more sensitive. Their radar is now looking for, did that guy glance over three times or more in the space of 90 seconds? If so, this equals a dangerous situation because the internet told me so. And it's a very sort of slippery slope in one direction only.

• 1:06:43Chris Williamson?

  It only moves towards more sensitivity, not more robustness, right? I thought that was interesting.

• 1:06:49Konstantin Kisin?

  Perception is projection.

• 1:06:51Chris Williamson?

  What's that mean?

• 1:06:52Konstantin Kisin?

  It means that you see what you expect to see.

• 1:06:56Konstantin Kisin?

  You perceive your own projections of the world.

• 1:06:59Chris Williamson?

  Uh, you had that fucking hyper viral moment about the scar makeup. Tell it again for the people that don't know.

• 1:07:06Konstantin Kisin?

  So they did an experiment where they told a group of women that they're going to put scarring on their faces of visual disfigurements of some kind. And then they would go into an interview and the purpose of the experiment is to work out whether the interviewer is going to treat them differently because of their facial disfigurement. What they didn't tell the women is as they were leaving to go for the interview, they touched up their makeup and without showing them the facial disfigurement, removed the scarring. So they went into the interview thinking they're facially scarred, but they weren't. And they came back reporting massive levels of discrimination, specific comments that the interviewer had made about them that they perceived.

• 1:07:48Konstantin Kisin?

  So you, you, you see what you expect to see. This is why teaching people victimhood is so dangerous because it makes them victims. It makes them expect certain things and then they will react differently. I mean, you know, police interactions are a good example of this. If you expect that the police are going to treat you badly because of who you are, you're going to act in a different way and therefore cause more problems. And I say this to somebody, you know, I was a very angry young man and I, my wife used to piss me off so much. She would constantly say, like, I'd get into an argument with somebody and I'd be like, that guy's a prick, he did this. And she'd be like, you are creating those situations, you know that, right? And I was like, no, you're... And it took me like a good 10 years to work out, absolutely I was, abso fucking lutely

• 1:08:33Konstantin Kisin?

  I was, right? So we, we perceive the things that we put out into the world. And this is, you know, Peterson talks about this is you can't see without hierarchy because your brain has to know what to focus on. And what you focus on is a function of the filter that you project onto the world. I'm focusing on you now instead of the bookshelf behind you. I could have been sitting here picking out a good book this entire time, it's been a waste, but, so that's, that's what's happening there. But it's interesting. I mean, I said something at the time, I was like, look, these creepy men need to stop staring at women in gyms, otherwise they're going to stop wearing lingerie to go there and then everybody loses.

• 1:09:12Konstantin Kisin?

  And, and what I'm, and what I'm trying to make is that like, you know, this is a very, I'm going to say something very controversial here, Chris, you ready? Men are attracted to women.

• 1:09:24Chris Williamson?

  I've heard about that.

• 1:09:25Konstantin Kisin?

  Let's sit with that for a moment.

• 1:09:26Chris Williamson?

  I've heard about that.

• 1:09:27Konstantin Kisin?

  So, you know, this idea that

• 1:09:31Konstantin Kisin?

  you're gonna be barely clad and men aren't gonna notice that.

• 1:09:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:37Konstantin Kisin?

  Sorry, that's, that's not what our brains are for.

• 1:09:40Chris Williamson?

  I learned.

• 1:09:40Konstantin Kisin?

  Our brains are for looking at your ass. That's what they're for. That's what they evolved for. I know it's crudely put.

• 1:09:46Chris Williamson?

  I learned the term for this new style of gym short. It's got what's called a butt scrunch.

• 1:09:52Konstantin Kisin?

  Right.

• 1:09:53Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen the butt scrunch?

• 1:09:54Konstantin Kisin?

  Yes.

• 1:09:55Chris Williamson?

  Right. Yeah, you're a married man.

• 1:09:56Konstantin Kisin?

  Online.

• 1:09:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, of course. Yeah, someone showed me a photo. I tried to look away.

• 1:09:59Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:59Chris Williamson?

  Um, yeah, it, which is for the people that haven't seen it and aren't training in gyms with like 20 year olds in. It's like a normal pair of shorts, training shorts for a girl, like kind of tight. But then it's got kind of like a thong bit that separates the ass cheeks out. Which has been normalized very quick. Do you remember when, do you remember the first time that wearing just leggings? Became a thing? Cause I do. Cause it wasn't when I went to uni. So it was after 2006. It was after, maybe it happened while I was at uni. So maybe before 2010. But I remember thinking, wow, that's like, that's like everything on display. That's kind of like, kind of like no pants.

• 1:10:40Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:41Chris Williamson?

  But then also kind of not. And then now it's like, oh, that's kind of like no pants. Well, like, that's kind of like just a thong. But blue or like purple or lilac.

• 1:10:50Konstantin Kisin?

  I feel you've dedicated a lot of time to describing this accurately, which I appreciate.

• 1:10:54Chris Williamson?

  I'm an, I'm a casual ornithologist on the side. Um, I wanted to tell you about this.

• 1:10:59Konstantin Kisin?

  Can I, can I say something just on that before you move on? Because I think we, we sort of like, we're, we're trying to pretend things all the time, which

• 1:11:11Konstantin Kisin?

  yes, men shouldn't be pigs, right? We can all agree on that. But in order to not be a pig, I first have to see your ass that you've shoved in my face, right? So I see it. I am then after that, not a pig, right? But I see it and it's there and there's, my brain isn't calibrated or designed or evolved. I mean, the, the sole purpose of our genes is to reproduce, right? How is that? Do you see what I'm saying?

• 1:11:36Chris Williamson?

  Well, there's a female frame that's placed around this conversation specifically that I don't think fully I'd maybe go as far as to say, like sympathizes with the.

• 1:11:49Chris Williamson?

  Male brain reward system. There is an inbuilt reward system that men have for looking at sexually gratifying objects, even things like two rocks that look a bit like boobs.

• 1:12:00Konstantin Kisin?

  Right.

• 1:12:01Chris Williamson?

  Right?

• 1:12:01Konstantin Kisin?

  What's the first thing a boy does when he gets a calculator?

• 1:12:04Chris Williamson?

  Right boobs. Yep.

• 1:12:07Konstantin Kisin?

  Now, is that because of toxic masculinity or is that because men evolved for millions of years throughout evolutionary history, including pre-human animals, to seek the opposite sex and the drive in males is just overwhelmingly strong? Now, once you have noticed that, how you act is where culture and society and civilizing man comes in, right? Just because you saw someone's ass doesn't mean, doesn't mean that you are allowed to go and stare at it or grab it or whatever. But you saw it and you're not, it's, it's almost like it happens and then you're like, okay, I need to.

• 1:12:46Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, yeah.

• 1:12:46Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:47Konstantin Kisin?

  That's how it works. Now, what do you want me to do about that? What, what are you supposed to do about that? I'm open to suggestions.

• 1:12:55Chris Williamson?

  Blinkers, blinker men.

• 1:12:58Chris Williamson?

  Big.

• 1:12:58Konstantin Kisin?

  Some people would be in favor of that.

• 1:13:00Chris Williamson?

  The big veil that goes over the top. Right. A little bit of inside baseball for people who aren't familiar with what's going on in the podcasting world. And apparently this one slipped by you as well. Theo Von and other significant podcasters allegedly defrauded of approximately $4 million and then calls out the fraudster in a video.

• 1:13:19Chris Williamson?

  In an unexpected turn of events, Colin Thompson, the man who was working under Cast Media and with Theo Von, is accused of orchestrating a fraud operation that cost Theo Von's podcast this past weekend and potentially other podcasts an estimated $4 million. Theo Von and his crew detected inconsistencies in their payments, which is when trouble started. Advertisers allegedly paid Colin Thompson and Cast Media directly, leaving Theo with less money than anticipated. And I know from my side of the fence that there are quite a few other podcasts that were with this particular company. And it seems like this gentleman has been living a good life. Meanwhile, he's been robbing Peter to pay Paul to keep on cycling this through photos of Lamborghinis

• 1:14:02Chris Williamson?

  and nice houses allegedly. And people aren't happy. And then Theo did a 10 minute video that said.

• 1:14:12Chris Williamson?

  Sorry, brother. You messed with the wrong rat. And this video, I think, within 24 hours, it hit a mill. Plays photos of the guy, all the rest of it. So ructions, ructions in the podcasting world.

• 1:14:25Konstantin Kisin?

  I can't wait to be able to be the fraud at a $4 million.

• 1:14:31Konstantin Kisin?

  That's my dream goal to get to that position.

• 1:14:36Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah, you got to be careful, man. You got to be careful. That's why what we're building trigonometry and we've got some big plans beyond just trigonometry itself is you know, bringing cool people together, but doing it under our own steam, under our own umbrella, having everything managed by us with the right values and the right team. It's really important. Yeah.

• 1:14:56Chris Williamson?

  For the people that don't know how podcast advertising works, it's, I handle almost all of my big partners as well directly. But a lot of the time, there'll be an agency that sits in between you and them invoicing is kind of hard. Oh, there's an IO and did the deliverables get done and how many numbers did that podcast hit and so on and so forth? And also, who's advertising at the moment? Oh, there's a new company in town. Maybe we can increase the the costs or the price that we're charging for this. All that like, it's messy and it's back and forth and whatever, whatever. Especially if you're doing lots of little deals as opposed to how I have it, which is a small number of larger partners. And yeah, you have these guys that sit in between you and them. Classic agency model. It's like a modeling agency, right? Like you have a model, there's your talent, you have clients that want models and you take a bit off the top.

• 1:15:39Chris Williamson?

  Take somewhere between 10 and 25%, depending on who the partner is and how big the deals are. But they hold the money, like they get paid the money from the advertiser. And then less they're cut, they'll pass it down to the podcaster. These podcasts are largely run, I mean, you'll get your YouTube AdSense revenue, which is not nothing. But fucking hell, it's not what you're making from your proper partners. And yeah, if, I don't know, man, I mean, it's such a, it's, obviously you can chase these people down for like, we're going to fucking get him for fraud, but then he's just going to declare bankruptcy or fucking move to the Cayman Islands or whatever. So. Yeah, I feel this is the first time that we've seen a big case like this,

• 1:16:22Chris Williamson?

  which is slap bang in the bullseye of our world, right? It's the first time that this has happened. And it's kind of surprising it hasn't happened before, but hopefully it's a formative experience that that's one other thing. If you want to fuck some people over for $4 million, don't fuck people over that have a combined reach of 20 million YouTube subscribers. You know what I mean?

• 1:16:47Konstantin Kisin?

  Absolutely. No, it's not a smart move. But look, I think we're sort of living through a wild, wild west of the internet. I mean, actually, the wild, wild west of the internet is over, but the podcasting world, it's very new. So there's going to be a lot of this shit going on. I imagine this isn't an isolated incident, actually. So yeah, I think we all got to be careful and smart about how the way we build, we build things that we build.

• 1:17:12Chris Williamson?

  Rule Britannia.

• 1:17:15Konstantin Kisin?

  Come on, mate, you're actually British, unlike me.

• 1:17:18Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:17:55Konstantin Kisin?

  I voted.

• 1:17:56Chris Williamson?

  That's from The Guardian.

• 1:17:56Konstantin Kisin?

  I voted Remain in the referendum. And I've largely, I don't know if I've changed my view of that, how I would vote. But my view of that issue has evolved so much precisely by seeing these fucking morons who just completely incapable of understanding what democracy means. Democracy means that when you lose, you accept it.

• 1:18:20Konstantin Kisin?

  There's some other parallels for that particular statement. When you lose, you accept it. And we've had for the last seven years, these just absolute fucking lunatics running around, acting like what democracy means is they always get their way. And they have to insert this into everything. And they've just become obsessed. And it's, it's mind boggling to me. How, how we're still talking about Brexit is mind boggling to me. I, I don't get it.

• 1:18:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's insane.

• 1:18:53Konstantin Kisin?

  It's insane.

• 1:18:54Chris Williamson?

  That's like a eons old talking point now.

• 1:18:57Konstantin Kisin?

  I think if you are still talking about Brexit, your brain is broken.

• 1:19:01Chris Williamson?

  When do you think that rule gets applied to Covid?

• 1:19:09Konstantin Kisin?

  I think that with Covid, I actually said this before Covid was over. And in this instance, I get things wrong all the time. But this was something that turned out to be right, that people will want to forget very quickly. And they have done. Even I want to move on from Covid. We talked about it earlier, but I don't have any great desire to talk about it. Most people have moved on without learning the lessons of the thing. So I think the reason to still talk about Covid is that there is a future pandemic coming. And we ought to learn the lessons of this one while we still can. With Brexit, it's a political decision that is not reversible unless you have another referendum, which in which case you're free

• 1:19:53Konstantin Kisin?

  to campaign to have another referendum, if that's what you'd like. I'm not sure showing up with EU flags at the Proms is the way to achieve a second referendum. Just, I'm not a political expert, but.

• 1:20:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, there is a, like a resurgence of activism occurring at the moment, but it's always in criticism of stuff.

• 1:20:12Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:12Chris Williamson?

  So George Mack, one of my friends, highlighted that the last time that there was a ticker tape parade for someone that wasn't healthcare professionals in America for something, not against something, was Nelson Mandela in the 90s. So you have a culture of activism and of public displays of.

• 1:20:38Chris Williamson?

  Passion, however, can only be against something, or people are only choosing to do it against something.

• 1:20:45Konstantin Kisin?

  And people respond to incentives. What's that saying? Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket. And there are many people in this country who made a career out of being prominent remainers. And when Brexit was over, what are you gonna do? So they just carry on. And the people they feed this crap like having this crap fed to them. So they just, they keep going. It's a reward incentive based system. Because it's a pointless conversation. You're not going to change the result of the referendum.

• 1:21:28Konstantin Kisin?

  Even if you succeeded in proving the Brexit was a bad idea, it's already happened. So you can argue for a second referendum or another referendum if you want, but that's it, right? But talking about how shit Brexit is, isn't about achieving a result beyond your own personal enrichment, satisfaction status, et cetera. And, you know, for me, this Marina Perkis woman, there's a shit ton of these people on Twitter whose only thing that they do is talk about Brexit and get, you know, thousands and thousands of views.

• 1:21:58Chris Williamson?

  It makes me sad to think about people who, I know there's like one incident that occurs, especially like public stuff, like some catastrophe or news story, like people that are still talking about Madeleine McCann. Do you know what I mean? Like, I understand fucking terrible situation, but there are people whose entire lives I want.

• 1:22:20Konstantin Kisin?

  I mean, they are her parents.

• 1:22:24Chris Williamson?

  I once stepped into.

• 1:22:36Chris Williamson?

  Fuck's sake, Constance.

• 1:22:40Konstantin Kisin?

  He was there. You left an open goal, I had to be.

• 1:22:42Chris Williamson?

  You can take the comedian out of comedy.

• 1:22:47Chris Williamson?

  I once descended, I got hit with the fucking like blast radius of um these two investigative journalists. I had them on the show when the disappearance of Madeleine McCann came out on Netflix. And these were the two main people, husband and wife. And I brought them on, I thought, fucking hell, like, these are the two, these are the fucking experts. These are the guys that Netflix went to. They must be like fucking legit, you know, any.

• 1:23:09Chris Williamson?

  Brought them on. Turns out there is an ardent fucking group of people who really do not like them on the internet. And I was a part of like Madeleine McCann Law for a couple of weeks. Because this guy has platformed these people that we know they're a part of the like, whatever the fuck cover up scheme. And they didn't know the thing that went on. Do you haven't read the original police report from Portugal or wherever she was from?

• 1:23:35Chris Williamson?

  And it's, there's part of me that thinks like, noble cause, you're chasing after it. There's part of me that thinks, holy fuck, you've been captured by this one thing. Like this one incident has just completely controlled your life forever.

• 1:23:49Konstantin Kisin?

  Hmm.

• 1:23:52Konstantin Kisin?

  I mean, the one thing that doesn't get said often enough is, you know, there's a certain proportion of society that's not mentally well. Massively overrepresented online, right? So I think a lot of people are just, you know, it's, it's, it's an obsession of theirs or whatever.

• 1:24:07Chris Williamson?

  You don't get to see what's driving.

• 1:24:09Konstantin Kisin?

  This is what I often think when I'm reading Twitter replies. Cause I'm like, well, the, these people are like, you know, normal and right? And most of them are, of course they are. But like, you read something weird and then I sort of like go, okay, let's imagine what sort of circumstances I would have to be sitting in to write this. And then I see that picture and I go, okay, this makes sense. You know what I mean? Like, when I see people saying really crazy shit, I'm like, so this, I, I just think what we forget sometimes is a lot of people are, you know, in that situation.

• 1:24:40Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:25:03Konstantin Kisin?

  I need to do that, man.

• 1:25:04Chris Williamson?

  Full works. Yes, I will 100% link you with them. One of the things they do, I think it's called contrast. So you're hooked up to an IV, which is like a mechanical IV. So when they press a button, just shit goes into you. So they've got you in the fucking cannula or whatever it is. They've got the thing in there. And then there's this huge, big wheel spinning around you unbelievably quickly. So you're kind of in MRI machine. It's a little bit more open and this huge fuck off wheel that's obviously like scanning shit. And then this, they pump stuff from this machine into your vein and it lights up your heart.

• 1:25:45Chris Williamson?

  It goes into the ventricles of the heart while this thing's in a very specific position over you and blah, blah, blah. But the felt sense of it is heat starting in your neck and going only through your torso. Doesn't touch any of your limbs, going only through your torso and finishing in like your bladder. And then it cools off around your bladder for about 20 seconds. It is one of the strangest fucking experiences. It's not unpleasant, strange, not, I would definitely wouldn't even say it's that unpleasant, to be honest. Fuck, it's like, must be what feeling like a dragon is like, just fucking heat moving around inside of you. So yeah, that was very interesting.

• 1:26:24Konstantin Kisin?

  I can't wait.

• 1:26:25Chris Williamson?

  Preventative medicine, though, we were saying it before.

• 1:26:30Chris Williamson?

  Playing a game where you try to catch up to a disease that's already happened by design is a losing fight, right?

• 1:26:39Konstantin Kisin?

  Absolutely. No, I think that that seems to me to be the future, the direction that we're going is like looking into genetic predispositions. And I know people who are having procedures because they know they have a certain risk, et cetera, you know?

• 1:26:52Chris Williamson?

  Chris Hemsworth found out on that Discovery documentary that he's got, I think he's got genetic predisposition to Alzheimer's. So he's spending way more time with like his family and he's doing other things. He adjusted his entire life because I might not be able to remember this.

• 1:27:06Konstantin Kisin?

  Should learn a second language.

• 1:27:08Chris Williamson?

  That's protective against Alzheimer's?

• 1:27:09Konstantin Kisin?

  People who speak multiple languages are much less likely to have it.

• 1:27:14Chris Williamson?

  Oh, I wonder.

• 1:27:16Konstantin Kisin?

  It might, might, which way the causal effect works, I don't know, but I imagine exercising your brain in multiple ways is helpful to protecting yourself against things like that.

• 1:27:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I don't know, man, you know, there's a multiplicity of, of

• 1:27:32Chris Williamson?

  ideas about how we're supposed to live our lives. And in some regards, it's amazing. You know, the promise of free access to information, 24 hours a day, all of human civilizations knowledge at your fingertips. That combined with the falling away of the gatekeepers and this loss of trust in institutions actually makes for a really fucking like disquieting journey for a lot of people. Because who do I trust? Do your own research. Fuck, I've got a life to live. I've got to try and do the family and the kids and the house and the dog and the me and, and you want me to, I've got to go and do my own, give me the medical journal, I'm going to go through this, whether it's about health, are carbs

• 1:28:16Chris Williamson?

  good? Is sugar good? What about, should we be eating more butter? What about meat? Is meat killing me? Or should I go vegan? What about paleo? Liver King says I need more testicle. Like, you know, and it's everything.

• 1:28:27Konstantin Kisin?

  And I'll see you and I'll raise you, which is what if the way for you to live your life that's optimal is different to mine? Right? My wife's very into Ayurvedic medicine. And that's the entire concept of it is the different types of people that need different food, different, different times that they eat, they, all sorts of different things.

• 1:28:49Konstantin Kisin?

  So a lot of it is experiential. Like, I, when I found out that you could just eat protein and greens, I was like, whoa, this is amazing. And that's what I do. I have carbs every now and again, but it fits how I am wired. And my wife's the exact opposite.

• 1:29:07Chris Williamson?

  She's water.

• 1:29:09Konstantin Kisin?

  She's wind.

• 1:29:10Chris Williamson?

  Wind. Yeah. You're fire.

• 1:29:12Konstantin Kisin?

  I'm, I'm, yeah, I'm, fire's the lead for me.

• 1:29:15Chris Williamson?

  Anton?

• 1:29:16Konstantin Kisin?

  Anton's wind.

• 1:29:17Chris Williamson?

  Francis?

• 1:29:18Konstantin Kisin?

  Water.

• 1:29:19Chris Williamson?

  Knew it. Bloody, bloody water.

• 1:29:21Konstantin Kisin?

  Pretty obvious.

• 1:29:21Chris Williamson?

  Bloody water.

• 1:29:22Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah. Water's great if you can get it off the sofa.

• 1:29:27Konstantin Kisin?

  Then it it's like a bull rolling down the hill. You can't stop it. It becomes unstoppable. But it's a fucking hard. It takes a lot of fire to get water off the sofa.

• 1:29:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I was fascinated. You taught me about this in in Austin when we when we were hanging last time. I thought it was really fascinating. You taught me as well. Ambient water, ambient, not not refrigerated water. Should avoid drinking cold water.

• 1:29:51Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:51Chris Williamson?

  Too much.

• 1:29:52Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, just that's that's their way. That's how they see it. And I'm by no means an expert. But generally, ingesting cold things is not good for you, is is what.

• 1:30:01Chris Williamson?

  Yogurt. I love yogurt so much, though.

• 1:30:03Konstantin Kisin?

  Dairy also not great, as I understand it. I mean, look, I'm not supposed to eat red meat, and I eat mostly red meat. So, you know, you break the rules sometimes.

• 1:30:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but no, I understand what you mean, that different different sort of strokes for different folks. But fucking hell, like, even if there can be different strokes for different folks, I should be able to find a source that can tell I'm this kind of a person, therefore I can do this kind of a thing. And this is where the

• 1:30:29Chris Williamson?

  if I was more conspiratorial, I would say that the goal of a messy information landscape is not to convince you of any one narrative, but to convince you that no narrative can be trusted. And it seems to me that if I was

• 1:30:49Chris Williamson?

  maybe even a nefarious domestic actor, wanting to make a sort of nihilistic, fatalistic, placid, not compliant, but just like surrendered populace.

• 1:31:03Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, you know, the rat electrification experiment, right, where they put a rat in a in a cell where the floor gives them an electric shock. And what they found was, um, in psychology, this is called, what's the term?

• 1:31:17Chris Williamson?

  Learned helplessness?

• 1:31:18Konstantin Kisin?

  Yes. This is a learned helplessness experiment where if the rat is able to end the electric shock by pressing a button. Then the rat will continue to do that. If the rat has no control over the electric shock, it will just lie down and take it. Right? So I think this, um, you, what you're talking about is a system that creates learned helplessness in people. Which is one of the reasons, while of course it's super tempting to bash the mainstream media and they deserve a lot of the bashing. We need a media ecosystem that's trusted. We do need politicians who can be trusted. Uh, I'm not happy with the status quo that we've got at the moment where we trust no one and with good reason.

• 1:32:02Konstantin Kisin?

  But the solution to that isn't to trust the mainstream. The solution is for the mainstream to become trustworthy.

• 1:32:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Do you think that's even possible?

• 1:32:10Konstantin Kisin?

  I think it's very difficult in a modern environment. It's very, very difficult because, um, I just see that us, we're running a small media organization to, to you are too. Right? It's like, do you get everything right? Do you, is your research always on point? You know, so it's very, very difficult.

• 1:32:25Chris Williamson?

  Interesting what you said earlier about,

• 1:32:30Chris Williamson?

  there are certain things that they're able to do that we're not, you know, like fact checking and stuff. They're also because of how they're incentivized and subsidized and the expectations, like non sexy stories, you know, digging into weather and accounts and stuff. Tell me which YouTube channel is going to predict tomorrow's weather? No one, right? Not sexy enough, too much of a cost to be able to do. And what, no one's saying the fucking Met Office, they're captured by the woke. Although there was that thing this year, right? Where they made most of Europe look like it had turned to ash because anything over thirty five degrees Celsius meant that it was like the blackened end of a cigarette. So maybe there is a little bit of

• 1:33:14Konstantin Kisin?

  Incredible.

• 1:33:15Chris Williamson?

  Fuckery going on.

• 1:33:16Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah, well, there is a lot of fuckery going on. What's interesting is there's no, I find the climate issue absolutely fascinating. It's genuinely fascinating to me because the, the historical ignorance on that issue that is being deliberately spread is, is like mind blown to me. Do you know the Romans, when they occupied Britain? They grew grapes on Hadron's Wall. Hadron's Wall for people listening is what used to protect. England from Scot- from what is now Scot- what is now England from what is now Scotland, right? One of the northernmost points on the British Isles. Uh, now, if you don't know, Scotland.

• 1:33:54Chris Williamson?

  Fucking cold.

• 1:33:55Konstantin Kisin?

  It's average weather in, I used to live in Edinburgh for seven years. Average weather in Scotland in, in August is like eighteen degrees and rain at best, right? So.

• 1:34:05Konstantin Kisin?

  Uh, the, the, what we are being told about that issue is absolutely mind-blowingly incredibly unhelpful and inaccurate.

• 1:34:15Chris Williamson?

  Wasn't the, I think it's still around, somewhere in London or somewhere in the south coast, forty miles inland from the coast, there's ports.

• 1:34:23Konstantin Kisin?

  Pevensey Castle, yeah. Pevensey Castle, you go there and they're like, yeah, the sea used to be here. I don't see the sea.

• 1:34:30Chris Williamson?

  Two thousand years ago.

• 1:34:31Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah. So. This whole conversation is very, very odd to me. And, uh, after my Oxford speech went viral, I, I had a lot of invitations to go and speak to different people and I, I was talking to this guy who works for the Indian government at a high level and he told me, when, when India became independent in nineteen forty-seven, average life expectancy was thirty-seven years old in India. And today it's, I think, eighty-two. And that's because they burn fossil fuels. Now, are we saying to a billion-plus Indian people, they're not allowed to do that anymore? Do you know what I mean? Like, the way we talk about this issue, just, it, it's, it, it's a cult. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any logical sense. The things that are being suggested that we do don't make any sense.

• 1:35:16Konstantin Kisin?

  The way we're approaching it doesn't make any sense. It's, it's incredible to me, the way this conversation's being had. Um, and I, I, and I'd love to understand, you know, Eric, who you just had on, he always says this, like, we're lying about the climate for the wrong reasons. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's, like, his point is, climate change is happening and it's a serious issue, but we are lying about the way to deal with it and lots of other things around it. Um, that's one of the most weird things to me about what's happening. Like Bjorn Lomborg, during that, oh my god, heat wave, we're all gonna die, kept posting stuff about, you know, like, actually, the number of forest fires is the lowest it's ever been and the number of hurricanes in America is, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:36:00Konstantin Kisin?

  And I would love to know what's going on with that shit. I would love to know.

• 1:36:05Chris Williamson?

  You got any theories?

• 1:36:10Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, one thing that's interested me a lot is obviously people are familiar with the concept of group think. But there's another thing, which is the Abilene paradox. I don't know if you're familiar with it. It's basically the idea that people will often do things because they think other people want them done. And you combine that with mass panic, indoctrinating kids into being terrified, etc. And I also think human beings love a doomsday narrative. And a portion of the sort of side that I've been arguing on, which is this anti-woke side, is like the barbarians at the gates. Now, I genuinely think that's true. I think we are undermining the founding pillars of our civilization. But there is an appeal to that worldview.

• 1:36:51Konstantin Kisin?

  And if you look back, neither of us are old enough, but in the 1970s, the planet was cooling and everybody was terrified of global cooling. Terrified.

• 1:37:01Chris Williamson?

  Terrified of the population bomb?

• 1:37:02Konstantin Kisin?

  Absolutely. Now we're terrified of the depopulation. It's what we love. We love to think, and I think there's a kind of like, we live in special times.

• 1:37:10Chris Williamson?

  Oh, like a mass solipsism.

• 1:37:13Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah, like, look, look, you know, the last 2000 years, you know, shit has happened and you know, you had Jesus, you know, World War II and whatever. But now is the real time when shit is happening, you know? And who knows, maybe it is happening. Not on this issue, I don't think. But yeah, the idea that we are living through a climate catastrophe seems highly suspect to me. Highly suspect.

• 1:37:32Chris Williamson?

  But also somehow very sexy.

• 1:37:33Konstantin Kisin?

  Very sexy. Now, that's not to say the climate isn't changing, the climate is changing, but the question I think we also ought to be asking is, is the climate changing a bad thing?

• 1:37:41Chris Williamson?

  Well, climate-related deaths have decreased by 50 times over the last 100 years. That's Alex Epstein, has he been on?

• 1:37:48Konstantin Kisin?

  Yes. We haven't had him on, but yes.

• 1:37:50Chris Williamson?

  Oh dude, you, I mean, you guys would fucking love him, I'm sure. He's an interesting dude. Climate-related deaths have decreased by 50 times. More people are killed by cold weather than hot weather.

• 1:38:02Konstantin Kisin?

  Yes, way, way, way, way more. And we know that because this is the thing about the idea of pursuing net zero is it makes energy more expensive. That's the method by which you achieve this, to some extent. And pensioners freeze to death every winter in this country. Now, that doesn't seem like a good thing to me. I don't think making energy more expensive for poor elderly people and them freezing to death on their own in their homes in the winter. I don't think that's what, I don't think if we were setting out to improve the world, that would be one of the ways that we'd do that. But because we're trade-off denialists, because we refuse to understand that actions have consequences, good and bad. We ignore that.

• 1:38:42Konstantin Kisin?

  And this hysteria, it's cult-like and it's, I find it very strange. I find it very strange. Whatever you think about the climate issue in and of itself, our response to it is strange.

• 1:38:54Chris Williamson?

  People are just looking for a cause.

• 1:38:56Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:56Chris Williamson?

  Right?

• 1:38:57Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:57Chris Williamson?

  And this is why Covid was so captivating on both sides. Because it gave us a righteous war to wage. And again, when you've got a multiplicity of ways that you can go with your life. The man box has been blown open. Nobody says that you should be this for masculinity. Maybe I don't even need to get into a relationship. I can just boss bitch or like incel my way through the next however many decades of my life, do all this sort of stuff. Ah, here's a single vector along which I can move. I'm no longer in an open field. I'm on a set of railway tracks. And yeah, you know, Peterson had the ordering chaos like paradigm out there. It feels like there's a fucking hell of a lot of chaos and not a massive amount of order for people.

• 1:39:41Chris Williamson?

  And then the people that live in chaos land and prefer that, look at the people in order land as tyrants. And the people in order land look at the people in chaos land as fucking vigilantes. And yeah, it's, it doesn't surprise me, man. You know, and this is where, I said to Eric, I wish that I'd got Eric to watch the Sam episode before he sat down with me. Cause it was difficult for me to portray a three hour conversation in 20 seconds. But I don't think that those guys are too far apart. Like Eric saying, we've lost faith in our institutions, but we can't get rid of them. Independent media is both advantageous and not going away. But we fucking can't like outsource our sense-making to them as well. How do we live in this new world?

• 1:40:25Chris Williamson?

  What does success look like in this regard? I thought it was fucking interesting.

• 1:40:29Konstantin Kisin?

  No, I think we're living in a, this is a metaphor that is overused, but it's the sort of the invention of the printing press kind of situation. And I mean, that caused two centuries of religious war. So I think what the social media in particular and the internet more broadly has done, it has broken our ability to make sense of the world and we are all reaching for a way to do that. I think it's going to take some time and it's not going to be without consequence.

• 1:40:57Konstantin Kisin?

  You know, and it's interesting because the argument about free speech is made very complicated by the existence of social media because there are people who say they're free speech absolutists. I've never called myself that because I don't believe anyone is a free speech absolutist.

• 1:41:14Chris Williamson?

  What's your conception on free speech? Give me the framework.

• 1:41:17Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, think about this. So Elon Musk says he's a free speech absolutist. He buys Twitter and then the moment people trigger his personal preferences, he shuts that particular form of conversation down, right? When it was about children or something like that, right? So spreading something, I think he said about Alex Jones or whatever, right? Anyway, my point is X, Twitter, whatever, has a moderation policy because it has to. It has to because the technology is so powerful. This is the, I'll give you both sides of the argument, right? But the argument for moderation, as in content moderation, is that the technology is so powerful, if you can start an assault on the Capitol

• 1:42:01Konstantin Kisin?

  or an undermining of an election or whatever it is, or a riot or a mass shooting or whatever, if you can start that from your phone, the technology is too powerful to be left uncontrolled. And I have a lot of sympathy with that argument. However, let's flip it the other way around. You live in the United States now, a country for which I have a tremendous regard and the history and the formation of the country is very interesting because it creates a country that is fundamentally very different to every other country that's existed before. Do you get seventeen seventy six if there is Twitter? And it's moderated? I don't think you do. Because who would allow a revolution to happen?

• 1:42:44Konstantin Kisin?

  You think King George would allow the spreading of misinformation? Right? So we are stuck in this place where on the one hand, yes, free speech is absolute and is really super important. On the other hand, actually, most people. It's very easy to be a free speech absolutist until you're in the hot seat, making the decision. And imagine you are in the hot seat and you've got the CIA, the FBI, the heads of government, the whomevers, your friends, coming to you and going, if you don't do something, people are going to get killed. And they are going to get killed. And that's on your conscience, it's up to you, right? So it's a very, very difficult thing with the power of the technology that we have that has the ability to multiply.

• 1:43:28Konstantin Kisin?

  Information, narratives, opinions, whatever, to such an extent. So we have not worked out how to handle that at all. And everybody who says they have a solution to it, I'd love to see them be in the hot seat for a day. And then we'll see how absolutist they are about free speech or how pro censorship they are, because there's a flip side to the coin, which is you do moderation, you're going to get accused of bias from both sides.

• 1:43:54Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:43:54Konstantin Kisin?

  Right? So I have no envy for those people. Now, I do think they've made a shit ton of mistakes, I'm just saying, I suspect I probably would have done too.

• 1:44:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, Sam had an interesting analogy where he was saying, if I spend five years building up the waking up social media platform and I want only Nazis to be allowed on it, I should be allowed to only have Nazis on my social media platform. Or the inverse, I should be allowed to kick Nazis off. It's not my job to have people I don't want on my social media platform. And this comes back to the, like, was it the pipeline versus public service?

• 1:44:31Konstantin Kisin?

  I mean, there's a very strong counter argument to that argument, which is the one you've just made, which is, once you've captured the entire market, you're a monopoly and we're regular monopolies for a reason. Which is, to be kicked off, to be kicked out of the local pub does not prevent you from going and having a drink in a pub. To be kicked off Twitter prevents you from communicating in that element of the public square.

• 1:44:54Chris Williamson?

  Has there been any? There's usually concerns around monopoly. Has there been any of that to do with online platform? Is there such a thing as too big of an online platform? Like fucking Facebook and TikTok and YouTube. Like, you know, large portions of the planet as users. So this is a new category in that regard.

• 1:45:18Konstantin Kisin?

  Absolutely.

• 1:45:18Chris Williamson?

  The banks got so big that they needed to be split up. You take large things and make them into smaller things, right?

• 1:45:26Konstantin Kisin?

  But you can't, not with this, because no one wants to be on the third best Twitter. Nobody wants to use the third best Google, right?

• 1:45:32Chris Williamson?

  You do it, you split them off and then everyone just converges back on which is the biggest one.

• 1:45:36Konstantin Kisin?

  The monopoly is what makes a valuable. The fact that it's on there is what makes a valuable. That's why Elon Musk bought Twitter rather than building his own from scratch. Because he has the money to build his own Twitter, but you just can't drag people over enough. So the monopoly is the point. This is why it's such a tricky thing.

• 1:45:55Chris Williamson?

  The new category of business.

• 1:45:57Konstantin Kisin?

  That's why it's the point.

• 1:46:00Chris Williamson?

  With sort of frictionless gravitation toward whichever thing you want to choose to use.

• 1:46:10Chris Williamson?

  People will always converge on the biggest, the best, the whatever one. Whereas, yeah, if Jim Shark gets two and a half billion users or customers. And they say, you need to split up into Jim and Shark, right? Or Lloyds and TSB.

• 1:46:28Chris Williamson?

  It's not quite the same. You don't have, not everyone's going to converge on this particular one. It's interesting, one of the analogies I used to use from my nightclub days. And Twitter's kind of like this. In nightlife events, it's one of the only industries where the other users of the product are the primary value of the product itself. So if you ask one of your friends when you're in your twenties, mate, how was last night? And they'll say, mate, it was amazing, so many girls in that club. You go, no, I asked you how your night was. I didn't ask who were the other people that went to the event? You know, you don't say, why do I use an iPhone? I use an iPhone because David Beckham's got an iPhone.

• 1:47:11Chris Williamson?

  So I use an iPhone because of the camera and the apps and the battery life and stuff like that. But nightlife was very, very interesting in that way, which is why it was so mimetic. It's the same reason why, like, I'll, I'll open this up to you, internet. Some industry secrets here, sometimes nightclubs hold queues and sometimes they make the queues thinner than they need to be. So they look really long and then they take a photo because it looks like it was busy. And we did that, we did that all the time, we still do. Pressure's week next week in Newcastle. It's exactly what every single nightclub will do. But you have that same thing with regards to the social media as well. The other users of social media largely determine your experience on it, which is why,

• 1:47:52Chris Williamson?

  you know, rumble is this and truth social is whatever, right? Is there a left leaning? Is there a left? Well, they had one mastodon, didn't they? I don't know what's happened, which tells you quite a lot. Speaking of mastodon, I had a guy called Ben Lam on the show. He's the CEO of this company called Colossal. He is using ancient genetic information to bring the woolly mammoth back to life. Within 20 years, we will have actual woolly mammoths walking on this planet. So they've found in the Arctic, very good for preserving DNA. They found bones and all sorts of other stuff. Mammoth carcass remains from that. They've taken, I think it's maybe 40 or 50 different, because you don't get a full DNA sequence in any one of them.

• 1:48:36Chris Williamson?

  Then they brought them all together, used AI to fill in the little gaps. They're then going to implant a, whatever it's called, stem cell, pluripotent stem cell inside of the Asian elephant. So an Asian elephant will give birth to a woolly mammoth. And then after a sufficiently long amount of time, they'll get placed up north and they can do all sorts of awesome stuff for helping to fertilize the Arctic. And he also wants to bring back the dodo bird. The interesting reason he wanted to bring back the dodo bird was the reason that the dodo bird was killed off was because of unsustainable hunting practices. So you'd think that the mammoth has like a, a real function, right?

• 1:49:20Chris Williamson?

  The dodo bird, kind of people laugh at it for being a stupid pigeon that couldn't fly away. But maybe it was because of the introduction of a particular, a particular like predator or whatever. Yeah, it might've been like ecological imbalance that was done by manmade. And his point is mammoth does a thing. It's like the, the farmer of the Arctic. Dodo bird. Is like a symbolic representation of, do you see all of the work that we had to fucking go to, to bring this thing back to life? Be more careful when you introduce invasive species into different, uh, different ecologies. I was like, fucking hell. And he's super fired up about it. I found him really charming. So I had a conversation with him the other day. I thought that was cool.

• 1:49:58Konstantin Kisin?

  So they're gonna bring back prehistoric animals? I think, I think I remember seeing a movie about that.

• 1:50:02Chris Williamson?

  I did say, you know, how far back can we go? Uh, real problem, bones, bones and teeth don't hold much genetic information, which is a fucking massive shame. But we can do stuff like saber tooth tigers, like particular types of saber tooth cats. Um, I was asking him, what else did he want to bring back? There was this huge fucking sloth, this massive thing that it was like the largest marsupial or something.

• 1:50:28Konstantin Kisin?

  They lived like on an island, but there were no predators.

• 1:50:30Chris Williamson?

  I think so. Yeah. Yeah. This gigantic fucking sloth. So there's like a laundry list of different ridiculous mega fauna, prehistoric animals, prehistoric, like deceased, it's called de-extinction. Uh, extinct animals that he wants to bring back. I just thought, like between that and preventative medicine and AI. Uh, what do you thought on AI? How are you feeling? Are you, uh, fucking scared that you're gonna lose your job to GPT six? Or?

• 1:50:59Konstantin Kisin?

  I'm not scared I'm gonna lose my job. No. Um.

• 1:51:06Konstantin Kisin?

  It's gonna make a very significant impact on the world, but what that's gonna end up looking like, I don't think anyone really knows. Uh, I think there's probably, uh, there's a lot of fear porn about it. And it may be justified. And maybe I don't have any profound thoughts about it. I think, um, if you look at human history, people always use technology for basically the same things. Right? Uh, getting laid, killing each other, et cetera. Right? So you'll produce amazing porn, you'll produce amazing weapons, you'll produce amazing everything. And then human beings are gonna do what they always do, I think, is the truth. Right? Um, like I remember, I think it was Desmond Morris. I, I used to read a lot of his books. I don't know if you're familiar with them, but it's one of the things he talked

• 1:51:49Konstantin Kisin?

  about. He said, like, when you dig up a clay tablet in Egypt from. You know, 4,000 years ago, you read it is basically the same shit that we talk about now. You know, my son doesn't call, doesn't write to me or doesn't visit me or whatever. It's, you know, human condition doesn't change. The tools we use to express it do.

• 1:52:06Chris Williamson?

  I saw a report from an ancient stone tablet from, I think, Egypt or ancient Rome. That was a justification for why this employee hadn't turned up to work. It was a sick note that he'd written and it's this fucking elaborate story about what happened. And the, the wife and there was a catastrophe and all this stuff. And yeah, you do realize that human nature is pretty fucking resilient.

• 1:52:31Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:31Chris Williamson?

  Over a long enough period of time.

• 1:52:33Konstantin Kisin?

  But coming back, here's another thing I'll say about the free speech conversation, which is that we haven't made nearly an honest enough case about free speech, which is why we're having a stupid debate about it because no one wants to say the truth, which is free speech has consequences that are bad.

• 1:52:54Chris Williamson?

  But like.

• 1:52:56Konstantin Kisin?

  There are people who say atrocious horrific shit. There are people who will use the opportunity to be on a social platform to mobilize and do terrible things. Now, there's a big conversation now about whether there's a lot of antisemitism on X. And actually there is, there is. I have to block more people than I used to have to block to on Twitter. But I'm still in favor of that being allowed. Because I'd much rather these people were in the open and people could see what they are and they can have their conversation instead of going off into a kind of like a private place where it's just them and the arguments are never challenged. So I think one of the things people don't say enough about free speech is yes, it causes harm, but the harm's worth it.

• 1:53:42Konstantin Kisin?

  And we don't make that argument because it's too honest and, you know, complicated and unpleasant and whatever. But the other side of the argument is terrifying to me. I don't think I've told this story publicly, but last time I did Question Time. Question Time is this big discussion, political discussion program here in the UK. Before they do the show, they do a warm up question.

• 1:54:05Konstantin Kisin?

  That's not recorded and it's not released. So it's like a warm up.

• 1:54:08Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:54:09Konstantin Kisin?

  And the conversation at that time was Donald Trump had just been unbanned on Facebook. And they were asking whether that was okay. And they went to me first and I was like, look, not that I'm his biggest fan, but I do think the former or sitting president of the United States should be able to speak in public. Yeah, I do. Controversial as that is. And then they went around the table and whatever. And then they went to the Labour woman who was there. Very nice woman. And she without batting an eyelid went, I think we should have the safest internet in the world. And I went, what, safer than North Korea? Right. This is coming back to this point about trade off denialism. Like they think safety doesn't have a price.

• 1:54:55Konstantin Kisin?

  And the other argument is freedom doesn't have a price. And the truth is they both have a price. And what we're trying to find is the right point in the middle between those two. We want enough freedom. And enough safety. And that line is somewhere in the middle because if you think about it, that's true of any issue. I can end murder outside of the prison system today. I can stop murder. Wouldn't you and rape? Do you want to stop murder and rape?

• 1:55:19Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:55:19Konstantin Kisin?

  Okay, let's lock up all men between the ages of fifteen and forty until they age out of it. You've ended murder.

• 1:55:28Konstantin Kisin?

  Right. But we don't do that. Why not? Because there's a trade off between safety and freedom. And so it's the same of everything and it's the same with free speech.

• 1:55:36Chris Williamson?

  You mentioned Trump. What do you think happens in twenty twenty four?

• 1:55:40Konstantin Kisin?

  I'm not an expert on it, but um it it looks like they're gonna try and put him in prison. And it also looks like he might win.

• 1:55:52Chris Williamson?

  Is that possible?

• 1:55:53Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:54Chris Williamson?

  Can both things happen? Can you be president from prison?

• 1:55:56Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:56Chris Williamson?

  You can be president from prison.

• 1:55:58Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:58Chris Williamson?

  Fuck off. You can't be president from prison.

• 1:56:00Konstantin Kisin?

  Look it up.

• 1:56:02Chris Williamson?

  You can be president from prison. Oh, my God.

• 1:56:04Konstantin Kisin?

  And you can run from prison. More interestingly.

• 1:56:10Konstantin Kisin?

  I wonder, maybe, maybe if you are, I don't know, maybe you can't be president, you can definitely run from prison. Maybe you get elected and pardon yourself.

• 1:56:26Chris Williamson?

  Right, so you're, okay, let's say, let's say that there's no prison. What, what happens? Presuming that everybody is a free man.

• 1:56:37Konstantin Kisin?

  But why would we presume that? I mean, I think it's pretty clear that that's what's gonna happen.

• 1:56:41Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:56:42Konstantin Kisin?

  It's the, the path that they're on, it looks to me like they're going after him. We just had Scott Adams on the show, uh, and this is, he said Trump needs to win to stay out of prison. That's what he thinks.

• 1:56:55Konstantin Kisin?

  And I also think that, the other thing he said is like, he actually, interestingly said that he thinks Trump started this, because when he talked about Hillary and he said, "I'm gonna lock you up," they were like, "Oh, oh, you wanna play? Let's fucking play." So I think they're going after him now and they want to put him in prison. And I think they will.

• 1:57:13Chris Williamson?

  But you also think that he...

• 1:57:17Konstantin Kisin?

  I think he'll, he'll win the nomination for the Republicans.

• 1:57:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:20Konstantin Kisin?

  And then it's, I mean, who the fuck, look at the last election, who the fuck knows what's gonna happen? But he can run from prison, that much I know.

• 1:57:28Chris Williamson?

  That's fucking insane. Vivek Ramaswani playing tennis with his top off whilst Trump's in prison as the Trump-Ramaswani 2024 fucking thing. That looks like what it's gonna be, right?

• 1:57:39Konstantin Kisin?

  I think that's what Vivek's going for, yeah.

• 1:57:41Chris Williamson?

  He's angling for it for sure.

• 1:57:43Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:44Chris Williamson?

  And who do you think gets nominated for the Democrats?

• 1:57:46Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, it's got, it's gonna be Biden, isn't it? I mean, they're not gonna abandon him. Unless...

• 1:57:53Chris Williamson?

  What, he falls down a flight of stairs?

• 1:57:55Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah. And in his case, it wouldn't even be a conspiracy. It's just like...

• 1:57:59Chris Williamson?

  Who do you think's the running mate? Any idea?

• 1:58:02Konstantin Kisin?

  Nah, man. Look, uh, let's be honest, neither of us is an ex, although you are now an adopted American, so you probably...

• 1:58:08Chris Williamson?

  An immigrant to that great nation, I know even less than you.

• 1:58:10Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah. You know, I try, I, the more I, the more people listen to what I say, the less I try and talk about things I don't know enough about.

• 1:58:18Chris Williamson?

  I mean, that was a Douglas Murray thing. He was, someone had asked him...

• 1:58:24Chris Williamson?

  About two years ago, I'd asked him why he hadn't written many articles. He writes like four, five columns a week. It's like 3,000, 4,000 words every week and then his books and then his speaking on top. Someone had asked him something along the lines of, why haven't you commented that much on Covid? He says, I'm going to do something which is very rare in the modern world, which is to not comment on something which I know nothing about. And I thought, what a fucking beautiful and outlier philosophy to have. But this is, you know, I see this, I see this allure in myself and, you know, I have to check myself and probably fail almost all the time at doing it. You, people start to listen to you about a thing or for a thing and you go, oh, well,

• 1:59:10Chris Williamson?

  why shouldn't I comment on the Ukraine? Maybe my, maybe my take on the Ukraine is useful. Maybe, maybe, maybe the world does deserve to hear what my thoughts are about immigration crossing the channel. And then you realise.

• 1:59:27Konstantin Kisin?

  I mean, I've commented on both those things, but thanks, mate.

• 1:59:29Chris Williamson?

  But you are from the fucking region of the Ukraine and an immigrant to the UK, right? That's lived experience.

• 1:59:37Konstantin Kisin?

  Yes, exactly. I know exactly what you mean. Your point is very, very, very valid. It happens with comedians, incidentally, which is why comedians' political opinions, generally speaking, are so demented. Because you stand on stage all day, making other people throw their head back and admire you, right? Or be enthralled by you or whatever. And you're like, oh, maybe I do know something. Let me give you my opinion about Brexit. It's like, no, no, just be the clown. Shut the fuck up. Now, that's why I don't do comedy, actually. It's one of the reasons. It's like, I always was, I was more interested in making a point than I wasn't being artificially funny. You know what I mean? And I always sawed myself more as a satirist anyway, which was a

• 2:00:18Konstantin Kisin?

  different thing. But yeah, being in front of a microphone imbues you with a level of confidence that is very often inappropriate.

• 2:00:26Chris Williamson?

  Right. It's like permanently being on.

• 2:00:31Chris Williamson?

  Oratorial Viagra.

• 2:00:33Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah, if everyone's listening to me, I must be worth listening to. That's, that's what happens in your brain.

• 2:00:37Chris Williamson?

  Regardless of what it is that I'm talking about, regardless of the format or the, yeah. I've got these, um, these live shows coming up, uh, towards the end of the year, November, mid-November.

• 2:00:49Konstantin Kisin?

  That's awesome.

• 2:00:50Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. Uh, what's your advice for someone who, I'm touring comic, played fucking thousands of shows across your career. What do people who haven't put that time in on stage not know about how being on stage works?

• 2:01:07Konstantin Kisin?

  This is gonna sound like a shit answer, but actually it's stage time is just like air miles on the clock. Like with pilot, you have to fly a certain number of miles. Um, but you know, I always think about, you know, whatever charisma, whatever else it is, it's really about a comfort with yourself in front of other people. If you're, and not everyone is equally charismatic naturally, but if you're comfortable with who you are and you are able to do that while you're on stage or in front of a camera or wherever, that's, that's the, the, the magic ingredient. It's like, uh, my favorite quote is, "The most important thing in show business is authenticity. If you can fake that, you can do anything." Right? Authenticity is the key ingredient, which is why I think you've been successful.

• 2:01:50Konstantin Kisin?

  I think it's why Joe's successful. I think it's why Francis and I have had the success we've had. It's, I almost feel, I don't know if you feel this, but the longer we go, it's like the more layers of the onion we peel off to reveal more of who we truly are.

• 2:02:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I would say so because you become more comfortable with things that you masked over before.

• 2:02:08Konstantin Kisin?

  Yes.

• 2:02:09Chris Williamson?

  There's, you know, uncertainty or like nerdiness, I suppose, like unnecessary rabbit holes that you want to go down. And I've never had this before. Obviously you had this and you may have had it before comedy. I don't know. But I never had a single pursuit that I got to go as narrow and deep on as I have on having conversations with people. And when you really, really start to fucking like drill down into, okay, what does, what does mastery begin to look like, which I'm not at, but I can glimpse. I'm like, okay, what does that actually look like? What does that feel like? What does it look like to make rules and then break rules and then put them back in again and do things?

• 2:02:52Chris Williamson?

  I'm talking to some of the guys now. I want to start doing slightly more scripted bits as a part of maybe some of our ad reads, as a part of maybe some of the intros. And that's like, if you actually look at that, that's a very inauthentic way of doing what is supposed to be an unbelievably authentic, relatable medium. We're taking the rules from, you know, like sitcom legacy media to try and apply that to this. But I actually think that that's breaking rules that have been made. And the reason you can is because you've learned them unbelievably well, right? It's not not knowing the rules, it's disregarding them purposefully.

• 2:03:31Konstantin Kisin?

  Yes.

• 2:03:31Chris Williamson?

  And I'm just excited. I'm excited by, by all of the different options and opportunities and, and ways that there's cool stuff to do. And it's fucking awesome to see what you guys are doing at Trigonometry. The, what I know about what's coming that more people will find out at some point over the next however long is fucking amazing. I think that the UK needs a nice movement, a good conglomeration headed by people who understand this industry that can be a platform for others who have amazing and interesting things to say, but don't yet have the platform that they deserve to be able to say them on.

• 2:04:05Konstantin Kisin?

  Well, this is what we've been working on for a long time. And I, I can't quite say exactly the people and who are going to be involved, other than to say they're going to be fucking awesome. But we want to use the platform that we've built to make it so the Trigonometry is the main show on that platform, but there will be other shows with other people and me and Francis interspersed with other interesting, funny, hilarious, clever commentators, et cetera. So rather than, you know, two Trigonometry interviews a week and some raw shows and a bunch of, we've started doing a lot of scripted stuff ourselves, comedy, you know, my, I re, I often record my Substack pieces now and we put them out as videos. We had, we had a couple of really viral ones. One I did about communism and fascism that-

• 2:04:49Chris Williamson?

  You did one about Jordan Peterson recently.

• 2:04:51Konstantin Kisin?

  I did, yeah. Yeah, that one's done very well, surprisingly. Yeah, so but also we want to start thinking about how, you know, I'm thinking about us now as a media organization. That's my frame for what we're doing. Want to bring other people through, help them make exciting content that fits with the values of what we do. That's going to be entertaining for our audience, it's going to be informative and grow it over time into a real hub for awesome content. And that to me is sort of super exciting next phase of this because I think the media industry that we are in, the new media industry is going to change rapidly. And one of the things I see coming down the pipe quite quickly, actually, is consolidation. This idea that you're going to

• 2:05:36Konstantin Kisin?

  give five quid a month to your favorite 70 creators, it's not going to happen. The admin alone will kill you, right? So people are going to want a place. And, you know, obviously, our politics are very different, but the model of the Daily Wire is, I mean, they've executed incredibly well.

• 2:05:51Chris Williamson?

  I went to go and see them. I filmed on Brad Cooper's show four, five months ago, something like that. Yeah. And, dude, it's a, it's a machine workshop for creating content. Yeah. Over there's the merch team. All they do is make fucking tumblers and designs for t-shirts. Yeah. Here's an entire three by 10 row of editors all working away. Yeah. Millions of meeting rooms. And here's an entire different building with everyone's studio in it. And oh, here's a control center that allows us to edit anything at any time. And I found this out fucking, I'll check that

• 2:06:29Chris Williamson?

  this is okay to say Shapiro has got some special fucking landline thing, some special type of connection that runs from where he is in Florida to where the hub is in Nashville, that allows them to cut his show live as if they were on site.

• 2:06:48Konstantin Kisin?

  Wow. I didn't know that. And I've been in that studio a couple of times now in Florida.

• 2:06:52Chris Williamson?

  I've so I've been to that one, but I've been to the pipeline where that shit ends up.

• 2:06:57Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Been there too. It's impressive. It's very impressive what they've built.

• 2:07:01Chris Williamson?

  Say what you want. Say what you want. But here's, here's an interesting thing for you. Two, two analogous stories that I'm sure that you've thought about before. The sort of

• 2:07:11Chris Williamson?

  Slow dilution or fucking explosion of the Young Turks.

• 2:07:16Konstantin Kisin?

  Hmm.

• 2:07:17Chris Williamson?

  And Crowder Daily Wire. That in a, you know, you're talking about congealing or bringing together. Meanwhile, a lot of the groups and affiliations and organizations, you know, IDW largely disbanded. That was like a loose affiliation.

• 2:07:34Konstantin Kisin?

  That wasn't an organization though, right?

• 2:07:35Chris Williamson?

  Loose affiliation of people, Young Turks, you know, you say the wrong things slightly. And downstream from that, some people on the network don't agree with other things that you've said. You know, like fucking apparently Ben Shapiro was Crowder's first ever lawyer or some bullshit as well. And then, you know, they've split off and the big C conservative. And he turns out that he bought the URL only a couple of months after they spoke, but months before he announced that he'd recorded these phone calls and all this sort of bullshit.

• 2:08:02Chris Williamson?

  So I think that sometimes we're too quick to try and pattern match stuff.

• 2:08:06Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:07Chris Williamson?

  And it's like, oh, all organizations devolve into, you know, fractured individual like groups or whatever. Or all, you know, power becomes centralized into one thing. It's like, maybe it's just flux. Maybe it's just tides, you know, maybe there's like ebbs and flows and stuff happens.

• 2:08:24Konstantin Kisin?

  I think you're going to be able to continue to do what you do, whichever way you want to do it. I'm interested in bringing people through who are very talented, but who, basically what we had to do with trigonometry. And one of the reasons I haven't made their few money is that we have a big team, as you do. But we have, we've always had a big team because we wanted to create the foundation for what we're about to do. And so Francis and I really don't make a lot of money from it because we're investing in the future. And what I want to do is we've kind of created a factory for making content. I want to bring people in who don't want to build their own factory, but who are very good as creators of.

• 2:09:04Chris Williamson?

  Making content.

• 2:09:04Konstantin Kisin?

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:09:05Chris Williamson?

  I mean, Carl Benjamin, Lotus Eater.

• 2:09:07Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah, he's done that.

• 2:09:08Chris Williamson?

  Spanked it.

• 2:09:09Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah, he's done very well.

• 2:09:10Chris Williamson?

  They're playing a game of Monopoly around the fucking, some like transport police bullshit somewhere in the country. It's like they're slowly taking up the, the, the transport people have got the corner office and got all of the ones on either side. Apparently one of the guys was telling me. That he had some incident that had occurred at the railway line. He had some sort of stalker that followed him at the railway line. And because it happened at the train station, it's the transport police that pick up on it. And he rang them and the guy rang him back and he could hear him through the wall. He said, mate, should I just come through, opened the door and was talking to the guy that was dealing with his case. Fucking hell, that's interesting. But yeah, you know, this, it's cool, man. It's cool. And it feels way more cool to see it happen from

• 2:09:55Chris Williamson?

  grassroots, where you can watch episode one of some horseshit show.

• 2:10:02Konstantin Kisin?

  Thank you.

• 2:10:02Chris Williamson?

  With terrible lighting.

• 2:10:03Konstantin Kisin?

  Appreciate it.

• 2:10:04Chris Williamson?

  Fucking audios all over the place and no one knows what they're doing.

• 2:10:06Konstantin Kisin?

  Ugly hosts.

• 2:10:07Chris Williamson?

  Ugly hosts. Yeah, that doesn't change. And then you work to the stage where you're like, holy fuck, like, I can actually see the full trajectory of this entire thing laid out in front of me, as opposed to like, oh, fucking Rupert Murdoch and is it part of-

• 2:10:21Konstantin Kisin?

  Shady McShadeface invested a billion dollars.

• 2:10:24Chris Williamson?

  Nameless, nameless, fucking like hooded figures drinking adrenochrome, dancing around a pentagram.

• 2:10:27Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:28Konstantin Kisin?

  That's where we want to go.

• 2:10:29Chris Williamson?

  I understand.

• 2:10:31Konstantin Kisin?

  No, but closing, closing the loop on all of that, I just think this is the next phase in terms of what we started with, which is, let's stop whining about how we've been cancelled. You know, I think it's, it's been a thing of mine, which like, we keep saying, well, the mainstream media isn't doing this, then, well, let's fucking do it then.

• 2:10:52Chris Williamson?

  Like your own mainstream media.

• 2:10:52Konstantin Kisin?

  If you think that they're doing it wrong, let's fucking do it right. Let's do it. And let's see who wins. That's the thing for me. It's like, I love the competition. I love attempting to build new things, the creating, the challenge of that, working out how to run a business with-

• 2:11:08Chris Williamson?

  Fucking immigrant mentality, man.

• 2:11:09Konstantin Kisin?

  Man, to me, this is the most exciting thing. You know, we were talking with a good friends of mine last night about how much money you need to be happy. And I was like, and they, and somebody said that the statistics are $70,000 a year. And maybe it's in like $2,009, but whatever. Beyond that point, it doesn't really make any difference. And I was like, well, for me, it does make a big difference. And then I thought, you know what, what if I made a million dollars a year, which is way more than I make now, but I wasn't having the experience of growing, working with my friends, all of that. And then I was like, actually, yeah, I don't think it is the money. It's the, it's the doing it. It's the creating. It's the building. This is why- Of all the people that I love to watch, I love Dana White interviews.

• 2:11:53Chris Williamson?

  I was about to bring up Dana White.

• 2:11:54Konstantin Kisin?

  He's a fucking, I just, I cannot wait to interview him.

• 2:11:58Chris Williamson?

  You got him in America?

• 2:11:59Konstantin Kisin?

  We are working on it. So he's, basically he's open to it, but it's just about finding the right time. As you can imagine, he's a busy guy.

• 2:12:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:09Konstantin Kisin?

  I fucking love that guy. I love listening to that guy. I love the way he dealt with COVID. I love everything about it.

• 2:12:16Chris Williamson?

  You've seen that clip, it went super viral a couple of times where he says, bet against me, fucking bet against me. Tell me it's not going to work. I love that shit.

• 2:12:23Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:24Chris Williamson?

  Every single time, man, like that energy.

• 2:12:26Konstantin Kisin?

  I'm the same.

• 2:12:26Chris Williamson?

  I really, really enjoy it and I think that it's missing. I think that there's not enough like conquerors in the world of personal development and business. There is from a performative level, but I don't look at Dana White and think that he's saying what he thinks sounds cool for people to hear.

• 2:12:44Konstantin Kisin?

  No.

• 2:12:45Chris Williamson?

  I think he's speaking his philosophy forward.

• 2:12:48Konstantin Kisin?

  Yes.

• 2:12:48Chris Williamson?

  Which is one of stand on this hill, come and have a swing.

• 2:12:52Konstantin Kisin?

  Yes, yes. And I've always been like incredibly competitive. I thrive on it. I love it. And you know, one of the things, by the way, you've taught me, I will say this is you were the first British podcaster who was in our space, who when I've met has been from a, who had a growth mindset, which is why I said when we first started, how unsurprised I am by the amazing success you're having, because you've always had that attitude. And it shows, and that's why you're successful. And that's why you're friends with everyone in the industry. You know, I just, I think it's a natural concept. Your success is not an accident is what I'm saying at all. It's a natural consequence of the person that you are. And Dana White inspires me in the way that I'm inspired by your success as well.

• 2:13:37Konstantin Kisin?

  Because it's just like, this is a guy who got his friends together. They bought this thing for $2 million or whatever it was. At some point, there were 30 something million in the hole and they just kept going until they crushed it. And there's a lot of other things that they do very well. I think as a. If you just switch on the fights on a Saturday night, you wouldn't see, but they make it entertainment. They make reality TV shows out of the content. They, the way they present the fights is like very well organized and it's beautifully shot.

• 2:14:10Chris Williamson?

  Think about it this way, think about what, if you watch boxing now, how fucking pedestrian, unnecessarily ceremonial it seems. Fucking guy carries out a mace and doffs his cap and fucking a list of 50 people who've donated money to this thing. We are here in the presence of the, by the Nevada state and the this, this, this. You're like, no, fucking just tell me the fight.

• 2:14:35Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah, show me the fight.

• 2:14:36Chris Williamson?

  Give me the tail of the tape, get me amped up, let them punch each other.

• 2:14:39Konstantin Kisin?

  And also, what they've done incredibly well is with boxing, no one gives a shit about anyone on the undercard. Or the card, they just care about the headline fight.

• 2:14:48Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:14:49Konstantin Kisin?

  UFC, the headline fight may very often isn't the best fight that actually happens on the night. There will be the best fighters on the night, but it won't be the best fight.

• 2:14:58Chris Williamson?

  Fight of the night will, I would guess, only maybe 30% of the time go to the main card.

• 2:15:01Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah, and it's just, and therefore they are building up other talent. This is what we're talking about with what we're doing. They're building up talent who are not the headline fighters, but you're seeing them from an early start and you follow them and you're like, oh, this person is getting better and they're fighting this guy and whatever. So just from a business perspective, I am so inspired by that attitude. I think it's, I love it. And I think we're probably going down very different paths in that you've gone to America where that attitude is prevalent. I'd love to take it, every time I go to America, I come away buzzing, but I'd love to bring more of that shit here. That's how I see our future.

• 2:15:37Chris Williamson?

  Sat next to, opposite Stephen Bartlett yesterday and said, if I could gift the UK anything, it would be enthusiasm.

• 2:15:43Konstantin Kisin?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:43Chris Williamson?

  You know, there's just so much enthusiasm in America and it is fucking, there's also stuff that they're super shit at.

• 2:15:49Konstantin Kisin?

  That's trade off.

• 2:15:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I wish that, I wish I could take some of Britain to America as well.

• 2:15:54Konstantin Kisin?

  I went to LA, man. I spent three days in LA, sort of in the kind of like entertainment world, you know, doing Bill Maher and stuff around that. Whoo, that is a different fucking world, my friend.

• 2:16:08Chris Williamson?

  How so?

• 2:16:08Konstantin Kisin?

  Oh, it's.

• 2:16:11Konstantin Kisin?

  I'm not a religious person, not yet anyway. But when I was there, I was like, I can see why people need religion. This place needs God. It fucking does. I'm serious, man. Like, the way people think about other people. Like, if all you have is your success, if your value derives from your status and success. Whoa, that gets dark quickly. Whoa, that gets dark quickly. Fucking disposable objects. Oh, man, it's fucking the way people, the way people see each other is there's no humanity there. It's just like you're an object for, for what I'm trying to get to. Um, and that was eye opening to me. I made in Hollywood make sense to me now.

• 2:16:55Konstantin Kisin?

  The movies they put out make sense to me now that I've been there. A lot of it makes sense. In a way that I'd never realized. See, I never realized how powerful Hollywood is at shaping our idea of what reality is because the movies like we in, in Britain, we think we understand America. Right? Because we watch their, their content. That's why. But that's not the reality of America at all. And the more you travel around America, the more you are confronted by that fact. You know, the more time I spend in the US. It, it makes, it makes me more right wing in the, in the American conception of like states' rights because I'm going, there's no, I, I had a flight from Salt Lake City

• 2:17:40Konstantin Kisin?

  to LA. And you get on the plane in Salt Lake City and you arrive in LA, which is not that far. And you go, these are different fucking, these aren't just different countries. These are different worlds. Different religion, different people, different way of thinking, different philosophy, different culture, different everything. And the values are completely different.

• 2:18:04Konstantin Kisin?

  You know, America is an incredible place. I'm really enthused by it and there's also trade offs to some of the way that people are there as well. So it's, and it's actually, you know, we talked about masculinity and femininity and I think, I actually know what people mean when they talk about toxic masculinity and toxic femininity, which is you need both. You want to be thinking about it as raising both bars at the same time. If you want to be a good leader, for example, right? You need to be strong and you need to be able to say the thing that people don't want to hear and make yourself say the thing that you don't want to say because you don't want to upset people. And on the other hand, you also need empathy and compassion too. Like you want to be raising both up and I see that in the same ways culturally.

• 2:18:48Konstantin Kisin?

  I want to take the best of the US stuff and the best of the British stuff and meld it together into, into something really exciting.

• 2:18:54Chris Williamson?

  Fuck yeah. Constantine Kissing, ladies and gentlemen. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with your stuff.

• 2:18:58Konstantin Kisin?

  The, the best place to find my work is Trigonometry, of course, on YouTube and the podcast and I write on Substack, which has got really blown up at the moment. I'm excited about that as well. So on Twitter, you know, at Constantine Kissing everywhere.

• 2:19:10Chris Williamson?

  Hell yeah. Constantine, I appreciate you.

• 2:19:12Konstantin Kisin?

  I appreciate you, my brother.