TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #404: Thinking Beyond the Crowd with Konstantin Kisin

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

Join Marty as he sits down with Konstantin Kisin to discuss woke culture, covid hysteria, comedy, Ukraine, and more. Follow Konstantin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KonstantinKisin Check out Trigger...nometry https://www.youtube.com/c/Triggerpod 6:06 - Thinking beyond the crowd 9:08 - The democratic response to Covid 14:57 - The next few years will shape the next half century 20:05 - Flaws in Bitcoin 27:13 - Escaping the Current Thing dichotomy 32:24 - Generational differences 36:51 - Calming the urgency to assess 45:51 - Comedy 49:41 - State of the UK 51:21 - People are tiring of woke culture 52:54 - Ukraine 1:04:54 - Baltic history 1:09:00 - Hong Kong 1:11:13 - Dangers of nihilism 1:16:21 - Plugs and wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital River CrowdHealth Bitcoin Talent Co TFTC Merch is Available: Shop Now Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel Clips YT Channel Website Twitter Instagram Follow Marty Bent: Twitter Newsletter Podcast

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Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up freaks, it's your boy Marty here to introduce RIP 404, error 404, content cannot be accessed, just kidding, you're going to be able to access it freaks, I sat down with Constantine Kissen, co-host of the Trigger-nometry podcast, author, and a great thinker, I had constantine on because i really appreciate his efforts to get people out of the binary framework that they're often thrust into and mainstream culture and political discussions really fascinating conversation this report was brought to you by our good friends at river river is a bitcoin company that has an exchange has mining as lightning api that you can build on i had i was often
Starting point is 00:00:52 referring to it as a bitcoin exchange it certainly does have an exchange but it's more than that it's a bitcoin company if you're looking to acquire bitcoin you're looking at the the banking crisis unfolding right now here in the united states you're thinking hmm there's a lot of counterparty risks there maybe i should get an asset that eliminates that counterparty risk bitcoin go to river river.com slash tftc they have the exchange you can dca if you dca into bitcoin you won't pay any fees on those buys if you hold bitcoin on river they don't recommend it they want you to send it to cold storage that you control but if you do hold it on river you can have the peace of mind knowing that your bitcoin is 100 reserved on the exchange and is held in a multi-sig wallet
Starting point is 00:01:34 you can send and receive over lightning to river and again if you want to build on lightning that river lightning services that their api so go check it out maybe you have a bitcoin exchange that you're using but you should be using a bitcoin company river you get the exchange plus a bunch of value-added services river.com slash tftc this route was also brought to you by our good friends down the hall unchained capital they're here to help you eliminate single points of failure in your custody model help you eliminate the third-party custody risk that exists in the incumbent banking system that is taking a lot of people out right now they have their vault product which is a two or three multi-sig wallet where you hold two keys unchained
Starting point is 00:02:13 holds one. As long as you have your two keys, you have permissionless access to your Bitcoin. It's a beautiful thing. If you're ever in a pinch and need Unchained to be the second in the two or three signature quorum, they're there for you. They have a consultation service that'll walk you through everything, get you hardware wallets, get you set up, get you comfortable. Go to unchained.com slash consultation. Tell them that TFTC sent you, you'll get $50 off that service. They also just released an inheritance protocol. They have a lending desk, an IRA product, a financial company of the future, Unchained Capital. Go to unchained.com slash consultation.
Starting point is 00:02:51 Learn about everything they have going on there. This report was also brought to you by good friends at CrowdHealth. CrowdHealth is here to help you reimagine how you pay for your healthcare. Health insurance is notoriously opaque, impersonal, egregiously expensive. I was on COBRA paying an insane amount. I switched to CrowdHealth. It's not health insurance. It's a different way of doing healthcare, paying for your healthcare.
Starting point is 00:03:11 It's significantly cheaper. I have my family of four on it. We're paying way less than we were on Cobra. So if you're an individual who unfortunately just got laid off in these tech sector layoffs and you're using Cobra right now, I know from personal experience how expensive it is. I would seriously consider CrowdHealth. It's a great community. You pay a monthly fee into a dedicated account. That builds up. If you ever have a healthcare expense, you bring the bill to CrowdHealth. They negotiate it lower for you. You know, the doctors say, hey, we can pay you in cash right away. Let's get a cheaper price. And the doctor likes that. They're like, Hey, I'm getting paid cash right away. Sure.
Starting point is 00:03:46 I'll lower the price. You pay the first $500 of that bill. And then the rest gets crowdfunded by the crowd health community. They have a Bitcoin community where you'll pay your monthly fee. It'll build up in your dollar accounts. And then after a certain amount of months, you'll begin to stack Bitcoin along that dollar account as well. So you can speculative attack your future healthcare costs. Another thing to mention about crowd health is it is a community of healthy individuals. You do have some metrics you have to hit to get into the community. And because of that, the overall BMI of CrowdHealth users is lower than the national average. And overall health care costs for the CrowdHealth community is lower than the average American health insurance plan.
Starting point is 00:04:25 So go check it out. JoinCrowdHealth.com slash TFTC. Use that code. You're going to get $99 a month for the membership fee for the first six months. JoinCrowdHealth.com slash TFTC. last but not least this rip was brought to you by our good friends at bitcoin talent co they're here to help you find a job or find talent a recruiting firm built by bitcoiners for bitcoiners so they understand the different companies in the space looking for talent and
Starting point is 00:04:52 what they need whether it's lightning a lightning developer or somebody knows ux around lightning or somebody's working on multi-sig at the protocol layer they know what they need to go out and find And then on the talent side of things, if you're out there, you're in the tech sector, you're in the banking sector, but you're a Bitcoiner, you don't know how to get in, go to bitcointalent.co. Tell them the TFTC sent you. Yeah. If you're a company, hit them up.
Starting point is 00:05:19 If you're talent looking to get into a company, hit them up. It's a beautiful thing. Enjoy this, Red Freaks. You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
Starting point is 00:05:55 I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. What is up, freaks? It's your boy Marty here, sitting down with Constantine Kissin, who made a splash earlier this year with, I guess it wasn't a lecture, it was more of an oration, a monologue at Oxford, talking about woke culture and the context of climate change and why young individuals shouldn't fall prey to the mindset, the doomer mindset that the world's going to end and should instead think differently. And that led me to your substack, Constantine, where you're really talking about alternative ways to view the world. And that's really what I wanted to talk about. It seems like a lot of the conversation in the mainstream is these binary choices that we have or are perceived to have as a society. And I think you frame it as the current thing versus going against the current thing. But I really like your attempt to try to shake people out of that binary mindset and have us thinking about alternative views, alternative systems, alternative ways of doing things.
Starting point is 00:07:04 I mean, that was a long preamble to the conversation. I guess what personally for you really drove you to realize this binary frame that the mainstream is trying to force the world into and got you thinking about alternative systems? I think I'm a bit of a disagreeable asshole. so if i can't disagree with somebody i usually will and i think that's kind of how i end up in in the middle of a lot of things i kind of go well you guys are sort of making sense but there's also quite a lot of bs on that and you guys are sort of making sense but there's quite a lot of bs on that and and so i often find that you know i i tend not to go along with the crowd i don't mind going along with the crowd when i think the crowd's right um and that is actually something that a lot
Starting point is 00:07:49 of people have trouble now with as well because they're like well i'm the sort of person that doesn't go along with crowds so i can never go along with a crowd even if you know that they're taking me to a safe place as opposed to off the cliff um so yeah i think that's more than anything where that comes from for me i just i i'm i try to be very uh careful about going along with other people's ideas of what i should do because i really learned from a young age that was important to think for myself yeah same i think that uh i mean not saying that i think exactly like you think for myself in the way that you do but that was one thing my mom beat into us growing up be a leader not a follower like think differently think about things from different perspectives and
Starting point is 00:08:34 i guess for you like talking about like the context of the world it's pretty chaotic in the world right now um again you have climate hysterics you have woke culture permeating a lot of the western hemisphere and it seems like people are very confused right now especially coming out of the last three years with covid lockdowns and a restructuring of the economy and a lot of authoritarianism around the world what are what are some of like the first principles that you anchor to when trying to view what's going on in the world and how you view it well i mean it's interesting that you bring up covid and authoritarianism because i was just i was talking to someone else an hour ago about the COVID. And to me, that really, I find that very
Starting point is 00:09:21 scary, because this guy I was talking to, he was saying, well, look, you know, what happened was really undemocratic. And they introduced in his country in Australia, they had quarantine camps. And in the UK, we had mandatory vaccination and all of these things. And he was like, that was undemocratic. And I was saying to him, no, that it's worse, much worse than that. It wasn't undemocratic. It was illiberal, but it wasn't undemocratic. It was exactly what the majority of the people wanted. The majority of the people in the UK, I don't know what the polling would have been like in the US, but there was a huge percentage of people here in the UK who just, you know, they lost the plot. They got really scared. They panicked. They made the government
Starting point is 00:10:01 panic. The media forced the government to panic. And there was a massive overreaction. And they had absolutely no problem with it. They had no problem with it. And so the scary thing to me isn't that we are sort of, you know, living in some kind of undemocratic world in which the evil elites are telling us what to think, which some people are persuaded by. I don't believe that at all. I think the problem is a lot of people are willing to give away far too much safety, far too much freedom, rather. A lot of people are willing to give away far too much freedom to get a promise of safety from a government that is therefore incentivized to keep promising them safety and is therefore incentivized to keep taking away their freedom. That's the meme, govern me harder, daddy, is coming to mind. Yeah, exactly. And we live in societies, it turns out. you know i mean people have known this throughout the ages but we our generation and younger had
Starting point is 00:10:54 the opportunity to forget about that when when the proverbial hits the fan you know people people go revert to type and it turns out quite a lot of people uh revert to authoritarianism mentally whenever things go bad yeah no and it certainly happened here in the states too especially in the beginning early 2020 people were i think myself included at least in the early days like all right two weeks to flatten the curve that sounds like a good idea let's just batten down the house i was there i was right there absolutely this is people are having a go at me now going oh you know you're you're this guy who you know keeps talking about covid authoritarianism but you you know in the first few weeks you were fine with it yeah i was fine with it for three
Starting point is 00:11:36 weeks because i you know we needed to find out what the hell was going on uh but once you know what's going on that's the point at which you've got to start acting rationally again and that was my issue with it you know um so i know it happened in america as well um the good thing about america is that you guys have different states and so if you don't like the states policies that you're in you can pack up and move in the uk what are we going to do yeah i mean i'm an example of that i live in texas now i was living in new york it was partly driven by all right i think texas is going to respect my my freedoms a bit better than the state of new york is right now so let's get the family it was incredible we went on a trip to america last year and we saw this with our
Starting point is 00:12:20 own eyes because we went from uh the east coast new york washington uh to texas and then to nashville and then to la and it was like it was like being in different countries man like when we were in austin i didn't see a person wearing a mask for the entire time that we were there when we got to la literally everybody was wearing a mask at the airport like everybody and if you got a a like a a taxi uh i can't remember what your system is we have we call it uber here um in in in austin or in a bunch of other places no one cared if you're wearing a mask this was last year um in la they were still making you wear a mask yeah so it was like completely different countries and my point is it's great to be able to choose what what you want and if you
Starting point is 00:13:13 are a govern harder me govern me harder daddy kind of person then you can go to a government govern you harder state like california and have a great time um but if you want a bit more freedom then you can do what you've done and move to a place that actually respects it yeah no and i think that's a trend that's only going to get more uh prominent here in the united states the states beginning to assert their autonomy from the federal government um in many ways that happened with covid uh like i mentioned this is a bitcoin podcast here in the united states bitcoin mining is a massive political talking point now and you're seeing individual states say hey mining's cool here others saying like new york saying uh we don't want bitcoin mining here i think that's
Starting point is 00:13:56 just going to keep extending into other parts of the social discussion so we have florida with the uh pulling the particular sex education materials out of the public schooling system something like that is happening in texas as well that's something that gives me great hope for the united states uh especially in a world that seems a bit uh pessimistic right now particularly when you think of the the trends that are gaining prominence well they have they were gaining prominence for a time but i do think things like esg and world culture are beginning to to erode a bit as people get fed up because at the end of the day like economic and social reality comes into play and well right but the economic and social and military reality is very difficult
Starting point is 00:14:44 as well right so you've got um maybe people taking life a bit more seriously and they maybe not don't have quite as much time for you know weird protests on college campuses or whatever when there's real stuff going on in the world um on the one hand on the other hand i think we you're right we're in a we're in a kind of pivotal time i think the future of the next 50 years is going to be shaped in the next 10 you know what i mean it's kind of like world war ii like world war ii finishes and that kind of sets sets the template for the next 60 70 years i think we're we're looking at something like that at the moment and what are you what are you looking at particularly in terms of areas where things are going to be i mean the geopolitical landscape is becoming
Starting point is 00:15:31 completely reshaped right as we speak uh both in russia and in china and therefore around the world um economically i mean the idea modern monetary theory uh summed up in a simple way the idea that we can continue to borrow money from our grandchildren uh endlessly uh that's it's sustainable for a while but eventually that's going to end and um people very clever people keep telling me you know politicians and economists and they've all got an explanation of how this makes perfect sense and you know a country like britain can run a national debt that it's greater than its gdp and can continue to pile more debt with a massive budget deficit uh and everything's going to be fine uh everything's going to be absolutely fine there's not going to be any
Starting point is 00:16:24 problems uh and they're all very clever and they know more about economics than i do and and they know more about finance than i do and and and that's all very very very very uh nice but um no no no that that's not that's that's not how the real world works uh there's no such thing as a free lunch at some point whatever is going on there uh that's going to have to be addressed one way or another and if we keep burying our head in the sand i mean the problem is just the when it when that bubble gets burst it's going to burst in the most spectacular way if we allow this to continue well it may be bursting as we speak particularly here in the united states there's a reassuring thought i mean what's going on now with these this banking crisis that started
Starting point is 00:17:12 probably a couple weeks ago but really accelerated towards the end of last week and continue banking is only one part of it man i'm sorry to interrupt marty but the banking is one part of it like a financial crisis and a coming to jesus moment on the issue of debt these are very different things you know and we've all been living way beyond our means for decades now and we are refusing to recognize that in my opinion you know and we basically our response to 2008 when a financial crisis turned into a global recession was to empty the medicine cupboard right we took all the medicine we had interest rates negative real interest rates were negative emergency level interest rates for like a decade uh just just you know threw everything at it well okay cool now
Starting point is 00:18:03 now now it's coming around again what are you going to do oh they're just going to print obscene amounts of money and that's what i mean what's going on in the united states now record a podcast about it earlier this morning with a gentleman named parker lewis has really been following the fed policy and its effect on the banking sector for like 15 years now and it is a bit intertwined in the sense that like the the government has mandated that the banks have to hold a certain amount of treasuries and as we're going through this crisis now uh people may have said oh you can never see this coming but if you look at the mechanics of it like the fed's going to jack up interest rates which lowers the value of the collateral that you're forced to hold on your
Starting point is 00:18:46 balance sheet and then as you have to sell that out to service withdrawals you have to mark down that as a loss and it's created this cascading effect but again yeah i completely agree like the keynesian brain rot thought of dead is just money we owe ourselves completely disregards future generations like no dead is money that our children and grandchildren owe us or owe them we owe to them yes we owe it to them we're borrowing it from them without their consent and what's more is it obviously affects uh you know we're we're like a problem gambler now no you know there will come a point where people don't want to lend us money you know uh one way or another or we were not prepared to lend it to ourselves or people don't want to buy
Starting point is 00:19:30 a currency because like these these things that we're doing they're not consequence free otherwise why wouldn't we endlessly print any amount of money like why should i pay any tax ever again if we can just print money and it has no consequences that's what they keep telling us we can print an endless amount of money and everything's going to be fine right 100 of gdp no problem 200 whatever like we can keep going apparently this is what they keep telling us we can we can keep this going why do i need to pay my taxes then why don't you just print my share of the national tax and spend it if there's no consequence to printing money well taxes are just the humiliation ritual part of it
Starting point is 00:20:11 i can tell you're a bitcoin you're a bit skeptical of bitcoin is that correct or um i i i i'm not uh i'm not skeptical of the technology and its potential for use uh i'm very skeptical of the marketing around it you know the moment a a system of doing business becomes ideological you know it shouldn't it should not be ideological like you know if if a physicist generally speaking is not going to be ideological about their branch of physics they want to know the truth as opposed to prove their point do you know what i mean yeah and when when i see so much ideology around like it's almost like a whole world view around bitcoin and the way it's marketed
Starting point is 00:21:06 by some people you know yet another hot girl in a crop top talking to the camera about hey guys you need to buy bitcoin i'm like jesus get that thing away from me you know so um that's what i'm skeptical about as for the technology i mean people say it's a great way to for people in in poorer countries to do business in a volatile blah blah blah i mean i spend a lot of time in poorer countries places like armenia and ukraine until the war and stuff like that nobody that is really using bitcoin to do transactions and you know i'm not saying it's not possible it is possible and some people do but so uh but uh it's an error that i always bookmarked by saying at the beginning i don't know anything about it and at the end by saying
Starting point is 00:21:51 i really don't know anything about it but people keep asking me so i keep giving them some kind of answer yeah i i uh i think i caught you on pop's podcast yeah talking about it um yeah and i did say to him repeatedly a i'm gonna trigger you and your audience and b i don't know what i'm talking about i don't think you're gonna trigger anybody by saying that and i think that's a very fair assessment um depending on who is explaining bitcoin it can come off a bit scammy um well right and this is one of the things i've been thinking a lot about outside of the concept of bitcoin itself is like because our experience now is our experience of the world is so fragmented compared to how it was 20 years ago right 20 years ago i mean probably not the case in america but in
Starting point is 00:22:40 the uk we had five tv channels right and most of the stuff you would see you'd be watching together with like almost everybody else do you know what i mean there'd be a popular program on at 7 pm and you'd watch that and everybody would watch that and so when you have social media and the internet and the huge explosion and content what we even mean by a word is different like what i mean by bitcoin is going to be completely different to what you mean by bitcoin because our experience so we just have a completely different window into that room from a different angle and you and i are seeing very different things i might be seeing some fluff in the corner where you are seeing a big sofa or a big couch in the middle right and and so our perspective of it
Starting point is 00:23:26 is is really shaped by the fact that our uh of of experience of the world is so fragmented now that we probably don't have a common one you know so to me bitcoin is the hot girl on twitter you know selling bitcoin to you it's a system of exchange or a medium of exchange or whatever else that is to revolutionize the world and so that's why i don't really have a strong opinion on it because it's not an area that i've studied that well yeah i think the lens the anchoring lens that really gets people in this fragmented world on the same page is just actually like interacting with it spinning up a wallet sending bitcoin holding it because when you do that you recognize that you have 12 or 24 words that represent your wealth and you use those words to make your bitcoin
Starting point is 00:24:13 appear in another wallet that's like an aha moment and that experience uh is uniform across the world instead of having a fragmented sort of explanation of bitcoin from many different mediums for many different people um but yeah i think i mean considering what's going on now on the banking crisis uh people talk about number go up bitcoin's going to be millions of dollars but what is really important is just having access to your money whether it goes up or down which people woke up friday morning with tens of millions of dollars in this bank they thought was solvent and didn't have access to it where if you have bitcoin and you have in your wallet and you have the the private key backed up like nobody can stop you from yeah sure but uh look i
Starting point is 00:24:56 have bitcoin i i have bitcoin uh and i'm you know waiting for it to explode because i already made the mistake once i bought it when it was i think i bought half a bitcoin uh for four hundred dollars and then i bought another half a bitcoin for five hundred dollars and then a few years later when it'd gone up to i don't know maybe my my whole bitcoin was worth about two thousand dollars or something like that it was those sort of numbers i was like oh wow this is like doubled in value okay let's sell it and then now it's well then it was worth whatever it was worth and now anyway my point is we have some bitcoin on my youtube channel that people paid us for advertising with that's been sitting in a bitcoin wallet and it was worth two thousand dollars a year ago now it's
Starting point is 00:25:45 worth eight hundred dollars so you know this idea that bitcoin is this brilliant store of value it has not been my experience uh you know necessarily no i could i mean yeah it's about you get the whole spiel it's time in the market not timing the market and all that yeah yeah but but if you actually need the money that you've got in there right like you're potentially gonna you know let's say i'm saving up to buy a house which which is what i'm doing right not going to save it up in bitcoin for that reason yeah i can see it it's uh i had that experience as well we do a lot of ad deals in bitcoin here uh took in a lot of ad money at the end of 2021 when the price was around 50k right and uh unless you were selling that right
Starting point is 00:26:32 away or locking in half of that you i have watched it depreciating value pretty significantly but um yeah no it's but when you when you put it in the context of the alternative which is the system that we're describing that is printing money putting us further and further into debt um it is a nice asset that brings peace of mind in the long term at least but yeah i agree there's gonna be a shit ton of price volatility year in and year out until until people wake up and understand that the incumbent system's completely messed up yeah but i mean i feel like it's all tangential too like we have these problems in the banking
Starting point is 00:27:18 sector with the national debt here in the united states and the uk and then you have like the social fray as well when people are getting driven to both sides of the spectrum that's one thing i worry about why i really like the framing that you put forth which is like current thing versus opposing the current thing it's like figuring out the other thing in the middle where people can meet and put their efforts behind to actually affect change in the world because what i worry about is people get driven to both sides of the spectrum and you have a very aggressive reaction from one side against the other and you get weimar germany like um situations world war ii like situations yeah it seems like well we're hopefully too far and too comfortable now to have to have an
Starting point is 00:28:05 actual uh that you know communist versus fascists uh battling out on the streets although you know you do see some of some some some things people could point to particularly in america in terms of you know far left groups and far right groups getting together and fighting and whatever but i'd hope that that remains a fringe thing but you're right i mean the the main reason i think to be concerned about that polarization is it prevents us from having a cohesive uniting vision of who we are uh and that makes us very vulnerable to people who would quite like to throw the west off its pedestal um you know this is a lot of people don't understand uh this about the conflict in ukraine it's really fundamentally about uh the attempt to reshape geopolitics and
Starting point is 00:28:58 i've translated many of putin's speeches on my sub stack uh and summarize them in a way that's easier to read for western people and this he talks about in every speech he he wants america out of eastern europe he wants america to stop being the single dominant geopolitical force in the world he wants what he calls a multipolar world um and uh if we continue to you know sit around and argue about what woman is we we're kind of exposing ourselves to uh you know we're not using our time as well as we could be in advancing our civilizational mission which is to make sure that our people thrive in the world that we are strong that we are capable that we are able to uh defend our values uh you know all of those things uh if we take i out of the ball
Starting point is 00:29:50 we're opening the door to other people yeah i mean putin explicitly leans into that too like look over there they're confused about gender ideology yeah exactly exactly and and he's mainly doing that in my opinion to uh he's doing two things he's pandering to people in the west who are frustrated at those things as i am by the way and as i'm sure you are uh you know the gender ideology being the extreme versions of gender ideology being pushed down the way that they're being pushed uh and so he's trying to win allies over in the west by going look look at this thing that you don't like i don't like it either um and he's pandering to people in russia who want to uh to think of the west as this like lgbtqi whatever which obviously they hate um and um you know he's trying to sort
Starting point is 00:30:44 of present the west as decadent which to some extent i'd agree with it has been uh to people who just you know they um there's there's this uh word for for europe in russian that these some of these uh putin uh fanboys like to throw out which is gay ropa like europe evropa is the russian word for europe gay ropa you understand yeah um so like it's it's it fits neatly into the narratives of both of those groups and he's trying to play to them both at the same time yeah yeah and sort of engender support from westerners like hey this stuff's crazy putin even recognizes it like is he a stronger leader undermine i mean well that's the other thing too is particularly in the united states i'm sure you feel this way in the uk too but like just looking at the political
Starting point is 00:31:38 class and the quote-unquote leaders we have representing us on the geopolitical stage as millennial looking at these people can't even put together coherent sentences anymore um and have no connection with reality or um the underpinning sort of angst that exists between millennials and gen z's uh it's really disheartening it's like i think i look at biden i look at across the spectrum whether biden on the left or somebody like mitch mcconnell on the right and others i'm like i don't think you guys align with me at all it is really discomforting to me to think that you represent me on the global stage yeah no it's interesting and you know one of the things increasingly i'm starting to realize i i just turned 40 a few months ago and like we have
Starting point is 00:32:32 people working on trigonometry who are like 17 and i've kind of up until this point sort of thought of myself as a young person and then you meet people and talk to people who are like 17 18 20 and you go whoa this is like a whole other generation like they've got their own challenges uh they're very think about things differently to us approach things in a different way so imagine someone like joe biden like we we are two generations away from him right so there's no way like there's no way he understands the problems of gen z or the problems of millennials or whatever uh and and look it was ever thus of course uh it was ever thus but yeah i know what you mean yeah i guess that's the thing i wonder about moving forward is how does that exchange of power
Starting point is 00:33:23 or exchange of influence happen um like how do we get the power out of the hands of the the the boomers and i hate to like like put people in like classes and say like it's their problem but it seems like they're living in it in a mindset we're gonna be boomers someday so you watch your mouth i know exactly but it seems and there's good boomers out there i've met a lot of them but the ones in power seem to severely underestimate the potential like the millennials and gen z's many people uh many individuals within those demographics have to affect change it seems like they're just putting their their foot on the on the brake to not let it happen yeah but but i also think it's a large extent you know the millennial's fault as well you know like uh
Starting point is 00:34:17 we're getting to the we're getting to the age now certainly i feel i am like we we should be influencing the way things are and not enough of us are because not enough of us you know have built things and and created things and achieved things that we should have been I think that's also true. You know, too many millennials spend their time moping about going, oh, my life is so hard. Well, sure. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard.
Starting point is 00:34:42 Yeah. But I don't think it's as hard as my 96-year-old grandmother in Ukraine who lived through the Nazi occupation and the Holodomor and the gulags and Stalin's purges and the collapse of the Soviet Union and now another invasion by Vladimir Putin. Don't think our lives were as hard as that. Right. so maybe there's an opportunity for us to take some responsibility and to go okay what are we going to do now you know and i think for for millennials uh you know that that's part of you know we're kind of uh i'm just about a millennial but there is a you know i feel like a slightly a generation that hasn't fulfilled this potential potentially you know agreed i think a lot
Starting point is 00:35:24 millennials are complacent and distracted i mean going back to the preamble at the beginning of this conversation about like climate change like climate change and larping about that particular subject has become a lot of people's personalities where they don't understand reality uh and the fact that you can virtue signal and say oh i care about the climate but that has consequences at the end of the day i mean particularly in the energy sector we've really driven the narrative that we need to transform our energy sector into this renewable safe haven but that's proving to actually uh deteriorate the the quality and the stability of our energy systems surprise yeah well the biden approved some kind of old drilling thing i haven't had a chance to read up on it
Starting point is 00:36:14 properly but there was some kind of all drilling approved today in america so uh reality is coming home yeah up in alaska i believe they're finally going to let them drill yeah up in that area of the country but no i mean it's i mean when you look at europe and trump tried to warn germany like hey you're becoming heavily dependent on vladimir putin's natural gas like you should try to restructure your energy sector so you don't become beholden to them they laughed at And less than three years later, that problem became very apparent to all of Europe. Yep, absolutely. And so what do you think is the most effective way to break out of that binary thinking
Starting point is 00:36:58 and start pushing people towards these alternative ways of viewing the world, alternative solutions, or just engendering a feeling of urgency and action in people? well i don't know that it is the feeling of urgency that i want to encourage people it's actually at this moment in time i think everybody just needs to be encouraged to have a feeling of self-restraint rather than urgency when people feel that something is urgent they start running around doing crazy shit we talked about covid i mean people had a lot of senses of urgency about that no it didn't do us any good what i think people need to do is slow down and look around and go is screaming and shouting about things changing the world is it is it look look around
Starting point is 00:37:45 since 2015 2016 brexit trump you know you take you through a whole litany of things what we've done is we've massively increased the amount of hostility that both sides have towards each other have the results been what you wanted right because i don't think they have uh they haven't been what i wanted uh and so do we carry on doing this do we carry on getting angry at each other and going no no they're really the the evil ones or do we try and have a a more sensible conversation and the the the dynamic of the cultural conversation is massively in favor of anger and hate and uh i'm not pretending that single-handedly by talking in a more constructive way on this podcast we're going
Starting point is 00:38:36 to change that but i'm just trying to model that and be that myself and have conversations with people from that place it's increasingly why i use twitter less and less because like the version of me that comes out on twitter because of the way twitter changes your brain is not the version of me that i would like to be most of the time you know i open twitter i'm very tempted to troll someone uh take a dump on them point out how they they mess something up how stupid they are blah blah blah blah um and i and i don't know that that's the best way to achieve the things i want to achieve so i'm just trying to be more constructive and think about um you know what are the things that keep people can unite around what are the things that can bring people together
Starting point is 00:39:24 That's why, you know, I started out as a stand up comedian who became very alarmed at all this woke stuff that was going on in comedy, because comedy being like a cultural industry, that all the cultural trends get there first. So it was like before society got there almost. And I was like, whoa, what's happened here? and so I became known as someone who was very against woke culture which I am but I don't know that the way to oppose that is the increasingly sort of I'm a I'm a victim now anti-woke movement you know I've been oppressed now I you know they they you know the as the saying the libs are transing the kids or whatever it is like you know there's there's libs running around your neighborhood just like grabbing kids off the street and taking them off to a trans reassignment clinic i don't think that's happening either you know what i mean so there's this a lot of this building up of victimhood on both sides um even you know and i say that as someone who thinks you
Starting point is 00:40:30 know we talked we alluded to the trans thing briefly like that's a problem the teaching of material to children in schools is a problem and doesn't need dealing with um but my view is the way that that issue gets dealt with is by convincing the majority of people that this is something is happening and that they should care about it. Because that's all that it really takes. Like we had a case here in the UK where a transgender rapist, or other rapists who claim they were transgender after they were called a claim to be a woman and
Starting point is 00:41:04 ended up in a woman's prison. Right. And when and when the public found out about this, they were like, Whoa, we don't support this and actually the country the country the part of the uk that happened in scotland the leader of scotland soon resigned soon afterwards i'm not saying it was entirely down to that but that was part of it right so you have to convince the overwhelming majority of people uh who are pretty much on on this side of the conversation anyway because they haven't been indoctrinated and all this crazy stuff they're just normal people who've got kids and jobs and lives to live and they're not really into the culture war you know um we just got to show them
Starting point is 00:41:43 a that it's happening and b uh persuade them that they should they should basically take action or speak up about it or whatever in a calm way uh in order to change these things right um instead of just building anger and resentment and it's so funny to me uh whenever i make this critique of the anti-woke uh you know people always like we must fight fire with fire and i'm like that generally speaking isn't how you fight fire like the fire brigade do not turn up to your house with a bucket of gasoline and some matches you know what i mean yeah well that's not how you do it even the metaphor doesn't work so i just think um the the solution to all of this is in the media space which is what we are the new media right uh is to have conversations in a way that's that's
Starting point is 00:42:34 gonna it's gonna bring people back from the brink you know that's gonna not make them feel you know there there are youtubers who who get millions of views and i they show up on my thing and it's every day it's like world war three or like biden about to destroy america or you know the maga is you know like all all that stuff from left and right uh and i've you know i i don't live in america but it doesn't seem to be to me on on the brink of imminent collapse i'm not saying you guys aren't problems but it seems to me like you're going to be okay for the next couple of weeks do you see what i'm saying like we shouldn't exaggerate too much the extent to which these cultural problems um are as as dangerous as we think now long term i absolutely think the trend
Starting point is 00:43:25 of wokeness is is a problem and if allowed to run unchecked it will do huge damage to um to to the west which to me is very important and i wrote a whole book about it but the way to to prevent that from happening is to check it calmly and gently uh firmly but gently at the same time right yeah and to start to talk about sensibly about what the potential positive solutions might be we've got to have a positive vision of the future and i haven't given you any any parts of that because that's a conversation that we still need to have as a society one of the problems we've had is that over the last 10 to 15 years like all the things that you used to be able to say are objectively good things even though not everybody
Starting point is 00:44:11 would be expected to participate in them like having family and having children right that used to be a thing that we all understood is like it's a good thing to have not everybody has to have it it's okay not people shouldn't be forced to have a family some people are gay and they might not want to adopt kids or whatever right some people just might not want to have kids even if they're straight some people may not want to be in a relationship that's all fine but generally speaking for most people having a family is good right that's something that we used to be able to say well now if you say that you're automatically like a conservative because you you think people most people are going to want to have children well guess what they they are going to want to
Starting point is 00:44:50 have children right and they should and it's good if they do it's okay and it's good if someone doesn't if that's the right decision for them but that's something that i actually think we should be able to say and lots of other things like that where we become so afraid of the marginal case that we refuse to say the bigger picture thing which is you know people living in healthy relationships is good men and women need each other uh having kids and family is going to be a good thing for most people and so on and so forth there's a whole bunch of these things um that we could talk about um that used to be possible to say now they almost have to be won back or reframed or rephrased for people to go oh that's a great new idea let people have family
Starting point is 00:45:34 it's not a new idea but but that's the sort of thing i'm talking about yeah being physically fit living a healthy lifestyle right fundamental being responsible financially with your money and the government being responsible with its money like these are all pretty uncontroversial things until about two minutes ago yeah no and then getting back to like twitter and the mediums through which people dissect this information like it's very they're very high leverage tools for a very small subsect of the population so i think that's another thing that really disrupts the conversation that people have globally is you have like a small minority of people leveraging this technology that makes their voice seem louder than it actually is it makes it seem like there's
Starting point is 00:46:16 more people who agree with them on this yeah i think that's definitely true as well yeah yeah and it's it's i think that's one thing people are definitely becoming more attuned to and that's why alternative media like your show this show others are beginning to proliferate um but you're seeing both ends like the vitriol and uh those against the current thing and those for the current thing are existing in alternative media platforms as well like bringing it back to comedy that was actually one thing that really um became apparent to me during the covid lockdowns and there was that series of youtube videos about mass psychosis that was going around and basically the first described the problem and applied it to what was happening in 2020 and 2021 and then the second
Starting point is 00:47:08 was like all right what is the solution for getting out of this and comedy is actually one of the solutions like bringing a bit of levity to the situation and lightly making fun of those in power pushing you down these these authoritarian paths and i think everybody connects with comedy and making things funny can make a subject approachable and then um give somebody a perspective where they're willing to change their mind and say oh maybe this is a little bit crazy it's so funny you say that man because during the pandemic um our show really exploded and that's because three or four nights a week at the time we do a show so our channel is an interview channel we do interviews with interesting people but also my myself and my co-host francis
Starting point is 00:47:51 four nights a week then three nights a week now we do a show a show called trigonometry raw and that is basically me and him joking about whatever's going on the most outrageous jokes we do all the crazy accents from around the world like we get people from india sending us rupees to get us to do their accent uh people from the middle east italy america obviously all parts and and Canada, Brazil, like everywhere. And we do terrible accents, and make jokes and take the piss, as we say. And we did that throughout the pandemic. And the most common thing people say to us, if they come up to us in the street, is you got me through the pandemic. Because people needed that relief, people needed to be able to laugh at the terrible things that were happening, both in
Starting point is 00:48:41 terms of the disease and the pandemic and the fact that people were dying and all the rest of it but also the massive overreaction that we saw from governments in the west as well uh and uh yeah i'm really pleased that we were two people out of i'm sure there were many people doing this but it felt like it still wasn't enough uh you know mocking and criticizing the the people who were doing it yeah because at the end of the day i think what it does is it highlights that the people making these decisions are fallible human beings as well people like to hold them on this pedestal and think of them as omniscient beings that can make the right decisions on our behalf but once you use a bit of comedy to highlight some of the missteps they've taken
Starting point is 00:49:21 and some of the contradictions of logic that exist with their decisions for like oh maybe these people are just humans too and if that's the case uh maybe us individuals can affect change as well yeah yeah absolutely yeah so what uh what's on the top of your mind right now in terms of what's going on in the world obviously world culture is big but uh i saw you had a discussion with piers morgan about the migrant situation in the uk obviously rishi sinek has taken up the prime minister role there unelected way what are your thoughts like rishi sort of being just planted as the prime minister of the uk well it's it's a system that we have we have a parliamentary system so we don't elect prime ministers uh in the way that you elect
Starting point is 00:50:11 presidents we elect a party and then they have their own process for how they uh choose the the leader um so you know that that's a regular thing it's happened to both sides the last time there was a left-wing government a labor government uh it was tony blair and then he handed over to gordon brown and there was no election and the moment there was an election he lost so um that that's pretty standard for our country i'm not a huge fan of russi sunak but um you know in terms of what's top of my mind i mean there's so many things i think um i'm following the war in ukraine very closely because i just like i said i think at the beginning we're in a bit of a pivotal time that is going to set the direction of travel for the next 10 20 30 40 50 years uh and i think that's
Starting point is 00:50:57 kind of beginning by the end of this decade we're going to know the direction of travel or at least we will be on the direction of travel whether we know it or not will be a different thing um so that's kind of what i'm looking at is how is that all going to end because that's the one big unanswered question for me in the world right now um on work culture i feel like we're starting to make progress actually i think uh two things are happening number one uh well many things are happening but one of them is uh some people are getting tired of all this work crap um being shoved down their throat as they increasingly encounter it the second thing is people becoming more aware of it going on because it's infiltrating their workplaces and
Starting point is 00:51:40 their colleges and their schools their kids schools etc uh the third thing is gen z are probably uh i mean the women not so much but the the young men the gen z men they're not woke at all men. Yeah, so the girls, you know, girls are girls, and they will go along with be nice and compassionate and kind of whatever, for a while. But, you know, the young men are no work. So there's a rebellion brewing against all of that, which is natural. It's what happens. It happens in comedy and music and everything. Everything goes in cycles, you go this way, then
Starting point is 00:52:15 you go that way. So I feel like we're making decent progress doesn't mean we've won or you know this isn't a problem anymore i think it still is but i think we're making uh good progress on that or at least in slowing down that um yeah so so the war in ukraine for me is the big big unanswered question and of course uh you know with what we've seen this week is this banking crisis going to be huge i don't know personally i don't have an opinion on that uh but more broadly as we've already talked about i think we are sitting on a on a time bomb economically and when that goes off we'll have to see what happens as well so those two things i think yeah it seems like uh the banking crisis is serious to the point where the fed is going to
Starting point is 00:52:59 have to step in and print a bunch of money they arguably did yesterday yeah um okay you can make the argument the quantitative easing five started yesterday um which and people are beginning to say that there's no way they raise rates next month so it seems like that that fed pivot that everybody's been talking about is probably here um because again the the setup of the capital requirements it's forcing people to sell these treasuries which is obviously driving their price down which is making everybody's capital requirements below what they're supposed to be so the fed has to step in there but i mean i do want to talk about ukraine too because as an american has been a big headline here in the united states particularly over the last year as taxpayers have
Starting point is 00:53:47 been sending over tens of billions of dollars well over a hundred billion dollars now month in and month out and we're asking like what what is the the value of these dollars how are they being spent what are we getting in return and there's obviously uh differing views amongst individual americans i tend to view this as a proxy war i would rather not be engaged in or supporting it would like both parties to come to the table to have some sort of talks but um it doesn't seem like our political classes is really um gonna try to do that they seem pretty keen on uh supporting the war uh the best they can yeah i i i'm not a fan of framing as supporting the war because i don't think that's what they're supporting this is i'm afraid one of those where i go along uh
Starting point is 00:54:42 or some people think I go along with the crowd. I don't. I just happen to know about this part of the world from a personal perspective. And so I have a different view on what's going on to most people. It's not for me ever to tell American taxpayers what they should be spending money on. But I would say that the American taxpayers get an exceptionally good deal for their money right now. Exceptionally good deal. And that is because the United States is degrading the military of its primary strategic adversary without a single American life lost and at a cost of a fraction of your defense budget, the entire purpose of which is to deter Russia and China.
Starting point is 00:55:25 So you're getting a very good deal, in my opinion. And by the way, you know, you can call it a proxy war. But the reality is that the Ukrainians are in the process of attempting to achieve sovereignty for their country. And that to me is a very American thing to support. I mean, if you think about the origins of your country, this is kind of like the Ukrainian 1776 moment. And in the same way that for America to become independent and needed help from the French, I know you guys don't like to talk about it, but I'm afraid you did, right? You know, the reality is that, you know, all sorts of revolutions and independence movements in the past have relied on foreign assistance. so from my perspective the most important thing is what do the ukrainians want like if america you know i was debating somebody the other day on this and he was like well if ukrainians stop fighting the americans would keep the war going and i'm like what like how the americans aren't over there fighting it's the ukrainians who are going we want our country we want to defend our
Starting point is 00:56:33 country please help us if you want to right and a lot of people you know that i know that there are many people who think along your lines in america and it's a point of view i completely respect because you know as a taxpayer you're allowed to say i want my money to be spent well like that's that's totally reasonable um but for you know from my perspective uh it's uh it's strategically a very sound thing for for for the west to be doing because if you look at the ideology that motivates putin uh it's very clear that his uh sense is that america should not be present on the eurasian continent like america he wants america out of europe entirely uh he talked in his last speech about how he wants to um and so the united states is evil and wrong because
Starting point is 00:57:25 it's undoing the post-world war ii geopolitical order well what does that mean the post-world war two geopolitical orders yalta where the the great powers basically decide that the soviet union because of its contribution to winning world war ii gets to dominate and subjugate the entirety of eastern and central europe up to and including east germany right so if if you want to let putin restore that order that's what you'd like to do that's why you know you talked about germany exposing itself to russian blackmail because of energy why do you think why do you think putin wants to why do you think gohard schroeder a former chancellor of germany is on the board of some gigantic russian oil company there's even a word for this schroederization
Starting point is 00:58:17 it's the infiltration of a country's elite by a foreign power who wants to subvert them for their own ends like putin has spent the last 20 years consolidating power within russia and attempting to rebuild not the soviet union but the russian empire right that's why he hates lenin because he gave away portions of the the russian empire in order to achieve peace and uh in the brestletov street in 1917 so no 1918 wherever it was and so um to me while i understand that 100 billion dollars is a lot of money and I'm sure it sounds like a lot of money to the American taxpayer I think from an American purely an American point of view forget Ukraine forget morality forget all of that it's it's a very sound investment and then you add to that the fact that you're you
Starting point is 00:59:06 know the moral case to me is very strong which is this is a country that wants to to have its independence from Russia and Russia won't let it be independent because it perceives this as you know russian land basically um so uh that's why we are where we are and look in addition to the financial side of it you know there's there's no doubt that having this conflict going on uh increases the risk of some kind of road to nuclear escalation now do i think we have a serious risk of nuclear escalation now no i don't i don't but the fact is it's above zero it's always above zero but now it's above zero plus so that's a factor and that's why you know people should be very careful and very sensible and you know idiots like lindsey graham running around going you know
Starting point is 00:59:57 send in the second airborne or whatever yeah like you know these people are insane but actually the west has been pretty smart in my opinion about the way it's handled it uh i know a lot of people are saying now in hindsight you know we should have given them the tanks from the beginning we shouldn't give them the apcs from the beginning well nobody it's kind of like covid in the first three weeks nobody knew what the hell was going on and a lot of people were rightly concerned it's like you know what if putin's just gone a bit mad and you know you you give them you give them some tanks and then he's like nukes ukraine we've seen over time with a careful strategy of giving them a bit of this giving them a bit of that giving a
Starting point is 01:00:37 bit of this and you've never really pushed hard across a line in some kind of major way that would give him a reason to escalate you know um it's been very smart from the west in my opinion uh so yeah uh that's kind of my take on ukraine i understand that a lot of people feel differently uh but you know uh that's it's an issue uh which i feel quite strongly about particularly because people spread a lot of like an awful lot of lies about ukraine you know this idea that ukraine is full of Nazis or, you know, Zelensky is some kind of Jewish Nazi or all of this Nazi crap. Like every country in Eastern Europe, I say this as someone who's Jewish, by the way, every country in Eastern Europe has a small fringe of anti-Semites on the far right.
Starting point is 01:01:20 There's probably about as many Nazis in the American military as there are in the Ukrainian one. You know, every army in the world has some people who are minded in that way. And it's been frustrating for me to have to talk about all this stuff. You know, people go, oh, America's got bio labs in ukraine yeah do you know who built them the soviet union and the reason that america came in in the 90s is they were like this small country has biological biological labs these bio labs we best have someone responsible looking after them it's the same reason that ukraine was forced by america britain uh and russia to give away its nuclear weapons back to russia because you don't want small countries having these sort of facilities that are not under control
Starting point is 01:02:02 see what i'm saying again by the way that treaty in 1994 uh those countries america russia and britain guaranteed ukraine's independence yeah because ukraine the minsk agreement correct no no the minsk agreement was in 2014 that was called the budapest memorandum that one yeah the minsk agreement was in 2014 after what happened then so it's a complicated issue but i think i've given you my take on it no and it's a very interesting take and a fresh perspective on this subject on this show particularly um it's been a lot of people talking proxy war and i think another thing that really makes americans and i'll just speak for myself particularly apprehensive about getting involved in this war is just my whole life whether it be the war in iraq
Starting point is 01:02:46 afghanistan it always seems like the u.s government and the intelligence apparatus have these ulterior motives where again i i totally feel for the plight of the ukrainian citizens and the ukrainian people when i see the us government and cia getting involved i'm like these motherfuckers have some ulterior motive that um well i hear you man and i oppose the war in afghanistan and the war in iraq and by the way i oppose them for exactly the same reason that i oppose putin's invasion of ukraine that this is kind of where i think people sometimes uh get a bit you know people go in a weird direction for me because if you oppose the war in Iraq you've got to oppose the invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin like what America did
Starting point is 01:03:30 to Iraq is exactly what Putin is doing to Ukraine do you see what I'm saying yeah and so I understand people's concerns about you know all my life I've just seen conflicts but this is different this isn't your country going and invading another country this is your country giving military support to a country that's been invaded that's the difference here do you see what I mean and look as i saw as i said to you about the french helping you guys during the american war of independence foreign powers will always get involved in these conflicts that's just how it works and so the fact that america is helping i can see why that would trouble some people but it's inevitable i mean you think the the people who are who started this conflict in 2014
Starting point is 01:04:12 in in eastern you think there were actual ukrainians who actually cared about rejoining the brilliant russian state no it was a small fringe funded by russia uh in order to create the agitation and the separatist movement that that they saw in the east of ukraine in 2014 these people would never have done anything if they didn't know for a hundred percent that they have russia's support so in that sense you could call it a proxy war from both sides both sides are funding the people that they like in this conflict uh that's what that's that's what it is man i mean ukrainians want to fight they want to defend their country and for me what matters is what they want yeah um due to bitcoin being global having built out a strong network around
Starting point is 01:04:59 the world of people in the industry that i know quite well i have a few friends in the baltics and in latvia and they very much align with what you're saying shout out to maddie mizinkshus over there well everybody in that part of the world is aligned with what i'm saying to a large extent and that's because like they know that they've lived through they get it and you could think of a country like latvia i mean people uh i was talking to my good friend eric weinstein the other day and he he's just been on joe rogan and he was saying well you know we let latvia and estonia join and that was the start of it and that's really well you because and his argument is well it's because these countries you know they were part of the soviet union and putin could never let that happen
Starting point is 01:05:40 how did these countries become part of the soviet union this is the bit that they don't teach you in history for some reason right nor neither in russia nor in america latvia estonia lithuania were taken over by the soviet union in agreement with nazi germany in 1939 they split eastern europe and actually people go with germany started world war ii that's not what happened that's not what happened nazi germany and the soviet union invaded poland at the same time and they split all of eastern europe between them and so the area that we now call western ukraine was actually eastern poland at one point and the soviets took it from from the polls slaughtered thousands of their people at exactly the same time as germany and they did the same thing in
Starting point is 01:06:31 latvia estonia and lithuania they came in they took out anyone who opposed them killed off the local elites and replaced them with their own puppets right so it's not like these are historically russian lands exactly these are just countries that the soviet union came and took over killed the people who opposed it and oppressed it by force um and so the latvians the estonians lithuanians they know what happens when russia gets strong and when russia has a leader who's managed to consolidate power it's always going to look westwards and that's why you know as generous as your country has been and it has been very generous um in percentage terms do you know which countries are the countries that are providing the most data in percentage terms
Starting point is 01:07:10 of their GDP, I mean, that are providing the greatest aid to Ukraine? Well, it's Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Poland. You know what these countries have in common? A border with Russia. What do you think they know that we don't? Yeah, no. That's, yeah, no. Yes, I agree.
Starting point is 01:07:30 I think Matthew Mazinczus, who lives in Riga, in Latvia, I think this is exactly how you would describe it. And I was actually over in Riga late last year talking to a lot of people from Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia. And, you know, there seems to be like a band of Baltic brothers getting together and saying, like, we're not letting this happen again. Then, yeah, again, bringing it back to the American side, for me, it's like, God, it's so far away. I don't want Russia to get strong. I hate all these politicians. And it's just like, fuck.
Starting point is 01:08:09 are we just throwing gas on the fire yeah no i i understand and uh when there's not a lot of trust in the political leaders in the political system as there is not uh then people are bound to think in that way and look obviously just like the russian intelligence services the cia gets up to lot of shit everybody does right uh so i i just think the this is very different to the other conflicts that you mentioned earlier and i think people sometimes forget that and like i said i understand you know why would we want to risk any sort of even raising the risk of nuclear war by even not not not not 0.1 percent for a fight somewhere where i've never been far far away way another side of the world i understand that sentiment but i think if if if you elect people
Starting point is 01:09:03 to think a bit more strategically for you as they must on behalf of your country that's something they can't just let let go because you're going to remember the world is watching the world's watching this isn't just about ukraine this is also about taiwan and it's about all sorts of other people going let's see what we can get away with let's see what we can do oh the russians can do this okay what can we do you know clearly the americans are weak clearly they're not able to to be as strong as they've been in the past you know look at how they pulled out of afghanistan right embarrassing now russia what else what else what else can we get away with well people forget i mean it got overshadowed by covid but hong kong right before um the world went into lockdown in
Starting point is 01:09:49 2020 that was taken pretty easily well that's kind of the british you know the i mean look hong kong is a difficult one for me because on the one hand i have many friends from hong kong and i completely understand that people in hong kong have got used to a different life and uh the the you know they think about the world the way we do they're pro-liberty pro-individual rights pro all of that sort of stuff and i you know i completely get that on the other hand if you look at the history of that place i mean it is in china taken from them by force by the british at the you know at the barrel on the barrel of a gun or whatever whatever the term is so the british had to give it back at some point and when they did this was always going to happen
Starting point is 01:10:35 so the best i think we could have done is get people out who who didn't want to be there which you know we've taken a lot of people in britain as refugees from hong kong was it a hundred year lease or something like that yeah it was and it wasn't given freely you know what i mean like it's not like the chinese suddenly went hey let's find some people on the other side of the world who we can give a piece of our land to yeah that's all it's very messy man history is a messy thing yeah it's not like good guys bad guys it is more complicated than that yeah yeah that's why and again putting in the context of like not trusting the political leaders and just being completely jaded from uh being a 31 year old who grew up and saw all the
Starting point is 01:11:23 bullshit from my government particularly that's why i like bitcoin and focusing my energy on that because instead of screaming and trying to get involved in something very complex that i may not understand understand bitcoin and do think it's an actionable solution to the problems that exist in the monetary world specifically i think if you fix the problems there uh it can begin having positive ripple effects in other parts of the world 100 man i mean i'm not saying specifically about bitcoin but if we addressed a lot of the economics things the economic problems we're having it would change the culture i mean a very obvious example of this is uh if housing is expensive or as it is in britain extortionately priced and young people can't buy a house or a
Starting point is 01:12:11 flat an apartment you call it and they can't pair up and they can't have kids they are not going to be rooted in reality to a large extent they're going to be living seven to a flat share on their phones and they're not gonna do the things that you do in life to become grounded to the real world like being in a relationship having kids or you know feeling like you have a stake in your society right that's what home ownership does to to to a large number of people this is like an asset you you're going to pay it off and you know 25 years from now if you behave yourself and you do things right you're going to have a thing that's worth you know a million dollars or half a million dollars or 300 000 or 100 000 whatever right that's a very grounding thing but if you
Starting point is 01:12:55 have a problem like we do in the uk where you've got a housing crisis and young people can't get on the property ladder at all and they're caught in a rent trap where they're paying masses of amounts of rent so they can never save up enough to buy their own home then you're going to create a generation of people who who don't have any investment in their own society and if you don't have investment in your society why would you act in a constructive way why wouldn't you run rampant and riot and destroy and burn things and whatever so economics matters man i agree with you yeah you turn to nihilism if uh if you don't have the prospects of a better future i mean we see that here in the united states or some crazy stat i think it's like 25 percent of millennials in
Starting point is 01:13:41 their 20s to live with their parents and yeah and then you have this dating culture i mean you mentioned like gen z is definitely beginning to rebel against that culture but i know i feel lucky to have been married for six years now with a couple of kids but i know there's a lot of people my age that are still stuck in that that dating market and getting these apps just swiping left and just dating for the fun of it and looking at it from an outsider looking at it's like very nihilistic uh does not seem like it's a very shallow and transactional world isn't that like yes you know for the fun of it uh fun is fun and that's all that it is but it's not fulfilling no you know um and so you you could argue that your single friends who are going around going
Starting point is 01:14:32 and doing that they're having a lot of fun and maybe more fun than you but the they're not going be as fulfilled by that process and i'm not saying that as a theoretical you know someone has been married for 20 years i got married at 20 but uh i just have friends who do that and i look around at them and the truth is that almost all of them would like to move to a permanent loving long-term relationship in which they can experience the full joys of that um but they don't and part of the reasons economic part is cultural part is you know people are increasingly uh unwilling to commit themselves to things um so the culture is very important as well agreed no like you said you're 40 but you're still full young i think that's another thing people don't really realize
Starting point is 01:15:22 is like it goes by very quick i can't believe i'm in my 30s but like the older you get the faster it seems to go in one day or it goes it goes quick when you have kids as you and i do uh because like my son is 10 months old i mean he feels to me like he was born about three days ago you know but it's been nearly a year no my my oldest is three now and he's beginning to ask like complex questions and he's very what is bitcoin yeah it's it's the money of the future son you're not gonna see that is ideology like i said is it is it yeah why is that no no no it could it could be no you're right it could be just a factual statement about the future the future currency could be bitcoin i think it's going to be maybe that is ideological i do have fix the
Starting point is 01:16:14 money fix the world in the audience right outside that doesn't have to be bitcoin and that i agree with by the way yeah well i don't want to take too much time i know it's getting late where you are i really appreciate you hopping on and talk about all this stuff because i do think again the framework you're trying to put out there from which to to approach these varying subjects and not get stuck in a binary mindset is very important i think it's very constructive to actually finding solutions and helping people take a step back and not scream at things and actually try to get things done i appreciate that man and you know one olive branch i'll i'll extend given that i've been uh you know mocking bitcoin this whole interview is it's funny that i actually
Starting point is 01:16:58 whenever i talk to people who are into bitcoin they are really into this mindset that's what i found for sure like they have a constructive mindset that's one thing i've definitely noticed um that it's a clear correlation to me from the people i speak to like the people who are really into bitcoin they're really into like how do we how do we get the future that we want as opposed to oh the world's shit and we must cry about it you know what i mean like i i definitely notice that for sure yeah no it's cool next time you come to austin you got to stop by the studio a lot of cool intersections between uh the bitcoin world and things like regenerative farming and different ways of schooling there's a lot of uh there's like a lot of sub verticals popping out
Starting point is 01:17:43 um yeah as well to to really bring home like solutions that people want like awesome man schooling if you don't want your kid to get indoctrinated and sexualized at a young age just go create a different school there's a lot of people taking action there as well yeah that's awesome love it all right well uh appreciate you coming on where can people find your book more about you your sub stack uh so a book is an immigrant's love letter to the west uh my youtube show is called trigonometry as in t doesn't like gun trigger the the people from texas will know what i'm talking about um and uh my sub stack is just search constantin kiss and sub stack i'm on i'm on twitter and all social media at constantin kisson awesome well i hope you
Starting point is 01:18:28 enjoy the rest of your night thank you for the conversation and uh yeah next time you come to texas let me know i appreciate my brother will do take care have yourselves a great day all right peace and love freaks Thank you.

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