The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - EMERGENCY DEBATE: What Trump’s Return Really Means for America & The Real Reason Men Voted for Trump! Is the UK About to Collapse?!
Episode Date: January 23, 2025Trump has taken the oath of office, but what does this really mean for the future of the world? The Diary Of A CEO’s first ever election round table is joined by three renowned voices: Scott Ga...lloway, Daniel Priestly and Konstantin Kisin. Konstantin Kisin, a political and social commentator known for discussing some of society's most controversial topics. Professor Scott Galloway, a renowned professor and business analyst who publicly endorsed Kamala Harris, offers sharp, data-driven critiques of Trump’s policies and their impact on democracy and the economy. Daniel Priestley, an entrepreneur and strategist, examines how Trump’s election could reshape the business landscape, addressing the challenges and opportunities for industries adapting to new policies. In this conversation, the guests and Steven discuss topics such as, how Trump will redefine masculinity, how wokeism is strengthening the right wing, what Trump’s return means for censorship, and the impact of the election on the UK. 00:00 Intro 02:31 What's the Big Picture as It Relates to This Election? 05:16 The Things Trump Is Promising Are Things That Should Happen 09:30 Has the Left Lost Its Way? 13:44 Did Trump Just Have a Better Marketing Campaign? 17:26 Millionaires Are Leaving the UK 20:18 Is the UK Still a Good Place for Business vs. the US? 23:30 Is the UK a Failing Nation? 24:57 Elon Musk's Attack on the UK 26:13 The UK's Attitude Toward the Rich Is Wrong 28:08 Is the British Attitude Holding Us Back From Our Potential? 31:13 Young Men Are Struggling in America 37:15 The Rollback of Trump's DEI Measures 44:13 Trump's Move Toward a Merit-Based Society 47:55 Masculinity and Identity Issues 52:51 Trump's Stance on Masculinity 56:04 Elon Musk and Censorship 58:49 The Power of Freedom of Speech 01:00:56 Why Has Elon Chosen Now to Raise These Issues? 01:04:00 What Does Elon Musk Want? 01:06:49 Big Tech Cosying Up to Trump 01:10:11 Living in an Echo Chamber With Algorithms 01:16:15 Social Networks Are Becoming Political Environments 01:24:16 Where Is the West Heading? 01:27:54 What's Not Getting Enough Attention Right Now? 01:33:24 Best Advice to Prepare Young Men for the Future 1% Diary Launch: 🤐👀The 1% Diary is almost back - make sure you're ready! https://bit.ly/1-Diary-Megaphone-ad-reads Follow Daniel Priestly: Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/DyXMfookeQb Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/2yBnZUwkeQb Website - https://g2ul0.app.link/HpUTO9ukeQb Follow Scott Galloway: Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/NXSe3vpRaOb Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/iSn6TsrRaOb Website - https://g2ul0.app.link/lkDgXatRaOb Follow Konstantin Kisin: Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/9dEAmZfnZMb Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/zxPCajjnZMb Website - https://g2ul0.app.link/rFcxrQlnZMb Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACBook You can purchase the The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards: Second Edition, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb Follow me: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: PerfectTed - https://www.perfectted.com with code DIARY40 for 40% off Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
The world is absolutely crazy right now.
This is one of the most interesting moments of social, cultural and economic transition that I have ever seen.
So I wanted to do something that I've never done before.
I called upon three of the leading voices on social, cultural, business and economic issues
to give their unfiltered, uncensored points of view
so that we can all make sense of all of this craziness happening before our eyes.
They don't always agree on much, but today they thrash it out to see if they can agree on something.
We go through the economy, Trump, Elon Musk, E.I, censorship, wokeism and why so many men are struggling.
Why are tens of thousands of millionaires running away from the UK?
The terrifying truth and opportunity in AI.
And I ask all of them, what is the most important thing in 2025 that nobody is talking about, with the aim of reaching clarity,
agreement and having a laugh in the process? This is the episode you probably didn't know
you needed.
I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the backend of Spotify and Apple
and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the
follow button or the subscribe button wherever you're listening to this. I would like to
make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favour and hit that subscribe button,
I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better
and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The
show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests
you want to see and continue to do in this thing we love. If you could do me that small favour and
hit the follow button, wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is
the only favour I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time. Back to this episode.
You guys are three of the best commentators, the most articulate people I know that also
have the most interesting broad experience and also I think political background. So
I wanted to talk to you about everything that's going on in the world and I wanted to ask
you guys some of the dumb questions that I ponder alone with myself and with my dumb
friends in my WhatsApp group. It feels to me that the world is at a real
moment of transition in many regards. So like social transition, cultural transition, economic
transition. And I think the US has been a catalyst for all of that. So that's why I
wanted to have this conversation today. We've got an American here, Scott, I think Scott's
the only American here. We've got Constantine, we've got Daniel, who are two Brits, but spend
a lot of time between America as well.
And so I want to come to Scott first and ask Scott a question, which is a very big broad question,
which is from your perspective, Scott, you know, when I talk about this feeling of transition that seems to be like almost inside my chest,
that we're at a really historic moment, what is your analysis on this? What is the big picture here?
What's happened over the last three, four, five, six, seven months? And how is that going to impact all of us around the world?
Well, if you think of the US as setting the tone economically and maybe even culturally for the West, there's definitely a reversion away from people feel that quote unquote wokeism, and I don't like to use that
word, but I'll use it here, was this sort of overcorrection to systemic racism and then
it began to cause more damage than it was, or cause more problems than it was solving.
And I think there's been a serious kind of lurch back, if you will, whether it's executive actions, declaring the border,
a state of emergency, you know, stuff around saying that gender is a thing, there's male and female.
And most of these issues, the actually American public supports, I would say on a more
cynical level, America used to be a platform for prosperity, the protection of civil rights, the projection
of women's rights and power and democracy abroad.
And I would argue that it feels like a pretty quick transition to almost like a, you know,
I call it a kleptocracy, but America has become a platform for acquiring wealth and then leveraging
that wealth as a means or a proxy of power.
And the ultimate example of that was the launch of two meme coins, the Trump coin and the Melania coin,
the day before the presidency, such that this conversation could have already or might happen this week.
And I'll finish here. President Trump, it's Vlad.
We're thinking about stabilizing our currency or trying to send the outflows of our of our reserves. So we're thinking about pulsing in about
600 billion rubles
into the Trump coin which based on my economists estimation would take the value of it to a 20 or 30 billion dollar market cap
Making you one of the wealthiest men in the world
Mr. Trump and none of this would be disclosable or transparent. Also, in unrelated news, we'd really appreciate you seizing
arm shipments to Ukraine. So I think we've gone kind of full kleptocracy is the way I
would describe it.
Are you optimistic, Scott?
Well, I'm a glass half empty kind of guy. I don't I don't know if I'm just getting older But no, I don't I don't see a man convicted of sexual abuse or found liable who inspired an insurrection
Retaking the White House is a point of light for the American experience
Constantine I
Yes, I suspect you'd have a slightly different view and all of the above
How are you feeling about everything that happened yesterday?
Did you watch the inauguration?
What is your big picture 30,000 feet view?
I think it's incredibly unwise to make bold predictions about what's going to happen over
the next six to seven months.
I do think what America had at the election and what the election of Donald Trump represents
is something that we in the UK don't have, which is choice.
They had a very clear choice between two very different perspectives on the world, between
two very different approaches, between two very different candidates.
And ultimately, criticisms of President Trump are necessary and legitimate.
Of course they are.
But at the end of the day, I believe having spent quite a lot of time in America around
election time and also just generally and traveling around real America, not just in
DC and LA and New York, the reason that he was elected was that the American people are
not prepared to accept what Europeans have decided they're prepared to accept, which
is managed decline.
The American people do not want their country to become weaker.
They do not want it to become poorer.
They do not want to impoverish their fellow citizens through net zero.
What they want is their country to be great, their country to be powerful, their country
to be influential.
The economic realities for most Americans are not really reflected in the figures that
we are told.
So when people talk about inflation, the reality of people's lives on the ground is that the
cost of living has gone up very, very significantly over the last few years.
And that's not always reflected directly in the overall inflation figure that we're shown,
because certain things are much more influential in people's lives than others.
And so whether the decision to elect President Trump ends up being this positive thing for
which there should be lots of optimism is a matter of the next four years.
Are we going to see a presidency that really does everything it promises?
And by the way, if you look at the things that Donald Trump is promising, I think whether
you're left or right, you have to acknowledge that they are things that are worth doing.
Having a secure border so that people don't come into your country illegally is a basic
duty of government.
Economic prosperity is a basic duty of government. Economic prosperity is a basic duty of government.
Withdrawing America from a kind of simultaneously aggressive but weak posture around the world
where America sort of says, yeah, yeah, we're going to get involved in these foreign conflicts,
but we're not actually going to then practically help Ukraine win that war is a kind of stupid
position on both
whichever side you're on.
So on all of these things, and of course, you know, Scott mentioned workiness.
I think he's absolutely right that there is a massive backlash happening around the world
because lots and lots of people who were completely apolitical until the last three or four years
are meant to make me until 2016, just feel
like the world has gone crazy and suddenly they're supposed to pretend that men can change
sex and become women and now they're entitled to be in female prisons and you know if your
teenager says that they are the opposite sex, you're supposed to chop their breasts off
and all of this other stuff that ordinary people just look at and go this is crazy.
Like I am liberal but this isn't liberal, this is crazy. Like, I am liberal, but this isn't liberal.
This is some kind of weird thing that's going on.
And I see the backlash against all of that
all over the Western world.
And I think Donald Trump signifies
that people are fed up of that.
And I have been warning for a very long time
that if the woke left continues to exercise this
level of influence on our public debate, the reaction will be the rise of the right.
And Donald Trump is one of the most diplomatic and pleasant versions of what you're likely
to get if the left keeps going crazy.
We will see what challenges the world throws at him over the next
four years and whether he is capable of responding to them. Scott, has the left lost its way,
in your view? And if so, how did that happen? And just to respond on some of Constantine's points
about Trump being the best of a sort of right wing collective, are we going to see right wing sort of
ideology spread throughout the Western world over the coming years? What's your take on all of the sort of right wing collective? Are we going to see right wing sort of
ideology spread throughout the Western world over the coming years? What's
your take on all of the above?
You definitely, you know, we Democrats, we get it right, and then we just go
too damn far. And, and so I look at I'm a professor on a campus, di 60 years ago,
there were 12 black people at Princeton, Yale, and Harvard combined.
That was a problem.
Race-based affirmative action makes sense.
This year more than half of Harvard's freshman class identifies as non-white.
But 70% of those non-whites come from dual-income homes in the upper quintile of income-earning
homes.
The academic gap between black and white used to be double what it was between rich and poor. It's now flipped. So DEI was a good idea that quite frankly has gone insane and now just represents the same racism it was trying to do away with.
So and then we created two candidates who were the only candidates who could make each other viable.
Vice President Harris, given the hand she dealt with,
did the best she did.
I think President Biden should be buried
in a crypt entitled narcissist who decided
that it made sense for him to go back on his pledge
to be a transition candidate
and gave us a British style election timing
on the democratic side in a marketplace
where you need time and money.
So we did not have a great candidate. Democratic side in a marketplace where you need time and money.
We did not have a great candidate.
There is an understandable swing back from what is an overcorrection around some of these
issues.
We gave them a huge issue with transgender rights.
There's more peddle players in California than transgender people, and yet the Democrats
decided to conflate it with the civil rights movement and think that it was okay
for a woman who transitioned, a transgender woman,
to enter a bicycle race and finish five minutes
before everybody else and then we all bark up the same tree
and decide that it's inspiring.
And parents all over the nation are saying,
what has, you know, we've literally gone crazy.
Where I would disagree a little bit with Constantine is that America choosing economic growth and
prosperity, there are 190 sovereign nations in the world.
189 would change places with America over the last four years.
We hit 71 new record highs in the markets.
97% of all AI, we've created more market capitalization in a seven mile radius of Essovo International
Airport than Europe's created in the last 20 years. AI. We've created more market capitalization in a seven mile radius of SFO International Airport
than Europe's created in the last 20 years. We have the lowest inflation in the G7. We have the
highest growth. We've grown 10% since 2020. That's triple the rate of Europe. Biden was unable to
communicate any of that effectively because there's this psychological dynamic that when your wages go
up, you credit your own written character. And when the price of cereal goes up, you blame the president. Now, similar to the future,
or how William Gibson described the future, it's here. It's just not evenly distributed.
Prosperity is unprecedented in the US over the last four years. It just wasn't evenly distributed.
Now, having said that, in America, you can stop working in August, and you've produced
more and made more money than you have in Europe the whole year.
And it has gotten better.
It says things are less bad than anywhere in the world in the US.
Biden was unable to communicate it.
And then talking about how great the economy is when rents were skyrocketing, tuition was
going up, it was an ineffective strategy.
But I don't think it's fair to say Americans
chose prosperity. We have prosperity. I would argue that quite frankly, some of the Republican
ideals around deficit spending, which are nothing but taxes on future generations pulled forward.
I mean, we'll see how that works. But his signature policies, a clampdown on immigration,
tariffs, these things are wildly inflationary. So
Constantine is right, it's going to be difficult. You don't know
what's going to happen. But it feels to me, I would argue that
my favorite appointment in the Trump administration in the
adult room is the 10 year bond, which is going to say, sorry,
girlfriend, when I believe the president tries to implement
some of these economic policies.
Constantine, is that true? Because what I heard there is that effectively Trump had a better
marketing campaign. And that reality is somewhat different from what the Americans were sold in the
in the last election cycle.
Well, politics is about marketing. And Trump is the marketer in chief. He's very good at branding
and selling ideas. And partly, that's what politics is about.
But in terms of the economy, I think Scott is entirely right.
One of the reasons I admire America so much, the sense of dynamism and economic growth
and the desire to create things and build things.
It's an observation I've had every time I've been there.
If you have a successful restaurant in the UK, you go, well, I've got a successful restaurant.
In America, if you have a successful restaurant, you open a second one and a third one and you create a chain.
Their attitude to business more broadly is fantastic, and I love it. But I think the
difference is that I don't think Americans were comparing the American economy under Joe Biden to
the European economies. They were comparing the American economy under Joe Biden to the American economy under Donald Trump in his first term and also what they expect him to do for the
future. When they look at the fact that he's got real business leaders in government now,
like Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk talking about government efficiency, we have to admit that all
Western countries have a massively bloated civil service, what
we call civil service in the UK, and the administrative state in the US, that wastes a huge amount
of money, that produces very little in terms of output in many cases, and that needs to
be slimmed down.
And people, I think, are very excited about that.
And when I talk to business leaders in America, including ones that were never on the
Trump train, so to speak, so many of them went over to his side in this election cycle, because
they just felt that he was going to continue to accelerate American growth and continue to
deliver prosperity for the American people. Now, Scott's point about tariffs and all of these other things,
you know, I've listened to Donald Trump enough now
to know that you not necessarily,
should not necessarily be taking him literally.
I think many of the things he says
are negotiation tactics and signaling.
So when he says, I'm going to build this or do that
or do this, you have to sort of read between the lines when he says, you know, this will be the worst thing that you just go, he's saying to people like you better work with me.
Otherwise, this is going to work out badly for you on all of these things.
And so it remains to be seen whether he's successful in those tactics of getting what he wants.
Look, America is always going to be an unequal society.
It's designed in a way that is going to make it that way.
In America, the focus is how do we grow the pie?
In Europe, the focus is how do we divide it up
so everyone gets their fair little share, right?
So Americans are about expanding the pie
and then the people who bake the pie
get as much of it as they possibly can.
But the question is, can there be a sense in America and then the people who bake the pie get as much of it as they possibly can.
But the question is, can there be a sense in America that the American dream is alive?
That you do not have to work three gig economy jobs to pay your rent?
That you're going to be able to buy a house?
That you're going to be able to afford to have children?
You're going to be able to raise a family perhaps on a single income, something that most people only dream about nowadays.
That's really what this whole economic conversation is about.
And we will see over the next four years
if Donald Trump is able to slightly even change
the direction of travel towards those things
that actually Americans of my generation and older
used to take for granted as the promise of the country that they live in?
I've thought a lot about this over the last couple of weeks
in particular, because we're hearing these big headlines
in national papers in the UK that millionaires
are leaving the UK in historic numbers.
I think it's 10,800 millionaires left last year,
which is an increase of about 160% versus the previous year.
And the general sentiment in terms of business confidence in the UK is at a several year low.
So I think it's the lowest it's been since just post pandemic.
There's this, I think it's the Institute of Accountants, they call up a thousand accountants every year,
and they run a survey to see how much confidence they have in business in this country.
And it's fallen 14 points to 0.2% confidence in terms of business.
But there's this bigger narrative emerging amongst my entrepreneurial friends
that if you want to start a business right now, the best place to be in the world is to be in America.
It's to get over to America and to leave the UK.
Now, Dan, how does that square? I know you have an accelerator, you speak to lots of entrepreneurs.
How does that sort of compare or contrast with what you're seeing at the
moment?
Yeah, 100%. The value proposition for the UK has dropped through the floor. Very, very
high tax. The ecosystem of business is in decline. Some of the smartest people are now
in Dubai. Some incredible creators that I know have moved to Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai.
Many are going to the USA.
So if people are interested in bigger markets and bigger opportunities, they're into the USA.
If they're interested in lower tax and more fringe opportunities, they're in the Middle East.
And essentially, you know, the UK hasn't found a place in the world.
I think there are three business models the UK could go for, which is either the head
office of Europe, which is what we were when we were inside the EU, and everyone used to
come here to build a European business.
We could be the back office of the USA, so the incubator for the USA.
A lot of smart companies get to their first 50 million of value
here in the UK and then sell to a US private equity firm or US listed company. And a lot of US
companies are now actually coming here to poach talent or to outsource things to the UK more
cheaply than they could do it in the US. The wages in the UK are through the floor compared
to what you would pay in the US, especially in tech roles. So very smart people in the
UK are massively devalued. And then the third option would be to be an independent tax haven
and to go with the low crime, low tax model of Dubai, Singapore, you know, those kind of options.
So we haven't really picked one of those three yet.
We're still, you know, all these years after Brexit and we haven't said which of those three models we want to adopt.
Scott, you moved here a couple of years ago to the UK.
And despite everything that's going on in the UK, are you still bullish on this being
a place for entrepreneurship in business? I was looking at some stats before we started
this conversation around the sort of key areas of concern for me. Business stats I've talked
about there, the drop in business confidence, the entrepreneur exodus that we're seeing,
but things like knife crime in the UK are up 81% over the last decade,
which I think is a symptom probably of something else.
And one of the big things I think a lot about
as an entrepreneur at the moment is artificial intelligence.
And our investment in artificial intelligence
from a global perspective is down about 2000%
versus a country like America.
So you've moved here, you've brought your family here.
Are you bullish on the UK versus the US
from an entrepreneur's perspective?
So the question I get most frequently when I speak here is to compare and contrast the US with the UK, and I use a personal anecdote.
My parents immigrated to the US from Glasgow and London when they were 19 and 22.
They took enormous risks. I've been an entrepreneur my whole life.
I'd like to think that a lot of my success isn't my fault, that I inherited sort of
that risk-taking DNA.
And when I speak to people in the UK, I say the primary difference is you're the ones
that stayed.
And that is it kind of comes down to a risk appetite.
The US has five times per capita the number of entrepreneurs.
It has five times the dollar volume per startup.
There's $5 million in venture capital waiting to be deployed for every startup in the US
versus 1 million in Europe.
I love what Constantine said about a restaurant.
I went into this great little restaurant in Seoul a few weeks ago called Dig In, and I
loved it so much.
I left my card and said, can you have the owner?
I'd like to open another one.
Does he need money? I just would never do that here. I thought that was a really interesting insight.
And the collision of risk, crazy ideas that occasionally become crazy genius and technology
and intellectual property and great universities results in a company that no one had heard
of five years ago being worth more than the entire UK stock market and Nvidia.
So there's just an enormous difference.
The way I would summarize my impression of the UK economy, I'll just say London, I have
no experience in it.
I don't go anywhere that's not walking distance from Marlboro.
So my bubble is pretty opaque.
But the way I would describe the economy here is I love the term the Butler economy.
And that is all the money I see being made here is people servicing wealth created somewhere
else.
Yeah, you're either in financial services servicing rich people, you're either opening
a restaurant or hospitality servicing rich people.
But I don't see a lot of organic wealth creation
I interviewed the two quote-unquote
Inventors of AI at one of your prestigious universities. My first question is how the hell were you not able to make any money if you invented AI?
Why haven't you be able to capture any money? But just for your listeners my
summation of
Europe versus the US after molesting the earth for the last 35 years is US is still
the best place to make money and Europe is still the best place to spend it.
Is this a failing nation, Scott?
I think you have too much going for you to be described as a failing nation.
You still have amazing universities.
It's the second, London's still the second best city in the world.
Premier League, it's an unbelievable export.
I know how ridiculous
that sounds. People want to be here. There's still rule of law, rule of play. You still produce amazing
rock and roll. I just don't see how you could say this is a failed. I would argue that the
second only to our entry into Iraq, the greatest self-inflicted wound was Brexit.
An American can't understand why you would decide to increase your prices while reducing
productivity in one fell swoop.
It's difficult for us to wrap our heads around some of the economic decisions the UK has
made, but I think a lot of people are kind of betting or hoping that the UK begins to
grow again.
So I'm in a weird way, I'm sort of,
I would call myself cautiously optimistic about the UK.
I think at some point it registers,
it begins to occupy the place it should command, if you will.
Constantine, I would ask the same question to you as well.
Do you think the UK is a failing nation
and Scott describes self-inflicted wounds there?
I've heard you speak of self-inflicted wounds
when you talk more broadly about the West
and what the West needs to do to turn itself around.
And also just layering a third point on top of that,
which is somewhat linked to this,
is Elon Musk has taken a particular interest in the UK
over the last month in particular,
and he's started to describe it online,
it seems, as a failing nation.
What's your view?
Well, I'm glad you asked me about Elon Musk, because the thing that I love most about the
media having this massive meltdown about, oh no, these Americans are interfering in
our political, these are the same media commentators who are constantly banging on about American
politics and saying, Donald Trump needs to do this, you need to vote for this, like all of this stuff is ridiculous. The reality is we
download our culture, our politics, our music, almost everything from America,
right? America has become what Britain used to be, which is the center of
Western civilization. And my request and ask and begging of British people is if
we're going to download American
culture and politics, let's at least take the good stuff instead of all this terrible
woke shit that we downloaded from them, the DEI and all this other nonsense, and actually
take the entrepreneurial spirit and all these other things that are really great about America,
the optimism, the positivity, the willingness to have a go, to take a risk,
as Scott was talking about.
So I wish we took more of that.
And it speaks to your question about are we a failing nation.
Look, I think it's a deliberately inflammatory question, which I don't want to kind of actually
accept in that way.
But what I think we should acknowledge is, are we trending up or are we trending down?
And when you talk about over 10,000 millionaires have left, I hear that through a normal British
person's ear.
And I worry that there's quite a lot of British people who will hear that and say, oh, good,
all of these rich parasites have left.
Because that's our attitude in the UK to a very large extent.
We see wealthy people not as what they are,
which is for the most part, not everybody,
but for the most part, people who've created
a tremendous amount of value for their fellow human beings
and as a result of that have been rewarded.
We see them because we have
this history of the land did gentry and so to us a millionaire is someone who has these
ill-gotten gains that they don't deserve. That is not really the world we live in. When
I talk to wealthy people in this country and pretty much everywhere else, for the most
part, especially in the Western world, these are people who've created something
that has fundamentally helped other human beings
do something better, do something easier,
buy products cheaper, whatever it is.
That's who the successful people really are.
And we just need an attitude shift.
That's what we should be downloading from America.
What we should be saying inside our heads is,
this person is successful
because they've helped other people. Great. We want, how do we get more of those people into our
country? And I'm afraid I'm telling you something that you know better than anyone, Stephen. If you
don't have entrepreneurs in your country creating businesses and creating jobs, the economy is going
to stagnate for the rest of eternity. We have to get smart, talented, driven people into our country instead of chasing them out.
Dan, I know this is a subject that you're very passionate about and
Constantine's articulated it really, really well. I've seen lots of your posts about this subject,
Dan. What are you seeing? And is it true that the British attitude is a form of self-harm that's
holding us back from our potential?
There are definitely attitudinal factors, but you'll also get the most incredibly entrepreneurial
people here in London. London is a melting pot for creativity. You've got sitting in
one city, you've got people who are phenomenal at media, finance, technology, entertainment,
politics, defense, like all of this. Like if you take the best of LA and Washington and New York and Miami and kind of start moving
it into one city, you know, you get elements of that in London.
It's a very diverse city from that point of view and it creates an entrepreneurial melting
pot.
The issue is taxes.
Nobody wants to pay 60% of their income in taxes.
And as soon as you hit, you know, in the US,
you don't hit the top tax rate
until you are six times the average wage.
Here in the UK, it's two and a half times.
So as soon as you're two and a half times the average wage,
you're in real trouble.
There are so many people in the UK
who deliberately hold their income at £50,000 because after
£50,000 you get taxed 40% of your income.
So people just give up and they say, I know some really smart, really talented people
who could be earning a lot more and they refuse to pay the 40% rate.
So they keep everything small because they don't want to go from 20% to 40% at the 50
grand rate, which is crazy.
And I've employed people who have said, can I have a day off a week rather than going
over that threshold?
So that's a huge issue, the tax issue.
The company rate tax is high.
The corporate capital gains rate is taxed very high.
The VAT is high.
The council tax is high.
All of these additional taxes just keep piling up.
And then the other cost at the moment, if we want to have an AI economy, we need cheap electricity.
One thing that Trump has committed to is really, really cheap energy.
There is no such thing as a fast growth, high, you know, high octane economy that has expensive energy.
Cheap energy equals fast growth. And we have the most expensive energy. Cheap energy
equals fast growth. And we have the most expensive energy in the
world. We can't run data centers here, because the energy cost is
going to be too high. So if we want to have an AI driven
economy, we can't do it with windmills and solar panels that
have got frost all over them.
Scott, you look like a lot of thoughts are going through your head following those two comments. What are you thinking?
Well, with respect to energy, Trump issued an executive order calling it an energy crisis.
Gasoline in the US on an inflation adjusted basis is less expensive than it was 50 years ago. We
are now the largest oil producer in the world. I would argue that we have a housing crisis
and that the executive order should have been around that. Just going back to the U.S., and I'm curious at the same dynamics and whether
Constantine and Daniel agree with this, I believe this, the election in the U.S. was supposed to be
a referendum on women's rights. Women's rights did not show up. This was a referendum on young men,
in my view. And that is, if you look at the two cohorts that swung most from blue to red versus 2020,
two of the three cohorts other than Latinos was people under the age of 30 who in the US are 24% less wealthy than they were 40 years ago,
people over the age of 70 or 72% wealthier.
Our tax code is basically an attempt to shove money from the young to the old.
And two, 45 to 64 year old women, who I would affectionately describe as their mother.
And that is when your son's in the basement vaping and playing video games, and I think a lot about struggling young men, you don't give a flying fuck about territorial sovereignty in the Ukraine,
or Ukraine, excuse me, or transgender rights. All you know is your kid isn't doing well.
And 210 times a day, your kid's getting a notification that somebody he knows is on a Gulfstream or
partying in St. Barts and it's not him or her. We not only have young people not doing as well,
this pornographic wealth is just shoved in their face. You end up with, in my opinion,
kind of a young struggling young men.
No group has fallen further faster in the world, I would argue, than young men in America.
They are, if you go into a morgue in the United States and there's five people who died by
suicide, four of them are men.
One in three men under the age of 30 has a girlfriend, two in three women under the age
of 30 has a boyfriend.
Why?
You think that's mathematically impossible?
Because women are dating older
because they want more economically
and emotionally viable men.
There's one in five men live at home at the age of 30,
one in three under the age of 25.
They're not having sex.
They're more obese, they're more depressed.
When women don't have a relationship,
they oftentimes channel that energy
into their professional lives.
More women owns single women owned homes in
the US and single men, women in urban areas under the age of 30
are making more money than men. When men don't have the guard
rails of a relationship or a job or being in school, they pour
that energy sometimes into unproductive things,
misogyny, nationalism or extreme nationalism, conspiracy theory.
In some, they become really shitty
citizens. They become sequestered from society. So I'm worried in the US our biggest threat
is a new species of asexual, asocial young men who are incredibly dangerous have lost,
have opted out of America. 60% of 30 year olds who have one child in America, now it's
27%. So people, I think in the US,
and I'm just a genuine question, I don't know if it's the same problem here, our tax policies have
taken money from the young, stuffed them in the pockets of old people, so Nana and Pop-Up can
upgrade from Carnival to Crystal Cruises. Meanwhile, young people can't afford education,
they can't afford housing. And we especially see this really acute emerging crisis among young men who are just opting
out of America, who don't even want to try and date, don't even want to enroll in school,
don't want to even try and get a job, just stick in their basements and go on Reddit
or Discord or why go try and shower or work out and get a relationship when you have you
porn?
Why get a job when you can trade stocks or crypto on Coinbase or Robinhood?
I think this is, in my opinion, this is the most dangerous trend in America right now.
It was almost like demonizing men for decades has consequences.
I mean, this is what's been happening.
Men are the root of all evil, the root of all evil, the root of all evil.
Every advert is about, you know,
the woman is strong and capable, the guy's pathetic.
In every movie, the woman's kicking ass
and the man is pathetic.
This has been going on for decades.
It's a cultural thing as well as an economic thing.
And many of us have been saying
that when you take meaning and opportunity away from men,
if you create an education system
that punishes boys for being boys,
if you create a society in which
traditional masculine virtues become vices,
then you will create exactly the sort of thing
that Scott is talking about.
It's a terrible thing that has been done.
Having said that, my message is always the same
to young men who I hope are listening, which is the answer to your problems is never going to be,
as Scott says, porn and this and that. The answer to your problems is going to take responsibility,
go out and get a job or create a business and actually make your life better. No one's coming
to save you. No one's coming to help you. There is no, the sort of programs that we have for women
where we sort of go, well, you know,
let's give them an opportunity here.
None of that's happening for men.
It's not going to happen because for evolutionary reasons,
we just don't feel sorry for men the way that we do for women.
That's a reality.
I know it sucks, but the answer for men
is gonna be the answer that's always been the answer for men,
which is for you to get off the sofa, to get off the couch, and go out and actually do and create and build and find your own way through it.
Even if you have to acknowledge that the society you live in has been conditioned for quite a long time to think that you're a piece of shit,
because you happen to have the genitalia that you do.
Now, that I think is the harsh reality of it.
And I think Scott is right to point this out as a problem.
And I hope that we start to have both in terms of economic policy, but in terms of also just
the cultural conversations and the way we talk about these issues, we come back to something
that human beings have known through the entire history of our species, which is men and women are both good and need to work together in order to thrive and
succeed together, in order to have families, in order to have children, and
in order for us to have healthy communities and healthy societies, you
need healthy femininity and you need healthy masculinity and they need to come
together and work together. That's what we're supposed to do. And these stupid gender wars and this idea
that men as a group are this and women as a group are that,
all of that just needs to end.
I was watching last night as Trump sat there
signing all of those executive orders.
And I also watched his inauguration speak
where he said, we will forge a society
that is colourblind and merit based.
And he signed a bunch of executive orders last night to eliminate a variety of different
DEI programs in the federal government directing agencies to dismantle these practices within
60 days. And then over the last couple of months, we've seen Metta come out and dismantle
and reverse some of their DEI programs. We've seen McDonald's, Walmart, Ford, Harley-Davidson, Boeing, Amazon, Toyota. It feels like there's a real shift happening in both identity politics,
but also in the corporate environment that those identity politics have really emerged from.
Are you supportive of Trump's move to roll back DEI measures?
supportive of Trump's move to roll back DEI measures?
So I think there's a lot of nuance here. I would argue in universities, we've DEI is used as a giant misdirect from people
such as myself, we're enforcers of the caste system and wake up
every morning and look in the mirror and ask ourselves the
same question, how do I increase my compensation while decreasing
my accountability? And what I found is the ultimate strategy is to create an LVMA trajectory that's bullshit, a leader strategy, where
Dartmouth sits on an endowment of $8 billion and lets in 500 kids. So the conversation
around who gets in is a misdirect from the important question that is how many. If you
are not growing your endowment or your freshman class faster than population,
you should lose your tax-free status.
We should be letting in more gay kids, more trans kids,
more white Republicans from rural state.
You know who doesn't talk about DEI?
Junior colleges, because there's no admissions.
They don't have a problem with DEI.
So I think DEI on campus has ended up eating its own tail,
started out with the right idea.
Now it's nothing.
And I would argue the same is somewhat true of the Democratic Party.
I went to the Democratic National Convention.
On the DNC.org website, it lists 17 special interest groups and it says explicitly who
we serve, Asian Pacific Islanders, seniors, veterans, black Americans, the disabled.
It basically lists, I added this up, 76% of the population.
And when you say you're actively advocating for 76% of the population, you're not advocating
for 76% of the population, you're discriminating against the 24%.
It's gone too far.
I would argue in the workplace, having served on seven public company boards, and I'm going
to do a lot of boasting here because I'm desperate for all of your affirmation, and 12 private
company boards, there's still work to be done in the private sector.
There still is a cycle.
40% of all venture capitalists and probably 70% or 80% of all venture capital deployed
are white guys from just two universities, Stanford and Harvard.
So I would argue universities, it's gotten out of control.
I'd love to see the DEI apparatus disassembled along with the ethics department, the sustainability
department, the leadership department.
These are all bullshit where we hire formerly important people with no standards.
They never get fired.
It just translates to more student debt.
In the boardroom, in corporations, in certain sectors, I do think there is a need to be
thoughtful about broadening the aperture of the lens and bringing in people who are underrepresented.
There's still a dearth of women raising venture cap.
So I think it's nuanced based on sector.
But to just say all DEI is bad, I want to move to where the University
of California did in 1997. They don't have race-based affirmative action. They have
adversity-based affirmative action. I'm a beneficiary of affirmative action. I had
something called Pell Grants. I was raised by a single immigrant mother who lived and died a
secretary. So I got grants. I had unfair advantage because I came from a household
that was low income. And I think that there should be affirmative action and I think it
should be based on color, but that color is green. The poor need our help. The moment
you start advocating for special advantage based on any external factors, I think at
this point in our society, it
probably causes more problems than it solves. That's exactly right. That's
exactly right, Stephen. And I think if we take a step back and look at why DEI has
become such a big part of the conversation, it's precisely because
instead of addressing the reality of people's lives, which is some people are
disadvantaged and some people are advantaged.
Actually, what we've mainly done,
and Scott alluded to at the very beginning of our discussion
is we've given a leg up to very wealthy,
ethnic minority people from successful families,
and their children now get into prestigious universities,
which they probably would have done anyway, some of them,
because they come from very advanced backgrounds
and the kids that are growing up in poverty,
black and white, have no shot whatsoever.
But the reason that it's become such a big issue
around the Western world,
actually I don't think it's the nuances
that we've delved into here, but actually something else,
which is we have created the most ethnically diverse societies in history.
And what I mean by that is not that we've created societies in which there are large
groups of people who are different from each other, but for the first time probably in
human history, we've created societies in which there is a lot of ethnic diversity and
there is no overt discrimination against some groups of people in the sense of, you know,
the imperial societies in the past would have had one dominant ethnic group, which is, you
know, the Russians in the Soviet Union or the Turks in the Ottoman Empire or the Brits
in the British Empire, whatever.
That was the ethnic group that was like the dominant one.
And everybody else was a kind of second class citizen and everybody knew it, right?
We don't have that anymore.
We have highly diverse societies where people of every single background exist in which
we have this idea that we're all supposed to be equal.
And when we have programs that explicitly discriminate
against people, there were times when the discrimination
was explicit against black people.
Well, we've gone full circle now
where the discrimination was going the other way
in university admissions, in hiring,
in corporate America, in government,
in all sorts of things.
You know, in this country, the government, in all sorts of things.
In this country, the BBC has internships that aren't available to white people, etc.
When you get to that point, as Scott said earlier on, everyone just goes, look, I know
I'm not supposed to say this, but the reality is this is racism.
This is a form of racism, and I thought we were trying to get away from the racism. So to the extent that the elimination of DEI is about creating a merit-based society in
which people are given an opportunity because they're skilled and talented and they have
the potential to actually achieve things and create wealth.
We all know this.
We all employ people.
How many of us are thinking about the races of the people we hire?
I don't think we think about that at all.
What we're thinking about is I run a business,
I need the very best possible person for this job
at the price I'm willing to pay.
I don't care if they are purple, green, blue, white,
whatever, it doesn't matter.
What matters is are we getting the best person for the job?
And my concern about identity politics has always been
that if we do not adopt that worldview,
then what we will do is create a worldview
in which we have different racial groups
competing with each other on the basis of race.
And that is a very, very dangerous mix
for a multi-ethnic society like ours,
which is why I've been begging people
to let go of this stupid idea of identity politics,
and to say, first and foremost, we are all Brits,
or we are all Americans.
We have this umbrella identity under which we all operate,
and our personal ethnicity or sex or whatever is secondary to that and
actually for the purposes of employment, for the purposes of college admission, etc. is
irrelevant.
Yes, if there is disadvantage, if we grew up in a single parent home with a low income
we may need some extra support there.
If we had terrible schooling or our education was not good, we may need extra support.
If there's certain things that make it easier for us because of the disadvantages we've
had to fulfill our talent and potential, I'm all for that.
But what we've created so far, and that's why I'm delighted it's being eliminated,
is an anti-meritocratic system which says we don't care what you bring to the workplace,
we don't care whether you deserve this place, we don't care what you bring to the workplace. We don't care whether you deserve this place
and we don't care about the potential you have.
Actually, we just needed a insert category tick box
to fill this slot.
And you filled it.
It doesn't really matter that you're not doing
your job very well because now we can say,
we're a diverse company.
I don't care about that and we shouldn't care about that
as a society and thank God that's now gone. Yeah, I think the worst part about it too is that it
calls into question when someone does succeed and they're from a diverse background, you know,
calls into question why they got that job in the first place, which I think is horrible.
You know, I just hired from two candidates, the final two candidates was a guy and a woman.
I would hate if the woman felt that she got the job because she's a woman and not because
she's best.
It turns out she was by far the best in the process.
And I would love for her to know that there was absolutely nothing that changed our view.
We weren't trying to fill a position with a woman.
We were trying to fill the position with the best
and she should know she was the best.
I think the contrast that was really fascinating
was between Trump's website and the Democrats website.
So in the Democrats website, it was who we're for,
which was what Scott was saying,
but the Trump's website was the 20 things we're gonna do.
And it was just a list of 20, these are the 20 action points.
This is what we're going to do this, we're going to do this,
we're going to do this, we're going to do this.
So it was a to-do list as opposed to the identities that we want to advantage list.
And I think that was the choice.
At the beginning, Constantine, you said America had a choice.
And for me, when I looked at those two websites, I saw this choice between the
identities being the main thing or the to do list being the main thing and very different
approaches.
Scott, I am when I was listening to that Zuckerberg interview talking about masculinity and identity
issues, one of the lines he said, and that sounded like something you've said on my show
before, where he said, I think having a culture that celebrates that aggression, a little bit more
talking about masculinity has its own merits that are really positive. Now, Mark Zuckerberg isn't
necessarily someone that I saw closely aligning to your worldview. Am I right in thinking that
that's something you agree with? Because I remember you saying to me, you think people should be able to walk in a room and
kick everyone's ass.
What I've said on your show is that I think the male form, especially under the age of 30,
with its bone structure, incredible double twitch muscle, and then this amazing,
amazing chemical called testosterone, you're going to look back at your 25 year old self and think, why wasn't I a fucking monster like Steve Barley?
And also, there is some masculinity when Russian soldiers pour over the border in Ukraine.
You want some of that big deck energy that Daniel was talking about.
In the case of Zuckerberg, I don't think I don't think he really understands an aspirational
view of masculinity.
I think when he couches immediately kind of trying to kiss Trump's ass because Trump
threatened to put him in prison and what he used to call moderation, he's now calling
censorship and when you have an algorithm that elevates incendiary hateful content,
I would not describe that as masculinity. For me, masculinity comes down to protection,
providing, and procreation.
And I don't think it's a,
I think to talk about gendering a workplace
in the context of trying to excuse
a total elimination of what I would think
is probably healthy moderation,
I imagine Daniel and Constance
might have a different view. I think he's just couching his supplicant obsequious kiss ass
behavior under the auspices of masculinity. It just doesn't ring true for me. And I'm not sure
we need to man up or fem up organizations and companies right now. When I talk about masculinity,
or FEMUP organizations and companies right now. When I talk about masculinity,
if I say at a conference,
oh, women are better managers,
everyone goes, yes, that's right, that's right, right?
That's okay.
If I say men are more risk aggressive
and make better entrepreneurs,
you're a misogynist, you're out.
And the reality is men and women bring different attributes.
But the masculinity and femininity,
I think masculinity is a wonderful thing.
I think we need a different image of it.
I think people born as male have an easier time leaning into those things.
Having said that, I work at a CrossFit with a bunch of lesbian firefighters.
They bring great masculine energy.
And they could carry my ass out of a fire.
So a lot of men demonstrate wonderful feminine qualities.
A lot of women demonstrate wonderful feminine qualities. A lot of women demonstrate wonderful masculine qualities.
I don't think these things are sequestered to anyone born as a specific gender.
What I think, when I talk about masculinity, I don't talk about it in the role of corporations.
I think that's fraught with risk and not worth talking about.
It should be about shareholder value or stakeholder value.
I think young men need a code.
We're going to church less, we have fewer relationships.
So what's the code you hold onto in terms of creating behaviors that are productive
for you, yourself, society?
And I think masculinity needs to be redefined as something more aspirational where you're
celebrated for being really fucking strong.
You're celebrated for not complaining.
You're celebrated for creating surplus value, create more tax revenue than you absorb. You're celebrated for not complaining. You're celebrated for creating surplus value, create more tax revenue than you absorb.
You're celebrated for being aggressive.
You're celebrated for breaking up fights at bars,
not starting them.
You're celebrated for protecting your country,
not shitposting it.
You know, you're celebrated for approaching strange women
and expressing romantic interest.
That's not a crime.
And if she's not interested and you're rejected,
you're both gonna be fine.
You know, you're celebrated for getting out of the house.
You're celebrated for working.
You're celebrated for making money and liking money.
I think there just needs to be a redefinition of masculinity
in the context of helping young men find a code
that they used to get from the armed services or from dual
parent households.
And I feel like they're struggling.
So I like the idea of something that they feel in their bones and in their body and
in their DNA that they can lean into that we celebrate.
And the conversation is flipped entirely.
Five years ago, I was called a misogynist for talking about masculinity. Now the conversation is being led and advocated by one group and it's mothers who are like,
my son is not doing well. I got three kids, two daughters, daughters in PR with the other ones at
Penn and my son is in the basement vaping and playing video games. He needs something to latch
onto. He needs a code. Anyways, but I apologize. Word salad.
Zuckerberg and masculinity. Give me a fucking break. He looks like a Chechen Mali dealer.
Sorry, back to you, Steve.
Well, it's interesting when you speak Scott, because your views on masculinity, um, appear
to me to be most better represented by the
right side of politics and the left side of politics, they both
have their own vision of masculinity, and yours seems to
be a republican view of masculinity.
They flew to Trump's credit, he saw the opportunity, and he flew
right into the Manosphere rockets, crypto, Joe Rogan,
Theo von, he said, No, I'm not going to run from this. I'm going to fly right into it.
Now, I would argue that his vision of masculinity has too much coarseness, too much cruelty,
too much bullying. I don't think that's masculinity. I think when we talk about Elon Musk
taking risks, sending rockets that are captured by scissors coming down, inspiring the EV race,
taking an enormous risk, making a shit ton of money.
Yeah, that's a great form of masculinity.
Accusing men trying to save Thai soccer players, calling them pedophiles, calling your employees
a sex criminal such that they have to leave their house, having 13 kids by five women
or three women, none of which you live with, living next to, sleeping next to a loaded gun,
losing control of your self-control because of addiction.
I don't think that's a great role model.
I think it's an amazing role model for boys.
I don't think it's a great role model for men.
In terms of energy, there are so many reasons why I'm a big matcha fan,
if you don't already know by now.
And so much so that I actually invested in the UK's leading matcha company called Perfect Ted and one of my favorite Perfect Ted products is these
delicious matcha pouches that come in every flavor from salted caramel to peach flavor
to mint flavor to berry flavor. One of my favorites is this vanilla flavor which I'm going to make
in just two seconds. You just take this mixer here, get a little bit of the powder,
pop it on top of the shaker like that.
Put the lid on.
Shake, shake, shake.
Delicious.
If you haven't tried this yet,
you can find Perfect Ted at Tesco and Holland Barrett stores
or online where you can get 40% off with my code,
DIARY40. Head to perfectted 40% off with my code DIARY40.
Head to perfected.com and put in code DIARY40
to try this delicious multi-flavoured matcha now.
Highly recommend.
And if you do it, please tag me, send me a message online.
Do you know that 80% of New Year's resolutions
fail by February?
It's because we focus too much on the end goal
and we forget the small daily actions
that actually move us forward.
Those actions that are easy to do are also easy not to do in life. It's easy to
save a dollar so it's also easy not to. Making one small improvement each day,
one tiny step in the right direction, has a big difference over time and that is
the 1% mindset which is why we created the 1% diary, a 90-day journal designed
to help you stay consistent and focus on the small wins and
make real progress over time.
It also gives you access to the 1% community, a space where you can stay accountable, motivated,
inspired along with many others on the same journey.
We launched the 1% diary in November and it sold out.
So now we're doing a second drop.
Head to thediary.com to grab yours before it sells out again.
I'll put the link below.
Constantine, Elon Musk, censorship, the word censorship was used there by Scott. We've seen this reversal in Metta's attitude, Facebook's attitude that had been built up over a decade,
where it almost felt like if you had sort of right leaning views or really any
unaccepted views and you posted those on Facebook, you would face maybe having the post deleted or your account suspended. This new world of
speech, of free speech, and as it pertains to masculinity, do you think Elon Musk's
decision to buy X, which I noticed Scott, you'd left X, you no longer post or tweet
on X anymore, do you think Elon's decision to buy X is a net positive for society?
Net, yes, but I think what people hear when you say that is there's no problems with this system
than, you know, compared to the ones we had before. There are definitely disadvantages to a free
disadvantages to a free platform like X now.
And one of them is, inevitably, when you remove censorship, one of the things that censorship was doing was keeping
all the deeply unpleasant people away from being able
to shove things in your face.
And that happens quite a lot on X.
So I don't enjoy that aspect of it, but I've always said
that would be the price
that we would pay for freedom.
Freedom always has a price and that's what we're seeing.
As for Zuckerberg, his miraculous transformation
into a free speech warrior is just wonderful.
And I'm delighted to welcome him.
I'm sure it's entirely genuine and not anything to do
with the election results we've just seen in any way whatsoever
and the fact that the culture shifted and those of us who were being censored by people
like him for years actually winning the argument.
Well what it shows you is we've won the argument on free speech when it comes to the big tech
platforms and it's going to be messy.
And I always said it was going to be messy because inevitably when you create these large platforms
that are algorithmically driven,
where the truth and the moderate reasonable take
is not what usually gets attention,
you're going to see a lot of unpleasantness.
I value the ability to hear
and communicate truthful ideas and facts over my own subjective
feelings of someone said a thing I don't like or someone was racist or someone was misogynistic.
I don't enjoy the fact that that happens, but I would rather that happened.
And also we were not being censored from saying, you know, COVID probably came from a lab in
China, which we were not being censored from saying, you know, COVID probably came from a lab in China,
which we were. You know, the Hunter Biden laptop story isn't Russian disinformation. Actually,
it's an important piece of information that American voters need to hear when they're making
their decision about the election. And all of these other things that were being suppressed and
censored across social media for years,
they're not anymore.
And I think that's a good thing.
And I think that's helpful.
And if you look at, you know, to bring it back to the UK for a moment, Stephen, as you
know, on Trigonometry, we've tried to cover the grooming gangs scandal and is an outrage
what happened in this country over decades.
We've been covering that for years,
since about 2019, 2020, to very little purchase.
And one of the reasons is,
it was just something that the media sort of covered
and then moved on,
when it actually should have been something we talked about
on a daily basis until serious action was taken.
And we saw real, real change, real change in policing,
real change in social work, real change in government,
real change in the way that these racially aggravated
hate crimes were treated.
Well, none of that was really being talked about seriously
until Elon kicked up a fuss,
amplified the voices of survivors,
amplified the voices of campaigners on X, which he bought,
and now the British government is forced to do whatever it can
to actually address those issues to the extent that it will.
You know, a lot of people will say it still doesn't go far enough.
Well, if it doesn't go far enough, we now have a platform
from which we can continue to have that conversation
until there is the sort of inquiry and the sort of outcomes
that people want
to actually deliver real change.
So is that a positive?
God, yes.
God, yes.
We needed that.
Those women who were raped on a mass scale
needed their voices to be amplified
by someone like Elon Musk on a platform like X,
which is now free,
to the point where Keir Starmer is forced
into defensive action. I wish that was around 30 years ago because
A hell of a lot of young girls and women wouldn't have suffered the way they did if we had the opportunity to get that message out
So god, yes, it's a net positive just to pick up on that Constantine. I've had a question in my mind for a while
Regarding the scandal which is horrific. I think something we all definitely agree on is
Why has Elon chosen now?
And why has he chosen Keir Starmer
as the sort of central target of this flurry of tweets
around the grooming scandals?
Because there's clearly, Elon's, I think, an individual
which you can kind of see thinking in real time.
Like if you go back through his tweets,
because there's so many of them, and they kind of come in these spurts, you can almost see
what he's getting at. Is there an underlying reason why he's made this a central issue over
the last couple of weeks? I think there are several reasons. One of the reasons that it's
happening now is actually most Americans were completely unaware of this issue until recently.
I remember a year ago being speaking at a private event in New York, and somebody said to me,
well, you know, what is the consequence of political correctness?
Why are you so against it?
Why are you so against censorship?
And I talked about the grooming gangs, and people were horrified.
They hadn't even...and these are well-informed, educated people who are media savvy and whatever.
So one of the reasons is I think to a lot of Americans, this issue is only coming to
the fore now in front of their mind.
The second issue, I think, is that Elon Musk understands what I said earlier, which is
we have a global Western culture now.
And so what happens in Britain matters just as much as what happens in America, because
we are symbiotic with each other now. When there's a
restriction of speech in the UK, when we have laws about what people are not allowed to say,
that has an impact across the world. When you see the European Union trying to pass legislation
about online censorship, that has an impact because if something exists in the UK and in
many European countries, it's only a matter of time before people in America
are gonna say, well, look, they've got this in Europe,
why don't we bring it over here?
And vice versa.
So what happens in America affects us in Europe
and in the UK, and what happens in Europe in the UK
affects America.
So what Elon, I think, is trying to do is to say,
we care about our civilization.
Elon doesn't really talk that much about the United States.
He talks about our civilization as I do,
because I believe that we are now one thing
to a very significant extent.
Now, from our civilizational point of view,
is it a good thing that mass rape gangs in the UK
are being insufficiently investigated
and treated improperly by the police and the government?
No, it's not. It's a very bad thing. So how do we address that? Well, we address that by putting
pressure on the government of the day. Now, I don't see the grooming gangs as a party political
issue. The Tories didn't really do anything about it properly either, although there were individual
members of the cabinet that tried to do something like Sola Bravaman. But he's putting pressure on the
government of the day. You can see him going after Nigel Farage, of all people, and saying
Nigel Farage is not the right leader for reform. So he's attempting to shape British politics
in the direction that he feels is the right way.
What does he want? What outcome does he want?
Look, I don't know what Elon Musk wants. I don't know him personally.
I haven't even yet had a chance to interview him, which I really look forward to doing,
because I think he's one of the great visionaries of our time.
Whether you like him or not, I think that's undeniably true.
But my sense is he's trying to talk about all the things that we've been discussing.
Freedom of expression, the end of identity politics
and the pursuit of meritocracy, a pioneering, inspiring vision of the future, which is why
he's talking about Mars and a vision for our civilization that goes beyond the narrow squabbling
that we do here on Earth, and the understanding that human beings are meant...
We left the cave.
We're not supposed to stay in a place
with the walls closing in on us
and feel like we're in decline.
We're not supposed to be a civilization
that has 1.5 children per woman,
and that is simply just leaving the planet Earth
because we can't reproduce.
We're supposed to look at the future
with hope and optimism.
We're supposed to say, I want things to be better.
I want things to be better for my children.
I want to have children.
I want the vision of our society being one of positivity and optimism
and a sense of a pioneering vision and inspiration.
That's what I think he wants.
And I don't really see any of that in the
current government in the UK. And I think he's right to go after them and say, you are destroying
your country's economy, you're destroying its culture, you're destroying its sense of cohesiveness
by allowing illegal immigration, you are destroying that sense of optimism and vision. And you're not
saying to people, let's build something better. You're saying, let's stay small, let's play small, let's not rise above our station. And I think we need people
like that, imperfect as they may be in all sorts of different ways, to drive our civilisation
forward to say to us, there is an inspiring vision to which we're all moving, as opposed
to just sitting there and waiting to die, which is what we've been doing for far too long.
Yeah, I think Elon is taking at his word.
He said a year ago that he was going to absolutely
dismantle the woke mind virus globally,
and he was going to ensure meritocracy and free speech.
And when he sets his mind on something,
he has the ability to stay focused on it
for a very long time to a degree most people can't fathom.
And he's absolutely willing to endure pain.
He loves a fight.
He obviously has the kind of mind that can't relax
unless he's kind of grinding up against some gear as well.
Like the way he works needs stress in his life.
He needs a big enemy.
He needs a big fight to engage with.
And I think
Keir Starmer just ticked all of his boxes as someone to go up against. I think it's interesting
as we talk about these big tech. I love that Scott has previously talked about breaking up big tech,
and I think there's potential for that in the next four years. All of these guys like Trump and JD
Vance and all of them have locked horns
with big tech and they've come, you know,
this is their chance to get revenge on big tech
in the next four years.
They could do a little, you know, you might see Google
have to, you know, spin off YouTube or you might see AWS
have to come away from Amazon or something like that.
Who knows, but it's interesting that a lot of these big tech
guys, they're probably cozying up to Trump.
Because you know, that could be on the cards as well. There's
been a lot of them. Trump butt kicking, but kissing over the
last couple of weeks, I think Trump's almost bragged about the
fact that everybody's flown down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss his butt
and to cozy up with him. And there's now headlines saying
that there's this tech oligarchy forming in the United States where Bezos and Elon and Zuck are all now friends and
they're stood behind Trump as this unifying force. Just to touch on a few points of that,
but also on Constantine's message that Elon is doing this for the betterment of humanity,
to further humanity, his involvement with the UK, but his broader involvement in politics now. Scott, does that square with how you think about Elon?
And I am quite curious to ask you why you made the decision to leave X
and to go to Blue Sky and threads and things like that.
Yeah, I can't speculate on what motivates Elon Musk.
I just, I quite frankly just don't get the guy.
And I don't also, I don't, I don't have the domain expertise to comment on the rape gangs.
It's such a serious upsetting issue. And also, I don't have the domain expertise to comment on the rape gangs.
Such a serious, upsetting issue.
I don't know it well enough to speak intelligently to it.
Just a topic of censorship, though, as it relates to meta.
A hallmark of a free society and a democracy is that pretty much anyone can say pretty
much anything about pretty much anybody.
I believe that.
The question is, do machines and bots have free speech rights?
Because if I say something, I believe, I may be paramount, but it doesn't mean I'm wrong.
I believe VCs whose portfolio companies I've said have overvalued have enlisted thousands
of bots to basically just shitpost me over and over on X to diminish
my credibility.
I think because I've been critical of Putin that the GRU has hired troll farms to create
lists of thousands of people to weaponize bots to say disparaging things about them.
Do those bots have free speech rights?
In addition, when Fox News distributes information to its anchors saying Dominion voting machines were weaponized
by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, despite the fact they knew that was not true, but they tell
their broadcasters to do it anyways.
And then Dominion says, this hurt our business, and you knew it was false, and you decided
to communicate it anyways.
Their courts find them liable, and they have to pay three quarters of a billion dollars.
What happened at Fox News was a dumpster fire compared to the nuclear mushroom cloud on Metta.
So a lot of what we're talking about here, if you want to say that mRNA vaccines alter your DNA,
I think you should have the right to say that.
The dissenter's voice is important because occasionally the conspiracy theorist ends up being correct.
The question is, when you have a business model
that elevates the most incendiary ugly content
beyond its organic reach,
should you then be exonerated from all liability and slander
that traditional media companies are liable to?
If we were to say the deal on Musk is a pedophile and start
stating facts and evidence of it, and he could show that it's hurt his ability to raise money
for Tesla, and he filed legal action against this podcast, I think we would be in a world
of hurt. And that legal liability is warrant warranted but the most powerful media companies in the world have section 230 protection
So they can they have a business model where conspiracy theory or novel content which is Latin for bullshit and lies and the more angry
It is it gets elevated beyond its organic reach
So while I'm kind of down with the notion that we should have free speech and anybody
should be able to say pretty much whatever they want, there's something wrong when we
have algorithms that have a profit incentive around rage, conspiracy theory and lies.
And two thirds of Republicans believe that the election was stolen.
And when one in five Americans think that 9-11 was an inside job, I mean, we are...
Let's be honest, they thought that before the internet.
I remember watching all the 9-11 truth of movies and all of that.
But your point overall is right.
I totally agree.
And by the way, Elon agrees with you.
When he bought X, he talked about the bot problem.
He talked about the amplification of outrage.
He hasn't done as much as I hoped he
would have done so far, but I hope that they do address that because that isn't an Elon or an
X problem. It's a technology problem of the modern world. The reality is that the more we live our
lives online, the more you're going to have a problem of the ability of foreign governments, of individual people to create fake accounts,
bot farms, et cetera,
to influence the way we look at all of these things.
And we are gonna have to come to terms with that reality
because it's a technological issue
that we're gonna have to solve for and we haven't yet.
It's also very easy for people
to get caught in their own bubbles as well,
which is a new phenomenon.
There was a time where if you believed crazy things,
you still had to sit next to someone else in church
and talk to them about their life and what they believe.
And you encountered dissenting voices,
you encountered sane, rational people
who had very different views to you
that you had to be friends with long-term.
Whereas where we are right now
is if you've got some sort of crazy view,
you can find yourself only talking to people
who share those views and only sharing content
that reinforces those views until such time
that you become extremely radicalized.
I think that's such an important point
because I think it's a real shame
that AI LLMs aren't crawling the real world.
I was at Granger's yesterday. Someone comes up to me, love your content.
Let's take a picture. They're so nice. Another person comes up to me and says,
I disagree with your view on this, but we have a civil conversation.
And then I come home to 40BOTS telling me I'm Professor Genocide.
I mean, people in the real world, generally speaking, I don't know if it's because of the threat of physical violence,
or they want to have sex with you, or maybe they think some point you'll hire their kid,
or generally just a comity of man, but people in real life I find are just lovely and wonderful.
And it's a shame that these LLMs aren't crawling this, because the traife and some of the vile shit
they're crawling online, which I don't even think reflects our species.
I think it reflects technology that has a profit motive around promoting the most incendiary
hateful content.
So there's got to be some sort of medium speed here.
And also I got off X, Steve, because you don't like Chick-fil-A, don't eat a Chick-fil-A.
If Musk wants to pay $44 billion and turn it into a Nazi porn bar, that's his right.
I don't think there's I don't think it's illegal. I don't think the government should step in.
But I don't have to paint his fence. And I can go to another platform. That's my right to and
everyone says, Oh, you're against free speech. I'm like, No, I'm not. I'm against being on a
platform that makes me feel bad. So he has the right.
And all this notion around meta free speech,
it's a little different because they control
so much of the media, but these are media companies
and they should be liable for slander or defamation
the same way traditional media companies are involved.
I think we could solve a lot of this problem
by just removing 230 protections
for algorithmically elevated content.
If you decide to elevate content beyond its organic reach,
then you are making an editorial decision,
and you should be liable if that, in fact, is slanderous or defamatory.
I think that's really fascinating as a way of handling it.
And also, we're living in a world where, as of this year,
some of the most phenomenal content you will read
will be algorithmically generated
and some of the most compelling content.
So this idea that Scott's talking about
should bots have free speech,
it sounds like a kind of intellectual kind of pseudo
intellectual topic, but it's absolutely
a very practical topic in the sense that
bots now can generate
conversations very easily. And some of that you could spend all day talking to a bot and
not know.
It's funny. This is this subject has come up because in the last week, I've had a flurry
of messages on WhatsApp from friends actually had two tweets yesterday, which you could
probably see if you just search my name, because on X at the moment, there's multiple ads running that are fake articles
with fake BBC headlines with my face in.
So it says things like,
the Bank of England is suing Steve Bartlett.
And this is running as a sponsored ad on X.
And people are tweeting me these things.
My friend says every time he refreshes the feed,
he sees a new sponsored ad of a fake article of me.
And sometimes it's like,
can't believe this happened to Steve
and it's a BBC article. You click on it, you get scammed. I think it's a crypto scam. I don't want
to click. I'll send the link to you guys so you can click on it for me. But I just, it really has,
because that is a bot, there's multiple of them, multiple accounts that have been spun out. They're
all verified accounts. And it's AI generated imagery with a paid ad behind it. That's the bit that really
gets me. I get people can post shit, but sponsoring it is a new level of like defamation. One
of the big macro things I've been thinking a lot about that I haven't shared yet is just
the amount of social networks that have emerged. In the last 10 years, there's been a 50% increase
so far in new social networks that have emerged. And we're seeing years, there's been a 50% increase so far in new social networks that
have emerged. And we're seeing this splintering now of the rumbles, the blue skies, the threads.
And it almost seems talking about echo chambers that social networks are becoming
sort of political environments, and you're choosing your social network now based on your politics.
This doesn't seem like a net positive thing for society.
doesn't seem like a net positive thing for society.
No, no, I think we're living through an era of the fragmentation of our reality. And it comes, you know, Scott's
point about people behaving better in person is true,
although I would say there is the windscreen effect or the
windshield effect, which is if you someone cuts you up in
traffic, and you feel that there's some kind of physical
separation between the two of you, most people behave slightly differently
in that context than they would if they were sitting next to somebody face to face in a
bar.
So there's something about being physically present with other people that changes it,
which is one of the reasons I know you have pretty much all your interviews face to face
and we do as well because I
Generally speaking is very difficult to connect authentically with people. Obviously we've managed to do it in the course of this conversation
But beyond that is difficult
and
So we're gonna have to work on that but I just what the point I'm trying to make is this isn't a political issue
It's not an X issue. It's not an Elon Musk issue, it's a technological issue.
We're living through, probably already have lived through most of the digital revolution. And I used
to, as a kid, love Isaac Asimov science fiction books. And one of the reasons I did enjoy reading
them so much is it was a world in which there was an exploration of what does the creation of robots, which
is what we're living through, mean for morality?
What does it mean for philosophy?
What does it mean for humanity?
How do we build rules in a world in which you have these machines that take every rule
literally and suddenly you find that the desire to protect humanity
results in the end of humanity. How do you navigate all of this? And that is what we're
living through. We are also living through a period when our realities are being fragmented.
And so we believe a very small set of things that other people like us somewhere in a very different
part of the world, as Daniel was saying earlier, also believe. And we now live in this, we don't
live in England or in Scotland or in America. We live almost like in a world of people who think
like us in the West. And then other people live right next door to us who live in a whole different
world because they consume a whole different set of information. That is the reality. We can complain
about it. That is not going to change. And the only thing I really want to raise, where I disagree with Scott about this idea that Facebook and X, etc., they are publishers
and not platforms. I don't think you can apply the same media organization section to them.
I don't think it's appropriate. They are platforms in which people publish information.
The artificial amplification is a fair point.
We need to deal with that.
We need to deal with the bot problem.
That's a very difficult one because one of the challenges
is the only way to really deal that I can see
with the bot problem is to get people
to verify their identity online.
That obviously has a lot of questions around that
because once you start forcing people
to give their identity over to some anonymous blob online,
who's collecting that data, what are they doing with it?
And if you don't like Elon Musk,
or if you don't like the previous Twitter regime,
as I didn't, then the question for you is,
well, let's say right now I look at Twitter,
and I'm like, yeah, I'm happy to verify
my identity.
I'm happy to confirm who I am.
Well, what if George Soros buys eggs off Elon at some point?
Are you still happy that that information is being held?
Are you still happy that the anonymous account you've now made confirmed?
What happens to the anonymous activist speaking about the Ayatollah's regime in Iran?
What happens to them when they've had to verify their identity and the wrong person buys our
platform or someone hacks it, et cetera?
So it's a conversation that's not...
If there were easier solutions on these issues, they would have been solved by now.
This is a very difficult thing for humanity to navigate, and we're going to have to find
a way to do it, and incrementally so.
I just want to respond to that.
I think you're guilty of the same illusion of complexity
that protects these companies from acting like actors
such that they can do anything regardless of the damage
to the Commonwealth to add shareholder value.
If you implemented...
We have, first off, this notion that you don't want to give up your identity.
Trust me, they know everything about you, Const have, first off, this notion that you don't want to give up your identity.
Trust me, they know everything about you, Constantine, already.
And I could go get a ton of information on you from the dark web fairly easily with a
credit card.
So the notion that somehow we shouldn't have some sort of, you could have, we need age
verification for social media.
There's no reason anyone in the age of 16 should be on a social media platform.
And regarding the the the civil rights activists or the women's right activists
and needs anonymity, you could create a number of accounts and use
blockchain or some sort of third party anonymous to have a certain number of accounts.
It says, look, if you want an anonymous parody account,
you want to make fun of people. Fine.
If you want to an account talking about issues that you feel are sensitive from other markets,
fine.
We could absolutely figure that out and then figure out, okay, this account is doing nothing.
It has no base.
It has no soul.
It has no values.
It has 72 followers.
All it's doing is trying to start fights online.
All it's doing is trying to make people feel shitty about Britain or shitty about America. And the reality is these
companies use that illusion of complexity such that they can have more bots creating
more fake clicks, more Nissan ads and more shareholder value. I think there's a middle
ground here. I think we could figure this out.
I agree. Well, that's what I'm saying. I think some of the ideas that you're putting forward, right or wrong, I don't know.
But these are the conversations we should be having.
How do we make sure I mean, my son is two and a half years old.
And if my wife has become a complete screen Nazi, so he's probably not going to get a
phone until he's about 40.
But I think your point about people shouldn't be on social media.
Just wait.
People shouldn't be on social media until they're 16. Absolutely correct. What that's
doing to the minds of, well, or everybody, but particularly young people who are really
susceptible to it. You're completely right. The verification dimension is difficult, as
I say. We're going to have to hash this all out as humanity. We're just going to have to work this all out. How do we live in this
new world that we now live in? It's going to take some time and I hope it's not as
bad as the last time the information space was revolutionized, which was the
printing press that caused about two centuries of religious war. Hopefully we
can avoid that and part of the way to do that is to create environments which are uncensored, where people
can express different ideas, we can have these battles and eventually come to some sort of
mutual understanding.
I hope that happens.
What I wanted to ask you all to really close out this conversation was these conversations
tend to be a bit of a reflection of what's in
the news cycle and what's in the news cycle tends to be a reflection of what people are
clicking. And a lot of that's driven by fear and the sort of narrative of the time, whether
it's immigration or the Trump inauguration. But what is the big important idea that we're
not talking about? What's the most important thing that we should be talking about that
isn't getting enough attention right now as it relates to the future of the West? And that's a big broad question.
I'll start with you, Daniel.
For me, it's the schooling system. I think the schooling system is not preparing people
for a world that exists and that we're teaching. You know, we haven't grasped the fact that
AI is going to be the biggest, most disruptive technology in the lives of our children
and that the jobs that we think they might be able to go into
probably won't exist.
We need to have a radical look at this idea
that children should go to school with the same age groups
or study a certain set of topics
or that it should be topic-based at all.
We need to explore, you know,
are there better models for the schooling system
that prepare people for the world that we're going to be in?
Our current schooling system goes back to the early 1800s.
It was essentially based on a military schooling system
in Prussia, and that's kind of where it evolved from.
I think what we need to do is think about
what are the skills that our kids are going to need.
I see too and I can only, I don't feel like I can wrap my arms around UK's issues but in terms of
the US political extremism I would put it number two, you know at negative 40 celsius and fahrenheit
meet and because of our electoral system and Citizens United,
people from the far left who are crazy
and people from the far right who are crazy
are just overrepresented.
And they come together to meet on reckless spending,
deficit spending, they come together to agree
on anti-Semitism.
And there's just too many people on the far left
and the far right.
And the people in the middle, it's minority rule,
they're just not represented.
However, I think the biggest threat that people aren't talking about, and I've actually spent some time talking with the
administration around this, or the former administration, I should say, is loneliness.
And that is, you have the deepest pocketed, most well-resourced companies and people in the world
trying to convince people, especially young men, that they can have a reasonable facsimile of life
on a screen with an algorithm.
And I think they literally go crazy.
I think they wake up and they're obese and lonely
and have no skills.
We talked about this. I think young people,
I say this jokingly, but have seriously,
I think young people need to get out of the house more,
drink more, make a series of bad decisions that might pay off.
I think we need,
I think we need more sex.
I think we need more people in third spaces, more church, more religious, more institutions, national service.
We're mammals, and I worry that one in seven men doesn't have a single friend. One in four men can't name a best friend.
So this loneliness epidemic where people get into a bubble and start engaging into conspiracy theory not trusting each other
Blaming women blaming the nation self-harm. I just I worry about
You know what I say to young men
I coach a lot of young men romantic comedies or two hours not 15 minutes for a reason this shit is hard and it's worth it
But I worry that we're raising, like I said, this new species
of asocial, asexual being called the young American male that is obese, anxious, and
just a shitty citizen.
Constandine, the most important thing in 2025, that's not getting enough attention.
In the UK and in most of Europe, it's an issue that Daniel raised earlier, which is in the UK, our energy prices are four times what they are in the United States.
That is an ideological decision.
It's done because we're saving the planet.
That's what we're being told.
The reality is our contribution to global carbon emissions is we're responsible for
2% of global carbon emissions in the world.
Making British pensioners freeze to death every winter because they can't afford fuel
bills is not the solution to climate change.
And if you amplify that further, driving businesses out of business, making our economy uncompetitive,
making Britain unable to generate wealth for itself and for its future, is not the moral position. Net zero, which is the impoverishment of our
society for ideological reasons, has been positioned as the moral cause where
we're saving the planet, we're ending climate change. We're not doing
any of that. All we're doing is virtue signaling and making our fellow citizens
suffer. So what we should be talking about is how do we make energy cheap again so that we can have a
prosperous economy. And guess what? When people are prosperous that's when they
actually start being responsible about pollution, about throwing away things
they don't need, and also when you have money that's when you can invest money
in scientific research which allows you to find cleaner, better forms of energy.
That's what we should be doing.
We should be making sure that we generate as much wealth for our fellow citizens as
possible because a lot of people are struggling.
And I think it's deeply, deeply immoral to impoverish already poor pensioners in this
country and to prevent businesses from hiring people
and giving them jobs and opportunities,
including the young men that Scott is talking about,
because we are saving the planet
and we're trying to keep little Greta happy.
We're not doing any of that.
We're not successful in that.
We should stop pretending
and we should do what Donald Trump said he plans to do,
which is drill baby drill.
We should be exploring and exploiting all the energy reserves we have in this country
in order to create clean energy and better forms of energy for the future, as well as
to improve the well-being of our fellow citizens.
That's what we should be talking about a hell of a lot more than we are.
You need cheap energy.
You're right.
What I would argue, I think it's going to
be liquid natural gas and nuclear. We haven't talked about AI. AI requires 10 times the energy
at the AI query as a Google query. The choke point is energy. I would argue in the US, I think we
benefit more from as opposed to drill, baby drill, build, baby build. I think young people have seen
housing prices just go crazy. There's a psychological benefit to household formation, forced savings. So I'm going to take your word because you're a
very smart guy that Britain has implemented a series of policies that energy stat you rolled
out was incredible. But in the US, like I said, I don't want to say we're drowning in oil.
like I said, I don't want to say we're drowning in oil. There were more drilling permits issued under Biden than the previous Trump admitted. I mean, just to call Biden anti-energy or that
somehow we have this massively overinflated energy prices, it's just not. That hasn't happened in the
US. We need more homes in the US.
And in the UK too.
And Stephen, let me just, before you wrap up,
fill the stats out a little bit more.
Obviously everyone understands that geopolitically
we're in a pretty tense time and there's conflicts happening.
Britain is in a position now where we would struggle.
You got to remember British history.
Britain is, Britannia rules the waves, right?
The way that Britain has become a great nation
throughout history is by having a powerful fleet.
We would struggle to build warships now
because we've closed down all our steelworks,
because we're green, right?
It's insanity.
And on every other issue to do with energy and industry, we have basically deliberately moved our production facilities to other countries.
Okay, great idea. Globalization, make things cheaper, ship things, wonderful.
Okay, what happened during COVID?
What happened when suddenly the entire chains of production
weren't quite operating the way that they normally do?
Oh, China's suddenly hoarding all the masks.
Interesting.
So what do you think is going to happen when there's a war?
Oh, they're just going to keep shipping the steel to us to make the battleships and the
warplanes that we need to fight them?
That's what you think is going to happen?
This whole thing, this whole agenda is ideological insanity.
And what Ed Miliband is about to do to this country when it comes to this issue needs
to talk about way more. And it is about economic prosperity. It is about housing, because one of the reasons
we don't build as much housing as we need to is again, building housing produces emissions
and we don't want to be not green. So that's why people in their 30s and 40s are now living
in flat shares for four people. We have got to let go of this obsession with net zero.
We have got to build, we have got to drill,
we have got to produce energy,
and we have got to stop thinking that the moral thing to do
is to make our poor citizens suffer
in order that we feel good about saving the planet,
which we're not even remotely saving by doing this.
Guys, thank you so much for all of your perspective.
One of the things I realized as you guys were talking is that you're all fathers
and you're all fathers of boys, although you're fathers of boys at different ages.
So I wanted to just give you all 30 seconds if you could.
And this is maybe me asking for myself for this advice.
But based on everything that's happening in the world, which can feel incredibly
confusing, especially to young people, where we're getting a lot of our information from different echo
chambers. What is the advice that you would all give to your young boys that would best prepare
them for the future and the next couple of years, starting with you, Dan?
Yeah, so I've got a six-year-old daughter, a seven-year-old son and a 10-year-old son.
Yeah, so I've got a six-year-old daughter, a seven-year-old son, and a 10-year-old son.
It's an incredibly confusing time
because preparing them for a world that's fast-changing is difficult.
We're taking the approach of a lot of general knowledge
across a lot of things so that you can use AI to run deep
in different topics.
We're encouraging the kids to interact with supervised AI conversations
and letting them know that that technology is available.
We're also just focusing on some manual skills,
like how to fix a boiler and how to, you know,
how to saw through some wood and, you know,
those kinds of things.
And also we're doing things like acting classes, being up on a stage and
performing. So all of those kind of typical things. But to be honest, it is a point of anxiety
in my life, just thinking about what the world looks like for 10 or 15 years from now
that they're going to be going into. So if you get clear answers on this,
I'm really open to learning.
For me, my son is two and a half,
so it's a little bit early for this pep talk,
but my message to him when he's old enough to hear it
is going to be this.
Your grandfather, your great grandfather,
my grandfather was taken as a slave laborer
from Soviet Ukraine
to Nazi Germany.
Your great grandfather was born, your great grandmother rather, was born in the Soviet
Gulag.
Your great grandmother lived through the German occupation and is now living through Vladimir
Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
You are not living in the worst time ever.
You're surrounded by pussies. If you
are a man and if you do your job and if you learn the skills that you need to do and if
you pursue the things that you want to do with your life to the best of your ability,
if you believe in yourself, if you believe that you're talented, if you actually achieve
the things that you set your mind to, there's never been a better time in the history of
humanity than now.
You're surrounded mostly by people
who feel sorry for themselves.
If you're not one of them, you're gonna clean up.
Young women are looking for a young man like you
who's actually gonna stand up for himself,
who's actually gonna go out there
and achieve and be confident.
Be that and you're gonna clean up
when it comes to finding the right partner for yourself.
You're gonna clean up when it comes to making money. You're gonna clean up when it comes to finding the right partner for yourself. You're gonna clean up when it comes to making money.
You're gonna clean up when it comes to your career.
You're gonna clean up on every front
because the bar has never been lower.
The bar has never been lower.
So just go out and be a man and life is gonna be great.
I'm older.
I have 14 and 17-year-old boys
and my observation is you can't tell them anything.
The best you can do is you can try
and model behavior for them.
So I'm trying to be really kind to their mother.
I'm trying to show them that, you know,
if you're serious about having a good family,
you gotta be a generous, loving partner.
I'm trying to be in great physical shape,
and which is getting harder and harder. I'm trying to be in great physical shape, and which is getting harder and harder.
I'm trying to be aggressive around them
in terms of business and trying to be kind.
And what I do, I do talk to them about
the concept of surplus value.
I'm like, you're takers right now.
You know, the UK school system, which is amazing,
is investing a lot in you,
and you're giving almost nothing back.
Me and your mother are loving you a lot in you and you're giving almost nothing back me and your
Your mother are loving you a lot more than you're loving us. You're just taking resources everywhere. You're a net negative
And your crossing of manhood isn't sex or some religious ceremony Your crossing of manhood is when you are start creating surplus value. You're
You're you're you're loving more people than you're absorbing, you're listening to more
complaints than you are complaining, you're creating more revenue than you're absorbing.
That's the notion of surplus value.
And I have this trick called what a man does.
And I've been doing this when their kids and my guests show up, a man goes and gets their
luggage and puts it in their room.
A man constantly scanning the table for empty water glasses.
And I mean, one of the proudest moments I ever had
was when my six-year-old boy who was all like 30 pounds
got up and went over this gigantic pitcher of water
at this table and started trying to pour
other people's water and everyone had no idea
what was going on here.
You know, I do these things called what a man does.
A man goes up to, a man asks a woman out for coffee.
A man pays for women.
I'm a sexist that way.
I still have told my men, my son gave me this rap on,
oh dad, you're so establishment.
I'm like, do you ever wanna have sex?
I'm like, then you need to pay.
I mean, that's the bottom line.
Anyways, but what I would say is I'm trying to model,
I'm trying to model good behavior or be a good role model,
but I agree with Constantine and Daniel.
I think every day they have more potential
to lead the most amazing life in history.
I'm not a nihilist, I'm not a catastrophist.
I think I have big problems, but given the blessings of the sons born to these men and future, you know, future sons
that you'll have Stephen, Jesus, it's good to be them. There's just, they have no excuse. They should,
they should, they should rock on. They should have a wonderful life. Constantine, Scott, Daniel,
thank you so much for taking the time, um, Sort of short notice to talk about all these subjects is incredibly wide ranging
conversation and you'll bring such an interesting, hilarious, nuanced perspective
to these issues. I'm glad that we can have these conversations and disagree in a
respectful way that hopefully clarifies a lot of the confusion that I experience
and a lot of people are experiencing at the moment. So thank you to all of you.
I'm going to link to all of your work on the screen. I know, Scott, you've got a
book coming on masculinity, which we're
all very, very excited about. We've been waiting. It's long overdue. Please hurry up. Constantine,
you've got an incredible podcast, which you've got Trigonometry, which I'm going to link
on the screen. And I suggest everybody goes and listens to and subscribes to if they're
looking for more of this stuff. And Daniel, you've just been on my show already, but your
endless amount of books. And I think the best place to get more from you is your website,
of course, the Daniel Priestley website, where you can find all of your books and I think the best place to get more from you is your website of course, the Daniel Priestley website where you can find all of your books and all of your work and
everything you're doing there. Thank you everybody, really really appreciative
and incredibly grateful for taking part in our first little experiment of this kind. So yeah, Thanks for watching!