The Pomp Podcast - #1148 Konstantin Kisin On Free Speech, Vladimir Putin, Jordan Peterson, Greta Thunberg, & Bitcoin

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

Konstantin Kisin is a comedian and co-host of TRIGGERnometry Podcast. He also authored a best selling book, called “An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West.” In this conversation, we talk about free speech, woke culture, Russia & Ukraine, China, India, Jordan Peterson, Vladimir Putin, Greta Thunberg, Bitcoin, & more. ======================= Announcing LYCEUM | Miami, a day-long event on March 4th, 2023 in Miami hosted by Pomp. We’re gathering an explosive group of experts to engage in a series of fascinating discussions. We'll cover topics from investing, emerging tech, scientific research, sports, music and more.We have some massive names being announced via Twitter throughout January so stay tuned for details.This will not be your typical event and it certainly won’t be one you want to miss. We’re going to learn a lot, make some smart friends, and as always, we’re going to have fun.Spots are limited so head to lyceummiami.com to buy your ticket today. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 200,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ =======================

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Konstantin Kisin is a comedian and co-host of Trigonometry Podcast.

He also authored a best-selling book called An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West. In this conversation, Konstantin and I talk about free speech, woke culture, Russia-Ukraine, China, India, Jordan Peterson, Putin, the Radical Moderate Manifesto, and much, much more. I really enjoyed this conversation with Konstantin, and I hope that you all enjoy it as well. Once you get done listening, jump on Twitter and let us know what you agreed with, what you disagree with, what you liked and what you didn't like. I always appreciate the feedback and it helps us get better. I always believe that it's important to talk to people about things that I agree with them on and also things that I disagree with them on. And Konstantin and I have a conversation about Bitcoin where he's a little bit skeptical and obviously I'm a little bit bullish.

Here is my conversation with Konstantin Kissin. expressed by pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got Constantine here with me. Constantine, you've got this viral speech from Oxford that's been going around the internet. And I wanted to unpack a couple of things that you said in there, most namely the idea that free speech is the foundation of Western civilization. That seems to be an idea that completely has gotten lost. Can you elaborate on that a little bit more in terms of why you think that is the

foundation of Western civilization? Well, obviously, it's not entirely true in the sense that Western civilization existed at times when we didn't have free speech in the way that we would hope to have. But my broader point is this, you know, the Enlightenment values that are the product that create that, you know, you get the scientific revolution and the technological and scientific progress that we enjoy in the West relies upon people's ability to express controversial ideas that other people are not going to like. I mean, the obvious and hack example of this would be, you know, the sun does not revolve around the earth. Well, there was a period of time when people would get severely punished for saying that. And now we know that is true. So in my

opinion, the success of the West relies in part, not entirely, of course, but in a large part on the ability to allow the market to decide many things. And that applies to economics, but it also applies to ideas. I come from, I was born in the Soviet Union and later lived in Russia. And Russia and China, two countries which are obviously very powerful in the world, but they have not been able to be as technologically and scientifically successful, despite having very, very bright and talented people. And part of the reason is that you cannot do science by government diktat.

You can't do research by some apparatchik or Mandarin somewhere deciding what should and shouldn't be looked into, what is the right course, etc. And I think for that reason alone, but there are many others, of course, too, the idea that we should be able to discuss ideas that people don't like and express opinions people don't like is a foundation not only of freedoms that we enjoy, but actually more importantly even than that of the scientific and technological progress which drives our societies to succeed so you and i see eye to eye on this whole idea of you've got to be able to test a lot of things you've got to be able to talk about a lot of different ideas and eventually the market will coalesce around solutions to real problems uh and especially when it comes to science and technology are you worried that woke culture and cancel culture and kind of all of these uh relatively new um you know movements if you will are actually putting that in

INVESTMENT. YOU MENTIONED RUSSIA AND CHINA HAVE SUCCUMBED TO THE GOVERNMENT OVERSIGHT AND PREVENTED THE FREE MARKET FROM GETTING TO THE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY INNOVATIONS. IS THAT ONE OF THE BIG IDEAS YOU ARE TRYING TO PUSH FORWARD? LOOK AROUND. IF WE CAN'T DECIDE WHAT A WOMAN IS, HOW ARE WE GOING TO MAKE TECHNOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS AND DO RESEARCH?

biologists going on TV and being asked about this issue. And, you know, it's controversial for them to express an opinion about biology. I know that that is also true of other areas of research. And so I think that's really important that we live in a society that is more interested in the truth than people's feelings. Yeah. As you were giving this speech, one of the things that you talked about was this wokeness movement really has convinced a lot of young people that they don't have agency, that they actually should complain rather than build or create. Why do you think so many young people are gravitating towards that? Is it simply because it's easier to complain than build or is it something else? I think it's a large number of things. And a lot of the coverage

of my speech has been, you know, comedian destroys woke culture with blah, blah, blah. And actually, I don't think that's what I was doing at all. I was challenging those young people to step up. I was not saying to them, you are just woke idiots and there's no point talking to you. I was talking to them precisely because I wanted to persuade them that they can be better and that there is a better way of doing things. But as to your question, why, I think there are many reasons. I think there are some legitimate reasons that young people feel disempowered. Again, I don't know whether if this is the case where you are, but in the UK, the housing crisis is a massive issue. young people are priced out of buying their own home and it's hard to expect people to you know

have an investment in their society if they literally cannot put roots down cannot start a family cannot pair up with someone else cannot live where they'd like to live etc so i think that's part of the problem and if you if you if you're not if you don't own your own home if you don't have a family if you're not looking after children who need you etc it becomes quite tempting to remain in that sort of infantile adolescent state for much longer than previous generations would have done you know my parents had me at the age of 20 i had my first son at the age of 39 like that's the difference and i'm part of this generation too so um that i think is part of it uh another part of it you're right man look it's a lot easier it's a lot easier to

just complain than to do stuff and of course social media technology enables that as well and then there's a failure of parenting over successive generations i mean if you think about it from a i've been thinking about this quite a bit if you think about it from a teenager's point of view an adolescent's point of view you don't really have anything of your own you can't really go out and create anything can you like what you can do is say to mom or dad you know can i have pocket money and if dad says no well what what options do you have really like you know in old schools you could in old days you could get a paper round that's not really available as much to younger people nowadays that sort of thing so what are you left with well you whine and complain

until daddy gives you the money and daddy nowadays will give you that money if you whine and complain long enough so it's the coddling it's jonathan hyatt has written about this beautifully it's the cuddling of the American mind. It's the fact that, as I said on Tucker the other day, we live in a society where adults are afraid of children. They're afraid of young people. And, you know, increasingly with good reason. I mean, if you look at the fact that if you are in a position

where you operate in some kind of institution, whether that's a college or a school or a corporation, you know, five 20-year-olds with blue hair can get together and get you kicked out after a long and distinguished career. So we are a society in which young people have a lot of power, and that power mainly comes from their ability to punish you for not giving them what they want, so why wouldn't they use that power? How much of your ability to talk about this stuff, to have it resonate, to have the speech go viral, is because you are a comedian or a satirist, and you're able to kind of say things and almost be in a protected class? I think a lot about comedians may be some of the last people who are accepted by society when they say the truth because it makes us all laugh versus if somebody was at a corporate job or a politician and they said the same exact thing, wokeness or cancel culture would go after them. Does that play a part of it?

No, people come after me as well. Well, I think, again, this is different in America. I'm pleased to say, you know, when we were on Joe Rogan's show, we went to his comedy club afterwards, and you could see that, you know, the freedom that we all associate, the freedom of speech with America is still alive. In the UK, it's not the case. Most comedians are pussies, and they won't say anything.

They won't challenge the narrative, and that's because they're afraid. And so I don't think it's so much that. The reason I can say what I say is I don't give a shit, man. I've got my own YouTube show that we built with my colleague Francis from the ground up. You know, if YouTube cancel us, which they won't, but if they did, we'll find somewhere else and we make it work. Like, I don't rely on anyone. I don't need anyone. I don't need the media.

I don't need the mainstream media. The only thing I need is to keep saying what I think. Our audience loves the show. They reward us for doing what we do. That's it. That's, I think, really the truth is the only people who can speak freely now are people who are uncancellable. to. And look, everyone is cancelable. You know, depends what you do, of course, and what you say. But generally speaking, if I'm out there expressing what I think are rational, reasonable

opinions, I'm not afraid to get canceled, not because I'm a comedian, but because I have my own thing that protects me from that. What's been fascinating about the response is obviously there's virality to it. So that leads to controversy and debate. But you've been pretty outspoken and transparent about some of the responses that you've gotten. Many of them have been quite rude, negative, pretty aggressive and abrasive, but also not only from individual citizens. But you made a comment recently online where you haven't been invited on any left leaning media outlets. It's pretty much only been right leaning media outlets. Is that just bad for their business model? And so they're kind of trying to protect their bottom line. Is it something where

they don't actually want to have the debate? Why do you think it is that there seems to be this line in the sand on the political spectrum and you're really only being engaged with on one side i'd love to know the answer to that question man uh i really would because you know i always joke that i identify as politically non-binary and that's kind of kind of where i'm at like i don't i don't look at i i'm not a team player in that sense i i don't want to be on team blue or team red i try to think about the issues independently and i think the idea that if you have a certain view of abortion you must have a certain view of guns there's a certain view of this a certain i think that's crazy to me like the how are they connected they're not you know so i i try to take

the issues independently but you're right we we live in a society it seems to me at least where um someone like me who's prepared to challenge the right on the things that they get wrong will still get invited on right-wing media uh but if i challenge the left on where they go wrong they won't have me on. And that is a failing of theirs. I think that, like we just talked about, they're afraid of their audiences. They're terrified that anyone with any heterodox opinion is going to be coming on and their audience is going to have a backlash against that. And who knows, maybe they're right. I mean, if their business model is built on feeding their audience only things that they want to hear, they're right not to bring me on. And long may

it continue because shows like yours and shows like mine are going to thrive. As you have built your show, what are some of the things that you've noticed that you may be allowed to do other than just speak your mind that you wouldn't be able to do if you worked for a large corporation? Are there certain types of guests? Are there certain business models? What else have you seen that really allows for kind of ultimate freedom that you're describing? Well, I think one of them is what we're doing right now i i actually get invited on tv a lot nowadays and i don't do as much of it as i used to and part of the reason is is like once you've had this you know we jokes like once once you've got the heroine of a long-term conversation why would you drop down to methadone

you know what i mean like this is so much more fulfilling and satisfying we're sitting here for a good chunk of time you're giving me the space to speak you're not talking over me you're not trying to make me look bad you know you let me make myself look bad if that's what happens but that's that's the way we do things and if I was working in some sort of corporate media you know you get three minutes to make one point and look there's a market out there for that and I'm not saying those people are you know shouldn't exist but I enjoy this I enjoy having a conversation I enjoy really connecting with somebody getting to know how they think getting to them getting to know how I think disagreeing where there's disagreement but doing it in a constructive way

as opposed to going for the clickbait and and all of that so that is a really fulfilling part of doing trigonometry um for me we get to interview fascinating people left and right you know we've had the jordan petersons and the douglas murrays and all the bill burrs and all sorts of different uh people comedians stand-ups satirists authors you know anything name it and we just sit and learn it's amazing what a great thing to do for a living man is to talk to people you find interesting uh to like i i almost i almost think it's i don't know if you find this but i almost find that it's very rare for me to have as meaningful a conversation off of the show as it is on the show how many people get the opportunity to sit down with a great mind for an

hour and just engage and speak and listen and and and think about the world like to me that that is incredibly gratifying. And I don't think if I was hosting something on TV or if I was involved in a TV thing, I'd get a chance to do that. I feel exactly the same. And actually, I've had friends stop me at dinner and they're like, hey, you're asking me questions as if I'm on the show. Because what you start to realize is a lot of conversations, they're pretty surface level. You don't actually talk about meaningful things, even if you are with smart people when you're in more social settings. And so I just tend to want to have the more meaningful conversation, which leads to kind of better questions.

So it's always funny when they remind me, hey, you know, it's okay to chill out and just have a social time. One of the things I read online that I was fascinated by is you wrote a radical moderate manifesto. And it's this idea that actually maybe being an independent is probably a pretty good idea. Can you describe a little bit

what that radical moderate manifesto entails? Well, the radical moderate manifesto is I think something that most people comfortably would have agreed on 20 years ago. But the way that the culture has gone is that that has changed a lot. I mean, to me, there are some very basic principles. You know, one of them is I couldn't give less of a shit about diversity. I don't think it's important. I'm a first generation dark skinned immigrant in the UK. I don't want to be given a leg up. I don't want to be given a hand up. I don't need to be a victim. I want the opportunity to compete on merit. Right.

And the thing that I really rail against is when it starts to get introduced into things where it undermines the quality of the effectiveness or the output of that particular thing. So I don't need a diverse army. I want an army that's good at killing the enemy. That's what I want, right? I don't need a diverse comedy, artificially diverse comedy industry. I need the best, the funniest people on stage in front of me, right? And wherever you look, the introduction of these arbitrary artificial targets, to me, often undermines the quality of the end product, which I'm against. But, you know, the other stuff is, like I say, obvious stuff.

You know, I want the police to enforce the law instead of policing jokes, as we do in the UK, and painting their patrol cars rainbow colors and whatever. I don't think that's what they should be doing. I think they should be prosecuting criminals, catching criminals, prosecuting them and putting them in prison and keeping them away from law-abiding citizens. You know, there's all sorts of just very obvious things. I invite people to go and read the Substack piece that I put out. But I think that's something actually that the vast majority of people could easily agree upon until, you know, you were the wrong person for thinking that, you know, endlessly, artificially changing the makeup of, you know. The idea that a company's primary focus should be on making sure they have the right number of Russians or other immigrants or women or whatever, to me, that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. I happen with our YouTube channel to run a small business.

We have a very diverse team, and that is because we don't care about diversity. We care if you're good enough. And if you live in a city like London, as we do, there's a lot of people of different types around. If you hire the best people, you're going to find a lot of them are different. They're all going to bring their own thing, and that is how it should be. It's amazing how without the mandate, you actually may end up having a more diverse team than many of the teams who do have the mandates. And there's been a lot of talk in the United States about the mainstream media will critique these technology companies and say, hey, you don't have enough diversity. You don't have enough, you know, ABC category that we think you should have.

And then there was a study done that actually showed that the tech companies were more diverse than the mainstream media outlets. And so it ends up being this thing where when you have frontal offensive kind of fire, it actually is a distraction so that you don't get return fire. Right. If you're constantly attacking other people, there tends not to be that much that blows back on you. So I've always found that fascinating, where if we agree that finding the best people is the goal, usually those organizations end up being quite diverse. And that leads me, I think, to this idea of like you are an immigrant. You did live in Russia. Putin and Russia have been all over the news. But you've written pieces where you basically have said, listen, listen to what he is saying in his own words. Here is why he is mad.

Can you explain a little bit for people, especially here in the United States, who I think just get bombarded with good or bad, you know, evil or positive, where you really took his words and I think highlighted nuance that a lot of Americans could probably learn from to better understand what the situation is between Russia, Ukraine and kind of Putin's complaints. at the Miami Beach Convention Center. The event is called Lyceum Miami and tickets are completely free for anyone who wants to come. I'm bringing together many of the most popular guests from the podcast over the last couple of years. Some of the guest speakers that we've already announced are people like Vivek Ramaswamy

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that you will be scratching your head as to how I even got them to show up. But come check out Lyceum Miami on March 4th. The Lyceum was a public gym in Athens, Greece, where people used to come together, talk about ideas and debate topics that were important to society. I want to meet people in person, in real life,

once again, after three years of a hiatus from real life events. And so I'm hosting the event. And as I mentioned, anyone from anywhere can come to this event completely for free. All you need to do is go to LyceumMiami.com and you'll be able to pick up a free general admission ticket.

Make sure you claim your ticket in order to get in through the doors. Lyceum Miami is gonna be a great time. So come check it out. Come hang out with me, many of the popular guests from the podcast, and other like-minded individuals. Lyceum Miami, March 4th, Miami Beach Convention Center. I hope to see you there. All right, let's get back into this conversation. Well, Putin's primary agenda, and he says it in his own words, and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, has expressed this many times. They want to change the global world order. They don't like the fact that America is the most powerful country in the world.

They don't like that America influences a lot of policy around the world. They don't like that many countries around the world have to reckon with America when they're making certain decisions. And what they claim they want is a multipolar world, in other words, a world in which Russia, China, the United States are equals. Of course, that is not a stable construction, and they know it full well. What they want, to put it simply, is to throw America off its pedestal. That is what they want. They don't like, as Putin said in one of his speeches, the end of Western hegemony is inevitable. And this is the classic, you know, I don't know if you're into combat sports, but I've really gotten to the UFC lately.

It's the challenger who wants to throw down the gauntlet to the champion and knock him off his pedestal. And, you know, I've been making the point for many, many years that wokeness, people think it's irrelevant. It's something that only happens online and whatever, but it's not. I mean, the core of wokeness is the direct destruction of Western self-confidence. The core of wokeness is to say we are bad, we are evil, especially straight white men, but actually white women and this and that and whatever. You know, anyone who's straight, anyone who's not. It's about fundamentally inculcating in our societies the feeling that we are somehow, you know, we're questionable. And that is a bad thing because what it does is it's like you're destroying your own immune system.

And people have forgotten the world is not some kind of kumbaya holding hands, unicorns and rainbows place. The world is a competitive place. It's a competition between different civilizations. And if we don't have the confidence in ourselves, if the champion doesn't want to defend that belt, if the champion doesn't want to stand up in the cage and fight. Someone else is going to come along who wants that belt. When you see Putin saying these things, why do you think it is that Western media isn't covering it from that perspective? Is it because it makes them uncomfortable?

It violates them? Okay, explain more. Well, most of them don't speak Russian. Most of them don't have the time to listen to a four-hour speech by Vladimir Putin or to read a transcript of one that I've made. Most of them don't have Russian speakers on staff. Most of them don't want to pay thousands of dollars to have his speeches translated. And if you're interested in clicks instead of the truth, well, why would you care what Vladimir Putin says?

What you can say, you can do one of two things. You can do what CNN does, which is go, you know, Vladimir Putin is the reincarnation of Hitler. Or you can do what some people on Fox News, including Tucker. And, you know, I was on his show recently, but I disagree with him vehemently about his coverage of Ukraine, which has been fact free, basically. And you can go, you know, it's all our fault. We shouldn't have got the you know, and blame it on America or or, you know, blame it on the Democrats or whatever, because that's what gets you the clicks. Get into the truth. It's hard. It takes time. It takes energy. um and i just think they're not very competent and that's mainly the reason that they're not giving the american people the information that they need if you were made president of the united

states for a year how would you interact with putin or uh respond to some of the things that he's saying is there like a clear path as to what you think the united states should do well i mean that's super difficult the you know the real question is what do you want what what what outcome do you want? That's how you know what you want to do. So what are you trying to achieve? What would you like to, what position would you like to get to? I think most people in the United States, whether rightly or wrongly, would say that they want to achieve peace. And, you know, there's a strong argument that maybe pursuing peace as kind of the holy grail may not be the best strategy. But let's just say that was the strategy is to achieve peace. What do you think

is the path there? Well, the thing is, even that, with all possible respect, you know, I've really enjoyed this interview and you're asking great questions but that is kind of a bad question because like i said this we did an interview my co-host francis interviewed me on our channel the day the invasion happened and that that that was a you know that got a lot of people watching it and he said like you he said you know what how do you get peace and i said surrender that's the quickest way to get peace right like if you come up to me in the street and demand my wallet and i go what's the outcome here that i want i want peace okay hand over the wallet fine you want to do that you want to i mean the united states has the power to make that happen if it pulls all

support from ukraine the ukrainians will will i mean they'll get slaughtered and then surrender is that what the americans want you want to give america's number one enemy a win like that and the confidence to keep going further is that is that what you think you think that's not going to have long-term consequences down the line. Peace for its own sake is not necessarily the outcome, because you've got to think long-term. And the long-term outcome here is you want peace, but what you also want to do is to prevent further aggression, because we've been down this road before. You've got to remember, Russia annexed pieces of Ukraine in 2014, and nobody did anything. And guess what? Eight years later, they come back. As soon as they felt

that America had its eye off the ball as soon as they felt confident that they could make further inroads. So from that perspective, I think peace is obviously the desired goal, but you've got to think about what you're prepared to sacrifice to achieve it. And for my money, allowing someone to behave in this way and encouraging them to do so by letting them roll their tanks over Ukraine would be the worst thing that the United States could do here. So you're highlighting a couple of the nuances that I find fascinating about the situation, which is peace, to your point, if you just surrender.

The United States, at least the public statements, is that the United States is not engaged. We're providing support to another country. And I think that country would like it to be believed that they are making their unilateral decisions. And so therefore, even if the United States said to them to surrender, they would not. Who knows if that would happen or not.

But to your point about preventing further future aggression, that then changes the chessboard a little bit, right? Because not only are you trying to achieve peace in the short term, but you actually are trying to serve as a deterrent. And one of the things that I've been very interested in is the use of U.S. sanctions as part of the strategy. And so what we have seen is that the United States has obviously gone very, very hard at Russia, unprecedented level of sanctions, but also got global coordination to hit them. But as we've watched that happen, it's thrown off commodity prices. We've actually seen an influx of trading volume with Russia. There's many other countries like China and India who have said we are not going to stop trading with them. We need wheat. We need oil. We need these things from them.

And now there's even reports starting to come out that actually Russian oil originally was kind of being repackaged as Chinese oil and sold at twice the price to Germany and other countries. But now there's places in Singapore where there are reports coming out that literally the tanks and the different storage facilities are overfilled. They don't have enough space because people are taking Russian oil and they're mixing it or they're kind of watering it down with other oil so that they can then sell it on the global market without having to say that it's Russian oil. when you start to see kind of the nuances and the complexity is there a right answer like that's one of the things i keep coming back to here right or is it just all trade-offs and actually there's a no-win situation like nobody wins when you have these kind of global showdowns i don't think that's true i i agree with like 99 of what you said i think you made a great point uh i think it's not look my favorite author at the moment that i'm reading the most is thomas soul and

one of his lines is, there's no solutions, only trade-offs. And I think that's, of course, true. In terms of sanctions, people talk about sanctions as if sanctions are one thing. I think the sanctions on energy were quite idiotic and are not really hurting Russia. Then again, technology sanctions are very effective at preventing Russia from continuing high-tech manufacturing, making more advanced weaponry, et cetera. So you have to pick and choose what you're talking about when you're talking about sanctions. But in terms of, you know, there are no winners, I disagree. I think it's very clear that there are two winners out of this.

It's the United States and it's China. They are the two winners here. Russia and Ukraine are both bad losers out of this. India is not particularly happy. And this is sort of, I was talking to an Indian politician recently. He sort of said it's a plague on both your houses with respect to Russia and America from their perspective. but yeah look i think what you're seeing more broadly bigger picture even if we take a step back is um and peter zahan is very good on this uh you're seeing the end of globalization

you know this idea of uh what was it called like peace through trade or some other or human rights through trade or whatever bullshit that the west convinced itself about you know if we just let Putin's cronies launder their money through the city of London and buy super yachts in the West. You know, the Russians, they'll get civilized and they won't be, you know, the usual self and whatever. And if we just, you know, if we just build some factories in China and make all our widgets there, they're not going to put a million Uyghurs in concentration camps and they're not going to suppress protests in Hong Kong. And they're not they're not going to remain the Chinese Communist Party. They're going to become beautiful liberal Democrats like all of us wonderful people in the West.

and that my friend is bs as we've just found out and we're going to continue to find out you know different civilizations have different cultures um and so that i think is the process that's happening the global supply chains are breaking down we saw during covid the like when the shit hits the fan uh you know the chinese are going to hoard the ppe they're going to hoard the antibiotics they're going to lie to you about the virus and where it came from and and how it's spreading and all of that. Right. And so rather than us exporting liberal democracy to these countries, instead, we're importing Chinese style authoritarianism when it comes to lockdowns and all of this other stuff. So the world is becoming I think we're in for a period that is going to be

or it depends where you are, of course, but globally is going to be quite a challenging period of time economically and in other ways. And as you say, it's a very complex, complex situation. And that's why I asked you what you want, because there may be a right answer, but it really depends on where you want to get to. When you look at the Western perspective of the world, do you think that there is a loss of confidence in the ability for the West and specifically the United States to kind of police the world? So you're talking about the collapse of globalization, and usually people will talk about manufacturing and trade and those types of things but obviously a lot of that has thrived because of the united states's ability and

appetite to run around the world and kind of police as we see the fall of globalization from the manufacturing and trade standpoint is your expectation that we will actually see the united states kind of contract that appetite um in terms of policing the world we obviously aren't going into ukraine we kind of are pseudo participating via support but what is your expectation kind of moving forward for how the united states will participate in some of these more global or or geopolitical events? Well, it's hard to know, man, because, you know, unlike many other countries, the United States is still a democracy.

And so you're able to elect people who can at least try to change the course of the country. I mean, I had obviously very profound disagreements with your previous president, as I do with this one. But the one thing that I think got him elected, whether you agreed with him or not, I just think it's a fact that the one thing that got him elected, and interesting to listen to Steve Bannon talk about the strategy

and the ideas behind it was, you know, the American elite and Western elites more generally are sort of trying to sell the public on this idea of managed decline. You know, we've had our time. We've been the dominant civilization in the world. And let's just, you know, China is coming and the Asian and the Africans, you know, they're going to be the future. And we just have to manage our decline. And Donald Trump came in and went, no, no, no, no, no.

We want to be great again. and you know whatever your views on him and his policies and whatever it's kind of irrelevant my point is it really depends on who you elect and if you and who we elect here in the uk and if we continue to elect people who are unwilling to stand up for western values who are unwilling to say uh you know that they're happy for america to be the strongest country in the world who who who want to talk you know like one of the things as an outside observer just listening to the way the conversations had in the united states like i don't remember the last time i heard someone say something i used to hear when i was a kid like every day which was that is un-american

right it's almost like we don't remember who we are anymore um and that is to me the biggest problem it's it's the collapse and collapse in western self-confidence so it really all depends on whether your country and mine can recapture that self-belief and self-confidence and look I say this as someone who opposed the invasion of Iraq, who opposed the invasion of Afghanistan. I don't think that it benefits the world for America to go sticking its finger in every pie and sticking its finger in everyone's business. On the other hand, there are also other things going on. I mean, that's why Ukraine is so different to Iraq and Afghanistan, because the United States did not invade Ukraine. And this is one of the things that I find so funny about these people who claim to be anti-war and anti-imperialist, when actually what they mean is they're pro the Russian empire's attempt to rebuild itself by means of war.

That is what they're actually saying, right, in effect. And I'm someone who opposes that, whether it's coming from the United States invading Afghanistan and Iraq or whether it's Russia invading Ukraine. It's kind of the same thing going on. Do you read it all into the fact that Donald Trump was elected in the United States, Boris Johnson, and even Zelensky, right? He's a comedian who eventually rose to become the president of a country. Those all happened around the same time. Is there anything that you kind of look at as connectivity, whether it was the mental state of various societies and countries all at the same time? Or like it feels like there's something that it was in the water across multiple countries at the same time.

And then they've kind of swung the pendulum back, and obviously we've got Joe Biden here in the United States, and you can kind of see the knock-on effects in some of these other countries. That's a really great observation, a really good question. I think there's some truth to that, and I think the truth is that the caliber of our politicians has been in a precipitous decline for some time. and so the only thing that gets the american people excited or the british public excited about voting for somebody is that they are outside the system right and in ukraine a country i know pretty well that was kind of the same it's not like people like zelensky is that they really didn't like the other guys that were the the political uh oligarchy that existed in the country at the time and that's why he was elected so i think you're right i think our levels of

dissatisfaction with our political class as such, that we are willing to look almost anywhere to find somebody who can come in from the outside and lie to us that they're going to change things. Yeah. One of the other ideas that I think is tangentially related to this that I've thought a lot about is for decades and decades, maybe even a century, the American dream was this thing that was held up for people around the world. And quite literally, there's story after story after story of people who did all sorts of insanely risky things to get to the united states just for the possibility of having economic mobility and freedom and democracy and capitalism and all these things but with the advent of the internet and global penetration

of the internet uh and many times in many of the developing countries there seems to be this like exporting of the american dream now to anybody with an internet connection and i always talk about like maybe a country like india where you have you know over a billion people and we now are starting to see literally kids with an internet connection and a cell phone or a computer being able to build companies and create some sort of economic mobility for themselves how does that impact one i think society but also two who ends up getting elected to lead those people right if you were a country where there was no economic mobility and there was no you know de facto american dream available you had to leave but now if you can stay does that have a major impact on

the politics of specific countries as well it's hard to say because uh i can't speak for the world because i don't know many countries but certainly in russia i would argue that's not been the case at all uh if you look at the fact that you know the support for the invasion is still quite high even though it's going very badly for russia um and it's because 80 percent of russians get their news from TV. You know, and so that 15 percent, the sort of liberal people in Russia who get their news elsewhere, you know, they've all run away or become dissidents or become, you know, the unofficial opposition or whatever. The overwhelming majority of the country are under the complete informational control of Vladimir Putin and his cronies. And likewise in China, it's not like,

you know, the Chinese give us TikTok, but it's not like they're all sitting there using Twitter on Facebook. They make their own stuff and they don't let their people access things that are in English, in the English language that they don't want to. And of course, the language barrier is also a very powerful thing. You know, most people in Russia and China don't speak English. So that sort of penetration, I'm sure it's having an effect. But as I look around the world right now, that does not seem to me to be what's determining who gets to be elected. And of course, it's a very westernized thinking uh western model of thinking because in both russia and china who has public support isn't really what determines who becomes leader uh once they become

leader it's important for them to have public support and they do things to retain it but that isn't generally how the person who who takes over the country is picked yeah it's um i think the first time that i really started to understand how some of this uh occurs in other countries that maybe are not as democratic as the United States is I was reading Bill Browder's book, Red Notice. And in it, he was basically talking about Putin as a business adversary, right? Or just another businessman. And then eventually kind of walks through how the rise of power. And so it sent me down this deep rabbit hole. And then in your talk, actually, that everyone seems to be very receptive to, you talk about Xi Jinping and his rise and kind of how his father was

actually uh uh really you know treated poorly um very poorly by uh the ruling class and now all of a sudden xi jinping has risen to be the leader of that class and so that is not a story that is common uh in the united states mainly because we just have a different system and a system that uh frankly probably would not allow those individuals to be able to rise in power because the tactics they used uh are negated here in the united states right but also i don't think you you'd have a cultural revolution in which a bunch of people are arrested and thrown into jail right as well so i think that's that's also a product of that well it's funny because i remember a a friend of mine in a now deleted tweet but right when the pandemic started uh he tweeted out

something and he basically said um you know the lockdowns never could happen in the united states because people value their freedom too much and then i remember a couple of months later we were in the middle of lockdown and i said to myself i actually agreed with the tweet when he said it Right. And here we are. And so I do wonder how much of the ideals, the ethos, many of the things that people, I think, kind of hold up on this spotlight of the United States when it's actually put to the test. Do they really believe these things? Are they willing to have the individual personal sacrifice to uphold them? Or is it something that you can talk about in quote-unquote peacetime, in good times, but when the bad times come, humans are humans and they just succumb to whatever the easiest path is? I think that's definitely true, but I think it's also partly about what I said earlier, which is if you don't continue to talk confidently about what Western values are, then when it comes to a decision like lockdown, well, if we don't really believe in individual liberty, then why not do a lockdown, right? if we don't really talk about how you know bodily autonomy is important i mean people do interestingly those are the same people that demanded vaccine mandates when it came to it in

many places but if we don't really remember that you know one of the core tenets of of western values is that the individual is sacred and is empowered to make their own decisions about their own lives and their own bodies and so on uh then it becomes easier to sell people on this sort of collective action. And I'm not saying collective action is always a bad thing or always unnecessary. You know, if your country gets invaded, everybody has to get together and fight. Right. And of course, in the early stages of the pandemic, it was hard to tell what exactly was going on. But once we'd allowed the government to instill the fear of God into people by brainwashing them through the media, I'm not saying the COVID wasn't dangerous. Of course, it was dangerous. But

the the level of fear that people experienced was disproportionate to the nature of the threat uh this was a disease that was very dangerous to elderly people and obese people that's about it let's be honest right of course there were people who were outside those two categories who who suffered badly but statistically speaking it was not that dangerous to them but if you looked at what people actually believed when they were polled particularly people who watched a lot of mainstream television and government propaganda on those mainstream channels the way they thought about that issue was like this was you know aids that could spread through the air that's kind of how people reacted and if you don't keep reminding people that you know freedom has trade-offs like

anything else we talked about no solutions only trade-offs freedom comes with danger and the United States was built by people who believed that, who understood that, and who were happy with that deal, right? But the more you move away from the way that your country was built and founded, because you forget your own values and what it's built on, the more you're likely to import stuff from other cultures. You've got to understand, I mean, lockdowns are not the sort of thing that would have been created in the West. It is a product of a communist party that has complete control over its country. And they exported it everywhere. And I'm not, this isn't me spitballing here. Neil Ferguson, who was the guy who was largely responsible for lockdowns and

our COVID policy here in the United Kingdom, who later, by the way, had to resign because he was visiting his mistress in the middle of the very lockdowns that he encouraged. He said, we didn't know it was possible until the Chinese did it. It's crazy that that got exported like that. But I also think that there's a number of ideas in society that have now come from other countries and kind of infiltrated the West. And I think that's one of your main points across your speech and then many of the things that you talk about on a day-to-day basis is if you have these Western ideals and you know who you are, which is a key piece to it, then it is easy to identify that idea is not part of who we are. We do not actually accept that logic. But when all of a sudden that becomes controversial to say, I am an American, I am British, I have these ideals, I have these ethos, and you don't have the identity in order to repel bad ideas, you kind of fall for anything, right? It's the old adage of if you don't stand for something, you fall for nothing. And I think that's maybe your biggest message that you continue to bring across all of these different topics.

I agree. I think that's right. I think that's where so many of our problems come from, is the inability to define who you are. And the problem we have is less the case in America, thankfully, but in Britain, like, you come up to somebody and you say, what are British values? They're going to look at you like you're trying to, you know, catch them out or make them look bad

or give them opportunity to hang themselves with their own rope because to even suggest that there's such a thing as British values, that they should be defended, you know, defined, and maybe even defended. This is controversial stuff, as you say, and that is crazy, crazy. There's a gentleman, Rob Henderson, who coined the term luxury beliefs. Had him on the show to talk about it, yeah. Amazing. Okay, so this idea of luxury beliefs, when I heard you talking about climate change and the fact that the impact of climate change is going to be determined by the poor countries or the developing countries, not necessarily the most developed nations uh that's the first thing that jumped to my mind is wow what

a luxury it is for a developed nation to think that they can impact uh this can you describe a little bit more in terms of what exactly uh you're looking for over the next couple of years from the developing nations to really determine how this will play out well i don't think it needs to be as complicated and i just think it's the universal constant human truth that people want to live a better life than they lived yesterday, and they want their children to live a better life than they do. And if you've got a population of 1.whatever billion in China and 1.4 billion in India, a lot of whom are poor, they're going to be industrializing as rapidly as they possibly can to deliver economic growth and prosperity for their people. And by the way, again, it's not me

saying it. I watched the Indian oil minister talking about this the other day, and he was being challenged on why they're buying russian oil and he was like we have an obligation to our consumer to provide energy like you know they as i said in my speech they're not of course look everyone who who believes in climate change is concerned about its impact and there are people in china and people in india who are working on that but the point is they are not going to be sit there and go oh you guys spent you know 200 years industrializing and now we're just going to remain poor because we're all concerned about climate change and so that's why i think you know the solution to all of these problems is going to be technological and as we talked about right at

the start the west is best place to deal with that yeah when you look forward are there certain types of information outside of uh kind of youtube that you really look for so one of the things that i've uh looked at and struggled with i think alongside many others is every single one of these whether they're geopolitical conflicts, whether they're things around mandates, whether they are things around the vaccines and and covid or anything else. Where do you get your information? How do you evaluate information you see to actually know what is true or what is worth putting weight to versus it's either propaganda or it's something that could even just be, you know, some sort of person on Twitter who's trying to get people riled up and posting some random video from five years

ago like what is your process like from getting information and really vetting it hey guys i hope you're enjoying this conversation as you probably realize we don't run any ads on this show that's right all the other podcasts all the other youtube shows that you watch they have advertisers we don't have any direct relationships with advertisers and we simply create this because we enjoy doing it now that we do that though we have a team and if you'd like to support us one way you can do that is to go subscribe to the Pomp Letter. It's a daily letter that I write to about 235,000 people about my personal opinion on financial markets, business, technology, and Bitcoin. Just go to pompletter.com and you can sign up there. I'd love to have you join us.

And it's a great, easy way to support the work that the team and I are doing on a daily basis. All right, let's get back into this conversation. That's a really good question. And I think it's actually something that everybody's struggling with right now like there is no answer really the one thing that i found and for me the war in ukraine was a very interesting example of this because i instantly saw people with whom i often agree who had no idea they could not find ukraine on a map and initially they were all looking to me to give them my view right and they were like oh wow you did that interview with francis on trigonometry you know it's you you got like half a million views or whatever it was like great you know uh that that was fascinating thank you for

this and then two weeks later they like had a narrative and it was locked in and they knew and they would argue with like two weeks ago this guy was asking me for my opinion now he knows better than me what's happening in ukraine so if you watch people over time you can see who like the number one rule i have is i try not to comment on things i don't understand right so if you ask me about something that i don't understand i'll just say i don't know people who comment on everything are largely going to be unreliable sources of information number one number two and the problem we have as well is like there's this meme online i don't know if you're familiar familiar with it which is i believe the current thing and that's kind of how like the people who think they've got

past the propaganda they think that the people who still believe the propaganda are like brainwashed to believe the current thing but there's also this other thing which is i oppose the current thing which is the exact opposite like if the mainstream media is saying it it must not be true well that's not quite how it works so uh i the way i've tried to do is i listen to different people i see who who is a reliable actor over time whose predictions tend to be accurate and who's not uh and that's kind of how I get my information. I want to talk about Jordan Peterson and Greta Thunberg, who I think represent maybe two extremes in the world. And there's plenty of people who disagree with one and like the other and vice versa. Maybe we can start with Greta. I've seen you call her

St. Greta of climate change, obviously at Oxford. Peter Thiel had a number of comments to say about her as well why do you think she has been so effective in terms of becoming the face and the voice of the climate change movement you can't criticize her interesting explain well she's a child right so what you're going to pick on a vulnerable autistic child were you some kind of monster right it's a very effective shield against criticism and discussion and debate and if you think about what she did it's not like she went around educating people about the climate that that wasn't her role her role was to chastise people her role was to say come back to the ideology that we talked about earlier it's it's almost like a religious cult uh you know whether

you and i'm not talking about climate change i'm talking about the ideology of net zero and reducing consumption and all of this stuff right because climate change is a separate thing that's a scientific matter. How you deal with it is also a scientific matter, but it's also a matter of logic. Like, as I said in my speech, if we produce 2% of global carbon emissions, it doesn't matter if we turn the lights off and never turn them on again. It's not going to make any difference, right? So the fact that people are demanding that we make ourselves really poor all of a sudden, that is not a rational demand. That is not a rational thing. And how do you get people to do irrational things. Well, you can't persuade them rationally. So you have to emotion, blackmail,

whatever it is, right? And a child who is upset and crying on stage is the perfect method by which to achieve that emotional impact, right? So I have no issue with Greta Thunberg herself. I think she's a child that has been badly let down by her parents and other adults around her who have encourage her to go down this path, which I think in the end will turn out to have been quite harmful for her, I'm afraid. So that's my take on her. I just think she's being used by people for their own political purposes. I saw the video of her being arrested, and I'll kind of put that in air quotes. And what I think surprised me was not her or others trying to get photo ops. I think that most of the times we see content, I always ask myself, you know, why are we seeing this and

why now right and uh actually it was more so the participation of the police i i think i was saying to myself you know what what is going on are those real police officers right what why are they doing this why are they participating um and so i don't know if you have any thoughts there in terms of uh you know what seemed to be kind of photo op made you know situations but it was also with what appears to be real police officers like do you ever read on that no not really i just i don't know enough about it to be honest yeah the other thing that you did as i mentioned was you wrote a piece on why they hate jordan peterson uh and he seems to be on the opposite end of the spectrum uh from a greta thunberg in terms of at least society's uh response and and also i think

uh a certain type of individual who is drawn to that message why do they hate jordan peterson there are many reasons of course there's always it's not a one thing but uh i think that um look i i need to preface this because it's important because the the short the cliff notes version is they hate him because he wants men to be better and he has a positive message for men but i don't believe that like i don't believe that the answer for men is to whine and complain right so i'm not into like men's rights movements because I just don't think more than anything else. I don't think they're effective. Forget about how they behave and the morality and whatever. I just I don't think people you know we're biologically different and we're programmed to have sympathy for women and we're programmed to consider men disposable. That is the biology of biological reality. Not going to change it. Men creating movements where they protest and complain about the rights isn't going to change anything. Men just have to be better and work harder and you know look after their own interests. And one of the things about the interests of men is to find women who want

to be with them and who don't hate men. That's really how you solve that problem at an individual level. But the reason they hate Jordan Peterson is he came out and he unapologetically wanted men to be better. He wanted everyone to be better. And that's one of the other reasons they didn't like him of course um but also he challenged the ideology and if you the reason i say this people will think i'm being sort of conspiratorial or whatever but if you if you cast your mind back to like the kathy newman interview and all of that they all he did also an interview for gq with a woman called helen lewis who's interviewed me and they all all i don't remember if she asked him this specifically but lots of other journalists all kept saying to him yeah but the majority of

audience are men what is that you know like like it was a bad thing no one goes to a cosmetics company and says the majority of the audience are women why is that because there's nothing wrong with women but there's something wrong with men in their world view uh and we you know we hear it in the language of wokeness you know you're just a straight white man you're a toxic toxic masculinity or toxic this toxic that and i think the reason that jordan peterson came under attack is because not only was he trying to tell men and women but particularly men to be better he also embodied traditional masculine virtues uh that that people don't want to see men exhibit in the world what do you think like the one or two top uh masculine attributes are that people

don't want to see? Confidence, strength, right? Someone who's not going to back down, someone who's going to fight his corner all the way. Again, because people are stupid, I have to say this. I'm not saying women can't be strong and confident, right? But we don't like to see men express those things. If you look at movies, if you look at television shows, if you look at stand up the guy's always the goof the idiot the this the that it's weak pathetic and the woman is the the girl boss and whatever that's what apparently we these people want to see um so the they didn't want to see a guy who would come along and go actually no you're wrong about that and i'm gonna i'm gonna make the argument and i'm gonna argue the case and i'm gonna persuade you and if you

don't agree with me well you're wrong like they don't want to see that they want to they want to attack him and then for him to back down yeah it is interesting that you mentioned movies i think there's been a very very big difference between uh even people who are cast uh for certain uh roles uh but the storylines of many of these movies right you start to see i always joke like the movie version of the mannequins inside of the store where they used to be uh what essentially looked like ripped you know models and now they've got dad bods and uh that's celebrated to a degree You also are starting to see some of that in movies where the hero or whatever actually doesn't look or act the same way that they would have 10, 15, 20 years ago, definitely not 50 years ago. And I do wonder how much of that is programming children's mind who then will grow to be adults and has a long-term impact versus, no, they watch a movie and then they go and they see a sports star on television where it can't be faked.

Like you, you can't be fat and be in the NBA, right. For the most part, like you, you have to be an athletic person who is able to actually accomplish the task. And so what about Zion Williamson? Who? Zion Williamson. Yeah. Zion Williamson. Like he's a, he's a chunky, chunky, chunky guy. I was just trying to make a joke. No, he would say that he, he is muscular without the definition. Mate, he's probably way more, more athletic than me. So I'm just joking uh don't don't hit me zion but um i i know what you mean look uh we i mean the media the hollywood they're powerful machines for communicating stereotypes to people right that's that's what it's about and if all you see uh when you're growing up is men who are weak and pathetic

then people are going to take that message to heart now of course some people will rebel against that um but my worry is not only that it's also like uh and i talk about it this in my sub stack about jordan why they hate jordan peterson is like i don't know if you've noticed this but there's been an explosion and people going to the gym specifically to look buff not to like be healthy or whatever but to like look buff like it's a it's a look thing for a lot of people and And my view on it is, and again, it's something I just, it's a theory. I'm not saying this is necessarily true, but it's the one area where men are still allowed to express authentic masculinity.

Like, you are allowed to go to the gym and lift weights. That's not toxic, not yet. There will be a time when that becomes toxic as well, right? And there are already articles about how going to the gym and being healthy is right wing. Like, they're already writing them. but but it's it's the one area where men can go and be men and show up in the world as men and I think that's why it's kind of displaced masculinity and that worries me to some extent don't get me wrong gym is healthy gym is great exercise great lifting is great all of that stuff

is great but some people now think that to be a man is to look like a man and that is not what to being a man is about at all being a man is about how you carry yourself in the world what kind of father you are what kind of husband you are what impact you have on the world what kind of leader you are these are the things that make a man a man uh you don't uh you don't have to be i'm not saying it's bad i'm just saying you know that can't be the only place that men channel their energy to be masculine like that energy that people spend going to the gym you might want to spread that around a bit in terms of some other things that's all i'm saying the last thing i want to talk to you about uh is bitcoin and actually we haven't talked about this so i have no clue if you

know anything about bitcoin if you're interested in it at all uh but a lot of i think your view of the world aligns pretty closely with people who uh are interested or or use bitcoin have you spent any time on it do you have any thoughts there around the asset yeah so i bought uh i bought half a bitcoin in like about 2010 maybe something like that i i don't remember when i bought half a bitcoin when at the time it cost me about 400 pounds so it's about 600 okay so probably 2012 2013 ish time uh although i'm not a currency converter expert yeah yeah and i i only bought it because like people were talking about it was like let's throw an amount of money i don't you know i'm not going

to miss uh at it and then it like doubled in price a few years later so oh great and i sold it so i got you know i got uh i got twelve hundred dollars back for it uh obviously regret that now um but i'm afraid i'm gonna trigger you and the entire audience by saying that uh i don't know i'm not an expert. I'm not qualified. So I'm not saying this is my like professional opinion or anything like that. I get the feeling that this is a giant scam and pyramid scheme that's going to collapse very soon. That's just my feeling. I don't have any great explanation of it. I mean, I can explain some of it to you if you want, but that's my sense of it. So it's fascinating to hear this. I've had a couple people come on uh who have similar ideas and talking through it actually the audience uh

really enjoys so i'd love to hear uh kind of why you think uh that or kind of what are some of the data points maybe that that have kind of built up in your mind that that's led to it in early 1990s russia um you you got to think you've got a communist system that's just collapsed You don't have a free market economy. You don't have advertising on TV for products. Everything is brand new. Like imagine you just like you popped out of the womb straight into like a capitalist world. That's kind of how it was. And we had this thing called Triple M. And every day there would be an advert commercial on TV. They'd be like, oh, I bought this Triple M thing and it's doubled in price.

You know, I said to my friend, go and get it. And he got it. And it's doubled in price as well. we're making loads of money and like that continued for a long time um and my dad who who who was financially literate i kept saying from dad dad we've got to buy some of this and he was like son this is going to collapse watch and of course eventually it did it was a giant pyramid scheme i'm not saying that bitcoin in and of itself doesn't have value because i think that the technology itself may turn out to be quite useful in fact it almost certainly will do but when i you know what i see like out there when i turn open my phone and i scroll twitter or whatever is like a hot girl going why don't you invest in crypto you know like there is a big

industry now around pushing people to buy this as a way to make money and i fundamentally don't believe that you can make you know i believe that money is produced by contributing and creating something productive right financial speculation is financial speculation right so if you're playing bitcoin as like a stock you go you know it might go up as well as go down cool then you know what you're doing you're gambling in the great casino of life and that's fine but is it something that's going to generate value uh i'm very skeptical about that um and we just did an interview which we haven't released yet but we will be with a guy called mike green he used to be peter teals personally you're familiar with him mike green and i've had many debates in public on this topic so

he's uh he's the perfect person to get the other side of uh of the perspective right right right well i i have to say i've i've listened to both sides of the argument now listen man i i want to remind people what i just said i don't understand this area i'm not an expert and i put that up front right but i'm more persuaded by his argument than the other argument so there's two i think main things that uh i would kind of respond with that um again maybe it won't change your mind but but i think are important to understand so uh the first is um when you think of the crypto industry there's like 20 000 of these tokens at this point right i think one of the big points is like bitcoin is very separate than the other 19 999 right everything i said i was i can be applied to

bitcoin in my opinion so okay that's what i mean okay so i think it applies even to bitcoin but all the other tokens even more so yeah correct definitely the other tokens and when it comes to bitcoin i think there there's two you know kind of fundamental things that i believe and and i think many people in the bitcoin community believe the first is the idea of like the production of money right so one of the things that obviously has driven uh fiat currencies and these national currencies uh are central banks and the centralized control and there's a reason why they do it and kind of how they run the economy when you separate money from the state in terms of bitcoin uh you need something to replace those organizations right and so what

has essentially replaced it is uh kind of a two-step process one there is a programmatic monetary policy that's coded that can't be changed by anyone and two is you have the miners who are helping to produce the bitcoin right they are securing the network they are doing this it is now the strongest computer network in the world it's the most decentralized yada yada uh and so i think that one of the things that becomes really interesting is if you think right now in the world You have in the United States a country that's been experiencing 6%, 7%, 8% compounding inflation now for multiple years. UK, very similar all around the world. You also have things like the debt limit in the United States where people are saying, hey, U.S. treasuries I thought were the safest asset.

Now, you know, I don't think the U.S. is going to default, but there's some hysteria here. Maybe I should go seek out something else. And then you also have people around the world who say, you know what, I just want something that I can use. And if you go to the extreme and you look at Venezuela or Zimbabwe, right, But if I can't actually get U.S. dollars because it's dangerous or they're going to get confiscated, the next best thing is to get something where I can just simply hold on to it. I have sovereignty over an asset. And so just as you had mentioned earlier that almost there's this luxury belief in the developed world around climate change and some of these things, I actually believe that there is this luxury belief around money in the developed world. And there's this gentleman, Alex Gladstein, who you should have on the show.

He is at the Human Rights Foundation. And he talks all the time about financial privilege. So if you or I go to the bank or to the ATM, we're able to easily get money out. We can send money, right? No one is trying to stop us from doing that or confiscate our assets. But there are many places around the world where that's not necessarily true. And that's where kind of Bitcoin as a pure technology, forget about the speculation on that. Pure technology has value for those individuals.

Now, how big is that market? How pervasive will that be? Will those people eventually get to financial privilege? All up for debate. When it comes to the financial speculation, I actually think you're 100 percent right. And I would agree with you. People who are using this to simply get rich probably will end up being hurt because you have an asset that the world does not yet know what the value is. Bitcoin community thinks it'll be worth a lot more in the future. Bitcoin critics, Mike Green and others, believe it'll be worth way less in the future.

And so naturally you have a market, there'll be volatility. And so the speculators usually end up getting run over, similar to, I think, the triple M that you described in Russia. And so the one piece that I think I'll leave you with when it comes to Bitcoin is I actually think you're a Bitcoiner. Maybe you just haven't realized it yet in that I look at Bitcoin personally and I say Bitcoin to me has taken the American ethos and ideals, things like free speech, and codified it. It is the ability for anyone to send economic value to anyone else without asking permission of a third party. It allows for a true free market asset that is traded 24-7, 365, with no intervention from external sources. And then I think the third thing is it allows for individuals to have private property rights in a technological sense in a digital world, which, as we know, if you compare Russia, China, and other communist countries, private property rights are incredibly important for the foundation of capitalism, democracy, et cetera. And so what I try to separate is like the asset from the price, because I think price like I've been a fool in the past just as much as anyone else and been like, oh, I think the price is going to go up or down or sideways or whatever.

You're always wrong. But when you look at the actual technology, it's almost as if they were able to take these ideals, which I think you and I probably agree vehemently on and say, OK, let's put them into a piece of technology and now go ahead and allow anyone in the world to access it. So, I don't expect to change your mind, but I do think that there's these elements of what you believe that actually are codified in Bitcoin, and if you can separate out price from technology, then I think the technology piece kind of resonates and fits nicely with many of the things that you've talked about today. Well, I think some of that makes sense to me. I suppose, and look, we've had safety Amos on the show to talk. So like we've had the pro and anti Bitcoin case. I'm just saying I'm more convinced by the, I mean, the financial speculation part of it troubles me. But also, you know, I spent quite a bit of time in third world countries. I don't see anyone using Bitcoin there.

I mean, there are people using Bitcoin. But like I'm not walking around and like Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin. everyone's like talking about it and using it to transfer money and stuff like that it may you know once you have infrastructure maybe that that will be what happens with it um and in terms of i'm i would separate you know i may agree with the values of bitcoin that doesn't mean the values of bitcoin are reality in the sense that i mean again this is a very low res version of what people say but like you know private property and the government isn't you know you can do whatever you want with your money the government is not gonna come on death and taxes man you know the

government is gonna find a way to screw you that's what the government's job is the government's job is to find you and to take some of your money that's what that's what they do best yeah well i think that a nuance to that right is like in america we have private property rights but still the government gets paid taxes the government still prevents you from doing certain things and all of that. It's more so what it allows for you to do is have the private property right in the digital realm, right? Before Bitcoin, there really was no way to have kind of the private property rights. So I do think that this is actually a really, really important point because many people look at the Bitcoin community and they hear private property rights as an example,

like, oh, they're all anarchists. They all want to take down the government. And I actually think as I've met many, many people in the community, they're like, no, no, no. I actually believe in the United States. I believe in democracy. I believe in capitalism. I believe in all this. And that's why I'm a Bitcoiner, right, is that these private property rights, I think, are going to be essential. And some of them will even go as far as to say, look, I think that the government will need this asset as we get kind of deeper and deeper into these debt cycles and things like that. Again, all up for debate. I know that you've got to run, so I don't want to keep you much longer. Where can we send people to find you online and also to pick up your book if they're interested?

Well, first of all, before we do that, I should just say I enjoyed hearing your take on it. And I'm always open, particularly on things I don't know anything about, to hear different sides and get new information. So I really enjoyed that part of our conversation. In terms of everything else, the book is called An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West. You can get it on Amazon. Read my Substack. Just search for my name, Konstantin Kiss, in Substack. And the YouTube show is Trigonometry.

It's also available as a podcast on Spotify and everywhere else. Those are the things that I do, and I really appreciate you having me on. Konstantin, I really appreciated this conversation. i learned a lot um and uh frankly i think there's a lot of people around the world who uh not only appreciate your message but also the way that you deliver the message so please keep it up and we will definitely do this again in the future fantastic thanks for having me