TRIGGERnometry - Fashion Expert: What Clothes Tell Us About Culture, Politics and War

Episode Date: December 25, 2024

Dimitry Toukhcher has outfitted renowned figures such as Jordan Peterson, Lennox Lewis, and Alice Cooper. He is a businessman and entrepreneur born in the former Soviet Union. - Subscribe to *AG1* and get a FREE bottle of Vitamin D AND 5 Free AG1 Travel Packs with your first subscription. Go to https://drinkAG1.com/triggernometry - Try *Verso’s* wildly popular longevity products and get 15% off by using code: TRIGGER at https://buy.ver.so/trigger  Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Which is interesting. Like, we didn't actually have a very big physical war in the West, but we surely had a cultural war. What does she really stand for? Like, I can't really answer that. So how do I design an image for somebody who I don't even know what their ethos is? Do you guys know? Nobody knows. When you're old and everybody questions your mental capacity and thinks you're a

about to die, what you don't want to do is you don't want to wear a black suit. Because what is black psychologically trigger on us? The idea of a funeral, the idea of death. To me, he was designed to fail. And I was like, oh, they're going to replace them. Dimitri, you're someone who's made suits and other clothes for a bunch of problematic people like Jordan Peterson, Zubi, me, a bunch of others, and a lot more famous people than those three, too. Why have you done that? To get on the show. Well, it's worked. Yeah, I was just, thank Have you guys run out of guests? And we have.

Yeah, it's like, well, who's next? Like, Pierce Morgan's Barber? No, the main thing. Well, so before any of the celebrity stuff, right? Like, I started a company in 2010, which became a global company by about 2015. We were selling in like 15, 16, 20 countries. I think we're 26 or 27 now. And the thing about the...

So at first, I kind of wanted to see how far I could go. I think in anything. Like, anything you do, you want to see what your potential can be. because eventually, like, the financial goals that I had set, I had met and exceeded them. The company was doing really well, and I thought, well, I'd like to get The Rock in one of our suits, in one of my suits.

And so I put The Rock as the background on my computer, and I would have this image, and so every day I'd go to work, I'm like, how do I get the Rock? And eventually I got into the movie Skyscraper, which was a big summer blog buster. It was like, you know, The Rock jumping from skyscraper, skyscraper was set in Hong Kong. It was filmed in Vancouver.

So I did, and if you guys want a crazy story about how I met The Rock for that movie, it was just wild. But I ended up doing 12 suits for the movie Skyscraper. And I never got to actually meet The Rock. And there's a great story behind that. And I thought, well, who's next? Because the idea is you want to aspire to grow. You want to aspire to be better.

So I thought, well, who's next? And at the time, it was maybe about 2016. I started watching Jordan Peterson videos on YouTube. And he had some really great Harvard lectures that he had recorded. It was before, kind of, it was maybe right around the Bill C-16 thing that was coming out in Canada, but it was way before he was famous, right? So I had maps of meaning, which I completely could not understand at all because it's like, like, 20, 30 IQ points above my level of grasping things.

So I was like, okay, but great lecture. It's very interesting. I thought, I want to get Jordan Peterson as a client. Now, his brother, he has a brother, Joel, who is a client, who had been getting some suits from our company. I think he's up in Regina and Canada. So I tried that avenue in different avenues, but getting to Jordan is like really, really hard. And so I kind of thought, okay, maybe it's not going to happen.

And then I was watching an interview with an NFL player telling his story about how he got into the NFL. And that's actually when it hit me. And the story was that he was watching the NFL as a young boy with his uncle. And he told his uncle like, wow, you know, this guy is an amazing football player. He was watching, I don't know, one of the great NFL linebackers. And his uncle goes, you know, that could be you when you grew up. And he goes, well, why would it be me? And he goes, well, why not you?

Somebody's going to have that job. And it kind of a light went off in my head. I'm like, you know, why not me? Like, I'm really good at what I do. Our company has a lot of social proof. We've got tens of thousands of clients around the world. Lots of people go on camera wearing our suits all the time. Who could possibly be more competent to make suits for Jordan Peterson?

That's going to sound selfish and arrogant, but why not me? And so I just went on with that approach. It was why not me? And on the journey towards that, you know, we were talking about, like, Lenox Lewis, started getting suits from us, Alice Cooper, which was a complete random occurrence. And then by the time, I finally got a reply from somebody on Jordan's team, it was like, oh, we saw your work with Alice Cooper and we like it.

I guess what I was asking as well is, the extent to which there's an ideological dimension to this, because I don't know if you make suits for Bernie Sanders or A or C. Do you know what I mean? So I guess what I'm getting at is, is there something about the worldview of some of the people that you work on? What is that? Well, so, like you,

yourself, I emigrated from the Soviet Union. And so obviously, anybody that comes from the Soviet Union or from Cuba does not think very highly of communism or like hardcore socialism whatsoever. Like nobody's like, nobody defected to the Soviet Union that had any sense of sanity, right? So when I heard Jordan Peterson promulgate, you know, his worldview based on, I suppose, competence hierarchies, that spoke very much to me because I started a business. I employ people. I watch how people operate all the time and how people progress through competency and regress through incompetency

and of course try to prig their way into higher positions like try to you know sanctimoniously say they deserve something that they don't actually deserve because their results don't show it. So I was like, I like that worldview. At the time also, you know, this whole leftist thing was becoming pretty apparent

and then COVID hit. And all of a sudden, you know, everything I had worked for was immediately taken away for an indefinite amount of time because we're a company that measures people for suits. We're a company that travels to people's offices and touches people to do that. Nobody's wearing suits. Nobody's going to the office.

Can't touch anyone. And I thought, well, it feels a lot like a government or governments are really impeding my dreams. Now, notwithstanding, there were some other stuff happening, obviously, on the virus side, which was pretty apparent early on, at least to me, that it wasn't as risky as as we were being told on, you know, mainstream media, like I started doing a lot of statistical

stuff. I, you know, laid out spreadsheet, started doing statistical analyses, like myself, like, I'm an insane person, right? I have a lot of friends with, like, math and physics degrees, you know, from university, and I would run the analyses by them, and they're like, yeah, this seems pretty accurate. And then here was the guy that was saying, hey, like, this is, this is how the world should look like. And I got into Von Mises and Prager, you know, and Dennis Prager, and I started watching all of that. And yeah, I think whatever frequency I picked up from that absolutely geared me towards that path. And so you asked, well, would I do suits for like Bernie Sanders? I wouldn't decline, you know, a client, let's say who wants to get suits. But obviously,

I'm on a certain universal vibrational frequency that has sort of connected me to people like you, let's say. So that's really interesting. So when I was reading about yourself, Dimitri, and about tailoring, I find fashion very interesting because fashion reflects the culture. Yes. How does your fashion reflect the people that you design for? Yeah. And your belief and your politics. Yeah, I thought a lot about this. So, you know, like, we're in England, right? And the whole bespoke movement in England basically kicked off after the London fire, I think was what, 1666 was the Great London Fire, right?

And then Mayfair started to rebrand itself as a sort of a place where luxury merchants would go and the aristocrats would visit those merchants there, starting with, I don't know, Prince George IV, probably, who was kind of a profligate figure. So what happened was, as the luxury consumption started to elevate in England, the society also became more liberal. So what you saw is with cultural change is that clothing always predicated a shift towards liberalism in society.

You saw this during King George IV. I mean, I know my clothing history, right? Like Edward the 7th, again in the early 1900s, you saw society more liberally, And so a lot of the clothing brands that were actually built over those years were built on a vision towards a more liberal society. Tom Ford being an example of that, like Tom Ford's entire mantra is like libertine living. What's the logic behind that? Well, well, the logic is that you're spoiling yourself.

You're living sort of a cyberritic life where you're, you know, you're enjoying and lusting yourself into luxury and, wow, you deserve it, how great it is for you. And so in the 60s and 70s, you saw the cultural shift as well with like the Vietnam War, whereas that's actually when the bespoke tailoring thing kind of fell apart. And Savarro was struggling because everybody moved away from their father's uniform. You know, it wasn't cool. It wasn't cool. The counterculture was liberal. But what's really interesting to me, and this was completely serendipitous, not intentional,

is today's counterculture is not liberal. Today's counterculture is a reawaking, it's a renaissance. Today's counterculture is seeking iconography. today's counterculture is seeking baptisms today counterculture is seeking rules you know and and and hierarchies again based on competence and i think again Jordan Peterson has sort of risen as the Internet's father is a central figure for that, right? So it wasn't that I purposely set out to design anything that would, you know, invoke society into some kind of a, I don't know, conservative movement. I just happened to work in suits, and it just so happened to align with the fact that today's

society is, again, seeking the return of the gods, let's say. And we just kind of fell into that. And the central figures of today's social movements, like Jordan Peterson, for example, and in some level you guys as well, of course, those figures tend to be looking for restoration to a greater society, looking for something better. And do you think it's the structure of the suit reflects, how can I put it, the fact that the people who you dress

are seeking a more structured way of life as opposed to the chaotic elements that extreme liberalism brings? I'm very intentional with that. I actually had a couple of emails with Jordan Peterson about this topic specifically. He was meeting with a prime minister who may be controversial in the world stage, and he had, you know, sort of prime this, that he had this dinner, and he's put some pictures up, and I emailed him, which is, again, kind of selfish of me, because I don't want to take up too much of his time. He's got a lot of things to do, and, like, I'm a dumb tailor

over here. But I said, hey, Jordan, this outfit you wore with his prime minister is the wrong outfit, and here's why the prime minister has a military background, and you're wearing an unstructured jacket, which is like, you know, the Italians and the British have very different views on tailoring. The British, it's always been very structured. Everything is military-based. Our jackets in England are military-based. Even p-coats and reefer jackets are based on the Navy. Whereas the Italians, as the Italian tailors would say, they like a looser fitting unstructured suit so they can reach over and kiss the lady's hand. Okay? You know, the British aristocrats do that stuff all the time, too. They're just not quite so open about it, right? So, so I, so I saw email, you know, I said,

I said, you know, JP, like, this is what I think is a better option next time you meet this particular prime minister. And I had some suits in the making form. I said, I want to do a structured rope shoulder, a lot more constructed, a lot more militaristic looking in a darker tone, so that you would pay homage and respect to the person with whom you're sitting, who has a military background, who is an Ivy League graduate, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? So part of what I do for clients and what our company does for clients, of course you have to take into consideration A, what they do on a daily basis, and B, what they're aspiring to project. Well, on that very point, it's actually a fascinating conversation

because we've obviously just had the election in the United States. And I guess the fact that the Democrat person was a woman sort of changes the dimensions of this slightly. But I'm curious to get your analysis on, you know, what people in those two movements, because they're really philosophical and intellectual movements more than politics. What are we likely to see and what does Trump, the way Trump dresses say about what he's trying to project and vice versa with the Democrats? I recorded like a very boring one

hour sort of dialogue with one of my coworkers when Trump was still running against Biden, right before Biden was replaced. And it was about the difference in what the Biden-Trump debate and what the two potential presidential candidates were wearing to the debate, right? And what I proposed from that video is that Biden will be immediately replaced after this debate and it was pre-planned before the debate just based on what Biden was wearing at the debate. And I made a very cogent argument towards it and I still remember those points, right? Because I'm looking at the candidate. You know, we all see the world through the lens of whatever it is that we do, right?

Like a doctor might be looking for signs of dementia in Biden, you know. I think we all were. Sure, sure. You know, but I'm looking as a clotheaer as a haberdasher. I see Biden's outfit and I go, oh, they're going to replace them. That's a number of things. So remember when Trump ran the first time against Hillary, Trump had a sort of ominous message because he himself had an ominous image, right?

He wore very dark suits that were completely oversized. He kind of came in as he looked like a classic American industrialist, kind of like a Henry Ford figure. And he came in and said, guys, we need rules, we need boundaries, we need terrorists, we need all of these things. and all of his messaging was negative, negative, negative. Trump walks out for the debate with Biden, he's wearing a Kennedy blue suit, a light blue suit. And I go, oh, my God, what a brilliant guy.

He's wearing a light blue suit, which shows a message of hope, which shows a message of perseverance, which shows a message of, you know, illuminating the future, which was not Trump's image in the first. And I did a very careful and a very, very, you know, granular analysis of what Trump wore in the 2016 versus 24 election, okay? And then Biden walks out, and I said, this is wrong. Number one, Biden went a shade darker on his suits.

That was an intentional decision. There's no way somebody dressing Biden would miss that. But when you're old, when you're old, and everybody questions your mental capacity and thinks you're about to die, what you don't want to do is you don't want to wear a black suit. Because what is black psychologically trigger on us? The idea of a funeral, the idea of death. And he went a tone darker. He's wearing a very dark navy blue suit. And I go, that is not the color you put an 80-year-old guy in who might have dementia.

Number one. Number two, he was wearing an overhand tie knot. which shows haptic incapability. An overhead tie knot is the first knot your father teaches you to tie. It's kind of the small little knot you tie it very quickly. I guarantee you bind this in tie his own ties. But the fact that they put him in an overhand knot, I was like, oh, they're showing that he's haptically incapable. So immediately I went right to his cufflings and he's not wearing cufflings, he's wearing button cuffs.

And I'm going, okay, if I'm dressing an 80-year-old guy and people are asking, hey, is this guy potentially incapable of leading a country? I'm giving him, you know, a beautiful full Windsor tie. I'm giving him cufflings to show that he's able to eloquently. placed cuffs into us. You know, I'm giving him a lighter color suit. There was other, he wore the wrong collar, so he's got an oblong face. You never wear a point collar with an oblong face because it shows like a mismatch. And it was, like, to me, he was designed to fail. And I was like, oh, they're going to replace him. That's so interesting. So from those little tells,

you could see the fact that he was already yesterday's news compared with Trump, who was actually showing a message of hope, a beacon of positivity. Now, what did you think of the way Camilla was styled? Because obviously, she's a woman, so that's different. Yeah, you know, the thing about Camilla, so obviously all the female candidates in the U.S. that I see, well, Hillary and Camel and even AOC when she's on camera, they're wearing pantsuits. Right? And I'm just, I'm not sure how much you can really deviate from that as a female leader. And I don't want to, you know, come off as like saying, oh, that's a sexist thing.

I don't really know how to signal competency better than with a suit. So I didn't really see Camelor wearing anything that would, well, first of all, what the heck is her branding anyways? That might be the more, that might be the more, you know, the more, the more base question. Like, what does she really stand for? Like, I can't really answer that. So how do I design an image for somebody who I don't even know what their ethos is? Do you guys know? Nobody knows.

Right. That's a really good point. I guess an interesting question there might be, is it kind of unfair for women? Because for a woman, you are either trying to project strength, in which case you might look a bit odd. a pantsuit is like very weird. It's a weird thing for a woman to wear. Like Hillary Clinton doesn't look normal. Yep. Especially when she's got that Stalin-esque weird. You know the name. Sure, sure, sure. You know what I mean? Yeah. But on the other hand, you can't like wear a mini skirt and have your boobs out either. It's kind of probably a very hard thing to balance for a woman

who's attempting to go for the president. Well, I don't want to overstep my boundaries of my own, you know, domain of expertise. But like, is leadership, leadership has for most of human existence been a male-dominated domain. And that domain tends to, you know, compete on things like, well, intelligence, number one, and obviously women are just as intelligent as men, but also physical prowess and power is an element towards leadership, because there are times that we have conflict and how do you resolve that. Right now, we're seeing conflict being resolved in the domain of violence, which is a male domain. Like, I don't know how women can, you know, compete in that domain whatsoever. You know, what we've seen from women in terms of how they

project leadership, at least what I see from an international scale. Again, I don't want to step outside my domain of knowledge, but I see them leading with this message of empathetic leadership. But I haven't really been able to understand what exactly that means. And I had a conversation with Chad GPT the other day. And I asked Chad GPT, I said, can you tell me what you think of Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand as a leader? And it said, well, you know, she exemplified beautiful empathetic leadership. And I said, can you describe what exactly empathetic leadership means? And Chad GPT was like, oh, she led, you know, with her heart first and caring for people. And I said, okay, well, she said that during the COVID pandemic in New Zealand, we would like to have a

two-class society. And Chad GPT replied and it said, well, yes, but that was the way to reward people for taking the vaccine. And I said, how is it rewarding people to have individual freedom of, you know, movement, individual freedom of autonomy over their habitus? Isn't that something that's implied with our social contract with society that we are free to begin with? And the opposite of that is not promoting freedom, but actually taking away freedom, which is inherently given to people. And Chad GPT was like, I must reconsider my answer and determine better what empathetic leadership means. So if Chad GPT can't answer it, like, how can I answer it? But you know, it's a good point because I was thinking about someone when you were talking about female leadership. And we

tend to always look to the modern when it comes to female leadership. And of course we should, because that's where the time that we live in. But let's look back at one of the most iconic leaders that has ever existed and one of the most iconic monarchs that has ever existed, Elizabeth I first. Right, right. So let's look at her because she's somebody, everybody knows Elizabeth the first.

She was somebody who dominated the world stage, who was respected as a leader, even though her own father, Henry VIII, would have preferred her to be a boy. So I guess I would ask, was she like a CEO or like a chairman? because that's different, right? Thatcher was CEO.

Correct. But so Thatcher was, to me, a factor of a Golden Mayor. You know, like, if you want to talk about the ultimate quintessential, you know, female leader that dominated in a male hierarchy, that's Golda Mary. And what was she like? Golda? Yeah. Well, I mean, how would you imagine? Can we just pause?

Who is Golda Mayor? Because there's going to be people who don't know. Well, she was the first basically leader of a first female leader of a Democratic country, Prime Minister of Israel and not only the Prime Minister of Israel, but the Prime Minister of Israel during like, you know, some of the biggest war the country has ever fought for its own survival. And we're talking about military intervention. You're talking about, I mean, which is, again, that's the male domain. And she dominated in that domain because she became the prime minister and was fairly popular.

And Margaret Thatcher, again, when you think of Margaret Thatcher, you don't think short skirts and all that, you know, Iron Lady. But here's the thing though, Iron Lady. Yes. Nobody who met her, and I know people who used to work for her and know her, they all said that she was incredibly feminine and powerful with her femininity. Like she would use it very, very well. So, whereas this is what I meant about Hillary Clinton, there's a kind of, it feels like this person has tried to make themselves not be a woman. Do you know what I mean? That femininity is just gone, which I'm sure was there or even is there at certain points, but it's been

suppressed deliberately. Whereas with Thatcher, from what I know, she wasn't afraid of people knowing that she's a woman and actually using that to sort of flirt with Gorbachev or whatever in a very playful way. I think Justin Trudeau does that too. But tell us about Golda Mayer a little bit more. What was she like? And by the way, whether dress and her and Thatcher, whether that was a part of it. Well, again, this is going into maybe a domain I'm not super deeply familiar with. I know their economic policies. I know their international policies. I just enjoy history. And you guys have a lot of historians on the show. There's some books back there that I've read, right? It's hard for me to quantify this into words, and maybe you guys can do it, but can you imagine a leader in a cocktail

dress? Hard. There's some dissonance happening, right? I don't know how to, I don't, I'm like, I'm not a psychologist. Do you think a woman can imagine a woman in a cocktail dress as a leader? Do you think it's because we're a chauvinistic male kids? No, not at all. No, because, because, this is really good, interesting conversation. I don't think so. And again, again, there's going to be somebody that's more educated in this field than me that's going to come along, give a different hypothesis here, but like, women would feel very threatened by women who are, you know, coquettish, let's say, and have a certain sex appeal. Like, women get competitive with other women, right? Really? Of course. Yeah. Of course. Shocking. So, so, and you know what else is

interesting? You know, you talk about empathetic leadership and you're like, well, we, there's an interesting study. Like, I do a lot of fundraiser events with our company because it helps us garner, you know, new clients. And there's some studies, a lot of studies that actually have consistently shown that when you have beautiful women at a fundraiser event, men give way more money. And we've seen this in our company, like when we have a beautiful female sales representative, we just see the package size, the basket size she sells is way higher than a dude. Which is like, again, nobody's talking about it, but we see it in the numbers. And so I do wonder, like, what kind of empathy that would evoke from men if they were to see

that in a female leader. But I don't know. Would that incite men to rise up and fight for their country and die in war? Cocktail dress, probably not. But I suppose the question would be, given that we live in the world that is attempting to balance this out, and whether you think it's possible or not, it's a different question. But we do see a lot of female leaders coming through in different countries. In this country, the leader of the Conservative Party, the new leader is Camille Badenock. If you were advising somebody who was a female leader aspiring really who had good policies and the right ideas even, what would your advice be?

how would you help them to kind of get the look right? Are you trying to get me cancelled? Yes. Is that the whole point? Mate, you're here. Welcome. If you haven't been cancelled, it's inevitable. Well, you can only get yourself cancelled if your opinion is like,

oh, Kemi's a woman, she can't do the job. That's what get cancelled. Short of that. Got it. Thank you for setting the boundary. Yeah. Yeah. It's very nice.

I mean, there's also the race element. Yeah. Oh, yeah. As Dimitri takes another sip of his water. Well, so... What would you advise be to women seeking leadership position? if they are going to do that, despite your best advice.

Let me tell you my experience in the suit selling business and how it correlates to this. So when I was in my early 20s, I started this company, I'm like, I'm going to go and I'm going to sell suits to women. I was a single guy. And I had a lot of male clients, but I'm like, oh, let's meet some hot lady lawyers, right? This is going to be great.

And my suits were pretty well priced. Like, we were manufacturing in Leeds in England at the time. So I thought, you know, I'm going to call some female partners at law firms. And when I met these ladies, it was not what I was expecting, because I hadn't seen a preponderance of women like that concentrated in one place. in the past. These women competed and won on male criteria, male-dominated criteria. So these women were disagreeable,

highly conscientious, incredibly hard-working. Like, these were women putting in 100 hours a week at their law firm. They were basically just dudes, like in terms of temperamentality, right? Like I said, I hadn't met a lot of women like that in my life. My mother is like that. My mother is like a very conscientious, disagreeable, you know, systems, analysts, data architect type of person was just all career, career, career. But to meet them in a group, and you kind of

go, okay, that's interesting. These women didn't win by, you know, by being caught Kattesh. They won actually by being competent, disagreeable, and hardworking, all those other factors. So if I were to advise a woman how to dress to win in that arena, I don't know how I could deviate from that. I would just say, hey, you're probably going to have to wear a suit because there's a level of, and maybe we as a society don't know how to resolve that, right? Like, how long have women been in the workforce, like 70 years? Right. But it's also, they need to embrace their femininity like I saw the comedian Bill Burr on SNL, and having this conversation,

he made a joke where it goes, ladies, the pants suit isn't working. We need to show a little bit more flesh, huh? We need to... And what he's actually saying is something quite profound, which is you can't just adopt the masculine. You need, as a woman, to combine the masculine with the feminine. Yeah, but this is where I question this,

because, and I think we had this conversation with somebody else in an episode that hasn't maybe been released yet, which is once you start showing flesh, then you instantly get switched into object of attraction mode, which is more difficult to respect as a leadership position. That's a very hard, tricky thing to balance, I would argue, just as a man watching outside. Because it's like, if you are like just like, well, she's hot,

you're not thinking about I want to follow her into battle in that moment. But there is such a thing as when someone comes in, a woman using her attractiveness that is powerful and is a power in the room. But it's a balance. This is what I say. Let me tell you guys my sort of theory on this. And again, I'm going to be stepping into some adventure. We're all going to get counsel. This is basically three men discussing what female politicians should wear for our appeal.

Here's what me personally. Here's what frightens me about having a female leader in a time of war. Specifically. It's a good starting point to get caught. Men inherently, and I'm talking like at our DNA level, we understand that war is death, because men have to fight and die in wars. Women have never had to do that. Like women, you know, even in Ukraine now, all the Ukrainian women have boyfriends in Germany

and Dubai, like they just left. And I see that all the time, right? Because I travel all the time and I meet Ukrainian women in coffee shops all over the world these days. Females? Just, Dimitu, just there. We should say there actually are quite a lot of women fighting in in the armed forces.

Sure, there are. But of course, but the overall... We should... This isn't me saying, doing that stupid thing the journalist do. I just want to make sure that we're respectful to those women who are actually bravely fighting. And I have friends that have fought in some pretty crazy battles, like female friends, and I've got actually some guests I should introduce you to that I've just gone... But generally speaking, your point. Generally speaking, right?

Of course. So women, like, like as a man, I know that if like a war comes and I can't leave the country, like my passport, this is where I'm at, like, that's what's going to be. going to happen is going to be death. I'm not sure that women necessarily have that same instinct because if your village is raided and you lose the war, all the men get killed and all the women get taken basically as concubines, the women's DNA still continues. The women still get to reproduce and live their lives with technically, let's say, stronger men is determined by battle. So even though it's not an optimal outcome per se, it's nonetheless not death and end of your bloodline. So I know that as a man my bloodline ends if we lose in a war

I'm not sure if women and again I'm gonna get a lot of hate comments in this But still I'm not sure that women implicitly understand that like That's the end of the bloodline forever because for them it's not And I especially worry about women leaders that don't have male offspring Because you know when women have kids they start voting more conservative This is a noted fact Yes, and I understand why when women have kids they start voting more conservative Because if they don't have kids it's like well I have all this female empathy I have all this motherly love to

give, right? I'm either going to become the proverbial cat lady or get some pugs. And, you know, now we see the spending on pets is like insane because women have less fewer children, right? But now it's like that empathy starts turning towards society as a whole. So women without kids, they tend to vote very left because, hey, let's let the migrants in. Let's have an open society. Let's show love and empathy for everybody, everybody. And the men are going, hey, these migrants and these people might not want us here. They might be dangerous to us, you know? And then women have kids. And again, this is statistically backed. Women have kids and all of a sudden, they're voting more conservative. And it's like, why? Oh, because they now understand that their

own bloodline is in danger going forward. That's really interesting. I wonder what the implications of that are, because it has been a point that I've heard people make to absolutely, like, just crazy levels of consternation. Like, you can't say that. You can't say that a female leader of a country that doesn't have kids. There's something about that that's going to change the way she might see the world. But as a parent, I can tell you as a man, it's changed my worldview, becoming a parent. So I think I don't, I actually genuinely don't know why this is such a controversial thing to say. I think it's just because people without kids want to get really offended by... Well, anytime you want to test any theory, you just push it to its logical extreme. Have you ever

seen ISIS execute female prisoners on camera? I don't know. I don't watch many of the executions. Well, but you know what I'm talking about. You know there's executions they publicize all the time, and it's always guys getting killed. Well, you know what's happening to the women. It's, again, not optimal. Yes. But again, it's also not death. The bloodline is not anything. There is a certain, like, you can't see to the other side of death, you know?

So that is a terminal thing. And it's like, for me, for me, would I be led into battle by somebody that potentially does not face the same consequences as me? By the way, this is why I'll never fly in an airplane when an, if airplanes are flown by, like, robotic pilots or drones or whatever, no, I will refuse to fly in an airplane unless there's a, a human pilot behind the wheel. Why is that? Because I don't like any system where the person responsible for my safety is not in the same boat as me. This is the leftist political argument, right?

Like, I don't like politicians spending my money when they haven't built anything substantive themselves in order to understand how money really works. Like, if you're not facing the consequences of your own actions, why should I face the consequences of your actions? That seems wildly hypocritical. That's such a good point because I think that really opens up the entire debate we've been having for the last eight or nine. years, which is what you're talking about is where populism comes from. Populism is the revolt of people

who feel that the people who govern them do not have skin in the game and, in fact, can pursue policies that harm everybody else because they feel virtuous, or they feel compassionate, they feel empathetic, but do not pay the price when their policies actually cause terrible consequences for everybody else, i.e. shipping jobs overseas, i.e. mass immigration that affects people who are not protected by gated communities, who are not protected by the comfort that they can afford. That is a really fascinating observation, I think. And that's where really this whole massive populist movement comes from. It's a feeling that the people who rule us do not have skin in the game. If you run a company, which I do, and I've had, you know, hundreds of employees, my biggest,

you know, maybe a couple, a hundred, you know, with all the front-facing salespeople, support, staff reduction, etc. You actually see very quickly how people. people act differently when they're not personally responsible for the outcome, and it's freaking wild. Yes. It's like, I'll give you a very simple example. Like, there was one year where I lost about a million and a half dollars on my business because I decided that I'm going to try to do this fair.

It was the stupidest experiment I've ever done. But, you know, but that's the great thing about running a business is you always, the market is ruthless. It tells you exactly what works what doesn't, right? I moved my salespeople from commission base to salary-based roles. No, but it was really interesting because, because, no, and it's funny and it's stupidly funny, But what I realize is that like a salesperson productivity in the company is actually very highly correlated to how long they've been in the business. Because they build a client base and the longer they stay, the more the clients trust them, the more the clients spend.

So I thought, well, if I can just take that pressure off my experience salespeople and some of them are like, yeah, this sounds great, then maybe things will be good because they won't leave in clients to continue buying and it completely tank our sales. So it's worth six months of my life. And why did it tanker sales? Well, so we have something called sales training, right? Sales training is like you teach somebody what to do and it's not always intuitive on what to do. like running a business or running an economy, it's not intuitive, because the ideas that you have in your head of how things work is not how things actually work. It's the dating paradox for men, right? If I buy her flowers and tell her she's pretty, she'll like me. And it's like, nope.

There are things that you want to work, and then there are things that actually work, what people respond to, right? So what ended up happening is our sales training a lot of times asks people to do things, which are uncomfortable for those people to do, like asking for a sale, asking for a bigger sale, presenting a more expensive or luxurious item. These are all things that are ultimately good because you want to aspire to get the best possible outcome for everybody. Well, what I noticed are the people that were not on commission is that they still went to work every day,

but they refused to do anything that made them uncomfortable. And the lesson it taught me is that a lot of productivity happens at the edge of desperation. Same with dating, but a lot of... This is like the whole porn argument. Like a lot of lack of mating with people is the fact that men are just significantly less desperate. And I've been observing that.

Like, I'm in my 40s now. And so I look back and I have a lot of 25-year-old guys in my company and how they act. I'm like, oh, a lot of your success just comes from desperation. And when you remove personal responsibility, you remove an element of desperation. And when you remove that, you know, what do you get now? Society is like here, and sorry for saying it, but like my train today was canceled in England. It doesn't smell the best. It doesn't look the best.

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what sector that you work in, whether you're a comedian, you can, and you've got a comedy club, and you're in a comedy club, you can do your safe set that you know will do very well, or you can do your new jokes that might not go across well, and the chances are they won't, but you've got to do it in order to improve. And the problem is, if you continually embrace comfort, it may feel good in the moment, but what you're eventually sacrificing is growth, and not only growth, it's also self-respect at the end of it.

Yeah, this is physics, it's the concept of entry. Like neutral is negative. Howard Schultz, I saw Howard Schultz speak when I was in university. It was one of the greatest things I've ever seen. And it was so fortunate that he came to speak up my school. And he said neutral is negative. And I've always stuck with that. Like everything I've seen that becomes neutral, it regresses to negativity.

That's so true. You can't stand still in life because even if you manage to stand still, everyone else is still moving forward. And you get left behind just as a result of that. It's really interesting. I mean, one of the things within that is just knowing you personally, someone who has thought very carefully and has a lot of real world experience when it comes to sales, what can you tell us about what makes a good salesperson? What are some of the important skills there? Well, one of the misnomer's about the profession of salespeople think that you have to be a good

talk or you have to be charismatic, you have to be gregarious, you know, that's the movie character salesperson. That's not true at all. I realized pretty early in my career that personality and results aren't very highly correlated. And I think Jordan Peterson spoke about that too. There's not a lot of connection between personality and productivity, right? Like, we all think of an accountant as like a really boring, you know, sort of consistent person, but I've known a lot of accountants that are super wild and just crazy guys, you know, or gals, whatever. So the top salespeople, you would expect them to be, like, again, because we're watching a Disney movie version of what a salesman is,

we'd expect them to be slimy and sort of, you know, honest Iago type. But no, a lot of times they're just very similarly temper they're similarly temperamental to what you would expect from a high performing person in any profession. They're highly conscientious. They're very intelligent and they have a degree of disagree. They have a degree of disagreeability whereby they're able to challenge and ask questions in a constructive way so they learn why they're doing what they're doing. But I think that's true across all professions, right? Yeah. Yeah.

But there must be something that predisposes someone to sales versus account. Propensity for risk and probably to talk and probably a level of testosterone Seriously you know like I was studying like like I have a problem with I had a problem in school in the sense that like I liked school I did well at school But it always bothered me that the teachers would set these rules that I don't think they understood why they said the rules Like I didn't understand I think you probably had a little bit of that I was exactly the same right I was like yeah well and the other thing is I never respected authority unless it was gained Right so you you didn't get my respect by having the teacher you got my respect by being a good teacher. And that's a function of being raised by Russian parents. Because your dad would say, your mother said this, but why? Because your mother said. And you're like, talk to me like this.

Like, don't use that pronoun. Don't use her. Say your mother's like, why can't I say her? You know, like, exactly. And it's like, because she's your mother. It's like, I don't understand positional authority. And that's actually very interesting because positional authority is management and competence authority is leadership. And there's a big difference there, right? So, you know, when I, when I observe, when I observe my teachers in school, I was like, why do they all this authority that hasn't been earned. And then I started reading into it as I got older, and I understood that teachers actually, the profession of teaching, attracts the lowest level testosterone of males. But it makes sense because teaching is safe, right? Like you grow up,

you're put into an institution, and then you're like, well, I'm going to study in the furtherance of that institution. And I'll go right back into that institution to uphold the institution. There's nothing venturing outside the institution, right? And so I started looking at the highest testosterone by profession and it was entrepreneurs, people that start businesses, of course. And it makes sense because testosterone is going to lead you to take risks, because risk-taking is a demarcative behavior towards, you know, reproduction. And so entrepreneurs have hired testosterone. So to me, if you ask, you know, what is really driving guys or gals into sales? Probably at some level, it's a higher level of testosterone.

Yeah. Oh, you were saying it's safe. I taught in East London. It's not that safe. I'm going to be honest with you. It's safe for being a tailor than in some of the schools. Yeah, but you left and you became a comedian. Yeah.

Wow. So there was some dissonance. you were feeling when you were in the school. Probably that your life was too damn predictable. Yes, it was that. That's what got me really frustrated in the fact that I had to leave. It's because, and also the fact was, is that I took a lot of pride in my work. And, you know, obviously I made mistakes and whatever else, but I drove myself to be an outstanding teacher, officially graded outstanding in both primary and secondary. Or I stopped showing off.

And I felt that, like, there were people who were putting in a court of the effort. So you're competitive? Yeah. And is that not a marker of testosterone? gastroen competition. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So it's not like you went there and you stay there. But again, I think this is all, I'm looking at like studies on this. And you asked me a foundational question. I've asked myself that same foundational question.

Like what drives people into something that has no predictable outcomes? Because when you're an entrepreneur, like you said, we were talking before the show, like, yes, you can do the right things, but it doesn't guarantee success. It only improves the opportunity to experience it, but there's no promises. One of the things, I actually really love fashion. I find fashion very interesting, particularly when it's when it's connected to musical movements, and particularly with British musical movements, things like punk, scar, you know, things that emerge fashion, politics, music. It's a

fascinating thing to see. You're very tapped into culture. You have to be with your job. What can you see coming down the pipeline connected to your role and your job, etc.? Okay, well, I have a book coming out with Michael Franzis. I wanted to quickly plug that. And part of the book is we actually talk about the evolution of suits through the decades, like the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, et cetera. So what's interesting to me is the movement of suits specifically, fashion in general, but suits specifically today, is kind of moving towards what suits looked like back in the 1950s,

which is a fuller-cut suit, which is a more traditionally conservative suit, not a lot of exuberant details, just very straightforward, fuller-cut suits. And the 1950s were an interesting era for that because we were coming out of the 40s, where things were being rationed, so fabric was difficult to come by. And then before that had the 30s where we had opulence.

Like the 30s were the golden age, you know, that was Clark Gable and, you know, Gary Cooper. These were like these were like the golden age of bespoke Taylor and kind of thing, right? And so the 50s were not a reemergence of the opulent 30s, but they were a breakaway from the restrictive 40s. So you want things that are conservative looking, but still fuller cut and more fabric. You know, you can enjoy that now because fabric is no longer. being rationed. And now that I look at the 2020s, what's happening with clothing, it's coming back to the 1950s. So I think we're coming out of a, it's almost like the clothing today is a reemergence

from a war, which is interesting. Like, we didn't actually have a very big physical war in the West, but we surely had a cultural war. Yeah. And I think there's the same sort of an ethos, the same spirit is running through that. So I do see suits coming back. I see a lot of really cool hats coming back. Like I have a friend who's in the hat business, and business is booming. And it's Like, when was the last time you saw a guy wear a hat like 10 years ago? So I see a reemergence of what some would consider more conservative fashion. And but that's a great point because one thing that I've noticed, particularly, and maybe it's me getting more conservative as I get older,

is I see people of our generation refusing to embrace a more adult look and still remaining in their 20s fashion. There's enough about me, man. I think, you know what I think is driving that? I think it's IT being a major employment sector and remote work being a byproduct of that. Because, you know, Jordan Peterson says it like this. Clothing is not something you just wear for yourself.

It's something you wear for others. You know, and so as we are acclimated to working from home, it's like, why would I put on a suit or a jacket at home? And I think, or I don't know, like as we sort of become a little bit, again, we're becoming cognitively dissonant towards remote work. We're seeing that reemergence, again, of coming back and meeting people in person. That's something that's going to drive clothing as well,

because I'm going to get dressed up for you guys in a way that I might not get dressed up for myself if I'm working at noon and home with my coffee. Do you think there's also something there about youth, the preservation of youth, because in a society that highly values people being young, which wasn't always the case. There were periods in human history

when you would have looked at someone young as totally useless, and you would have said, well, you're not really a person until you're in your 60s, right? Whereas now, you know, the American presidential election was a bit of an exception, but generally speaking, we tend to think of youth as being a good thing.

Yeah, I think you're on the right track, but I don't think you're exactly on point. I don't think it's revoking of aging. I think it's revoking of personal responsibility, which is exactly what's been happening in the culture, because everything the left has been doing is about abdicating personal responsibility. So it's not about I want to look youthful because I miss being 15 or 18 years old, it's because I don't want to take the responsibility of determining my own destiny, which is part of what putting a suit on is. So you're there, you're almost there, but I think it's a cultural thing. That's interesting. Because I really, I love wearing a suit. So as the show has got bigger, we get invited to more, you know, prestigious occasions. And Constantine went to me,

mate, you've got to get a suit. And then when you go and buy a nice suit, it changes the way you hold yourself, it changes the way you move through the world, and it changes the way you speak. It's a real thing for men. You're evoking a spirit of people that are greater than you that build great things, truly. You know, I had this conversation recently where it's like, it was John Peterson. He said, you know, you're wearing a suit for others to show respect. And I said, I think there's a deeper sense there because look at, you know, in mathematics, if you want to have a proof, right, you can prove something is true, but you can also prove the opposite is not true, which proves that something might be true, right? And so when you look at people that want to destroy society,

I mean, I'm really talking about these radical leftist types. Imagine what they look like. And you always pictured the same thing, right? Like a rotund blob with blue hair and piercings, just everything about destructing the self-image in order, well, from a female perspective, what they're saying is if the male, you know, if the agency you have as a male is finding me sexually attractive, I'm going to make myself super unattractive, so you have absolutely no agency over me whatsoever. It's They're destroying their own sexual market value intentionally to show you that you suck as a man. That's what's happening. And so what's the opposite of destroying your personal image is uplifting a personal image?

So the opposite of that leftist movement is conservatism, right? Like paying conservatism conserved the institutions, paying homage to the institutions but before you. So to me, the suit is not only a respect factor. It's also evoking the spirit. Like, I'm showing respect to people that came before me that built things that I'm completely incapable of building, which are great things. These things that operate around this in society that are amazing. And so it's more than just respect. It's a spirit. And very, very quickly, you know, like for me,

I went to a private school in Vancouver, a parliamentary school. But I didn't belong there. We were immigrants. And so we got, like, free private school. And so you had all the local, you know, the kids that grew up in the city and their parents grew up, etc. And then you have the weird Russian kids. And I was from Ukraine and my friends were from Latvia and, you know, in Sarajevo, like from all over sort of the Slavic countries that came to Canada. And my dad, you know, he's an RV technician, like a mechanic at the time. You know, he would take me to school in his 1989 Corolla or Camry, which was, you know, he was getting ready for his overalls. But there was a private school. So all the other kids are being dropped off, you know, with their dad's driving a black BMW wearing a suit. And I was like, wow, I want to wear a suit.

I don't know why, but it made me feel like those men were important. Yeah. That's what it is, right? It is, because when I was a kid, I loved wearing suits. And why is that? It's because you know that what you wear communicates something about you. And if you want to project a sense of power or authority or status, there is nothing that does that better for a man than a well-cut suit.

And a status of respect for the institutions around you because they're freaking unbelievable. Like, you know, you guys were saying earlier, like, oh, our camera battery is not working. Like, how does a battery even work? Like, somebody had to make that. Like, that's such an important thing for me, right? I'm like, I flew here. How does an airplane fly? Like, somebody had to build that together with many brilliant minds. These are all institutions around this that we get to enjoy.

It's that irony, you know, of that kid typing about how he's an anarchist, but doing it on an Apple computer. Like on the greatest thing that's ever been invented that you can hold in your hand, it's incredible. So it's evoking respect. It's evoking a better future. It's also evoking a spirit of greatness. I see it in my kids. I've got two boys. I took my son with me on a business trip to Hong Kong earlier this year.

he's eight and I was doing a lecture at university there about luxury fashion and I got my son a suit. You know, eight-year-old kid puts on a suit and oh my God, he lights up, he stands up. He looks at himself and he sees maybe something about his dad and himself. That's a great feeling when you're a kid. Maybe not when you're an adult, but as a kid, that is an incredible feeling. And we always talk about how, and people always say, you know, this is the 1930s. this feels like the 1930s in terms of culture, if we look globally, what's happening,

the world becoming more unstable. Do you see that reflected in fashion or not at all? No, 100%. Absolutely it is. The pandemic actually catalyzed that quite a bit because things were moving towards more casual during the pandemic, because keep in mind, heading into 2020,

we were still on this weird timeline after Harambe died and everybody went nuts. I don't know what said that off. But we got on a weird time. line, right? Like all of a sudden, inverted ideas started becoming proliferated as a sense. They were completely nonsensical. Men were women. Women were men. And, you know, everybody had to be a doctor because of the color of your skin on because you can actually, you know, help heal a person, all this crazy stuff started happening, right? And as the institutions deteriorated, it started

our fashion. And then it kind of culminated in the pandemic where everybody was just wearing t-shirts and shorts all the time. So yes, you had this sort of a war that was emerging a sort of cultural scale. And you're right, like now we've reemerged from that. And as I'm seeing our clients, and we thought, hey, after the pandemic, we'll never sell a suit again. That's completely not true. We're selling more suits than ever. Do you think if you see military iconography styles come into fashion, do you see that as a warning sign for society? I would ask, what is the cause and what is the effect? You know, it's like, okay, well, let's say we're seeing some militaristic styles. Where is that coming from exactly? Like, is that coming from designers or is that coming from where? School uniforms? It's a good point. I don't know where that would come from. Does that make sense? Yeah. It does. So let me ask you a different question. You mentioned speaking to clients. One of the interesting things I've always found about talking with you is that you have access to lots and lots of people. Now, they're not representative of the population even remotely, but what you do have, most of your clients are not going to be, you know,

public commentators or Jordan Peterson or Constantin or whatever, they're going to be lawyers, bankers, business owners, et cetera. When you see those people and you see thousands of them every year, I imagine, what are you hearing? What's the word on the street or the word in the boardroom, so to speak? What are people saying about, you know, the cultural situation, the political situation, the global situation? Is there some kind of thing that you're picking up? Absolutely. I've been in some really crazy rooms with, you know, lawyers, bankers, politicians. One thing I'm noticing is there's a profound fear amongst the white collar professional class when it comes to stating their true opinion. Like it's been, I've had judges, you know, that have been very famous and

well-known judges that I've sat down with, you know, and they would like kind of say, hey, man, you know, all this stuff that's on my email, the gender pronouns on email, it's all crap, it's bullshit, but I can't do anything about it. I used to hear that all the time for my clients. Like how much they disagreed with what was happening, but for whatever reason, they would were so afraid to stick out their neck, sort of say, because they were afraid it was going to undermine their, so they built their entire profession on, you know, being part of an institution. And so they would rise up to the institution, and they would just get like these golden handcuffs where they couldn't express themselves. And that's something that's made me so thankful about being, you know,

let's say, an entrepreneur. And it's also made me understand why governments hate entrepreneurs so much, because they can't control us. You know, so that's probably been the main theme is that a lot of them really, it's like, it's like, you know, the silent Trump thing. Like Trump just crushed the selection, everybody's like, oh my God, how did it happen? You know, all these people in large institutions, I'm like, I'm a lawyer, I can't believe he won. It's like, no, man, like they all voted for him. But publicly they're saying something else. And is that changing now that the elections happen?

Are you having conversation with people where you feel like they're more willing to express themselves? Yeah, people can breathe easier, for sure. As they say, the air feels cheaper to breathe, you know. Yeah, for sure, there's a sigh of relief because, you know, there's this pressure that's been building up, you know? And, you know, it's so annoyed me. Like, I would have, like, a guy on my LinkedIn who's like, Bill, who weighs 320 pounds and is a big surly beard, he, him. And I'd be like, thanks, Bill. Like, I was having a hard time. He goes, dude, I don't know, like, they make us do this, blah, blah, blah. And now all of a sudden, you know, the people that had, whatever, whoever

those people were that had the control to, like, to create that or to enforce that, they seem to have lost their power. I don't know how that looks on a, you know, on an individual scale, but I mean, in general. So I do see people breathing a little bit easier. But you know, what's interesting is I used to have an office in Ukraine. We had like 50 plus guys working for us and gals working for us in Ukraine. And so I would go to offices with people that had money in Ukraine, which usually they weren't like the kind of people that have money in the Western world. Like they just, you never quite know what you're really dealing with. And they would tell you things. And those things they would tell you would completely be the opposite of what you're hearing in the

media, like a complete inversion, but they're the people that are actually in the media. And you would go, wow, like so much of our world is built on a facade of a certain, like, sanctimonious promulgation, some preaching of some values. But the people that are behind the scenes on those, they don't necessarily believe those values at all. It really shifted my world being around these people, because I learned that I, I mean, this is going to sound crazy, I learned from my job that I can't trust the news. And what it also tells you is that if you are an entrepreneur, the main reason, people think it's about building wealth or whatever. And look, of course, it's about being financially independent, but it's not.

It's about freedom. 100%. You know, because for all of us sitting here, the reality is, for one reason or another, we didn't fit into the normal workplace. And part of the problem is, well, I'm speaking for myself, I'm certainly including everyone else here as well. It's an inability to button my mouth. Creative disagreeable people tend to not do very well at the bottom of hierarchies. And it's a very interesting just a position, right? Because you're creative and disagreeable,

which is actually creative means you're basically smart. You know, and disagreeable means, well, you're able to challenge in quotas and all this status quotes. But you won't take bullshit. That's really what it is. But you need that.

Because if you're a yes man, you're going to get stuck in middle management, you're not going to like it very much. So you're creative, you're disagreeable, but you're also not really competent because you're at the bottom of the hierarchy within your profession.

So any idea you have as great as it might be, the moment is a slight outlier from what is known to work, you become an incompetent thug. And it's like, well, why are you telling me what to do? You've never actually done it. And most people that think the system is wrong are going to fail with their own system anyway, so they probably are wrong.

So the odds are already against you, right? So if you're going to be that person, and you guys are certainly those kind of people too, then you better damn succeed of the thing you do because otherwise you're just a disagreeable thug. Right? And that's useless. Dimitri, it's been great chatting to you. As you know, the last question we always ask is,

what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be? Oh boy. Oh man, there's so many uncoher things I can think of but how deep do we go? Go for it. Give me a thread man, give me something to go on. No, no, no, no. It's all you. It's free hit. Something that we're not talking about that we should be talking about. Yeah. How we should not let people work in positions in government where they can exercise any authority unless they've built some kind of an institution that's been proven by the free market. That's a fascinating point. Thank you so much for coming on the show. So you're running out of closet space. The good news, you don't need to stop shopping.

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