TRIGGERnometry - Konstantin Kisin Defends Book in Battle of Ideas Debate

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

SPONSORED BY: Ridge Wallet. Use Code “TRIGGER” for 10% off your order at: https://www.ridge.com/TRIGGER This episode was recorded at the 2022 Battle of Ideas festival. Konstantin defends his book, 'An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West' and answers questions from a live audience. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ | Channel ID: UCo_8zzSxKeL3arKWVuP8wdQ Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My grandfather, this is one of the things I talk about in the book. He criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, much like people are now in Russia criticizing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And he was immediately fired from his job. His wife was fired from her job. Their children, that's my father and my aunt, were kicked out of university, for one comment that he made in private. I wrote the book before the invasion of Ukraine,

but people who've read it know that the preface essentially predicts what has happened. When the powerful forces that hold the current world order together abdicate their responsibility or abstain from that responsibility, then other people will attempt to fill that void. I think to remind people most of all that what we have in the West, the freedom, the prosperity, they didn't fall out of the sky. They're not random occurrences. The problem we've got is if you change the language, you can change the laws. without legislating. And that's really the biggest problem.

If you have laws that say people must be safe, right? That law is there to prevent violence against people. But if you change the meaning of the word safety, you've now got a law that is a law against people having the wrong opinions in public. The idea that you must force people to be equal is evil, whether you are looking at it through the lens of class or race or sex or gender or whatever other bullshit

people have come up with. And the reason it's evil, is not that it's not a good thing to redistribute wealth and income from one group of people to another. It's the amount of tyranny that it takes to achieve is inevitably going to lead to millions of people being killed, as it has done every time it's been tried. Hello everyone. Thank you very much indeed for coming to this bookshop Barney. My name is Austin Williams. I'm the director of the Future Cities Project.

This is a special Barney in association with trigonometry and, of course, the Battle of Ideas. a curious setup in the round. You have to excuse my back to some members of the audience and vice versa. So this Barney, if you haven't been to one before, it's kind of like hopefully an engaging conversation with an author about their book, for them to explain to you what they've written, why they've written it and their ideas behind it. This one is looking at Constantine Kissin's book,

An Immigrants' Love Letter to the West, and with a touch of marketing genius, it came out just as the war started. And actually, if you look now in the news, Russia says it's losing lots of conscripts to the war. And last week, there was a general, General Oleg Mijyev, was killed. But this book won't cost you an army and an Oleg. It's only 14 quid.

There's another one coming. Hang on. So this one not about Russia, actually. There's a session tomorrow on Russia. Constantine's already done a session on Ukraine. This is about kind of British values, British values which are under attack and in some ways need to be defended. In it, Constantine says, freedom, human rights, tolerance, peace and prosperity must be guarded

and never taken for granted. And the Times congratulated you on the book, but then did criticize you for not defining what constitutes the West. And I kind of thought if the Times doesn't realize what the West is, then we've got a bigger problem than maybe than even we thought. Constantine is a podcaster and together with Francis Foster, who was in the last session, is a co-creator of trigonometry show, which has half a million subscribers.

One man and one round of applause. That is the sort of reaction I'm working for here. That's the only payment you can afford, isn't it? Anyway, Constan is a translator, writer, social commentator, and is described as a Jewish, Russian, British comedian, which is a bit like one of those kind of jokes that you, a Russian, and a Brit, walk into a bar. Wait for it.

The Brit says, the Brit says, I'm kind of, I'm tired and thirsty. Could I have a beer? The Russian says, I'm tired and thirsty. Could I have a vodka? The Jew says, I'm tired and thirsty. Could I have diabetes? Anyway, it goes downhill from here, right? So it's a really, the main thing is it's a really enjoyable book.

If you haven't read it, it's on the bookstand. I thoroughly, thoroughly recommend it, really, really insightful book, and very challenging as it happens. it's available on the bookstall, so please go and get a copy. The way the Barney works is simply that I allow Constantine to do maybe a five-minute introduction, or as near to five minutes we can get. Then I've got a whole series of questions which I've derived from reading the book, which hopefully will allow Constantine to draw out some of the more themes.

If you haven't read it, you'll understand it maybe a little bit more, and then we come out to you the audience for your questions and comments on what you've heard and what you've read, yes, and more broadly. So, with no further ado, can we welcome please Constinate Kissing Give us your thoughts I feel like I have to turn around

and say thank you over there to the people clapping as well Thank you for that introduction One thing I like disagree with people So I'll immediately disagree with you In that you say the book is not about the war And of course it isn't But the main contention of the book

Is that what Frank Faradie Who I just did a session with on Ukraine Talks about which is what he calls The West's Moral Disarmament And that is the complete loss of belief in our values, in the fact that they're important, in the fact, frankly, that they even exist. The idea that there's such a thing as British values or Western values is now something that a lot of people question. And my contention is, and has been from day one,

and of course I wrote the book before the invasion of Ukraine, but people who've read it know that the preface essentially predicts what has happened, because it is, in my view, inevitable that if the West weakens itself morally, economically, militarily, then the law of history is very clear when the powerful forces that hold the current world order together abdicate their responsibility or abstain from that responsibility, then other people will attempt to fill that void. So it's unfortunately, because the situation in Ukraine is obviously very tragic, but it is unfortunately a very timely book, if I say so myself, But the point of the book is, I think, to remind people most of all that what we have in the West,

the freedom, the prosperity, they didn't fall out of the sky. They're not random occurrences. They're the product of centuries of intellectual debate, of actual war, of endless battles in order to attempt to work out what is a better way of governing than the way of governing that exists in most of the rest of the world, including the country from which I come, which is a strong man leader comes in, kills or imprisons anyone they don't agree with,

and then they rule for as long as they can sustain that. We've gone beyond that in the West. That seems to me to be a better way of doing things, and I'd quite like people in the West to remember that and to be willing to defend that. So I wanted to write an immigrants-level letter to the West to remind people that, particularly young people,

who maybe haven't tried, travel very much. You haven't seen much of the rest of the world. Who've grown up in comfort and prosperity. Who don't really appreciate what we have here, how rare it is, how unique it is, and therefore how worthy of defending and protecting it is. And that's the crux of the book.

Very good. Very good. On that basis, I'm sure you'll all now want to buy it, but let me just ask a couple of questions, if you will. The gist of the book, I'll just take a couple of quotes and throw them back at you to see what you think. Or maybe you can just do that up the point. So you say, Over the past few decades, ever since postmodernism, moral relativism, and multiculturalism became a thing. Intellectuals and academics, brackets, many who buy into the Soviet-style theory, have promoted destructive fashions. As a result, the West has lost all self-confidence in his own values.

And so that undermining of cultural norms, I think we probably all recognize, I was just wondering whether you were positing that this was a destabilization from without or whether it's actually happening from within. How do you... Yes. Yes, it's both. It's both. And you cannot destabilize a society from without unless that society wants to destabilize itself. So the external forces that would seek to capitalize on the discord and the divisiveness that we have in the West, China, Russia, et cetera. They've been putting a lot of money into bot farms that amplify these supposed divisions in Western society.

But if those divisions weren't there, those efforts would be completely futile. So we've done this to ourselves, and then, of course, our enemies will want to take advantage of that. And that's where I think it's a combination of those two things. As we make ourselves weaker, opportunistic adversaries will take advantage of that. I understand. But give us a little bit of background as to how you think that kind of, I don't necessarily buy into the many who buy into the Soviet style theory. I don't necessarily think that's a driver. But how is this kind of moral relativism?

It's a big question. but how has it really occurred? Give us a snapshot. I don't know that I know the answer to that question. I don't know how, I think it's a very complicated thing. I mean, one of the people we interviewed on Trigonometry recently is a woman called Louise Perry, who has a book called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

I think her central argument is the technological advances of the sexual revolution altered the dynamic between men and women and therefore changed the status and role of family and many other things. and I think a lot of this is technological. The development of social media has taken those ideas, particularly ideas of the sort of progressive left.

They have an advantage online because they sound good and they feel good. They feel so good. Equality and diversity and all of this stuff. It sounds a lot better than, I don't know, closed borders or meritocracy. These things have a different. and ring to them. And so these technological changes that we've seen, they amplify some of the directions of travel

that I think are unhealthy for Western society because we're no longer able to argue for the things that actually represent British values or Western values. That's a fair point. So like the chapter on language and undermining or destruction of certain kind of words and meanings is really, really interesting.

And there's diversity, there's gender, there's all that kind of stuff we know about. even, as you say, progressive or even left wing, right? I mean, what do we mean by these things? So again, just to flip the question around, I suppose, as a linguist, how do we deal with that? Do we try to reclaim some of these words, right? You know, I think I'm progressive, right?

I wrote a book on progress. Yet if you say that today, it's meant to be, you know, something else. So do we reclaim these words or do we give them up as lost and try to formulate new ideas and new ways of expressing ourselves? Well, again, yes. We have to reclaim or, you know, the word woke, I think, is a very interesting one because obviously we all know it started out as a self-descriptor of people who thought that they were on the right side of history and blah, blah, blah.

And then people like me started mocking it and then it became a derogatory term. And now it's kind of got to a point where I don't really use the word woke because I just think it's tarnished by all sorts of things. So these linguistic battles will always go on. My first invitation to people is, first of all, to recognize. what is happening with language. So for example, I always like to use as example, the term inclusion. This is one, and safety, these are words that have meanings. Inclusion means that people are included. Yet what we'll find in a modern, inclusive space is quite a lot of people

like me and you would be excluded from them. Or if we talk about something like safety, safety means the absence of physical violence. Yet safety now means that no one disagrees with your opinion. So it is to notice these things. And then the problem we've got is if you change the language, you can change the laws without legislating. And that's really the biggest problem. If you have laws that say people must be safe, right? That law is there to prevent violence against people.

But if you change the meaning of the word safety, you've now got a law that is a law against people having the wrong opinions in public. So the first thing I think is we've got to be aware of it. And then, yes, culturally, satirists and, you know, podcasts and whoever can play with these other terms and make them terms of ridicule so people can no longer have that shield of virtue when they're talking about being woke while advancing some very regressive ideas. Okay. Because it's always done by the tolerant, isn't it?

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In terms of the Russia story, you say, compared to Russia, we have a free and honest media, low bar. And matter of fact, there is a kind of a debate to be had as to whether we do have a free and honest media. Well, we don't, but compared to Russia we do. Well, compared to, you know, yeah, compared to Russia, China looks good. But I mean, the point is, is that are you letting the West off the hook by making those low bar comparisons? Well, I think anyone who follows my work knows that I'm not exactly a big fan of the mainstream media.

And I've been very critical about many of the things. In fact, there's a whole chapter in the book, which is a sort of reproduction of a long Twitter thread that went quite viral during the pandemic, in which I talk about how misrepresentation, false messaging on that issue, and on many previous issues, has destroyed our faith in the media, which now means that people, you know, there's this kind of online meme of, I support the current thing, and now there's that I oppose the current thing, and people will blindly believe or disbelieve things simply because the mainstream is advancing them. But people also should not be confused. When we talk about societies like Russia and China, there is a difference between a media landscape, which is increasingly

misrepresentative and not entirely accurate and people choosing and picking what they want to hear and a society like China or Russia. In Russia, for example, there is no independent media anymore. Everything is state-controlled. 80% of the Russian public get their news from television and that is entirely controlled by one man and his cronies who are able to enforce a particular vision of reality on the rest of society. So this is kind of the issue that I address with the whole book, which is, yes, we have problems in the West. Yes, we're not perfect. Yes, some of the ways that our institutions have allowed themselves to be degraded over time are really, really bad and dangerous, and I talk about it in the book. But we mustn't throw away the baby with the

bathwater. We do need a mainstream media for all the excitement that people like me have about new media and the destruction of the old way of doing things and whatever, that's great. But we still do need mainstream publications that will spend a million pounds doing some kind of genuine investigative journalism. We still do need mainstream institutions. I mean, I think the BBC is beyond saving, but the idea of the BBC is actually quite a good one and so on and so forth. So yes, we don't have the perfect media landscape, but it's nothing like these authoritarian countries. And again, we shouldn't take that for granted. Yeah, but so how do you play that comparison line then, right? because like I say, it's a low bar.

That's my cheap shot at your argument. But in terms of you saying, you know, we have a free press notionally. Freeer. Yeah, exactly. So by comparison, I get it. But is there a more worthwhile... How would you deal with people criticizing the press in this country, regardless of the fact you do it? But, you know, I mean, by them saying, actually, we are freer than what's going on in Russia,

therefore we should have the ability to criticize the media in the West. Do you know what I mean? How I deal with them is usually I call them idiots on Twitter. But I don't know how you deal with that. That's just a lack of understanding and a lack of context. You know, we have a saying in Russia, everything is understood in comparison. You cannot understand the value or meaning of something

unless you have something to compare it to. So yes, the media in the West has many issues. Yes, those issues need to be resolved. Yes, part of the solution to those issues is new media attempting to highlight and expose the problems with the old media. But again, we must not throw the baby out with the bathwater. We are fortunate to have a society in which there is a debate happening. Most other societies in the world have no debate at all.

It's a uniform view that's imposed from above. And so we have to remember the value of those institutions, try to call them out when they're going wrong, and hopefully that is the method by which they get better. Fine. Okay, good. again, bear these questions in mind and other questions that you may have to develop if you don't like the answer. If you don't like a question, we've not a question, just move on. If you don't like the answer, by all means, come back to it in the question and answer session.

In terms of the education section, you criticize, again, I'm going to court you. And obviously, I'm courting you out of context in some regard for the sake of Plemic. You're doing a mainstream media, I mean. For Plemic, yeah. It's not a gotcha. It's more I just want to kind of work out what you're getting at. You criticize you. UK education for not teaching about the ills of socialism, you say.

Yes. Of course, and you say that's a good, that's because, quotes, today's teachers and professors often think communism is a good idea. I haven't really come across that myself. But anyway, but I get the gist. But does that mean that you are kind of in favour, you know, by teaching the ills of socialism, it means that in praise of something else by comparative standards. So do you want to have a politicized education system, which?

No, I just want an objective one. I'm quite problematic like that. I just, I think that we, we need to teach people about, uh, history in a broader context. So if we're talking,

you know, we spend a lot of time teaching ourselves about the evils of Nazism quite rightly, of course. But if you just compare on a raw numerical basis, communism is far more dangerous and has taken far more lives. And yet I find that almost nobody in this country understands that. Now that to me seems like quite a big problem.

And you say that there, you haven't met many people in academic. who think communism is a good idea. I've met quite a few, number one, but also you have to consider what we mean when we're talking about communism or Marxism. I mean, many of the racial conversations

we are now having, I mean, look at BLM, for example, right? That is an organization run by people who are openly Marxist. Many universities have professors who are openly Marxist and many of the identity politics conversations we have in this country.

They're just a new form of Marxism. It's a race-based Marxism instead of a class-based Marxism, right? Except that that undermines a very notion of what Marx is. I mean, I would say I'm openly Marxist. Yeah. But I don't support Black Lives Matter. Yeah. So, you know what I mean?

So I just, I don't necessarily recognize the characterization of this being a left-wing. I mean, socialism and communism are different. Marxism and communism in some respects are slightly different. But so it's kind of really- Real Marxism has never been tried. Is that your phrase? No, no. I think it's your phrase based on this conversation.

I don't think, for the record, I didn't say that. But, you know, so I'm happy for you put words in my mouth. But it's that idea about, you know, teaching the ills of socialism was kind of striking phrase for me. I mean, if you say the horrors of Nazism, I kind of understand it. So are you saying about teaching, you know, what happened under Mao's China or happened what under, you know, what happened in Stalinist Russia?

Yeah, but it's not just about what happened under Stalin's Russia. You've got to understand the Soviet Union carried on after Stalin. and it wasn't particularly great after that either. And the point I think that people don't seem to have really grasped in the West is the idea of communism is evil in and of itself and it leads to evil outcomes because it is an evil idea. The idea that you must force people to be equal is evil, whether you are looking at it through the lens of class

or race or sex or gender or whatever other bullshit people have come up with. the idea that you must put your hand on the lever and take from people who have drive and ambition and creativity and whatever else and you must take from them as much as possible and give it to people who have none of those things and who are not contributing to society. That's an evil idea and we should just be very clear about

and the reason it's evil is not that it's not a good thing to redistribute wealth and income from one group of people to another. It's the amount of tyranny that it takes to achieve is inevitably going to lead to millions of people being killed, as it has done every time it's been tried. Okay. I don't recognize that characterization, but fair news. Although I recognize Stalinist purges

and also Mao's purchase as being one of the greatest crimes of society. Sorry, Austin, this is what people don't understand. More people died in Soviet Ukraine alone from an artificial famine created by the incompetency of the communism, state, then the Nazis killed during the entire occupation of the Soviet Union. Right? So it's not just about evil Stalin who came in and wanted to kill certain people. It's about the fact that a system, a central planning system inevitably results in this

sort of nightmare. I don't know whether it does or not. But, I mean, the function is that, I mean, it did, right? I don't know whether you can necessarily project that. But I'm not here to defend Soviet system, right? I'm certainly not here to defend the Chinese system. We can have that row again. And in China, more people died in the cultural revolution

and in the Great League Forward than even did under Stalin. Yes. So, I mean, so we can compare statistics and notes, and I'm against both of those things. So don't get me wrong. But we're going off. Well, maybe we're not up being. Maybe we're not up in mind.

Yeah, well, I'm going to move on now. So bear that in mind. I'll talk that one up as a win for me. We'll have that over a bit. I'm just messing with it. So the early part of the book talks about kind of socialist utopias, thank you very much,

explores hypocrisy, those who profess to be egalitarian but live the lives of privilege. Kind of quite an interesting take. Anybody that has a good, Michael Moore is all right by me. Michael Moore, you know, talks a good talk, but then it has several houses, you say, you say, Engels had many factories,

that old chestnut. You call the Bolsheviks grifters, that's a good one. But anyway, but actually you are known, I think for tackling the content of what people say rather than necessarily their background. So is that a fair line of attack? It is a fair line of attack

because I am known for pointing out the hypocrisy of people who say one thing and do another. And I think people like Bernie Sanders who went on holiday, not just on holiday, his honeymoon was in the Soviet Union. While people from my country that I come from were starving, were impoverished, were struggling to have basic necessities.

He was there being given a tour by people he thought were just ordinary citizens, who were actually KGB agents, whose only job was to take around gullible Westerners like Bernie Sanders. And then he now is a multi, multi, multi-millionaire who preaches socialism for everybody. It's hypocrisy and it's complete nonsense. I have much more respect for a Marxist like Cornell West, for example, who actually lives with the things that he preaches. My issues were people who are being inconsistent

with the very principles that they espouse and in the process impoverishing all laws. All right. I won't mention private schools. Anyway, no, just a joke. No, no. What about them? Anyway, so the next question is comedians being targeted.

It's kind of interesting that there's this kind of schick that comedy or comedians are the last bastion of free speeches, which is actually quite interesting, isn't it? And just take a look in the last year, two years or so, comedians getting cancelled, left, right and centre. And it's that idea that comedians should be allowed to say things in the context of a comedy routine, which kind of pushes the bar, pushes the boundary.

So do comedians, should comedians, have bigger room for manoeuvre than, say, me and you in this room? I mean, or maybe put it another way, why has it occurred that comedians seem to be in the forefront of actually challenging those kind of, very woke speech called boundaries that we're all having to put up with. Well, the truth is that Austin's most comedians are nowhere near challenging the woke boundaries of the modern society.

They are actually enforcing them on other comedians. The few of us, people like myself, Francis, Andrew Doyle, Leo Kirstnick, I mean, I can go on for a while in this country who are doing that, have all been pushed out of the mainstream comedy industry one way or another and have had to create things outside of that in order to even get our voices heard. But the reason that we are at the forefront of that is we are constantly, we use irony and satire a lot.

We say things that we do not mean. And in a society which deliberately misrepresents jokes as somebody's actual opinion, comedians are obviously going to find themselves in the fire line pretty quickly. And of course, comedians, the job comedians are actually supposed to have, in my opinion,

is to push back against the dogma of their day. day, the dogma of the comedians who, the dogma that existed 20 and 30 years ago, when I was growing up, my heroes are people like Bill Hicks and George Carlin and others who were pushing against the Christian right, who were the one saying, you can't say that, you can't do this, you can't, whatever, they've been replaced by a religious left. And it's the religious left that is enforcing its dogma on everybody at the moment. And the comedians who are attempting to challenge the dogma of the day find them. up against that. That's why it's funny, you've got people on the Christian right now defending

a comedian's right to be offensive, which to me is just mind-boggling. Yeah. Well, what about, well, let me give you two quotes in the book, which I just want you to resolve for me. One is where you say more and more comedians are self-censoring for economic reasons and promoters are unlikely to re-book the act if they perceive it to be divisive. Okay, we got that. Then you say, the beauty of capitalism is that consumers assert their democratic power with every penny they spend. So you have this kind of consumer power which you describe the first court

seems to be kind of cancel culture that people are canceling you and not coming to your show, not you, one's show. But then the beauty of capitalism, people are allowed to do that. Is that a contradiction? No, there's no contradiction because the comedy environment in this country is a complete cabal.

It's a monopoly run by a handful of people who decide who gets which opportunity. and if the comedy industry in this country, as it has done, decides that the most important thing about a comedy shows that it's diverse, as opposed to that it's funny, then you end up with the comedy shows that we've ended up with. And then what happens is they get cancelled by the market. But first, the ideologues who are booking those shows and making those shows, they get to impose their will on a show like Mock the Week, which inevitably gets cancelled.

They get to impose their will on a show like The Mash Report, which I actually wrote on for a while, which inevitably gets cancelled. They get to impose their will on a show like Live at the Apollo, which will soon be cancelled because no one watches it anymore. So you've got a deluded monopolistic cabal that runs the industry,

and then you've got the market which punishes them for the things that they're doing that don't actually meet what people want to watch. And I always have to say this because it always sounds like I'm sort of whining and complaining.

I had a great comedy career. I did everything I ever wanted. I wrote for some great shows. I opened for some of my heroes on tour. I did my own show in Edinburgh. It's all fine. You can still do it. It's just that much harder.

And because of that, a lot of people are terrified. They won't cross any lines. And I can tell you there are hundreds of comedians in this country who would love to be able to do the jokes that they want to do. But instead, they're going around doing dick jokes because it's the only thing that's acceptable anymore. I don't know what you mean. Finally, then, which follows on from that, I suppose, you say towards. the end of the book. You say that your status as an immigrant means that you're protected from

the worst of cancelled culture. And you describe yourself as teflon-corted, untouchable immigrant. Slightly optimistic, perhaps. Well, I look at Lebedev and think it didn't work for him, did it? But I mean, does it mean, would that assume that then you're

a bit too obliging? You're to, dare I say, tame to be cancelled? Are you too I don't know, are you too much engaged in supporting the question model. Never been described as tame before, I promise you. It's not equality people usually associate with me.

No, I think the point I'm making about sort of immigrant privilege, if you like, in the context of this conversation is I don't believe that I would be sitting here having this conversation with you if I was a British-born, straight, white man, that great evil thing. Because the book would never have been published in the first place. And it wasn't particularly easy to get it published anyway. People don't know this about the creative art. and publishing in this country in general,

but there's literally like one literary agent and one publisher that will publish books like this one. And so we live in a very restricted environment, and the only reason even those publishers and even those agents and even those people are able to work with someone like me is they can go, well, guys, guys, guys, he's not white, it's okay. And that to me seems like quite a big problem. Oh, there's a hiatus point there.

That's good. The inflection, sue me for a second. Okay. Right, ladies and gentlemen, I've done me bid. So it's over to you. And again, apologies for my inability to turn. It's an age thing. Gentlemen in the awkward corner. Hello, I was just wondering who your literary influences were in writing the book. Not to inflate your ego too much, but it reminded me of Orwell and maybe even Soljanitson. It's a family member. No pressure then, huh?

Can we take this lady as well? Hi yeah, the phenomenon where immigrants, the most patriotic British citizens, is not really a new thing. I think it's existed for decades, unlike America where overt page is more acceptable. Do you think there's something in our character that just quite enjoys negativity? I do. I do. I also don't, I actually don't know that I agree that immigrants are the most patriotic. I think they're the ones that are allowed to be the most patriotic in public. I think that's really the issue. I think there's quite a lot of people in this country of every background who are very patriotic about Britain, but they are concerned about being, because, you know, being patriotic has been confused

with all sorts of, you know, xenophobia, racism, whatever. So, yeah, but in terms of the Solzhenitsin comparison and Orwell, I mean, those are two people that I have read. So I don't, I, I, I, I feel very British about trying to compare myself to people that I consider great. I think, I actually, while I'm a you know, Solzhenitsyn is one the most formative influences on my thinking. And I quote him in the opening of the book. And I actually tried to avoid repeating his mistake because the mistake that he made is when he was released from the camps. He was able to publish the Gulag Archipelago

and he was eventually invited to go to the West. And he went to America where he started lecturing Americans about what was going wrong with their society. don't like that, which is why I've come to Britain, where you love being told how terrible you are. So I can tell you how to write your wrongs. No. So, yeah, those are two people that I respect very much.

I think they made very good points. And the one thing I would say to people, because most people haven't read it, if you want to understand the way that censorship operates, particularly in our society today, read Orwell's preface to Animal Farm, where he talks about how much difficulty he had. in having it published because even in those days, coming back to our conversation about communism,

because the Soviets were seen as necessary to winning World War II, it was very, very difficult to publish a book that was critical of that system. And it wasn't through hard censorship. It was through enforced self-censorship.

And I think he writes beautifully about that. In terms, very quickly, in terms of the immigrant stuff, I'll follow in, because on the break, kind of on the topic of Brexit, kind of, I hear to raise that B word, but you say most people don't hate immigrants,

they hate the politicians who say they do, which I think is a really, really important point, and dismissed or misrepresented by a lot of the media and popular opinion. But it's there to discredit kind of popular opinion and that idea of populism, which has then taken on, as we've said before, taken on this kind of dark interpretation, populism, rather than being a popular opinion.

What do you think about populism, the label populism? Because it kind of is brought in to a lot of conversations these days, which maybe it doesn't deserve to, but also it's given this negative connotation. Well, first of all, on Brexit, I voted Remain in that referendum. And the thing that really changed my opinion about that issue to the extent that I've changed my opinion about that issue was I had to watch the country that I've come to lived in as a dark-skinned immigrant or my life. life be misrepresented as full of, you know, half the country is racist, half the country hates immigrants, half the countries, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, first of all, that didn't even make any sense to me because the immigration that people

were concerned about was mainly from Eastern Europe where people are white. So that doesn't ring true. But also my own experience of living in this country, my very valuable lived experience, tells me that this complete nonsense. It doesn't mean to say that populism doesn't exist. People have always wanted to hear a simplified version of. reality that panders to all their prejudices and whatever. But I just think the way we have the conversation about immigration is completely insane at

the moment. I like ice cream. I don't want to eat ice cream for every meal, every day for the rest of my life. And the attitude to immigration has got to be the same. Immigrants contribute, immigrants are great, but when the numbers become, it's like the great man Joseph Stalin said, joke for you, the great man Joseph Stalin said the quantity has a quality all of its own. And the problem we have with immigration this country is not that immigrants are bad people. It's that when I came to this country in 1995, 3% of the British public thought that

immigration was a major issue because it wasn't a major issue, right? And then you have the Blair era where more people came into this country in about 10 years that had come into this country between 1066 and 1950. It's quite a big shift, and for people to be concerned about that doesn't make them racist or xenophobic or whatever. You can be in favor of immigration. You can think that people like me

who I would like to think came to this country and contributed and created jobs for local people and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, are valuable without thinking that open borders is a great idea. It's not that. And as you know, I talk about this in a book, a lot. Left-wing politicians, let alone right-wing politicians, have been making the very

point that I've just made for the last 30 years. Barack Obama was to the right of Donald Trump on immigration. It's just everyone forgot. Yeah. Well, it was Barack Obama who maintained the war from America to Mexico, didn't he? And the whole issue, which I presume we've discussed in the last session on Ukraine about sovereignty and about borders, it's kind of fundamentally in our face now. So it's something which maybe those Remainers who denied its existence maybe have to rethink.

Anyway, any more or any more? There's a gentleman at the very back. Oh, there's lots of... Sorry, I didn't... Because you wearing T-shirts, I just assumed you were like saluting or something. Take this gentleman and then we'll go back to the T-shirt men. What kind of session do you think this is?

Well, I'm pandering to your Putin-esque agenda. Brilliant. Thank you, Constantine. You spoke about wanting to have a more objective education system. What role then do you think parents should play in helping to shape the national curriculum and the content that their children are learning? It's a very timely topical issue, both in the UK and overseas. I think there are discussions about it at the Battle of Ideas. And I ask, because obviously every parent will have their own subjective opinion about what should and shouldn't be taught. How does society manage that? Yeah, it's an interesting question and very much above my pay grade. But what I would say about it is, I, for the first few years of my life, so until I was about 13, I obviously was educated in the Soviet education system, which was very good on the hard science, as the chemistry, the whatever, but also contained a huge amount of historical and cultural indoctrination, which everybody knew was complete bullshit. And so the role of the parent, in my opinion, partly will be about, you know,

what the curriculum should be or whatever, but actually everything begins in the home. You have to give your children the context for the things that they're being taught. you have to inoculate them against some of the crap that they're going to be inevitably taught in any school. And, you know, when I talk about a more objective system, I just, I think we are failing to educate our children. And I, this is true for my generation too. And by the way, you know, when I went to school in this country, it coincided with like a

five-year period of my life where my family had money. So they sent me to a good school for a very short time before going bankrupt again and blah, blah, but I went to a good school and we were taught history terribly. Terribly. I learned more in history by watching a one-hour YouTube video than I learned in my entire time at school, right? So I don't know that this gets fixed necessarily in the education system and I think the challenges we're seeing

as a result of the sexual revolution and the breakdown of the family are much more where these issues are happening where there's not enough parents to basically teach their children right from wrong, the stuff that they're being taught in school that is completely nonsensical versus what's actually true and to set a context for the things. So as a new parent, this is probably extreme optimism on my part, but I'm sort of hopeful that I can teach my children the stuff that they need to know and protect them from some of the indoctrination they're going to get in school.

Very good. All right. Take these two gentlemen, statuesque figures. Yeah, I think a lot of the problems we have in politics in the West come from the fact that a lot of people think that everyone else in the world thinks exactly like us. So, you know, people don't understand why Putin would invade Ukraine. People don't understand why someone would vote for Brexit or just disagree with them on something. Do you see us recovering from that, any way of stepping into other people's shoes and understanding that they have different motives and morals and values and they're going to, again, going to act on those and that drives their behaviour. Hold that thought. I'll take the other guy. Take you so as well. Yeah.

Two very quick things. A personal question, what are you most, what are you most proud of in the past year? The baby, the book, or America. And the second thing, very quickly, is, do you think the whole culture war is because everybody's bored and we've got nothing to believe in, i.e. lack of religion? Would there be a culture war if we actually had things to really believe in and we weren't so comfortable? Yeah, both good questions. So the first question is, just remind me briefly because my memory is failing. People believe that everyone else across the world.

Yeah, yeah. How can we get people to listen to each other and understand each other's point of view? To empathize with... Well, this is one of the paradoxes of the progressive leftist way of thinking because it's all about inclusion and tolerance and understanding and empathy. Yet they are the very people who don't seem to understand that the reason people have different points of view is different genetics, different upbringings, different life experience,

different lived experience, different, all of these things, right? And that, I think, is largely a product of social media where, as I say, certain types of ideas get way more traction because they sound better, even though often they're completely wrong. So I think we will get away from that way of doing business whenever we find a way to destroy social media. It's probably the only way. How many subscribers do you have?

Yeah, let's hold on to them. social media. And what am I most proud of? Well, I didn't really have that much to do with the baby, I can tell you. It's a very limited level of involvement. No, you know what? The thing I am most proud of, actually, is that trigonometry is now a small business that employs, including me, Francis, and our producer, Anton, another seven or eight people now.

about seven or eight people and I'm really proud of that I'm really proud that we employ people that we give people meaningful work that people come and work for us for very little money let's be honest because they love what they do

because they love being involved in a project that is passionate where we're all pulling in the same direction and you know Francis and I have been we've transformed from basically two idiot comedians to actually managing a small team of people and looking after people

and making sure that they're developing and what they're doing. To me, that is really the most exciting thing about what I do. You've got hardcore fans. I'm like today in Russia as well. Hardcore fans.

Yeah. Yeah, so I'm excited about that. But in terms of the culture, was, are we just bored? I think you're right that a lot of the problems we have in the West are a function of our comfort and prosperity.

And every time something goes badly wrong, I am really hopeful that that is the kick that we need. which is like when the pandemic happens. Do you remember there was that like brief moment when everybody was like, oh guys, we're a society. We should pull in the same direction. Let's bring some food to our neighbor, right?

And then we had George Floyd and everybody, you know, everybody went mental. The thing that we need to do what? We need to look after our people and we need to have solidarity with ourselves and whatever. And just there was a couple of months that everything was kind of going. I was like, oh, wow, we're starting to unite around this common threat that we face.

and then you have Dominic Cumm who, as Francis always points out, must have been the biggest supporter of BLM because it just took all their attention away from him. And that happens and the world goes crazy. I mean, you see people posting these videos now from the summer of 2020 where you've got like white

people kneeling to black people, right? And I was saying at the time, this is mental. This is completely mental. My first day at Union at Goldsmiths a year ago, I had white girls come like to me, I'm so sorry for being white. I'm so sorry. How nice for you, my friend.

Actually, there's a terrific... Have you seen this viral video by Russian state? Yes. Which is doing a parody of America on an airplane. And it's all that stuff where they allow the black guy to walk to the toilet on the airplane while all the white people can have back to. It's really clever piece of work. That's the thing.

It really isn't that clever. It's actually very easy to satirize if you can put it on television, which you can't in this country. Trust me, I can rustle up some comedy writers that could do that a hundred times better. It just wouldn't go anywhere. I thought it was quite funny.

I'm not saying it's not funny. It was great. In relation to your views on the mainstream media, being someone who works within the mainstream media, but not in this country, how do you think,

what's your opinion of the media coverage of the war? I mean, it's a big question, but what are the strengths and weakness is in your opinion of how the war is being covered in the mainstream media? It's a good question. You've obviously caught me in a massive generalization because the mainstream media is composed of all sorts of different outlets

and different people will cover it differently. If I think of coverage of the war and the mainstream media, I sort of think of the BBC. And I think the BBC has not been inaccurate, generally speaking, while also the main issue I have is, I don't think that you could possibly work out why the war is happening, why Russia invaded,

what's actually going on on the ground, and what is likely to be the future and what are the most important issues from the BBC because all you see is pretty refugee running away from bombs or, you know, the LGBTQ survivors of Putin's invasion

in Rotherham being integrated with the family. These are all great stories. I just don't think that they really educate people about some of the issues. And I think it's one of the reasons that the alternative media has been so involved in covering this issue

and attempting to bring certain issues into life because I just don't think the mainstream media is calibrated to educate people and to give them the information that they need because they're much more, you know, it's odd to me

because I sort of used to think that it's the online space where everything's clickbait. But actually I often feel now with the mainstream media, they are the ones that are doing most of the clickbait. because they're going, you know, if it bleeds, it leads type of thing.

And we all get, look, I have family in Russia and Ukraine who've all been affected by all of this. And it's terrible. I just don't know how much yet another story about the poor victims of war advances people's understanding of what's happening. And that has always been my priority to try and explain to people why it's happening. Why does it matter to the West? And I think people really don't understand. And, you know, it's funny, I wrote this thread on Twitter recently, which was a translation of Vladimir Putin's latest speech

that some of you probably have read. And I had a bunch of mainstream journalists follow me afterwards and ask me questions. And these are people who cover the war. And I'm like, why are you asking a satirist and podcaster what Vladimir Putin is saying? How come you haven't got a whole team of people analyzing his speeches, breaking it down, explaining to people in the West

what he's actually saying. It's a catastrophic failure. And it's important because if we in the West don't understand what's going on, how the hell are we going to react to it in the right way? So why haven't they? Look, you probably know more about it than me. I am just seeing the symptoms. I can't explain what the disease is exactly.

I think there's probably not a lot of money in doing a three-hour breakdown of what's happening in Ukraine. And there's probably quite a lot of clicks in people who want to do. just see a pretty refugee running away from a bomb. It's a theory. Okay. There's a little behind you as well. I gave up on that.

Straight white man. Take those two gentlemen there. We'll take the white guy first. As is his right. Just on the history of trigonometry, there's a great episode where Constantin and Francis talk for about an hour and a half about the story from being in a

flat in Dahlston to the empire they are now. And it's very, it's quite life-affirming, partly because it's been through so much kind of shit, one's the better term, and kind of come out at the other side, although Anton doesn't come out of it very well. But, you know, I guess he's the butt of the joke often.

But no, I wanted to pick up on a point you made in the plenary about Ukraine earlier on and a point that someone else made earlier about how other people see Western values. And someone asked about how we try and, you know, encourage people to see them in a more positive way. But could you give some examples of how, in Soviet Russia and also in post-Soviet Russia, something that we would take for granted, or at least maybe the people in this room would, like liberal democracy or equality or

tolerance of speech and so on, would be seen by the authorities or the people who shape public opinion and the culture? What would we be really surprised to hear would be a common view in Russia? Well, Russia's never had a single democratic trance. transition of power ever, ever. The first mention of Russia is 882. That's the Kiev and Bruce that people talk about. In its entire history, Russia has never had a single democratic transition of power, right? So that seems to me quite important.

That's something we completely don't understand. And it's true of most of the world, by the way. It's true of most of the other countries in the world. Democracy is quite rare, quite unique and quite a fragile thing, which is why, has to be guarded so carefully. The idea that in the Soviet Union, you would express your opinion in public and that opinion was unpopular and you would be safe. It would never occur to anyone that such a ridiculous thing could happen.

In the late 80s, this is why we were having the argument only about Stalinism. My grandfather, this is one of the things I talk about in the book. He criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, much like people are now in Russia criticizing the Russian invasion. of Ukraine. And he was immediately fired from his job. His wife was fired from her job. Their children, that's my father and my aunt, were kicked out of university for one comment that he made in private. And there are people in Russia today who initially, when the invasion happened, they went out with placards to protest. And the placards would say for peace. And they would get

instantly arrested and dragged away into prison. So then they started going out with no placard at all, just standing with their hands in there. And they would get arrested. the idea that you should be able to protest against your government because you disagree with it but it doesn't really occur to most people everywhere and the only way that they are able to do so is to go out and get their head smashed in by the riot police as you see in Russia as you are now seeing in Iran

as you would see as you saw in China of course it was Tiananmen Square and not just Tiananmen Square but it was a countrywide thing what happened people in the West absolutely do not realize how rare and unique and precious what we have here is. And to the point where it wouldn't even occur to people in other countries that these things are good things to have because they've never had them. Yeah, it's funny because when I taught in China for about six years

and when I first took my Chinese students out and I offered to buy them a drink, mainly because it was 25 pence for a pint, but buy them all drink. And then one girl said, I don't drink in public. Okay, so, you know, you think, okay, what the hell does that mean? I don't drink in public. So I kind of harangued her sufficiently that she explained that in the 70s, the family always used to have their meals outside in the village, and then the grandfather got drunk and said too much,

and before you know it, he was hauled off, her father was hauled off. So there's a family rule not to drink in public. And it's like moments like that when, I mean, you've lived it, right? But almost like that, when you realize this is a different system and a different perception about, you know, what your personal and private versus public experience, So I think it's kind of very useful to remember that these are very, very different social systems. And it's kind of very difficult, as somebody was asking at the back there, very difficult to grasp the kind of the conception of what China mindset might be.

I don't know that that doesn't, not meant to be racist, but it's generally difficult to understand how they think about certain things and interpret them because it's of such a different historical magnitude to what we've had in the West. So it's kind of a very important point you raised. Hey Francis, do you like locals? I live in London, mate. So obviously not. The only pleasure I get from the locals is when we share an intimate moment as we watch a Japanese tourist get trapped in a tube door. That is good. But I wasn't talking about the locals.

I was talking about our community on locals. You mean the one where you get phenomenal behind the scenes content when you... ...that you space, space, when you get to ask, Wask incredible guests like Jordan Peterson, Brett Weinstein, Bill Burr, Sam Harris, Adam Carolla, Heather Hying and others your questions? Not just that, you can get supporter-only benefits like trigonometry mugs, monthly calls with other top supporters, and even a regular meal with me and Francis. You also get phenomenal behind-the-scenes footage of our trip to America,

where we met a whole host of incredible guests and gave ourselves terminal indigestion. We're also starting to do monthly giveaways for locals only. The first one will be signed copies of Andrew Doyle's new book. Plus, you get access to an incredible community of like-minded people who share memes, have fun conversations and most importantly, you get to make new friends. You can support us with as little as $7 or about £5 a month,

or give us more for the higher tier benefits. Go to trigonometry.com. Go to trigonometry.com and support the show. Take the gentleman further over then, please. Okay, so just you said you had cast iron immigrant privilege before. I'm just wondering how much longer that will last, given that in general the left have now discovered from the last two cabinet.

that, you know, black and Asian people can be Torres too. And in some cases, significantly more right-wing than their cabinet colleagues. And also in America, there are more Hispanic people who voted for the Trump. So it's a narrative of the gammon or white privilege. Is that going to hold forever, or will they have to come up with some kind of new kind of formulation

about who the problematic people are. Yeah. Quasie, quite a, are you superficially an immigrant? Yeah, well, I don't know. I'm internally xenophobic, I guess. No, I think it's funny, isn't it? Because anyone with half a brain knows that immigrant communities actually tend to be more conservative

on particularly on social issues than the native population. Yeah, we pretend that ethnic minorities are this sort of monolith who all believe, you know, in eternal progress or whatever it is. I don't know how that issue is going to play out. I mean, I don't know how people in this room feel. I don't know how people in the country feel. I think many of these ideas, you know, the idea that a black cabinet member of a conservative government, which is frankly useless at the moment, but nonetheless, a black cabinet member of that government has internalized racism because they have the wrong opinion according to some white leftist.

that seems to me to be slightly discredited by now and so I don't really I think increasingly people take less notice of it I think the way that we are having this conversation in this room is probably not the way it might have been had two years ago I think we're all starting to kind of to realize the to borrow one of the language tricks we're starting to realize the gaslighting that's been happening

and I think more and more people will open their eyes to how much crap they've been sold about it And I think you just, particularly as the makeup of our society changes, as we see that politics increasingly reflects every ethnicity in this country, increasingly reflects every variety of person, whatever, I think that issue will probably go away because people like me and people like you and others, just we're kind of immune to this. Like if, I mean, someone once called me a Nazi,

and I was like, Jewish Nazi, the best kind. Like, it's, it gets silly after a while, you know what I mean? Okay, this gentleman. All right. So I'm for Blackpool. And if we don't... So you're oppressed. Well, yes.

I mean, I'm probably a thick racist northerner. Nobody's ever really called me out. I work for the BBC, so I can't really say much on social media is about politics. I'm not allowed to have a view. And obviously, the BBC's run by a guy that used to market fizzy drinks to fat kids. So, you know, and Bill Hicks, his view on marketers, you, I'm sure will remember. For this question, you wrote an immigrant's letter to the West. Have you had a letter back, an actual letter, or a direct response back from an individual?

And what was it? What was the best one? It was Douglas Murray's very generous review in which he sort of, he thanked me for writing the book, and he said that the feeling is reciprocated. He spoke on behalf of the West, which was in Douglas' style and who I love. but yeah that was you know right or left or whatever

I think Douglas Murray is one of the most insightful public commentators that this country is produced in quite some time I don't agree with Douglas on everything

I agree with him on a lot of things that he says I think he's had the courage to address a number of issues that nobody wanted to be honest about way ahead of time

and so when he wrote a review suggesting that, you know, he was grateful to me for writing the book. You know, that meant a lot to me. Yeah. Any hostile ones? The reviews. Yeah. No, no, no, reviews.

But the letter, the concept that you've written this book and... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, it was funny. There was a woman on Twitter who followed me after I translated that Putin speech. And she was so enthusiastic about everything that I'd said about it. She's absolutely brilliant. Can't wait to read your book.

Next day, she just, like, sent me 100. like hate-filled messages about how wrong and bad and terrible my book is. So there was a, I managed to persuade one person very quickly. Very good, very good. Toby. I run a kind of alt media website called The Daily Skeptic was lockdown skeptics. And we've had a number of problems with censorship. So I think Facebook have currently banned the Daily Skeptic Facebook account. We were closed by PayPal about a month ago.

they eventually changed their minds. But for, and it looked as though they did that because they thought we were guilty of spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines. And I wondered, I know, I know trigonometry has in the past had some similar problems. YouTube videos being removed. You convinced that you're being shadow banned.

Not convinced. We have direct evidence. We have evidence. Direct evidence. You've been shadow banned. I wondered, as, as trigonometry has grown, grown its audience, as it's become a business with seven people, whose livelihoods you're partly now responsible for, how do you now navigate this world?

Do you find yourself having to self-censor more and more to avoid this kind of actual censorship by big tech? No, because I firmly believe, and Francis, and I think our whole team is united and believing that the point of trigonometry is to explore difficult issues. And I think the moment we start doing that, I don't think the people in this room would be in this room.

so we cannot sell out to that and if the day comes that we can no longer do what we do on YouTube then we will find another way of doing it and if that means that we all have to take it here we've always been very clear every time we talk with you know myself Francis and Anton about you know well maybe we should like give this person a bit more salary or give ourselves a bit more salary so we can do whatever

we that's always with the understanding that you know things may go up as well as down because of the nature of what we do. What I am very concerned about Toby, as you know, you and I have spoken about this before, and you've had some issues with PayPal recently, is that, like, if you've got the wrong opinion, you can't have a bank account,

which is the direction we're going. That is a very, very dark path. That is a very dark path. And that's got to, I mean, we've got to fight so hard against that. Because, you know, before you know it, you're not going to have electricity if you've got the wrong opinion. I just think... I think that that is the most scary thing to me,

and I wish more people would focus their attention on that. Can I just jump in on the conversation? In terms of the PayPal issue, I've just cancelled my PayPal accounts precisely because of your problems. But what do you think? But I'm opposed to consumer boycotts. So I had a bit of an ethical turmoil

as to whether I should be doing this in support of you or whether I should actually be not endorsing the idea that I can bring my consumer power to play on distorting a company's own decision-making processes. How do you sit on, sorry, how do you sit on this? Well, thank you for closing your PayPal account. I think lots of people did. There's a sod all in it, but anyway, yeah.

But I think the number of people who did may have contributed to their decision to restore the three accounts of mine that they closed. I think that you often hear a slightly different argument to the one you made, which is that, well, why should we fetter the freedom of association of these private companies by saying they can't discriminate against certain customers on the basis of their political beliefs? You know, you can always go with another payment processor that isn't going to discriminate in that way, and the market will solve the problem. And I think there are two arguments against that.

The first is that, well, first of all, PayPal is a monopoly. It's about eight times larger than its nearest competitor, and it's quite difficult to make a success of sites like trigonometry, and the Daily Skeptic, which depend on donations, amongst other things, if PayPal closes your account. The second thing is, I think, you know, it's odd. You hear people on the left, like James O'Brien, making this kind of libertarian argument

as though they'd suddenly joined the Institute of Economic Affairs. You know, he says, why shouldn't they discriminate against you? They're a free company. This is a free society. But you wouldn't say the same thing if they discriminated against someone on the basis of the color of their skin or their religion or their sexual orientation.

And I think your political belief should be in the same category. And to your point, Constantine, I think we definitely do need to do something about this urgently to prevent the emergence of a Chinese-style social credit system in the West, except, you know, without communist authorities enforcing ideological orthodoxy, it's these capitalist corporations in California. What can we do about it? Well, the Free Speech Union is lobbying the government to amend a bill currently going through Parliament to make it more difficult for companies like PayPal.

and lots of other financial services companies to discriminate against people on the basis of their political beliefs. Whether we'll make any headway, I don't know, but we're certainly hoping to do that. Yeah, and everyone should know, we are trigonometry, are huge fans of the free speech union. I think it's really important, and you do great work.

Can I just add one other thing as well, coming back to your question about, you know, self-censoring to protect our staff or whatever, the one principle, the guiding principle of my life, and I'm fortunate to be able to have this principle because we live in a time where people like you and I are not burnt under stake, is that the truth of it is that in our society, I think, if you make a stand on principle that costs you in the short term,

it probably will benefit you in the long term. At least that is a belief that I operate by, I'm sure at some point it will turn out to be untrue. But generally, the way I try to carry myself in the world is based on that idea, which is that if you stand up for what's right now, You may suffer the consequences early, but in the long run, you will be vindicated and actually shown to be correct, and that will reinforce people's support for you. You will find an audience of people who believe in what you do.

I know you did a lot of opposing of the government's restrictions around lockdown, which was a big concern of mine as well. And I was frankly, you know, sending quite rude messages to government ministers and whatever, who now say to me, oh, you were sort of right. do you know what I mean? And so I think that standing up for what you truly know to be the right thing,

even when it's difficult, will benefit you in the long run. And so from that perspective, if at some point it comes to that we are starting to have trouble with our payment system or whatever, we will find a way. And I hope that people,

if more people had that attitude, I think we'd be making more progress faster. And I do think in the modern world it is genuinely true, particularly because, you know, you with the free speech, you are able to look after the little man who maybe doesn't have a big platform and doesn't want to build a big platform.

They just wanted to make a joke at work or whatever. You know what I mean? So, yeah, I think what you're doing is very important. Very good. Lovely, loving there. Mutual appreciation society. Yes, good. We'll take this last year, please.

Lady, sorry. My question is following on from self-cancelling and it's going to be just touching on the sea word, not capitalism, comedy. I see comedy as a high level of intelligence, and I'm wondering, how can we sustain it as being an outlet, basically walking that fine line between being offensive to some and not offensive to others through council culture? How can we sustain? Is it through persevering?

Yeah, I think, look, there's a couple of answers. I mean, the flippen answers, comedians need to grow some balls, I suppose. But the bigger answer is I think the internet is the answer. And that's why I'm so opposed to the online harms bill and the online whatever it's called now. They keep changing the name. But in my view, the biggest issue that we face, I feel weird sort of answering a question with my back to you. But the biggest challenge from my perspective and the thing that I am most focused on is we spent four and a half years on trigonometry pointing out. the hypocrisy of this woke idiocy

and also challenging some of the anti-woke idiocy that is also now starting to emerge. And that is good for as long as that was happening. The problem that we have is if you don't have a positive vision of a counterculture, people aren't going to buy into it, right? And so I think what we have to start to do is to shape a positive vision of the counterculture,

whether it's comedy, whether it's anything else. And people just have to go out and do stuff. They got to go out and create. The internet allows you to find your audience. So from a comedy perspective, that's part of it. And then here's the new dad part of me, which is, you know, I think this doomsday narrative that exists on the left, particularly to do with environmentalism. And on the right, there's a sort of, it's not maybe equal, but there's a similar sort of,

you know, the West is all decadent and degraded and devoid of any values. So, you know, let's let Vladimir Putin take over. he's a good Christian of whatever nonsense these people have brought it brought into but there's a sort of like you know the world's over type of narrative and that is just nonsense and people need to have more kids not fewer

more kids of the solution instead of being the problem so that's got to be a big part of it and then we just have to take an honest appraisal on culturally about environmentalism and we have to be honest we have to say look the climate is changing human beings contribute to it, the world's not going to end in 10 years, and if we poured all the energy that

we pour onto paintings into actually working on problems and solving problems technologically, we'd be a lot better off. And by the way, we wouldn't be buying our energy from our enemies, making ourselves vulnerable, making ourselves unable to respond strongly like we've seen. So that positive counterculture is forming, I'm having all sorts of conversations with all sorts of people. It's sort of behind closed doors at the moment. But believe me, there's a counterculture building. Comedians are going to be a big part of that. Sato is going to be a big part of that. Movies are going to be a big part of that because if you look at the output from Hollywood and whatever over the last decade, I mean, I used to love the cinema. I don't go,

I haven't been to the cinema for God knows how long because it's all crap, right? And that, the demand is there. The market will fulfill it as long as we're still allowed to do stuff on the internet. The market will decide. Gentlemen, under last there. Hi. At the moment we've got a Conservative government whose support for free speech and

for anti-woke issues is positive, but at best feeble. We've got the prospect of a Labour government very, very strongly coming in a couple of years. Do you think we're all going to be swimming in water of a different temperature then? Can we take the lead in front?

Well, you mentioned that there is a Marxist problem in education, and as a student I wholeheartedly agree. I feel like whenever I do a history essay, the professors, they want you to write about history in a certain way. I remember in my second year, I did a module on the Soviet Union, and the professors just kept saying that the Western historians, they were essentially, they saw so many negatives in a Soviet Union, and so they advised against, using their arguments and our essays. And I remember a friend of mine, she's half-Ukrainian, and she personally felt really uncomfortable in her lessons because these professors, they've never lived in the Soviet Union before.

They just kept saying, oh, you know, there were some things that weren't great, but, you know, there are other things that we can still praise. And, you know, clearly the Soviet Union was just, you know, generally, you know, a bad thing. How do we solve this issue of, you know, the Marxist problem in education? Thank you. I don't know that you can solve the Marxist. I'll come back to the gentleman's question.

I don't know that you can solve. I mean, academics are always going to lean in that direction because they like ideas that don't work but sound good. This is what they do. And this is some, I can't remember, it's Melissa Chen. I don't know if you guys, Melissa Chen, who I'm a big fan of, She tweeted something a long time ago, she said, you cannot remain woke

when you're building anything, whether that's muscle, whether that's a business, whether that's anything, right? So the moment you get in the practical real world, you start to be confronted by the reality that people are not equal. They're not born with equal intelligence

or equal drive or equal passion or anything. And so the people who live in their towers of academia, they're always going to be slightly deluded. And I think the way that that gets solved is the way you're solving it, which is critical thinking. You are there, you're being asked to do these assignments, you're starting to see the flaws and the arguments that are being presented to you. And I don't imagine you're going to come out of that experience being a Marxist. So that we kind of solve that problem.

It's certainly in your case. And I think eventually over time, people will grow out of it. I don't, I mean, academia is important, but I think culture is much more important. And I think that is really, you know, the conversation I was, the point I was making to the lady there is if we can change the culture, everything else will go with it. And they're always going to be Marxist professors. You know, that's just what they do. But so on your point about the conservative government, I mean, I have some conservative friends who would say this isn't really particularly conservative government. and I mean, they're probably less woke

than Kier Stama's party might be, but they're still pushing through the online safety bill, which is, as Andrew Doyle will tell you, filled with critical social justice, language and ideology from start to finish. And is, in my opinion, if not purposely built, then certainly accidentally built, precisely to suppress the sort of counterculture emerging

that I'm talking about, where people are free to make jokes on the internet, free to speak, free to take risks, et cetera. So, but yeah, I mean, the only thing that could possibly be worse than the current Chambles is a Labour government, which we're almost certainly going to get. Yeah. So it's happy days ahead, mate.

Yeah, and on a high. There's a few more. But if you always say anything, just in terms of what that lady was saying there, because it's interesting the way you phrased it, I mean, part of it I agree with, and part of it, I'm just a little bit kind of worried when you say a Ukrainian student was worried,

It sounded like she was being triggered by somebody saying that, you know, what was going on in the Ukraine was, you know, the fault of the Ukrainians or whatever it was. And there's a, in SOAS, you know, School of Oriental and African Studies, their student union about two years ago did a big takeover argument that how dare, you know, white Western expert professors, or just call them professors, who had spent all their years understanding Africa, how dare they teach African students? because what do they know?

They haven't had the lived experience and they basically are imposing a kind of a Western-centric understanding of Africa on the students rather than maybe a knowledgeable one. I can't speak to the exact... I think that's the opposite of the point. No, I don't think it was.

I think the fact is that there was an element of that in the question, right? But obviously more broadly than actually was talking about the fact that there's a Marxist tone to what some of the students' lectures are teaching them. So I think... So I'm just slightly worried

about the middle ground of what was being studied there? I mean, I don't think that the teachers, you know, have to be Russian or from the Soviet Union to have an opinion on Soviet history. It's just that they were kind of being insensitive. I mean, it's like you just can't ignore certain things that happened in the Soviet Union. You can't just brush it away just because the dominant historiography

in the West is that, you know, it was, it was bad and we just want to disagree with what the West says because, you know, we're woke and stuff. I mean, for example, I have a teacher, a professor who is very knowledgeable about the country of my family's from and, you know, and he's white and I don't disagree. Like, I don't think it's a bad thing that he's knowledgeable about where I'm from because he's white. I'm just saying that you can't just, you know, forget that some things happen in history that are wrong, basically. Well, I actually speak to this very point in the book.

I don't know if you've read it, but I talk about in one of the chapters why the Soviet Union was brilliant. I list all the reasons it was generally brilliant. Free education, free health care, free child care, you know, very high standard of education on the hard sciences, equality for all, much less wealthy and income inequality that we have in this country. And as I say in the book, it's a pity you had to kill 50 million people to make it happen. that's kind of the trade-offs, right? And I think the point that you're making is very valid one, which is you've got people who are essentially saying

you should disregard a particular way of looking at this issue because it's all Western, which seems to me actually the exact opposite of the argument that's just been made. So I agree with you completely. Yeah, it is opposite. That wasn't the point I was picking up on. I was picking up on the point of her friend

who was upset by what the lecture was saying. A very minor point in the entire account. equation. So I'm not, I'm not going to go at you. Well, what I'm saying is I think I would also be quite upset. I mean, I would demonstrate it differently because I'm a contrarian asshole. But if I was in a, in that classroom, I'd be going, you have no idea what you're talking about. This is what happened. This is what my family went through. It's called fighting back, arguing the case. Exactly. Right. That wasn't the point that's

make. You, sir. So I think the biggest problem that we're all facing and why a lot of people like cars like the sleeping giants are waking up is what's happened, and I'm old enough to remember since the 70s, is this creep of postmodern Marxism in the elites and the university. You're triggering Austin here. Yeah, yeah. Postmodern Marxism, you can have a good one you want. Well, it's a combination. Jordan Peterson made a good point about it.

and what's happened is especially in the humanities but it's now creeping into apparently math now is also white supremacy that's another thing look it up and what's happened is that all the people who are educated in the humanities go into the media and go into all these big corporations

and into government and it's an infection that runs deep in all the most powerful elites in society and all the big organs of communication and the difficulties we're having

whether it's PayPal or Facebook or Twitter is simply because there is a shouty elite backed up by Greta Thunberg and others who get the oxygen

of publicity and a monopoly on the on the public debate and so that's the big challenge and what we really need is a proper alternative marketplace which is your is what you're doing in your own way it needs to get bigger there needs to be an alternative to PayPal but the problem is as someone has said these these guys are monopolies they're not they're not capitalists at all they are They are corporate monopolies. They're anti-capitalists. You know, capitalism is all about being able to get, you know, you vote with your feet. If you don't think this works, move somewhere else. And we need a leakage where we can get out and challenge it.

Great. Thank you very much. You, Madam and yourself? Yeah. Hi. I just wanted to say I really liked your Substack article about how to destroy a progressive argument, three steps to do it. One, you know, where is the evidence, two, on what grounds? I can't remember the other. These are not mine, by the way. I should say, I don't want to take credit for Thomas Sol's work.

These are Thomas Sol's three questions. Compared to what, at what cost, and what hard evidence do you have. And I especially liked your point in terms of how the, one of the logics to progressiveism, you know, abolishing prisons if you just presume everyone has a good nature and people only commit crimes because they're failed by the system rather than just simply being bad people. And I guess I wanted to ask, you know, are we seeing any dangers at the moment of the excesses of progressivism beyond, you know, theoretical posturing in academia. Well, look, sorry to interrupt, but it's a really good question.

So we'll talk about Thomas Sol in a second because it's really important. But if you look at what's happening in places like California where we just came back from in terms of releasing criminals from prison, in terms of not arresting people if they're stealing stuff from a shop that's worth less than $900, if you're not arresting people who are sleeping on the street and you're not actually giving them the support. they need because most of them are drug addicts and have mental health issues that they need treatment for, then yes, you create a progressive hellhole that productive people move out of as has happened with California. So, of course, you see that. But the really interesting

philosophical point that you pick up on is, I mean, I don't know how many people here are familiar with Thomas Sol, the American economist and many other things. Absolutely, one of my favorite thinkers. And he wrote many, many, many very interesting books. But, One of them is called a conflict of visions, in which he talks about the two visions of the world that people have. And one of them is what he calls the constrained vision, which is the idea that human beings are fallible. They are flawed. They are imperfect. And the very best way to understand how human beings are likely to behave in the future is to look at their behavior in the past. So if you look at human behavior in the past, you would not be surprised when Russia invades Ukraine.

because people have been going to war for the entire time that human beings have existed and in every other area you accept that people will commit acts of murder and heinous crimes and it's not because they've been quote unquote failed by the system

but because society produces a certain number of people who will commit crimes that you've given the opportunity and motive and whatever the unconstrained vision however is the vision of the ability to perfect humankind the idea that all the great revolutionaries, whether it's the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution,

underpinned all of that, which is we can transform humanity. We can make a new man, homo-saveticus is what he was called in the Soviet Union, who can be reprogrammed away from crime, away from having more allegiance to his family than to communism or whatever. And it is this ideology,

this progressive ideology, that is at the root of a lot of things, including the fact that we didn't really plan how we would deal with Russia in this sort of situation because what I'm saying is, I mean, it's as old as time. The Romans knew this Sevis Pacham Parabellum. If you want peace, prepare for war because war is always coming. And it is only people who are strong

who are able to resist and prevent war by showing strength in advance of the war, right? So there are all sorts of areas where this very optimistic but inaccurate way of thinking is damaging our societies internally, but also geopolitically, and it's a big problem. Final words, sir. So congratulations on the baby.

Thank you. And this is a good segue to the question. So what would be your advice to second generation immigrants suffering from an identity crisis? Like me, so for example, I was born in this city, but my face is from Egypt. at school a small minority

used to call me a terrorist fast forward three decades later on Muhammad Salaah so so this is I think it's a key question that there's a

identity crisis especially if it's top down it seems to be we're destroying our values and if there's nothing that pulls us together then what is your advice? Yeah

it's a really good question actually a really good one to finish on I don't know exactly what you mean because identity crisis is two words and what you are personally experiencing, I don't know.

I think in terms of being bullied at school and all that sort of thing, the valuable thing that my parents always taught me and it's very bigoted and prejudice, but they always said, look, there's a bell curve of IQ in society. Some people are idiots, and the people who are being racist to you

are probably idiots, so you probably should just ignore them, right? Yeah, of course, right. They're one of the tales of the, the bell curve, right? So that's what I would deal with. But in terms of your identity now, I would say to you, what do you believe? Do you believe in Western values? Do you believe in British values?

Do you believe in democracy? Do you believe in freedom? Do you believe in the right of people to speak their mind, even if it offends you or others? And if you do, then you are as British as anybody. You've come to this country, your parents came to this country and you grew up here. you're as British as anybody, make yourself British, contribute to the society. I don't know what you do for a living or what you're going to do for a living, but for me, you know, when Brian asked me about what I'm most proud of, like I said, I'm most proud of

that I contribute to this society, that I've built something here that other people benefit from. And if you do that, I don't think you need to have an identity crisis. Your face is not from Egypt. Your face is from wherever your face is. You know, your genetics are what they are. It doesn't make you anything other than genetics. People can live in different parts. So you've got a point you want to make.

The crisis is that I'm trying to uphold the values that are in your book. Yeah. Try to uphold the values that are in your book. Yeah. But if it's all crumbling around me, then there's nothing for me to hold on to. I understand. So then I'm just an Egyptian living in the UK. Yeah, yeah.

And this is the doomsday narrative that I've been talking about. And my book is full of warnings and predictions about things going wrong if we don't. But I believe it's people like you and it's people like, me, and it's like everybody else in this room, that if we believe that these things are worth defending and we actually defend them, then they will not crumble. That's why I wrote the book. And I think that's why you ask the question, because you don't want these things to crumble, because you believe in them. And I think you've got to lean in, my friend. You've got to go, this is what I believe. I'm going to stand up for it. I'm going to fight for it. And if it crumbles,

it crumbles, but I've done my best. I think that's the answer to your question. I think it's a very good point. Yeah, shut up. Round of applause. Very finally, I mean, my due penit is that, I mean, don't have an identity crisis. It's got nothing to do with your identities to do with what you believe, what you think, what your politics are, and it's broader than your personal identity. I'm Welsh, but I very rarely tell you that because it's got nothing to do with anybody, and it plays a very small part in my life.

I'm more interested in democracy and political ideas. That said, I also think that the name Progressive, which is where we started the conversation is such now an abused term because everybody who's progressive and says that they are are the most reactionary twats you could ever come across, right?

So I think we need to either, like I say, reclaim some of these words or use them in a different formulation. I think we need to understand what progress means, progress development, as you say, about environmentalism. It's about development,

not sustainable development. It's about really kind of humanity being put first. So I'm a great belief in that. But it also means reclaiming the idea of Marx, because, not because I'm trying to convince you be Marxists, but I'm saying that there is an abuse of what I've heard today is just not what Marxism is. But on that note, thank you all very much for coming, very generous of you to ask your questions.

A round of applause for Convin. Thank you, guys. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. If you don't have it, on the box stall now.