Interview with Konstantin Kisin from Triggernometry on Heterodoxy, Biases, and the Media
An interesting one today with an extended interview/discussion with Konstantin Kisin co-host of the Triggernometry YouTube channel and Podcast and author of An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West. Topics covered include potential biases in the mainstream and heterodox spheres, media coverage in the covid era, debate within the heterodox sphere, the dangers of focusing on interpersonal relationships, and whether the WEF is really using wokism to make everyone eat bugs and live in pods. It's fair to say that we do not see eye to eye on various issues but Konstantin puts in a spirited defence for his positions and there are various positions where a two-person consensus is achieved. Matt was physically present but he preferred to occupy the spiritual position of The Third for this conversation, given Chris' greater familiarity with Konstantin's output.Prior to the interview, we have an extended, somewhat grievance-heavy, opening segment in which we discuss 1) the recent damages awarded in the 2nd Sandyhook court case against Alex Jones, 2) Russian apologetics and the heterodox sphere, and 3) Institutional Distrust and Conspiracy Spirals. Dare we say this is a thematically consistent episode? Maybe... in any case, there should be plenty for people to agree or disagree with, which is partly why our podcast exists.So join us in this voyage into institutional and heterodox biases and slowly come to the dreaded conclusion that philosophers might be right about something... epistemics might actually matter.LinksBloomberg article on Alex Jone's almost $1 Billion damagesJRE: #1848 - Francis Foster & Konstantin KisinTriggernometry episode with Sam Harris on Trump, Religion, and Wokeness (Featuring Epoch Times ad read)Triggernometry episode with Harry Miller on excessive policingKonstantin's appearance on the Dark Horse PodcastNew Republic article on the Heterodox figures touring for Orban's governmentInvestigative Atlantic Article on the Epoch TimesTwitter Thread by Konstantin on a recent speech by PutinTwitter Thread by Konstantin outlining why he thinks many have grown to distrut the mediaA Special Place in Hell: The Adventures of Baron Munchausen By Proxy
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what we're talking about.
I'm Professor Matt Brown, with me is Chris Kavanagh.
And so, good morning, good afternoon, Chris.
How are you doing?
Hello, Matthew.
How are you on this fine, indeterminate morning when people are listening to it as if it's today?
I'm alright, I'm alright.
I've got a thousand things to do.
Halfway through a grind application, which is very boring for me to do, but I have to do it because it's my job.
So this is a welcome relief from that.
That's right.
Well, we'll try to be efficient so that you can get back to your grind and your...
Increasing your references, your output markers, your engagement stats, all of those things, you know, the metrics that guide your life.
You should be watching closely.
You should be taking notes.
You know, this is how you get that brass ring, my son.
I don't even know what that means.
It sounds like sexual innuendo.
But I'll just get over it.
D 'Angelo episode.
That will be the next one that people hear.
That will be our next decoding one.
This is an interview episode.
I'll talk a little bit about the interview after some other things that I wanted to reuse.
There's a bit of a rant, Matt.
There's a bit of airing of grievances.
That kind of thing.
That happens from time to time on the podcast.
But before any of that, I did want to Mention that there's news about the second trial of Alex Jones with the Sandy Hook parents, and they were awarded just under,
in total, just under $1 billion, which is...
Any way you slice it, a hefty award in damages.
Yeah, that's more than walking around money.
Yeah, no, they obviously are not going to get that, right?
My understanding is that it gets appealed and then it gets revised.
Well, you know, so I think obviously he will appeal that some obvious, not obviously, but potentially it will get capped down or there'll be some reduction.
But it's starting from such a high bar.
Now that at the very least, it looks like even if it came down 80%, it's still a huge blow.
And even in that case, the thing which I don't think is a foregone conclusion is that Alex's trial team have consistently performed in an extremely incompetent fashion.
They've delayed proceedings.
They've refused to comply.
And the two court cases that are complete...
He had the chance to defend himself.
He had years to submit materials and, you know, to build the case.
And his side failed to do so in both cases to such an extent that there was this rare thing where the trial judge said, you've so utterly failed that you lose by default, right?
So the only thing we're going to ask the jury to decide is what the damages are.
And that doesn't bode well for his ability to successfully appeal.
I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that he will have successful appeals.
Now, what he will try to do and what he has already tried to do is declare himself bankrupt.
But he's still running a show and a lot of the court proceedings were detailing that he has all these shell companies and so on where he's trying to hide his finances.
But I also don't think it's a foregone conclusion that he'll just be able to hide The fact that he has millions, like if he's traveling around in jets and releasing the show.
And this is just the second, I think, out of four court cases that are ongoing with the parents.
So there's two more to come.
So, I mean, it's just great news.
It's not everything he deserves.
He's still going to wiggle about in it, but it's something.
Well, it does feel like endgame.
The endgame could take some time, but...
It does feel like Endgame for Alex Jones.
It's a side date for Freeze Bitch, that's all I can say.
Well, look, the thing that keeps striking me about this is, and I genuinely was thinking about this when I heard the verdict, that, you know, it's a lot of money, right?
Hundreds of millions awarded to people in damages is like a huge amount.
But at the same time, what Alex and Infowars did to these parents?
Was they had the worst thing I can imagine.
Like kids, you know, really young kids brutally murdered.
And then unhinged conspiracists set his hordes on them that alleged the kids didn't die or in some cases that they killed them.
You know, parents had to have open casket funerals for their children who were shot to show the bodies to try and stop the conspiracists from claiming that nothing...
And those parents, it's been a long time since Sandy Hook.
They have to relitigate this event over and over just to try and get something, right?
Some punishment for Alex and what he did.
And it's, no matter what happens with a payment or whatever, it's vindication that what he did was wrong and harmed him.
And they've had their chance to talk in court.
And he's still on his show saying it's a synthetic event and this is all a plan to take him down.
And I just think the more that that becomes apparent and the bravery of the parents, the more that that's shown, it must at least on some respect feel like they're being vindicated in the fight against what he did.
Like, there's external vindication.
Of course, it sounds like a lot of money and he almost certainly is going to be unable to pay.
All of it, probably most of it.
But there are a lot of affected people.
There's a lot of people that were hurt by this.
So I think in that context, it actually doesn't seem that excessive, at least in terms of specifying what he ought to pay, even if ultimately he can't or won't.
So in any case, it's good news, a little bit of consequences for promoting really some of the most vile We're good to go.
So in any case, it's good news, a little bit of consequences for promoting really some of the most vile conspiracies possible, targeting the parents of dead children, murdered children.
So it's just nice to see.
So that was good.
And there's more to come.
And if it does take Infowars down, that's on Alex.
That's on Alex and all the people there.
They did it.
And of course, Alex, for the last however many years, has been soliciting donations and sales to help him defend himself against the globalists who want to show.
Yeah, I mean, he was doing it during the court case.
He said it in speeches in court, referenced, you know, websites and stuff where people can donate.
He's a scumbag of the highest order.
And the other thing that will happen is, you know, various figures in the heterodark sphere will...
Wring their hands about what message this sends and none of them will ever take any time to look at his content or what he does day in and day out.
They just knee-jerk react to it and they don't look into the details or any of the circumstances, but they're very strongly opinionated about what's proportionate and what's reasonable in the case.
That's probably one of the more frustrating things, isn't it?
The way these Very particular issues which have an awful lot of details to them and are their own thing, right?
It's not a two-dimensional talking point for if you're on the free speech side, anti-censorship or whatever.
It's its own thing.
It reminds me of how the American culture war figures jumped on COVID and the Australian response to it.
Knowing anything about it, without looking into it.
No.
Just because it was a convenient two-dimensional thing for their cultural talking points.
And that is very irritating.
And, you know, people like Candace Owens do it, but people who should know better also do it.
Yeah, yeah.
It betrays the fundamental lack of interest in the topic.
Like, there are different positions that you can take.
On tolerance of unhinged conspiracism, even like abuse directed at individuals and all that.
There are various positions that you can take about where the balance and where the red line should lie.
But what strikes me is how often the people staking out positions on that and using Alex Jones as a reference, they don't know any details about...
the specifics, right?
They just know maybe what Alex has said, some very superficial engagement.
And it means that they're not actually dealing with the reality of the situation, or they don't know anything about the court case, right?
They just have their intuitions and the vibes.
Joe Rogan is someone who has been friends with Alec Jones for decades, and I would bet money.
Has not watched a single episode of Infowars in maybe a decade, if he ever did, right?
Like, he went on and he appeared there, but he has never shown that he actually knows what Infowars is about.
Like, he thinks Infowars is a centrist, you know, taking shots at Republicans and Democrats, and it is not.
It is an extreme, far-right John Bircher conspiracist.
The criticism of figures like George Bush and stuff was typically directed at them not being properly right-wing enough.
And the kind of insular, you know, isolationism stance, that is not something that makes you not a right-wing figure.
That's very common in American militia communities and stuff.
Yeah.
Well, anyway, good.
Hopefully justice will be served.
Yes, yes.
And there's more to come for old Alex.
So let's see what happens in the next coming court cases.
So from that good news, Matt, this is the little grievance component.
What's been tweaking your style, Chris?
What's been grinding your gears recently?
No, well, look, actually, it kind of relates to what we were just talking about.
And I'm sure you're saying you have been following the conflict in Ukraine, right?
The ongoing invasion from Russia and the quite impressive defense that Ukraine has been mustering to that.
And in recent days, there was an attack on a strategically important bridge by Ukraine, which I think damaged logistic capacities for Russian forces.
And Russia retaliated by bombing a lot of places, including civilian centers.
There was a playground that was hit, there were other facilities, and there were casualties.
But just the targeting of civilian centers was the dramatic thing, and it received widespread condemnation.
And it just put into stark relief for me that...
All of these contrarian hot take machines, especially the ones that present themselves as the defenders of the West, the principled figures who are standing up for Western values in the face of the onslaught of wokeism and communist values and all that,
they've been utterly useless and, if anything, apologetic for Putin.
Like Putin's regime, the strategy seems to be that they want to weaken public support in the West for sending arms or sending resources to Ukraine by putting the squeeze on with gas prices and that kind of thing over the winter,
right?
And a lot of strategists are saying that, you know, they're hoping that this will dwindle the public support for Western governments supplying aid to Ukraine.
Those figures, they're on the front lines for Putin.
Like saying that we should capitulate to his regime, reducing support, kind of blurring the lines about who's actually responsible.
And these are supposed to be the people who value Western democracy and who stand up.
Jordan Peterson, you know, and those kind of figures.
But yeah, it just...
They're as useful as a, you know, a chocolate teapot.
That's how I feel.
Yeah, me too.
It is ironic that these guys that project themselves as these muscular, robust defenders of, yeah, Western civilization or the neoliberal world order, whatever you want to call it, the moment that an actual, real enemy...
They roll over.
They roll over like a puppy dog because Putin is scratching their belly talking about how he's fighting against wokeness and, you know, Western depravity and restoring traditional Christian old-fashioned values.
I mean, it's such nonsense.
It's so ridiculous.
It wouldn't work on a child.
But with these guys, it seems to work just fine.
Yeah, absolutely useless.
And it's that contrast between the claim that they've spent so long, they've read so many books, they understand the psychology of authoritarian regimes so well.
And yet, when faced with a clear authoritarian regime and engaged in an aggressive invasion of a neighboring country, they're completely befuddled, right?
They're falling for propaganda.
They're repeating it.
Elon Musk.
Is out repeating Russian talking points, right?
Like, all of them present themselves as these great independent thinkers.
And they're not.
They're absolutely susceptible to the base propaganda coming from an authoritarian regime.
And you just, yeah, it's just, it's so striking.
The one thing that they theoretically are good at is riling people up to cheer.
For, like, the values of Western society and democracy and so on.
And they can't do it.
They cannot.
No, it reminds me of COVID and vaccines and all that stuff.
I mean, because there are exceptions, yeah?
Some of our cast of characters, you know, were pretty good on that issue.
Many of them weren't.
I think the same is true with Ukraine.
And another thing that comes along, it's got nothing on the surface to do with the culture war fixations that people have.
It's something, if you really are a polling mass and someone who can generate good takes across different fields, then you should be able to say something useful.
The majority of them have failed on those two topics, but there's been a few notable exceptions both times.
There are exceptions, you know, like Sam Harris and Claire Lehman on vaccines, for example, and in the case of Ukraine, the guest that we interview later in the episode.
Constantine Kissin from Trigonometry has been quite strongly condemning the various heterodox figures, James Lindsay and whatnot, that implied that it's all a UN plan and Zelensky is a puppet ruler and all these kind of things.
So yeah, there are real divisions, but it's just how many of the figures that are presenting themselves as independent, critically minded.
Strong thinkers.
And they're just weak and easily manipulated.
And I think a lot of it comes down to their need, their narcissistic need to be presenting an alternative perspective.
Contrarian.
Contrarian.
So that's a grievance.
That's a grievance.
Got that one off.
Now, the last...
The last thing before we switch to the interview, which has no disagreements or grievances, it's just a friendly exchange of views, is I wanted to talk about this thing that I've observed, and I think lots of people have observed it in a variety of contexts,
but it's this thing about where people become disillusioned with institutions, and from there...
You know, there's a specific topic that they see covered in the news or they see covered on some, I don't know, some newspaper.
And then they feel that it's been covered very badly, right?
The examples of Legion, you can point to the, what was that?
The school with the kids being shouted at by the protesters.
Oh, the Covington kids.
Yeah, okay, there we go.
The Covington kids or, you know, there's the...
Interview with the WHO person who hangs up when somebody's talking about Taiwan.
These cases, or just, you know, with the media, I think they did do a bad job with the Covington initially, but also there are cases where they do cover scientific issues badly, right?
Like they may present false balance on vaccines or global warming or so on and so forth.
Chris, you know, I've seen articles which claim that eating chocolate every day will cure cancer, and that shattered me when I've been eating chocolate consistently.
Yeah, apparently wine cures cancer, though, so you're fine.
It depends which day that you read it, whether it cures or causes cancer.
But yes, so this thing about the media being bad and the ideological capture of the media, it's a common refrain.
And to travel in the depths of time to a previous conversation that we had on this podcast, see if you remember this exchange.
Because this actually explains it.
The reason why there's an asymmetry here is, culturally speaking, the institutions we're losing, right?
The institutions that are no longer trustworthy, the institutions where you have to pause.
Before believing the article where you never had to before because you understand how much ideological capture is working in the background.
We're talking about the most important sources of information humanity has.
We're talking about Princeton and Harvard and Stanford and the New York Times and Nature and Science and The Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine.
But they're not lost.
And JAMA.
We're talking about all of it.
All at once captured by a moral panic, right?
Now, if you don't perceive that to be true, you and I have a disagreement about the nature of the problem.
But just grant me that I perceive it this way.
Sam Harris, that is, and he does perceive it that way.
Yeah, so the one thing there is like, you know, I can't remember if I said this at the time, but I don't doubt that Sam perceives it like that.
And I know that many people share.
The perception, right?
But he did go on to clarify that he didn't think they were completely captured just on the way to being captured.
So that's at least a step down from there.
But one of the things about that that struck me is that notion that you could previously just trust the, you know, nature and the New York Times to, like, you didn't need to critically examine what they were reporting because they were So good that there was never an ideological concern.
And just that was never by read, like, of anything.
You know, as soon as I learned history in secondary school, the thing that they emphasized was, look at the lean of the source.
Journalists have always been journalists.
They always have their blind spots.
The JAMA or The Lancet published Andrew Wakefield creating the modern anti-vaccine movement.
So, you know.
Like, I don't buy into this previous gold in the edge where there was no concern, so you didn't need to critically consider the information you were receiving.
Yeah, agreed.
I mean, to throw it, Samuel Boyne, people have noticed that the New York Times has become more partisan, I suppose.
That tended to happen sometime during or after Trump's initial election, as the right-wing mainstream media was going full ball in the other direction.
If we take Australia, like our principal newspaper, our equivalent, we don't really have an equivalent of the New York Times, but if you had to pick the biggest one, it would be the Australian newspaper.
Now, that has a heavily centre-right slant to it, heavily.
And people know that.
And it's been like that for ages.
And I think all through time, you know, newspapers and so on have always had their angle.
And so I think he is...
Imagining a time that a golden age didn't exist and also is a bit fixated on left-wing ideological capture, as if there hasn't been all kinds of ideological captures happening in every direction from forever.
Yeah, no, I didn't play this just to relitigate the debate with Sam, but because I noticed it cropping up, I mean, I have been noticing this narrative cropping up endlessly.
For years, but recently there were two examples in content that I came across and it seemed worth discussing.
So one is Graham Linehan, the writer for Follow Ted, who has become like an anti-trans activist of sorts and been kicked off Twitter, is a very controversial figure, I think, for lots of good reasons.
But in any case, listen to this clip of him being interviewed recently on a YouTube channel.
Well, maybe there's an argument, like if you're talking about COVID misinformation, but then again, what is COVID misinformation?
We don't know anymore.
One of the big problems with where we are at the moment as a society is we literally do not know who to believe.
If another massive pandemic happened, good luck to the government trying to get anybody to do anything.
Because no one knows whether they were all just conned for a few years or whether their life expectancy is being shortened, as some people like Brett Weinstein have said about some of the vaccines.
We don't know.
I'm not even sure I'm 100% on climate change anymore because I've been lied to so conclusively by all the people I used to trust.
You get anti-vax with a hat tip to Brett Weinstein, and you get climate change skepticism even coming in.
And that's Glynneur kind of drawing that, that's his nickname, by the way, Gremlin and Glynneur, from his view that trans stories are completely misrepresented in the media.
Therefore, you know, we can't trust them on anything else as well.
Yeah, yeah.
So you see the theme emerging here, which is that when people don't like a particular thing, they might be convinced of one particular point of view.
It could be about ivermectin.
It could be about trans rights issues.
It could be about something else.
It could be about the Iraq War.
It could be about anything.
And then they generalize and decide that they cannot trust institutional narratives on.
Any topic whatsoever.
Yeah, at all.
Yeah, and so Glenn is a bit of an extreme figure, even in kind of gender critical circles, I think he's regarded as extreme.
So him leaning towards anti-vax and climate skepticism is perhaps just like he's already quite far down the conspiracy spiral.
But the next clip I want to play, Matt, I want to highlight is from what I consider a more reasonable source.
I listened to this podcast, A Special Place in Hell, with Megan Dom and Sarah Heider.
And I've been on Megan's podcast.
I enjoy their podcast.
But I am blocked on Twitter by Sarah because she got annoyed with me making various critical comments.
But part of what I was commenting on was, I observed similarities in the rhetoric that she was presenting and where I've seen similar spirals amongst anti-woke people like James Lindsay and whatnot.
And I listened to a recent episode and there was a part again talking about media bias and where it leads.
And I thought this is a good...
Illustration of a more moderate presentation of distrust of institutions.
But to me, it's very much of a piece where Graham Linehan ends up.
So with that said, I'm not saying they are equivalent.
No need to take it as a huge dunk.
Just listen to the argument made.
Hopefully that's enough to make people not be extremely sensitive.
Let's see.
It's stunning.
It's a big part of my black pill pessimism.
Just watching this, watching the insanity take hold on institutions that I respected and I trusted and now I don't know.
If you can be so wrong on something and you can...
Show yourself as being capable of being that wrong.
I suddenly began to feel skeptical of, you know, a hundred other claims.
Oh, you go crazy.
That's so bad.
That's bad.
Yeah, it's so bad.
It is crazy.
I mean, that's how you get to a point where you don't trust anyone or anything.
And start watching, you know, bizarro YouTube channels that lead you down some weird path.
And I can't...
I just don't know how to avoid it.
Once you lose faith in something, it's very hard to force your brain to say, no, no, I'm going to continue to trust them, despite knowing here's this scenario and this scenario and this scenario in which these institutions or organizations are simply hiding the truth.
Strong things there, Chris.
Did you want to go first?
What pattern are you seeing here?
Well, so two things that I would say in response to that is one, I think it betrays this binary perspective of either complete trust in institutions and sources of information or absolute lack of trust,
right?
You simply do not believe them.
Everything that they say is questionable.
And to me, there's a very There's a wide range of positions in between that.
And the appropriate one, from my perspective, is scepticism of all sources correctly proportioned.
To the biases of the outlets that you're covering, right?
If you know that an outlet is not good on a specific topic because of ideological reasons, then be skeptical of the claims there.
But if you know the reporting about war and conflicts, it tends to be well-sourced and verified, and they have fact-checkers and stuff, then you proportion the skepticism appropriately.
So, like, I would not encourage anyone to take on pure faith anything.
That they read, be it academic or media-based, but the stance that everywhere is equally untrustworthy and that you find some bad coverage in some place, and this basically means that you can't assume that there are any standards.
Seems to me to go too far.
Yeah, it reminds me of a certain kind of psychological term, which is around attachment styles, and there's this insecure attachment.
Where you become extremely enamoured of someone, become extremely clingy, they're just the best thing since sliced bread, and then they do something that doesn't live up to your expectations for this extremely deep, ultra-high trust relationship that you've got,
and then your heart is broken and you repeat the process again with somebody else.
I mean, that's the unhealthy way to have relationships.
As you say, these things are not black and white.
Every source of information that's ever existed at the dawn of time has always been coloured, infected, biased, whatever you want to call it, by a lot of presumptions and assumptions and just ideological frameworks that exist.
Like I, for example, believe that Western media reporting on Ukraine is a hell of a lot more reliable.
But I don't think it's perfect.
There's always assumptions and biases that come into play, and you do your best to keep that in mind.
So if you read an article in the New York Times which is saying something that you feel is ridiculous and silly on a particular topic, as you say, Chris, the solution is not to walk away from the New York Times and start watching crazy videos on YouTube.
The solution is to cultivate an appropriately sceptical trust network, not the kind of scepticism that is basically paranoia and conspiratorial reasoning.
Yeah, so the issue for me in part is that we've so many illustrations of where this thinking goes when, you know, you take it just a little bit further down that road.
And just to illustrate...
I happen to have another clip handy from a previous episode, so see if you remember these figures.
And then you get on to the institution one, which is that nobody, as you know, nobody in an institution now can tell the truth.
And it's slightly worse than that, which is that...
I'm used to my saying stuff like that, and then people calling me an extremist.
Do you believe what you just said?
Yes, I mean, I don't doubt that there are some...
My phrase is, almost everybody...
Particularly in an institution, is lying about almost everything, almost all the time.
That's where I believe we've gotten.
Right.
Yeah, so that's where it leads.
That's where it leads.
Douglas Murray and Eric Weinstein for anybody that might be lacking the concept.
You could tell by the plummy voice.
Yeah, that's where it leads.
And Chris, I mean, I get it.
It is like a tempting place to go, isn't it?
This total skepticism.
It feels like...
I can see how it would feel like the right...
Yeah, and psychologically satisfying to go there, right?
Because then you enter another ecosystem where everybody is the brave truth seeker looking through the matrix and, you know, not like the sheeple who are buying and all those things.
And yes, that's the extreme end of the pool, but that is where a lot of the heterodox energy has got sucked, as we've seen, like in the COVID pandemic and now with the Ukraine conflict.
There are times where you see things covered that you know well.
I've had that experience of, like, being invested in a topic, and I see mainstream media and coverage on the BBC or whatever, and they do a bad job.
And I can see why they might have done a bad job, because, you know, they have a particular, they're taking account of a particular perspective or so on, or they don't have the relevant expertise.
And it can disenchant you, but, like, I just feel this is the same way with all the people who reacted to the replication crisis by being like, this completely destroys all my faith in science.
And you're like, no, that's the wrong takeaway.
Like, these are not new things.
We've seen the consequences of them.
But the appropriate thing is that you should always be skeptical of individual studies.
You should always have a skeptical eye to things, even things when you know the evidence is there.
That doesn't mean that climate change research is not dreamly strong in support of certain conclusions.
It's a misappropriation of, like, doubt uniformly across all subjects when the weight of evidence for different subjects is different.
Yeah, in a nutshell, I reckon, try to approach your information network a little bit like you'd approach your social network.
That is not like an angsty teen.
Like in Michigan, Adol.
Well, each to their own.
Yeah, if I take climate change, I can find articles about climate change that are kind of catastrophizing and exaggerating things or whatever.
I can find articles which link.
Climate change to aspects that are more politically sensitive around social justice and equality and so on that might be more arguable.
You know, you can have your opinion about the discourse around things, but if your response to reading an article that you feel is a bit over the head is to go, well, now I can't trust, I don't know anything about climate change now, it's all a complete mystery to me, then that's the wrong takeaway.
That's like...
The position of extreme scepticism is worse than the position of just total credulity because knowing nothing and going around the world as if nothing is known, you're an empty vessel.
First of all, people just can't operate like that.
Even if you could, it would be useless.
What people tend to do, of course, is that they fill up their opinions with a bunch of...
Worse sources, like those YouTube channels that Sarah Hader mentioned.
Yeah, and I will also say that, like, I think people are just, they're bad on this map when it comes to, like, COVID.
Part of the thing that they've taken is that we basically don't know anything, if the vaccines actually helped, and we don't know what are the likely long-term effects and so on.
And that's wrong.
We know that the vaccines were extremely effective, that without them...
There would be many more deaths.
There's so much empirical validation from independent countries, independent bodies, showing that the vaccines helped in all circumstances.
They're not perfect panaceas.
But apart from some media person, Rachel Maddow or some politician over-egging it, the scientists didn't.
The literature never said we're going to get a vaccine that will completely solve everything.
There was always recognition of limitations and that's what's happened with every vaccine in history.
So things being imperfect, new strains emerging, this is what happens.
It's not perfectly possible to predict these things, but I feel like people treat the information around COVID, around debates about how long precisely you should keep schools closed and stuff, Somehow also associated with,
you know, the vaccines and whether they actually were useful and stuff.
And it's like, no, that isn't actually a legitimate debate.
The scientific evidence completely supports vaccines as an extremely effective treatment to reduce the severity of the pandemic and reduce deaths, right?
There would have been many more.
Well, this goes to your point of about...
Not approaching things as like an all-or-nothing proposition.
Not lumping.
Like, there's a bunch of stuff we know about COVID.
There's a lot of stuff we know about vaccines and alternative treatments like ivermectin or the source of the virus.
Some of these things are known with a huge amount of certainty.
Some of them moderate certainty.
Some things like exactly how many weeks we should close schools for, we know with relatively little certainty.
But, of course, in a pandemic, authorities have to make the best decision they can.
at the time now finding out in retrospect or having your doubts about one of those things not being perfectly accurate in your view and then saying well that just destroys my confidence in the entire edifice that is a silly way to approach your knowledge of the world to be informed by science and journalism science isn't perfect Journalism,
I've experienced science journalism, is even less perfect, and the political discourse around it is more imperfect still.
But, you know, be an adult, grow up, put on your big boy pants.
Just to be clear, Matt is not directing any particular people.
It's just a general point.
But that part of people, you know, kind of referencing towards now they are sceptical and they've learned.
Pessimism and stuff.
I kind of feel like you didn't.
You should have been skeptical beforehand and you should be still skeptical now.
And you shouldn't be wildly swinging to these extremes.
And we've seen that often people, when they become skeptical of mainstream authority, they become incredibly credulous to alternative claims and bad sources of information.
So just everyone be careful.
Unless you end up here.
Unless one gives up any attempt to believe any of this, right?
And this issue about...
Well, I don't know what vantage point I want to pull back to to analyze this with you.
The total collapse.
Of institutional integrity across all sectors, across the entire Anglophone world.
Almost.
Maybe there's a pocket of integrity somewhere.
It's very hard.
WTF?
That's what's at the bottom of the spiral.
That's where you go.
I'm just saying.
Anyway, Matt, that was...
You know, this is quite a long opening segment, but yeah, it's been cropping up so much.
It has.
And just to emphasize, yes, like you said, my comments were directed at the material you played for me, Chris.
Not at anyone else, least of all, the upcoming guest who you spoke to and had a good talk to.
Oh, yes, yes.
So we did have a conversation with the host of Trigonometry, a heterodox sphere.
Podcast, as you can tell from the title, and we had a robust exchange of ideas, opinions about things to do with limitations of the mainstream media institutions and also issues with the heterodox sphere and Constantine's particular channel,
potential biases or not, and COVID pandemic and stuff.
So kind of related to stuff that we're talking about.
But in any case, Let's not waste any more time and go and listen to Constantine.
And one final thing to note though is Matt is very quiet.
He was there, he was watching, but he's quiet and that was by his choice because we had a limited time with Constantine and he felt I was better prepared with the information.
Right, Matt?
I didn't stop you.
You didn't stop me, that's correct.
And it was actually a good thing too because there was thunderstorms rolling in and my power went out towards the end.
So it was all for the best.
You did in the end have a robust exchange with Konstantin in the aftermath.
So there is that.
You did have your moment to talk to each other.
Yeah, so that was that.
And in any case, We'll hand over to Chris and Matt in the past.
Take it away.
Okay, so today with us we have Constantine Kissin from the Trigonometry podcast.
So podcast host and comedian.
I guess, Constantine, is that accurate description as of now?
I haven't done stand-up since the pandemic started.
So a comedian in retirement or on a break or whatever it is.
I still write a lot of satirical stuff, so I sort of think of myself more as a satirist.
But yeah, you're right about my background, podcaster, comedian, satirist, whatever you want.
Yes, and I think you're a beast in England.
That sounds threatening in your accent, but yes, I confess, guilty.
Yeah, I lived in London for, I guess, about 10 years, so I'm familiar with that neck of the world, but not based there now.
So, Constantine kindly agreed to come on because I think we talked a while back about...
Potentially having a discussion about areas that we might agree or disagree on.
And then I listened to your recent appearance on Joe Rogan and some of the same issues that I thought would be useful to discuss came up and you kindly agreed to.
And broadly speaking, I would say I don't know how familiar you are with our podcast, but we tend to focus on Online gurus or secular gurus.
So this is people that fall into the Jordan Peterson, Nassim Taleb.
We've also done Ibram Kendi.
And who's that guy that we...
The science writer, Matt, that we like...
You're a hero.
Not...
Okay, I was going to say...
I've got to say, you guys treat your guests with a lot of respect.
I love it.
Yeah, well, just to highlight that we do try to range widely across the guru sphere as it exists, but we do have a tendency to focus on the kind of IDW heterodox sphere,
in part because that's where a lot of the most dramatic Bombastic-style gurus are the Weinsteins, for example.
But in any case, one of the things that we've come across quite often is that people within the heterodox sphere tend to see a much bigger concern emanating from the mainstream institutions and mainstream media sources.
And to have less of a concern about the kind of alternative ecospheres and guru figures that we talk about.
So I thought it might be good to talk about the relative problems in each of the spheres and where, you know, you might disagree with our emphasis and we might disagree with yours.
So maybe it would be useful just to start if you...
Kind of outlined where you're coming from or where you see your position being, you know, in the online discourse or commentary space or whatever you want to call it.
It's a very big and open question, I suppose.
So the way I self-identify is a kind of enlightened centrist.
I'm not interested in partisanship or party politics at all.
I can't really understand people who are party political.
It boggles my mind.
It's like how you could wed yourself permanently to one side of the political spectrum in hugely varying circumstances.
I find strange that people are willing to do that.
I'm certainly a fierce critic of a lot of the mainstream institutions and the direction they've taken.
I hope...
That hasn't prevented me from being an equally fierce critic of where the old media is going wrong and the war in Ukraine and the way some of the supposedly heterodox people are covering that is something I've been calling out from the moment that it started because that is an issue I understand pretty well being half Russian,
half Ukrainian, having grown up in both countries, etc.
So when I see people going off the deep end on that issue, I haven't been shy about calling that out.
But yes, I guess that's my position.
I see myself as being somewhere in the center looking at both extremes and going, you're both crazy.
In terms of the mainstream and the alt media, I mentioned some of the areas where I think the alt media can go wrong.
I do think you have to be careful when you're comparing institutions or systems of communicating information.
I'm going to sound very woke here, but it's kind of like stupidity plus power.
If a guy on a YouTube channel with 30 followers is saying something really stupid, I'm less concerned about that than I am about a mainstream publication saying something equally stupid because the reach is bigger.
And so I do think the mainstream media, which for the moment still has a much bigger reach and therefore more influence, should be subject to more scrutiny.
But apart from that, I don't know if that gives you enough to start sticking pins in me.
Yeah, so I know, for example, that you had run-ins with James Lindsay over Ukraine before his ignoble exit from Twitter discourse.
And I think, in general, you have been in the trenches over the Ukraine.
Even actually on the Rogan appearance, I noted that he was more skeptical about the validity of sending arms to support Ukraine or American involvement, and you push back, which I think is to your credit.
So I guess from what you said, the value of being able to criticize people on both sides of the political spectrum, and including people that might agree with you, is something that You would seem to regard as like an important value,
right?
Well, Ukraine is just the latest example.
So I've been very clear, for example, that even though...
Because of some of the people that I've interviewed, there are a lot of people that think I'm massively on the Trump trend.
And I have friends who are big Trump supporters.
I'm good friends with someone who used to work for Donald Trump at a high level.
But I'm very clear that I was very clear on January the 7th, on the morning of January the 7th, when appearing on the Lotus Eaters podcast with Francis.
That I thought what happened was a complete abomination and completely wrong to the, let's just say, dissatisfaction of many of the people in his audience.
So I'm not really ever hesitant to criticize either side when they're doing something wrong.
I just see that the threat from the...
I don't like the word woke anymore because first it was co-opted and now it's been re-co-opted.
But the threat from the progressive left...
Particularly in the reaction it will trigger from the right, is to me a far bigger concern than some of the other stuff.
So that's why I've been a vocal critic of that, because I think it's very, very dangerous.
Yeah, so I guess one of the points that I would raise is that whenever I listen, and we listen to a lot of content where people are being critical about the, you know...
Institutions or the kind of social justice left or progressive left or however you want to frame it.
And one thing that often seems to go unmentioned in those conversations is, first of all, that there is a very large receptive audience for critiques of those mainstream positions and of social progressivism on the right.
And those tend to be not what you're talking about with small YouTube channels.
You have huge media entities, you have national newspapers, and you have channels dedicated to pumping out right-wing takes.
And I often see that if it is recognized, like just kind of gesture that there is right-wing media, but the right-wing media is like a huge ecosystem.
And in terms of disinformation or kind of pumping out partisan rhetoric, it seems equally, if not much more, guilty than the left-wing media ecosystems.
If you're looking at Breitbart or the Epoch Times or the Fox News, there's definitely a very strong tolerance there for partisan positions.
So I wonder, in those terms, I rarely see that, like on Joe Rogan, that's very rarely discussed, for example.
And do you think that is a case of there being just more of a focus on the issues of the left?
Or why does the right-wing ecosystem tend to get a pass in heterodox spaces?
I don't think that it gets a pass.
I just think to liberal people like me and Joe, the idea that Fox News is full of bullshit and is right-wing propaganda is taken as given.
I've been on Fox News once, I think.
I don't consider it to be an objective source of information, just like I don't consider CNN to be an objective source of information.
However, when you talk about the ecosystems being equal, I wouldn't agree with that.
I went on Twitter this morning, and I saw a tweet from Joe Biden talking about how...
He was basically criticizing the right, but what he was saying is we have a situation where people either, if there's an election, either they win or they believe that the election was stolen.
And this is treated as a perfectly reasonable thing for Joe Biden to say, even though it's very clear that the mainstream media spent four years after the election of Donald Trump in 2016 lying endlessly.
About his election, the reasons for his election, claiming it was Russia collusion, Russia interference, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, to the point where at the time even I believed it.
And one of my reasons for being so disenchanted with the mainstream is how much they've been lying to us.
But nonetheless, Joe Biden can go out and say that, and no one is going to flag up his tweet for misinformation in the way that they would do with someone on the right if they tweeted something like this.
So I think the idea that there's an equal and opposite echo chamber is untrue.
I think the number of outlets and how seriously they're taken by the ordinary person is completely different.
If I was to...
Give a normie friend of mine, quote-unquote, an article from Fox News.
The way they would treat that would be very different to an article from The Guardian, even though in my experience, they're both equally frequently, equally as inaccurate as each other.
And in some cases, The Guardian is more inaccurate and the bullshit that they're peddling is worse.
And so I think that to present these as equally significant is inaccurate, in my opinion.
In that case, Constantine, one thing I'd push back on, though, I listened to Rogan's podcast, and we've covered him in a couple of episodes.
And it's not accurate to kind of present Joe as having just a complete wide variety of perspectives in terms of political takes.
Generally speaking, he tends to be more...
In line, in modern terms, with the right-wing positions, like the conservative right.
I mean, the politicians that he is in favor of are like DeSantis and...
Bernie Sanders.
But if Bernie Sanders, Joe said that he would possibly vote for him in the primary, and then when it was presented as an endorsement, he himself clarified...
He wasn't endorsing, just saying he liked Bernie.
But he had Bernie Sanders on the show, and he had Cornel West on the show, who's a radical leftist professor.
I'm not, by the way, I wouldn't claim that Joe's show is entirely politically balanced.
No show can be.
And I am not pretending that Joe is a left-winger.
I think by the current conception...
In the current climate, I think he would be centre-right on most of his politics.
Although, I think I pissed him off a lot by saying that open borders is a really stupid idea.
I heard him later talking about how maybe it's a good idea.
So I don't know what his take is on that.
But I don't think presenting him as conservative is at all the correct way of presenting his views.
Yeah, I think that probably Matt and I have a slightly different perspective, although we'd agree with you, there are various issues where, you know, like, people are complex, they have, you know, different takes, and Joe has a famous clip where he took the urban to task about the need for regulation,
right?
And Candace Owens on Green Stuff and others.
Joe is someone who seeks the truth, and he's willing to challenge people when he disagrees.
So granted, no person, there are exceptions, but not an outright polemicist.
But I think if you take a look at Joe's content over time, and especially during the COVID period, it heavily leans towards the right-wing narrative.
And not lightly so, because we covered his episodes with Robert McCulloch and Peter...
Sorry, Peter...
McCulloch and Robert Malone.
And the level of endorsement of conspiracism around COVID, it wasn't the light asking questions.
It was not too far from Majid Nawaz.
And those figures were introducing that the pandemic had been planned by the authorities that the...
Amount of deaths were being covered up, that people with bullet wounds to the head were being counted so doctors could profit, that no doctors were interested in curing the disease and so on.
And these were quite extreme positions.
And then Joe made it clear on that that he saw it as his duty to kind of promote these people that were being silenced.
And that to me is not thinking, you know, I'm just going to see both sides and ask because when Joe had on figures.
That were pro-vaccine and there was much less of them.
But when he did have them on, it was a grilling of, you know, taking them to task.
And that is not what happened with the people who were anti-vaccine.
So I know that's a specific example, but I think that Joe and other figures in the heterodox spheres have a tendency to retreat to we're just asking questions and having a debate when The reality is more advancing a specific narrative,
and often that narrative is on the right.
And I actually think it's perfectly fine for that to be the case, but it feels like it should be acknowledged more than it is.
So I agree with you on a lot of what you said, and I disagree on some of what you said.
So what I agree with you is, I do think when we had the peak of...
Lockdown and vaccine enforcement and talk about mandates and all of this stuff.
I do think during that period the people that Joe had on and the way that He talked to them, he accurately described in that it was more to one side than the other and the way the guests from one side were treated was different to the guests from the other side.
Where I don't agree with you is, first of all, I don't see those issues as being right versus left at all.
There were plenty of people on the left who were leaning more in the direction of people like Robert Malone and Peter McCullough and many, many apolitical people.
So I wouldn't see that issue as right and left, even though I agree with the premise of what you say.
And I said at the time, by the way, that I don't agree with Robert Malone and whatever, but I'm glad Joe had them on, and I'll tell you why.
I didn't discuss this with Joe, so I don't know why he made the choices that he made.
But from my perspective, the biggest issue that was happening at the time was the idea that government must censor people for having these discussions.
That we must prevent people from having these conversations.
And to me that's a very dangerous idea.
I don't agree with this at all.
And I was relieved that the most powerful podcaster in the world was forcing the government.
To essentially take note of the fact that they don't have that option if that is what they're trying to pursue.
So while I disagreed with some of his guest choices and I disagreed with the balance, you know, I actually, when he said, I'd like to have people from the other side on, I suggested a couple of people to him that I thought would put the balance view.
It wasn't like he cut me out and never talked to me again.
Do you know what I mean?
He's open to hearing people's ideas.
So the main point of disagreement with you is I don't think it's right versus left.
And number two, I don't necessarily see the job of the old media as always being balanced.
The job of the old media is to provide balance.
These are very different things.
So if the mainstream media refuses to do something, then Joe Rogan or Trigonometer, whoever, may do that thing.
And then they both look unbalanced.
But what we are trying to do is say, look, there's this other point of view that's not being represented.
And I think it's important.
And in the case of the pandemic, my big issue was we mustn't force people to take a vaccine and we mustn't censor people who have even wacky, crazy ideas about COVID, the pandemic or whatever, because...
At the end of the day, if we want to live in a reliable society, we've got to be able to have these conversations openly.
And so I was simultaneously not happy that certain people were being promoted and also happy that they were not being censored.
I know that's a complex position and it sounds quite difficult, but that's the way that I was coming at it from.
And I think that will happen on a lot of issues.
If you look at the people we had on trigonometry during the pandemic, I think we were a lot more sensible about it.
We had one guy on who was Dr. Sucharabh Bhakti, who I think people would consider very problematic.
And really, it's not like we were endorsing his point of view.
We wanted to hear what he had to say for himself.
YouTube then banned that video and gave us a strike for that.
Based on the rules, the way they updated them at the time, our interview did break the rules of YouTube and we therefore didn't appeal it because we felt it was a fair...
And after that, you know, our own views on that issue evolved.
When we had COVID, we put an episode out talking about how bad it was for both me and Francis, discussing, you know, our updated views and all of this stuff.
So, you know, we tried to, I certainly always tried to approach it from a position of honest inquiry.
And my concern with all of this stuff is the mainstream media were not doing honest inquiry.
They became a propaganda wing.
Of the government.
Governments which, as we now know, were prioritizing public health over truth.
And I don't believe that a government should ever do that.
So there's a bunch of points that you made there, Constantine.
I will say that I saw your episode where you discussed with David Fuller, you know, and he was critical about some of the ways that you covered COVID.
And it was to your credit that you had that discussion with him.
And he pushed back quite...
Forcefully, I think.
And also the subsequent discussion that you had with Brett Weinstein on his podcast, just personally speaking, it was very nice to hear someone saying that I don't have the expertise.
I don't think I should be commenting on this.
And not everybody needs to issue their takes on everything.
People are not experts on every topic.
So I acknowledge that you have
I'm not saying that your position on this has been entirely just endorsing right-wing partisanship or that kind of thing.
But some of the bits I'd push back on are when it comes to figures like Malone and McCulloch and the anti-vaccine movement, although traditionally there's been opposition on the left and right, particularly the kind of Health and wellness,
left side of things.
And the anti-vaccine movement has traditionally had a lot of support from kind of mothers who link it to autism because of Andrew Wakefield and that kind of thing, right?
But I would definitely say in COVID era, there is a strong right skew.
To anti-vaccine sentiment.
And that you can see this by the fact that most of the figures who you're talking about not getting a hearing in mainstream media are regular contributors now to right-wing media.
Fox News are, in most cases of the people that appear on Joe Rogan's show, Infowars as well.
May I pause you just for one second?
I don't mean to derail you at all.
I would agree with you in terms of the media that...
That have these discussions.
But that's not who's, in my experience, who's watching that.
I know loads of people in my life who would come up to me and go, thank you so much for talking about the vaccine mandates and all of this.
And when I speak to them, my sense is they're not political at all.
And they're certainly not right or left wing.
So I agree with you that the right wing media grabbed that as an issue.
And promoted it because it aligns with some of their beliefs.
I don't think that's who the audience are.
Obviously, I don't have the empirical data to be able to prove this to you, but I'm just going based on my own experience.
Sorry to interrupt.
No, that's fine.
And I would take the point that there are plenty of people who think there are valid debates to be had about school openings or the length of lockdowns and so on.
But I tend to think that I'm not saying there are no missteps or that there aren't cases where there's a skew towards the government's position on mainstream media or that kind of thing.
But I do think there was a lot of debate about those topics in the media and that the media is now such a fractured ecosystem that it was not difficult at all to hear.
In fact, if anything, it's more like it was very easy.
To hear the contrarian takes on things.
And that when it comes to stuff like vaccines, you know, there always has been a vocal minority anti-vaccine movement with Andrew Wakefield, RFK Jr., these figures,
right?
And typically, they're not given mainstream media coverage because their position is not equally well supported.
And those figures For example, Brett Weinstein headlined an event with RFK Jr. and Dell Bigtree and a whole cadre of anti-vaccine figures in the UK.
So the linkages between the modern kind of critical of COVID vaccines is very tied into the anti-vaccine movement.
And, you know, in the same way that we don't say...
We need to give equal hearing to the climate skeptics as the climate scientists.
It does feel that you can create a false equivalence by seeking out, you know, the kind of meme is in Joe Rogan's forum, for example, that nine out of ten dentists recommend this.
Let's get that one dentist and see what he says, right?
What about that?
Yeah, I hear you.
So first of all, I don't think the equivalency you're making between vaccines that have been tried and tested for 30 years and the current...
The conversation about COVID, well, not the current conversation, the conversation from around a year ago, are in any way comparable.
I don't think they're the same issue at all.
There's a big difference between a set of vaccines that's been around for decades and a new vaccine whose long-term consequences we do not, by definition, know.
So that's the first point I'd make.
The second point is, I don't think it's true that the contrarian view was represented in the mainstream media at all.
For the first year or so of the pandemic.
I mean, I remember the press conferences Boris Johnson was having where never a single journalist ever questioned him about, have you done some analysis on how many people lockdowns will kill, right?
And that is a fundamental input.
That is necessary to make a decision.
If you're making a decision between two choices, to go left or to go right, you need to know what are going to be the outcomes of the left one and what are going to be the outcomes of the right one, estimates at least.
Otherwise, you cannot make that decision being fully informed.
So I don't agree with you that it was well represented in the mainstream media.
In terms of Brett and all of this stuff, the only issue I have with the way we're having this conversation, and I'm really enjoying it, is You're kind of getting me to defend other people a lot, whereas I'd prefer that you just attack me and I can speak for myself.
Because I can tell you what I think about Brett.
I disagree with Brett's approach to COVID.
I also am not qualified to agree or disagree with Brett's approach to COVID, but I instinctively do not agree with the way that he's approached it.
At the same time, Brett is a very good friend of mine.
He is a man I respect tremendously.
Him and Heather are two of the finest human beings that I've ever encountered in my life, and fortunate to have encountered quite a few very high-quality human beings.
So I believe in being able to disagree with people about important issues and still appreciate the good qualities.
But yeah, if you want to have a go at me personally, I'd probably find that a lot more interesting and easier to have that conversation.
So there's some interesting points, Constantine, and I think the point that you raise at the end about the personal relationships between people is a good point to switch to from the COVID issue.
But I just want to respond to one or two of the things that you said, because Matt and I have spent...
Quite a bit of time looking at anti-vaccine rhetoric.
And this has been an interest long before COVID.
There's papers from 2012 and stuff talking about the kind of tropes that you see in anti-vaccine communities.
And I can say with complete confidence that...
Most of the rhetoric that is in the COVID debate is exactly the same as the anti-vaccine rhetoric that you would see 20 or 30 years ago, with the same arguments about it's not all vaccines, it's these vaccines, it's long-term consequences of triple-dose MMR vaccines,
and so on and so forth.
And you're right that we cannot know...
With 100% confidence, the long-term consequences of these specific vaccines yet.
But billions of people are being dosed.
And if there was a genuine danger and the technology was very risky, there is debate about those kinds of things.
Like the doctors are not villains wanting to mass murder people.
So this would be the greatest controversy ever, right?
If that in 20 years...
Hundreds of thousands of people are dying early and so on.
So the clinical trials that were conducted were extensive and they're misrepresented by the anti-vaccine people.
I'm not asking you to get...
Sorry, but that is an argument I'm making with all respect.
I was talking about lockdown, if you remember.
So in terms of the anti-vaccine stuff, I'm not saying I thought Andrew Wakefield was going to be pro the COVID vaccine.
Of course he wasn't.
And of course, all the people who were anti-vaxxers before are going to be against this particular vaccine.
I'm not disputing that at all.
What I'm saying is that there were a lot of people like me who were simply saying, is the lockdown...
The solution to this problem and is having a second and a third one, the solution to this problem.
I never got an answer to that.
Nobody ever, ever, and I speak to people in government, I speak to ministers in the British government occasionally, none of them can answer this question.
How many people did you estimate that lockdowns would kill?
And if you can't answer that question, how on earth could you have made the decision to lock down in the first place?
And how on earth could you have made that decision to lock down further?
And when I'm talking, by the way, about kill, I'm not talking about the vaccines going around killing people.
I'm talking about we do have a record in excess deaths at the moment.
It's not just suicides.
It's cancer treatments that end up being cancelled.
It's whatever it is.
And it's going to run for decades, the consequences of these decisions.
And all I wanted, number one, was to have a transparent conversation about that.
Number one.
Number two.
I thought that in the desire to achieve their public health objectives, which is to get everyone vaccinated, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, the government attempted in this country, I mean, don't even get me started on Canada and Australia and Germany and Austria, but even in Britain.
The government went way too far in attempting to deny people their basic civil liberties and their rights and attempting to force people to take a vaccine against their will.
I mean, I made this point on Joe Rogan.
I'll make it again.
Does it make any sense to anyone that you've got a health minister like Sajid Javid, who is not a medical expert, forcing doctors to have an injection that they don't want to have?
Yes.
Does that make any sense?
It makes sense to you?
It does.
Okay, explain to me why that makes sense.
Because the public health procedures are not just decided willy-nilly.
Yes.
I've heard you, in other contexts, talk about how people with utopian worldviews, about how the world can be perfected, and if we just get the right political system, that's inaccurate.
Representation of human nature.
And it can lead to very bad places, right?
European worldviews.
So you have to price in constantly when you're dealing with government, when you're dealing with public health, that there will be miscommunication, there will be inefficiencies, there will be miscommunications, right?
And so when you price that in, and my experience of the pandemic, it does sound very different to yours because I did see not only in mainstream media,
like politicians being questioned about policies, but also in podcasts with virologists who are very strongly pro-vaccine, debates about what public health measures are appropriate and robust discussions about it.
And it was presented as if...
That was never allowed.
But I heard it all over the place, and I heard heterodox people endlessly complaining, Joe Rogan complaining every week about it.
And the reality is that you weren't forced to get vaccines, right?
Unless you were working in health services or education or government.
Or care, yeah.
Right, right.
But the reason for that is to avoid vulnerable populations being impacted.
So there is a public health rationale for it.
And individual doctors saying, well, I don't want to do that.
That is their right to do so.
But you can't say that if you have a regulation where like, if a doctor says, you know, I don't believe that I need to clean my hands in order to stop viruses spreading and he's medically trained, you don't say, well, you know, he's
got reason.
How many doctors are doing that, though?
Well, yeah, but...
No, no, no, no, but this is the point.
This is exactly the point.
Because it wasn't 0.001% of doctors saying, I don't want to have this vaccine.
It was quite a lot of them.
And we were going to lose a lot of medical staff.
When my son was born four and a half months ago, several of the nurses, or the midwives, rather, who helped to deliver him in private...
told me that they were not vaccinated and that they were going to leave the National Health Service if they were forced to do it.
So I'm not just talking based on just, you know, something I invented in my head.
I'm telling you there were lots and lots of people who were medically qualified who did not want anything to do with this vaccine.
Now, why they did or didn't is a different issue.
My point to you is that In a situation where a significant minority of doctors and medical experts don't want to have a vaccine, I don't think it makes any sense for that to be enforced upon them, particularly when we don't have any evidence that the vaccine was hugely effective at preventing transmission from one person to another.
Yeah, but the vaccine has proved extremely, like, when we're talking about the impacts of COVID, right, you know, the death statistics and stuff make it very clear that This did lead to excess deaths across the world, a large impact on public health services and medical facilities.
And transmission, the way that it's often presented, I find in the heterodox sphere, is as if the vaccines are practically useless and do nothing.
But when you look at the literature...
I don't think that at all.
Yeah, I'm not saying you specifically, Constantine, but I mean that transmission relatively less effective with later strains, right, with the earlier vaccines.
But in most cases, not on the par, just less effective.
And when it comes to stopping the spread amongst the population of the virus, public health has to take...
Something of a one-size-fits-all approach.
I mean, I'm sure you think that, but I disagree with this completely.
I mean, this argument can be used to push all sorts of tyranny onto the population because if the interests...
Hold on a second.
Let me answer your point.
If the interests of the nation require some sort of health measure, I mean, you know, we've got to protect the NHS.
Why don't we just shoot obese people?
They are the real epidemic.
They're the ones that are doing it.
How far do you take restrictions of people's civil liberties and forcing people to inject stuff in their body?
Why don't we invent a vaccine for obesity and force fat people to take it?
Almost everybody in our society would completely agree that that would be unethical.
Forcing people to have an injection that they don't want to have would be considered unethical in any other circumstance other than when everyone shits the bed over COVID.
So how about childhood vaccination for things like polio and tuberculosis, which are not optional?
I'm in favor of it, and I want my son to have it.
But why?
Because I think those vaccines would be advantageous to him.
But if they are not mandated, like childhood vaccination, and you choose not to have it for your kid, and the polio virus comes back, or your child gets polio and is...
Badly injured.
So your preference would be that we don't mandate any vaccinations for any diseases and allow them to return, or is it specifically COVID?
I think it's slightly different with children because children are incapable of making that decision for themselves.
We're talking about adults.
So if we're talking about adults in the context of COVID, I don't think COVID vaccines should ever be mandated, no.
But just...
COVID vaccines.
So you do think there are circumstances where if the disease is infectious enough or debilitating enough that it could be right to mandate it in order to keep immunity and to protect children?
I think for me the issue is less about the disease, although obviously that's a factor.
I don't think it'd be stupid to pretend otherwise.
If Ebola had the levels of spread of COVID, we'd be having a different conversation.
Although I don't think you'd need to force a lot of people to take it because they'd be taking it themselves.
For me, the issue is children.
Children, you know, they have to have adults make decisions for them, and that's a bit different.
So that would be the difference for me.
But my point is something else, which is the taking away of people, all sorts of rights that people normally have during COVID.
That was the thing that...
Annoyed me.
And those were the principles that I thought were being violated that I thought were important to stand up for, which is why, again, I encourage you to ask me about my views as opposed to defending people who think the vaccine is, you know, a 5G plot or whatever the hell that is.
Sure.
So that leads, maybe we can leave, you know, the vaccines behind.
I know it's a topic that endlessly becomes a sinkhole for conversation.
I appreciate you responding about it as you have.
But the point that you raised before that, Constantine, was that, for example, with Brett, you might disagree with his views about COVID and you're not responsible for his particular views and that you find him to be a very nice person, principled person,
and his wife, Heller, as well.
And that raises to me something which I hear a lot of.
Again, I'm going to use the term like the heterodox space or whatever, but there seems to be an over-reliance on this heuristic.
If somebody is interpersonally nice to you, that this is somehow indicative that they can't actually be promoting misinformation or actually be...
Hold on, hold on, hold on a second.
The very first thing I said is that I don't agree with Brett about COVID.
Okay, so let me finish the point I want to make there because I'm not saying that this is the case.
I mean, more in line with, like, in most occasions, I don't find it hard to imagine that people are able to have positive interactions with someone.
So recently, with your appearance with Rogan, you talked about meeting Sebastian Gorka and him being a fun guy to hang out with to go to a shooting range to eat steak or whatever the case might be.
I find that to be like, when it's presented as a novel insight or something that we need to bear in mind, it strikes me as potentially rather than insightful and interesting to be obfuscating of the reason that that person's criticized.
Because usually the reason is not that, you know, they are a fun person to have dinner with.
It's because of the particular...
Ideology or information that they're promoting, that they get the criticism.
And I see constant kind of refrain to personal relationships and the importance of them, as if that is something that we aren't considering enough.
And that if, I mean, if you could sit down, I know this is going to, I'm just, I'm using an extreme example.
I'm not saying Sebastian Corker is this, but I mean, if you could sit down and have a nice dinner.
With Viktor Orban and he can have a nice chat with you about the problems of woke culture, it doesn't mean there's any less repression of the media or authoritarian steps to control opposition parties in Hungary.
And yet you have lots of people who are...
Reeling against authoritarianism and the woke and going to Hungary, right?
Have I done that?
Again, you're talking to me about other people.
I am not a fan of Viktor Orban, have never defended him, have never commented about him, not least because I don't know anything about Hungarian politics.
But let me come back to your point about what I said about Sev Gorka.
You're doing a disservice to what I said because I didn't make the point that Seb Gorka is a good guy and I went for steak and shooting guns with him and therefore blah blah blah blah blah.
What I said is...
Not only that, we had dinner with him and some of his conservative friends.
And what I said was, these are people who love this country.
They care about this country.
They're actually well-intentioned, even if you may disagree with the way that they behave, right?
And that is my point.
My point is twofold.
First of all, we have to get back to the idea that we can disagree with people without hating them.
And I do think that is something that we've lost a lot with the emergence of social media.
Would anyone disagree with that?
Number one.
Number two, when you talk to people whose behavior you sometimes don't approve of or don't like, you may often find out things about them.
So, for example, Seb gave me a copy of his book, and I read the first few pages on the plane as he gave them to me.
And he talks about how both his daughter and his son were being, I think one of the newspapers called his 17-year-old son a traitor.
in a national newspaper headline and his daughter was nearly kicked out of her university for quote-unquote being racist Do you think it's possible that the angry version of him that you see on TV has something to do with those things as opposed to to do with what kind of person he is?
My four and a half a month son is next door.
And I can tell you, if someone was going after him in a national newspaper because he's my son, I would go fucking ballistic.
Right?
So in some ways, the way that Seb behaves sometimes is quite restrained, given the experiences he's been through.
And I'm not saying that justifies his behavior.
I'm not saying I agree with everything he says.
I don't support Donald Trump in the way that he does.
However, I do think that is an important context that gets lost when we have these debates in this clip, clip, clip, this is the worst of Seb Gawker ever.
And that was the point that I was making.
It wasn't that the fact that at stake with him means that he's a good guy.
I think I'd push back that I sincerely doubt.
One, I would not automatically accept the way that Gorka would present.
How he's been treated.
It may be the case that he's had harsh media coverage and his family have been targeted, but I doubt that before those events that he was a very mild-mannered soul who was not a polemicist.
I think that there's a culture of victimhood.
Of course there is.
Which is quite ironic because there's a constant complaining about it on the left.
You yourself, Constantine, have mentioned in lots of discussions that you've had with people that we shouldn't spend so much time feeling sorry for ourselves because things are pretty good for us.
We've got big audiences and people listen to us and we have nice conversations, right?
And I completely agree with that position.
But I guess the point...
One of the things that you emphasized at the start of the conversation was the importance of being able to criticize both sides and people that you broadly agree with.
Often more important than being able to attack the people on the other side of the political aisle.
And that's part of why I am raising these examples, like people traveling in Hungary to Orban or the anti-vaccine stances.
Because what I see, for example, is that when people in the heterodox sphere get together, they're often fine to talk about They're collective enemies, the progressives and the woke and what they're doing wrong, and they avoid those topics which might be bad.
What have I avoided?
This is a problem when you talk about Hungary.
What am I avoiding?
So, for example, Constantine, would you, if you had Peter Bogossian on, are you likely to hold his feet to the fire about why he's in?
Hungary doing tours for Orban's government.
When you've spoke with Douglas Murray, have you ever raised the issue of his defenses of right-wing populist leaders across the world?
I don't think his support for right-wing populist leaders around the world needs defending.
I don't know anything about Peter Boghossian's tours.
Like I said, I don't know anything about Hungarian politics.
If I did, I wouldn't hesitate to ask him about it at all.
No.
But isn't there something where you can basically take that stance?
Because, you know, you can prepare for interviews, right?
And you can check what stances people have taken on things.
And if you choose to go with that, like, let's say you had James Lindsay on, right?
And many people have.
And discuss with him the issues of the social justice left, his kind of main focus.
But they astutely do not discuss his conspiracy.
Again, you're talking about other people.
I had James Lindsay on my show with Peter three years ago, at which point we talked about the things that were interesting to us at the time.
We haven't had James Lindsay on the show since, and one of the reasons is his Twitter behavior, to me, makes him a completely discredited person.
And so if we wanted to have him on and talk about his Twitter behavior, we'd happily do that.
The problem is a bunch of people have already done that with him.
He has his bullshit excuse.
Which is Twitter doesn't matter.
What do you want me to do with that?
Get him on for an hour and talk about that?
There's no benefit to that.
I said what I said about James, both publicly and privately.
I think I chose my words very carefully and described what I think he's become.
So my problem with this conversation, I'm really keen for us to have the robust discussion, is you keep presenting other people as being somehow...
It's not contaminating of me when I'm not connected.
I'm not doing those things.
It's not about contamination.
It's about willingness to challenge and more if people are going to...
Tell me, where am I not challenging people that I should be?
Okay, so an example.
You interviewed Brett and Heller about their book, The Hunter Galler's Guide to the 21st Century.
This was at the height of their promotion of anti-vaccine rhetoric.
Sure.
You didn't raise it at all.
And other people have noted that when they were arranging interviews with them, their publicist asked them not to address that.
Controversy.
You got a lot of criticism from your audience that I saw at the time for not raising that issue.
Michael Shermer did the same thing.
So that's a case where it looked a lot like you were avoiding a controversial issue to talk with someone about a position that you agreed.
That specific issue, that's not accurate.
Because what happened is we had Brett on it like a couple of months prior.
And so to talk about the COVID stuff again would have been completely pointless.
I think that publicists did say they wanted to talk about the book.
I was much more interested in the book than talking about COVID.
That's why we didn't talk about COVID.
But I don't see that as shying away from challenging people on difficult things.
It's just we wanted to have a conversation about a different issue at the time.
And as you saw in my conversation on Brett's podcast, I had absolutely no problem saying, What my opinion was about the issue of COVID and what my disagreements are with him.
So it's not an unwillingness to challenge.
It was just an individual instance in which that was how it was.
Again, if you've got other issues where you think I'm not challenging someone, I'm open to hear it.
Okay, so another example that's specific to the podcast.
So when you talk about enlightened centrism and an approach which is apolitical, the advertisements on your podcast, for example, are for Nigel Farage's cryptocurrency.
No, no, no, it's not cryptocurrency.
Sorry, no.
It's for an investment company that he founded 30 years ago that gives people investment advice.
It's not a cryptocurrency.
Okay, so Nigel Farage is...
No, no, it's not Nigel Farage.
It's an investment advice company that happens to have been founded by Nigel Farage.
I'm not selling it as, you love Nigel Farage, therefore buy this thing.
It's useful information for people who want to make investment decisions.
Okay, but would you not...
So I think the branding involving Nigel Farage is incidental to that product.
It's suggested by the people that's what they wanted.
We advertise people who give us money.
But that would be my question to you then.
The Epoch Times, for example, is a far-right publication by most metrics that has promoted anti-vaccine, the big lie.
It's promoted QAnon conspiracies, and it's associated with the Falun Gong movement.
And it is not hard to locate.
Critiques of it.
Now, when you have advertised for it, it's quite a ringing endorsement.
And the point I want to make there is, if the majority of advertisers for you are leaning in that particular direction...
You have no evidence to make that claim whatsoever.
You've picked out two examples and called that the majority.
We advertise hundreds of different businesses every year.
Would your contention be that those are...
My contention would be that the overwhelming percentage, I'm talking 90 plus percent of our advertisers are apolitical in any way, shape or form.
So in that case, Konstantin, if a far-left organization wanted to promote on your show, would you also read an endorsement?
It depends on what it was.
I'd have to say it.
I don't know what you mean by far-left, first of all.
We've had people who I consider to be weird lefties of the kind that I massively disagree with, who are currently peddling the Ukraine Nazis bullshit and whatever.
People like Aaron Maté and Jimmy Dore and whatever.
And if Jimmy Dore wanted to advertise his YouTube channel on our channel, I'd say we'd have to have an internal conversation about that.
But also, I don't know that your characterization of Epoch Times as far right is accurate.
That's certainly not been my impression when I've read it.
So I don't accept that either.
I don't think Nigel Farage is far right by any stretch of the imagination.
Out of UKIP?
Yeah, UKIP were not far right.
Nigel Farage is a Thatcherite economically, and he was pro-Brexit.
Where's far right in that?
Well, for example, during the Brexit campaign, the poster that they produced with the large crowds of people, colored people, anti-immigration sentiment.
I don't think wanting to restrict immigration makes you far right.
How about the implication that Turkey was on the precipice of joining the EU and there would be millions of Muslims entering the UK with visas because that was likely to happen?
Politicians lie to embellish their case all the time.
I didn't think that was a good look, but I don't think it makes them far right.
So what is far right?
It's kind of a neo-Nazi?
A neo-Nazi, yeah.
Yeah, or someone who's openly fascist.
That's what far-right actually means.
Remember?
These words have meanings.
They have meanings.
So you would say, for example, Stephen Miller...
The fact that the left-wing media has been spreading all this stuff, calling these people far-right, doesn't make them far-right.
These words have meanings.
My ancestors were killed by far-right people, right?
So I'm kind of picky about these things.
It's important.
Certainly.
So like Stephen Miller, for example, in the Trump...
You would regard him as moderate conservative?
I've never met him.
I have no idea who he is.
I've never, don't think, interacted with him.
So you suggested, Konstantin, that you wouldn't advertise something without an internal discussion.
And from your reading of the Epoch Times, it's not far right.
It's maybe conservative tinged or that.
But does that mean in your political spectrum?
So things like the big lie promoting that is...
It's simply a moderate position.
What's the big lie?
The big lie is that the election was stolen by fraudulent voting behavior.
To me, that's an extreme position that I disagree with very strongly, as I disagree with the spreading the big lie about the 2016 election, which the mainstream media comfortably spread for four years with absolutely no criticism, I imagine, from people like you as well.
Well, so the distinction there would be that while there's plenty that you can criticize about, for example, Rachel Maddow's position, if people came in that Russia completely decided the election for Trump, I would agree that's not true.
But equally, the notion that there was no interference from Russia.
In licking the emails from the Democratic Party or arranging various online campaigns to support Trump.
Those have been documented quite extensively to actually have occurred and at every step along the way, denied, denied, denied by the right wing.
Yeah, and the people who peddle the big like and give you lots of...
Lots of little bits that in their mind add up to influencing the election.
The definitive answer on 2016 is Russian involvement did not decide that election.
That's a fact.
I'm sorry.
But see, you're not being fair to these two different sides.
I think they're both completely wrong and both deeply unfair and both shouldn't have been done.
What you're doing is you're downplaying the behavior of one side and playing up the behavior of the other side to make it look imbalanced.
To me, there were two big lies and one was peddled by every major institution in America and around the world.
The other one was condemned by the very same institutions that spent four years peddling the first big lie.
Surely an important difference is that the Democratic candidate conceded on the night and the party acknowledged the transfer of power.
And also to speak back to your point that I would automatically defend a claim that the left wing would make.
So in the Brexit campaign, when people claimed that Cambridge Analytica swayed the election by targeted psychographics, I wrote...
Two articles explaining why that was very likely not the case and the Brexit vote was just won by, you know, standard political campaigning and I would say playing up xenophobic sentiment.
But in any case, you didn't need the psychographic explanation.
It's just, you know, there was an anti-institution sentiment and dissatisfaction with the EU, so that's what you get.
But I think that...
That speaks counter to the point that I wouldn't be willing to criticize that.
But I definitely do not think there's an equivalence between Trump and the Republican Party, the mainstream Republican Party's stance on the fraudulent nature of the election and how many are willing to now endorse that stance versus the accusation that the Russians were responsible for the election.
Because I don't think that...
It's the same level of support.
So let me take back the allegation that you might be unfair about it because it's unfair.
I don't know.
We were talking about media coverage.
You started this conversation by talking about the Epoch Times.
I don't see how it's any different for the Epoch Times to suggest that the 2020 election was stolen after left-wing media spent four years suggesting that the 2016 election.
Now, the behavior of Trump and his supporters, I've already told you my position on January the 6th, but that's separate to the issue of media bias.
And so if the center-right and the center-left both want to lie about elections, I disagree with that very strongly, which is why I immediately said that this bullshit about the election being stolen, you know, shouldn't get all this attention.
But I'm just not comfortable with all this pearl clutching about the Epoch Times when CNN are perfectly allowed and have and did for a long time not only lied, lied, lied, lied, lied, but also then in 2020 participated in what was effectively an attempt to steal the 2020 election together with the big tech companies by suppressing information about the Hunter Biden laptop,
right?
That was an attempt to influence that election.
And we know from polling.
But afterwards, the Democratic voters, the people who voted for the Democrats, some of them would not have voted for the Democrats, for Joe Biden, had they known about it, right?
So all I'm saying is, I'm not comfortable with all this pearl clutching.
Yes, the Epoch Times is right of center.
I don't think it's far right by any stretch of the imagination, at least in my opinion.
Do I agree with everything the Epoch Times published?
God, no.
Do I agree with anything any publication publishes?
God, no.
Do I agree with everything guests say on trigonometry?
God, no.
But I do think we need a media ecosystem where people are allowed to express their opinions.
Yeah, I'm fine.
I think I completely agree that there's a broad church for different opinions and political stripes.
And I would actually argue that there is a lot of space in the media ecosystem for a whole range of views.
To me...
The Epoch Times is quite clearly farther right than Breitbart, which I think that most people would recognize as being on the farther right of the spectrum.
Well, I have to look more into it.
I haven't read everything on the Epoch Times.
My main contact with it is a guy called Yanni Kellek, who hosts a program called American Thought Leaders, which, you know, again...
Some people I agree with that he has, and some people I don't.
But my experience of him has been that he's very honest and very principled.
So I can look into him more.
That certainly hasn't been my impression from a cursory look at it.
Yeah, and I will say, Konstantin, I'm using that example purely because you asked me to speak to examples.
No, no, no.
Like I said, I'm very, very happy for you to challenge me.
So let's just come back to the point, though, right?
We started this conversation with you saying that the majority of our advertisers are right-wing or far-right or whatever.
I think we can agree that the majority of our advertisers are not.
Right?
The majority of our advertisers are apolitical.
Nigel Farage's investment company, not Nigel Farage.
You've got to understand this, right?
We're not advertising Nigel Farage, right?
Although we've had Nigel on the show a couple of times, I have absolutely no problem with Nigel Farage.
I don't agree with some of the things he said.
And the last time we had on, I challenged him very strongly, not least on Ukraine yet again, right?
So it's not like I'm unwilling to challenge him, but we weren't advertising him.
In terms of the Epoch Times, You know, we've talked about that.
That's one example.
I don't think it's fair to deduce from one example that our advertising strategy is aimed at people on the far right or even on the right, frankly.
I'll definitely concede that I haven't done, you know, an inventory of your advertisements.
Take my word for it.
Yeah, it was on the Sam Harris episode.
There was quite a jarring...
Yes, I understand.
The conversation with Sam to the Epoch Times, so that's what it was that made it stick in my mind.
But in any case, Konstantin, I know that you had a hard art and you have a young infant.
I can do another, I'm guessing another five minutes if you want, and then I'm really going to have to run, if you want.
Okay, yeah, that's great.
I just didn't want to...
No, no, no, I really appreciate you being respectful, but I'm enjoying this conversation so much.
I'm going to move something and we'll...
We'll do another five minutes.
Go for it.
Okay, so now my brain wasn't wrapping up.
You've been extremely quiet.
I feel bad if I don't at least give you the option if you wanted to chime in.
No, by the way, just being quiet so you guys would have room to talk in the time that you had.
No, sorry.
My brain was heading towards wrapping up as well, so I wasn't preparing something.
Okay.
There was one last thing I wanted to bring up.
And I wanted to see if this was your position or I'm presenting it unfairly.
And it's a bit different from the things that we've been talking about.
So I'll try to do it quickly.
So I listened to your conversation with the ex-police officer talking about the overreach, you know, the police visiting people's eyes over...
Yes, yes.
About tweets and Facebook posts and that kind of thing, right?
And I actually would agree with a lot of the points made about potential overreach from the...
And the one thing that did strike me in that conversation was,
though, that there was this concern expressed about graduates being preferred for the And there seemed to be a consensus, and I included you in this, and if I did it unfairly,
please correct me, but the view was the police force is hiring graduates because they want people who are kind of drenched in woke ideology that will make it so that they can promote a progressive agenda.
Did I say that?
That was, I mean, so I think, Harry, was it the name of the guy that said it?
Harry, Harry Malia.
He talked about this primarily, but yourself and Francis seem to agree with this assessment that the emphasis on hiring graduates was likely to be because they wanted to instill a particular ideology.
And I got the impression that, in general, you viewed it as graduates being sought was an indication that an institution was likely to be captured.
So is that not a fair...
I'd have to go back and see what I said.
I'm not conspiratorially minded, so I don't think that they're getting in graduates because graduates are woke and they want to wokeify the police.
That's not really my opinion.
No.
Okay, that's good.
That was part of what I wanted to check.
And I guess that would be the kind of thing where I would say, in my case, and obviously I'm argumentative and have my little bugbears, but...
I would tend to want to push back when somebody like a Majid Nawaz or a James Lizzie introduces this notion of like a grand conspiracy to, you know, wokify the world in order to introduce Chinese-style communism.
And I know that you are concerned about the far left and its blasé nature to the threats of the far left, but I...
I wasn't sure if you found those conspiracies like the focus on the WEF and Klaus Schwab to be equally concerning or if you agreed with them.
I just wasn't clear.
I don't agree with them.
I don't agree with them, as you can probably tell from the conversations we've had on trigonometry.
Have you ever heard anyone invited on to talk endlessly about the WEF?
I think one guest mentioned it.
In the last question we always ask, which is a complete free hit.
And generally, we don't tend to debate that one.
It's just sort of left as a free hit for them.
With what Harry said, I have to go back and see what I said or didn't say, but it's not my view that there's a conspiracy to infiltrate the police with graduates.
That does not mean that I don't think that the College of Policing, for example, wouldn't quite like to have as many graduates as possible because it makes their job easier, which is enforcing their particular views.
I mean, the way that conversation might be is we've got to get the right people in, quote-unquote, and that is people with the right mindset who are able to take the police into the 21st century.
That may be the way that that conversation is being had, and it doesn't seem to me conspiratorial to think that that might be possible.
But no, I'm not really on board with most of that stuff.
I don't find it particularly persuasive.
The more I learn about the world and the more I interact with people who are actually in government or actually at the head of the police or actually doing stuff or whatever, the more I realize how bloody difficult it is to get anything done.
And so the idea that a few people in the room are going to get together and have this sort of conspiracy seems to me just...
You know, impractical, factually inaccurate.
I mean, I look at trigonometry.
We have, in addition to the three of us, Francis, myself, and our producer, we have seven staff.
Like, we can't get an episode to go out on time the way I want.
Like, the idea that there's, you know, people, maybe they're that much better at conspiring than we are.
But, yeah, I'm not, I enjoy a good, like, I'll happily go and listen to David Icke for entertainment, but I don't believe it.
No.
Yeah, so maybe that's an interesting point to round off on.
I find that there's a spectrum of concern, right?
And there is sometimes the presentation of all our institutions are captured, science is no longer trustworthy, governments are just purely getting ready to make everybody eat bugs and live in pods, right?
And to me, that veers...
I agree.
I agree completely.
And I guess I have noticed in your content a note of optimism that you think there is a greater tolerance for different opinions emerging and there is a kind of pushback for different perspectives.
So I might be giving you an undue note of optimism.
I'm going to do a lot more of that going forward, too.
I'm going to do a lot more of that going forward because I think it's important.
We are shaping the culture by the conversations that we have influencing it.
And I think the doomsday scenarios from both left and right are completely unhelpful and actually very arrogant in some ways.
There's a sort of hubris to this idea that we are the first generation of people who can't solve their own problems.
Actually, I think we can.
Well, that's a positive note to end on.
And we often criticize the people that we listen to for undue and lengthy back padding about the conversations that they've had and how great it is that they're able to do these things.
So I genuinely do appreciate you coming on and having the discussion robust as it was.
And yeah, so if you want to tell people where they can find you, if they want to hear more of that kind of thing, please do.
I really appreciate it.
First of all, I really enjoyed this.
It was a lot of fun.
I'm glad we had it.
I can be very passionate, particularly when I'm defending things that I believe in or defending myself or whatever, but I hope...
No one confuses my passion with a lack of respect or a lack of enjoyment.
This is exactly the sort of stuff that I love doing.
So first of all, thank you.
People can buy my book.
It's called An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West.
It's a Sunday Times bestseller.
They can find my podcast, which is Trigonometry, on YouTube and on all the podcast apps.
And I'm on Twitter and Substack, which is where I put a lot of more substantive pieces out at the moment.
People can find me there as well.
My name is Constantine Kissin, and thanks for having me.
Cheers, Constantine, and that was very professionally done.
It was.
That's how you do it when you're good at this kind of thing.
So cheers for coming on, and yeah.
Well, that was that.
That was that interview.
How was that?
It was good.
I'm now casting my mind back to the ghost of Christmas past, remembering how the power went out.
I listened to almost all of it.
Enjoyed it.
I thought you both argued your corner pretty well.
And then what did I do afterwards?
I probably had a drink.
Well, I'll definitely say one thing to Konstantin's credit is that, you know, you can take whatever position you like about the arguments that myself and he made in the preceding interview, but he did listen to...
The argument that I made and then allow me time to respond in full, which I'm just saying that was nice.
That's nice to deal with.
That's what you want.
He was responsive to points and he did engage in turn taking.
So full marks to Constantine as a podcast guest for that.
And Andy also, you know.
Robust exchange.
He wasn't walking away in a strop at the end and that kind of thing.
So that's also to his credit.
That's right.
10 out of 10 for interlocutory skills.
You too.
You did well as well.
Thank you, man.
Thank you.
Fine.
Perfectly fine.
All right.
I did all right.
I did all right.
Right.
Well, enough of that.
So we've got two things to do before we're out of here.
One of them is...
Our famed review of reviews segment.
And the other is give our patrons a quick shout out.
So for the reviews, Matt, I'm going to keep it short this week.
And I have...
I like this.
This is a good review.
I'm going to try and encourage more of this.
We have a review.
The title is Terrible and Trite.
And it says, Two wannabe sense makers feel to make any sense.
Five stars.
That's from DadBodRyan in Canada.
So I appreciated that, right?
That's pretty good.
Short and sweet, yeah.
I like this etiquette, by the way, of the nasty verbal review accompanied by the five stars.
Yeah, it's ironic, isn't it?
That's irony then, obviously.
Could be, could be, could be.
It is!
I'm not sure.
Well, okay, I am a little bit confused about this, because here's another review.
The headline is an unsmiley face, unhappy face.
And it's by Anonymous6380.
It says, they don't have the balls to take on the gurus of race, Glenn Lowry and John McWhorter.
Five stars.
There's a pattern here.
And listen, by the way, you can't, I mean, you probably can, but you can't just nag us.
We're not little Pavlov's dogs.
You can't say, oh yeah, I bet you couldn't beat up that guy over there.
Oh yeah, I'll show you.
If we cover Glenn and John, it would be because it's a good thing to do.
Not because somebody goaded us.
But yeah, I wouldn't have any trouble.
Covering them at some point.
Yeah, actually, yeah.
I mean, Glenn Lowry, isn't he?
He's an opinionator and is probably one of the better spoken advocates for...
Are you doing under Barack Obama?
He's very articulate.
No, no.
Oh, my God, Matt.
Oh, my God.
No, I was not thinking that at all.
I was thinking, like, he's smart, right?
And he's an academic, he's a professor or something, and he puts forward what is a conservative point of view in a way that is a lot smarter than how would you often hear it.
So I like it challenging.
I knew what you mean, Matt.
I just didn't know all the people.
Yeah, yeah.
I realized I tripped over that.
Okay.
Move on.
Let's move on.
I think Glenn Lowry is sort of center-right, but him and Joe McWhorter are often discussing racial issues in America.
It's not something that we love.
It's not a super fun topic to cover.
But, you know, we will do Robin DiAngelo next.
So, you know, there we go.
Yeah, you can't blame his cannulousness for wanting to stay away from that.
Who wants to go into the American racial politics?
Come on.
Yeah.
Come on.
Come on.
Americans, if you were at Australia and you had the option not to be embroiled in that.
You'll be tempted.
You'll be tempted.
I mean, you guys have got that choice.
You're stuck in it.
You're going to be doing it forever and ever and ever.
But, you know, we don't have to.
We can do other things.
So, ha, dig that.
And there's enough gurus doing enough guru stuff.
But, well, in any case.
And here's the last one, then.
If we take those as the negative reviews, they're not really negative.
You know, they get five stars, but they'll count.
And the last one is, like an intellectual Abbott and Costello.
Five stars.
This is from Feral Fluffy Bunny.
In Australia.
And these guys are quirky and opinionated, which is fun.
Chris is hilariously garrulous.
And Matt is like his straight man.
They do seem to have a thing with Eric Weinstein, but realistically, who doesn't?
I enjoy their rambling discussions.
Nice.
That's good.
Yeah, that's nice.
You're the straight man?
I don't mind being the straight man.
We've both been watching It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and I did a little...
I got the highest amount of votes for who I was hoping for, and I've forgotten his name.
Dennis Reynolds.
Dennis Reynolds.
And then I asked people, and I think you did a survey too, who you are.
I copied yours.
And who won your survey?
Charlie.
Charlie, yeah, Charlie, Charlie.
Now, look, you know, it's not a perfect analogy.
It's not perfect at all.
But I think you are the slightly hyperactive, intense one.
Am I?
Am I?
Well, yeah, for people that don't know, it's always sunny in Philadelphia.
They probably know the meme of the guy standing in front of the board with all the pins and red lines connecting, waving at them.
That's Charlie.
So that's who we're dealing with.
And Dennis Reynolds is...
A kind of sociopathic narcissist.
So that's unfair for you, Bob.
But, you know, there you go.
But he's smooth.
So, you know, I'm happy with that.
I think on balance, he can say whether he's good or bad.
Well, that's true.
That's true.
So that's our reviews.
That was a nice review.
It was, thank you for that.
And the other ones were, we're okay too.
And now the last remaining thing is to thank our patrons.
And, Matt, here, I'm getting a grip around the best way to do this with the Patreons, but there may be people who are thanked twice as I switch methods, and if that is the case, I apologize.
It's a bonus.
No, it's hard to apologize for.
They're getting a bonus.
Yeah, that's right.
So here we go.
And, oh, also, we may have new sound files thanks to a very kind...
Listener, I'll update on that later and give appropriate credit.
But yes, in any case, yeah.
So, not this time.
Not this time.
So, who we have to thank in our conspiracy hypothesis category is Andrew Achilles, Language Guy, Thea Elwald, John Colgrove,
Rob Franks, Christine Jenkins, Pavan, Michael Morenci-Freem, and Ramunas.
That is our conspiracy hypothesizers for this week.
Excellent.
And I think I know John Colgo from Twitter.
Sorry.
But thanks to all of you.
Me too.
Me too, I believe.
Not just John.
Yeah, all of them.
Whether we know you from Twitter or not.
It doesn't matter.
We thank you equally.
Just Matt will single you out if he does.
Anyway, here we go.
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Okay, we will, Brett Weinstein.
Now we will turn to revolutionary geniuses.
I'm looking forward to it, Chris.
I've got to tell you, I'm looking forward to an update to those sound files because I'm, you know, probably...
You're bored?
Don't say that!
I made those!
But yeah, I can understand.
It's been a long time.
They're due an update.
Nonetheless...
Our revolutionary geniuses for this week, we have Lucy Frasterisk, Joao Barbosa, Joao Barbosa, Jay Graves, Dan, Lawrence Nagel,
and Kit McLean.
Oh, also Nelaya.
Nelaya as well.
And Helga.
And Helga.
Great.
Lovely.
Thank you all.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, thank you.
Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking.
What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know.
Yes, indeed.
Now, speaking of thinkers, the last category, the galaxy bringing gurus, the people who can join us for monthly live streams and whatnot.
Here we have Simon Crubber, Adam Taylor, maybe for the second time, Taylor, Michael Moriarty, Amber Howe,
who definitely has been mentioned before, Paul Taylor.
Thank you again, Amber.
And Jay, I'm pretty sure we've heard four.
We've probably thanked, like, 60% of them before, but thank you, Ian.
That's all right.
Thank you, anyway.
They're in the top tier.
They deserve to be double-edged and triple-edged.
That's it.
So thank you all, Galaxy Brains, one and all.
Thank you.
You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard, and you're so polite.
And, hey, wait a minute.
Am I an expert?
I kind of am.
Yeah.
I don't trust people at all.
So there we go.
Not trusting people at all.
That's relevant.
It is.
Yes, it is.
We're giving our intro segment.
So, right.
That's us done for the week.
When we next meet you all, we'll be chatting about Robin DiAngelo.
So you've got that to look forward to.
Yeah.
And in the meantime, take care of your epistemic trust network.
Prune it with caution and diligence.
Stay away from black, red, or whatever, blue pills.
Just don't take any pills.
Stay away from those pills.
They're a bad idea.
They don't lead any more good.
Just say no to pills.
Just say no, yeah.
And then avoid the Weinsteinian wormholes that are lurking out there in the cosmos.
Indeed, indeed.
But it's still important to consider the disc and...
Note the gin.
Note the gin, Matt.
That's it.
That is important.
And thank you for mentioning.
And thank you for being here.
Without you, it would have been hard.
It would have been much harder.
The interview would probably be the way to see it, but the rest of it would have been much more difficult.
Without me, you'd be ranting and raving in an empty room.
People would think you're insane.
But I'm here, so it's okay.
It's socially acceptable.
I wouldn't be doing that.
Yeah, I'm not monologuing.
God, that would be horrifying.
So, yeah, alright.
So, everybody thank Matt for the existence of the podcast on Twitter or elsewhere, and we'll see you next time.
