April 30, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| There are a lot of people on the anti-work side who don't believe in free speech. | ||
| They don't believe in debating people's ideas. | ||
| They believe in destroying people. | ||
| There are a lot of people who are unwilling to have a discussion with somebody. | ||
| They disagree and they spend their entire time owning people. | ||
| Now, I go on the BBC and make them look bad and we'll put a clip out, but that's not who I am and it's not what I do, right? | ||
| And I think generally... Look, it's hard to be... We talked about it earlier. | ||
| It's hard to be anti-something and be constructive. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and we are at the local studio here in Miami and joining me today is the | ||
| co-host of the Trigonometry podcast and author of An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West, | ||
| Constantine Kisson. | ||
| Konstantin, this is bizarre that we have never met in person before. | ||
| And it is awesome that we now have. | ||
| We have. | ||
| What should we do now? | ||
| Let's talk. | ||
| Let's talk about stuff. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I think some people sort of think you are like the British version of me in a way. | ||
| So, what's the deal? | ||
| Well, I have a sidekick. | ||
| Give me a little history of your situation. | ||
| Listen, I'll be honest with you, man. | ||
| I'm going to spill the beans. | ||
| I used to watch your show religiously, particularly 2017, 2018. | ||
| Those crazy formative years. | ||
| Yeah, and I thought what you were doing was incredible. | ||
| And you showed what was possible for somebody who is independent minded, who wanted to come in and, you know, interview interesting people from a position of perhaps not knowing very much. | ||
| And so I said to my buddy Francis, why don't we do something like this? | ||
| It is genuinely seeing you and Joe, you know, have these conversations was an incredible influence. | ||
| And so I'm delighted to be here with you. | ||
| Well, I'm glad that you are. | ||
| Was nobody really doing that in the UK yet? | ||
| The more independent-minded stuff? | ||
| Obviously, there's a gajillion chat shows and the UK has a long history of long-form interviews and that kind of thing. | ||
| Yeah, I can't think of the top. | ||
| There are people, there are other people who have slightly different conversations, but I think that mix of levity with seriousness and that is something that is kind of interesting because we're both former stand-ups. | ||
| And Frances still does stand up. | ||
| And I think that gives you something because you've always got a way to release tension if you need to. | ||
| And for us, it's been very important because, you know, we interviewed a woman, Dr. Ella Hill, who's a survivor of one of these grooming gangs. | ||
| I don't know if you're familiar with them. | ||
| And we interviewed her for an hour. | ||
| And this isn't really anything to do with us, but nonetheless, it's an interview about a victim of the most heinous crimes Which is funny. | ||
| It's funny, right? | ||
| And that, I think, is the magic sauce. | ||
| Was she ready to be funny about it? | ||
| Yeah, it's all down to her. | ||
| We were just able to play along, that's all. | ||
| So you're out of the stand-up game, huh? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I hated the lifestyle. | ||
| I enjoyed being on stage, but driving around for hours and all of that... | ||
| That's funny, because for me too, I loved, loved, loved doing stand-up. | ||
| You know, I do gigs still here and there and book tours and that kind of thing. | ||
| It was never the being on stage or being at the comedy clubs. | ||
| It was everything else. | ||
| It was the life that it could lead to that I couldn't deal with, which I think is why so many comics end up on drugs or dead, basically. | ||
| Look, there are harder lives, obviously. | ||
| Working in rice fields, maybe. | ||
| You know, getting home at 2am, waking up at, you know, 10 the next day is just not... I can't do it. | ||
| And now you and I are both fathers, so it's not for me. | ||
| When lockdown happened in the UK, it forced me to really, really evaluate it. | ||
| And my wife, we've been married for 20 years. | ||
| We have the most beautiful relationship. | ||
| But I was working so hard because we were trying to get trigonometry off the ground. | ||
| We were doing stand-up, both of us. | ||
| Francis was doing great. | ||
| Oh, wow, you married a comic, too. | ||
| Well, no, my... I married a comic? | ||
| No, no, I'm talking about Francis. | ||
| Oh, I thought you said my wife. | ||
| I thought you said my wife. | ||
| We did stand-up. | ||
| She did stand-up. | ||
| Yeah, sorry, I maybe misspoke. | ||
| Maybe Francis is my wife at this point. | ||
| No, what was happening was basically both Francis and I were working extremely hard. | ||
| And by the time lockdown came, even though my wife and I have a beautiful relationship, it was kind of like lockdown sort of, I wouldn't say it saved our marriage, but our son certainly wouldn't have been born without it. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Because suddenly I was like, oh, oh, I'm at home now. | ||
| And maybe I should actually spend some time with this person that I claim to love. | ||
| So either I misheard you or you referred to him as your wife. | ||
| In either case, one of us is not looking very good here. | ||
| Well, it's probably me. | ||
| Probably not, probably not. | ||
| So for people that don't know you, don't know your work, can you just talk a little bit about your sort of childhood and into what got you into sort of the cultural, political thing that we're kind of in the mix of and then we'll hit the issues of the day. | ||
| Well, the short version of it is I was born in the Soviet Union in the late 80s into a family that I was imbued from a very young age with stories of my ancestors, people who starved in the gulags for saying the wrong thing or who were really severely punished. | ||
| My grandfather, the way I ended up in the UK, is my parents, they were very wealthy for like three years and in that time gap they sent me to boarding school in England because my grandfather was there. | ||
| And the reason my grandfather was there was that in the late 70s, early 80s he criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. | ||
| And he was immediately ostracized by his friends, fired from work, his wife was fired from work, his children, that's my father and my aunt, were kicked out of university for him making this one comment in private. | ||
| And so, when it came to living in the UK and doing stand-up, and I saw this climate that was happening where suddenly, it was very, very sudden, at least to me, because I wasn't paying that much attention, Suddenly words became this all-powerful thing that was to be treated with the utmost seriousness. | ||
| And jokes could not be treated as jokes. | ||
| If you made a joke that people didn't like, they couldn't just say, oh, that's not funny. | ||
| Now you had to be punished. | ||
| And in addition to that, you know, the one thing that I really, as an immigrant to the UK, I found very unpleasant was This idea that all our social problems, whether that's Brexit or Trump or whatever, can be explained by claiming that people are racist. | ||
| And that's when I came across your show, actually, because I was trying to understand, because I'd lived in England for most of my teenage life and all my adult life. | ||
| And I'm a dark-skinned immigrant, I experienced racism once or twice, but I never felt like it was a racist country. | ||
| And so when a referendum like Brexit, where I voted Remain, by the way, you couldn't vote for Hillary in 2016, and Francis did too as well, we both did. | ||
| When the explanation for that, that was being offered to us, was that half the country was... I was just like, no, this is BS, this isn't true. | ||
| And that, I think, is part of the reason that we really started to look at these things, because we felt our own industry change, and also we looked around at society and we just went, something is off, we're being told a bunch of lies. | ||
| And quite nasty ones as well, you know, for Francis particularly, His father is an evil straight white man who married a woman from Venezuela in the 80s when that was not the done thing in England. | ||
| And he voted Brexit and she was suddenly demonized. | ||
| And that picture of our societies is so inaccurate that it was very frustrating, and I think trigonometry is partly born out of that frustration. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's interesting because I wasn't talking about Brexit that much at first, but then because of the Trump situation here, I started having a couple people from the UK and some Americans that were talking about Brexit, and then suddenly I had all these people in the UK watching, and I was like, I didn't even intend that. | ||
| But there was definitely a connection between Brexit and the Trump thing, for sure. | ||
| There was, and the cultural forces that swirl around those issues are largely the same. | ||
| Now, you guys do politics very differently to the way that we do, but fundamentally, the way I see it, it was a sort of, it was a rebellion of the people. | ||
| Whether it was channeled in the right way is a different conversation, but people certainly in the UK felt that a lot of their concerns were not being, not only heard, but they weren't even being aired. | ||
| And so that, I think, is why those two issues are very similar. | ||
| And did that change your politics then, once you saw the reaction to Brexit? | ||
| I mean, I think, like, if I was to somewhat try to pin you, I guess I would say you're a classical liberal. | ||
| It has a slightly different connotation from a UK perspective. | ||
| I have a hard time, even though I wrote a whole book defending liberalism, from an American perspective, it's almost ridiculous to call myself a liberal at this point, just because people don't understand the words anymore. | ||
| But did that shift your political ideology? | ||
| I think it maybe did a little bit, but mainly I've become clearer about what I think. | ||
| When we started Trigonometry in early 2018, I wasn't someone who was politically educated. | ||
| I studied politics in university, but it wasn't something where I had a political philosophy. | ||
| You know, I was a guy who did jokes about being Russian on stage for a living. | ||
| That's what I did. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it wasn't something that I really had thought about very much, and that's the beauty of what we do, is we get to be educated by our guests. | ||
| That's what I really enjoy about it. | ||
| But in terms of where I am now, It's hard to place because a lot of, it's a sad thing to say, but a lot of what I do is being in opposition to things. | ||
| And it's actually something I've been thinking and talking about a lot of getting past that because we're going to have to. | ||
| But up until this point, you know, I say that I reject wokeness because I'm a liberal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That is my position. | ||
| It's the most illiberal ideology out permeating throughout the West right now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I reject it also because I don't believe in discrimination. | ||
| And if you believe in actual equality of opportunity and that people should be treated equally irrespective of who they are, you cannot possibly be woke. | ||
| It's not possible, right? | ||
| It's also not possible, of course, to go in the other direction, but that's about where I am. | ||
| And in terms of Where I am in terms of what I see from a positive side, it gets much harder because I don't really... I'm not ideological. | ||
| I sort of pick positions based on whether that particular thing makes sense to me. | ||
| And so on certain things, people would place me probably on... Because now believing in a border makes you right-wing, now I'm on the right, I suppose, on that issue. | ||
| On others, I'm very liberal. | ||
| Socially, in particular. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, which is odd to me also, not odd to me, but it's interesting to me to see this realignment because here I am in Florida. | ||
| I'm married to a man, father. | ||
| I'm fully, wholly embraced by everything going on here in this sort of new freedom conservative movement. | ||
| And if you were to listen to the media, this is the most homophobic, racist, bigoted, backwards place in the world. | ||
| And from where I sit, it's literally the freest As DeSantis says, the citadel of freedom right now. | ||
| Well, I've only been here for a day, so I haven't had much of a chance to find out. | ||
| But they haven't come to get you yet. | ||
| They haven't. | ||
| And what's interesting to me is that we're sort of in a position now, because we've been lied to so much and because the words have been debased, To such an extent. | ||
| They could say that, you know, DeSantis is whatever. | ||
| I wouldn't be likely to believe it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I actually think that's such a... That's a damn shame, right? | ||
| It's not just a shame. | ||
| It's very dangerous, in my opinion, because if you look... Look, I was not a fan of Donald Trump. | ||
| I remain not a fan of Donald Trump. | ||
| But as someone whose Jewish ancestors fought on the Eastern Front to defeat Nazi Germany, It is an insult to them and to me to imply that this guy, whatever your view of his politics, whose daughter married a Jewish man who he then appointed to serve him, | ||
| He is a Nazi. | ||
| He hates Jews. | ||
| He's anti-Semitic. | ||
| It's an insult. | ||
| And it's dangerous because the problem we have is some people are Nazis. | ||
| And we have to be able to say, that's a Nazi, that's not a Nazi, and for that to be believed. | ||
| And so this erosion of languages, people don't understand how dangerous it is. | ||
| I think it is genuinely a major issue. | ||
| You know, one of the things that I said, I think, the day after Trump was elected, and I didn't vote for him the first time, I did the second time. | ||
| I said, you know, guys, let's pause for a second here because let's see what happens. | ||
| But once you keep calling him Hitler and all his supporters Nazis, it's not what you're doing to them. | ||
| It's what you're doing to yourself because you're painting yourself in a corner. | ||
| Now, if the economy is doing well and we're not going to war, I mean, a bunch of things that were happening under him, you can't suddenly be like, you know, that Hitler. | ||
| Pretty good. | ||
| Pretty, you know, pretty good, right? | ||
| And so that, I think, has led to a lot of the hysteria. | ||
| It has. | ||
| And, you know, I think while you and I wouldn't be sitting here without social media, social media has had a big impact on the way we communicate, and not in a good way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you see it as a net negative, actually? | ||
| I always struggle with that. | ||
| It's like, wow, look at my life, look what I've been able to do, and all the people I've been able to connect with, and the new ideas that we can all share, or even old ideas that we can finally share in a sensible way. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And yet, the anxiety, the craziness, the doom scrolling. | ||
| Obviously you and I being able to sit here and have this conversation is worth society being screwed for the next few decades. | ||
| I think we're living through the next information revolution. | ||
| The invention of the printing press, you get two centuries of religious war and all that craziness. | ||
| That's what we're going through now. | ||
| Can you stop this? | ||
| I mean, there was a guy who tried called Ted. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| So I think what we have to do is make the best of what we've got. | ||
| But that starts with acknowledging the sort of problems that social media has caused because we now live in a world where Making sure that what you say sounds good is much more important than being a good person. | ||
| And that's a problem. | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| Because you know from, I don't know if this is the same in here, but on the British comedy circuit, anyone who was really nice on stage was probably groping a woman in the green room. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| It's always the biggest feminists on stage that are... Exactly. | ||
| And vice versa. | ||
| The people whose material was grotesque and offensive and whatever, they're usually the people that actually were really decent behind the scenes. | ||
| And the other thing is, you know, sometimes I think people wonder why our institutions have been so captured and I think a big part of the reason is progressive ideas sound good. | ||
| All things to all men, I mean, you know, equality for everybody and, you know, I grew up in the Soviet Union, we saw all that, but we didn't have social media. | ||
| Now, the problem with a lot of the classically liberal and conservative ideas is they don't sound good. | ||
| What, I have to take responsibility for my life? | ||
| What, I have agency? | ||
| What, some things are my fault? | ||
| Who wants to hear that? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, they do sound good once you're a little older, but I suppose when you're 15 they don't sound good, and now people are perpetually 15. | ||
| I think that's exactly what's going on. | ||
| And so, yeah, we're all going to, as a society, have to come up with some answers to what we do about it. | ||
| Do you see any of it as a fault or a flaw within classical liberalism itself? | ||
| I mean, when I've watched so many, and I want to talk about a moment on your podcast that really went viral with Sam Harris, but when I've seen so many of sort of the old school libs just kind of collapse under this thing and either go woke or become largely irrelevant because they can't make sense of the new world, do you think that there's like an actually inherent problem with classical liberalism? | ||
| Well, I think the people you're talking about, what you'd call libs, what in the UK we would call center-left. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So that's why the words can be a little confusing. | ||
| But I think people will know what we mean. | ||
| I think their problem is they don't want to be me and they don't want to be you. | ||
| That's their problem, and they're cowards. | ||
| They're terrified. | ||
| They're terrified of the extremists on their own team and so they won't speak up. | ||
| And when they do, what happens? | ||
| They get called right-wing and all the rest of it. | ||
| So a lot of them, you know, we saw your journey and we were inspired by that. | ||
| A lot of people see your journey or our journey and they're very put off by that. | ||
| They don't want to be called names that they're uncomfortable with. | ||
| So I think it's that. | ||
| Did you have a moment where you decided to walk through the fire? | ||
| Because I think about, people always ask me about that and I don't know that I, I know I had my wake up moments, you know, my moment with Larry Elder and this or that, but I don't know that I had like an actual moment like sitting down with myself being like, let's just go through. | ||
| I just, I just kept going. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it was never that hard for me if I'm being honest. | ||
| You know, when you've got grandparents who spent 15 years in the gulag for saying the wrong thing, when you come from a country in which people were beaten to death and tortured to death and executed for speaking their mind, it's not, you know, people say, people say, oh, you're so brave. | ||
| Come on, that's silly. | ||
| So I was never really that scared. | ||
| Plus, I'm a contrarian asshole, so I like pissing people off. | ||
| I like saying the thing that people don't want to hear, even that is true and that needs to be said. | ||
| So I embrace... I'm quite a combative person by nature. | ||
| I try to temper that, but I quite like it, to be honest. | ||
| I wouldn't have it any other way. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| I think one of the things that kept me sane throughout this was I didn't do this for friends. | ||
| And I think a lot of people do a lot of this for friends and to be liked, and it's nice to be liked. | ||
| I'm not saying it isn't. | ||
| But my best two friends, one of them I met the first day of kindergarten, 1981, and one of them I met the first day of third grade, you know, a couple years after that. | ||
| So as I saw people kind of like me and then they suddenly didn't like me, I was just kind of like, all right, well. | ||
| And it's still painful. | ||
| I remember you going through that. | ||
| I remember you would talk a lot about, you know, this friend and that friend, and I understand that. | ||
| For me it was easier because, if I'm being honest, I never liked 99% of the people I was working with. | ||
| It must be nice being a total contrarian. | ||
| I would say I'm like a begrudging contrarian or something, but there must be something very refreshing about the full thing. | ||
| I like the space I'm in now. | ||
| I really get on with people in this space because we operate in the same way. | ||
| But comedians tend to process the world through emotions, and I don't. | ||
| And I get very tired of people who believe things because those things make them feel good as opposed to because they're true. | ||
| So when I was doing stand-up, I would leave a gig the moment I was done, 90% of the time. | ||
| You didn't want to sit down with all the alcoholics and complain about all the problems in the world and not have a dollar between you? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| And you know, even though I'm an adopted Brit, I have a much more American attitude about life. | ||
| I want to be successful. | ||
| I want to be great. | ||
| I want to be the best at what I do. | ||
| I don't mean, you know, have the most subscribers. | ||
| I want to get better. | ||
| I want to improve. | ||
| I want to create. | ||
| I want to build a team. | ||
| I want to build a business. | ||
| I want to build a YouTube channel. | ||
| And that's not an attitude you're allowed to have in the British sort of creative arts, you know. | ||
| It's funny, I remember I met a guy who I haven't seen for a long time and he had just opened on tour for Ricky Gervais, which is a huge achievement, right? | ||
| Huge achievement. | ||
| And I was like, oh man, congratulations. | ||
| He was like, oh yeah, I got really lucky. | ||
|
unidentified
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I was like... | |
| What do you mean? | ||
| I've seen you work for 10 years. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But we do have that sort of, you know, you've got to play yourself down a little bit in the UK, and I can't do that. | ||
| So let's talk about one of the guys, and you said to me right before, you know my rules, I have no rules on this show, and you said to me right before we started that you have no rules in essence, but you don't like to talk bad about former guests, and I try not to do that as well. | ||
| But I want to show a clip. | ||
| That will be tested over time. | ||
| It will be, right, right. | ||
| I hate to tell you it's going to really be tested the longer you do this, but in any event, we played a clip. | ||
| We played two, I think, two clips from you over the last year. | ||
| I want to show people both of them. | ||
| The first one I want to show, throw to, is you guys had Sam Harris on the podcast. | ||
| This is, what, about six months ago now? | ||
| He was he was closer to a year ago was sort of August July August | ||
| I thought it's about eight months or so ago Whatever it is our last trip to the do you want to set it | ||
| up in any way or should we just throw to it? | ||
| And then we'll no you go for it. All right, so let's throw to the clip | ||
| I mean a hunter Biden at that point a hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his | ||
| basement I would not have cared right? | ||
| It's like, there's nothing. | ||
| First of all, it's Hunter Biden, right? | ||
| It's not, it's like, it's not Joe Biden, but even if Joe, like even whatever scope of Joe Biden's corruption is, like if you, if we could just go down that rabbit hole endlessly and, and understand that he's getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden's deals in Ukraine or wherever else, right? | ||
| Or China. | ||
| It is infinitesimal. | ||
| Compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in. | ||
| It's like a firefly to the sun. | ||
| It doesn't even stack up against Trump University. | ||
| Trump University, as a story, is worse than anything that could be in Hunter Biden's laptop, in my view. | ||
| Now that doesn't answer the people who say it's still completely unfair To not have looked at the laptop in a timely way and to have shut down the New York Post's Twitter account. | ||
| That's a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump. | ||
| Absolutely it was. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But I think it was warranted. | ||
| And again, it's a coin toss as to whether or not that particular piece... Sam, I'm sorry. | ||
| I'm really sorry. | ||
| I was the one that said we should move on, but you've just said something I really struggle with, which is... | ||
| The kids in the basement? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Fuck the kids in the basement. | ||
| I'm interested in democracy. | ||
| You're saying you're content with a left-wing conspiracy to prevent somebody being democratically re-elected as president. | ||
| Well, no, I'm content. | ||
| But the thing is, it's just not left-wing, right? | ||
| So Liz Cheney is not left-wing, right? | ||
| Liz Cheney is doing everything in her power. | ||
| You're content with a conspiracy to prevent somebody being democratically elected? | ||
| No, but there's nothing... Conspiracy, it's not... It was a conspiracy out in the open, but it doesn't matter if it was... It doesn't matter what part's conspiracy, what part's out in the open. | ||
| I mean, I think it's like... If people get together and talk about what should we do about this phenomenon, you know, it's like... If there was an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, And we got in a room together with all of our friends and had a conversation about what we could do to deflect its course, right? | ||
| Is that a conspiracy? | ||
| Man, that is something, because I know that Sam obviously was influential in your political and, I guess, cultural evolution, and you sort of tried to save him there, but... Well, I like Sam a lot, and I would say that out of all the guests that we've ever had on the show, he's probably been Present company accepted. | ||
| The nicest person that we've had in terms of... We actually on that day had massive tech issues and he sat there for 40 minutes waiting for us to get the camera rolling. | ||
| He was incredibly... And he made us feel really comfortable about that. | ||
| So, on a personal level, I really like Sam. | ||
| And that's why, you know, I was sort of... Sam, there's a cliff there. | ||
| Please don't walk off it. | ||
| And, you know, his comments speak for themselves. | ||
| I thought that... | ||
| I disagree with what he said fundamentally, and I think you could see that on both our faces. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But you were trying to sort of save him, but the only reason I'm really showing it is not to bash him, it truly isn't, but it seemed like almost in some ways a final nail in the coffin on this odd adventure that he's been on intellectually over the last couple years, going all in on the Trump hate that you described earlier related to other people. | ||
| Or thanking Jack Dorsey for banning Donald Trump on Twitter when the whole idea of what we were all doing was in free speech. | ||
| So that's why I think the moment caught fire the way that it did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think the reason that clip went super viral was that... | ||
| Sam showed people the thing that they always suspected was there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Motivating the thing. | ||
| And it's a hard one because, you know, the first thing I did actually after it happened is email Sam and just make sure he was okay because It's not easy. | ||
| You mean after it had gone viral? | ||
| After it had gone viral, just to make sure that, you know, he was okay because I wouldn't want a guest to come on the show and then, you know, who knows what happens from there. | ||
| I was kind of concerned, to be honest, but he was very generous and actually he said he thought we did a great job. | ||
| Yeah, I think with that, my fundamental disagreement with Sam about this is that It's a threat misassessment, in my opinion. | ||
| And if you exaggerate the threat in your head, you're then willing to take actions that you otherwise would not, and violate principles that you otherwise would not. | ||
| And we saw this, as you know, during COVID. | ||
| People get scared, people overestimate the nature of the threat, and then the reaction they demand from their government, or they themselves have, is just completely out of whack. | ||
| And so, destroying democracy to prevent Donald Trump, that doesn't make sense to me personally. | ||
| Right, so let's talk about the COVID thing a little bit because obviously it has framed almost everything over the last couple of years. | ||
| I went radically anti-mandate and pro-freedom, literally moved my entire life across the country in the midst of it because of all of the craziness. | ||
| I sense you're in a similar spot when it came to mandates and things of that matter, but What was your evolution like related to all this? | ||
| I supported the first lockdown in the UK. | ||
| We didn't know what was going on. | ||
| And we were told it was very dangerous. | ||
| And while we should all be skeptical, of course, of what the mainstream media tell us in that sort of situation, I do think as a responsible citizen, you do have a duty to at least consider it. | ||
| And remember, what we were told in the UK is, this is going to be three weeks, we're going to solve the problem, everything is fine. | ||
| And they told you three weeks. | ||
| We got two weeks. | ||
| Two weeks. | ||
| They told us either two weeks or 15 days. | ||
| They were always working with one extra day. | ||
| The longest three weeks in human history those turned out to be. | ||
| So in the beginning I supported the first lockdown, you know, but from there I just felt that we went in a dystopian direction very, very quickly. | ||
| And on the basis of data that to me didn't seem reasonable, we were forced to wear these face nappies that don't do anything, as we know. | ||
| And not only do we know that now, we knew that before. | ||
| We knew that before, right? | ||
| And I think it signals to me something I talk about in the book actually. | ||
| That we are importing ways of doing business that are fundamentally anti-Western. | ||
| And we have this from the UK. | ||
| Neil Ferguson, not the historian who we love, but the guy who was essentially behind advising the government to have the lockdowns. | ||
| He was a scientist in the UK. | ||
| Oh, that must have been tough for our Neil Ferguson. | ||
| Yeah, I imagine so. | ||
| So he said in, I think it's a Times article, that we didn't know lockdowns were possible until we saw what the Chinese were doing. | ||
| I mean, what a horrific... And I think this speaks to something else. | ||
| You know, one of the things I mention in the book is most people don't... Do you know where political correctness comes from? | ||
| The term itself. | ||
| The term political correctness? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| The Soviet Union. | ||
| And it never had anything to do with protecting the rights of minorities and not offending people or being nice or anything like that. | ||
| It was a very simple thing to tell people like my ancestors, Comrade, this may be factually correct, but it is politically incorrect. | ||
| And what that means is you are not adhering to the party line, right? | ||
| And to me, the fact that we adopted a Chinese-style response to that sort of threat. | ||
| Signals that we are moving in an authoritarian direction. | ||
| And the thing that scared me most, this is, look, this is not a popular thing to say, but I think it's true, at least in our country. | ||
| It wasn't the politicians that did this. | ||
| It was the people. | ||
| They wanted this. | ||
| Poll after poll after poll after poll. | ||
| You know, 20% of people want nightclubs shut down permanently, irrespective of COVID. | ||
| Irrespective of COVID, Dave. | ||
| They want to shut down things just because there's an opportunity to do so. | ||
| Wear masks on public transport, 40% or 30%, forever. | ||
| It doesn't matter if there's COVID. | ||
| You know, we shot the bed. | ||
| And I'm really uncomfortable with what happened. | ||
| You know what day it was for me that I realized what nonsense it was? | ||
| Because I'm with you. | ||
| The first two weeks, I granted everybody a long leash. | ||
| And I can even grant, in retrospect, I can even grant a longer leash. | ||
| We were so hit in the head. | ||
| It was the first time we had dealt with this. | ||
| I think we've all learned a lot and hopefully a certain portion of us won't do it again. | ||
| But for me, it really was day 15. | ||
| Once they said two weeks to stop the spread and we rolled into day 15, Because it changed overnight. | ||
| They kept saying the new normal. | ||
| And once I started hearing the new normal everywhere, it was on commercials, it was on NBC, CNN, I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. | ||
| Something else is going on here. | ||
| And then that clearly bore out to be true. | ||
| But what do you think that says about human nature or the spiritual side of what's going on here? | ||
| That we actually wanted it. | ||
| And from an American perspective, I don't know if this is quite true from a UK perspective, We re-voted. | ||
| We voted in a lot of the same people that did this. | ||
| Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, the list goes on and on. | ||
| Well, we know this throughout history. | ||
| I sort of joked during the pandemic at some point that, you know, this is at least the one thing that hasn't happened yet is we haven't blamed the Jews. | ||
| But we did just about everything. | ||
| It was just about everything else, right? | ||
| So when people are scared, when people, when bad things are going on, people, you know, The instincts come out and the worst side comes out and it's like human beings, you know, on an individual level, when you're having a bad day, all your worst aspects of your personality are magnified and the best ones are dampened, right? | ||
| And I'll tell you what it was for me. | ||
| For me, it was what happened over BLM in the UK. | ||
| That really showed me that this is a complete nonsense because we had this first lockdown, which I and almost everybody obeyed to the letter and had a lot of respect for. | ||
| There was another moment when the sun first came out. | ||
| It's a rare occurrence in England. | ||
| And some people had the temerity to go outside and sunbathe. | ||
| My God. | ||
| And this was, by this point, it was very clear that this virus does not spread well outdoors. | ||
| And I said on Twitter that, you know, I think people should be allowed to sunbathe. | ||
| And I don't know what I could compare it to, the reaction that I got. | ||
| So I thought people were starting to lose their minds. | ||
| But then we saw the whole country having been locked down for this entire time. | ||
| BLM happens, and suddenly protests outside without masks are a public health intervention? | ||
| They were actually pro-public health, that's what we were told here, because racism was a bigger problem. | ||
| They're to be celebrated, they're to be encouraged. | ||
| If you want to live in a Western liberal democracy in which people are judged on the content of their character, that can't happen. | ||
| That can't happen. | ||
| And to me, that was the moment when I just went, okay, this is done. | ||
| And to the point where, you know, we were, I remember going to speaking at a protest in Parliament Square outside the Houses of Parliament in London. | ||
| When they were trying to force medical staff to have a vaccine in order to remain in their post. | ||
| And it's interesting, I've never told this story publicly, or maybe, no, I don't think I have. | ||
| When my wife gave birth, she had quite a long and difficult labor, and it was supposed to be at home, she wanted to give birth at home, but we had to go to hospital because it wasn't going well. | ||
| And it was a long and difficult and scary and all the rest of it. | ||
| But as it was looking like, you know, things were going to get really bad, this midwife came in who was a higher level midwife than the other ones. | ||
| And she was like this angel. | ||
| She was incredible and she helped my wife give birth naturally. | ||
| It was just like she fixed the thing. | ||
| It was beautiful. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| And afterwards, all the other midwives had left and she was just filling out some forms and she was asking us various questions. | ||
| And my wife, who was pregnant at the time the vaccine came out, wasn't going to have it. | ||
| And this midwife is reading the thing. | ||
| She goes, oh, this, asking various questions. | ||
| Then she said, are you vaccinated? | ||
| And I, you know, I, my wife's just given birth. | ||
| I'm sort of trying to look after her. | ||
| I don't want to, you know, but equally, I don't want, you know, this medical professional to think that we're the wackos and Whatever. | ||
| So I said, well, you know, we were pregnant and I start sort of fumbling for an answer that will please both sides, which is unlike me. | ||
| And she said, don't worry, I'm not vaccinated. | ||
| And we had a conversation. | ||
| I said, so you must have felt really bad when the government was trying to force you to be vaccinated. | ||
| And she said, I was going to quit. | ||
| That woman would not have been there if the government had carried on with that program. | ||
| And so for all the crap we took for standing up on that issue, I felt that to me was the ultimate vindication that that happened. | ||
| It's a story that I really appreciate and think about a lot. | ||
| And that's when we talked about being brave and whatever. | ||
| It's nonsense. | ||
| We all got to say what we believe. | ||
| So since the woke thing is kind of what I think has really put you on the map, do you see the precursor to COVID with all of the woke craziness that we were dealing with before COVID? | ||
| Then COVID comes, now everyone's brains are completely broken. | ||
| Does it seem like sort of fairly obvious to you that we're at where we're at right now? | ||
| That if you had three years or whatever we had of like hardcore wokeness online, then we get three years of COVID. | ||
| And now we're just in this like post-COVID woke broken weirdness. | ||
| Yeah, I think COVID broke a lot of people's brains, left and right. | ||
| Because you and I both know social media is not good for you. | ||
| And we all spent three years just downloading Twitter into our heads. | ||
| A lot of people did. | ||
| So I think that's had a huge impact. | ||
| But I think the bigger question is, We don't have a shared consensus anymore. | ||
| We don't. | ||
| And how can you, how can you have a, you know, you talk about classical liberalism, that means, part of that means the ability to discuss ideas and debate ideas. | ||
| How can you debate ideas if you don't agree on reality, right? | ||
| There is no basis in reality. | ||
| And I actually, it's interesting because I don't know if you saw Gavin Newsom's non-campaign campaign ads recently. | ||
| Oh, I saw them. | ||
| You saw them? | ||
| We played them. | ||
| I don't know if you know that. | ||
| I don't like that. | ||
| Yeah, I imagine so. | ||
| But what I found interesting about that is he was using all the quote-unquote tropes of people on the right. | ||
| And so he's basically saying, I believe in freedom. | ||
| No, it's incredible that he has the gall to put any of this in his mouth. | ||
| And everyone's the reverse of the truth. | ||
| We went through the list. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But there are people who believe that. | ||
| And there are people on the other side who believe the opposite. | ||
| And so, that lack of shared consensus is really where the problem's at. | ||
| So, you got a solution on that? | ||
| I mean, I talk about this all the time. | ||
| What do we do about that? | ||
| I mean, I think it was a very tactical move that Gavin did that, to use the words freedom, to talk about all of the things that are happening in Florida as if they're negative relative to freedom. | ||
| And that we're the ones banning books, not true. | ||
| It's actually him trying to find Tequila Mockingbird in California state schools. | ||
| All of these things, you know, women's rights and your own body. | ||
| It's like, wait, you were the one trying to inject everybody with your stuff. | ||
| You know, all the nonsense. | ||
| But what do we do with that as that continues to break down? | ||
| I oscillate between two different thoughts on this. | ||
| I've talked a lot about the post-Woke future, because to me, a lot of the people who I would hope were on our side once, I see them as equally abominable now as the Woke. | ||
| The anti-Woke is becoming a parody of itself. | ||
| What would be an example of that? | ||
| There are many examples of that. | ||
| I mean, there are a lot of people on the anti-work side who don't believe in free speech. | ||
| They don't believe in debating people's ideas. | ||
| They believe in destroying people. | ||
| There are a lot of people who are unwilling to have a discussion with somebody. | ||
| They disagree and they spend their entire time owning people. | ||
| Now, I go on the BBC and make them look bad and we'll put a clip out, but that's not who I am and it's not what I do, right? | ||
| And I think, generally, Look, it's hard to be, we talked about earlier, it's hard to be anti-something and be constructive. | ||
| It's hard, objectively. | ||
| And so, for me, the answer, when I talk about going for a post-work future, culturally at least, what that means to me is I don't believe, before we started we talked about the NBA, which was very heavily politicized. | ||
| I don't think the average person wants to turn on the NBA and watch a bunch of players talking about BLM. | ||
| I also, by the way, don't think you want to turn on the NBA and watch a bunch of players talking about how CRT is destroying schools and all of that. | ||
| I have this strange feeling they want to watch some basketball. | ||
| Dribble the damn ball? | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Well, you know, that is a loaded phrase now because of who uttered it. | ||
| But for me, you know, I think people want to enjoy the content. | ||
| I think that is also true of drama, of comedy, of all of these things. | ||
| So as people crave that more and more, I think that's where we're going to end up. | ||
| And I think it behooves comedians and people who are in the creative space to try and Perhaps you attack both sides and therefore bring them together, or bring them together just by bringing them together, by focusing on the things that are common to all people, on the story. | ||
| Drama, for example, doesn't have to be anti-woke or woke, it just has to be good. | ||
| And the problem, certainly I don't know about this country, but in the UK with comedy, it just got ruined by You know, Mock the Week, which was a huge show. | ||
| Mash Report, which was a huge show that I used to write on, actually. | ||
| They both got destroyed by being excessively political in one direction and also by an artificial focus on people's faces instead of how good they were at writing or performing or whatever. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I think part of the answer just lies into not going back, but going forward to a place where not everything has to be about politics. | ||
| And I think that's part of it. | ||
| However, You know, I was on Michael Malice's show recently and I was talking about how I'm concerned about what's happening in this country, just as an outsider observing about the heatedness of everything. | ||
| And he said, well, look, you're right, but I don't think there's a pressure valve release that's going to happen because, you know, if Trump runs, the heat is going to be higher and they're going to stop calling him fascist. | ||
| So, it's difficult. | ||
| I think culturally what we've got to do is play to the 80% of people in the middle who don't care about either. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Malice has sat in that very chair and said something very similar. | ||
| It's funny because he oscillates, I think, between that black pill and the book obviously was the white pill. | ||
| It seems to me we just have to figure out how to build new things and separate from them, that I agree with Malice. | ||
| They're never going to stop. | ||
| The question is, can we build fast enough To have lasting things before they take everything that was good from you and good from us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the one thing I'm really trying to think about a lot, and I think becoming a father really helped me with this, to become a little bit more empathetic to people, We were young and stupid once as well. | ||
| And these woke kids, they don't know any better. | ||
| I think we have to remember that they're open to persuasion. | ||
| You know, I don't know if you saw my Oxford Union speech. | ||
| Was that the other clip that I wanted to throw to you? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I really tried to speak to people in a way that they could hear. | ||
| And I think that's also part of what we've got to be doing. | ||
| We have to be less partisan ourselves. | ||
| We all do. | ||
| We all do. | ||
| And I think there are things that I agree with left-wing people on and there are things that I agree with right-wing people on and I try to just find that middle and speak to them. | ||
| And one of the things that therefore happens is I kind of deliberately actually piss off elements of our audience. | ||
| We both do, on purpose, to sort of to prune the extremists. | ||
| And I think that's the way you culturally do that. | ||
| Whether our politics can survive the social media age, that's a very different conversation. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's interesting because when I was going through my political awakening and the show was taking off and then I suddenly had all these lefties who once loved me now telling me I was a sellout and all this stuff. | ||
| It was like... | ||
| You mean I'm selling out to just get endless hate and like traverse this new area that I don't know what the hell is gonna happen and now like now there's this whole obviously sort of anti-woke thing but I was just like walking into the dark like I don't know if this any of this is gonna work I'm just doing what I think but usually people's People have a way of going after your motives. | ||
| You know what's interesting is the more you become a public figure to any extent, the more you realize how ridiculous what you think about other people is. | ||
| I know what Dave Rudin... I know you get a lot of shit because you started out, I'm on the left. | ||
| And now you picked a team to some extent, right? | ||
| In terms of politically at least, right? | ||
| I think you've got to pick a team to make things happen. | ||
| I absolutely do. | ||
| And you're perfectly entitled to the view. | ||
| But what's more, I don't understand why people can't understand that people change their mind over time and over experience. | ||
| I imagine it is not uncommon for someone who starts out and builds a very successful business To become more right-wing on the economy. | ||
| I mean, the more tax you pay, the more it hurts. | ||
| You know, 100%, I used to say this all the time, that my life was an example of the ideas that I was talking about on the show, because I agree with you. | ||
| I wasn't an expert in a lot of these things, but I was talking to Jordan and I was talking... | ||
| Sam and all these guys and then my career started taking off the business started being built I was dealing with taxes and employees and all these things and I have more of this sort of freedom set of ideas and I was like oh I'm putting these things into place but I'm trying to build a studio in a garage in LA. | ||
| Where they have 8,000 regulations and I can't put a vent over there and now it's too loud. | ||
| So all of the things that I was talking about I actually was living through and I think that that solidified a lot of it. | ||
| And that's why I never have any respect for people who make that argument about you or about others. | ||
| People are going to change their mind over time. | ||
| They're going to develop their own positions. | ||
| And if someone started out being liberal and then became a conservative, people do that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's quite a normal thing. | ||
| I mean, people have done this for millennia. | ||
| Although it's a little curious when people go the other way as they get older, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There aren't many examples of that, actually. | ||
| I mean, that one is harder to understand. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's harder to understand. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So let's throw, actually, to the Oxford Union speech that you mentioned. | ||
| How many views did this thing get? | ||
| It's hard to say, probably somewhere between 100 and 200 million views across different platforms. | ||
| Lordy, lordy. | ||
| All right, let's go. | ||
| And the only thing that wokeness has to offer in exchange is to brainwash bright young minds like you to believe that you are victims, to believe that you have no agency, to believe that what you must do to improve the world is to complain, is to protest, is to throw soup on paintings. | ||
| And we on this side of the house are not on this side of the house because we do not wish to improve the world. | ||
| We sit on this side of the house because we know that the way to improve the world is to work, is to create, it is to build. | ||
| And the problem with woke culture is that it's trained too many young minds like yours to forget about that. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| The brainwashing element is pretty interesting of this. | ||
| That that's hard to get people out of. | ||
| They feel like they have this kind of holistic worldview and that somehow everyone before them was an idiot or a moron. | ||
| That's the one I can't get over. | ||
| Yeah, to be honest, I think young people always think that about other generations. | ||
| You know that thing about when I was 20, my dad was an idiot? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And by the time I got 40, he really wisened up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, I think we all experience that at some level. | ||
| So, my issue is that, you know, look, culture is the brainwashing of young people. | ||
| That's what culture is. | ||
| It's a passing down of certain values and beliefs about What it is to be human and how we ought to conduct ourselves, right? | ||
| That's why you have an education system. | ||
| That's why you have cultural content. | ||
| That's why we teach children certain values. | ||
| We are quote-unquote brainwashing them. | ||
| My issue is that I've never understood this, you know, as a first generation immigrant. | ||
| I sort of, people want to tell me that I'm a victim and I've never understood. | ||
| And it doesn't really matter if it's true or not. | ||
| What matters is, is it useful? | ||
| And that's my issue with all of this stuff. | ||
| It's like, why are you teaching children things that will make them fail? | ||
| Why are you teaching children things that will make them hurt? | ||
| Things that will make them anxious? | ||
| Things that will make them depressed? | ||
| Why are you not teaching them Look, you believe in climate change, go for it, right? | ||
| Go and fix a problem to do with that issue. | ||
| Go and learn and study for years and work hard. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| Melissa Chen, I don't know... Oh, I know her well. | ||
| She's a good friend. | ||
| A wonderful person. | ||
| I love Melissa. | ||
| I think it was her that tweeted out something a long time ago. | ||
| She said, you can't remain woke if you build something, whether that's muscle, a business or anything. | ||
| And that's why I would challenge those young people, very bright young people at Oxford. | ||
| They're the future. | ||
| Whether you like it or not, they are going to be the people running our countries, right? | ||
| I challenge them to recognize that if you care about whatever the issue it is, you've got to fix it. | ||
| You can't just sit and mop. | ||
| Were you shocked how many students at Oxford are buying that stuff? | ||
| Because when I spoke there, it was a lovely talk and I did my thing and then there was some Q&A and I was getting some pushback on stuff. | ||
| But I didn't feel it had fully sort of proliferated throughout. | ||
| But I get the sense that it's deeper now. | ||
| That was probably five years ago when I was on tour. | ||
| Yeah, it's hard to say because you see, you know, 400 people or 500 people who came to see the debate. | ||
| So what the mix of it is, it's hard to say. | ||
| I did, you know, the thing that really I found very reassuring is I had a few people, people I know this, but the debate started like three hours later than it should have done. | ||
| So we ended up sitting in the pub waiting. | ||
| And there was this girl who came up to me and she could not believe, she said, so you think there are woke people in the UK? | ||
| And I went, yeah. | ||
| And she went, so you think there are woke people in the media? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And she was like, so give me an example. | ||
| And I give her an example. | ||
| And we went round and round for an hour. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Anyway, after the debate... You go, lady, I got a big talk to give you. | |
| After the debate, she comes over to me and asks for a selfie. | ||
| So, you know, we got to be willing to try to change people's minds. | ||
| And I have hope for young people, because I was young and stupid, and probably I'm still, to some extent, both those things. | ||
| And, you know, people are persuadable. | ||
| And you persuaded me, your guest persuaded me, and I believe that we can persuade others. | ||
| What about the people that are pushing it sort of, I don't want to say blindly, but did you see a clip about a month and a half ago on Real Time with Bill Maher where he asked Bernie Sanders if he knew the difference between equity and equality? | ||
| Did you happen to see the clip? | ||
| I didn't see that one, no. | ||
| So it's a really incredibly enlightening moment. | ||
| Do you know the difference between equity and equality? | ||
| I mean, it's basically saying to him, do you know the difference between socialism and capitalism, in essence? | ||
| And Bernie fumbles, fumbles, and then basically says, I don't know. | ||
| And Bill explains it to him. | ||
| And it's like, well, wait a minute. | ||
| You've been the prime mover of these ideas from an economic perspective, at least. | ||
| I don't think he realized how It was going to become racialized and sexualized and everything else. | ||
| But it was clear to me that he just didn't even know what he was talking about. | ||
| That doesn't surprise me. | ||
| I mentioned Bernie in An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West because it boggles my mind how anyone in this country takes him seriously. | ||
| This is a guy who honeymooned in the Soviet Union. | ||
| Where he would have had exactly the same experience as every other Westerner coming to the Soviet Union. | ||
| They would have been taken to some fake wedding where fake KGB agents were having a fake wedding and then they would be taken on some kind of trip. | ||
| Every movement would be controlled. | ||
| And these are the people who came back from the Soviet Union. | ||
| I can't remember if it was... | ||
| I don't want to slander dead people, but I can't remember who it was. | ||
| Somebody, one of these darlings of the left, came back from the Soviet Union in 1938, as millions of my countrymen and women were starving, and said, I've never eaten as well as I did in the Soviet Union. | ||
| These gullible clowns in the West who have never experienced socialism, | ||
| have never experienced communism, who sell simple but false ideas to people, | ||
| they don't deserve to be taken seriously. | ||
| They don't. | ||
| And they don't offer any solutions. | ||
| The solutions that they offer will be counterproductive and hurt people in this country and around the world. | ||
| It boggles my mind that people don't understand that, but they don't. | ||
| I know you've only been, how many days in America? | ||
| You're in Florida for a day, but you've been in America for a couple of days. | ||
| Yeah, we've been in America for a week and a bit now. | ||
| For about a week, and how much longer are you here? | ||
| Another week and a bit. | ||
| Alright, so you've got two some-odd weeks in America. | ||
| You're bouncing around to some different states, I assume. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Do you sense, or maybe it's a little premature, that the federalist system that we have here, where Florida can be so different, And California is the escape route of all of this. | ||
| That's really been my saving grace in all of this. | ||
| That by picking up, moving my life, my family, my businesses, etc., that I have roots now in a place that my ideas and the things that I care about can flourish. | ||
| And they couldn't flourish. | ||
| I didn't have to leave the country, in other words, where it would be trickier for someone from the UK or someone from Canada. | ||
| You're very mild in the way you describe it. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| It's not tricky. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| During COVID, there was no part of the country that was better than the one that I was living in. | ||
| And even within the European Union, which we're no longer members of. | ||
| Is that mind-blowing to you? | ||
| I mean, just knowing the UK is not unbelievably massive, but there's obviously some geographic variation, and London is very different than going out even two hours in any direction, that you don't have that much flexibility. | ||
| It's kind of the way in most countries, actually. | ||
| So what is mind-blowing to me is the incredible situation you've got here. | ||
| And I love it. | ||
| Of course, America, like any country, has problems. | ||
| But I love that part of it. | ||
| I love this. | ||
| I think this is a brilliant country. | ||
| I think people don't say that enough, people don't hear that enough. | ||
| If you're growing up in America or anywhere in the West, really, but particularly in the United States right now, you're the luckiest person in the history of humanity. | ||
| And the reason we are where we are, Dave, is people have forgotten that and it's become an unfashionable thing to say and a dangerous thing to say. | ||
| Some people feel really shy about saying it. | ||
| And that's why, speaking as a first-generation immigrant, I feel a duty, I feel a genuine duty to remind people of that. | ||
| Yeah, trust me. | ||
| You spend a little more time in Florida with some of the Cubans who, you know, fled Castro or their parents did or whatever. | ||
| It's like, these people free. | ||
| They'll be, by the time you spend 24 hours here, you're going to, it's going to be in you even more. | ||
| As Francis always says, you know, communism is a great red pill. | ||
| Yeah, that's probably the ultimate red pill. | ||
| What else has been on your mind lately? | ||
| Like what, you know, I know we can do the woke thing always and the slight sort of differences between the old liberals or whatever, but what else have you been sort of thinking about lately? | ||
| Well, every time we come to America, first of all, on a personal level, we're like, okay, we've got to come in. | ||
| We've got to move here. | ||
| So you really feel that now? | ||
| Do you feel that more as a father actually? | ||
| I feel that less as a father. | ||
| That's actually the one thing that holds me back. | ||
| Because I have to say, I think I speak for a lot of parents now in this country and elsewhere, which is like, | ||
| you give, you create this miracle of life. | ||
| You nurture it, you look after it, you give it everything you possibly can, | ||
| and then you send it off to, I mean, the stuff that, like, | ||
| so that to me is terrifying, because I think in this country | ||
| you guys are doing worse on that issue actually. | ||
| The trans issue in particular and the sexualization of children, you guys are doing worse here than we are in the UK. | ||
| Do you fear though that it's just a matter of time? | ||
| I mean BLM, the idea that you guys had a BLM in the UK where your cops in London don't have guns and there was no problem, I mean I hate to tell you but Oh, I'd go back in three months and you might have a problem on your hands. | ||
| I think we're actually making progress on the trans issue, believe it or not. | ||
| And I think one of the reasons that is, is that it's not a partisan issue, actually. | ||
| Really? | ||
| So you're left there? | ||
| The Labour Party is not all about this the way our Democrats are? | ||
| The Labour Party mostly, mostly is. | ||
| But most or as much of the pushback culturally and sort of in our space and elsewhere is not from people on the right. | ||
| It's from gender-critical women, some feminists, some not. | ||
| You know, Posie Parker, who we were one of the first people to ever interview in a long format. | ||
| Oh, is that right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| That video got taken down as hate speech from YouTube. | ||
| And then because it was reinstated, thank God, strides into effect. | ||
| It's now 1.3 million views for a channel that at the time had, I don't know, 100,000 subscribers or something. | ||
| So it's people like her, and what that opens up is the opportunity for people who are not on the right, people like J.K. | ||
| Rowling, people like Rosie Duffield, who's a Labour MP, to bravely step forward, and genuinely bravely, unlike us, you know, these people get rape threats and death threats and all the rest of it. | ||
| And join forces with others and actually tackle that issue. | ||
| The Tavistock Clinic, which was doing a lot of these transitions, I mean, some of the stuff that's come out in the reports, I mean, people should look into that because it's absolutely terrifying. | ||
| That's been shut down. | ||
| Now, that doesn't mean we're not going to continue to have issues with it, but we are making some progress. | ||
| Nicola Sturgeon, the former First Minister of Scotland, where they had the... Did you follow the story? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| The guy who raped two women. | ||
| No, I don't think I know this one. | ||
| Guy Ray, two women, claimed he was a woman and wanted to be in a women's prison. | ||
| There's many versions of that. | ||
| Yeah, we call it prison onset gender dysphoria. | ||
| You get to the courtroom, suddenly, oof, I feel like a woman. | ||
| But my point is that is being aired, it is being talked about, it is being discussed on mainstream television properly, and we are making progress. | ||
| It doesn't mean we don't have a long way to go, but I fear that My concern with the way that this issue is being discussed in this country, and I say this as an outsider, what do I know? | ||
| But it's just, if enough people keep saying the Libs are transing the kids, you're going to get to a position where that makes it difficult for left-wing people to step forward and talk about this as well. | ||
| Do you see what I'm saying? | ||
| And I think because of that, we're actually making better progress on that particular issue than you guys are in this country. | ||
| So that issue is the main one that's holding me back, actually, about moving here. | ||
| But the thing I love about it is, you know... Well, I wouldn't worry about that because there'll be plenty of states where your kids will be just fine. | ||
| Well, exactly. | ||
| Florida. | ||
| As long as it stays purple. | ||
| No, we're red. | ||
| You're all red now. | ||
| Florida's basically the reddest state in the country in some ways. | ||
| I mean, DeSantis won by 20 points. | ||
| Super majorities on both sides. | ||
| Nobody's coming for the gays. | ||
| Nobody's coming for the black people. | ||
| It's just fine here. | ||
| That's reassuring. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I feel like I'm sitting on the board of tourism. | |
| No, you like it here. | ||
| You're not black or gay. | ||
| You'll still be okay here. | ||
| I don't think I can handle... I mean, how you boys get any work done in this year, I have no idea. | ||
| But my point is, apart from my concerns about what's happening to children, this country's great. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| You want to build a business? | ||
| Sure, go for it. | ||
| You want to do this? | ||
| Sure, we'll help you. | ||
| That's the attitude, and that, to me, is the most inspiring thing. | ||
| And this isn't me shitting on Britain, because I love Britain too, but my temperament, I think, is more suited here. | ||
| In the next five years, we're going to end up here. | ||
| So that's on a personal level. | ||
| In terms of society and culturally, we talked about it already. | ||
| We're going to have to work out what to do about social media. | ||
| And that's a really tough one. | ||
| That's a really, really tough one. | ||
| Let me ask you one other thing, which is that I just finished watching, I think it's season five of The Crown. | ||
| First off, did you watch The Crown? | ||
| No. | ||
| It will be irrelevant. | ||
| You'll know enough about the monarchy to be able to ask my question. | ||
| I really enjoyed the show. | ||
| Putting aside any of the specifics of the episode, This idea that the monarchy exists over time and that it is constant, I mean the whole point of the show is it's the constant battle between modernization and conservatism and that something should last beyond a labor government or a conservative government. | ||
| And in some ways I watch it and I think, boy, we could use a little bit of that in America, like something separate from our daily, you've got to go Republican this time, you've got to go Democrat this time, because it separates the sort of big ideas from the day-to-day politics. | ||
| And I wonder what you think of that, if I explained it in a somewhat sufficient fashion. | ||
| A thing that brings people together is important. | ||
| This is what we've lost, right? | ||
| And the monarchy, you know, we were in the transition, as everyone seems to be, on that issue as well. | ||
| You know, the passing of the Queen was mourned, I think, to such an extent, not only because she was this extraordinary person, but because You know, people see the England of their youth going away. | ||
| And I think for a lot of people it was that extra bit meaningful because it kind of marked the passing of the old. | ||
| And it remains to be seen whether under the current king that continuous thing, that thing goes on. | ||
| I think it probably will. | ||
| According to the show, at least, which I think is fairly factual, I mean, he really was pushing for change all along, you know, from youth. | ||
| And if he makes the mistake that his younger son made, which is to start weighing in on politics, I don't think there will be any way to defend the monarchy at that point, because the monarchy's purpose is not to be party political or partisan. | ||
| And once you start weighing in on these very divisive issues, as a neutral observer who's supposed to just provide the backdrop against which society takes its Of course. | ||
| Konstantin, I'm glad you made it across the pond. | ||
| I'm glad that I had a little something to do with the adventure that you're on. | ||
| Thank you very much, Dave. | ||
| It's great to be on the show. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics, instead of mindless drivel, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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