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Feb. 1, 2023 - Viva & Barnes

01:30:41

Live with Comedian and Host of Triggernometry Konstantin Kisin! Viva Frei Live

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	Even if Joe Biden is in Ukraine or wherever else, or China, it is infinite that no Trump is involved in.
	It's like a firefly to the sun.
	It doesn't even stack up against Trump University.
	It's like a firefly to the sun.
	I don't know what's going on with that clip.
	Okay, the clip glitched out for some reason, and I wanted to show that clip because this was the first of several meltdowns that Sam Harris had engaged in that I thought were outrageous, but I wanted to show Constantine's face in the context of that meltdown, where I'm certain Constantine was saying to himself, as he's looking at Sam Harris, holy cows, I can't believe he's saying this.
	And this is going to go viral.
	Not that that is the goal of everyone during a podcast, but at some point, things happen where you say, I can't believe I'm hearing this.
	This is going to attract the attention of the world.
	So, yeah, I don't know why I can't play that clip without it glitching out, but it's on Twitter.
	That interview is out there.
	And I want to thank whoever it was in the VivaBarnesLaw.locals.com community that reminded me of that.
	Isaac David Waxman.
	Thank you for reminding me of that.
	Okay.
	Today.
	Sorry, I don't mean to scream.
	Constantine Kissin, host of Trigonometry with Francis.
	I actually forgot Francis' last name, but I know it's an F. We're going to talk for a bit.
	I was on Trigonometry a while back, back during the convoy, the Canadian convoy, the Ottawa Trucker convoy, after Justin Trudeau had invoked the Emergencies Act.
	And then Constantine and I got into what was a misunderstanding on Twitter.
	And I'm glad we now get to...
	Talk again in person because Twitter is not a place for nuanced discourse.
	It's not a place for mutual understanding.
	It's a place actually that I believe exists to create misunderstanding, conflict, and that's what drives the wheels of the Twitterverse.
	I'm going to bring Constantin in right now.
	Constantin coming in in three, two, one.
	Hey, dude.
	How are you?
	Good and yourself?
	Yeah, very good.
	Thank you.
	Now I'm going to see if the chat says the audio is level.
	I think it's good.
	I have very shiny lips today.
	I don't know why.
	It looks incredibly weird.
	You have shiny lips.
	I got a shiny forehead.
	But it's nighttime where you are and I'm dealing with my floodlights.
	Floodlights and a greasy forehead.
	Constantine, it's good to see you again.
	And I'm glad we can find...
	I feel guilty.
	I have...
	You know, I tend to obsess over misunderstandings.
	And I've been obsessing over our Twitter misunderstanding from a while back.
	But I'm glad we can now talk in person.
	And I've been listening to about 20 hours of you in the last week.
	I feel so sorry for you, my friend.
	Well, it's actually...
	I listened to the...
	My commiserations.
	Well, it's phenomenal.
	I listened to like seven hours of you and Francis on Joe Rogan, the two episodes.
	The psychopathy episode, I forget the name of the doctor.
	Okay, people say the audio is good, good.
	Constantine, for those of us who may not know you, for those out there who may not know you, the few, 30,000 foot overview, and then we're going to begin this discussion.
	Well, a very short version of the story is I was born in the Soviet Union in the early 80s and I grew up in that society.
	I then saw that society collapse around me as I was a young kid and my family involved in various aspects of that.
	My father was kind of like a mini-oligarch turned government minister under Boris Yeltsin, turned what would be the right way.
	He had to flee the country under a false identity because he was falsely accused of a bunch of things since vindicated.
	And my parents, when that brief period in their time, when they had a bit of money, they sent me to England to boarding school, which is how I ended up here in the UK.
	I ran my own small translation business.
	I got bored of that.
	And I was like, you know what?
	Let's do stand-up comedy.
	So I started doing that, and I did that for many years.
	And then, as you mentioned, Francis Foster, him and I decided to start our YouTube show, Trigonometry, in 2018 to basically understand What the hell was going on around us?
	Because we were just two idiot comedians, didn't care about the culture.
	The culture wars, the any wars, the anything.
	Didn't care about politics particularly.
	Probably were quite sort of normal, left-leaning, you know, comedy people, which is what you're surrounded by.
	But what we started to see was, particularly around 2016, suddenly like...
	You know, suddenly everyone was racist, all of a sudden, just like out of the blue.
	Like, everything was fine, and then everyone became racist overnight.
	And I find that very weird, because I'm obviously first-generation, quite dark-skinned immigrant in the UK.
	I'm not saying, you know, there aren't any racist people here, but it wasn't my experience that I was constantly surrounded by bigots.
	Quite the opposite, actually.
	When people...
	Find out you're from a different country.
	They're welcoming and curious and interested, and it's a spark for a conversation rather than for some kind of antagonism.
	And particularly, by the way, if you contrast it with my experience of living in Russia, actually, I found British people are far more tolerant, which won't surprise many people.
	You know, that was part of it.
	And then in comedy, you sort of be standing, you know, as a comedian, you spend most of your time standing backstage listening to other comedians.
	And it just became normal for, like, you see these guys going and say, oh, I'm a straight white man, so I'm this and I'm that.
	And I couldn't understand what was going on.
	Suddenly, like, race became a thing and men were toxic and all this, just out of nowhere.
	And it was a very strange thing and we couldn't understand it.
	And so we wanted to...
	Start a show and basically ask people who knew more about it than us what the hell was going on.
	And over that time, we've interviewed, other than you, you know, the Jordan Petersons, the Douglas Murrays, the Andrew Doyles, who's a good friend of ours, and lots of other people left and right, to basically understand what was going on in the culture, what was going on in comedy, what was going on in politics, and start to kind of educate ourselves, really.
	Trigonometry has always been primarily a self-education project, and everyone else is just along for the ride.
	All right, that's a lot there, and we're going to break it out or parse it out, but just actually go back to your childhood, because you're 40 years old, born in Russia.
	Russia fell, or the Soviet Union collapsed in 91, so you're nine years old when that happens, give or take?
	Am I wrong?
	Okay.
	You say you're dark-skinned, and this is why I always thought you were Greek and not Russian until I started learning.
	Jewish, but obviously Sephardic?
	And Greek background.
	No, no.
	Ashkenazi plus Greek.
	My dad is...
	So there were a lot of Greeks in the Soviet Union who lived on the Black Sea coast.
	And so my dad's family are from that background.
	And my mom is probably Ukrainian.
	So it's hard to know because it's also intermixed.
	So basically, quarter Jewish, quarter Russian-Greek, quarter and half Ukrainian.
	It's my background.
	Okay, very interesting.
	And now, born and raised under the Soviet Union, you have conscious memories of this.
	It's not like you left when you were four and you don't remember a thing.
	You were raised as a child under that regime, saw it collapse.
	How long after?
	The school under it as well.
	This is one of the things I talk about in my book, sorry to interrupt.
	First of all, I experienced it myself, my family, what we talk around the dinner table, you mustn't say this at school.
	So I still remember that.
	And of course, then, you know, you talk to, particularly as you know, in Eastern Europe, you have big families.
	The grandma is always around the table telling stories.
	So I'd hear all about the gulags and the Stalin purges and all of that when I was growing up as well.
	So that was also a big part of kind of my connection to the history of the Soviet Union as well.
	How many kids in the family?
	Are you an only child?
	No, I have three younger sisters.
	I have a bunch of aunts who all have a bunch of kids.
	So, like, a big family.
	So, big family.
	You're, as a child, literally brought up to say, these are the things you can't talk about publicly.
	Because if you do, we might get in trouble.
	Right.
	That's exactly how it was.
	That's exactly how it was.
	And actually, that is, in a way, how I ended up in the UK.
	Because my grandfather, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 79, in the early 80s, he said, He criticized in a private conversation what the government was doing and one of the people there reported him to the KGB and they came to his flat,
	to his apartment, they searched and they found a radio receiver that he used to listen to, Voice of America and BBC World Service, all these banned western evil capitalist propaganda and they forced him out of his job.
	His wife was forced out of her job and his children, that's my dad and my aunt, they were both at university and they were both kicked out of university.
	All four of them, the entire family's lives were ruined by this process to a large extent.
	And my grandfather, unable essentially to have a proper job, he was a very promising physicist.
	He was able to move to the UK.
	And so when my parents had money, they were like, well, he's in the UK.
	Why don't we send you to a school near him?
	And so this experience of like, if you say the wrong thing, you're going to be punished.
	It wasn't theoretical to me.
	I saw it happen to my own family with my own eyes.
	I know people are going to be listening to this and getting ahead of our conversation saying, wow, that sounds very familiar to what we're seeing now where people literally lose their jobs, not for saying the wrong thing privately, but sometimes, but say the wrong thing publicly.
	Does this traumatize you as a kid or do you not know any other normal than this?
	So it's like, oh, this is the way it is and I don't even have a basis for comparison.
	I think that as a kid, I didn't feel traumatized by it because it was something I was aware of, but it had not a huge amount of impact on my life, actually, if I'm honest, because I was just a kid.
	Those things didn't concern me.
	It was later when I came to the UK and I saw the contrast.
	I remember it's quite a funny thing because nowadays they'd call it bullying, but when I turned up at school...
	Barely spoke any English, spoke with thick Russian accent like this.
	And the kids, the other kids would like, you know, kids make fun of each other.
	So I'd make fun of them for something.
	They'd make fun of me for something else.
	And for me, it was like, you know, it was my accent or, you know, Russia or whatever.
	And I would be like, don't say that.
	And they'd say, well, actually, it's a free country.
	You know, people don't say that anymore.
	But back then, that was kind of what people thought, you know.
	While, of course, you know, I didn't, you know, enjoy them teasing me in the same way that they didn't enjoy being teased by me about other shit, I kind of took that on in maybe quite literally.
	And I thought, well, actually, this is a country, look, you can say things that may be offensive to some people, but you're allowed to speak.
	And coming from a society when you were not allowed to speak and your own parents had to protect themselves and protect you from expressing your actual opinions.
	You know, in the Soviet Union, we had several layers of kind of truth.
	There was what you said in public, what you said around the kitchen table, and then also what you'd say.
	In your own mind when you were on your own.
	These were different layers of truth.
	And so being in a country where that was less the case, that's what opened my eyes, really.
	And my granddad, who was forced to flee the Soviet Union effectively or into exile from the Soviet Union, he always was immensely grateful for that.
	And he really thrived here in the UK, even though he had his life in many ways ruined by, you know, he couldn't really pursue his physics career.
	He had to uproot himself in his late...
	I think it was that he moved to the UK.
	Probably early 50s.
	And it's hard.
	You know, it's hard moving country with a different culture and different language at that age.
	But he embedded himself very well here because actually, I think, at heart, he was a Western-minded person.
	He valued the things that we in the West value.
	And so he always...
	Made me super aware of how important that is.
	And him and I disagreed about many things, but that was the thing that we actually felt very close on.
	And so you came to the UK or were sent to the UK when you were, what, 13?
	Yeah, around that time, yeah.
	And so that's two years, well, that's a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, just for those who can only imagine what that is like.
	From the West, it's a historic moment.
	From the East, I imagine it has to be immensely destabilizing and borderline terrifying.
	What happens?
	When that happens and what happens to your family?
	Well, it's interesting that you say that because it's absolutely true.
	And I have a piece on my sub stack called Why Russians Support Vladimir Putin.
	And I talk about the period between 1991 and when he comes to power in 1999.
	And it was a shit show.
	And people in the West are incapable of imagining.
	I'm not exaggerating.
	I'm not trying to be special or anything.
	You cannot imagine.
	Let me explain what I mean, right?
	Imagine, think about your life right now, your job, your career, your family, your house, your bank account, your savings, everything that you do in your life, your hobbies, everything, right?
	Imagine that through no fault of your own, one day, none of that exists anymore.
	Your bank doesn't exist anymore.
	The savings that you had in it, they disappeared, right?
	Your career?
	Well, guess what?
	In the Soviet Union, being a scientist, being in the military, being a teacher, being some kind of public official, these were all highly respected, well-paid jobs, right?
	Early 90s Russia, no one gives a shit about science.
	People are trying to survive.
	So scientists went from being respected academics.
	I literally remember walking to school, and this was normal.
	I was probably about 10. I would walk for 15 minutes to a bus stop.
	I would take a 15-minute bus ride and I'd get on the underground and I'd take an hour underground ride to my school.
	That was my journey to school at the age of 10, right?
	And I remember outside every metro station, every underground station, there would be older people.
	I mean, they seemed very old to me now, so they were probably about 40 or something.
	You know, selling their belongings, selling furniture, selling clothes, selling books, selling anything they could sell.
	And these were quite often people that, I don't know, three weeks ago, were respected people.
	And when you say respected, also, career, job, it's all employed by the state.
	So if the state was paying them their healthy salaries for government jobs, they were respected.
	State, it collapses.
	Your employer, that's it.
	Let me ask the obvious question.
	To whom are they selling it?
	Like, who has money to buy things at this point, other than the political elite class?
	Well, it was also a time of opportunity, right?
	Because when the system collapses, things have to be built from the ground up.
	So if you don't have any banks, someone has got to create a bank.
	If you don't have any private businesses to sell and buy things or import goods, etc., someone has to do that.
	And so there was a class of people, and my dad was one of them.
	You know, him and his friends started a small construction company, and then a year later, he'd done so well, they...
	Bought another company and then that company started one of Russia's first banks.
	That was a crazy time.
	You can't imagine it.
	There was a lot of poverty, but also a lot of opportunity.
	And so there were people who could afford to buy these things because they'd come up with something new.
	They'd adjusted better than others.
	But imagine you're one of these people and then the war in Chechnya breaks out.
	And so if you are...
	A respected former academic in your 40s.
	Suddenly, your son's been sent off to war.
	And your daughter, I mean, you know, in the Soviet Union, didn't have prostitutes.
	It didn't exist.
	I remember in 1990s Russia, as a kid, I didn't know what prostitutes were, but I saw these women selling themselves, basically, on the street.
	It was normal.
	You know, you'd be walking along the street, you'd be driving your car, and a woman would knock on your door and be like, you know, $20 for a blowjob or whatever it was.
	Literally like that.
	It was insane.
	So seeing that kind of collapse, you can't imagine how destabilizing that is to people, how destabilizing that is to people's psyches.
	And guess what?
	When the shit hits the fan, and as you know, the reason for our misunderstanding was about the war in Ukraine and Putin, I'm no fan of his, but the craving for stability is where his support comes from.
	Because after eight years, there was one of the years, and it wasn't even like 91, I think it was 98, inflation was 74%.
	Imagine that.
	Imagine that your salary basically gets devalued by the time, you know, if you get paid on a monthly basis, your salary is worth nearly half by the end of the year, what it was at the beginning.
	Right?
	That is insane.
	And so the impact that has on people is traumatic.
	And so this is one of the reasons that You know, in the West, we think democracy and liberty and freedom, these are great things.
	But to a Russian person, to many Russian people, not all, of course, but to many Russian people, that is what they think about when they think about democracy.
	That period.
	That's what democracy is.
	Chaos.
	Absolute chaos.
	The end of your life as you know it.
	Misery, poverty, the suicide rate was insane.
	Drug addiction was insane.
	Emigration, the brain drain, you know, millions of people died or left Russia in that period of time.
	The, you know, the population fell significantly during that period.
	It was extremely traumatic for people.
	It was a very, very chaotic period.
	And I remember as a kid.
	That's amazing.
	And so then your dad sends you to the UK.
	Do they, you go to school there?
	I learned watching your podcast with Zuby that you went to school with Zuby.
	Yeah, we did.
	He was actually in my house.
	He was a couple of years younger.
	So I should have been the one beating him up, but even then it was not likely to happen.
	I don't know how big you are.
	How tall are you, if I may ask now?
	I'm 5 '9".
	Zuby isn't actually that tall, but he's pretty hench, and he was already kind of like a big guy.
	5 '9", you got three and a half inches on me.
	You go to the UK, do your parents ever join you?
	No, they never moved here.
	So what happened with my dad is after his business career, he was asked to be a junior minister in Boris Yeltsin's cabinet, one of his cabinets.
	And while he was there, Russian politics was extremely dodgy and messy at the time.
	Another minister orchestrated a campaign against him to remove him so that that minister could steal more money for himself from the public coffers.
	And so my dad eventually ended up fleeing Russia under a false name.
	Being falsely accused of tax evasion.
	And he ended up in a small country called Armenia, which is where my family live now.
	He's since been cleared of all these bullshit charges, but that is his path.
	And so that's where they stayed.
	And by the way, the money that they'd had, a lot of it was confiscated.
	This is why it took many years for my dad to be vindicated of the charges, because in a normal country, what happens is if the police come and arrest you...
	And seize things from you so that you don't flee the country or whatever.
	That stuff, whether it's jewelry or cash or whatever, which is what they took from my parents, sits in an evidence locker, right?
	It's sealed, it's locked and whatever.
	Well, that's not what happens in Russia.
	And so the reason they would never close the case is they would have to give that stuff back.
	And that stuff was no longer there.
	So it wasn't until my dad worked this out and told him through his lawyer, you know what?
	Keep the watches, keep the jewelry, keep the money.
	And then they were like, okay, cool.
	Well, in that case, you're innocent.
	That's how it went.
	Yeah, well, you say they don't do that in the West.
	Then you have this thing called civil forfeiture where they do something very similar, but just under the pretext of law.
	So you get to the UK, very little, no English.
	You're not assimilating, but you are integrating into an entirely new society.
	Briefly, like that transition, but I just got to get to the crux of this now.
	You lived through that in the Soviet Union, and I think a lot of people are saying we are seeing elements of this in the West right now.
	When I was at the Ottawa protest, and I'm talking to people from Hungary, Romania, Venezuela, and they're saying, I see what I fled my country happening here, and yet when I'm second-generation Canadian, when I say it, other second, third-generation Canadians who've never lived through it say, Viva, you're being hyperbolic.
	Don't make those comparisons.
	You don't know what you're talking about.
	You've never lived through it.
	You have.
	Do you see the same trend?
	Happening in the West now that you live through in the East.
	Well, I haven't been to Canada, so I obviously can't speak about Canada.
	But from afar, I mean, you know, freezing people's bank accounts because they have the wrong opinions does seem a little wrong to me, to put it mildly.
	I think you're right and the people are right in the sense that the direction of travel is definitely towards that kind of Soviet-style authoritarian pro-censorship society.
	And they're right to say we're not there.
	We're not in that position.
	I think that's also fair to say because, of course, in the Soviet Union, it was the state that did this.
	And if the state didn't like what you said and if you carried on, they would literally put you in a prison camp, right?
	So it's a little bit different.
	But the direction of travel is not healthy.
	And I actually, you know, people would have seen probably my recent speech at Doctors of the Union, but I gave another speech.
	In which I talk about why saving the West is important.
	And one of the quotes I gave there was from a guy called George Kennan, who was the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, or he worked as part of the team for relations with the Soviet Union.
	And he warned the West that the greatest mistake that we could make here in the West is to become more like the thing that we're fighting.
	And this is my concern with the West.
	How did you think Marxism is a Western idea?
	In the West, but it was not really applied in the West as nearly as vigorously as it has been elsewhere.
	And so I think that we are starting to apply some concepts which took hold in the East in places like Russia and the Soviet Union and China back here in the West.
	And if you read my book, most people don't know.
	Do you know where political correctness comes from?
	I know now because I've watched a lot of your podcasts.
	You explain it so it doesn't look like I'm stealing your knowledge.
	No, that's fine.
	But most people don't know.
	People think political correctness is about, you know, not offending minorities, being respectful, being polite.
	It's about not offending people and whatever.
	That's not where it comes from at all.
	Political correctness was invented in the Soviet Union in the early days of the Soviet Union.
	And the point of it was nothing to do with protecting anyone's feelings, making anyone feel comfortable, avoiding offense or anything like that.
	It was about saying to people, well...
	What you're saying is factually correct, but it is politically incorrect.
	And what that meant is it is not convenient to the party dogma.
	And that is precisely how, in my opinion, increasingly this weapon of censorship and political correctness around speech is being used.
	It's about saying, well, look, you know, maybe you're right about this, but we don't care.
	What we care about is it's offensive to people.
	We care about it's not convenient to the party line, to the thing that we're trying to advance.
	So if you try to have a conversation about, you know, for example, to me, I'm massively against the idea of positive discrimination.
	I think it's an abomination, right?
	There is no such thing as positive discrimination.
	There's just discrimination.
	And the fact that you personally decided that this type of it is positive doesn't make it positive.
	It's just another form of discrimination.
	But if you want to have a conversation about diversity, equity and inclusion.
	No one is going to challenge you on the facts of it.
	People are just going to say, well, you're racist or you're bigoted or whatever.
	And that is a way to prevent you from challenging the dogma.
	So we've become Sovietized in our thinking.
	I'm wary of people who go, well, you know, it's just like the gulags.
	It's not like the gulags.
	What it is, is a way of thinking that leads.
	Potentially down that path.
	So I'm not happy about the direction of travel, but also, of course, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that we're still the freest people in the history of the world.
	This is true.
	And I see the dismissing of the comparisons because they're not identical.
	That's a cheap way of actually getting out of recognizing the patterns.
	Because you compare because they're not identical.
	It's the necessary definition of a comparison.
	And people sort of tend to think that...
	Nazi Germany-Soviet Union is only characterized at one point in time, ignoring the lead-up to it, where you can find a lot of similarities in the lead-up.
	And the aftermath, by the way, because when people think about the Soviet Union, they think you're comparing it to Stalinism.
	As I just told you, in the late 80s, the situation was much better.
	You weren't being shot for having the wrong opinion, but you were still being punished.
	And that's more the type of society that we're, in my opinion, potentially at risk of heading towards.
	So you're in the UK now.
	You're in the land of the free.
	At least it was at the time they weren't locking up people for making Nazi pug jokes.
	Although that's Scotland, but close enough.
	How do you get into comedy?
	I mean, that's actually probably point number one.
	How do you get into comedy?
	Well, I always...
	See, I actually got into comedy, I think, somewhat by mistake.
	In the...
	I always thought that comedy was a place for people who thought differently, who wanted to challenge the prevailing narratives and do it with humor.
	And the people that inspired me were George Carlin and Bill Hicks and so on.
	And so when I was doing my translation business, I got to a point where people started to invite me to talk, to give talks and conferences about how to do things.
	And I quickly worked out, if you don't want to start handing out pillows and blankets...
	During your talks, you better make people laugh.
	So then people would be like, well, maybe you should try being a comedian because they were laughing at the jokes I was making.
	And then I was like, oh, cool.
	Well, I feel quite strongly about some of the stuff that's happening in the culture to some extent.
	And I have a few things to say.
	And comedy is an interesting way of doing that.
	And so I started doing stand-up mainly through that.
	And then quite quickly discovered that that isn't what the mainstream of the comedy industry, certainly in the UK, is about at all.
	It's massively conformist, extremely woke, way more woke than society in general.
	And very kind of, there is an ideology and you will follow it!
	To be kind!
	That's kind of how I found it, which was, to me, quite a shock, actually.
	And so I've ended up...
	You know, during the pandemic, I stopped doing it because trigonometry started, you know, took off and it started taking up so much of my time.
	And now we do three live streams a week, which is me and Francis, you know, joking about what's going on.
	We call them raw shows and it's super edgy, offensive satire of the comedy of the day of whatever news articles and whatever is coming up.
	And I'm really at home doing that.
	Whereas stand-up, I think it was kind of a transitionary career for me.
	It wasn't quite the right fit.
	And when did you get into it?
	Are we talking like 2015 to...
	2014, 2015.
	Yeah, right.
	And that is...
	It's funny, like I wasn't awake.
	I say like not in the cliches.
	I wasn't paying attention to this.
	Back then I had started my own law firm.
	I was like, you know, 24-7 working in law, not paying attention to it.
	2016 election of Trump is when I started realizing what the hell was going on in the world.
	But that is when the woke stuff really started.
	Jordan Peterson started raising the flag shortly after that.
	So you venture out of stand-up, although you hone your skills, you learn some stuff.
	Pandemic hits, and then you start Trigonometry?
	No, no, we started Trigonometry in April 2018.
	And by the time the pandemic hit, we'd kind of got to a point, and you've got to understand, we started from the ground up.
	So two no-name comedians, no profile, no connections, no money, no studio, no producer, no cameras, nothing.
	And we just started it from the ground up.
	And as we were doing stand-up, we built it up over time.
	And we got to a point where when the pandemic hit, it was already big enough.
	That was the first time we ever took even a small salary out of doing trigonometry.
	We hadn't made any money.
	And any money we made, we put into a bank account and didn't touch it because we knew that we were going to need it at some point.
	And when the pandemic hit, we were like, well, we can't do stand-up.
	But what we can do is everyone's at home.
	We're at home.
	Let's start doing more live streams.
	Let's start doing more than one interview a week.
	And we just started pumping out more content.
	And our audience grew massively.
	And people loved the fact that we were putting more stuff out.
	And, you know, the most common thing when people come up to us, which occasionally happens in the street, they go, you guys got me through the pandemic.
	Because it was a really difficult time for a lot of people.
	And having three, at that time, it was four raw shows a week.
	For an hour and a half, you know, taking the piss, as we say, in this country out of what was going on, you know, pushing back with satire, but also with just indignation against the authoritarianism that we saw in this country and around the world when it came to lockdowns and vaccine passports and vaccine mandates, etc.
	A lot of people felt very alone in that time, and they needed to see that they're not alone.
	They needed to see that there are other people out there who agree with them.
	And it kind of became a hub for people.
	Who were perfectly reasonable, normal people.
	They weren't anti-vax crazies who thought vaccines give you AIDS or whatever it is, whatever people believe.
	They just felt that the government was using this as an opportunity to engage in a bit of a power grab and going a bit far in terms of the restrictions.
	And the government shouldn't do this in the West.
	And we kind of became a voice for those people for that small...
	Yeah, Rachel says trigonometry saved my life.
	So I hope that's not true because that is a very sad statement, Rachel.
	No, you know what, Constantine, like people, first of all, people are going crazy.
	I mean, I think in a sense, if people want to say I've gone crazy publicly over an extended period of time, say it.
	I mean, I can understand people viewing it that way because I didn't look like this and I didn't think like this four years ago, but the world wasn't off the flipping rails four years ago.
	I didn't see neighbors.
	Calling in the police because their other neighbor was outside too close to someone in a park four years ago.
	And people needed an outlet and people needed someone who, you know, I hope kept things in the realm of reality or in the realm of digestibility.
	And I know you did that.
	And so people mean it.
	Yeah.
	No, no.
	I was only...
	I was just a thrower.
	I know, I know.
	But things went crazy here, man.
	Like Francis and I, we went for a walk.
	We went to...
	Once they started to open things up a little bit, we went for a walk and we dropped into this open-air market.
	Open-air market, they sell food and drinks and whatever.
	And we were standing there and we bumped into a friend of ours and we were chatting to her and this guy in a high-vis jacket and shades came over and went, sorry, no talking.
	Who the fuck are you?
	And I think that's kind of the point that we got to.
	Things were very, very strange for a period of time.
	And we even talked about moving the whole thing over to Florida or Texas at one point because it was like, well, if they do this other thing, then this is like, that's past the line.
	Thankfully, we didn't go as far as that.
	But yeah, man, so we already had something before lockdown happened.
	And during lockdown, we made it a full-time job for everybody.
	And now we're at a point where we've got about 10 people working for us.
	We've just built our own studio from basically the ground up.
	Not quite the ground up, but it was an empty room that now has walls and lights and all this stuff.
	So it's an exciting time.
	It's a really exciting time.
	Yeah, you've got the neon light in the back.
	That's, I think, my next investment above and beyond my former license plate.
	That was my Quebec license plate.
	Best 300 bucks I ever spent.
	So you've had some amazing guests on.
	I want to get to one because the Sam Harris meltdown, and we're going to get to the speech at Oxford, and then we're going to get to international stuff, conflicts in Russia, to bring everything back.
	Sam Harris, when that interview occurs, you're a good person.
	I don't think you have a malicious bone in your body.
	You don't conduct an interview with the intended purpose of destroying someone.
	When that's happening...
	And I zoomed in on your face, and I think I'm a pretty decent judge of character.
	Were you flabbergasted by where that interview went with Sam Harrison?
	Did you digest or compute in real time what was going to happen as a result of this podcast?
	So the second part, no, because I didn't...
	The number one rule that we have at Trigonometry is it's all about the guest.
	We want you to come on Trigonometry and have a good experience.
	And so...
	To see what happened to Sam, even though I disagree very strongly with what he said, I am not happy that that's what happened.
	And I've made that clear a number of times.
	And Francis and everyone here feels the same way.
	I'm grateful that Sam gave us the time.
	He's a busy guy with a big audience, and he didn't have to do that.
	He was very generous with his time.
	We had a lot of tech issues on the day, and he was very patient.
	He was a really good human being.
	And so to see him being mobbed in that way didn't give me...
	Any pleasure whatsoever.
	And I wasn't, because I don't think in that way, I wasn't thinking, oh, this is going to go viral.
	I was just thinking, wow, Sam is kind of like, he's kind of gone in a direction that I don't agree with, like badly.
	And I actually, I don't know if you watched the full interview, I actually wanted to move on.
	And he was like, no, no, let's talk more about this.
	And that's when he came out with the kids in the basement and all of that.
	But even the kids in the basement is just a metaphor.
	People made too much out of that for my liking.
	But it was what he said about how a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump was justified.
	That's when I was like, I mean...
	You can have that opinion, but then you're not in a democracy anymore.
	If you want to live in that society, that's cool, but let's call it something else.
	I don't know what that is.
	Dictatorship of left-wing progressives or dictatorship of the people who want to control.
	That isn't a democracy.
	I was just stunned, really.
	I didn't know what to make of it.
	What's interesting is we actually do questions for our local supporters.
	That goes behind the paywall.
	And I would say the stuff he said about COVID on that is even more controversial.
	But because fewer people saw it and people didn't clip it, he didn't get as much of the attention.
	And by the way, we never made any hay of that clip that went out.
	Someone else put it out, by the way, a guy who I think is a piece of shit, that tweeted it.
	I don't know who tweeted it out originally.
	I didn't see the entire interview, but I saw more for context just to be sure.
	But yeah, sorry, just...
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is fine.
	So the guy that tweeted it, he's the guy that goes after a lot of people and he, like, tries to deliberately present them in a bad light.
	But, I mean, what Sam said is what Sam said.
	And I think I can see why people were pissed off about it.
	See, people look at COVID and say, like, people went off the deep end during COVID, but it is this...
	I don't want to say Soviet, but Soviet-esque or fascist-esque or censorship-esque.
	It started well before COVID, and then COVID was what really ramped it up on steroids, but it started with Trump, where the ends justified the means, and anything could be justified in order to prevent what was being falsely depicted as a catastrophic Nazi in the White House.
	And it started then, and Sam, in that clip, and in subsequent clips, showed the mentality, which I think is symptomatic of the time, but started back in 2016.
	Have you spoken to Sam since that interview?
	Yeah, so the first thing I emailed him was just to check in and make sure he was okay because I know how painful it is or can be if you're getting mobbed and attacked by loads of people.
	It's not an easy thing to deal with.
	So he actually was very magnanimous.
	He said, you guys did a great job.
	Thanks for having me on.
	And you didn't really seem phased by it.
	And then we also had another chat about him potentially coming back to talk about...
	Twitter files and why he left Twitter and whatever, and he wasn't interested.
	But I'm sure we'll have him back at some point to talk about other stuff.
	But I agree with you.
	Look, I think COVID broke a lot of people's brains left and right.
	And one of the dangers of emotional dysregulation of that nature is it causes threat misassessment.
	And if you actually thought that, you know, Justin Trudeau is actually a fascist and is actually a Nazi who is actually going to kill people and actually going to put them in camps.
	Then what Sam said would be justifiable, right?
	Because if the next Hitler was literally in the White House, well, maybe a left-wing conspiracy theory to deny him the presidency would be legitimate.
	Where I disagree with Sam is on his assessment of Donald Trump as a threat.
	And I think the bar for conspiracies to deny the presidency and the democracy should be so high.
	The guy literally has to come out quoting Mein Kampf and doing the Nazi salute before you get to that point.
	Just on the Justin Trudeau thing, the dude has locked people up.
	Are you familiar with the euthanasia in Canada?
	I am, yeah.
	The guy is crazy, man.
	I think he's a bonafide psychopath.
	Like, clinical.
	Jordan Peterson has more, you know, psychological training than I do.
	Right.
	But I don't defer to him.
	I defer to my own assessment here.
	Okay, so it's very interesting.
	Were there other notable, like, what's the most notable interview you think you've given on trigonometry that you've had that you can think about?
	That we've done.
	Well, we've had Jordan Peterson on a couple of times.
	I think the one that's got the most views as an interview is our interview with Posey Parker.
	Who is a women's rights campaigner.
	This was early days, so this was probably late 2018, early 2019.
	I'm pretty bad with dates, but something like that.
	And this is at a time when the trans conversation wasn't being had anything like the way it's being had now.
	And it was an interview that the title was Trans Women Aren't Women, which was like...
	Explosive at the time.
	YouTube took it down, called it hate speech.
	Politically incorrect.
	Right, exactly.
	We kicked up a big stink in the newspapers here and eventually got reinstated and, you know, Streisand effect, once something gets suppressed, it gets huge numbers.
	And it was good because you can see me and Francis, two fairly liberal-minded comedians.
	We've never thought about this issue very carefully, who know it's a minefield, who know that this is a risk to their careers.
	And we are trying to talk to her, but we're also principal people who are interested in the truth.
	So this lady comes in.
	She's very polite.
	She's very sensible.
	She's basically dropping truth bombs left, right, and center.
	And we're like, ah, ah, ah.
	And we're trying to, like, survive our way through the interview.
	But at the same time being intellectually honest, but also trying not to get cancelled.
	And you can see two people change their minds in real time.
	So it's a kind of piece of trigonometry history that will always stay with us.
	But the interview that I'm most proud of, actually, that we've done is with a woman called Ella Hill.
	I don't know if you're familiar with the grooming gangs.
	You probably would be if you listen to our Joe Rogan story.
	I'm very familiar with it.
	I was familiar with Tommy Robinson until he was unpersoned.
	I was following that.
	It's atrocious and people don't know the details or the racial component.
	A racial component in terms of the politicizing of it.
	Someone's going to snip and clip that out of context.
	Why the scandal was buried was for political correct racial reasons which most people don't know.
	It elaborates so that So basically, up to half a million women and children, young girls, were sexually abused by groups of men in this country over a period of 40 years.
	These crimes were racially aggravated in that these men were mostly from a South Asian background, so Bangladeshi and Pakistani background, and they were targeting specifically white local and Hindu girls almost.
	And so these were racially aggravated crimes.
	If you target other people because of their race, that's a racially aggravated crime.
	But instead of being treated as a racially aggravated crime by racist men who were sexually abusing women and children, it was covered up by the police, by social services, by the government because of fears of being...
	You know, seen as racist, being a problem for quote-unquote diversity, etc.
	A gigantic scandal.
	And we had one of the victims on the show talking about this.
	She's anonymized, so you can't see her face.
	She's a wonderful woman, a very beautiful person inside and out.
	And, you know, it's a brilliant conversation.
	And what's weird about it is we're talking to a survivor of gang rape, basically.
	And it's funny.
	It's a funny conversation.
	That's all credit to Ella because she plays along and we're making jokes with her because we know that we can.
	And that's kind of, to me, that's what sums up our show.
	We want to talk about difficult subjects, but also with enough levity that the conversation can actually be had.
	Without getting too far into it, because this is in and of itself a show on its own, the racial...
	Ethnic element to that which could have caused some problems to political correctness.
	Was there not also an element that there were people in the police, people in parliament, people in high positions that were also benefiting, for lack of a better word, from this ring of human exploitation and they were covering up for prominent figures in high positions?
	I'm not aware of that.
	When you say benefiting, in what sense?
	You mean participating in this?
	Participating.
	Clients.
	Like participating.
	I'm not aware of any of that.
	I think there was one guy who may have had some tangential involvement, but I'm not sure that that is the case.
	Have you ever had Tommy Robinson on?
	No.
	Okay, so the political correctness around that, there was a tweet that was retweeted that went viral that said, bury the story because it's going to make certain Ethnic groups look bad.
	Well, the exact quote was, and it's worth repeating exactly, was these girls need to shut their mouths for the sake of diversity.
	And there was nothing ironic, sarcastic, dark humor in that.
	And a Labour MP retweeted it and then deleted her retweet.
	With Twitter, you know, I'm not defending that tweet and there's no but to it.
	It's actually just going to be the segue into the next part of this discussion.
	It's very difficult to read sarcasm sometimes.
	It's very difficult to read.
	I had the thought the other day, when it comes to human interaction, sometimes you can say the same thing and do the same thing in a loving manner or in a hateful manner.
	And you know the difference in real life, but when it comes to the written word, you can't tell the difference.
	So, people want to know your position on Russia-Ukraine war.
	And instead of me saying what I think it is, this is the good time just to...
	You flesh out, explain your position on this, and I want to try to bring it back to...
	The West turning into the East, and then maybe some people thinking the East becoming more West than the West is at this point.
	Your overall take on this, given your background, what is it?
	That latter point is a myth, and I think a lot of people have gone so far off the deep end, they think that Putin's Russia is this great, sacred Christian, you know, the savior of Christendom.
	I mean, that could not be further from the truth.
	My position is very simply this.
	I believe it is in the West's interest to prevent irredentist Russia from expanding ever further westwards.
	I understand the argument about NATO expansion provoking Russia, but what people never seem to think about is, okay, let's say NATO didn't expand after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
	Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland wouldn't be part of NATO.
	Do you think that they would still be independent countries?
	They wouldn't be.
	This is what Russia does every time that it's able to centralize and coordinate power.
	It looks outward and it looks to recapture territories that it's used as its own or as being in its sphere of influence.
	So my view is that it is in our interest, particularly in the interest of the United States and the UK, to prevent Russia from doing that.
	And Ukrainian...
	The Ukrainians want to defend their country, and it's an incredibly effective way for us to do that by providing them with the support that they need.
	That's my opinion.
	I've never advocated for any country in which I'm not a taxpayer to do that.
	I don't tell Americans you guys should be giving your taxpayer dollars to Ukraine.
	But as a taxpayer in the UK, I support my country doing that.
	The question is going to be this, though.
	I say financing conflict.
	The Russia expansion to reclaim territory that it lost previously, people could understand that as well.
	When you go to the Ukraine in particular, and you back it up, I consider you to be more educated on this than me, as many other people, but I think I've gotten the grasp on it now.
	When you go back to the Maidan revolution in 2014, and how that plays into this, do you not get the sense, notwithstanding what you might feel are...
	I don't know, they call them imperialistic tendencies of Putin, can barely manage their own country, might not have global domination on the checklist.
	But the revolution starting in 2014, do you not see potentially Western interference, Western meddling?
	Every revolution has Western meddling.
	Every revolution has foreign meddling.
	If you think about the American Revolution, did the French not help quite a lot?
	Were they not involved in that?
	Every revolution, whenever there is a revolution, foreign actors will attempt to interfere.
	But what actually happened in 2014 was President Yanukovych promised the people of Ukraine, after being elected, that he would sign a trade deal with the European Union.
	And under pressure from Putin, he changed his mind.
	Promised to sign one with Russia instead.
	A bunch of students went out and protested about this.
	There weren't very many of them.
	They weren't particularly disruptive.
	And Yanukovych sent in riot police who beat them up.
	And that's the point at which ordinary people went out into the street to protest about the treatment of these students.
	Again, under Putin's direct instructions.
	And we have phone call logs from Putin and Yanukovych.
	They were speaking many times every day when this was happening.
	They cracked down on the new protesters again, tried to beat them up.
	There was police with, you know, all sorts of brutal tactics, brutalizing the protesters.
	And that's why the Ukrainians came out onto the streets in the tens of thousands in Maidan.
	Now, was America upset about this?
	Was America unhappy that Ukraine was moving in a pro-Western direction?
	Of course not.
	But this was a country that was a puppet of the Russians and they reacted to the fact that it was no longer going to be that in 2014 by biting chunks of Ukraine.
	And this is the problem that Ukraine has always faced.
	It's not really a country that's existed for a very long time because it lies on the border between two great civilizations and it's always been disputed territory.
	It's a great tragedy of the lives of the people who live there.
	Now, do you find there are certain, and people are going to vehemently disagree with you, people are going to say this, you know, there is a little bit of demonizing and canonizing on both ends, but when I look at these, and I don't think I've gotten blackpilled, but I'm not far off, when I look at some countries saying Putin is a murderous dictator, and that he may be, but then you look at the West.
	And the things that they've done in terms of violating sovereign integrity of foreign nations, fabricating wars that lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.
	Part of me, this is also bringing it back to the discussion about, you know, not political correctness, but doing evil while cloaking it with benevolence, which is sort of the way of the left today.
	I see similarities in the way Western governments have carried out their atrocities.
	They do it in a manner that allows them nonetheless to judge and create international conflict on the basis of other dictators doing it not so politely.
	That's why I was so vehemently opposed to the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the intervention in Syria, the intervention in Libya.
	I disagree with the West foreign policy on all of those countries.
	This isn't the same.
	This is a country that's been invaded, that is asking for help defending itself.
	This isn't Iraq, where we just came in and decided to remove the person who runs that country.
	We haven't invaded Russia.
	We haven't tried to depose Putin.
	It's not Afghanistan.
	It's not Syria.
	Libya, where we're trying to invade a country or destabilize it to create regime change.
	This is Russia's...
	See, this is what gets me, and this is why I don't get pissed off with people anymore, but I used to get quite pissed off with people when this first happened, because they were like, Well, I'm anti-war and I'm anti-imperialist.
	It's like, no, no, no.
	What you are is pro-Russia expanding its empire.
	That's what's happening, right?
	And if you're anti-war, well, you can't then advocate for policies that allow an invader to win.
	That would be being pro-war.
	So when, you know, you mentioned earlier financing conflict.
	I mean, that's a way of phrasing it that I disagree with because you're not financing conflict.
	You're allowing people to defend themselves who are being slaughtered.
	This is going to be the fundamental one-screen, two films.
	The bottom line to all of this is I think there's room for good-natured disagreement.
	And what upset me is that my tweets, which this morning I tweeted out...
	Don't worry about it.
	Why don't we just talk about the issue?
	Forget about the tweets.
	I'm not pissed off with you.
	No, no, I was going to say, it's all good.
	Even yesterday, well, with Ben Shapiro now going back and assessing his position on vaccine, it's disagreement.
	That'll be a separate issue.
	I think people are never going to agree on this.
	The only question is, you know, what is going to be the solution?
	Because people are going to look at you, Constantine, and say, what you're suggesting is victory at all costs.
	No.
	When did I suggest that?
	Well, because you're saying that if you're dealing with a Hitler, if people view...
	When did I call him Hitler?
	Well, no.
	If you're dealing with someone who you think has...
	See, this is what people who think what you think think about people who think what I think.
	But I don't say any of those things.
	I didn't say Putin was Hitler.
	You said he was a murderous dictator, now he is, but I don't use that as a reason.
	I said it is in the West's interests to prevent an irredentist Russia from expanding westwards.
	That's all I said, right?
	Nothing about Hitler, nothing about victory at all costs, right?
	I didn't say any of those things.
	First of all, one does not have to say Hitler in order to conceptualize a Hitler-esque, someone bent on territorial conquest.
	But let's...
	Okay, you're right.
	I don't think that was actually people's problem with Hitler.
	I think it was more to do with the Holocaust and everything.
	But look, I am not like, oh, Putin is bad, we must...
	Like, that's not what I'm saying.
	Putin is doing what any Russian leader who's achieved the consolidation of power that he has achieved would do in his position, right?
	And it's the West's job, in my opinion, to prevent that from happening.
	If we want to remain the world's superpower.
	And by the way, I translated several occludes and speeches, so it's not like I have some caricature of them.
	As a professional former translator...
	I translated the speeches and I put them on my substack so you can hear from the horse's mouth what he wants.
	And both him and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, have been extremely clear what this is all about.
	They want what they call a new world order.
	And that means pushing America off its pedestal and creating this multipolar world.
	What do they mean by that?
	They mean a world in which China and Russia and the United States are equals.
	Now, we know that that is a fundamentally unstable construction.
	You cannot have an absence of hierarchy.
	In human civilization, what happens is some people will attempt to vie for leadership, and what you're going to get is actual World War III, if that happens, right?
	I am very comfortable with an American-dominated world.
	That's what I want to see, and that's why it's in our interest to make sure that it remains the case.
	See, that's where the issue comes.
	If one is comfortable with an American-dominated world, you're comfortable with a world in which the atrocities, the war crimes are just committed.
	No, no, no, no.
	I am against those things.
	Invading Iraq and invading Afghanistan was not necessary for the United States to remain a superpower in the world.
	Those are foreign policy mistakes that I disagree with.
	The same with Syria, the same with Libya.
	You don't have to buy into the neocon project to think that America is a force for good in the world, which it is.
	Well, getting to that, America being a force for good in the world and the Russian New World Order, it does seem, or it does feel like...
	America itself is working towards a new world order itself as well by forming basically a global-type government, which is why I think people are actually sort of amenable to looking at Putin and Russia, not China so much, but Putin and Russia, as sort of the resistors to what people see as the new world order of the West, which is dominated by all of the things that you noticed.
	In Russia back in the day, censorship of free speech, censorship of free thought, getting people to believe the absurd that men can be women, women can be men, and that, you know, the people in Chernobyl were not radioactive.
	It was just in their heads.
	Right.
	You don't think this happens in Russia now?
	Well, actually, I could tell you this.
	I don't know what happens in Russia now.
	Okay, so in Russia now, if you call the war in Ukraine a war, you go to prison for 10 years.
	Okay.
	That's what happens in Russia.
	Is that the multipolar world that you want to be living in?
	Well, but then the flip side to that is in the Ukraine, if you...
	I don't even know if you're allowed to even say things anymore in the Ukraine.
	There you are.
	It's just as tyrannical as in Russia, but for the good.
	No, no.
	In Ukraine, what's happening, this is a country at war that's defending itself, and it operates under wartime rules, right?
	All this stuff about how he's banned the Orthodox Church, complete bullshit.
	What he banned is the Russian Orthodox Church.
	One element, yeah.
	That got sort of blown up.
	Who were open collaborators with Russia.
	And I know this because I have members of my family who are part of that church who were saying to me on the day the invasion happened, I am so glad they've invaded, right?
	So I know about these people.
	People say Zelensky's banned political opponents.
	Oh no, he banned Viktor Medvedchuk, whose daughter's godfather.
	Is one Vladimir Putin, who's been funded for 20 years from Russia to create an alternative power structure in Ukraine so that when Russia invades, this guy can take over and lead.
	This is why, you know, all these Scott Ritters and all these other people are like, oh, you know, they invaded with only a small number of troops because they're not really trying to take over Ukraine.
	No!
	They invaded with so few troops, it's because Putin's intelligence was telling him that Ukraine was about to fold, we've got loads of people on board, we just take the airports, we get Zelensky, and then we've got the country.
	That's why they invaded with a small number of troops and got the asses kicked, right?
	And the reason Zelensky's banning these people is they're open collaborators with the enemy.
	What did the United States do when they were attacked at Pearl Harbor?
	Took 120,000 Japanese Americans and threw them in internment camps.
	Zelensky hasn't done that.
	And I'm no fan of Zelensky.
	I did not approve of his election.
	I thought he was a bit of an idiot, frankly.
	And he's actually shown himself to be a very courageous and principled leader in a very difficult situation.
	And for all these idiots on the internet, this is what really pisses me off.
	These guys on fucking Twitter going, oh, Zelensky is this.
	Why don't you go and lead a country at war?
	Why don't you actually put your life on the line if you're so courageous instead of criticizing people whose name you didn't know until the invasion happened?
	Well, I'll tell you this.
	Okay.
	And this actually, it comes back to something in the beginning where you say, look, if you're going to have a conspiracy to really prevent a Hitler from rising to power, it really had better be Hitler.
	And now it's like, it sort of seems like it's been watered down where you can ban political opponents if they're related to someone who's a political adversary.
	No, no, not related, funded by, in order to create an alternative power structure and openly collaborating with the enemy.
	And this guy was exchanged in the prisoner exchange by Vladimir Putin for like hundreds of people.
	That's how valuable he is to Russia.
	Right?
	So this is an enemy collaborator.
	This is like a Hitler agent in America.
	Oh no, they banned him.
	God forbid.
	I think some of the chat says move on to another topic because politics ruins everything.
	I'm enjoying this.
	By the way, I get worked up talking about this, but it's nothing personal.
	I get annoyed with people spreading false narratives about this who don't understand what's actually happening.
	Right now, it is, I'll say, a little bit of spin because there were some who said, yeah, he banned all religion when it was that one specific.
	That won't justify it to some people.
	And you say, well, we're at war, so war measures are normal.
	Yeah, that's great.
	We invoked the War Measures Act in Canada and we saw what the government did with it.
	When the government doesn't give up power once it takes it and it invokes the War Measures Act.
	I mean, read Orwell's preface to Animal Farm.
	He talks about the fact, even Orwell talked about the fact that in wartime, censorship is quite acceptable for certain things.
	Orwell said the level of censorship we've had in Britain during the war was actually quite reasonable, right?
	When you're at war, the rules are different.
	Well, no, it's not the same.
	Well, first, you're saying they're really at war.
	There will be some people who say that they're reclaiming territory that wanted to join Russia in the first place.
	Territory that was taken from...
	Well, let's talk about that if you want to talk about that.
	Well, I was going to just see how we can redefine the term war because whenever they do it, they say we're at war now.
	We're at war against the virus.
	We're at war against misinformation.
	Yeah, but come on.
	That's different.
	This is the actual war.
	So we can disagree with what the Canadian government is doing without necessarily lumping everybody in into the same pot.
	Okay, so then let's actually get to this.
	There are people who will argue that this is not about global...
	Well, not global conquest.
	About broader conquest than...
	The Donbass region, the eastern region of Ukraine, which voted or views itself as being a part of Russia or at least independent from Ukraine, and that this is not a war, but this is rather to affirm the autonomy of those eastern states that view themselves either as autonomous or part of Russia.
	Okay.
	So now someone's going to say, what's the retort to that?
	So when Chechnya tries to break away from Russia, Russia is entitled to fight two wars and force them into submission, install their puppet in Kadyrov, and retain Chechnya as part of the Russian Federation.
	Right?
	I can tell you one thing.
	That's fine?
	Is that okay?
	I would not venture any opinion on Chechnya because my learning curve on the Ukraine-Russia conflict has been steep enough.
	My point is, if a part of a country wants to break away...
	Is that country entitled to protect its territorial integrity or not?
	This is where the discussion would be.
	If part of the country wants to break away and the country that says we own you, you don't get to break away.
	And it was actually part of the election of Zelensky in the first place, which was to negotiate a resolution to that disputed territory and not be egged on into war by big brother and big police who are helping you.
	Zelensky was elected after.
	Those territories were already part conquered by Russia.
	Right?
	Those territories were part of Ukraine.
	There were never any votes in those areas to join any other country until they were invaded by Russia.
	Crimea was simply taken by Russia, and then they've held referendums.
	Now, if you take a country and you put your own troops in there, any referendum you hold after that is obviously bullshit, right?
	Number one.
	Number two, if Canada decides to invade the north of the United States and take a couple of states, invades them, captures them, and has a referendum, and they decide to stay in Canada, is that legitimate?
	Well, there's nuance that's being left out of that hypothesis.
	Which is what?
	Well, from what I surmise, this would be one thing I would want to check, is when the eastern provinces either...
	They voted for Zelensky overwhelmingly, you know that, right?
	He got more votes in the East than he did in the West.
	From what I understand, it depends on where you break it down and what areas you're talking about.
	No, no, no.
	He was overwhelmingly elected by the Eastern regions.
	He lost the West and won by the Eastern Central regions in those elections.
	With widespread support.
	This would be an element of fact check.
	What's Joe Rogan's...
	Jamie, can you pull that up?
	This would be something that I'll check afterwards, but I did recall that there was a breakdown of the votes, and it was very much regional.
	Go and look at the election map.
	He lost the West and won in the East, overwhelmingly.
	I'm looking at the chat to see if anyone has any fact check there.
	So, well, okay.
	Operating on that premises, without going into where that vote would be broken down based on geography within geography.
	Let's address the central argument, right?
	Your central argument is this.
	These people are Russian.
	They're Russian speakers.
	They want to be part of Russia.
	Why doesn't Ukraine let them go?
	Is that your argument?
	No, well, mine would be, there are multiple levels to this.
	The one would be, my understanding is that...
	There is a dispute over the eastern provinces.
	There is split loyalty between Ukraine and Russia.
	My understanding was that there was a vote, and I understand the debate about how you conduct a vote and whether or not the people who were going to vote in Ukraine had fled already to western Ukraine.
	Nonetheless, there is a dispute over eastern provinces which historically have changed hands a number of times.
	So not like Canada just invading the US.
	Historically it changed hands.
	Have independents who don't want to be a part of Ukraine or Russia but be independent and Ukraine says no.
	Zelensky elected in 2016?
	What was it?
	2014 or 2016?
	I think it's 2017.
	I don't remember.
	I'm terrible with dates.
	Me too.
	Well, he was elected in having platformed, having run on a platform of negotiating a resolution or at least engaging in it, gets elected and then reneges on any form of negotiation now that he sees he has the backing of NATO powers.
	Okay, I don't think that's what happened.
	I don't think that's what happened.
	What happened, I think, is actually neither Russia nor Ukraine were particularly happy with the Minsk Accords.
	They were not sustainable.
	Neither side followed them, and that's why you have the conflict that you have.
	But you've got to remember this all goes back to how did this whole thing start.
	It started with Russia invading and annexing Crimea and invading those two eastern regions and supporting the people who...
	Who broke out there.
	Like you talked about foreign intervention.
	I mean, it's exactly the same thing, but the other way around.
	Russia funded and supported these rebels in order for that conflict to start in the first place.
	If Russia wasn't meddling, everything would be fine.
	Would be the argument.
	I'm not sure.
	I was going to say about Crimea.
	That was not my understanding about Crimea either, but this is where...
	What's your understanding about Crimea?
	That they voted...
	After Russia put its troops there.
	After they annexed it, then they had a referendum.
	In which, surprise, 98% of whatever it was people voted to be part of Russia.
	But a better example would be, I mean, Canada.
	Okay, let's take Mexico.
	There are several states in the United States that used to be part of Mexico.
	Is Mexico entitled to invade the United States?
	And have referendums in Texas and California and whatever else, Arizona, whatever other states were part of Mexico.
	There's a lot of imperfections with that analogy in that they're not current issues.
	They're not current debates and they're not ones that are...
	Well, if Mexico was powerful enough, they would be current issues because Mexico would fund rebels in those areas.
	But the reason it doesn't happen is the United States is a lot stronger than Mexico.
	That's all.
	My point is, all I'm saying, my friend, is this.
	If you want to go revise history with force...
	You can do that in every country for the rest of eternity.
	We can have a fight between England and Scotland.
	There are parts of France that might want to be parts of Germany and parts of Germany that might want to be parts of France.
	That's largely what World War I and World War II were about.
	You know, Alsace-Lorraine, these are two territories between those areas that are always in dispute.
	And that's what wars are about.
	You want to revise history with military force?
	Okay, fine.
	We can have that conversation.
	But at the end of the day, either nations have territorial integrity or they don't.
	And my broader point is nothing to do with this anyway.
	First of all, the John Mayer Scheimer stuff about how Russian speakers, that means they're pro-Russian, complete bullshit.
	All of my family in Ukraine, North, East, South, West, all are Russian speakers.
	None of them are pro-Russian in this conflict.
	By the way, even the ones who were in the Russian Orthodox Church who were pro-Russian from another part of my family, they've all changed their minds after they saw what Russia was doing in Ukraine, surprisingly enough.
	So this narrative about how these regions were desperate to break away, no, no, they weren't desperate.
	There were some people in those regions who were funded and supported by Russia who decided that they would like to be independent or actually part of Russia.
	Lots of other people didn't want.
	You would be surprised to hear most people don't want to be at war.
	That's the conflict.
	But the real truth of it is, man, is from a Western perspective, it's nothing to do with that.
	It's about what do you allow Russia to do?
	And in 2014, this is what happened.
	Russia was allowed to start a civil war in Ukraine in these two eastern regions and annexed Crimea.
	No punishment.
	So they come back in 2022.
	No punishment again, they'll come back again.
	That's why, however this conflict is resolved, and I don't think it'll be resolved for a while because now the side is tired of fighting, what needs to end up happening is Russia will probably keep some portion of the territories it currently occupies.
	And in exchange for that, as I've said from day one, Ukraine gets some kind of long-term security.
	Guarantees, not like some words on a piece of paper, but actual physical security.
	And that means you'll either have to join NATO or there's a peacekeeping force and you get some kind of Korean-style split scenario.
	Joining NATO might be the very, what some people perceive to be, you've characterized the Russian side.
	Others are going to say their existential threat is NATO expanding into Ukraine.
	It is biological weapon.
	Factories, research facilities in Ukraine.
	It's nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
	What would America do if there were nuclear warheads in Mexico or in Cuba?
	There would be a problem.
	Russia has caused this conflict to go the way that it has.
	Sweden and Finland, for example, which were maintaining their neutrality precisely for this reason, because they're countries on the border of Russia.
	They've since joined NATO.
	So, by the way, all this stuff about Ukraine becoming a threat is all bullshit anyway, because Russia has a border with NATO already.
	A border with NATO already.
	So if that was an issue, it wouldn't be such a big deal anyway.
	What would be the size comparison between the border?
	I presume you mean...
	It's a smaller border, of course it is, but nuclear weapons don't need a big border, right?
	It's not like the distance between Poland and Russia and Ukraine and Russia is so massively different that a nuclear missile can't cover that area.
	Then why the specific NATO interest in Ukraine to begin with?
	Well, this is what I was going to say is, do you know who are the biggest supporters of Ukraine's defense by percentage of GDP?
	The biggest supporters of Ukraine's defense, meaning contributors to this conflict financially with weapons?
	To Ukraine's defense.
	By GDP, so it's not going to be by raw number.
	It's going to be per capita.
	Well, let me think.
	I'll say the US anyhow.
	Okay.
	Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Sweden, Finland.
	What do you think these countries have in common?
	The border with Russia.
	What do you think they know that people on Twitter don't?
	I think that's the statistic.
	They are risking so much.
	They are risking confronting and antagonizing an aggressive Russian state by supporting Ukraine.
	Why do you think they're doing that?
	Well, you're going to say for the existential fear of Russia expanding, they might be...
	Correct.
	Why do you think Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Sweden and Finland were desperate to join NATO?
	Well, I got to it before the chat.
	I think the GDP argument comparison is nonsense.
	I mean, that's because you're dealing with such small entities in the first place that it almost becomes a meaningless comparison.
	Okay, if you have $10,000 and you give $1,000...
	I understand the argument.
	$1,000 to someone with $10,000 is a lot of money.
	How much would they be dedicating if their GDP had the U.S. if the U.S. were not also funding this financing?
	I have no idea.
	It would be zero because they would have no chance of anything.
	I don't agree with that, but it doesn't matter.
	My point is they're risking a lot.
	It's not about the money.
	It's about how much they're risking.
	Why are they doing that, in your opinion?
	Well, I'm not sure that I would necessarily agree that they're risking direct retaliation.
	You think funding an enemy of Russia while having a border with Russia is not a risk?
	I don't think it's the risk that you make it out to be that now Russia's going to lash out at them.
	If borders don't matter and the nukes can reach all places on Earth, it doesn't matter if it's a neighbor or a neighbor of a neighbor.
	So I think that...
	It's an interesting statistic.
	These countries have economic and military concerns about Russia.
	They always have done.
	When my dad was in the Russian government, his job was to keep Latvia and Estonian-Lithuanian line, actually.
	These countries are in Russia's sphere of influence, and those countries have been invaded by Russia over and over and over and over again throughout history.
	And that's why they wanted the safety of being in NATO, just like Ukraine wanted the safety of being in NATO.
	And just so everybody also understands, the purpose of a discussion out there is not to convince anybody.
	I'm actually more interested in hearing Konstantin flesh out his opinions, and the smarter people on the internet are going to dissect it.
	But I do want to bring this one up, because this would have been my retort.
	They're not risking anything.
	They're actually buying support from the U.S. and NATO.
	How?
	I don't understand.
	How are they buying support?
	By being on the side of the stronger power for now.
	Okay, fine.
	Let's accept that part of it.
	How are they not risking anything?
	Because they're basically buying insurance from the mob.
	I mean, that's the way I would flip the argument.
	You don't think there's a risk to Finland and Sweden and Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania from openly supporting a country that is in direct confrontation with Russia?
	No, you mean direct confrontation with Ukraine?
	With Russia.
	They're supporting Russia's enemy in a war.
	You don't think...
	You guys are all concerned about World War III because America is giving support to Ukraine.
	You don't think Russia would have something to say about Latvia and Lithuania doing that?
	Countries which are historically in its sphere of influence?
	Countries which has tried to keep under its boot?
	Well, let me flip the argument on you then.
	If Russia's looking for an excuse to expand, why wouldn't they have already used this as a pretext?
	Because those countries are, thankfully for them, part of NATO.
	That's why they were desperate to join NATO.
	We're seeing the exact same thing and you can view it whichever way you want here.
	Russia's not attacking them because they've got the big brother, the big bully backing them.
	How'd they get that?
	By supporting the big bully.
	They asked to join NATO the moment they could.
	Look, none of the countries, none of the countries in Russia's former sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, None of them have wanted to remain part of its orbit.
	Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, right?
	Even Hungary, okay, Orban is pro-Putin, but Hungary doesn't want to be part of Russia's sphere of influence, right?
	The only country that's remained in any kind of alliance in Eastern Europe with Russia is Belarus, because Belarus is a guy who's even more dictatorial than Putin.
	That's the only reason, right?
	None of these countries want to be part of Russia's sphere of influence.
	You know why?
	Because they don't want to live...
	In that part of the world under that sort of regime.
	They actually would quite like to have some freedom and liberal democracy.
	Thank you very much.
	I'll say it's not an indefensible perspective.
	It's an interesting perspective.
	But it is funny how you can look at them.
	You can look at this and see it from both sides.
	You can see it and describe it.
	You're saying, why would they risk provoking war with Russia?
	I didn't say provoking war.
	I said it's a risk because Russia can do trade embargoes.
	Russia can use its economic power.
	Am I wrong?
	Those trade embargoes would be pretty useless now that those members are NATO members and have the rest of Europe.
	No, those countries still, I mean, before the war, they used to do a lot of trade.
	I mean, they're neighbors.
	People say defund NATO.
	And then the problem is, though, Konstantin, there are people who look at NATO as the villain that some, I won't say you, but I suspect...
	Maybe you.
	Some look at Putin.
	Like, okay, so we're picking our dictators here.
	You prefer the NATO.
	Correct.
	I do prefer NATO.
	That's correct.
	That's exactly right.
	The world is going to be ruled by somebody you don't like.
	I'd rather they had more of my values than not.
	Sorry.
	And that, I think, is actually where we can put a bow tie in it, is that people are going to say...
	You're picking NATO dominance over Russian dominance.
	Correct.
	I told you an hour ago I prefer an American-dominated world.
	Because I've lived in a world that's not dominated by America, and I don't want to live in that world.
	And I have two friends from China.
	I don't want to live in that world either.
	That's the choice.
	That's the choice.
	How about people who are going to say that NATO is the true bully, saying to Russia, you either deal with us dominating you...
	Or die trying.
	Or we'll crush you trying.
	Why is that?
	No one was crushing Russia.
	Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania wanted to join NATO.
	So did Ukraine.
	No one made Ukrainians pro-Western.
	Ukrainians were pro-Western.
	I used to go to Ukraine twice a year.
	And in Ukraine, a decade ago, in fact, two decades ago, you know what they used to call...
	So we didn't have...
	Do you know what's...
	I don't know if it's the same in Canada.
	Double glazing.
	What we call double glazing.
	Do you have that?
	On donuts?
	No, no, no, no.
	Not on donuts.
	Windows.
	Windows.
	I don't know what...
	You mean like frosted?
	Two panes of glass instead of one, which keeps the heat trapped.
	Okay, fine.
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So that is the technology we didn't have in the Soviet Union, right?
	And in Ukraine, when it first became available, do you know what they called it?
	They called it Eurowindows.
	When lawns first became available in Ukraine, where you could have a lawn made for your house, they used to call them Euro lawns because the idea was everything that's from the West is good, right?
	People in Ukraine wanted to move in a pro-Western direction from the moment the Soviet Union collapsed.
	This was not the case in Russia.
	In Russia, everything Western is bad and shit and whatever, right?
	Ukrainians as a country and as a nation, most of them wanted to move in a pro-Western direction.
	And that is what this is all about.
	No one made them want to be part of NATO.
	NATO didn't come in and drop microchips in the head and said, you need to move in a westward direction.
	These countries want to be under our umbrella of protection.
	And it's up to us whether you want them to be part of that.
	Constantine, I'll do what I like to do in a debate and say, okay, take for granted your position.
	Russia is bad and bad and needs to be stopped and NATO needs to win.
	What do you say to the fact that this war, It's actually doing nothing other than continuing further conflict because it's very profitable for all of the parties involved, and it's using Ukrainian innocent civilians as the pawns to further endless war.
	I agree with you.
	War is bad, and the sooner it can end, the better.
	The question is how it ends.
	And this is what I never hear from the people who think they're pro-peace, which they're not.
	How do you end this war?
	How do you end this war?
	Tell me.
	Well, I would say you will hold independent referendums on the eastern provinces and...
	How do you hold independent referendums in a country that's occupied?
	Well, I would say get the UN in, but we know what the UN does when they get- Yeah, but all the people who were going to vote to stay in Ukraine have already been fled, killed, or imprisoned.
	But so now you've set up a premise where there is no resolution, because if you lose the vote- No, no, that's not what I said.
	I gave you my resolution.
	I gave my resolution on March the 3rd when I was on Question Time in this country, and I gave it to you during this talk again.
	Russia gets to keep- Those eastern regions that it's already occupied, because no one in Ukraine expects to get them back anyway.
	It gets to keep Crimea, in my opinion.
	Ukrainians, by the way, don't like me saying this, but this is my opinion.
	And in exchange, Ukraine gets to join NATO.
	That's the deal.
	Now, neither Russia or Ukraine will accept that deal right now.
	That's why the war won't end.
	Well, I think nobody's going to agree to them joining NATO if what NATO's going to want to do is continue bio-research on Ukrainian soil and plant nukes there.
	I mean, obviously.
	The whole point is, here, take the little sliver and allow us to bring in arms that will allow us to, when we want to kick you out of that sliver the next time, do it, boy howdy, because we've got nukes on your border.
	Okay, so tell me how you end the war.
	I would say hold something of a referendum on the eastern provinces.
	So we've already got to the point that we know that's impossible.
	No, you've got to that point.
	You asked me my solution.
	Now you tell me why it's not possible.
	Well, it isn't possible because the people who are going to vote there don't live there anymore.
	So you're then holding a referendum on a territory that's been cleansed of anyone who was going to vote in a way that Russia wasn't going to like.
	Yeah, okay.
	I was going to analogize this to the Middle East, but I will not.
	Okay.
	That would be...
	You may not like the solution.
	You'll say, I'm going to lose that solution.
	But you're already prepared to concede it under your peace plan anyhow, so it should be no problem.
	Right, because I don't want fake referendums to legitimize what happened.
	Well, you'll have to either caveat the referendum with, but we know we're going to lose.
	And, I mean, I don't know what the solution is to the denazification of the Ukrainian army.
	I mean, I don't know how you eliminate the Azov Battalion, but...
	It's already been largely eliminated in combat.
	So how do you denartify the U.S. military, which probably has more Nazis in it?
	You know what I would say?
	I would say defund the American...
	What about denartification of the Russian military?
	Much more natified than the Ukrainian one.
	What about denartifying the Russian state?
	Dmitry Rogozin, former Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, former head of Russia's equivalent of NASA, openly, on camera, doing a Nazi salute, saying white people of the world unite.
	That's fine, is it?
	No, what you're saying is, I think...
	Why don't we denotify Russia?
	Why aren't you so concerned about that?
	No, no, I'm saying...
	Come on, man.
	We care about Nazis, right?
	Let's denotify Russia's military.
	You asked for the peace plan.
	My whole point in this is that Ukraine and Russia...
	What are we going to do about the Russian natification program?
	Constance, you know how to resolve this problem?
	Stop funding Ukraine, the Ukraine war machine, and they'll negotiate their peace.
	That's how it works.
	Oh, you mean they'll surrender?
	They would...
	Surrender.
	Well, that's good.
	I'm glad we got it because this is the position that all the pro-peace people don't want to say out loud.
	You're pro forcing Ukraine to surrender.
	That's fine.
	That's a perfectly acceptable position.
	You're strawmanning, but I don't care.
	How am I strawmanning?
	You said, take away the support and they will negotiate their peace.
	The only peace they'll be able to negotiate is a full surrender.
	Well, you're predicting the future.
	That's what would happen.
	But if they can't defend themselves and Russia is invading, what other solution is there going to be?
	First of all, There are different ways to protect yourself, not all of which is through a corrupted military machine that will enjoy a war that never ends.
	You presume the US is involved to support Ukraine when they might just be involved to promote this war for as long as they can.
	Forget about that.
	I'm just talking about the point that you made, which is, you said, take away the support and let them negotiate their own settlement.
	Now, that is equivalent of saying there's a rapist raping a woman.
	Let's take away her support and protection and let them negotiate their unsettling.
	What do you think is going to happen?
	That's what would happen.
	So you're not pro-peace.
	You're pro-surrender.
	Constantine, you've set up a straw man that Russia is raping Ukraine.
	That's exactly what it's doing.
	That's what it's doing.
	And others are going to look at this as regional conflict and where it got escalated.
	What happens in regional conflict?
	Typically, the regions negotiate it, but what falsifies regional conflict is when outside regions come in and start propping up one party over another, and that exacerbates the problem and makes a regional conflict an international one.
	Fine.
	Okay, let's go back to the beginning of this debate.
	Is it the West's obligation to get involved in every global conflict where you think one party is raping another?
	I told you that I was against Iraq.
	Yeah, but someone would have made the argument that the Iraqi people are getting raped by Saddam Hussein, so it's up to the West to come in.
	I mean, you can throw that analogy around everywhere.
	Hold on.
	I'm not saying it's our obligation.
	I'm saying it's in our interest, coming back to the point.
	However, let's go back to what you said.
	Hold on, let me stop you there.
	Not our obligation, but in our interests.
	Of course it's in our interest.
	I said that, again, an hour ago.
	No, I know what I said, because it's an interesting way of viewing conflict.
	Let's just come back to the point that you made, right?
	Which is...
	If we take away the support from the Ukrainians, they will negotiate their own settlement.
	Now, go back to February 24th of last year.
	What happened when Ukraine didn't have foreign support of the scale that it has now?
	Russia nearly occupied all of central and eastern Ukraine, half the country, right?
	I'm not sure I would agree.
	That's what happened.
	What do you mean?
	They were this far away from Kiev, they took Kherson, they were this far away from taking Kharkov, and they were pushing Ukraine out of the two eastern regions.
	And that was with a lot of support.
	Fact that one.
	Yeah, go look on the map, man.
	I know what was happening.
	I was paying pretty close attention.
	Anyway, that's what was happening.
	They nearly took over half the country, including the capital.
	So if Ukraine had no foreign support, what kind of peace settlement do you think they'd negotiate if Russia knew for a fact that they could overrun the entire country?
	Well, they would just miraculously stop, would they?
	No, I think they would have negotiated the independence or referendum of the East, but now you've already predicated that that not being a solution.
	They nearly occupied Kiev in three days.
	But, well, I see.
	We're going to have that.
	We're going to have to double check.
	They were this close to Kiev.
	They were literally on the outskirts.
	I had family members sending me videos of Russian tanks on the outskirts of Kiev.
	Is it?
	I mean...
	And if you pull...
	Western support away from Ukraine, they would take over at least half the country, probably all of it, if they could.
	Install their puppet government with your friend Viktor Medvedchuk, and everything would be fine.
	If that's what you want, I wish you would just say it.
	Because I have no problem with people having that position.
	I genuinely don't.
	I just don't like dishonesty.
	If that's what you want, say it.
	Constantine.
	I've said what I think would be the solution to this.
	It's that.
	That's your straw man to make it look like...
	It's not a straw man.
	What would happen to Ukraine if it didn't have Western support?
	We saw that in the first days of the invasion.
	Half of it would be occupied.
	That's what we saw.
	I'll fundamentally disagree, but it's an impossible thing to answer what would happen if...
	The dispute appears to be over the Eastern region.
	If it were Russians' intent to take...
	So why did they try to occupy Kyiv?
	Why did they occupy Kherson?
	Why did they occupy Zaporozhye?
	Why did they try to occupy Kharkiv?
	None of these cities in the eastern regions.
	These are the biggest cities in Ukraine.
	Why did they try to occupy all of them?
	Why did that happen?
	Why did they try to capture Zelensky?
	Why did they want to capture Zelensky?
	That's a much different question.
	But you're asking why, which presupposes the that.
	So that would be one matter-of-fact question as to whether or not it is...
	Well, you need to go and look up the facts, my friend, because that's what they did.
	In the first days of the invasion.
	Remember Buccia, where all those massacres happened that people like to talk about?
	That is on the outskirts of Kyiv.
	Gostomel, the airport that they tried to take, is on the outskirts of Kyiv.
	All of these places, they tried to take the capital in the first days of the war.
	Do you remember that massive convoy that got stuck on the road?
	That convoy was going from Belarus to Kyiv to take the capital.
	That's what they were trying to do.
	They took Kherson in the south.
	They got some local traders to help.
	That is not part of the eastern regions.
	What about Kharkov?
	Again, not part of the eastern regions.
	They were this close to taking it.
	You might be, I mean, for the sake of argument, it's an interesting tactic, confounding taking strategic points of interest in the context of a conflict versus taking...
	The entire country.
	So why would they take an airport?
	I presume it's so that they can secure...
	The capital, Kyiv.
	It's in the center.
	No, no, but I understand.
	But I think we disagree on that as a matter of fact.
	I don't think...
	What do you mean we disagree on it as a matter of fact?
	My understanding is not that at any point that Russia was trying to take Kyiv.
	Well, then you need to do more research.
	Okay.
	And if I'm wrong, that's where the internet will say Viva was wrong as a matter of fact.
	Konstantin was right as a matter of fact.
	Cool.
	All right.
	Now, with that said...
	You know, I think we've milked, not milked, but rather...
	Dude, we've overrun by half an hour and I wish we had more time because I'd happily chat to you about this for hours.
	So let's end on an optimistic note.
	Is the West in a state of free fall for freedom of thoughts?
	What is the state of England, the UK right now?
	I mean, it looks like shit.
	I mean, we've seen what happened with Count Dankula.
	We've seen people seem to be ushering in.
	Censorship.
	People seem to be ushering in absolute denial of basic science.
	They seem to be ushering in the world that you grew up in that you left.
	What is your optimism, if any, for the state of...
	Well, the world that I left is even worse, as we've talked about.
	In Russia, people are getting arrested for protesting as a single...
	So initially, they would go out with a placard saying peace or something.
	They'd get arrested.
	Then they would go out with no placard, just hand their hands up.
	They'd get arrested for that.
	You get arrested in Russia and put in prison for 10 years.
	For saying, for calling the war a war.
	So the world is all in a bad way, in my opinion.
	Am I concerned about what's happening in the West?
	Yes.
	That's why I, like you and like many other people, are trying to improve the West from the inside.
	If you think Putin is the solution to the West problems, you have another thing coming.
	I don't mean you.
	I don't mean you.
	I don't think Putin's the solution.
	I think this conflict in Ukraine and the drumming up of getting into World War III is part and parcel.
	The two countries that have benefited the most from this conflict are China and the United States, and the two countries that have lost the most from this conflict are Russia and Ukraine.
	Absolutely.
	So this is not beneficial to the West.
	I think in some ways it will actually help.
	Not that it's a good thing.
	I'm not for this war being in place or continuing, but it's not going to end anytime soon.
	And so the West is in trouble.
	I think many other countries are in even worse situations.
	And what we have to do as Western citizens is look inward and deal with our own governments and hold them to account and try to also change the culture.
	Because I say this often to Americans.
	It's like the reason, for example, comedy is not nearly as much trouble in America as it is in the UK is not that you have a First Amendment.
	It's that you have a First Amendment culture.
	Right.
	You have to have a culture that underpins these attitudes before anything else.
	So I think that's our job.
	We've got to change the culture.
	I'm trying to do that.
	You're trying to do that.
	And let's carry on.
	All right.
	Constantine, thank you very much.
	You know what?
	I thought this when you told me in the beginning that you only had an hour.
	I said, I'm going to try to go for as long as I can because it's the ultimate compliment when someone...
	It goes past the a lot of time.
	Thank you for staying on with me.
	Everybody in the chat, thank you for being here.
	I didn't get to the super chats, but I've starred them, so I'll get to them in my locals and thank everyone for that.
	Constantine, stick around just for two seconds.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes.
	Everyone out there, see you tomorrow.
	I'm going to announce my guest for tomorrow, this afternoon.
	It's a big one.
	Everyone, peace out, peeps.

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