Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Konstantin Kisin & Josh: Multiculturalism, Migration & the Media

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Konstantin Kisin & Josh: Multiculturalism, Migration & the Media · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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Good day humans, Merry Christmas, welcome to the Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas, and Dangerous
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Ideas are the bread and butter of today's guest Constantine Kissin, the host of one of
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the most popular podcasts in the world with his friend Francis Foster Trigonometry, where
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they chat with heterodox guests from across the political spectrum.
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I was on the show last year, you can watch that interesting conversation at the link in
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the show notes. Constantine was born in the Soviet Union, moved to the United Kingdom
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when he was 11 years old. He went viral in 2023 for a speech that he gave at the Oxford
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Union Student Debating Society, arguing that woke culture has gone too far, that made him
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a bit of a poster boy for certain elements on the right, including in the United States,
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and I wanted to sit down with Constantine on this show and talk about the problems in
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Britain, the problems in the media, the problems in podcasting, taxation and welfare and multiculturalism
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and the broader media landscape and how he thinks about platforming extreme voices. I also
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wanted to get stuck into it a little bit with him on climate change, which he and I don't
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see eye to eye on, and get stuck into it. We did. I love this conversation, I hope you
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do too, the one the only Constantine Kissin.
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I wrote an article last week saying there's good news for Britain, things are really bad,
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and that's kind of where I'm at, I feel like we are so far down the path of being unable
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to deal with the problems that we have, that the only way we will deal with the problems
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that we have is if things get so bad that people, it's kind of like that situation where
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most people have had that relationship or an addiction or a job where it's like, it really,
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really sucks, but not quite enough for you to do anything about it. That's where we are.
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Right. And you're waiting for rock bottom. Yeah, I'm excited for rock bottom is there's
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an odd ton of phrase. I'm not excited about it because it'll be very unpleasant for a lot of
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people, but I just feel that that is the only way we get back to normalcy or just forward
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towards some kind of new normalcy. What if it's instead the path towards extremism?
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I think that we are already on the path towards extremism and it's inevitable if the state
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to squal continues. So in some ways, I almost think that if that were to happen, there is more
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of a chance of avoiding extremism because the people will be confronted with the reality of
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needing to actually take action because part of the thing that's happening on the extremism is
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a lot of the extremist retro from both left and right is not geared towards solving the actual
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problem wherein you have an actual real problem that's really, really bad. That's when both left
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and right, some portions of them at least will have to get serious. But the risk you're pointing
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out is totally probably that. Yeah, I mean, I worry that the bigger the stressors become,
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the more tempting it is to reach for those easy solutions rather than find, come together for
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collaborative and sophisticated solutions. What are exactly other problems that you see the UK
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and the West more broadly facing? Well, those are two separate questions slightly because in the UK,
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we have a more specific problem that they, for example, do not have in the US. The number one problem
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the Britain faces is the economy. We are poorer today than we were before the financial crisis in
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2007, 2008 on a per capita basis. So all of the other stuff that people talk about like immigration,
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illegal immigration, lots of other things that have become the mainstream consensus to the point
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where the labor home secretary now sort of sounds a little bit like Enoch Powell while not doing
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anything, but sounds like it, right? The main reason for all of that is partly it's cultural, of
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course, but the main reason is just the country is poorer than it was, not only not getting richer,
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but actually is poorer. And that means lots of things. It means that not only are people finding
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it harder to get good jobs, it also means infrastructure is crumbling and is not being improved.
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So I just spent two weeks without running water in the town where I live,
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simply because the water companies are not able to spend enough money and have a good enough
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organization to maintain what a largely Victorian built water systems, for example. It's the same
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with the trains, it's the same with everything. So the economic issue is number one. On top of that,
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you've got, so you've got a economics, b infrastructure, and c, you've got, I mean,
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I don't think it's overstating the case to say that in the big cities, petty crime has effectively
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become part of daily life. So I was walking through May, a couple months ago, I saw a guy in a
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balaclava on one of those e-bikes snatch a kind of boutique bag off an American tourist.
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It was kind of a weird moment because you realize how we're all kind of NPCs in those moments,
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or we don't know what to do because he was like, hey, come back here. I don't think he's coming
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back, mate. But anyway, oh, I wasn't going to come back. But now that you shout out at me like that.
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That's right. Now the interesting thing about that was interesting is an interesting choice of
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word because it wasn't interesting. It was kind of horrifying to me was that I was staying
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the night in London, and I had a bunch of meetings with people the next day. And literally,
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everybody that I talked to about I was shocked by this incident because I don't live in London.
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Everyone I talked to was like, oh, yeah, my daughter was marked on the bus sale the day,
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come from school. Oh, yeah, my father's just been snatched. Oh, yeah, this, oh, yeah, this,
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oh, yeah, that, oh, yeah, that. So the kind of sense that there is a low level of
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crime that goes just effectively unpunished and unprosecuted and un-pursued and it's just become
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part of life is the case as well. That's partly again about economics. It's about not having police
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officers to do the job. And you know, people will say, well, yeah, they've got the resources to
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arrest people for tweets, which turns out they do. But I don't think that's necessarily the primary
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vehicle through which that problem exists. It exists mainly because there's not enough
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police officers walking the streets and preventing crime and prosecuting that crime and putting
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those people in prison. So you've got that. Then on top of that, you know, I've told the story
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a thousand times, but perhaps the audience may not have heard of it. When I came to Britain in 1996,
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50,000 people a year came into this country, net legally, i.e. go to an embassy apply for a passport,
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get on a plane, come to Britain, we will come you in. Today, that's a number of people who come
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into the country illegally every year. And these people are being put up in hotels. They're being
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put up in military bases. It's costing us, at one point, it was costing us 10 million pounds a day.
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Today is probably more than that in various, and that's just for accommodation. That's not
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for lots of other things. So it creates a sense of a, we don't have money, beware spending on other
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people. This is all very unfair. And the, you know, the conversation by legal immigration has broken
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out of the sort of right wing echo chamber and it's just now completely mainstream. So just taking
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those things separately, they're sort of declining infrastructure, the petty crime and immigration.
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On declining infrastructure, of course, what the left would say is that this is what the right
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always does, which is impose austerity and under fund public services. And then when everything
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falls apart, find a convenient scapegoat like illegal immigrants to blame when really the problem
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is that there hasn't been enough funding for to keep up with the demand in the UK. Is there a grain
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of truth to that or is that wrong? There is a grain of truth to that in the sense that you can't
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keep investing money in infrastructure when you don't have money. So when the conservative government
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came in, which I was no fan, even remotely, they tried to do austerity. They didn't do austerity.
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They've reduced spending by a tiny, tiny, tiny amount. And in many ways continued to grow it.
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But when you, when you're running debt at more than 100% of GDP, you are going to have to cut some
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things. But the issue isn't really about that for me. For me, the issue is that you can't fund
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public services if your economy isn't growing. And our economy isn't growing. And the part of the
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reason the economy isn't growing is that we've got, we've got this thing called net zero, which is
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basically we've got the most expensive electricity prices in the world, industrial electricity
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prices in the world. So you can't run a business that requires electricity, basically, and be
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competitive. On top of that, because we have this thing called net zero, we outsource all of our
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manufacturing to other countries where they make these things in a dirtier way. And then we shift
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them back to the UK using big tankers that burn bunker fuel to dirtiest kind of fuel you can imagine.
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But because it's off the books, we get to say we're really clean and green and wonderful.
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So basically we've destroyed our manufacturing and also made consumer electricity prices very
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expensive. And then you've got, we've got the highest tax burden in peacetime ever. So anyone who wants
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to run a business, anyone who's industrious, creative, et cetera is basically leaving the country.
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There's one of the other things that people don't talk about. We spend a lot of time talking about
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the fact that people fleeing other countries are coming to Britain, many of them illegally,
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but actually tens of thousands of our best people are fleeing Britain to go to other countries.
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I had lunch with a friend of mine who's a lawyer constantly in last week when I was in London,
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and she was saying that there are so many cases which are just backlogged in the legal system
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that people will find themselves. Cases that should be ordinarily through the system in months
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are now taking years. And there are even just to get on the docket at certain chambers.
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It'll be a 2027 date for your first hearing. And I was just baffled because I was like, why not
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just spend the money to, as she was saying that like oftentimes there'll be, you know, in the middle
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of summer, they'll have to just cancel or postpone trials because it'll be so hot because the air
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conditioning has broken in these old 1700s buildings which they are running the trial in. And I was
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like, why isn't there a quorum of people who are fed up enough that they insist that there's
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adequate funding for that for police and petty crime? I mean, I would have thought that a
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Giuliani style figure like Giuliani in the 90s, I mean, with a zero tolerance broken windows
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approach to cracking down on crime would be very successful as a mayor of London. Why are those
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political, why is the not sufficient political will for it? Because there's not sufficient money
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for it because one of the things is lots of people, if you ask people, should we spend more money
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on X or Y or Z? They'll all say yes. But the question is, where does our money come from?
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Well, there's always ways to raise new revenue, isn't there, Constantine? I mean, you know,
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you have a wealth tax or you would increase corporate taxes or there are all kinds of things
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that lefties would propose that would raise more money. Yeah, the problem is we're at the point in
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the Lafayette curve where raising more taxes actually reduces your tax take. So the Lafayette curve
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is the relationship between tax rates and tax revenue. And it turns out that when you raise
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taxes beyond a certain point, you actually begin to collect less revenue in tax revenue than you
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would with lower tax rates because if you think, well, if you think or no growth or negative growth,
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you think about what taxes are. If you think about, let's say, I don't know what the case is in
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Australia, but in the UK, we have a very high level of tax on cigarettes. We have a very high
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level of tax on alcohol. We have a tax on sugar. We have a tax on burning fossil fuels, etc.
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What are those taxes all designed to do? Well, partly it's about raising revenue, but the other
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thing it's about is about inhibiting that activity. You're raising the tax on sugar to stop people
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consuming sugary products. You're raising the tax on cigarettes in theoretically to stop them
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smoking. Now, what happens when you tax business jobs and employment? You are inhibiting business
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jobs and employment. And of course, we live in a world in which the people who are at the top
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of society economically are the most mobile they've ever been. And so what you're simultaneously
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doing is not only inhibiting those activities, but you're pushing them out to other jurisdictions.
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And if you're somebody who, you know, living in Dubai is a kind of, you know, it's not for
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everybody, but there are lots of people who will happily live in Dubai and pay zero tax and live
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in a place where you can leave your gold plated mobile phone on top of your Lamborghini outside
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and nothing will happen to it. You know, there will be people for whom that is a much better option.
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And many of those people don't have to go to Dubai. They can, they can also go to,
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you know, they go to the US. They go to lots of other places. I know lots of people,
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British people are moving to Australia. Now, I'm not saying all of these things are that much
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better in Australia. But even if everything was the same in Australia, you've got a better climate.
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Even, well, that reason, it would be a noticeable difference in infrastructure. I got to say,
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I mean, when you go to the UK and it is, it is noticeable that things are falling apart in a way
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that they're not in Australia. But I know safety wise as well. I mean, Sydney and Melbourne,
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you know, outside of some horrific recent incidents on a day-to-day basis walking around Sydney
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and Melbourne, I didn't feel the way I feel. I feel more safe walking around New York at this point.
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Yeah. I mean, the problem about taxes is that that argument is often abused by people on the right
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to justify endlessly reducing taxes as well. So I mean, if you think of Republican administrations
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in the United States, they will, they basically have swallowed a fantasy that there is no amount
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of tax cuts that won't pay for themselves by increasing productivity such that the, you know,
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the revenue will increase nonetheless. And they do it over and over and over again.
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And it never actually turns out that way. I mean, the deficits do keep getting bigger every time
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they cut taxes. So how do you know where you are on the Lathe curve? How can you be sure that
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increasing or introducing a wealth tax in order to fund more police would tank the economy?
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Well, because the taxes they've introduced are already tanking the economy.
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And the taxes are not being spent. See, the rationale for the left-wing economic theory,
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which I think is often a valid approach to economics in certain economic situations,
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is that you borrow money in order to invest the money into things. And those things then generate
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returns. And as a result of that, you get returns on your investments, which allows you to effectively
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pay off your investments later down the line. But that is not what we're doing. 60% of our current
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borrowing goes to pay off previous borrowing. We are borrowing money to repay our previous debt
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and we're borrowing money to fund a huge welfare bill that we have in this country, whereby
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basically more than 50% of the country receives more benefits than it pays on tax. And that
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portion of the population is obviously incentivized to keep electing people who promise to spend
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more tax money on more things, on more benefits, on more support for this, more help for that.
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And yeah, but in terms of where we are on the left, we have the highest tax burden in the history
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of this country in peacetime. So that sort of tells you that we are towards the other side of it.
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Now, I take your point. You know, I am not somebody who believes taxation is step. I believe in
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redistribution. I believe in some sort of welfare state. But what we have now is a welfare state that
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traps people in welfare instead of helping them get off it. So if you are somebody who's
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had a bad year and you lose your job and you're a bit depressed, we don't help you get back
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into the jobs market. We give you money so that you can live without ever getting a job ever
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again because you're a bit depressed because you lost your job. So the welfare bill is astronomical.
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We had a great episode of Fraser Nelson talking about this. So that's where we are and the economy
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is effectively it's unproductive. You've got an ed zero, which is ham could just driven out all
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industry. And on top of that, the tax burden that we have is push everyone I know who has a
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business that's portable is trying to leave the country. When you say the tax bill is larger
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than it's ever been, is that, do you mean as a proportion of GDP or in like pounds terms?
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As a proportion of GDP, it's 38%. That's amazing. Where's it all going?
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Right. I told you on welfare. I mean, but our interest repayment budget, I believe
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us spending on interest repayment on paying off previous debt is double our defense budget.
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Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it? The austerity, the cuts that had to happen during the great recession
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and the spending that had to happen during COVID, that there was no strategic plan about how to grow
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ourselves out of those deficits. What do you see? But that's for the reasons that I gave you,
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the incentive structure is for people to vote for people who promise to give them more money
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every opportunity. That money has to come from somewhere. What Britain has done over the last
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several decades is sell all the infrastructure that it could. The water company that messed up
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my water for two weeks, they're owned partly by Australians and partly by somebody else and
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partly by someone else. It is all your fault. Nuclear power stations, some of them are owned by
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foreign countries to that level. Some of them are strategic adversaries, you might say. We've
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got Chinese investments in our nuclear energy, etc. I think I'm right about that. We sold off
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everything we could and then we borrowed everything we could, which is why we come back right to the
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beginning of our conversation. This situation is fiscally unsustainable. Everyone who is a sensible
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economic commentator that I know believes there is a fiscal crisis coming. That is where the people
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who lend you the money say, we actually can't lend you any more money because we're not sure
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you're going to pay it back. At which point you have drastic actual austerity?
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Actual austerity. We're going to cut things by two percent. No, you actually cut things by 20,
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30, 40 percent and you begin to live within, I mean, we begin to live within, I mean, that's going
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to be terrible. It's going to be horrific for lots and lots of people. It's going to kill lots of
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people. It's going to be terrible for the quality of life, life expectancy, all these things are
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going to suffer, but that is what's come. When you say that people keep voting for politicians who
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will promise to give them more money, what's happening to the right in the UK? Because I would never
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have guessed that we would have the realignment that we seem to be seeing where the most popular
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candidate for the Prime Minister ship is Nigel Farage and essentially the other major party instead
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of the Tories now seems to be the Farage's party. What is that about? What's fueling that?
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What's fueling that is that we interviewed Kenny Badenock who is the current leader of the
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Conservative party who took over after the terrible performance of the last election. I think one
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of the first things she said to us is we talked right by God and left. The Conservatives party
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behaved effectively like the Labour Party when they were in charge for a very long time.
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They will argue that they had first, they had the coalition government with the Lib Dems,
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then they had the whole Brexit thing that took up four years. The moment they were done with
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Brexit, Covid came along. The moment they were done with Covid, Ukraine came along and so they
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were the victims of circumstances. I think there's a lot of truth to that. I also think it's a
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convenient excuse for the fact that they blacked the balls to do the things that they needed to do.
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The Conservative party is a coalition, part of which isn't really switched on to these issues
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and wasn't really prepared to talk about the things that you and I are talking about in an open
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way. They've effectively done what the Conservatives have done. They've completely decimated
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their own brand to the point where to the person who would vote for Nigel Farage, which is
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an increasingly large swath of the country, the Conservatives party and the Labour party don't
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look that dissimilar to each other. In that they both did the same thing. They're both massively
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discredited. They are both not going to do the things that they need to do to effectively
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rescue the country from the malaise that it's in. And so Nigel Farage, his popularity is explained
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by that, but also Zach Polanski, the leader of the Green Party has become very popular because
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the left wing answer to these very same problems looks like a left wing populist who talks about
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a wealth tax and the rich on pay and a fair share, which is for whatever you may think about
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the rich. I don't know whether this is a case in Australia and Britain, we are trained from a very
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young age to hate the rich because they're evil and blah, blah, blah. Well, unfortunately for us,
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the top 1% of these evil people, they pay 33 to 34% of all income and capital gains tax in the
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country. So when you demonize them and chase them out of the country, we have a morally right
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just you may feel doing it. You're chasing away one out of 100 people who pay 33 out of every
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hundred pounds we own. So it's not a particularly viable strategy, but my point is left wing populism
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is also on the rise for the reasons that we've spent the last 20 odd minutes discussing.
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One of the solutions that the left would probably propose is that all of all Western countries
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should probably band together and implement some kind of universal tax at the same time. You
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sometimes hear this about corporate taxes, right? So the corporations can't offshore themselves to
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Ireland or to some low tax environment. So everyone agrees on a baseline bottom for their wealth
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taxes and their corporate taxes. Is that a good idea? No, it's a terrible idea because what you
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are doing is you're making yourself uncompetitive and the people we've been discussing will simply do
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what they're already doing, which is go to the Middle East and go to America, which is never
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going to sign up to this in a million years. You're not going to get around the reality that
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taxing people who are a business owners too high is going to push them to places that tax
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and less. I think in the thought experiment America is ruled by Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren
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and is on board. So the people would have to go to yes, they could go to Dubai because presumably
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they're not going to be on board, but there were all kinds of reasons why people don't want to set up
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large industries that serve as the west outside of the west.
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Yeah, the thing is that thought experiment is a thought experiment. It would never happen in
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reality because America is not a country that is going to sign up to that in a million years.
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How do you work, Constantine? I'm interested in just pivoting to your the success of the podcast,
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your career. How much preparation do you do? What does the day look like? Because a lot of people who
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are starting out are like, what do I do when I'm trying to create an independent creative space
24:58
for myself in this world? Well, again, very different questions because today we're at a point
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where we've got 10, no, if you include me in France as a 12 people work in a trigonometry now.
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So our day looked very different to somebody starting out and to us when we were starting out.
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And also preparation wise, it really depends. We have some guests who are like comedians and we might
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just joke around with them and we don't prepare a huge amount. If we're interviewing Benjamin Net in
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Yahoo, we're going to brush up on a Middle Eastern history and politics a little bit. So it really
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fundamentally depends on what the interview is and what the nature of it is. Sometimes we interviewed
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Dave Smith or we had a discussion with Dave Smith, which was obviously going to be a discussion
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on which there was going to be lots of disagreement. So you prepare for that in a very different way
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to a conversation where you're interviewing someone and you're just letting them rip.
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So it really depends. A lot of my time is spent doing more in addition to the interviews,
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more strategic stuff or where we're going, who we want to interview, how many of this type
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of interview we want to do this year. What innovation do we want to add, what extra content do we
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want to put out? So more kind of CEO type stuff as well. Is there a craft to interviewing?
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I think so, yeah, for sure. I guess if people ask me, you know, what not that they necessarily
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should take me as someone who's particularly good at it, but if people were interested in my approach,
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our approach is number one, there has to be a base level of rapport at least at the beginning
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and respect that the guests feel, no matter how much you might disagree with them.
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So even when we had a woman called Deborah Francis White on of the Guilty Feminist Podcast,
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which is one of our most viral episodes because she acted in a very unreasonable way,
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even with her, she had a good 30, 40 minutes to set out her case where we didn't interject,
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we didn't argue. So establishing that basic level of mutual respect and the feeling that the
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person is going to get to say what they want to say is really important and that's important
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even with people with whom you profoundly disagree, but it's even more important with people where
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you know, they might be a very controversial figure who is also saying some really important
27:27
things and you have to you have to find a way to do both. When we interviewed Tommy Robinson,
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which was, you know, a big call on our part at the time and a lot of people, you know,
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to this day, people think, you know, that was really, I just, there's a profile of me in telegraph
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out today. This is like the headline and they talk about it all the time. But for us, it was
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important that we let him express himself fully and get his message across while also challenging
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him on the things that we genuinely thought he's worth challenging on. And that's kind of just
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the basic approach we have is I think a lot of journalism got itself into trouble because
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journalists began to ask themselves the question, what questions do other people think I should ask
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of this person? We don't ever do that. We go, what question do we want to ask this person? What
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question do we think is right to ask this person? What is it about this person that we feel has
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to be brought to the surface? Good and bad. What are the areas of disagreement that we have to
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address because they are critical to this person's worldview? That's kind of how we go about it.
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Doesn't that mean that you're likely to be more sympathetic or go easier on people who you
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agree with than people you don't? And is that okay? Yeah, we are easier on people that we agree
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with and that is okay because we do not pretend to be unbiased. We pretend to be objective to the
28:55
best of our ability but we have opinions which we're upfront about. So if I'm talking to somebody
29:02
who thinks a wealth tax is a good idea, I don't think a wealth tax is a good idea and we're not going
29:07
to have that conversation from the perspective of the wealth tax is a great idea. If I'm talking
29:12
about wealth tax with someone who thinks it's a bad idea, we probably won't spend as long talking
29:17
about it because we both agree and we'll comment on that. The tradition of old school journalism
29:22
would not be that you should agree with people's ideas. It would be that whatever the idea is,
29:27
you probe it fearlessly taking a sort of devil's advocate position. Sure. I do play devil's advocate
29:35
occasionally but there are issues on which I don't play devil's advocate because I'm not that
29:40
interested in exploring the alternative position on whether gravity is real. It doesn't appeal to me
29:48
it's the same case for does a three year old have the intellectual capacity to decide their sex
29:54
and other things of that nature where I know what I think I'm pretty comfortable with what I think
30:00
and I'm not going to explore the devil's advocate position. If you disagree with that position,
30:06
I will argue with you in order to establish where we both sit on that issue and how strong and
30:13
robust your argument is and if your argument is stronger than mine, I'll then adopt your argument
30:19
but yeah, there are things on which I played devil's advocate but on a lot of issues I don't feel
30:24
the need to. Yeah. I mean, isn't there a risk that there are interesting ways in which your own
30:29
ideas could be challenged when they come out of the mouths of a guest that you're missing because
30:34
you don't go after it? No, because in order to be challenged, we bring on a guest who disagrees
30:40
with us about that issue and then we have a robust discussion about that. Those are the best
30:44
episodes. I mean, that one that you just mentioned, Deborah, what was her name? Francis White.
30:49
Francis White was one of the ones that I listened to when I knew that we were going to be speaking
30:53
because I had a lot of time when I was traveling last week and I think it's one of the best episodes
30:58
that you've done really because it is so contentious and I think you guys are at your best when
31:04
your hackles are up and when the guest is kind of being a bit of streperous and you can call
31:10
them out on it, but in it like an intellectually stimulating way, it's not nasty. It is just like,
31:14
there's a genuine clash of world views. How do you decide how many interviews to do like that
31:21
versus the ones where you're inviting somebody on whose world view you basically agree with where
31:26
you know, you can have a friendly on that issue when not that strategic Josh, honestly, we're just
31:31
like, who should we have on in the next few months? Although this person's asked to come on,
31:35
all that person looks interesting or should we, you know, we probably have a good discussion with
31:40
that. So for example, on our last America trip, we even went as far as inviting Nick Fuentazon.
31:45
This is somebody with whom we profoundly disagrees, you can imagine. He chickened out,
31:50
Candace Owens likewise, but you know, we're always trying to get those interviews with people
31:56
with whom there's profound disagreement because we feel there's a lot of value. It's not about,
32:01
you know, is this going to be a great episode or whatever. We also feel there's a way of
32:05
responsibility on us now with the platform that we have to bring on people who are talking shit
32:11
to large audiences and to show you that they're talking shit. How important is it that at the end
32:16
of the interview, you feel like you have exposed them as talking shit?
32:25
Well, it depends really, right? So for example, when we had Dave Smith on, right? I don't know if
32:31
you've seen that episode. Yeah, I did. I wouldn't necessarily, look, I profoundly disagree with
32:37
Dave and I do think that a lot of people would have walked away from that with the view that his
32:45
arguments are incorrect. There'll be some people who walk away from that, thinking my arguments,
32:49
or Francis arguments are correct, but I wouldn't describe Dave as talking shit because he's just got
32:54
a different opinion about something. When you're talking about, actually, I don't think that that
32:58
was, you know, I've heard him on like common users podcasts where common really forensically goes
33:04
through what Dave believes and you know, yeah, journalismistically takes it apart. I didn't find
33:10
your interview with him to be competitive or... No, it wasn't. It was respectful, but there was
33:16
profound disagreement and both the his arguments and our arguments got explored thoroughly. So I think
33:22
you could easily walk away from that, you know, with a perspective on how accurate both sides of
33:30
the argument were. You learn something about how valid and not, you know, those arguments are,
33:35
I feel. And we didn't go into exposed, Dave, and we didn't go into show you that he's talking shit.
33:41
But there are others with whom, yeah, of course, you're bringing them on in order to expose the
33:47
inaccuracy and falsehood of their ideas. Although, even with Deborah, one of the reasons that, you know,
33:53
I eventually ended up kind of going at her pretty hard is I actually didn't go in to that conversation
34:00
with an intent to show you that she's an idiot or she's wrong about stuff. We actually went into it
34:07
with the intent of having a genuine conversation. She asked to come on the show. I think that's a
34:11
pretty courageous thing to do. I respect that to come on a show where you know that people are not
34:15
going to agree with you and to ask to come on. Now obviously she had a book to plug, but nonetheless.
34:21
And so that's why we gave her a lot of time to set her argument out. But the reason I went out
34:27
her is that the first time I challenged her, she became very nasty and manipulative and she tried
34:34
to put words in my mouth and act like I'd said something horrific and all of this other stuff.
34:39
And if you want to play that game, well, I don't necessarily particularly enjoy playing that game.
34:45
But I am pretty good at it. And so if you want to come at me in that way, then you're going to
34:49
find out that that that that game can be played in both directions. Yeah. So yeah.
34:56
I mean, do you think that you treat that like the amount of conviviality versus pushback is the same
35:02
in the Dave Smith conversation as it would be in someone you disagree with more on the other side
35:08
of politics, a basimuse for a, you know, a lefty. But basimuse is exactly the same. Before the
35:15
interview, we were super friendly with him. You know, because I used to do comedy and Francis
35:20
still does, there's a kind of stand up brotherhood thing going on there where it's like, you know,
35:24
we've all done this kind of thing. So we were, so again, the basimuse of interview is another one
35:29
where we opened it being like incredibly friendly and reasonable. And he acted the way that he
35:35
acted at which point I then had to go, oh, wait, this is, this injury is going in totally different
35:39
direction. I'm going to have to ask this guy the same question 20 times because he won't answer it.
35:45
So my degree of conviviality is primarily based on the other person's behavior. If you come into
35:53
the trigonometry studio and you have zero ideas I agree with, but you're pleasant about it,
35:58
we're going to have a pleasant conversation. Yeah. What do, what does conventional journalism
36:03
get wrong then on that? Because the decline of the legacy media, I mean, I have my own ideas
36:08
having been in there is much talked about the freedom of the independent media is much talked
36:15
about, but also the concerns about the fact that we don't have any editorial oversight. So you know,
36:20
we can just go out there and we can all talk to Darrell Cooper about how Hitler was the good
36:24
guy in World War II as much as we want to. Like what do you make of the of your own conception of
36:31
guardrails if there are any? Again, several questions there. So in terms of what the mainstream media
36:39
gets wrong, I think it sort of peaked with the Kathy Newman Jordan Peterson interview, which
36:44
was a very good example to me of what the media had become. It had become a place where an actual
36:51
conversation was unlikely if not impossible. It was a fake conversation. It was fake people having
36:58
a fake conversation and a fake and just remind people of that conversation. It was it was a British
37:05
journalist and she sat down with Jordan and she had she came in with obviously a preconception
37:10
about what she thought Jordan was and every time he tried to articulate himself, she would just
37:15
sort of say, so what you're really saying is and she'd say something completely different which
37:18
just straw manned him as if he was a misogynist sexist dinosaur. Yeah. And on top of that, you say
37:25
that she came in with a preconception. That is true, but I don't think that's the only thing that
37:29
happened there. I think it was that plus she came in with an agenda to prove that her preconception
37:35
was correct. When we have a guess on trigonometry, we will of course we're human beings. So we're
37:40
going to if we've invited a person on and we have some idea of who they are or who we think they
37:45
are. But if they prove themselves to be a different way, we will run with that conception that is
37:53
different to the one we had. And Dave Smith is a very good example of that. I grew to respect and
37:59
like Dave without growing to respect his arguments, even remotely more than I did before we had
38:04
the conversation because other way he conducted himself. He was respectful, he was friendly, he played
38:09
the ball not the man. And I go, okay, well, my preconceptions about this guy have shifted. I actually
38:14
think his only crime, you know, we got a lot of shit from our side, so to speak, the people who
38:20
agree with us for having him on and for the way that we had the conversation. But his only crime
38:25
is that he has a different opinion. There are a lot of people where my preconception of them was
38:31
they're probably going to be a decent person. And actually we learned in the course of the interview
38:35
that they want. So my point is that the problem with the Catholic human interview is what it
38:42
exposed is that when a journalist brings someone on like her to have a conversation, they already
38:47
know the conversation they want to have. And therefore it's no longer a conversation.
38:51
That's not how a conversation is. If you go to me, a friend to have that conversation you've
38:57
decided you want to have, well, think about the experience on the other end of that. Your friend
39:02
is not going to enjoy that. Very unlikely to enjoy that. Especially if what you've come in with
39:08
is an agenda that is determined to prove that they're evil, basically, right? And so I just think,
39:15
I respect a combative and a probing interview. I think that's really important. I enjoy being
39:23
interviewed in that way. If I know that that's kind of the tenor of the discussion, I enjoy
39:30
participating in that. But it's got to be done in a constructive way. And I just felt that the
39:35
media had moved far, far away from that. Now partly it's a technological thing. They ended up
39:41
going for a shorter and shorter sound bite. And new media opened up the length of that sound bite
39:49
all the way up to three or four hours sometimes. Unfortunately, that is now being reduced back.
39:55
So I see clips of trigonometry all the time where someone's been clipped out of context and
40:00
misrepresented. But I guess at least the reassuring thing to me is we are not doing that.
40:05
Right? The media would do that. They would get somebody on. They wouldn't show you the full
40:10
thing. They'd show you two minutes on which they'd often be very badly misrepresented. So
40:15
that I think is the biggest thing. And then of course the other thing is, again, I don't believe
40:21
in this some kind of evil cabal where people sit down and decide what the news agenda is.
40:26
But there was a sense in which I think journalists became very monocultural in terms of
40:34
it's interesting at the very same time that the idea of diversity, equity and inclusion got
40:38
pushed very hard. You got lots of diversity of faces and genitals and sexual orientations and
40:44
all these other things. While all of these people basically came from the same background,
40:48
they were pretty well off. They went to university. They all had the same opinions about
40:53
most things and anyone who didn't was kind of seen as the pariah on that. And that created a
41:00
monoculture on lots of things. So there was a kind of cozy consensus about integration. There
41:04
was a cozy consensus about economics. There was a cozy consensus about the climate crisis,
41:10
so to speak, and lots and lots and lots of other things. Yeah. I mean, it was even having worked
41:14
on the co-face in public broadcasting. I can say that there was another element to it apart
41:19
from the monoculturalism of the cohort, which was that the diversity logic was that it would be
41:28
offensive to a minority community to report on the concerns of that community by anyone other
41:34
than a member of that community. So it became inconceivable over the past 10 years that you
41:39
would write about LGBTQIA plus issues and didn't and did not assign that story to queer people
41:47
working in the queer vertical of the organization. Similarly, you wouldn't write about racism unless
41:52
it was a person of color. And what that did was that it just dramatically reduced the diversity
41:58
of points of view, because you're supposed supposed to be writing for the entire community
42:02
and producing for the entire community, not just your subcommunity. So if you're covering
42:09
the controversy over pediatric transgender care, and the only people who are writing about it
42:15
are people who are ideologically essentially activists for one side of the position.
42:23
It's almost like every story about mining has to be written by someone in the mining industry.
42:28
I mean, you would immediately see that there's a conflict there and that that is, you know,
42:31
you need to broader diversity of voices. But the the the narrowness of the definition of what
42:37
constituted diversity led directly to a lack of diversity and the things that, you know, the kinds
42:44
of points of view that were being considered within H topic. And of course, just on that, Josh,
42:51
very often people from within a community who had an opinion that did not align with the opinion
42:57
that was common in the journalistic institution were never at the table to speak for that part
43:04
of their community. So if you were, for example, a black person who did not agree with the BLM narrative
43:10
and thought that actually the problems of the black community are elsewhere, you were never
43:14
going to get a chance to write that story or to make that case because partly you were never
43:20
going to be in the room in the first place because diversity didn't mean black people. It meant
43:25
black people with an opinion that matched the opinion of the people who hired them certainly.
43:30
And yes, I mean, even if it only meant black people, there are only so many people you can hire
43:34
and if the majority of black people think a certain way, then they get also likely to be the most
43:39
enthusiastic about prosecuting that particular case. And so they're probably going to put their
43:43
hands up to be covering black issues more. Whereas I mean, it's, yes, it's a self reinforcing
43:48
loop. And as you know, I mean, I, you know, I was a, you know, an out gay broadcaster in Australia
43:54
who wanted to write about my, you know, my conflictedness about pride. And that was not considered
44:01
kosher. But at the same time, the broadcaster was the official sponsor of pride. And so the
44:07
argument that the reason why they objected to my talking out about it was because, you know,
44:12
I'm not allowed to express a biased political opinion was ludicrous because everybody,
44:17
every other show on the network was constantly a cavalcade of drag queens and, you know,
44:23
and pride advocates. But the one very person on the network wasn't allowed to, um, to pipe up.
44:29
So yes, but I think I do think that that moment is ending. And I do think that there is a hazard
44:33
for us in the alternative media in the sense that if the definition of who is a good person to
44:39
have on the show is are they convivial and easy to get along with and not a sort of
44:45
obstreparous and obstinate during the interview. Then the whole landscape can be
44:51
gained if charming, uh, right-wing idiots just learn that being really chatty and convivial
44:59
is the best way to broadcast bad ideas because, you know, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes and,
45:08
you know, I don't want to offend people by lumping them into that bucket. So I won't go down
45:12
the sliding scale, but there's a spectrum of people who are much more actually charming and
45:18
really nice. Like, I mean, I've had Candace on this show, fabulous to chat to, completely toxic to
45:25
the culture, I think, and totally delusional about a large number of issues. But if my yardstick is,
45:31
well, I'll have convivial conversations with people who are good at having convivial conversations,
45:35
and I'll have argumentative ones with people who are argumentative, don't we get sucked into
45:41
uh, the risk of, I suppose, slanting the scale in favor of whoever learns that conviviality is the
45:50
trick? I actually think the incentive structure in the media is even worse than what you've described.
45:55
Get a human, well, if you've listened to this much of the episode, then you must enjoy it
46:01
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46:05
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