When I think about your childhood, growing up under this shadow of communism... The only thing communism is good for is solving America's obesity problem. Everyone's going to be poor and starving.
I love how you call yourself political non-binary. People like to label me also as, oh, you're so political. I'm actually on the side of truth.
Political correctness wasn't invented in the West. It was invented in the Soviet Union. There is a real struggle in the West right now to develop discernment. My reaction was, clearly, I am missing a piece of the puzzle here. Peterson brings you on to debate you.
Did he change your mind on anything? Constantine, welcome to the United States of America. Thank you. It's always a pleasure to be here.
It's so good to have you. I love this country very much. I love almost everything about it.
But as I keep saying, it's making me fat and that's all your fault. It is all our fault. If you'd like some sugar here, you can add.
Yeah, excellent. You know, it's interesting because when I think about you, the first thing that comes to my mind is you're... outrageous social media letter that you read when you refused to take that unpaid gig as a comedian. And then I think about your Trigonometry show and all the guests that you brought on.
And of course, your tour with Jordan Peterson, which I'm sure many of my listeners have heard about you through that. But as I've been preparing for this interview, I learned about your background and what your dad did, your grandfather, what they went through. And so before we get started about ideas and opinions and ideology, will you just share with us where are your parents from and how did you grow up? So I was born in the late Soviet Union in the early 80s.
My parents, my mother had been 18 for four days when I was born. They were very young, very poor students, very talented, promising, but poor students in Moscow State University. And then quite quickly... My father ended up being punished for the crimes of my grandfather, his father, the crime being, he said that the Soviet Union shouldn't have invaded Afghanistan in a private conversation. And within days, he was fired from his job, his wife was fired from her job, and both their children, that's my father and my aunt, were kicked out of college where they were studying.
So his academic career was interrupted. But very quickly after that, the Soviet Union started to unravel. And actually, my father was able to land on his feet. He made a lot of money under the Boris Yeltsin during the Boris Yeltsin period.
But also during that, this is pre-Vladimir Putin coming to power. He was falsely accused of tax evasion and Russia had to flee the country under a false identity for reasons that are long and complicated, eventually completely exonerated of all these false charges. But he, you know, he lost everything he had.
And my parents... made a conscious decision to send me to boarding school when they still had money. I would say, you know, my family were wealthy for a very short period of time, which happily for me coincided with sending me to boarding school in England.
And they made a conscious decision knowing that, you know, they managed to accumulate some amount of wealth and they could have held onto that and just lived off it. Not probably not for the rest of their lives, but for a really long time if they really wanted to. But instead they spent...
a significant portion of that on keeping me in the UK, making sure that I could at least start going to college. I never finished my degree because they just ran out of money. But they really sacrificed a lot to get me to the West because they wanted me to have a better life than they did. Your dad had a prominent position when he was...
I guess it was Russia at that point? It was, yeah. So in the Boris Yeltsin cabinet, he was a junior minister. He was the junior minister for relations with former Soviet countries.
He was doing very well, but then there was, you know, Russian politics is always dirty, but it was very, very, very dirty at that time. And so in order to punish his boss for something his boss was not supposed to be doing, according to other people, they basically came at my father and used these false allegations against him. And, you know, it ruined the course of his life very, very dramatically.
It's so interesting to think about somebody who is kind of like prominent in Russia and probably feeling very, very Russian and proud, still sending his son to boarding school in the West. What went through his mind and what were those conversations like at home saying, hey, son, we're sending you abroad? Well, actually, very much.
My dad, Cleo, was very progressive. because he sought my consent before sending me to boarding school. Yeah, he was like, do you want to go?
And you were like 13 years old. Yeah, yeah. And I was like, yeah, sure. I think what was clear to my parents was... You know, it's interesting because my father and I, we have a great relationship nowadays anyway.
And the only major thing we really fundamentally disagree about is actually geopolitics, Russia, Putin and all of that. We have very different views of that issue. So in spite of sending me to the West, I would say he's probably quite anti-Western. But one thing he recognized was the material reality that I would have a better life if I went. and lived in the West and clearly he was right.
Yeah. I mean, here you go and write an actual book about how you love the West, right? Yeah.
So that's incredible. Well, he read it in the Russian translation, but I think he saw it as his kind of duty to me, as opposed to, this is not the sort of book that he would naturally seek out, I don't think. So what did he say? What was his reaction? He said, you know, I don't like the title of this book, but I'm going to read it anyway.
Wow. Yeah, it's pretty incredible. So, okay.
So I have my critics at home and abroad. Of course. Well, that that certainly inoculates you against the internet mob, right?
Yeah, that helps. Yeah, I started this conversation, but I don't know how many people know about what happened to you when you really kind of, in my opinion, made this like world stage presentation, I think about why you refuse to be censored as a as a stand up comedian. So maybe you can just share that experience. What led you to do that?
Well, by that point, we'd already started my YouTube channel, Trigonometry, with my co-host, Francis, who was another comedian. And we were just, the reason we started the channel partly was we were starting to feel that the comedy industry in the UK, which was and remains very woke, is very different to America. In America, you're in a much better place. You have these people like... Joe Rogan and Shane Gillis and Dave Chappelle and other people who are just basically refusing to bow to the mob and they're making their own way.
Andrew Schultz, many others. In the UK, that's not the case. The comedy industry is very small, controlled by about five people who all have the same opinions because they really believe in inclusion and diversity, except for anyone who disagrees with them, obviously. And one of the women that actually runs the Edinburgh Fringe Comedy Festival, it's the biggest arts festival.
in the world. She was speaking at an event for creative people in that industry in 2018, in which she said that she looks forward to the new era of woke comedy when comedians get to decide what isn't acceptable. This is how people think.
And the entire industry was like that. And we just, you know, various things that happened where, you know, when Brexit happened, for example, I'm a fairly dark skinned first generation immigrant to the UK. And when Brexit happened, I didn't vote for Brexit. So that's kind of like the equivalent of voting for Hillary in 2016. I voted remain. But what I found deeply troubling and frankly just disgusting was the way that people on my side of the argument talked about the people on the other side.
My reaction. So see, when Brexit happened, I was shocked. by this. I hadn't looked into any of the cultural stuff that I now, you know, in conversation often about.
And my reaction was, clearly, I am missing a piece of the puzzle here. If I was, if I didn't know many people who voted for Brexit, and I was shocked by the outcome, and yet 52% of my fellow citizens voted for this thing, there are... There've got to be a few pieces missing in my understanding of reality.
Number one, it seems that my circle is not reflective of the wider country. Number two, I may not have explored these arguments sufficiently to understand the issues involved. And number three, the explanation that I'm being given by people on my own side, which was half the country is evil, racist, bigots, blah, blah, xenophobic, whatever. I... just instinctively knew that that is not a viable explanation because that was not my experience.
I'm not saying there are no racist people in Britain or intolerant people or whatever, but the idea that half the country, that's insane. That's just not accurate. It's not reflective of my experience.
My experience in actually pretty much all Western countries that I've been to is that when you tell people you're from another country... They're generally curious, open-minded. They want to ask you questions.
If they see that you are someone who's made their home in the country and you're integrating, they will encourage you and help you and support you. That's been my universal experience, pretty much. So when people started saying that...
Brexit happened because of that. I just thought, okay, this can't be true. So we started to ask questions and talk to people who'd voted for Brexit on the show to try and understand it.
And then in the comedy industry, that manifested itself in, you know, we went through this whole period around that time, 2016, after Brexit, 2017, 2018, where this idea of punching down. I don't know if you're familiar with this concept and it's worth explaining because it's the most ridiculous thing ever. But it's sort of this idea that, you know, as a comedian on stage with a microphone, you have power, right? And there are all these other groups of people who are, they don't have as much power. In some ways, they're beneath you.
They need your condescending, you know, kindness and you've got to be sensitive and you've got to treat them with good love. So, for example… You can't make jokes about women if you're a man, because women are an oppressed group and you are in a position of power. You can't make jokes about different ethnic groups or the differences between ethnic groups.
You know, white people are like this, black people are like that, because that might... And it's this very, like, they say it's about compassion and respect and understanding, but it seems to me an incredibly superior and self-aggrandizing way of thinking about it. So we have this idea, and...
that you can't make fun of people who are, who are quote-unquote victims of life. And yet, when Brexit happened, comedian after comedian, because when you're a comic, you spend most of your time standing in the green room listening to other comedians on the same show when you're doing the circuit, went on stage, comedian after comedian went on stage, and they would say, all the old people that voted for Brexit should die. There was variations of that joke. And look, there's ways to make jokes about how people you disagree with should die. I mean, that's a staple of comedy.
People have always done that. That's cool. But there was a less jokey and much more literal tone to the way that they preach. Yeah. And it wasn't like, hey, here's a funny joke about old people voting for Brexit.
It was more like old people voted for Brexit. We hate them. You know, it's claptor. It wasn't laughter.
It was claptor. And to me, that just seemed very inconsistent. If we're talking about people who are oppressed, well, in the UK, elderly people, very often, particularly the ones that voted for Brexit, live in deprived areas of the country. They live on the state pension, which is a few hundred pounds a week. A lot of them freeze every winter because they can't afford heating to pay for their heating.
Are those really the people in power that we're punching up at? Is that? And it was that, and, you know, I really resent the re-racialization of society where people are increasingly encouraged to see themselves as members of a particular group instead of just individuals.
And therefore, you can't do this to that group instead of, like, talking to an individual person and having particular opinions, disagreements, whatever. So all of this was happening. So we started the show, and we were investigating these issues. And in the process of that, I was also doing stand-up. So these students saw me at a gig.
They liked my set. This was the funny thing about it. They really liked the show that I did and then invited me to perform at their college and sent me what they called a behavioral agreement contract, which said that they had a zero tolerance policy on racism, sexism, classism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-religion, anti-atheism.
And it also said that all jokes must be respectful and kind. Um, and when I turned it down, it became a very big news story around the world, which was quite a shock to me because I truthfully, I, I don't like to use the term, but I actually think in this case, it really applied. I had been very gaslit by the comedy industry that we were operating in because they, they were basically saying, well, all of these ideas that you were talking about or exploring or asking people about, you know, it's all right wing. It's all this, it's all that, you know, oh, the only people who are interested in that are like.
problematic white man or whatever. And actually, I don't think I've told the story publicly before, but I remember it really took me many years to process that as being false. And I remember the moment it hit me, Francis and I, my co-host and I, we went to the gym next to us and we were walking down the stairs and these two...
smoking hot black girls were walking up the stairs. And that's why I remember it, because it was like really striking. And I looked at them. I thought, wow, these are very beautiful women.
And then she looked at me and went. Oh, trigonometry. But I was shocked.
And I was shocked every time that somebody from an ethnic minority or a woman or whatever would come up to us and say how much they enjoy the show. So we had to deprogram our own brains with reality over years to realize our audience is actually very reflective of society at large. And we're not evil for trying to have these conversations and push back against what we see as extremism on the left.
There's two people, I think, who are coming from the left, you know, or certainly in the center in my case. And so, yeah, it was a, that was something that it was a bit of a shock because of the way that we saw the world. But then, you know, when that contract story went super viral around the world, I just got emails from thousands and thousands and thousands of people.
And then I realized it's not just me being a weird contrarian. This is how a lot of people feel. And that was, you know, more than anything, yes, it let more people know about what I was up to and whatever. But more than anything, it was more like almost a sign from above, whatever that means to an agnostic like me, that you're on the right path here. You're not just making this up.
So it was very encouraging. Isn't that amazing that some of the things that appear like the worst thing ever end up being the best thing ever. It's just kind of how life works. I love how you call yourself political non-binary. And I completely agree with that because people like to label me also as, oh, you're so political.
I'm like, no, I'm actually on the side of truth, right? I'm on the side of common sense. And I think, you know, we're living in this era where people are really forced to choose one side or the other side and not actually allow ourselves to think through ideas. And when I think about your childhood, you know, growing up, really under this shadow of communism and your parents being raised by people who really lived under this shadow of communism, I can't help but think that is that what inoculated you?
Did that help you develop discernment? Because there is a real struggle in the West right now to develop discernment, to be able to say, you know, I'm not going to join the right or the left. I'm actually going to go and study. I'm going to allow myself to. pull my brain out of what my brain's expected to think, but actually really, really think.
What are those lessons that you had from your childhood that you think helped inoculate you, as I say, against these bad ideas? Real world experience. I mean, look, the only thing communism is good for is solving America's obesity problem.
If you institute it, everyone's going to be poor and starving and that'd be great. That real world experience, what people, I think what it really taught me, the stories of my family, you know, my grandmother being born in a gulag, all of it, is that the reason ideas like communism and radical socialism don't work is that, well, there are many reasons, but one of them is, and one of the reasons that it should be resisted at all costs, is that in that sort of system, because what you're doing is you're taking away from the productive people. to give to the unproductive people, that necessarily requires a high level of tyranny, because productive people don't want to give away the things that they've generated to people who haven't, right?
And so, first and foremost, it's a system that is dependent on authoritarianism. And so if you oppose authoritarianism, it doesn't really matter whether you oppose communism or not, because those are inseparable. You cannot, you cannot have a radically quote-unquote progressive society without a radical level of authoritarianism and tyranny.
It's not possible because the idea is so contrary to human nature, you have to use a lot of force to put it in place. But to your broader point about not falling into the trap of polarizing your own brain, look, I think it's a natural consequence of the fact that ultimately every four years at an election, you either pull this lever or that lever. And it may be the case, by the way, that, you know, even as an independent thinker, every four years or, you know, for a period of your life, you pull the same lever.
But that's not the same as believing every single thing that people who pull the same lever say. And I think the reason I feel that is when I was younger, when I was in my 20s, actually, this won't mean much to the audience, but when I came here, I had a jacket on. On the inside, it's got a face of the comedian Bill Hicks, which is something someone made for me. It's a great hero of mine. And I have another one with George Carlin, who was another comedian.
Comedians 20, 30 years ago in this country in particular, they were pushing back against the authoritarians of their day. And the authoritarians of their day was the religious, conservative, Christian right. These were the people who were saying, you can't make that joke.
You can't talk about this. You know, you can't Monty Python, for example, their show was very controversial because Christians were upset about it. I am not, you know, there's this idea now that, you know, the left is authoritarian and the right loves freedom. The right loves freedom when they're not in cultural power, right? Let's be honest about that.
I don't think either side is naturally inclined towards maximum freedom, especially for people that they don't agree with. And so there have to be people who hold that line, which who say, actually, the principle is more important than the tribe, you know. And that's why I'm very happy to be speaking with people on the right and the left.
Right now, most of the people that want to hear from me are on the right, because they're the ones that feel that their ideas are not being given an equal playing field or a level playing field. Their ideas are being... oppressed, suppressed, whatever the word is.
And I think they're right. I think that's absolutely true. I think there's been a tremendous amount of, you know, the tolerant people being extraordinarily intolerant. And I think the place we're in, in terms of all the polarization that we're seeing, is largely a product of that, a product of people who are divorced from the reality of their fellow man, the reality that while for them, their particular experience of globalization or their particular experience of immigration or their particular experience of all these things that are happening in society.
You know, they've got a French au pair or whatever. They think of that as immigration. Whereas if you are an electrician, your experience of immigration in the UK is you can't buy a house, you can't have kids, and your wages are plummeting in real terms.
But my concern is that people who have that sort of They have the control of the mechanisms by which we communicate. They have the chattering classes, as we call them in the UK. They don't have any interest in the experience of other people, as I didn't, when I was surprised by Brexit. And I just thought that that was a real, we like to say nowadays, teachable moment for me. And I took it upon myself to teach myself some things.
And so I sought out people who I didn't agree with, people that I used to, you know, you're evil, you know. I remember listening to... After the 2016 election here, after Donald Trump got elected, I spent, I watched every single interview that Steve Bannon did. And I hated Steve Bannon with a passion, but I watched every single thing that he did because I thought, here's a smart guy who helped to get this guy elected.
I'm guessing it's possible that this guy knows something I don't. And that, I think, is the healthy reaction, which we did not see. from our media, from our corporate organizations, from academic institutions, from a lot of people in that space, their reaction was not, what have I done wrong?
And how have I ended up in this place where what I think does not match reality? Because that's really the truth is, what is the point of the truth? The point of the truth is to be able to predict the future effectively, right?
It's to say, if I do this, right, if I move, this book is going to fall off. That's gravity. We know, right? If I do whatever, that's the point of finding out what the truth is. If your ideas about reality are continually proven to be incorrect and you double down instead of trying to learn, what does that say about you?
Well, what it says is you're not interested in the truth. You're interested in your own self-delusion. Well, that takes a lot of humility to be able to say that, right?
Even to watch Steve Bannon's show or watch PragerU, God forbid, right? I have found that when people who are diehard leftists, and maybe that's where you were a few years ago, maybe not, maybe you're a classical liberal who's actually just willing to hear what another person has to say. When they watch the content, they're not looking to hear the perspective of the other side.
They're just looking to find the one word that confirms their bias so they can go ahead and attack rather than really gain some sort of understanding. And there's a huge difference between those two. you know, actions. Yeah. And I think we're all capable of that perceptual self-delusion, which is why I think orientating yourself towards the pursuit of truth is the right way to go.
And that means that maybe 20 years from now, I'm going to be sitting on a left-leaning show and you, you know, people in the right-wing space are going to think I'm a... whatever the terms now, libtard, cuck, whatever, like everyone has these, right? I'm happy with that. I never thought that... When it comes to politics, it's a tribal game.
I understand that. But I'm actually less interested in politics than I am in the space of ideas. And in the space of ideas, you can either have an allegiance to the truth or you can have an allegiance to ideology.
And when you have an allegiance to ideology, you're going to go further away from the truth. So I know one of the things that you're very passionate about is free speech, right? Your kind of anti-political correctness, the whole... incident that you had in comedy, do you think that there is a line that needs to be drawn when it comes to free speech?
For example, Elon Musk freeing Twitter, right? Is that necessarily a good thing? Is it a bad thing?
Is there a line that needs to be drawn? What about what they call hate speech? You know, I know you're somewhat Jewish, right?
You're Jewish, right? Okay, what about anti-Semitism? or inflammatory speech that's happening on Twitter right now?
How do you respond to that? Yeah. Well, so first of all, I'm a big fan of Elon Musk. I know that he's not perfect.
Nobody is. But I think the things that he's doing, not just with Twitter, but elsewhere, I think it's important that there's a guy who's saying, here is, and you don't even have to agree with his particular vision of humanity, of, you know, spreading the human. human civilization across multiple planets.
You don't even necessarily have to think that that is the right approach. But who else is articulating any vision for what human beings should be reaching for, aspiring to, moving towards? What is that?
Who is doing that? So even on that perspective, I think what he's doing is incredibly important. With Twitter specifically, I think that the previous regime had the Overton window shut very tight.
And I think that they made a lot of mistakes, including, I don't remember what day it was exactly, but I remember waking up, this was in the middle of COVID lockdown. So during that time at Trigonometer, it was me, Francis and our producer living in an apartment because we were like, this is the only way we can continue doing the show. So I woke up in the morning, I opened my phone and I saw that Twitter had shut down, suspended the account of the New York Post.
and prevented the sharing of the Hunter Biden laptop story. I remember saying to the guys, this is the biggest story of the year, because people talk about election interference. What could be more dishonest and damaging to American democracy than that? Than basically a group of hoodie-wearing billionaires getting together and going, you know what?
We actually can put our thumb on the scales now. And because we feel this is the right thing to do, let's suppress this. I don't think you had to be a right winger or a fan of Donald Trump to see that as a huge problem.
So the fact that Elon has taken over, I think, is good. I think you'd have to be lying to pretend that the result of that opening up the Wolverton window has not been that there's been more offensive speech on Twitter, including things. like anti-Semitism and other forms of racism. My attitude to that is Twitter gives you the tools to deal with that.
I don't particularly care if a bunch of people with an IQ of a carat say things to me that I don't like. I just block them and I go about my daily life just fine. And more importantly, I think one of the things we're really losing in the West because of the way the conversation has been hijacked is people are unwilling to recognize the trade-off between safety and freedom. I am happy to accept more unpleasant speech on Twitter as a price for opening up the conversations that need to be had. And if that's the way that trade-off works, I don't mind.
I'm comfortable with that. So I think that freedom of expression is a, it's not just, see, we've turned everything because we've forgotten where we come from and why we got to where we are. We think of everything as a moral thing. Free speech is a moral good. The individual rights are...
Why? And increasingly, people are unable to explain why freedom of expression or individual rights or other Western values are good. So let's first of all talk about that.
Without free speech, you don't have the technological progress and the technological, frankly, dominance that we have around the world. Why? Because when you have freedom of expression, and freedom of research and freedom of science, people are free to pursue their crazy ideas in a way that is without restraint, without government interference.
And then, of course, you lay on top of that the capitalist model where if you come up with a cool idea, You can really make a hell of a lot of money because it's of value to other people. It's not the case in most other countries. In China or Russia, science is government-directed, government-managed, and that's why they're not making as much progress as we are, and they haven't made as much progress as we have historically. But it works at every level.
You know, Victor Davis Hanson, who I'm sure you know, he's talked about the fact that Western armies fight better. Because of free speech. What I mean by that, of course, you don't have free speech in the army, but what you have is a flatter hierarchy where the soldier on the ground can pass information up the chain of command without being fearful of being punished for doing so, which is not the case, for example, in the Russian army nearly as much.
So in every way, our ability to communicate our pictures of reality is that those old men trying to feel the elephant. from different sides, right? Like the more voices you have, the better picture you're likely to end up getting.
So in the pursuit of truth, which is useful, the ability for people to express themselves is essential. And the other things that people should know is we are increasingly using the language of the enemy. Political correctness is a very good example of this.
Political correctness wasn't invented in the West. It's not a Western idea. It was invented in the Soviet Union.
in order to say to people, comrade, what you're saying is factually correct, but politically incorrect. And it never had anything to do with not offending minorities, not sounding sexist, never had anything to do with that. It was all about the same thing that it is about now, which is enforcing the party line. You must not say this, not because it's not true, but because it makes people uncomfortable. Well, tough.
Being uncomfortable is part of life. Isn't that incredible that we adopted phraseology from communists? But it's not the only example.
I mean, look, the phrase American exceptionalism, people use this all the time. Do you know where that comes from? No.
It wasn't invented in America. It was Stalin. It was a phrase he used, and it meant that this American arrogance that America wouldn't succumb to communism like other countries.
You know, Americans, they think they're better than everybody. Well, guess what? America is the most anti- communist country in the world by the way that it evolved and is designed.
And America did withstand it and it will continue to withstand it as long as we stop using the language and the ideas of the enemy and allowing our education system and various other institutions to be taken over by these people. In full transparency, one of the things that's been really worrying me, especially now that I have a show and I get to read the comments and I post things on Instagram and we have our influencers. It worries me to see the internet mob really influencing influencers.
And what I mean by that is because it is open, because X is open, and to some degree, so is YouTube and Instagram, there seems to be a push where influencers saying things I don't believe they actually believe in, but because the mob is so, and it's usually the empty can that rattles the most, right? And so... The mob will put pressure on you to really kind of identify either with a very extreme right-wing point of view or a very extreme left-wing point of view.
And you have these like very, very powerful, I don't know if they're as powerful as they appear to be, but if you spend time online, which many people under the age of 35 do, you do feel that pressure where you're expected to say certain things. You know, we're lucky at PragerU because we're really funded as a nonprofit. And so we're not really so driven by the views and the likes, et cetera.
But I'd imagine if you're a for-profit business that is really driven by getting ad money and views and followers, et cetera, how do you and your team navigate through that? And also just how do we stay rational, right? And how do we actually stick to the truth when we have an engine of social media that is really pushing us in two different directions? Well… There are a lot of pieces to that, I think, Marisa. First of all, I completely agree with your analysis.
I think one of the things that worries me the most, actually, people talk about AI. One of the things that worries me the most about it is AI is incapable of experiencing reality. AI gets its ideas about reality from the internet. And if you think about the fact that we all know the internet isn't real, the way people talk online, the things they say is not real, young people look at that and they don't know any better.
a lot of the time, not least because they didn't grow up in an intact family. They didn't see good role models for how to be a man, especially, or how to be a woman in the world. So the problem that you're describing, I think, is 100% there. In terms of how I tried to deal with it, well, I'm very lucky in that I have a great partnership with Francis on trigonometry.
We started it together. We built it together. and we're very different personalities. I am more gung-ho out there, whatever. He's much better at taking the time and saying, well, have we thought about this?
And have you considered that? And maybe we shouldn't, you know. So we restrain each other and we also push each other in really powerful ways.
So that really helps. And another question is, look, in our materialistic society, uh, what I'm about to say sounds almost pious and preachy. But ultimately, it really depends on what you're optimizing for, as economists would say.
If you're optimizing for money and clicks, then those temptations that you talk about are, of course, going to be there. But no one said that there is no... I've read the Constitution and the founding documents of Britain and everywhere else.
Nowhere does it say you have to only care about money. It doesn't say that. The capitalist model doesn't say that the only thing that matters is money.
We can run the money side of things on money, but money is not the only thing that matters in life. And in fact, I would put it to you that you and I and all your viewers know that if they were to look objectively at their life, the things that actually matter to them are not money. And so then the question becomes, well, what is it that you think is actually important.
And for me, there's really a combination of things. First and foremost, I come from a family of people who were sent to concentration camps for expressing opinions and for saying the wrong thing and for trying to describe truth as they understood it. And I'm not prepared to dishonor their memory by pursuing something else. in order to benefit myself materially. I'm interested in the truth.
The second thing is, I was always like that anyway, but when my son was born, I really, I became much more responsible with the way that I behaved online. Because, you know, coming from a stand-up background, if anyone says anything to you on the internet, you're like, I know how to take you down, I know how to make you look like an idiot here, you know, here's a joke about it. I've become much less into that because...
I want to be the kind of man that my son can look at and be proud of. I want to be someone who sets the example that I'd want him to follow. And I think if I were to be objective, I would say that there were times when I wasn't doing that. I wasn't behaving in that way.
And I want to be in a position that when my son has moral quandaries, I'm not requiring him to operate on the basis of what I say, but he can learn that from me by watching. And so I'm... I want to be the kind of man who sets that example and then I don't have to explain it because that's much more powerful, I think. And then I just fundamentally believe that the pursuit of truth is the most important thing for someone in my position. For the reasons that we've discussed, the closer we are to truth, the closer we are to being powerful in the world in terms of protecting our country.
achieving whatever results or building things or whatever you have to. The closer you are to truth, the easier it becomes to do things that you want to do. So yeah, I think that that's where I'm coming at it from. And I understand that other people feel other pressures and, you know, they should do what they want to do and we'll do what we want to do.
And I'm, I've said from day one, I'm, I said this when I started standup, I don't mind if my career is unsuccessful, as long as I do the things that I believe in. And it's the same with trigonometry and my book and everything else. I know how to get five times as many clicks as we currently get.
And I'm not going to do it because I don't believe in doing the things that I would have to do. So I hope that doesn't sound too pious to people, but that's the place I'm coming at it from. I know you spent a lot of time recently with Jordan Peterson.
And as we were walking in, you mentioned that he had an impact on you while you spent all this time with him. So, you know, it's very much what he talks about. And I think there is a few things that he talks about that really resonated with me.
One of them was the idea that the reason that you might want to do things that are scary, you know, challenge the tribe that you're in, not pander to an audience, whatever is that we're discussing is that is not that you are this great moral principled person, but actually that you are just aware of the cost. of not doing that. And I think that way of framing is exactly correct because Jordan brought me along to argue with him actually on his tour. He said, you know, you are, I'm translating here into my language, but you're like, you are a very good contrarian asshole.
You're smart. And you don't mind disagreeing with people that you respect, which is true. And so he wanted for us to have debates on stage, which we did for a period of time.
But ultimately, what he's doing on his tour is he's telling people how to live a good life. And the thing I took away from it was, you know, I don't know how much sense this will make to many of your audience. But if you're into video games, there are video games where you have this concept of karma.
Like your character can take certain actions. You can do a good thing or a bad thing, and your karma goes up or it goes down. And that then affects all the subsequent decisions that you're going to make in the game.
So if you have bad karma and you come to some kind of situation, well, the people in that situation might not like you as much or might steal from you or might kill you or whatever versus if you follow the good path. And, of course, bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people. But it is materially my experience that when I behave in a way where I am being the best version of myself, life responds in that way.
That doesn't mean I'm not going to get cancer or get run over by a bus or whatever. These are separate things. But Jordan said something very interesting when we were on tour, which I have found to be true, which is the best way to store wealth or success or whatever it is, isn't… the regard other people have for you. And the best way to achieve that is to actually do things for other people and to serve them and to be useful to them and to do things for them. And I'm lucky in that I've had the benefit of several people of the caliber of Jordan, you know, have an involvement in my life and how I think about things and support me.
And so I'm trying to do that. You know, if I see someone young and talented, I try to bring them through. And I'm generally trying to contribute to others more than just thinking about myself, which is where I would have been a few years ago, truthfully.
So that was super useful. And then this is coming back to what I was saying about my son wanting to be the person that he can look at instead of having to ask. The thing that makes Jordan's message work.
is that, you know, I spent three weeks with him. He was ill for a portion of that time. There was all sorts of things.
It's a tour. Things go wrong, things happen, whatever. There's no one I've ever met, I think, or very few people, where the message and the messenger are so completely aligned.
So when you see someone operating with that level of integrity, it's very, very difficult, unless you really are blind, to not see that and think, wow, this is powerful. I want to be more like this. So, again, we hesitate to say such things in public because it sounds, you know, cringe or whatever. But Jordan is a great man. He's a great man.
And the impact he's making on the world, you know, the experiences we had were just, in Oklahoma, I went to see the Thunder play the Bucks in the basketball arena. And the next day, we played that same arena. You know, he sold out Radio City in New York, this iconic venue.
thousands and thousands and thousands of people physically pay a lot of money. They dress up, they bring their girlfriend or their husband or whoever, and they come out to see a show that's very intellectually dense about how to live a better life. That's the impact he's making on the world. So he's someone I have a tremendous amount of respect for.
So I'm so curious because Jordan Peterson brings you on to debate you. You end up really liking him. Obviously, you probably respected him. from the get-go, did he change your mind on anything?
Well, the thing I just described about how you see the world and your role in it and how you see every individual decision that you make, absolutely, he changed my mind on that. And one of the things is, so I was on top of Jordan for three weeks and then we were on doing stuff with trigonometry for another three weeks. And in between, I invited my wife and son to come and for us to have a vacation together here in the US.
So, and I was just like 10 times the husband, 10 times the father that I was before. And I realized a lot about the way that I had not been living up to not only my potential, but also my duties in my marriage as a father. I just realized that there's so many more levels that I can hit in terms of being there for my wife in a way that I, you know, I used to think about. I think I used to think about relationships maybe in a very business-like way.
You know, you do this and in exchange I do that kind of thing, you know. And what he helped me to see was that if you really want a very strong relationship and a very beautiful relationship with anybody, then what if you were to voluntarily give more of yourself? then contractually you're obliged to. What happens then?
And what I've discovered is what happens then is the other person is really happy. And then they give more of themselves. And it's just this virtuous cycle. Whereas if everybody's sitting there with an accounting spreadsheet, oh, you did this and I did that. So it really just opened me up to be much more generous.
And experientially, that seems to work really well. So we also had... And the thing he actually brought me over to discuss with him was God and faith and whether it's necessary and whether it's real and what is the nature of belief.
And he said to me, you know, I'm making some extraordinary claims here. And I certainly felt that we were able to do the job he brought me over to do, which is to find the areas where perhaps he was overstretching the boundaries of reality a little bit, making claims that… I don't want to say that they were not true, but they were not things that he could then prove, let's say, right? Or things that perhaps were an over-claim on his part. That was my takeaway anyway.
So I feel like we helped each other without any grandiosity about it. I felt like I did my job. He was extraordinarily generous.
And actually, one of the things he said to me at the end is he was like, I'm so sorry I haven't given you more time when I felt like you'd basically spend the entire time giving me advice and and uh that I'd asked for um and just you know really encouraging me to be the best version of myself and I learned a lot about leadership from him as well because you know when you're Jordan you're on this tour you travel with an entourage there's a bunch of people there and everybody around him is a great person you His security guys love him. His tour manager is a great guy. The guy who does the music for him is a great guy. And Jordan sets that tone.
He holds that space for everybody to really step into the best version of themselves. So even in terms of leadership, I really, really took so much out of that. Why do you think people like Jordan Peterson, Dennis Prager is kind of in a similar space where he mostly talks about happiness and gratitude and how to live a good life? They're labeled as right-wing extremists. I mean, you find that a little puzzling, given that you've spent so much time with him.
And like everything you discussed right now, all the things that you've learned from him, all your interactions with him seem to have very little to do with anything political. Yeah, look, I don't know Jordan's politics deep inside out, but I think it's fair to say he's probably center-right. I imagine Dennis wouldn't balk at the idea that he is right-wing.
So I think... There is an element of truth to the idea that both of these men are right of center, I think. But also, I think we can't pretend that the far left don't use the label of right wing simply to discredit people. When they say that you're right wing, they don't mean that you disagree about tax policy.
They mean that you're an evil person. They mean that you're a bad person. And so the reason people, it's not inaccurate, I think, that Jordan is on center right at least. or a classic liberal maybe, or whatever it is.
But the reason they say that isn't because they're trying to inform people about his political views. They're trying to say, this is a bad person, don't listen to them. Which I think is incredibly discrediting to them.
Because if someone like Jordan, who's making a massively positive impact on the world, on young people, on people who are struggling. I mean, some of the questions I hosted. the Q&A at the end of every show, some of the questions that people ask, I mean, they're mind-blowingly horrifying. People who've just been through, you know, been abused by their parents in the most horrific ways and people who've lost people. There was a guy at our show in, I think, El Paso who literally lost his son who was supposed to be at the show with him five days prior.
You know, people are really coming to him for a lot of guidance and getting it, getting it. They're coming away from those shows with a like I did, with a better understanding of how to deal with the tragedies and the complexities of life. If that person is not aligned with you, well, what does that say about you? If this person who's bringing good into the world is on the other side of you, well, what does that say about you?
What are you bringing into the world? And I think to people whose ideas about the world are based on victimology and resentment and grievance and... self-pity and and their fake pity for others And a complete lack of pragmatism and constructive attitude to the future. They resent people like him Precisely because of that he is doing good and they're not. That's what I see.
I mean some of the resentment that I can relate to here with the work that we do at PragerU is that we say that we should raise the bar instead of lowering the state standards of education, instead of lowering standards and expectations of people of certain color or certain race or you know because I'm a woman I should be given an extra leg up in order to make it into into whatever board right. those things we find really troubling. We actually find these things to be racist. I mean, it's everything that they're claiming about us is what they're doing, right?
And so, but that is the label that we have to bear because they don't like the fact that we say DEI is racist. One of the things you said to me earlier is that there is a poverty of expectations, which I think is so brilliant because if you really want to raise somebody up. You expect more of them, not less of them. I remember doing that as a teacher, right? Like the kids who I actually challenged the most were the kids who did the best.
I'll tell you an example. There was a study of a group of kids who were, I believe they were in first or second grade. And a bunch of scientists went to the teacher and said, there are five kids in your class who are absolutely brilliant. They're geniuses. We can't tell them that they're geniuses because we don't want it to get through their heads.
We don't want to tell the parents, only you, teacher, will know that they're geniuses. But, you know, you really need to pay attention to these kids. So don't tell the rest of the class that they're geniuses, but make sure that you accommodate these five geniuses.
By the end of the year, the scientists went back to the teacher and they wanted a report on how the five geniuses were doing. And of course, the five geniuses. did amazing, right? They were ahead of the entire class, except that the teacher later found out that those five kids were chosen randomly. None of them were really geniuses.
They were just treated with higher expectations. And I'll never forget that as a teacher, because I do the same thing with my staff. I mean, sometimes they're resentful of me because I push them so hard, but then they look back a year later and they say, wow, you pushed me, you believed in me. And so when we're robbing kids.
of any gender or not just kids, individuals of any color, gender, last name, wherever they came from. And we're telling them, we're going to lower the expectations for you. That will be good for you. I mean, that is the message we preach.
And we're then called racist, xenophobic. I think a lot of people have abandoned their responsibility, particularly when it comes to children. for recognizing what as an adult you're supposed to do. You're supposed to show the next generation the way to live your life.
And that is an empirical question. It's not an ideological question. It's empirical. Is it more useful for a child to be encouraged to fulfill their potential or to navel gaze and analyze the precise way in which they didn't have as much as Johnny the neighbor?
Well, guess what? Wherever you go in life, there will be people who had it worse than you. There'll be people who had it better than you.
There'll be people who got dealt a set of a hand of cards that you couldn't even imagine someone getting that good a hand. And there'll be people that you couldn't even imagine getting that bad a hand. And when you play the game of life, the only option you have is to play the cards you've been dealt with to the very best of your ability. You either do that or you do not that.
And when you do not that, you get worse results. So I just don't see it as an ideological issue. DEI is racist, irrespective of whether right-wingers like PragerU say it, or whether center, politically non-binary people like me say it, or whether progressives who are opening their eyes, like my friend Bill Ackman, for example.
I don't know if he's progressive exactly, but certainly he's. he's coming to this issue. Another politically homeless. Right. He's coming to this issue with fresh eyes.
It doesn't matter. The truth is irrespective of who's saying it. Even the worst people that I may disagree with, when they say something that is true, pretending it's not isn't going to help, right? So why do we say DEI is racist?
It's not because of politics. It's because... When you treat people differently because of the color of their skin, that is racial discrimination.
It doesn't matter who's saying it, whether it's Jordan Peterson or Cenk Uygur or whoever, AOC, it doesn't matter. If it's true, it's true, and if it's not true, it's not true. And when it comes to all of this stuff...
I care about what works. I'm really, really not interested in what people... I remember reading this book by a former British ambassador to America.
I can't remember the name of the book, but it was about his experience as a diplomat. And he talks about how he became a diplomat in France, and they were discussing some kind of potential solution to some kind of problem between Britain and France. And he says at some point, one of the French diplomats threw up his hands and said, well...
I agree with you that this works in practice, but I don't think this works in theory. I couldn't care less about whether something works in theory. And I think quite often we get distracted.
I think people on the left are prone to thinking that things that make them feel good work instead of looking at the data. And people on the right sometimes are misled by thinking that things are logically, the things that make sense logically. That means that that's a good thing. And I'm like, why don't we just look at the results, right? When you do this, do you make more money or less money?
When you do this, is your relationship worse or better? When you do this, are your kids going to be more successful and fulfilled or not? When you behave in this way, is there more racial conflict or less? When you do this, are you stronger geopolitically or weaker?
That's what we should be looking at. And then we should be making our political decisions, in my opinion, based on that and not, oh, when I think about the world in this way, that makes me feel really good because I'm really compassionate person. Well, compassion is useful, as is pragmatism.
They have to be paired, A, together and B, with reality. Right. So I want to end with my favorite part of your book, which I really highly recommend.
And I know I say this many times when I bring people on. I love the book. This is another great book to hand to college students, especially ones who are politically homeless or what you call politically non-binary.
It's very relatable. And it ends with a section that actually got me to laugh out loud as I was listening to it. So I think people get a real kick out of it. But also left me with wanting to have some pragmatic advice for parents, friends of people who want to hear, how do we not.
Destroy the West, which we all love so much and appreciate so much. And so you outlined 10 ways to destroy the West. I'm going to read them to you one by one.
Maybe you can give us an inoculation, a way to inoculate ourselves against this madness. So number one in 10 ways to destroy the West is see everything in terms of race always. Well, how about.
There was a great man once who gave a speech once in which he said that we should all be treated on the content of the character. I thought we spent a long time and a lot of blood and violence and discord and human horror to get to that point, which is very natural to human beings. We're pre-wired for tribalism. That was a beautiful idea.
And if we practice that idea, we're going to get a hell of a lot further, particularly in our societies, which are multi-ethnic. You know, if we're going to stay together and unified and work together for the good of our society, we have to see ourselves as American first or British first or Westerners first or whatever it is that unites us above our individual tribal identities. That doesn't mean that, you know, Jews can't go to synagogue and black people can't do this and white people can't. Of course, we can have our own particular ways of being.
But ultimately. at the end of the day, we should be seen through the content of our character. Are you a good person? Are you making a positive impact or are you not?
And it was the West that invented this idea. It's the West that should practice it. Embrace self-loathing. Well, it's one of the things I often say, you know, the way history is taught in, well, everywhere, of course, because, you know, our education system is not perfect, but particularly in the West, it disconnects us from the... the truth about our society.
And if you teach, you know, last time I was in LA, it was to do Bill Marshall. I said, well, you've been teaching your children for at least two generations to hate their own society. Why do you expect them to then suddenly think it's great? If you keep telling them that the only thing that defines the West is slavery and racial tensions and mistreatment of women and whatever.
First of all, none of that's true, right? That doesn't define who we are. Secondly, we're actually doing better on all of those things than anywhere else in the world.
That's kind of helpful to remember because if you think about it, if you're a woman or you're an ethnic minority or you're a sexual minority, where would you rather live in the world? I mean, it's a real question, right? Outside the West. What do you have?
You have China, which puts Muslims in concentration camps. You have Russia, where they decriminalized domestic violence recently, and attitudes to gay people and minorities, whatever. You have, where else are you going to go? Japan?
India? Where is this great utopia that we're always comparing ourselves to? So, in order to have a healthy view of your own society, I would say this. If you talked...
the way that people talk about their country, about your spouse, people would think you're an abuser. If you said, you know what, my wife is the biggest piece of shit in the world because 200 years ago, she did this. People go, well, hold on a second. Your wife is not perfect and she did certain things, but you have a duty to work that out and you accept her with her imperfections and there are lots of other people you could compare her to and she's clearly... good in these areas.
Like that's how you talk about someone you love. You would only talk in the way that some people now talk about their country, about someone you truly hate and despise. And I don't think you can preserve something that you despise.
Why would you? Why do you think we are so susceptible to these kinds of ideas? Like on the one hand, we know that the way Western values have developed has led to the most prosperity, right? This is why we love it here. Do we know that?
Do we know that? I don't know that you could get a 20-year-old, many 20-year-olds now, to explain how we are here, why are we here, and even to be able to put where we are in context against other places. The idea I just mentioned to you of having to compare our society to others, I don't hear anyone else talking about this. So I think one of the reasons is we've been teaching our children, A, that their society is bad, and B, in order to be able to teach because it's obviously not true. you have to then not teach them about every other society that's ever existed.
So this narrative, for example, look, America has rightly a very difficult conversation about race and slavery and so on. But this narrative, we have this in the UK as well, that there was no slavery, and then the British Empire came along and invented slavery. And then woke people came along and ended slavery. That's kind of how many people think about that issue. Well, that isn't true.
I mean, slavery existed everywhere throughout history. Slaves were probably the first good that human beings ever traded amongst each other. Africans practiced slavery long before the evil Western colonial powers got there. The Africans were the ones capturing the slaves.
And we, in the West, the British Empire in particular, were the people that actually ended it at great And not only in our own, we didn't just end the slavery that we were doing that rightly we should have ended that was terrible. We also spend a great amount of money and blood to force other countries that didn't want to end the practice and still don't in some cases to end it as well. So it's a complete inversion of history to try and say that we are the most evil on that issue.
On the contrary, I always give this example, I give it in the book. If 30 years from now, the vegans get their way. And we all agree that eating animals is a great sin and evil and whatever.
And we are the first people to come to that realization. Would we then say that we were the worst people? That doesn't make any sense, just logically, right?
So I think the way that we talk about all of these issues is designed to separate people from reality and history. contextual understanding of it. It's why I always plug anything that's ever been written by Thomas Sowell, because I just think he's so good at unpacking all of this stuff.
And of course, because he happens to be black, it means that people can't then just say, oh, this guy's a racist, and you can actually listen to the ideas then, which is helpful. Right. It's like we have the best ideas, but the worst way in teaching these ideas, mostly because the Department of Education and the teachers unions and all of the Marxists that have...
corrupted our systems and teaching our kids to basically hate the West. That is what's happening. I want to fast forward through the rest of them because people can actually read.
I'm not giving you the succinct answers that you wanted. No, you're giving great answers. But I think the most puzzling thing to me and what we're seeing and living through right now is how people are being useful idiots. And I'd love for you to give us a sense of how do we inoculate people out of being useful idiots?
Well, I think the orientation towards being genuinely interested in the truth is the only way to deal with that. You have to be interested in the truth instead of what makes you feel good. And it's one of the other things I took away from my time with Jordan. What makes you feel good in the immediate moment?
Isn't necessarily the right thing to do It's not like I didn't know that before but I experienced it in a different way and this is also true of ideas Ideas that make you feel good are often not true It's why they make you feel good because the truth is quite unpleasant Often and it's difficult and it means you have to do things you don't necessarily want to do so You have to you have to think about what the truth is instead of going along with things that you are cognitively predisposed to and if you find yourself demonizing other people if you find yourself calling people names if you find yourself treating people badly if you find yourself angry and resentful and bitter that's that's not that probably means you're not doing something right right like if you are hateful towards other people because of politics or whatever then You have to consider the possibility that you have bought into a way of seeing the world that is corrupting you, ultimately. If you are filled with hate because you are such a progressive, tolerant person, don't you see the contradiction there? And these hypocrisies, as I think we both know, exist on the different poles of the spectrum.
There are people who say that they're Christian and their message is love. just go around hating people and mocking and criticizing and attacking other people. So we're all prone to these hypocrisies. And ultimately, you got to look at, is what I am doing a reflection of, you know, the ideas that I'm espousing?
And if it's not, maybe it's time to change something. It's one of those great pragerisms that Dennis likes to share. Does it feel good or does it do good?
Right. Yeah. Well, Konstantin, it was great having you on. We love having you here. PragerU.
Keep up the great work. And really, I recommend everybody go grab this book. It's a great one to share. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
Thank you for having me.