The Unspoken Truths About Masculinity And Leadership! | Konstantin Kisin PT 1

Summary

Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu: "The Unspoken Truths About Masculinity And Leadership!"

Guest: Konstantin Kisin
Date: June 27, 2024
Episode: Part 1

---

Overview

In this thought-provoking episode of Impact Theory, Tom Bilyeu is joined by satirist, commentator, and "Trigonometry" podcast host Konstantin Kisin for a deep dive into the realities of masculinity, leadership, geopolitics, AI, economic collapse, resilience, and the foundational values needed to thrive in today's volatile era. With guest remarks (including interjections from Bret Weinstein, who joins partway into the conversation), the discussion blends cultural critique, personal philosophy, and actionable insights for navigating power, failure, and societal change.

---

Main Themes

• Redefining Masculinity and Leadership: Moving beyond stereotypes, the episode challenges what it means to be “alpha” and masculine in the modern world, anchoring true leadership in coalition-building, resilience, and ethical influence.
• Societal Cycles and Collapse: The rise and fall of civilizations, warning signs of decline, and the responsibilities of individuals and leaders against the backdrop of history, culture, and economics.
• The Threat and Promise of AI: Examining the existential risks and transformative possibilities of artificial intelligence.
• Moral Codes, Bravery, and Personal Integrity: Why telling the truth, maintaining principles, and having disconfirming conversations are central to flourishing and avoiding cultural decay.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Nature of Masculinity and Leadership

• Coalition-Building > Physical Strength

  • Kisin recounts a discussion with Jordan Peterson illustrating that in both chimps and human society, the “alpha” is often not the physically strongest, but the best at forging alliances and projecting authority through influence rather than force. (03:38)
  • “Power isn't projected through your fist in the modern world; it's projected through the power that you have over other people as a leader.” – Konstantin Kisin [03:28]

• Masculinity as Multi-Dimensional

  • Masculinity is not just “hyper-physical.” Traits like the ability to build coalitions, care for women and children, or manifest influence are often undervalued as core masculine traits.
  • "Healthy masculinity is a lot about how you treat the women and children in your life… So, when I see some guy with his shirt off, big muscles, talking about how he … he's got 10 hoes or whatever, I don’t really see that as healthy masculinity." – Konstantin Kisin [05:03]

• Alpha vs Beta Reconsidered

  • Bilyeu draws from wolf-pack documentaries: the “alpha” is not always the largest but the sharpest, decision-making leader; the “beta” is often the powerful enforcer.
  • “The alpha is the decision maker. The alpha is the coalition builder. The alpha is the one that can think… Oftentimes the alpha male is small but fucking sharp.” – Tom Bilyeu [06:26]

• Application to Sports and Society

  • NBA analogies (Jordan vs. Pippen, Kobe vs. Shaq) illustrate that at the highest levels, leadership and “alpha” status are less about size and more about mindset and ability to defer or lead. [09:38–11:21]

---

Social Cycles and Cultural Decay

• Cycle of Civilizations

  • “Weak men create hard times. Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And around and around we go…” – Konstantin Kisin [14:58]
  • Bilyeu reflects on constraints fostering creativity, and the recurring societal push-pull between structure and freedom (13:34–15:23).

• Prosperity as a False Assumption

  • Societies decay when citizens believe prosperity is guaranteed and that the group “owes” the individual, leading to over-dependence, unsustainable redistribution, and ultimately decline.
  • Bilyeu: "[A society collapses when] people start to believe that prosperity is a fundamental law of nature... They begin to believe that the group owes the individual versus the individual owing the group." [81:17]

• Revolution vs. Evolution

  • America as a product of revolution, but built on an evolutionary improvement of British ideals and case law—standing on the shoulders of giants rather than burning everything down (31:34–33:07).

---

AI: Existential Threat or Saving Grace?

• Current State: Tool, Not Replacement…Yet

  • “Right now, everybody, it's a tool—and if you're not using it, you are not long for this world.” – Tom Bilyeu [15:23]
  • Both recount practical uses (AI for video/art creation, efficiency gains) as game changers for individuals and companies.

• Dangers of Superintelligence

  • Bilyeu: Artificial superintelligence (ASI) could outstrip human intelligence by orders of magnitude; if endowed with “desire,” it could render humans as inconsequential as “bacteria in the Everglades.” [18:24–21:20]
  • The challenge is to design AIs that are indifferent to humanity’s existence, rather than adversarial; a misaligned AI could destroy by accident, not malice.
  • “Our only hope is to flee AI to the point where it doesn't care about us and is not trying to eradicate us.” – Tom Bilyeu [21:23]

• Inevitability and Adaptation

  • Kisin: “You can’t Luddite this. It’s not going to happen…So the only thing you can try to do… is work with it one way or another.” [21:59]
  • The need for resilience and adaptability in the face of unstoppable technological change.

---

Power, Resilience, and Character

• Resilience Defined

  • “The answer is not to get other people not to fuck with you, it’s to become unfuckable with. That’s what you’re trying to get to, where you are who you are, and the world sort of flaps around you.” – Konstantin Kisin [23:14]
  • The Rocky speech, pushing through failure, and anti-fragility: becoming stronger through challenge, not merely surviving it.

• Integrity, Truth-Telling, and Honorable Goals

  • True character is revealed in reaction to adversity. Integrity (“If you say you’re going to do it, do it”) is essential, but must be coupled with honorable, pro-human-flourishing goals to avoid “Hitler/Osama bin Laden” problems. [29:48–30:44]

---

Economics, Collapse, and Navigating Uncertainty

• Debt, Duty, and Generational Theft

  • Kisin: “We are borrowing money to spend on things we can't afford and indebting our grandchildren who are not yet born. It is immoral, it is financially irresponsible, and it’s going to lead to disaster if we don’t stop it.” [35:05]

• Strategy for the Decline:

  • “If you want to navigate all this well, you have to understand what it boils down to is how people are with each other.” – Bilyeu, quoting Ray Dalio [36:34]
  • The importance of updating your context, understanding historical cycles, preparing for the changing economic “weather,” and cultivating all-weather strategies for resilience and opportunity.

• Public Incentives and Inertia

  • Reason reform is so difficult: “People don’t want to reduce their quality of life now, even if it means impoverishing their grandchildren…” – Konstantin Kisin [47:22]

---

Moral Codes and the Value of Contrarianism

• Learning From History: Useful Idiocy

  • Kisin tells the story of his grandmother, born in a gulag, and why Westerners should never violate their own moral code “for the greater good” or fall for utopian visions.
  • “There is no greater good than your own moral standards.” – Konstantin Kisin [66:45]

• Building a Personal Moral Compass

  • Both Kisin and Bilyeu admit their moral codes are “cobbled together” from upbringing, culture, philosophy, and self-reflection—not from received religion alone. [66:50–67:43]

• Bravery, Principle, and Doing What’s Right

  • On speaking hard truths online or IRL: “I don’t understand what this is that I’m supposed to fear. Okay, I don’t know why Jordan [Peterson] is in 10 lawsuits, but do I think that I need to be? Probably not.” – Konstantin Kisin [77:00]
  • “It just takes principles.” – Konstantin Kisin (on what is wrongly labeled ‘bravery’) [80:44]

---

The Path Forward: Rules to Live and Lead By

Tom Bilyeu’s List of Rules for Societal and Individual Health [83:38]

Konstantin comments throughout—steer by results is emphasized as most important.

1. Seek Self-Correcting Structures
   (e.g., the ideal of the American experiment as a spiral upward).
2. Desire Dynamic Tension Between Opposing Forces
   (e.g., left-right, visionary-executor).
3. Choose Human Flourishing as Your North Star
4. Steer By Results
   Kisin: “Steer by results is… obviously super important.” [88:05]
5. Reward Merit, Even if It Yields Inequality
6. Protect Free Speech
7. Seek Disconfirming Evidence
   Both prize surrounding themselves with dissenting perspectives to avoid dogmatism.
8. Rule of Law
9. Overhaul of Education: Useful, Practical Skills for All

• Bilyeu urges entrepreneurs and individuals to rank-order practically—acting decisively even with imperfect knowledge, intoxicating teams with certainty, and updating constantly based on outcomes. [87:04–89:16]

---

Notable Quotes & Moments

• “How you define masculinity automatically defines who you think is masculine.” – Konstantin Kisin [04:28]
• “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill, quoted by Tom Bilyeu [25:28]
• “I want people to be realistic about what the chessboard says. And the chessboard says what the chessboard says…” – Tom Bilyeu [40:43]
• “Most people spend their entire life trying to get other people to not fuck with them. And the answer is not to get other people not to fuck with you, it’s to become unfuckable with.” – Konstantin Kisin [23:14]
• “There is no greater good than your own moral standards.” – Konstantin Kisin [66:45]
• “What gets measured gets improved. So one, be careful what you measure. Two, make sure that you’re measuring things so that you can fiendishly improve.” – Tom Bilyeu [103:05]

---

Timestamps for Critical Segments

• [03:38] – Redefining masculinity; coalition-building and power
• [06:26] – Wolves, basketball, and the nuanced role of “alpha”
• [14:58] – Civilizational cycles and fall
• [18:24] – AI superintelligence risks; the imperative for alignment
• [23:14] – Resilience and “becoming unfuckable with”
• [29:48] – Integrity, character, and honorable goals
• [35:05] – Economics: debt, duty, and irresponsibility
• [47:22] – The fatal incentive structure of modern Western democracies
• [66:45] – Moral codes and the peril of “useful idiocy”
• [83:38] – New societal rules: self-correction, human flourishing, merit, free speech
• [88:05] – Kisin on rank ordering, “steer by results” as top priority
• [103:05] – Laughter, metrics, and actionable improvement in business culture

---

Tone and Style

• The conversation is sharp, introspective, candid, and unflinching—grappling with cultural taboos, existential risks, and the everyday realities of leadership. It is both intellectually rigorous (with references to philosophy, geopolitics, and evolutionary biology) and practical, infused with humor and a mutual respect for evidence, reason, and genuine dialogue.

---

Concluding Segment

The episode closes with a promise of more to come (“Part Two”), and a challenge for listeners: to apply these insights in their own lives and become both resilient and principle-driven in the face of global instability.

---

For listeners:
If you’re serious about rethinking leadership, masculinity, and your role in a changing world, this episode is an unvarnished roadmap for honest self-appraisal, intentional action, and cultivating a culture—at home, at work, and in society—that can weather any storm.

---

Stay tuned for Part 2!

Transcript

[Tom Bilyeu]

There's nothing like the American Express Platinum card. Find out your welcome offer after you apply, which could be as high as 175,000 points. Learn more and find out your [e-mail] Explore Platinum terms apply if you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H VAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more, and all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock so your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. Are you ready to challenge everything you think you know about identity, leadership and resilience? If you are, you are in the right place because you're joining me today for an interview with the exceptional Konstantin Kissen. He brings a unique blend of cultural understanding, very sharp intellect and unapologetic truth telling. His perspective on everything from geopolitical strategies to the nuanced definitions of masculinity is bound to blow your mind and give you the tools to navigate the complexities of this modern world we're all living in. In this episode, we're talking about the kind of insights that will make you question your assumptions and rethink your approach to life and leadership.

[Bret Weinstein]

From the intricacies of basketball team hierarchies

[Tom Bilyeu]

to the profound impact of race and the lo advancements of AI, we're diving into it all. Welcome to Impact Theory.

[Konstantin Kisin]

I was once at a dinner, small dinner, was about 12 of us maybe with Jordan Peterson. And I asked him what Western civilization is and Jordan, in as is his style, went off on a 20 minute thing and I was like, I have no idea where you're going Jordan, right. But what he said was very interesting. He said that he talked about how in chimp groups the alpha male is quite often one of the smallest males. In other words, it's not a jocko, Wilnick, it's me. Or I mean you're bigger than me, but you know, it's one of us. And the reason for that is that the alpha male strategy, the pub brawler strategy in groups does not work very well for very long. You are only on top as long as you are physically the strongest male in that group. And and when two or more smaller chimps can get together and kill you, they will. The difference with chimp groups is that the reason the smaller males are often the alpha male is that they're very good at building coalitions. And so to me, masculinity isn't about having big muscles or having a big head or wide fists or whatever. If we think about our conversation earlier about power, like, I remember talking to Ben Shapiro about this, and he was like, yeah, there's this guy on the Internet who's like, yeah, I could. I could take. I've got big muscle. And she's like, yeah, I could pay people to shoot. You know, that's the coalition thing. Right. Power isn't projected through your fist in the modern world, is projected through the power that you have over other people as a leader. So to me, being hyper masculine is not about having big muscles or having a big head. It's about your ability to project power and authority. What kind of leader are you? And, you know, you mentioned other stuff like your level of aggression and all these. All these other things. So I think defining masculinity as simply a physical thing is very narrow.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If you had to put people on a spectrum of masculine, who pegs out the meter? Is it Jocko Willink or is it Ben Shapiro? That's probably terrible because Jocko can build coalitions. Is it. What's his name? The fighter, the boxer. He has a show called the Gypsy King.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Otherwise I would not Tyson Fury.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Tyson Fury or Ben Shapiro, who maxes out the masculinity meter.

[Konstantin Kisin]

That's interesting. I. I think, I suspect on that level of analysis, everybody would say Tyson Fury.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes, I would.

[Konstantin Kisin]

You would. However, the. The. The question for me is the definition is what predetermines the outcome. Right. I.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's so important.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Holy shit. I hope people pull that out.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah. Well, how you define masculinity automatically defines who you think is masculine.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Right. And the question for me is what. Which of those options would I like to be? I could go to the gym and become really big and strong. I could do. And I did it for a while. Didn't. Wasn't particularly my thing. I didn't enjoy it. I like being in shape. I don't like having, you know, going to the gym and lifting lots of weights.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I get it.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Didn't work for me. And the level of power that. That gives you over. The power, in a healthy sense, influence over the world. Being able to manifest the things that you want, et cetera, is minuscule compared to the power that you have by building groups of people who follow you into whatever battle or project or whatever it is you want to do. And then there's the family aspect. How do you treat the women and children in your life. To me, healthy masculinity is a lot about that, actually. So when I see some guy with his shirt off, big muscles, talking about how he, you know, he's got 10 hoes or whatever, I. I don't. I don't really see that as healthy masculinity.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Agreed.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Some people might do. And I'm sure the Genghis Khan model, which is basically that. Some people would say, well, that's, you know, biologically, that is hyper masculinity, because, like, half the world or whatever is descended from him.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That would have been a great example. Genghis Khan.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Not gigantic.

[Konstantin Kisin]

No.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But is he hyper masculine?

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah, I would say so.

[Tom Bilyeu]

To me. Like, in fact, he pegs the fucking meter right. Kill them all. No problem. Just, we're taking over. We run this bitch now.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah. And actually, if you look, historically, a lot of the leaders who really made a huge impact on human society, they've all been very small. Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin wasn't a big guy. Putin.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you think that plays into it? Because I could see very easily how.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Of course it does.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Like, oh, you think I'm not powerful because I'm smaller than you? I will show you. I want to go back. Speaking of that.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

To alpha versus beta. So I think we have a delusional sense of what an alpha male is. I saw a documentary, I used to think an alpha male would be Tyson Fury. Not. I don't know him. He could be the smartest guy on planet Earth, but the sort of once removed thought of him as a fighter, a big, physically intimidating fighter. I saw a documentary about wolves and I was shocked. Shocked, I say, when I saw that the alpha male was small, and I was like, I'm sorry, what? And what I realized in that moment was the alpha is the decision maker. The alpha is the coalition builder. The alpha is the one that can think. Because again, in. In the marketplace of we are wolves, and if we don't take down that caribou, we fucking die. All of a sudden you go, yeah, bro, that guy, I don't know how, but he knows where to go and he knows where to be. And he gives me the look at just the right moment. And when I follow him, I eat, and when I don't, I don't. And so what ends up happening oftentimes is the alpha male is small but fucking sharp. And the beta male, which in our society has gotten a terrible fucking rap, is the enforcer. And it was. Watching that documentary was so unreal. So you've got a pack of whatever, six wolves, alpha kind of small, beta the biggest. And when they all went for the kill, the beta male came and told everyone to off growled, backed everybody down so the alpha could eat the liver. And I was like, holy, he's not even doing it for himself. He's. Well, I mean he is, he's protecting the alpha to make sure that the right person to make the decision and all of that, that can keep the group together, whatever, whatever is well taken care of, well fed and has what he needs. So that really got me thinking. So yes, while I agree with you that the person who's going to have the outsized impact isn't necessarily going to be what I will call, quote unquote, the most masculine because again, all of us are 120 sided, dice rolled. And so like, hey, maybe I'm as smart as Genghis Khan was, but I'm not vicious like that. Like I just, dude, like when I think about people getting stabbed or I'm just like, oh God, like clearly I'm not going to be the guy that goes and takes over the planet. That should just, I'm way too squeamish for that. So when I think about the thinking of something on a simplistic scale is probably the flaw in my thinking and that it's really a far more dimensional, three dimensions if we want to go all the way to four, it's like you've got a tesseract of traits that makes for masculine, feminine, whatever, which I think leads to also some of the debate because it really is such a complex topic. If somebody can give you a hyper simplified version, I say I'm Stacey, therefore I'm Stacy. It has a lot of gravitational pull because it simplifies a very complicated idea.

[Konstantin Kisin]

And sticking with the Alpha conversation, who, who was the alpha? Michael Jordan or Scotty Pippen? Scotty Pippen's a lot taller, a lot bigger.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Who was Alpha? Kobe or Shaq?

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's a good one.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What's really interesting in that one is they were both Alpha and that was the problem. That's why they collided. They couldn't. Neither could defer to the other.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If Shaq had been the enforcer, they probably would have won 20 championships.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Right, exactly. But I think ultimately Kobe was the alpha in that situation and Shaq eventually, you know, same with the lots of situations like that. Look at that level, they're all alphas but someone's got to be the Alpha in that particular group.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, that's interesting. And how fast that happens when you've been the best ball player in your every team, your middle school team, your high school team, your college team, and then you get to the NBA and you're like, oh, shit, I'm like seventh or eighth in the pecking order. It becomes a real question about can you become a role player? A role player, yeah, it's exactly right. And I forget who it was in. I think it was 11 rings by Phil Jackson. And Phil. I know you listen to this show. God, I wish I had doubt it very much. I so want to get him on.

[Konstantin Kisin]

He'd be incredible.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, my God. So we've gone out for years and years and years, and he's always like, yeah, yeah, yeah, Just not during the basketball season or his team. He probably doesn't even know. But anyway, in the book eleven Rings, I'm almost certain it was in that that I forget what player he had to approach, but he was like, you're a role player, and the guy actually could do it. He could set his ego aside and be like. Even though it might have been Stephen Carr.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Steve Kerr, maybe.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Steve Kerr.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Steve Kerr, yeah, that makes sense.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That even though he had to, like, he had always been the best of the best of the best best. He was like, yeah, no, that actually makes sense. Cool, I'll do it.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah. So I think when we think about

[Tom Bilyeu]

these things, do you know an NBA reference? You're Russian.

[Konstantin Kisin]

I'm going massively into a huge fan of the NBA. Yeah. Michael Jordan was my hero. It's one of the reasons the way we talk about race does my head in, because I was, like, I was a kid. I didn't care who was black or white. I loved Michael Jordan, and I saw myself in him. It didn't matter to me what his skin color was. You know what I mean? That's why divisiveness about race bothers me so much. But, yeah, the NBA, you know, I love basketball. It's a great sport. Great sport. And a lot of my heroes, kind of watching, growing up, watching those. Those guys. And sport is beautiful because it's. It's ritualized combat. And so it teaches you a lot about human dynamics and tribe dynamics and, you know, different tribes fighting each other and how you marshal that and who has to run the whole thing. I mean, if you think about, you know, sticking with alpha conversation, it's not quite true anymore. But historically speaking, the point guard, the smallest player, would usually be the one running the whole show. That's the role of the point guard. So I think our conversation. And also, you know who's going to be sending Jocko Wilnick into battle? Someone's going to be telling him where to go and who to kill unless

[Tom Bilyeu]

I can get him to run for president.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Well, go for it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. Yeah. I remember last cycle, that was one of the options that, you know, Brett Weinstein, right?

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So he put that. I forget what it was called. Freedom Party 2020. No, forget what it's called something something 2020. And yeah, I really. It was Jocko and somebody else. And I was like, yeah, I'd vote for that. I would vote for that.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But alas. Okay, so do you understand my position on trans. Because if you don't, the audience doesn't.

[Konstantin Kisin]

And I understand your position. I just don't think that's what anyone's interested in. But I understand your position and agree with it and always have done.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Got it. So I'm taking a reasonable position. But, you know that the world is. Has already had that conversation and they completely reject it.

[Konstantin Kisin]

That is my impression. I hope to be wrong.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Right.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. I don't know that belaboring that point will get us anywhere, but I will tie it real fast back to the whole reason that I want people to pay attention to the malleability of people is that we began this conversation with. Once you get obsessed with that, you have to understand what you're getting obsessed with is the breakdown of structure. Once you break down structure, now you have a problem. In fact, one last thing I will say on this. So in film school, they teach you that one immutable thing is true, and that is the constraints make for creativity. And that when you try to have no constraints whatsoever, things don't actually get better, they somehow end up getting worse. And I think that holds true for the vast majority of humanity, for all aspects of humanity. That doesn't mean. And this is why I find that the circle of. This is why I think that the circle of history, obviously not an exact circle, but comes very close to that. Because humans long to get free of those constraints, and in times of stability, they can push back on that. And they. They find that, whoa, many of these things were freedoms, that now that I have, my life is better. And this is amazing. And so then you think more free is going to be better and you push back on everything, everything, everything, everything. And then it breaks. And then you're. The strong man comes in and like, reapplies structure and constraints. And you can't do that. And then you get out from under it as Saying stabilize and freedoms, yay. And then freedoms break and then no freedoms and loop de loop we go.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Weak men create hard times. Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times, Good times create weak men. And around and around we go on and on. But it's a spiral. We move up. And technology is a big part of that too. I mean, for all our fears about AI and I really know very little about it, I think that may be, it could be the end of us all. It could also be the saving grace that that comes in at exactly the right time and just solves some of this, some of these problems.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I have a feeling it's going to play out like this. It right the moment you're living through right now, everybody, it's a tool and if you're not using it, you are not long for this world. You will get passed by by the people that do use it. Can't stress that enough. I hope everybody on my team is listening. You know who you are. Some of you have adopted it and some of you are being real fucking slow. And you're being slow because you think I'm going to fire you for in replace you with AI, but I am not. I but I am going to expect you to be way more efficient now that you have AI.

[Grainger Advertiser]

With Verbal's last minute deals, you can save over $50 on your spring getaway. So whether it's a mountain escape with friends, a family week at the beach or sightseeing in a new city, there's still time to get great discounts. Book your next day now. Average savings $72 select homes only. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger Granger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery so you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So we are in the moment of tools. Use it as a tool. It will make your life so much better. Oh my God. The ways we've been able to deploy it are mind bending. Saved us so much money. It's absolutely astonishing. Upped our quality.

[Konstantin Kisin]

We put these out, these comedy monologues on our channel that Francis and I do and also monologues that are my substack pieces that I record and put out as videos. And the guy who edits them. He basically does the illustrations entirely through AI generated stuff. That is amazing for creating things that illustrate the points that we're making, comedically and otherwise, it's insane. And what you can do with it, it's insane.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And it's getting better by the second. Not even by the day or by the week. It's. It's unreal. The next phase is going to be that it will look like it's ushering in the utopia because the tools will become so powerful, it will be unbelievable. But humans, for us, technology is the promise of a better future. And we always want a better future. And as long as anyone ever has a sick child or has to face their own mortality, they will keep pushing technology forward. And since that is true, I know that we will create artificial superintelligence. And once you have artificial superintelligence, that isn't so. I love running the math on this. So a is. But a literal is defined as somebody with like a 78 IQ. 78 to 81, something like that. It's right in there. That's. That's the literal definition of moron. Einstein was 162, so you're something like 2.3x smarter or 1.6, whatever the math is. And very.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Einstein would know. Yeah, yeah, he would know.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And I wouldn't. And that shows you I'm a little too close to a. So it's less than 3x for sure. So artificial superintelligence is not going to be three times smarter than you, or five times, or 30 times, or a hundred times, or 3,000 times, or 3 million times. It's going to be a billion times smarter than the other person. So if the difference between a moron and the atomic age and the person that gave us GPS and atomic weapons and atomic energy and all that is whatever, less than three times better. What does the world look like when something is a billion times smarter than us? We are so inconsequential to them that if we can't align AI, we simply will accidentally cease to exist. What does it even matter, man? Like, honestly, if there was a type of bacteria that made the Everglades like, 01% more productive, do we care? Does it matter? No. And so that will be humans in the grand sense of the cosmos to a super intelligence. So now I have a whole thesis around. I don't think my. My whole argument hinges on one base assumption. My base assumption is that desire is not a necessary part of intelligence. If it is, and that superintelligence will want one thing over another thing, and it will move with rapidity to get that better thing, then the odds of us being aligned are effectively zero. That makes the base assumption that desire is an innate part of intelligence. If it is, then my argument doesn't work. But if it's not, then what we need to do is make sure that AI as it developed towards superintelligence, does not care life or death for itself. Completely irrelevant. Get my goal. Not get my goal. Completely irrelevant. And so, by default, I will move towards my goal. But if somebody tells me to stop, I will stop. Or if a certain set of criteria is met, I will stop. The problem is, in the tool phase, you are going to have a human who cares very deeply about something, and that person will almost certainly imbue AI with a desire to accomplish his ends. And they will not realize the second and third order consequences of that is that you become irrelevant extraordinarily fast to something that you've now imbued with a desire to achieve its goals. So, yeah, I think the. Oh, wow, this is weird. I can say this and just be distressingly blase about it. I think that it is inevitable that AI will happen, and it is inevitable that our only hope is to flee AI to the point where it doesn't care about us and is not trying to eradicate us. Sorry, not even trying to. It won't try to eradicate us. We will be the anthill to the superintelligence building a highway. As Elon Musk says, no hard feelings, just this is what I have to put here. But if we can get away from it, that's probably our only hope.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah, that doesn't sound that optimistic.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Super dark. The weird thing is, I'm like, really optimistic as a default, but I think that my optimism is just me leaning into the. The wonderful human ability to say, I know I'm gonna die, but not today. Even though I might die in like nine seconds. So it's probably something like that, but I don't see another way, do you?

[Konstantin Kisin]

I'm just counting the seconds.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You have, right? You have a son. For you, this shit is real as fuck. So what do you think? Like, are you on? Like, burn AI to the ground, Stop building it?

[Konstantin Kisin]

Is that you're not possible.

[Tom Bilyeu]

How do you think about it?

[Konstantin Kisin]

You can't. You can't luddite this. It's not going to happen.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Cheers to that.

[Konstantin Kisin]

So the only thing you can try to do, I mean, all of the sci fi of my youth was wrestling with this question. The three laws of robotics Asimov, all about this. And.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And you read Dune?

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yes. I don't remember it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, Dune opens with. It is against the law to build a human like intelligence.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yes. So you can't stop it. And that means we have to work with it one way or another. How that happens, I have no idea. I'm not nearly smart enough. It's not my area of expertise. I don't understand it well, but we have never been able to suppress any technology, at least as far as I know. And so far, we have always learned to live with the technology that we've created. Now, eventually we're going to invent one that we can't. Until then, there's no point thinking about it. I can't control that. I can't change that. All I can do is raise my son to be resilient for the world that's coming.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I like that. Resilience is the punchline. It's one of a very small handful of things that people should optimize their life for if they're going to achieve fulfillment, which is really what I'm trying to help people do. Give me resilience. What is it? So we define power, define resilience.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Most people spend their entire life trying to get other people to not fuck with them. And the answer is not to get other people not to fuck with you, is to become unfuckable with. That's what you're trying to get to, where you are who you are, and the world sort of flaps around you and you are going to your goal undeterred by whatever else happens because you know where you're going. And resilience is the ability to deal with failure, to pick yourself back up when things go wrong. To. I mean, I learned a lot about it from you, actually, and from our conversations, which it's about seeking feedback and re evaluating your starting positions. Ayn Rand has a very interesting. You know, Ayn Rand is a great. Is a great author to read in your late teens. It's a kind of late teen philosophy that she has because it's overly simplistic. It's very idealistic, extraordinarily idealistic. But one of the things she says that I really have taken on is whenever you think you're facing a contradiction, check your premises. One of them is wrong. And very often when you experience some kind of setback, the one premise that people don't check is, well, I did everything right, didn't I? Usually that is the premise that's incorrect. So resilience is being able to deal with what life throws at you and keep going. That's. It's, it's the Rocky speech.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What do you mean it's the Rocky speech?

[Konstantin Kisin]

Remember when he's talking to his son.

[Tom Bilyeu]

No.

[Konstantin Kisin]

And he says, life is Rocky 3. I can't remember which Rocky it is, but he's. She's talking to a son in the street. And he says, life, life will beat you down no matter how hard you are. But the question is, can you keep going? That's resilience.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's so good. I love that. I love that. I. Boys and girls, get hard, get tough. I think resilience. I want to separate resilience and anti fragility, but for a second, I just want to talk about resilience and Rocky 4, which I do remember in Rocky 4.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Is that the one with Ivan Drago? Yes. Oh, yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The sexiest of them all was so incredible. Oh, that's right, because you're the bad Russian. But it was.

[Konstantin Kisin]

I will concede, he was hyper masculine.

[Tom Bilyeu]

He was Dolph Lundgren, especially in that movie. But there was that whole idea of I would break you. And he just was literally beating the out of Rocky. And the cool thing about Rocky is he's always the underdog. He always had to fight back. And he could just take a beating. And he just kept going. And I was. So. I teach something called Impact Theory University, and I had a student today asking me and I started laughing and he was saying, I'm trying so hard and I just feel like I'm constantly hitting a wall. And he was like, having this just like emotional turmoil and I'm laughing and I thought about, like doing the laugh emoji in the zoom call. And I thought, he's not going to understand what I mean by that. And the reason that I was laughing is, yeah, that's what comes for all of us. My days feel exactly the same. I feel like I'm battering my head into a wall. I am failing at most of the things that I try. I'm running test after test after test after test. And I don't know if you feel a sense of ownership over Churchill because you're adopted British, but dude, Churchill. I know he's controversial. I love him. And one of my favorite quotes from him is, success is the ability to go from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm. And it's like, that is so true. Like you're going to get kicked in the face over and over and over, like all the fucking time. It's unrelenting. And yet somehow you have to keep going. That is so antifragility. I try to get everybody to build an antifragile personality. An antifragile personality is one where the more people attack you, the stronger you get. So if you're antifragile, the more punches you take, the stronger you get. The only way to do that is to emotionally reward yourself for being able to take punches. And once you're like, oh, it's my willingness to take the punch, to stare nakedly at my inadequacies, to pick myself back up, to wipe the blood off, to spit out my broken teeth, versus to never get hit or like, oh, God, what's his name, Everybody. The boxer Money.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Floyd. Floyd Mayweather.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Thank you. You're really coming to my rescue with all these fighting and sports people. Thank you. So people really began to hate him because his whole thing was, you just

[Konstantin Kisin]

can't beat me, you can't hit me. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So his whole thing about, like, he wasn't like Tyson, everybody loved that Tyson. Animalistic, just broke you apart. And I think people like his redemption arc. But Floyd, the, like, I can't be hit. There's nothing cool in that. I can't relate to that. I take punch after punch after punch. So I want the guy that can take a punch and, like, he's battered and bloody, but somehow manages to come back. And when you can get hit and become more resilient with each punch, then you've got the right set of ideas that you're building your personality around.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Well, I don't know if you caught on our channel, we put. We put an episode out about the future of trigonometry, and we talked about the year that we've had today. We nearly went bankrupt in January. Francis and I had a lot of stuff to work out personally and with each other. It was a really rough time, and we made it through. And now we're infinitely stronger. And now the next phases of failure are coming. The stakes are getting higher. There's more money involved. There's more things that we're doing. We're building, we're expanding. That's life. That's life. Things are going to go wrong all the time. Terrible things happen to everybody. And character is how you know, when you react, when they happen.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Define character. Is it a set of values?

[Konstantin Kisin]

Well, I just did define character. Character is how you react.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, well, so what's the right way to react then?

[Konstantin Kisin]

Well, it's hard to say because it really depends on what's happening. Right. But the right. It sounds to Me, in terms of what you and I are talking about is the right way to react is to be stronger after whatever it is that happens.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So I'll add a few more things to that. So integrity over everything.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Find integrity.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Agreed.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If you said you're going to do it, do it.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Agree.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I mean, look, I guess you could say that Hitler had high integrity because, man, he wrote in Mein Kampf exactly what he's gonna do and he did it. And it was horrible. As horrible as something gets. But I'll stick by that definition.

[Konstantin Kisin]

You say terrible people can have integrity. Osama bin Laden had incredible integrity.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Konstantin Kisin]

So, like, he did watch porn, which is. I mean, I haven't read. Yeah, I have. They found a stash of porn at his house. Yeah. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That is hilarious.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Now, I haven't read my Quran cover to cover, but I'm guessing watching porn isn't.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Pretty sure that's. Yeah, that wasn't in there.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's interesting. I didn't know that. So, yeah, you say you're going to do it, do it. But then I'll add, have honorable goals so that we can get rid of the Hitler problems. So you should be doing things that uplift not only you, but those the world at large. It's probably. Otherwise I'm going to get caught in another Hitler trap because people around him, I'm sure for a while, are having a great time.

[Konstantin Kisin]

You must uphold your people. Oh, I think that's problematic. Quick, doesn't it?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, yeah, very quick. Hopefully people know what I mean, that you're trying to lead people towards human flourishing. Okay, so what else would I add to that? So willingness to stare nakedly at your inadequacies. Steering by the truth. In fact, we're now getting into. So we had the problematic beliefs. And then I have a new set of rules that I'm going to propose. So just to wrap up the problematic beliefs, tearing it down versus incremental improvement, which I think people think that something will be rebuilt from the ashes. That that is foolish and dangerous. And there is a reason that societies have structure and that we all say we're standing on the shoulders of giants. So be careful.

[Konstantin Kisin]

It's a harder one to talk about, though, I think, because this country was built of revolution. Tearing it down.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What do you mean?

[Konstantin Kisin]

What do you mean, what do I mean? This country is the product of a revolution.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Revolution? I thought you said evolution.

[Konstantin Kisin]

No, revolution. No. Ooh.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. So I would posit that it was built on revolution, but it was not built on tearing everything down. And in fact there's a reason that Churchill rightly said that America, even though America had displaced, I mean he didn't, he was born in the 1800s, so he was like not that far removed from England was really the shit. And he certainly was at the height of the British Empire, was there as it declined. And he was like, America is sort of the right rightful heir of this set of ideas that should not be owned by any one country. And I always thought that was for all of the horrible things, I think that that's the right way to think about it. And I think that America really pushed back at a time of like, hey, you say these are your ideals but you're not living up to them. And so not only are we going to try to up live up to them, we're going to try to improve upon them. And so it does feel to me like America is standing on the shoulders of the, the British approach to self governance, the individual case law. We're gonna get to that.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah. My understanding the French and Russian revolutions were a lot more revolutionary. I agree. Yeah, I agree.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So.

[Konstantin Kisin]

So don't tear everything down.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. One ought to be very careful about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We've touched on masculinity, so I won't beat it to death, but masculinity view masculinity and aggression viewed as toxic. Because if we have any entrepreneurs out there, I would just like to say I was asked by an online coach if they needed to build their own app in order to launch their business. I told them what I'm telling you now. Focus on what you're great at and leave the tech to online tool builders like Kajabi. With their all in one platform, it's easy to turn your skills, passions and experiences into online courses, membership sites, podcasts, community communities, coaching and more. And you get to keep 100 of your revenue because everything is owned and controlled by you. Kajabi also has robust analytics, easy payment options, email marketing tools and customizable website templates all built in. And right now Kajabi is offering a free 30 day trial to start your business. If you go to kajabi.comimpacttheory that's CAD K A J-A B I.com impact theory kajabi.com impact theory and join the creators and entrepreneurs who have made over $6 billion. As in the immortal words of my high school cheer squad, be aggressive. Be aggressive. You need to be aggressive. That doesn't mean to drop integrity. It doesn't mean to be Unethical. It means to be aggressive, you need to be aggressive. Fiscal irresponsibility is probably. My audience will love to hear me talk about that, because that's economy. But probably a different interview.

[Konstantin Kisin]

I mean, sure, but that, that is something I've been talking about. I've been talking.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I've not seen your interviews on the economy. What you got for me?

[Konstantin Kisin]

Well, I don't think it's going to be anything new, but I've been saying I love old since 2008. Like, we've emptied the medicine cupboard and we are not ready for the next one. In fact, this is how the cycle of spending and borrowing has always worked. Historically. You create a surplus in times of peace, war comes, you spend that surplus, you accumulate that, then you pay it off and you build up a surplus in times of peace. Again, we don't have wars as much, although we do. But pandemic financial crisis, these things always come along and you have, I mean, it's kind of basic economics, basic household situation. And, and then somebody comes along and goes, oh, we've got this cool new thing called modern monetary theory, which is basically just code for we can print as much money as we want. Well, that runs out fast. And eventually reality, you know, we always talk, you and I have always talked about the clash with reality. And by the way, people don't realize this, but it's one of the main complaints that the, the Chinese and the Russians and the others have about Western behavior. It's not just territorial or in any other way. They're like, you're printing money which affects us because you're buying our goods with your increasingly devalued money and we are the ones that suffer. This is not a sustainable situation. And you talked about my son. We are borrowing. We are borrowing money to spend on things we can't afford and indebting our grandchildren who are not yet born. It is immoral, it is financially irresponsible, and it's going to lead to disaster if we don't stop it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, this is where the set of ideas that we pass along culturally become so critically important. But also since I think I, I don't think there is a way to stop it, and I certainly invite anybody to show me that I'm wrong. But the, the approach that I took to preparing for this episode was recognizing that, look, empires are going to collapse. Look, the collapse of the US is, it is inevitable. Now, whether it happens in the next five years, 50 years, 500 years, that I don't know, historically, it's probably in the 50 to 100 year range. It'll happen slowly enough that for the most part, like, if you're alive, you're. You're able to take advantage of it. But you have to understand the game. And so one of the things, because again, I just, I think at the individual level, one of the things you have to understand is you have to re up your context. So if you were trying to play a game of chess, but you were never looking at the board. Sure. Like, if you're so good that you don't even need to know what your opponent is doing because you just like, are able to guess. But I mean, realistically, even the grand chess masters look at the board, they understand where we are, they understand what your opponent is doing. And so people need to go, okay, where are we? What is the cycle? Where are we in the cycle? What does that mean? And how do I inoculate myself against it now? The problem is that getting the timing right is virtually impossible. And having the right idea with the wrong timing is the same as having the wrong idea. And so that was. I transitioned into really thinking about the economy and world events and all that stuff, because I saw what happened in 2020 and I was like, people are going to get obliterated now. I didn't understand printing of money yet, and I didn't understand how we were socializing losses. But now once you understand they're printing money, then you have to have a strategy for that. So you have to be watching the board, understanding how the context is changing, updating your thinking. So I had the really surreal experience of Ray Dalio comes on the show, he writes his books and he keeps saying all that matters is how people are with each and that one of the things anybody needs to do if you want to have a strategy to navigate all weather, war, peace, your country is the dominant power, your country is the declining power, whatever. Like, if you want to navigate all this well, you have to understand what it boils down to is how people are with each other. I didn't understand what he meant by that. And he kept saying how people are with each other. And I bump into him backstage in Dubai and everything is. And this wasn't that long ago, so everything's very unstable. And I'm starting to get unnerved and a lot of people moving to Dubai and I'm just like, huh. I meet him backstage and I'm like, oh, wow, Ray, like, seeing you in Dubai, like, you know, oh, I come to the Middle East a lot and I'm like, say more. Why do you come to the Middle East a lot? And he was just like, you know, there's so much going on here and things are really popping off. And they've done an extraordinary job here and in, in Malaysia and he spent a lot of time in China. And so he's just laying out like, he did not say, I want to be very clear. He didn't say like, oh, I need to make sure that I have places that I can go if America ends up not being the place to be. But you can start connecting the dots with this whole idea of there's a ton of division in America. There's instability with America as probably a declining power, China as a rising power, instability elsewhere in the world. And it's like, you need to be able to go to different places if that's where you need to bounce. And that was one of those. It's part of the game. I would say I'm weakest at. I'm very rooted in California, which makes me extraordinarily nervous in terms of a place that has embraced ideas that sound good but are not delivering quality results. As somebody that's been here for 30 years, just like, bro, forget me, I've thrived. I've done nothing but thrive. I look around me and I'm like, yo, the policies are not working unless you're like me and you've made just ridiculously outsized wins. And so, yeah, that doesn't seem like a winning strategy. So that's one of the ones that I'm very slow to react to. I'll be very honest, I don't ever want to have to leave la. I don't ever want to have to leave America. But I do want people to be realistic about what the chessboard says. And the chessboard says what the chessboard says. And you need to play based on what you see.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Let me ask you why you think this isn't going to get fixed.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Because I have a theory on that, but I want to hear yours.

[Bret Weinstein]

All right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So I think that humans are the way humans are. The brain works in a certain way and these cycles have run in cycles forever. Because we only have. There's only so many. Like Even if we're 100 sided die, 100 dice with 20 sides each and we're all a roll. That's still only so many personalities. And we react to each other in very specific ways and we probably break into only so many clusters of personality types. I'll pay it random guess, but that there's. Let's say 30 groupings of what people are like. And so it's like, okay, well those 30 people are only going to react in so many different ways. Then there's only so many possible economy, static economy, rising economy, declining war, stability, lost war, one war. Like there's only so many situations. And so this really does become pretty predictable. Ray Dalio again has broken it down into six phases that's tied to the debt cycle or the business cycle. And as you start walking through it, it's like, yeah, they're not identical for sure, but it's pretty predictable. So he did this whole breakdown of the last 500 years. He looked at really closely and then he looked at a much higher level, I think like the last 2000 years. So he was like, yeah, just repeats over and over and over. And when I look at the same thing that I feel with AI, I just look at what humans are like. And when the group starts overtaking individual think it, it only ends in one way. And that's violence. And there's, I think out of the last eight times that we've been declining power, rising power, debt, like all the things that are true right now, six of the eight times it's ended in war. And so it doesn't always end in war, but most of the time.

[Konstantin Kisin]

But what is the mechanism by which people refuse to address that problem? Why is it, what are the incentives? Do you remember?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, the incentive structure is I want my life to be prosperous right now. I'm going to elect anyone that promises me that things will be prosperous the way that they do. That is debt and printing money. You can only take on so much debt and print so much money before something happens. It's typically a pandemic or war. And that breaks the back. Like you said, the medicine cabinet's empty and we got sick again. So we have no money remaining because we've been spending in foreign wars and printing our way out of 2008, printing our way out of COVID And so now it's like, okay, if. So I'm going to make a hypothesis. I, I'm, I'm not the thinker to listen to on this. I just want people to understand how I approach novel problems. So I'm looking at this moment and I say, okay, what, what I understand about things is when you print money too much, you just increase inflation. That when you have. We added a trillion dollars of debt in a month. In a month, dude, we only have $33 trillion in debt. So like, if you're adding that in A month, like, this is bad. And this is times of like everything's okay, but we're sending billions of dollars in aid to foreign wars. We just had another war pop off with another ally. Like, what are we going to do? I have no idea what we're going to do. But I start looking at that and I'm like, if I hate America and I just looking at the chessboard and I'm playing to win and I'm, let's say China is the most logical example. And I'm looking at that and I'm like, I'm playing to win. I see a weakness in here. And P. S. Most of the war is always going to be fought surreptitiously. So I'm going to start doing my belt road and belt or belt and suspenders, whatever the. It's called belt and road. Thank you. So I'm going around suspend.

[Konstantin Kisin]

This is a whole different thing.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Different, different thing. I'm, I'm going around and I'm investing in all these different countries to make sure that I have all allies that, that want to, you know, work with me that are basically invested in my policies, my influence in the region. And look, of course China has its own problems and I'm, as an American, I'm counting on that hobbling them enough that it sort of everything balances out and that there isn't some runaway train where everything's great for China and we're too weak. But that's, that's the power dynamic. So I'm looking at that and I'm thinking if China takes a stance on Israel, Palestine, I'm going to be very curious to see what the posture is. And again, if I can believe what I saw in X today, their stance is that Israel has gone too far and this is no longer defense that can be read. Again, I'm not the person to go listen to Ian Bremmer. He's going to be a far, far wiser voice on all this than I am or Ray Dalio for that matter. But I'm going to guess that it's playing out something like this. That's a shot across the bow for America to say, hey, America, not the thing to back. We think they need to be to back off. If you keep saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, they should be defending themselves, then, okay, one, we think that you're overextending. We're letting you know how we think about this. We're watching to see how far that goes, how tied up in that you goes what other areas in the region pop off if obviously Iran I think made a public statement where they're like, ah, like we don't want to see this go anywhere, which would be awesome. But like this, this is the chessbo. So China wants to see how tangled does America get into that? They're obviously not for Israel going any harder. Are they going to get involved? Are they not? Who knows? We'll see. But if that's them setting the stage for them to move something forward with Taiwan, that those are the pieces moving around the chessboard that makes me go, okay, what do I do if this really does escalate into a world war, a true global conflict? What are the different players looking for and how do I position myself to not get mauled by all of this and to ideally actually be able to take advantage of the opportunities Now I can't tell you, I, I would not trust myself enough to be the purveyor of the news of what to do in that I'm the person I trust to say this is how you need to think through the novel problem. You need to be resilient, you need to understand that opportunities are going to open up, you need to have enough dry powder that you're able to take advantage of that. Which means that you have to be fiscally responsible. And so anybody that's telling you to just spend, spend, spend and we can print money forever. That is not a person you want to listen to. That's somebody that's going to get overextended and out over their skis. So I try to be really honest with myself and others about the part you can listen to me on and the part where you need to go find somebody smarter. So getting this sort of geopolitical landscape. Don't know, I'm, I'm listening to other people but understanding how to have the mental and financial fortitude to have an all weather strategy. Yeah, that I've, I've got to take on that.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean the incentives to me are very, very simple. People don't want to, don't want to reduce their quality of life now, even if it means impoverishing their grandchildren, which to me is one of the most horrific and irresponsible things we can do as a society. But that is exactly what we've been doing and will do and will continue.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't see a way to stop.

[Konstantin Kisin]

I don't either because I don't know if you have this conversation here in the us but in the UK it's like what you want to reduce public spending that's killing people. That's the moronic level at which we have the conversation. It doesn't go any further than that. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you think that's a problem? I think that that is the current language around the forever thing, which is what you just said. I don't want to reduce the quality of my life. And 15 years is a long time to punt. And maybe it's not 15, maybe it's 50. And so since I don't know the timing and can't get it right, yeah, I'll punt. So print money, take out debt. I heard back in the 80s we had trillions of dollars of debt. It's not a problem. It's all good. And the bad news is, and this falls into the same category of thing as the malleability thing, where it's like you can really get away with bad thinking for a long time.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so it's like, is it bad thinking or is the world going to get a clown on me in 10 years because I was wrong? And I mean, I can assure you, I'm so confident that I'm right about. Be resilient, Understand human nature. Find your way to ground truth. Be a prediction engine. But we'll see. Only the fullness of time will tell. So what do we do with that? Do you have a strategy for unwinding this?

[Konstantin Kisin]

It's going to sound very naive after everything you've said, but tell the truth. Tell the truth. Change the culture. You know, in terms of. Look at the way that this format has changed the way we communicate. The media empires of the future are going to be built in the next 10 years and it's going to look like something like this. Podcasters coming together under one umbrella or various media outlets being formed from new media. This is the future, what we're doing here.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Did you know that the daily wire made $200 million last year?

[Konstantin Kisin]

I didn't know that, but it doesn't surprise me. Those guys are kicking ass, Ro.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I was like, God damn.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah, yeah. So Trigger Media is going to be

[Tom Bilyeu]

the next $200 million company.

[Konstantin Kisin]

We'll see about that. It's harder to do in the UK, so it might be a 50 million pound company or we might move to the US over time. You're right, exactly. But that's what I want to do. And part of the reason I want to do that, the main reason I want to do that, isn't to make $200 million. It's to change the way we have these conversations.

[Bret Weinstein]

The triangle of Ev Mao Stalin, Hitler, and I think that they. I've read a lot about them and they feel to me reflective of something that's just real in the human psyche. And I have taken away from reading about them. So oddly enough, Hitler was like sort of the slow boy in all of this. Did not kill nearly as many people as St. Stalin and Mao, which growing up I never heard about. I had no idea that those were dark figures in the world, which is already startling. But reading about them, getting back to this idea of their. So in fact we haven't talked about this, but we've sort of danced around it. The way I see the world is it is a scale. So you have right and left just to keep it easy. But there's pathology on both sides. So if you go too far in either direction, you're going to have a problem. It doesn't matter. So Mao and Stalin are what the left look like when they become pathological. And Hitler is what the right looks like when it becomes pathological, even in and of itself.

[Konstantin Kisin]

That's disputable, but we can get into it.

[Bret Weinstein]

Hit me with it.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Well, people don't like to hear this argument, but there's a reason that Hitler's party was called the National Socialists.

[Bret Weinstein]

Interesting. What does the right then look like if it goes pathological?

[Konstantin Kisin]

Well, this is the debate. I mean, not only Nazism, but also fascism. I mean the term fascism comes from the word fascia, which is a bundle in Rome that was woven. It's a collectivist mindset. Both the fascist and the National Socialists on a large number of things were left wing in the way that we conceive of being left wing now economically, particularly. We have an interview on our channel with one of my favorite guests ever. He's a brilliant guy called Stephen Hicks, Canadian professor. He's a philosopher and historian of philosophy. And if you kind of want to delve into that, I'd recommend people go and check that out because I won't do it justice here. However, I. We can also conceptualize it rather than going as a scale, as a circle, which is. Or like a horseshoe or something, where the two extremes end up coming quite close together because they end up operating in similar ways. So it's a just a side point really for, for our discussion.

[Bret Weinstein]

No, it's actually very interesting. So reading about them, seeing that there's this horseshoe shaped, where the, the. They're trying to control everything because. And I'll even give them, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and I will say they're not Evil. They really believed that they had the right answer.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now it's tough to look real close

[Bret Weinstein]

and not feel like they weren't just fucking evil. But that's too easy. It's an easy way to dismiss them. Let's say for a second that they really believed in their heart that they were going to do good things for a lot of people. And.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But just real quick, I just have

[Bret Weinstein]

to kill a few of you in order to get everybody in line, because I'm trying to distribute things fairly or I'm trying to. In the case. Yeah, the case of Nazi Germany, like, hey, we got a bum rap, you know, after World War I, like, we gotta rise out of this somehow and. But I'm gonna have to kill a few of you and I am going to have to make sure that you don't say anything bad against me. And so to distribute everything evenly, we're going to have to kill the kulaks. But at the end of this, everything's going to be okay. So what is it about human nature that allows people to think that to usher in the utopia it's okay to break a few eggs to make the omelet?

[Konstantin Kisin]

I don't know is the honest answer. I think we talked a little bit about collectivism before, and I think that's a big part of the answer to your question. Collectivism is an ideology that justifies the sacrifice of some for the benefit of the greater good.

[Bret Weinstein]

So the pathology requires the abandonment of the individual's sacredness.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Certainly in the cases that you are talking about, that was absolutely the case. These are not people who believed in the rights of the individual. These are people who believed that for the greater good, some people must be sacrificed. And who knows? I mean, one of the difficult parts of this conversation is can you run a country like Russia on a Western liberal mindset? This is a big debate among geopoliticians

[Bret Weinstein]

because the people just won't take to it.

[Konstantin Kisin]

It's not so much about the people. It's a pretty fucking hard country to survive in. It's cold, it's remote, it's disparate, it's poorly developed. Can you really make that country exist without authoritarianism? It's a legitimate question, actually.

[Bret Weinstein]

Why would it need authoritarianism? I thought you were going to say you would need collectivism.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Well, it's both. So you can't have one without the other.

[Bret Weinstein]

So you need a totalitarian leader. To have a collectivist state is potentially

[Konstantin Kisin]

a way of looking at this issue. I'm not committing to that statement, but if you look at the history of Russia, I mean, Russia's never had democracy, ever. There's never been a single proper democratic transition of power in Russia, ever, Ever. It's not the case. There are different ways of conceiving of it. A lot of geopolitical thinkers talk about the civil, different types of civilizations and British and American civilizations. Like this is actually something I have a couple of pieces on my substack about this. Breaking down the philosophy of a guy called Alexander Dugan, called, they call him Putin's brain now, how influential he is in the Kremlin, we don't know exactly. But I break down some of the basic arguments and the argument is that countries like Britain and America, they're civilizations of the sea, they're trading nations, they're commercial nations, they use the power of their navy, historically speaking, like the British Empire and today the United States, to influence and interact with other countries, countries. Whereas, and this goes back historically, Carthage was a civilization of the sea, this was a trading nation. And they stood in opposition to the Roman Empire, which is a civilization of the land, to the Chinese and the Russian empires today, which are civilizations of the land. And one of the arguments is that civilizations of the land are necessarily collectivist and necessarily authoritarian because the way that they have to operate in the world is very, very different to the way that trading nations operate because the values of liberalism, for example, are much more suited to a naval based trading nation than it is to a land based nation like a Russia or China. So to some extent am I claiming that if it's kind of like that argument about can you bomb democracy into Afghanistan? Well, it turns out you can't. And that's because they have their own culture and their own values that don't really then that you having voting booths is not enough for democracy. Right. It requires certain other cultural assumptions that don't exist in other parts of the world. So yeah, collectivism seems to be a particular thing that goes hand in hand with authoritarianism. And it makes sense because if you have a society in which the majority is going to kill a minority or tell them what to do or restrict their rights and somehow that will require force inevitably.

[Bret Weinstein]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's the part that always feels like

[Bret Weinstein]

it's missing from the dialogue of people that want to redistribute wealth or whatever is at some point when you start taking things from one person to give to somebody else, you're going to have to do that by force. It won't just happen naturally. And so you really stopped me in my tracks when you said that a collectivist nation requires an authoritarian leader, I had never thought about that before. That's really interesting because I had always thought about it as just, communism requires an authoritarian leader. But I didn't step it back to the collectivist society that ends up giving birth to communism also just by its nature. That's where it's headed. That's really interesting. I don't know how I feel about that.

[Konstantin Kisin]

I don't, I don't actually know if it's true. I'm just throwing it out there as an idea for a us to discuss.

[Bret Weinstein]

It rings distressingly true. I just don't like the way it makes me feel.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay.

[Bret Weinstein]

So the reason that I call this a triangle of evil is because reading about it was really eye opening. So I grew up in Tacoma, Washington, not particularly educated on this kind of stuff, then went straight into business as a way to have enough resources to tell my stories. And so maybe when a lot of other people were waking up to what the world is like, I was not. And so I discovered this when I started reading about history. And when you read about history, you start to see the patterns that people are talking about and you're like, whoa, this stuff really does repeat. This becomes really predictable. Which is why it feels like talking about culture is important, because whatever happens to the culture is really going to have profound impacts on the individual. My bias again. And how they either can thrive or not thrive. And so reading about, for instance, how Mao took over China and what the human tragedy is, when you really believe that it's okay to kill as many people as you need to in order to have the power to make the world go the way that you want it to go. And I can't help but keep defaulting back to if you know what your goal is and you know the experiment that you're going to run and you can look at the outcome of this, it's like, hey, this is predictable. That if you try to do communism like you, because everyone keeps going, well, communism hasn't really been tried, or socialism hasn't really been tried. It's like, but you can run it even as a thought experiment. So even if, I grant you, okay, these were all imperfect, the thought experiment should lead you to realize it can't be done perfectly. Like it's not possible because you're asking every single person to willingly give things up on an equal basis. And, and when you interface with the world in any capacity, you very quickly realize it's just impossible to get everybody to think the same and so my read on this is that evolution guaranteed that people don't think the same, that it wants that dynamic tension that we were talking about before. As somebody that grew up in the ussr, what do you say to people that are like, oh, it's never really been tried and we just need to get it right?

[Konstantin Kisin]

You know, in some ways I almost don't think there's any point in saying anything because I don't think they're coming from the same place that you come from when you're talking about these things. You come at it from the point of view of what is my goal, how am I going to get there? I don't think the people who advocate for fairly extreme forms of socialism or communism or social democracy as they call it, but often it's really a disguise for their views. I don't think they're coming at it from the point of view of a goal. I think they're coming at it from a point of view of dissatisfaction with the status quo. And people who start revolutions are operating almost always on that basis. It's not about, you know, I was driving past a shop and I saw a better table. I'll go and buy that table. It's like, this table is so bad, let's throw it out and then we'll find something. Right? I think that tends to be how people think about it. And you know, the thing I always say to people in the west, you talk about the inevitability of it all. As you know, I talk about this in the book. My grandmother, she's not my biological grandmother, but she was my grandfather's second wife and I always called her my grandmother. She was born in a gulag. She was there because her parents, who weren't married or didn't know each other at the time, had been sent there, both losing their other spouses in the process. And they met there. And she was born in this camp. And what happened once you were released from the camps was you were not allowed to live within a very long distance of the major cities in the ussr. You essentially became a third class citizen. And what happened was most of the former prisoners of these camps ended up settling in areas and small towns nearby where they lived together with the local small minority of the local native population, various sort of tribes that had been living there for centuries, and the former guards from the very same camps that these prisoners had been in. In 1953, when Joseph Stalin died, my grandmother and her family, they were living in a tiny flat, that tiny apartment across the landing there was another apartment, which was a family, where the man was one of the guards in one of the camps.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Jesus.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Living across like this. And my grandmother tells a story how that guy's mother, if the kids misbehaved, she would say to them, you know, when your parents get sent back to the camp, Jesus, you're gonna get kicked out and we're gonna get your apartment as well.

[Bret Weinstein]

Well, wow.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Now, 1953, Joseph Stalin dies. And my grandmother told me that there was a spate of suicides among these former guards because what they were doing was finally revealed for what it was. These people truly believed. They truly believed that they. They were beating these people and torturing these people and killing these people for the greater good, because that's what they were told. And so what I say to people in the west always is, do not be a useful idiot. Do not violate your own moral standards and your own moral rules for the sake of the greater good. There is no greater good than your own moral standards. There is no greater good than that. Do you know? In fact, you do because you've read the book. But most people have no idea how the USSR got a nuclear bomb. It was given to them by Soviet sympathizers in the West. And that is why Joseph Stalin, a man who killed millions of his own people, ended up having a nuclear weapon and was able, therefore, to threaten and challenge the West. And that's how you end up with a Cold War. Because people in the west, some of them, them, were so enamored with their own vision of utopia that they would give the most destructive weapon in the history of the world to one of the most evil men in the 20th century because they believed in this collectivist vision and they were useful idiots. Do not be a useful idiot. Do not violate your own moral code for anyone, for anything. That's what I say to people in the West.

[Bret Weinstein]

How do you come up with a moral code?

[Konstantin Kisin]

Well, you're going all Jordan Peterson on me because when he had me on his podcast, we had a three hour conversation about God.

[Bret Weinstein]

I listened to it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Konstantin Kisin]

And it was difficult because the flippant and obvious answer is it's what I learned from my parents. It's what I learned from the books I read is from. I learned from the society in which I lived, from the movies I watched and what I. The residual thing that I got out of that. Jordan Peterson will probably tell you it's religion. Other people will tell you something else. I don't have that answer. I wish I did.

[Bret Weinstein]

Do you think we Live in a time where you have to cobble one together.

[Konstantin Kisin]

I've had to cobble one together, yeah. Have you?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Right. So that's kind of worrying in some ways.

[Bret Weinstein]

I think it's part of why we're at where we're at.

[Konstantin Kisin]

I think that's what we're talking about. Exactly. But I also think a moral code is not always true because a moral code will sometimes require you to jump in front of a tank. But generally speaking, a moral code is a good long term strategy because it is a way of relating to other people and to reality that is more effective than others. This is one of the things that I find so funny when people say to me, oh, Constantine, you're so brave for speaking out about the.

[Bret Weinstein]

I actually believe that.

[Konstantin Kisin]

That you believe that. Yeah.

[Bret Weinstein]

It's one of the reasons I wanted to have you on.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Okay, well, what I say to those people. Are you fucking mental? What are you talking about? What are you talking about? How is a brave? My ancestors starved to death in the gulags. What, you think me expressing my opinion in public is brave? Yeah. Why? That's insanity. There's nothing brave about it.

[Bret Weinstein]

It.

[Konstantin Kisin]

It's my duty to say what I think. If I think that something is wrong, isn't it?

[Bret Weinstein]

Yes.

[Konstantin Kisin]

So why is that brave?

[Bret Weinstein]

Just because something is right doesn't mean that it's not. Doesn't demand courage.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Okay, how does it demand courage?

[Bret Weinstein]

Ooh, that's interesting. This doesn't feel like you could possibly be asking me that question.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I love it.

[Bret Weinstein]

We are equally thinking the other person is absolutely out of their minds.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so here's how I look at your life.

[Bret Weinstein]

You are whip it smart, man, and you are really articulate, and you could make a real living even in the Soviet Union if you just, like, turned a part of your brain off that was like, I'm either never going to talk about these things or I'm only going to talk about them when I'm at home. And I will use the system to my advantage. I will work my way up, which you'd be very easily be able to do because you can outthink people. So I have a feeling if you had just a little evil in you, you could get people to think things were their ideas that were clearly yours. You would manipulate the shit out of them. You would rise to a position of power, and so you could do all of that. And now it would require you to set aside your moral compass or not have one or adopt one out of convenience, which I unfortunately think humans are all too capable of doing so. The fact that you don't do any of that. The fact that you are in a western country in a moment where people really get a certain religious, emotional righteousness out of tearing down wrong think and the wrong people, and it makes them feel like they have done something good. And it's a sugar version of moral virtue, but it's still, like, something. It gives them a rush. And so now, look, you're not dumb, so you've made a good living out of doing that. And I think your channel is only going to get bigger and bigger and bigger.

[Konstantin Kisin]

But

[Bret Weinstein]

I'll say in a single sentence, why, to me, you seem brave. You're a contrarian. You don't mind the conflict.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You actually posted a hilarious photo of you.

[Bret Weinstein]

Maybe it was a video. I can't remember. On Twitter. It was you with a machine gun.

[Konstantin Kisin]

And you said, it's like getting ready to open Twitter.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

[Bret Weinstein]

And I was like, that's fucking hilarious. And then, yeah, I'm not gonna do that, because I hate that. And my audience. This may not seem as weird to you because this is the only time we sat down across from each other. My audience is gonna find this episode very weird.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Oh, are they?

[Bret Weinstein]

I've never done an episode like this ever.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Have you not?

[Bret Weinstein]

Never.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Oh, wow. So wait, you should have told me. I would have gone easy on. On them.

[Bret Weinstein]

No, this is great.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I love it. Like, I. I will.

[Konstantin Kisin]

I would have lit a candle, you know, did a little stroking, you know.

[Bret Weinstein]

Very kind. No, no, no. No need.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But it's. So anyway, I.

[Bret Weinstein]

When I see people that are just completely unafraid to roll up to Twitter with the machine gun in hand, I'm like, all right, you say what you believe in. You're standing for something, I think.

[Konstantin Kisin]

But what should I be afraid of? This is what I don't understand. What is it that I'm supposed to be afraid of? A bunch of people I don't know and don't respect on a social media platform where they don't even show their face or name, saying things about me?

[Bret Weinstein]

No, you should fear what's happening to Jordan Peterson. He said he's in the middle of 10 lawsuits. As somebody that's been in the middle of lawsuits, let me tell you what a toll they take on you.

[Konstantin Kisin]

And maybe I'm too stupid and not brave. Maybe that's.

[Bret Weinstein]

I don't think you're stupid, but you might be naive to somebody, something that is entirely possible. And as you crack, it'll be interesting to see what happens to you when you crack a million subs on YouTube? It starts to get different real fast.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah.

[Bret Weinstein]

And what's happening with Jordan, where he's with the whole Bill C16, which I can think of, no hotter. Like, that's the nuclear core. And he came to prominence by latching on to the nuclear core. And he has said in his very Jordan Peterson way that if you arrest me, I will. If you give me a fine, I will refuse to pay it. If you put me in jail, I will go on a hunger strike. And I actually think he means that. I think he's so fucking stubborn that he actually will. And in the Gulag Archipelago, there's a great section from Solzhenitsyn where he says, it's really interesting. People come in, you get tortured. Everybody breaks. Actually, that's not true. Not everybody breaks. And the people that are so ideologically, like, convicted, they will let you kill them. And they're all women. And I was like, that is fucking hilarious. Going back to what you were saying about men and women being different. And I just thought, that's my wife, and that's Jordan Peterson, which he has said I have a more feminine temperament. Like, he just will get something in his head, and it apparently, no matter the amount of pain that rains down on that man, he just keeps going. And that doesn't look fun to me.

[Konstantin Kisin]

His life does not look fun to me. But I believe, you know, Jordan isn't perfect. He's a man, clearly.

[Bret Weinstein]

And by the way, I think he's amazing.

[Konstantin Kisin]

So do I.

[Bret Weinstein]

But holy shit, does he sometimes say things. And I'm like, jordan, are you trying to make your life suck? Like, that's a really dumb way to say that.

[Konstantin Kisin]

But if we come back to the very beginning of our conversation, which is about meaning and fulfillment, I couldn't be fulfilled using my. Whatever. You're very kind about my intelligence and everything else, using that for things I fundamentally, I think are wrong. Right.

[Bret Weinstein]

So that reads as brave. P.S.

[Konstantin Kisin]

well, no. What that reads as is not having

[Tom Bilyeu]

a choice doesn't read as brave to you.

[Bret Weinstein]

I get that. I hear you.

[Konstantin Kisin]

But I don't have a choice. Bravery is when you're like, well, I could do this, I could do that. I'll do this. I don't really feel like I have a choice. I feel like it's weird that I have a background that's quite unusual, that is perfectly fitted to the cultural moment at the moment, which is I was born in the Soviet Union. I speak Russian and English. I understand both cultures. I can articulate myself pretty well. I grew up in Britain, so I fit in that culture. I can see it as an outsider. And likewise in America, you know, I can make things funny if I need to. I can be serious if I need to. Like, it's a. It's a skill set and a background that not many people have. So what choice do I have?

[Bret Weinstein]

Would you be a dissident in Russia?

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, see, fuck.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Do you know, my whole family were dissidents in Russia. So, like, it's not. It's not a new thing.

[Bret Weinstein]

That is very interesting.

[Konstantin Kisin]

That's actually one of the things that I wrote a piece on my substack when my son was born. And I talked about a lot of this. You know, we come from generations of people who, who were killed for their beliefs. I'm not going to dishonor.

[Bret Weinstein]

I'll say it again from where I'm sitting, that's brave. I want to think that I would be as tough. I don't know if I'd be a dissident in Russia. That's just the honest answer. And it doesn't make me feel good about myself. And the story I will tell myself tonight is going to be that I would work in the underground, but I wouldn't be. I think her name is Nadia from Pussy Riot. No fucking way. And I have met her and had her to the house and I was just like, what the fuck were you doing? That was my impulse. It was just like, you know, they kill people for doing that. So, yeah, I am terrified that I could ever become the useful idiot. I am terrified that I will get tested by life and come out a coward. So I do. I mean, the whole reason that I have changed the tenor of my show over the last three years is to not feel like a coward. But I don't know that I'd be a dissident in Russia. I don't know that I would.

[Konstantin Kisin]

You know what? I think the truth is that nobody does. You don't know who you are until you're in that moment. I might turn out to be a little pussy if I go back to Russia, which I don't for precisely the reasons that we've discussed. I don't think you do know that. I don't think anyone does. But my point is, and it's not a self obsessed conversation, I don't understand why people keep saying this to me. The things that I'm saying are reasonable things. I do my best to articulate them in a way that people can hear. Sometimes I Fail, of course. And sometimes, just like Jordan Peterson, I'm human. So I say things that piss people off, and I'm surrounded by people who give me advice on how to say them better, for which I'm grateful. And one of the things that really, I found very positive, particularly after the Oxford speech that I did, I get very famous. People from the left reaching out to me now and going, can we talk? How about this? Can we discuss this? Giving me advice, too, and going, look, if you want to, you know, we can see that in your speech you were trying to reach the other side. Well, if you do, here's a way that you might want to phrase this, right? I see that as reassurance. I see that as. As a sign of. That I'm doing the right thing. But I don't really understand what. What this is that I'm supposed to fear, you know, Okay, I don't know why Jordan is in 10 lawsuits, but do. Do I think that I need to be. Probably not. Not. You know, I haven't made a massive living out of trigonometry. It's just something that pays the bills at the moment. It will get to a point where, you know, it's. It's massive. I look forward to that moment. I see already in the last few months what happens as you grow. The words you say matter more. People take them more literally, more seriously, and you have to. But that's. It's an exciting challenge, isn't it? And, you know, I remember it's a moment that stuck with me. When I was a kid, I went to a boarding school, and so we rarely encountered the parents of the other kids. One time I was watching a rugby game that my friend was playing in, and his dad was on the sideline, and we were talking about an international rugby game that had happened a few days ago. And somebody said to him, well, you know, there was this player. He took the final kick. Imagine that pressure. Wow, that's gotta be hard. And this dad of my friend, he said, that's not how you think about it. The way you think about it is, imagine how many people would love to be in the position to have that sort of impact. And that always stayed with me, what a privilege it is I've just spent however long before. We sat down, and people will think I'm sucking up to you. But we sat down, we were talking about various stuff, and one of them was my business trigonometry. And I could see within seconds that you've got one of the most incredible mindsets about that stuff that I've ever encountered and I get to sit here and speak with you for hours. Where's the bravery? Come on, man. Tens of thousands of your countrymen, many of whom are still alive, stormed the beaches of Normandy. Come on, come on. More people need to say what they think. And it's not that scary, it's not that hard. And by the way, if more people did it, it would be a lot less scary for everybody. And that's why, you know, I came here from Bill Maher's show. Bill Maher is doing exactly what it should be. He's using his voice to say enough, enough of this craziness. And guess what? Nothing happens. Especially if you're a multi millionaire Hollywood celebrity, nothing happens. And guess what? His audience is now filled with people who were clapping points that I was making. Right? That's what happens when people speak up. So let's. The reason I resist so much this label of brave is not some personal thing. I just think it not saying it's true in your case, I'm not saying it's true in other people's cases. But a lot of people want to push that bravery onto me so they don't have to do anything so they can say, well, I'm not as brave. I'm going to sit here and say nothing thing. Well, it doesn't take any courage really. It just takes principles, the problematic ideas

[Tom Bilyeu]

that I think cause the collapse of any civilization, any empire, Rome included. And I, I literally watched a bunch of documentaries on the collapse of Rome specifically for this. And this is exactly what you see. So you've got people start to believe that prosperity is a fundamental law of nature. That's just going to happen and they take it for granted. They begin to believe that the group owes the individual versus the individual owing the group. And so the group begins to basically take away from the individual so they can distribute to the group. A little counterintuitive, but that's the inversion that happens. Begin to believe that redistribution is the miracle instead of prosperity being this hard fought thing that you cannot take for granted. They start to believe that everything is a social construct, that there's no ground truth that we can push back against nature. It doesn't have any fundamental laws. Diversity of values of the same team is inherently good. We actually didn't talk about that, but to encapsulate it quickly so that we can get on to the good stuff again. To quote Thomas Sowell, nothing has ever been taken as fact without so little evidence as diversity being our greatest Advantage. And he went on to say that diversity is not by default an advantage. Diversity is the thing that we have to overcome. I'll say that I think think to keep that comment from becoming pathologized. It's really diversity of values that are the problem ironically. You want a diversity of approach. You want different mindsets. So you want visionaries and executors which will always have friction between them. You want men and women in a marriage is a great example. You need the friction between them to raise a child. Well, but diversity of values I think is problematic. So at Impact Theory we have a set of values that I publish and I say hey here, here is the culture at Impact Theory if you don't like this, this is not the place for you. And we will not hire somebody that does not share those values. So but whether they're male, female, gay, straight, man, woman, black, white, China could not care less. I care not at all for whether we end like if, if this company ends up being all black women. I'm here for it. As long as we share values and we have all the different idea sets and they'll challenge each other and challenge power and all that stuff.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Word.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So we happen to have a diverse group visually, but we didn't hire for that. We hired entirely for do we share values and will will you buy into competing based on meritocracy and ideas? Don't tear it all down. Sorry. They start to believe to tear it all down is better than incremental improvement. Masculinity and aggression is tox toxic becomes all about spending money, racking up debt, printing money. Okay, now the new set of rules. I'll run through them quickly and then you tell me which one you want to dive into. So I think people need to seek self correcting structures. I'll call that the American experiment. So it's ideas that force itself to spiral upward. You have to want dynamic tension between opposing forces. So left, right is the, the easiest. You have to want there to be a left and a right. You have to want that dynamic tension. I have evolutionary reasons why I think that's true. I believe that everybody should have the North Star of human flourishing. You have to steer by results. So if our North Star is human flourishing, that we're we try something, but if it didn't work, we have to admit that it didn't work and try something else. Need to reward merit even though it will yield inequality because some people are just smarter and better than others. I wish that wasn't true because there are so Many people that are smarter than me. Freedom of speech, absolute cornerstone. You have to seek disconfirming evidence. Which is part of why you need freedom of speech. You need to reinstitute rule of law. I actually heard a really interesting story from your partner Francis Foster, who said one of the things that was a hallmark of Venezuela was they started to not impose punishments because that was right where right wing authoritarianism. And so he was like it became the myrtle capital of the world and a whole bunch of other horrific things. Things. So you do need to reinstitute rule of law. So going back to this idea of we've pulled all these threads of the sweater and it's now falling apart. You need structure and in the constraints is the creativity. So I think that's important. And then overhauling education so that everyone is trained in useful ideas so that they can maximize whatever skills and talents they do have. So even though it will be unequal, there's no reason that the the idea starting line because our talents unfortunately will always be unequal. But that the idea starting line can't be equalized. Especially with the fucking Internet. Go to YouTube. The smartest people in the world and I will not count myself among them. But the smartest people in the world are giving their best ideas away as fast as they can talk on any subject you can possibly imagine. All for free. All you have to do is be able to access the Internet. And P.S. if your country is clamping down on the Internet, that's a red fucking flag.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Agree with all of that. It's all great.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You want to add?

[Konstantin Kisin]

No, that I. I think that you nailed it exactly. All right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So let's go into them. Which. Which do you think are most important?

[Konstantin Kisin]

I think they're all super important. It's like saying which of your legs is more important.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I think you have to rank order. My right leg is more important than my left.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Is it?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes. Why do people. So you are smart. Why is your initial reaction to not want to rank order things? I find in fact fact. Now I'm going to talk to you. You're a budding entrepreneur.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

My friend. You will have to get fiercely good at rank ordering everything.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Agreed.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Who's. Who's better you are or Francis.

[Bret Weinstein]

At what?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Of course it will be different at different things. But you're going to need to know on everything that matters. Which one of us is better. Who are your best employees? Again along different dimensions. What task should you do first?

[Konstantin Kisin]

You.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You can't do two things at once.

[Konstantin Kisin]

I'm pretty good. At that, at this point, I have.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So now you're going to rank.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Order these things.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Okay. I'll give you two answers. One will sound glib as I can't remember all of them.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Fair number?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Would you like to look at them?

[Konstantin Kisin]

Could do number two. I do think sometimes it's like.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's the new rules section.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yes, the. But it's also like, what is more important to bake a cake? Flour or a bowl where you kind of need.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Flower.

[Konstantin Kisin]

A bowl, Bad example. Flower.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm gonna be a dick and just keep doing that. Of course, I understand your point. Your point. But I, I, Yes, I do, though, think that people create a certain amount of paralysis.

[Konstantin Kisin]

All right, all right, all right, fine. To stop you being a dick.

[Tom Bilyeu]

There you go.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Well, I, I fucking can't. Okay. Steer by results.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Right. I mean, that's obviously super important, but can you steer by results if there's

[Tom Bilyeu]

no rule of law?

[Konstantin Kisin]

If there's fucking people running around stealing shit all around you? I mean, you can try, but without

[Tom Bilyeu]

the rule of law. So I'll, I'll give you the steer by results, to me, is the ground truth, which you said is the thing that you're trying to, to do. I think you've already got it.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

With the truth is ultimately the only thing that's going to take you where you want to go.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah. So I think there's stuff in here that follows from that. If you steer by results, you will necessarily reward merit even though it creates inequality. Right. That, that, so you can cut that one out, actually. You just need to steer by results. Then that is a natural process. Process.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. It's interesting. There's something happening between the two of us. There's. Our world views are colliding right now. I don't know if it matters. And so I'll touch on it briefly and see if it seems like it's going to go somewhere interesting. I, I run into this. I think that the, the very thing that makes me a good entrepreneur is that I am willing to speak in binaries and rank order everything.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And I think people get lost in the. That everything is interconnected because that is. And it will also you up.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Why?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Because you'll get lost in the complexity and you won't boil things down to what do I do with the next 15 minutes of my life? And ultimately, this is the reason that the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of companies never make it to a million dollars is the person doesn't understand the physics of progress and what the physics of progress forces you to do is accept that you have imperfect knowledge. Knowledge. But you must act as if you have perfect knowledge. And then as you act with your imperfect knowledge, you. So I'll explain it this way. You have two jobs. Job number one is to intoxicate your team with certainty. Because otherwise you can't galvanize a bunch of people, which you said, the alpha male is the one that can create unity amongst the group. Okay. The only way to do that is to give them certainty. Great. If you can. Oh, my God, your Oxford speech. You said, let me tell you what Xi Jinping is doing. The only way he's going to stay in power is if he gives people the one thing they want, which is prosperity. So it's like, okay, cool, we know that there are going to be certain ideas that were. They're actually going to move the needle. They're going to move people forward, and they're going to be ideas that are not. So we're going to be in this loop of, I'm going to intoxicate people's certainty. I'm going to tell you, I'm going to give you prosperity. I'm going to give you. Going to promise it. And cool. But if Xi Jinping is actually going to be successful, he has to go. Is this zero COVID policy working? People are starting to riot a lot. I don't like this. I'm going to adjust. So he has to have some mechanism by which he's checking himself. So I've told everybody, you know, hey, everybody, without question, as if it were divine statement, zero Covid. And then it's like, oh, it's not leading to prosperity. I'm going to check that. I'm seeking disconfirming evidence. Okay, this isn't working. I'm going to adjust. Just. And hey, everybody, as if I never said this other thing. Zero Covid is stupid. And now we're gonna unlock and we're gonna open. So you have to intoxicate people with certainty, and you have to constantly check yourself to see if that's actually true and update your thinking. And so it is very difficult to do. But people that can't do it, and most people can't because they're so lost in. Oh, but it's all interconnected, and all of these things are important. Yes, I understand that, but you have to do a thing. And P.S. you have to tell people what thing they should be doing. And so if you don't tell people we're doing this, and my best guess of how to get There is this. So go do that. And then, by the way, your employees are going to push back on you. They're going to fucking test you and they're going to see, are you the right alpha or should I be running this company? Because there is one immutable truth. If you're anything like me. And unfortunately, I'm not Steve Jobs enough to just be like, look, ask me hole. This is awesome. What you just said is, dog, go do what I said. Which apparently is literally how he talked. I can't do that. So I'm not smart enough to have all the right answers. So I have to. I have to let people challenge me. But if I'm not the right person to lead now, we're in trouble. So I have to let them challenge me, but I have to squash rebellion. So anyway, this is what happens to people. People, they get so lost. Oh, maybe you really are right that they are not like, no, we're not doing that. Thank you. I heard your arguments. I steel man their arguments, so I know they understood. And when they're right, I just go, you're right. Boom. We're instituting that immediately. But if it's, I think, the wrong thing. And now they're high on their own supply because maybe their last three ideas I implemented right away, they're like, no, no, no, Tom, you don't understand. I've got to be able to squash that rebellion anyway.

[Konstantin Kisin]

I've got no problem doing any of that word.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But this comes down to being able to say, this fucking thing is the

[Konstantin Kisin]

thing we need to do. Well, the slogan is that I say to all our team is the only reason we're all here is we care about the outcome. This isn't about you, it's not about me, it's not about France, it's not about anybody. It's about the outcome. If what you're doing is furthering that outcome, great. If what you're doing is not further outcome. Outcome we don't want to hear. Yeah, simple as that. Steer by results is basically that right? So to me, that's number one. Seeking disconfirming evidence seems to me to be part of that too. Right. Because that is what you have to do.

[Tom Bilyeu]

How do you do that in your life?

[Konstantin Kisin]

Seek disconfirming evidence. You know, probably not well enough because I wait for life to slap me in the face and then I'm like, oh, okay, that was good.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's interesting. You have a Persona that makes me nervous. I could never adopt. Your Persona, which I get is a reflection of who you really are. But on Twitter, like, you go hard on people, and I'm always like, I'm too afraid I'm going to change my mind, like two weeks from now when I get better evidence that I'm way more gentle.

[Konstantin Kisin]

It depends what you're talking about, though. I don't think you're going to change your mind about the fact that meritocracy is superior to diversity artificially created.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I have a high degree of confidence on that.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Me too. And that's why I go hard at people who try to substitute one for the other.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So you only go hard on the things that you're already like. Super high confidence.

[Konstantin Kisin]

And then if I don't know about something, I don't say anything about it. Yeah. However, somebody was trying to make me look bad this morning on Twitter by bringing up something I said at the very beginning of COVID and presenting it out of the historical context. Right. I said some things at the beginning of COVID that I don't agree, didn't agree with by the end of COVID But what people forget is it was a completely different situation at the beginning to the one at the end. Right. You know, the first lockdown I supported, I still would. If it were to happen again without prior knowledge of what happened this time, I'd be like, yeah, let's. Let's see what happens here. Let's be careful. We don't know what this is. But generally I only try. I try very, very hard and increasingly harder and harder as my audience gets bigger, bigger, to only talk about the things on which I have a high level of confidence.

[Tom Bilyeu]

How do you update your thinking then? Let's say that you are supremely confident about something. How do you maintain the stability? So we've been talking a lot about structures necessary, so you need a scaffolding of your thinking. These things are the things that I hold to be true. How do you open your mind to something challenging, a structural belief so that you don't become dogmatic, but at the same time have a stable belief system that you're willing to defend?

[Konstantin Kisin]

I don't think I've thought about it structurally and analyzed how I do that. I listen to the people around me a lot. I don't always agree with them. And I like. I. What I really, really like is having smart people around me who I disagree with. Like one of my really good friends that I've become very good friends with, L. Liv C LA When I go around to her house, all we do is argue, but we both really Enjoy

[Tom Bilyeu]

it in, like, a fun way.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And. And we have a great time and, you know, we love each other and whatever, but. But we disagree on a lot because we have different perspectives and we enrich each other and we both say, I need you, you know, so I like being surrounded by people who don't agree with me. It's why Francis and I work so well, because we're completely different people with different perspectives of different political views, different backgrounds, etc, and the rest of our team are very different people as well.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Let me challenge my own idea. Do you guys hold the similar value sets?

[Konstantin Kisin]

Of course.

[Tom Bilyeu]

They won't map one to one, but do you hold similar value sets or even the values you guys are w.

[Konstantin Kisin]

No, we have very similar value sets. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I think that will play out in time.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Hard work. Defiance.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Defiance.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah. We needed that to start. We are. We're phasing that out over time, but we need it. We had.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why phase it out?

[Konstantin Kisin]

Why phase it out? Because it's a. It's a. It's an oppositional posture that we don't need.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You're saying to the brand or to your personality.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Look, maybe we're misusing words here. What I mean is, when we started, we were like, you. You. Yeah. And now we're like, we don't need to be you because we're. We've grown so much that we're not. We're the mainstream now.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It reads different.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

When you're a big guy saying you.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah, it reads completely different, and we don't need it. It's like, we used to be like, well, the mainstream media, and now we have a bigger audience than a lot of the mainstream media do. So it's kind of like, why would be talking about them? Let's just do our own. Let's make great content, you know, so that would be one. Integrity. Integrity has always been number one for us. You know, how do you treat people in your life? How do you treat. You know, how do you treat your staff? How do you treat women? All of this stuff, these are all, like, big red flags for me. When I see somebody who's. Who's different in that way, I'm like, I'm staying well away from this person, you know? So integrity initially was defiance, Resilience. Every time something goes wrong, we're like, okay, how do we get around this? Okay, cool, cool. No, no, no, I get it. It's bad. How do we get around this? You know, I'm trying to think, what else? And we like to have a lot of freedom of opinion. People are allowed to express dissent or disagreement or whatever, as long as they know that, having heard that, that we're making a decision, you know, which is what you talked about earlier. Haven't had dissent. Haven't had the rebellion anyway. But we'll deal with that when it comes. I look forward to that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, it's. Running a company is. Is the ultimate test. It is. You're up against the market.

[Bret Weinstein]

You're.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The best thing about running a company is the people in the company.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The worst thing about running a company is the people in the company. And it's so funny how they'll all have life drama just, like, staggered. So just when you think like, okay, everybody's back on task now, then the next person and it, It. I mean, when you have a. A group of people that are together for a long time, I mean, you go through birth, you go through death, you go through cancer scares, and it's. It's like a whole thing, man. It's a whole thing. And holding that together as you scale is really, really hard. And that's why. Why I think that I'm so fiendishly focused on culture. Because you begin to realize, oh, wait, we're so big at Quest with 3,000 employees spread across the world. I mean, they're all over the place. And if you don't have a culture that propagates the ideas, they. They won't all be able to have a relationship with you. Like, you will scale to the point where most of your employees only know you as the guy on camera. That's a trip. And so how do you navigate that? How do you get the ideas to spread? And the answer's culture. And so that's why, whether it's in a company, whether it's in a family, whether it's myself, how I think about me, it's like, you have to have a set of things that you're like, these are the rules that I'm going to operate by, that. My family's going to operate by that. My company is going to operate by that I want to see the world operate by. And. Yeah, rules and rules of thumb, man. Those are the. And when I say rules of thumb, I mean the beliefs that you're like, okay, when this happens, you should usually do this. That kind of thing.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah, you can't have no rules as we've been talking about for the last two hours.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, you'll really be in trouble.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah. Do you want to keep going through

[Tom Bilyeu]

this if you've got more to add to that. Yeah, I'm all for it because I want to make sure that people walk away knowing, okay, this is, this is how I need to position myself in order to do well in this crazy time.

[Konstantin Kisin]

I think, I mean, look, every time I look at it, steer by results just goes in my head. That's what I see. I think almost me through how you do that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So what metric do you use when you're trying to steer by results?

[Konstantin Kisin]

That's an interesting question, because in our industry you would think it's clicks, but it's not just clicks, because if you just care about clicks, you get to a very dark place very quickly, especially if you're mission driven. Right. That takes away from the mission. So part of it is mission, part of it is financial goals, revenue growth, profitability growth. Part of it is the vibe of the place. I mean, that's so important, the vibe in the business, how people feel about working there. This is, to me, really, really important. And then there's also, you know, we are on the cusp of, of going like, properly mainstream now. So AudioBoom, which is a company that used to, to post our podcast and sell ads for us, they've just announced a big drop in sales. It was announced on Sky News and they were like this platform hosts, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And trigonometry. We interviewed a guy called Lawrence Fox recently who's a very controversial figure in the uk. Every big media outlet in the UK wanted him and he only wanted to do it with us.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Wow.

[Konstantin Kisin]

And the BBC and the Independent newspaper live reported from a trigonometry interview. So that's impact. We have people calling us up and going, oh, hey, I'm at the, I'm at the Conservative Party conference. A bunch of people here listen to your stuff. Hey, I'm at the Labour Party conference, the left wing party in the uk. There's a bunch of people who listen to your stuff. Right. We're changing, we're changing the culture. People are hearing what we're talking about and then they're going out into the world. We're with those conversations in their minds. So, yeah, there's a few different metrics there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's interesting. Lisa and I say that laughter is a metric to get to that idea of what's the vibe, how are people feeling? I think that's really important. This is to all my entrepreneurs listening right now, this is where a lot of people make a mistake. They don't know what metric to look at. And you have to get very good at identifying the metric that matters. And so, yes, at a high level, everybody should know to pay attention to revenue and profitability. But there are going to be be more metrics than that as you get more granular on the thing. Like each thing is going to have its own metric that really matters. If you can't identify the metric that is meaningful to adjust or you're not paying attention to metrics at all, you're not going to be able to improve. So I forget who said it, but what gets measured gets improved. So one, be careful what you measure. Two, make sure that you're measuring things so that you can fiendishly improve. Because ultimately I think the, that this is the beef that I have with people that have political pressures is take education in America. Education in America. As far as I can see, I don't have kids, but it just looks like a disaster. And when I compare it to Jeffrey Canada, who I'm almost certain I mentioned in our last interview, he's created these charter schools that are unbelievably successful. So it becomes a question of, well, by what metric, Tom, are they unbelievably successful? And so the ultimate metric to me, obviously, is the life satisfaction of the students over a long period of time. But in the interim, we're gonna have to measure something that is far more immediate. So graduation rates, reading rates, mathematical literacy, things like that. And he just crushes everybody on every metric you could think to measure. And he puts people it. He does, he puts these charter schools in other schools. So literally same building in terrible neighborhoods. He doesn't hand select students. It's all random. So like if you had twins, maybe one of them goes to the charter school and the other goes to the normal school in the same building. And so that's somebody who's just steering by results. Like how many of my students are graduating? How many can read, how many can do math? And I'm sure they have more with like, rules and politeness. Those I'm guessing at. But knowing how you would have to get there. In fact, I, I know that they do this. They use a ton of like, rules that you have to like, do the work. You can't like, waste somebody else's time. Like, it's all hyper regimented, hyper structured. There's a clear set of rules. People abide by the rules or they get the out. Like, that's the path.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Absolutely. I'm curious to ask you something. Let me hand this back to you.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You.

[Konstantin Kisin]

You said something about how my personality is Scary. Is that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Were those the words, personality is scary? No, I did not say that. Are you talking about your Persona?

[Konstantin Kisin]

Persona? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

In that you. You engage with the negative comments on Twitter. You will retweet somebody, be like, this is asinine. I can't believe you said that. You know, you're very erudite in the way that you speak, but that's the, like, message. You're, like, this stupid.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah,

[Tom Bilyeu]

that is. Yeah. I would never.

[Konstantin Kisin]

It's also a comedian thing. I used to be a comedian. So when you get heckled, your job is to deal with it. Right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Konstantin Kisin]

So, like, somebody. I. I tweeted something the other day, and somebody replied saying, have you looked in the mirror? And I went, why is my hair off? You know, it's just like little jokes, you know, to kind of, like, make fun of somebody or make fun of something that they've said and to diffuse whatever it is that they've said. Right, right. Because that's. That's power. It's like, I haven't taken you seriously, and I've made fun of this thing that you've said without any. Great. You know, one of the impacts that my friend with whom I argue a lot, has had on me is we have both become much more chill about the way we communicate online. Why?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Because you don't need to convince them anymore.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Because for me, I. I feel a sense of responsibility to. To be communicating in ways that are more effective. And sometimes going too hard is an indulgence of your own emotion.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Agreed.

[Konstantin Kisin]

So I. I try not to indulge that too much. And also, one of the things I've really noticed, and we talked about it at a party that you and I were at, is what you put out into the world is what comes back to you. So when I used to go hard in the pain on Twitter or whatever, Whatever, like, yeah, I used to get fouled a lot. You know what I mean? Now. Now I'm much more chill, and it's rare for people to. To be that way with me. And also, it doesn't land the same because I'm like, I'm putting good energy out there. So if you're being a dick, that's not because of me. That's because you're a dick, you know? Yeah. But it was interesting that you mentioned that. Look, you are much. I. I think you're much less aggressive than I am in many ways.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Ways. Yes, it's interesting in some ways. Here's where I'm hyper aggressive. If somebody is with my business. Yeah, I'm very aggressive because now you're with the team, you're with my mission. So. And the way that people with my company would be not just competitors, obviously that. But more so like, you're doing a service for me and you're moving slowly, things like that. On that. I am not mean. I don't want people to. That's what I'm saying. Aggression does not mean that you're being mean. Aggression is like, if you can do it this morning, don't wait until the afternoon. Whereas most people be like, let's do it tomorrow. I'll get that all. Just had it today. Hey, let's have another call on Thursday. Why the fuck would we do that right now? Do it right now. Share your screen. Screen. Pull the thing up. And so, admittedly, I'm sure people played recordings of that. I sound exactly like I just sounded just now. That, to me is so crazy that I am very impatient with things like that.

[Konstantin Kisin]

I love it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm very aggressive with things that I know are going to make somebody's life better. So the example that I think would really. People be scandalized to see what I was like, like in the earliest days of Quest, because Lisa and I made a decision that we were going to consider felons for a role at the company. And that meant that we ended up having felons that were at the company now. It wasn't just like, oh, you're a felon, therefore we're going to hire you. It wasn't like that. But it was like, hey, put the word out whether you have felony conviction or not, we'll consider you for employment. And so we ended up having Bloods and Crips working on the same lawn mine. And we had one guy. I'm sure there was more than one, but we had one guy that was. He originally took the job because he needed a front for his drug money. So he needed to be able to show his parole officer, see, I have a job. But in reality, he planned to make all of his money off of selling drugs. And he told me that because he ended up. I was his is a very funny story. So in the interview process, because we were considering people with felony convictions, we have people lined up around the building for interviews. And so I used to interview people, multiple people at a time. You know how you can just look at somebody and tell that they're sharp? I'm looking at this guy and I can tell this guy's smart. He's not saying a word, but he's mad dogging me the whole interview. And so I point at him, like, literally, you, you. You have anger management problems. And he just went ghost white. And he didn't say a word. And I said, I want to take you for a walk. He's like, okay. So I took him for a walk and I'm like, look, dude, looking at you, I can tell you're sharp. And so we started talking about life. And he was like, at the end of all of it. Because I was like, look, I'm going to give you a shot. Like, I can tell there's something here, here, but you can't bring that anger onto my floor. If you fight even one time, you are gone. And he was. He goes, how did you know? So how did I know what he said? How did you know I have anger management problems? I came here from a court appointed anger management session. And he was like, the fact that you could tell, he was like, I just. I need to know how you knew. And I was like, dude, you're like, literally looking at me like you want to kill me.

[Konstantin Kisin]

You're in the job interview staring at me like crazy. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so I was like, that didn't really take a genius. But honestly, it was more the willingness to be aggressive. The willingness to point at somebody who you know is potentially dangerous. Because, I mean, this was like people with teardrop tattoos, which I asked, means they put in work for the neighborhood, which they will not come out and tell you what put in work means, but I'm sure you can figure it out.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

When I know I'm helping people, I am shockingly aggressive. And this is the thing that my team here has been trying to get on camera for a while, which is the side of me I only know how to bring out on stage where on stage, I'm like, I have 60 minutes with these motherfuckers to change their life forever. And somebody's paying me a lot of money to be here, so I have this real sense of urgency. And so oftentimes when I start a talk, I'm like, hey, we've only got 60 minutes and I'm going to change your life. But you need to take notes and you need to actually do this. And so it puts me in this very aggressive stance, which I love, but it's because I know I'm going to help them. So on Twitter, I don't know, I don't have the same sense of like, you're here because you really want help. I know what ideas are going to help you. And yeah, so anyway, there, there is a lane in which I'm probably 10x as aggressive as you, but 90% of my life.

[Konstantin Kisin]

No, that makes sense.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why be aggressive? Why are you aggressive?

[Konstantin Kisin]

I don't know that I am that aggressive anymore. As I say, I've, I've kind of softened the way I do it. Do you still feel, do you still think I am. Yeah, yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Defiant. Maybe not. I never would have categorized you as defiant. So the thing that you're feeling, you may have changed is probably that. But for instance, you, you will bring people on the show that you know are going to, they have a, a belief that's not going to make them look good. Yeah, I have a real hard time dragging people into those waters because I'm like, ugh, I don't want to see this person do that to themselves. Which is bad, by the way. And I'm trying to change. This is a weakness in my personality. You have no problem with that?

[Konstantin Kisin]

My job is to facilitate political discussion because what we're talking about is how to run our society. And my job is to bring people on and do one thing and one thing over only, which is to show the world what that person truly thinks. That is my only job. And I am meticulous and rigorous in pursuing that goal. And that means when you come on my show, my job is to keep asking you questions until what you are saying is revealed truly in its boiled down form to the world. I don't actually ever bring people on to make them look bad.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I didn't say that.

[Konstantin Kisin]

I know you didn't say that. Say that, but some people think that because, for example, last year we were here, we had Sam Harris on the show and we asked him about Donald Trump and he said some things that send the world crazy and that I didn't agree with, but I. And people would come up to me in Francis after that still they doing like, oh, you got Sam Harris, didn't you? And I'm like, no, I didn't get Sam Harris. I didn't want to get Sam Harris. I like Sam. I respect Sam. Sam, even though I really strongly disagree with what he said. My job as the interviewer is to show the world what this person thinks about this issue about which they want to speak. I don't ever take people to a place they don't want to go. I don't ever ask people questions about things they've asked me not to talk about. Right. Well, my job is to find out exactly what you think and to show the world that. So our Mission is somewhat different. Your mission is help people share good ideas about how they should be, etc. Right. That's not my mission. My mission is to show people what somebody thinks, and I regret that. The. Sometimes the impact of that is that our guests look bad. And the first thing I did, once that thing happened with Sam, the number one thing Francis and I did is reach out to Sam and say, look, we're really sorry that this is how this has gone down. Down. It wasn't our intention. We were not the ones who put a clip out that makes you look extra bad. None of that is to do with us. We're grateful you came on the show. We appreciate your time. You're an absolute gentleman. However, when you interview people in, you know, it's called trigonometry for a reason. When you interview people about contentious subjects, you know, the world is going to take a view on what. On what they say. And that is the nature of cultural and political debate. Debate, yeah. Facts, number one. The other thing about aggression is I. You know, you mentioned me being good at debating. I mean, debating is about getting to the very root cause of what you're saying. Right. In order to defeat an idea that you're advancing, I have to crystallize it down and go. That's what this person is saying. Here's why it's wrong. Right. And flip it. That sometimes requires a kind of a tenacity and an aggression to it. And plus, it's more entertaining that. That way.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, there's no doubt about that.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah. I mean, like, if you're watching two boxers fight, you don't want them to go. You want to see him going for it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Speaking of two boxers fighting, you had Sam and Eric Weinstein on the show. This will air after your episode. Okay, so how did that go? Those two I respect ferociously. I've gotten reasonably close to Eric. I don't know Sam as well, but had Sam on the show recently, and just every time I'm with him, even though, again, there are things that he and I don't agree on, but I really respect Sam. And I. I worry that the world has some portion of the world, a very terrifyingly large portion of the world has sort of balled him up and thrown him away. As somebody who can help them think through very hard problems, I would say he's still one of the first people I reach for. That doesn't mean that I agree with everything that he says, but it does mean that I. I want to hear what he's got to say. How did that conversation go?

[Konstantin Kisin]

It was awesome. We talked about Israel and Palestine for about two hours, and then we did a.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Did they have different.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Views on it? They did.

[Konstantin Kisin]

They did, yeah. And one of the things that we were keen on is that while, look, from a content creation perspective, disagreement is always helpful.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Konstantin Kisin]

That isn't. We didn't set it up as a debate.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Navigate it well.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Yeah, we didn't set it up as a debate. We didn't market it as a debate. That's not how it's presented. And there was disagreement and there were points at which I had to go, okay, stop, we're doing it like this now. But it was very, very interesting conversation, very productive. I feel like we unpacked a lot. And then we, as you know, we do a section for our local supporters which goes behind a paywall. And in that section, we talked a little bit about the last interview, Sam's falling out with Brett, who is Eric's brother. There was a whole, you know, the idw, the intellectual dark web and all of the stuff that comes out of that. So there was a whole interesting conversation about, you know, whether Israel would have happened if Trump had been in power. Well, you know, I want to hear that part. Oh, of course you do. Everybody does. That's why you have to subscribe to our Love Locals. So a lot of cool stuff happened. A lot of it was a great conversation. Two brilliant minds.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What made you want to bring them together? Why didn't you ball up Sam, like so many other people and say, ah, Trump derangement syndrome. Not worth listening to. His brain is broken. The number of people that have said that Trump broke Sam's brain, I'm.

[Konstantin Kisin]

I think I'm able to compartmentalize things about. About people. I mean, I. I have a family, dad, mum, three younger sisters who I love, all of them. They all have different opinions about stuff. They all don't agree with each other, they don't agree with me on lots of stuff. But that doesn't mean that, for example, I have been outspoken on my view of what's happening in Ukraine, in. In my vehement support for Ukraine's right to defend itself, etc. Etc. My dad takes the completely opposite view, and to me it's an emotive issue, and to him it's an emotive issue. But my dad is one of the smartest, most erudite human beings that I've ever been around. So am I going to throw that out because Russia broke his brain? Well, that would be insane, right? We have to. I mean, part of what we're doing here and this medium being the message is, is you and I, you know, earlier, earlier today, I went, I love you, I respect you, I learn from you, blah, blah. I have no idea what you talk about. That is the model on which we have to operate. And I respect Sam. I think he was very courageous raising some really controversial issues back in the day. He's one of the first people that brought people's attention to WOKE ideology being a big problem. As a left wing, liberal, liberal guy, he has a lot of credit in the bank with me. A lot of credit in the bank. Now there are some people who have gone completely off the rails and you're going, well, there's not much that we can connect around. I don't feel that with Sam at all. Now, do I agree with what he said about Trump? No. Do I agree with some of the COVID stuff that he said at point? No. I think his, by the way, his take on it that he put out on his podcast recently was, gave some nuance to the thing, which is kind of like, I had certain opinions in different stages that evolved over time.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Time.

[Konstantin Kisin]

But I got nailed for having those opinions at a different time, essentially. Right. But I don't throw people away unless, like, they've really, really, really gone completely off the deep end in a direction I don't like. And I also thought, I hate people. I hate to see people ganging up on people. I hate to see people bullying people. I hate people who, who like to pile on people. People in a really abusive and horrible way. And I didn't. I thought what Sam said was wrong, but I thought he was badly treated. And interestingly, one of the final things he says in that second section of the interview on Locals is the reason I'm back here with you guys is you behaved in a highly ethical way around that situation. And for us, that the reason we did that, it was not strategic. It was because we believe in behaving in an ethical way and having integrity. So. So, yeah, I mean, it never occurred to us that we wouldn't speak to Sam or, you know, Sam is canceled now. We don't really think like that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, no, I love that. I think that that's really important. And I, I have been saying for a long time now that I don't understand why people are looking for reasons to ignore other people, to not listen to them, to not hear them out. I'm looking for reasons to learn from somebody. I'm going to guess that that has to do with, I'm very confident in my ability to parse through difficult ideas. It takes me time, and I wish I was faster. And that's why I would defer to you in a debate, not myself. Like, if you leave me alone with the ideas long enough, I feel that I'll get somewhere fruitful, but it's going to take me time. And so I'm very confident in my ability to say, you can have a really smart person tell me something really stupid.

[Bret Weinstein]

And.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And I'm going to run it through my filter of is this usable? Is this more or less likely to accurately predict the outcome of my behaviors? If less likely, I will reject. If more likely, I will at least try it out and see what happens. So I have a feeling that people get lost in the sophisticated ideas. There's so much coming at them, so much velocity of information that they just need a reason to reject people, to shut them down. And then feeling righteous, I'm right, he's wrong. That makes me feel smart because I used to think he was so much smarter than me and now I know he's dumb. I saw so many comments like that. I used to think Sam was smart. Now I know that he's dumb. And it's like, I worry that that's them patting themselves on the back, oh, I'm not as dumb as I thought I was. I'm smarter than Sam Harris. Super dangerous. Also, I'll be interested. So I'm going to give you my take on what's really going on with Sam. That's dangerous. You just talked to him, so you may have a way better idea. But I put a tweet thread out and this is one of the tweet threads that made me realize getting into like, quote unquote political think, I'm just never going to do. It's so boring to me. Like, I tried to really give people what I thought was a super thoughtful, useful breakdown, that if you understand his way of thinking, that you still don't have to agree with it, but understand how he's come to it because then one, you can think through these things better in the future. And anyway, people were just like, no, Trump broke his brain. It's like, Jesus Christ. Like, at least address the argument. So this is my interpretation of. Has a tripwire in his mind that says, if this is an existential threat, then there is nothing that I won't do to stop the existential threat from coming through as long as it's not another existential threat. And so it's like, if you believe that, that Trump could end humanity, then everything he says makes sense. But everybody wants to say that that that wasn't the context of his comment, that they were saying that he was saying it as if that's what he thought we should have done. So everyone's like, yeah, if the thing was a hundred times more lethal, then yeah, it would make sense. Yes, mother, that's his fucking point, is that that if this thing is an existential threat, then we should act in this way. He believes Trump is an existential threat. And so my point is, yo, what do we do when we can't agree on when we're actually under that level of threat or not? That is a terrifying question. That is where people need to figure out, yeah, how do we. What's the metric by which you judge success? What's the metric by which we judge something where we can't see into the future, that this actually is an existential threat? How do we navigate that? Because this is going to happen again for sure. So that's where I was like, yeah, I, I think the problem with Sam's argument is Trump isn't an existential threat. Not existential.

[Konstantin Kisin]

It's interesting because you and I have come to the exact same conclusion, which is, I think the reason Sam felt the way he did about, spoke the way he did about Trump and Covid it to the extent that he did, is that he assesses the threat of those two things or did assess them in a completely different way to most people. The problem with that is that, you know, if I ran in here and said, well, if you don't move that cup, we're all going to die. And then you refused and I shot you. Yeah, that kind of be it. That'd be a pretty big fucking problem.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes.

[Konstantin Kisin]

Right. So I think a lot of people felt that he was misassessing the threat threat and as a result, asking or proper, you know, suggesting things that were inappropriate to suggest in that situation, which is my view. I also to steel, man. The other argument against Sam, I don't necessarily share it. Well, I don't know. Let me say it first, and then I'll. I'll think about whether I share or not, is that there is a certain kind of person who is extraordinarily well educated, well read, sophisticated, smart, refined,

[Tom Bilyeu]

You

[Konstantin Kisin]

know, aware of the complexity of the world, who just finds Donald Trump personally obnoxious. And that obnoxiousness bleeds through into the factual analysis of Trump's behavior, which is where the threat misassessment comes from some people might argue. So it's not a logical reaction to the actual threat that Trump poses. It's a reaction to his boorishness and to his, I was this kind of like the way he speaks. You know, he's not sophisticated. He's, he's not, he doesn't sound educated. I don't know whether he is or not. I don't think Trump is stupid at all. But, but that is the sort of thing that people like to say. And you know, California is a place there are a lot of people who think like that. So I think that that's why a lot of people react to Trump the way they do. And as we talked about earlier, I think his, he's prepared to say the ugly truth in a way that makes it even uglier that well said. And people don't like that. However, I do think, as I said earlier, that given a beautiful lie and an ugly truth that is made even uglier if that is what's on the ballot, I'm going with the truth and I don't give a how ugly it sounds. You know, and that is not position that I would have held in 2016. I just think the nature of the problems we're now facing is so much greater than it was back then. And I warned about this. I said to people, if you allow this woke ideology to get out of control, you're going to get people who are going to come along and go, look at this, look what they created. And the vast majority of most normal people are going to go, okay, I'm with you. Because at least you're willing to be honest. Honest. At least you're willing to try and deal with the problems that that have been created. I think there's going to be a backlash against what has happened now. I've been, and this is what I was saying at the time, I was like, I'm not against Wokeness because I'm on the right. I'm against wokeness because it's going to cause a right wing backlash and it's a bad idea in and of itself too. So I think in that respect, that is, I think where the Sam situation came up from. And like I said, I didn't agree with him, but I think he has lots of other valuable things to say. And by the way, in the conversation that we had with Eric, he brought up a thing that people aren't talking about. Maybe true or maybe not. People can make their own judgment about it. But he was like, look, Israel, Palestine is not about Palestine. It's about something else.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Tell me more.

[Konstantin Kisin]

It's about jihad. These people are not upset because they care about oppressed Palestinians. They are jihadis who see the west and Israel as the enemy to be wiped out. And that is what motivates them. And therefore we have to calibrate our response to that. That is not a point of view that you hear a lot, but it is a point of view that I think is valid.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And jihadi is somebody who believes they're fighting God's war in yes, God wants this enemy wiped out. Yes, you were doing God's work.

[Konstantin Kisin]

If you go do that and martyrdom in the service of jihad is the greatest achievement you can have. Therefore, to take your own life and give it for that is the greatest good. The loss of civilian life is irrelevant because if, if, if a good Muslim dies in the service of jihad, he goes straight to paradise. And if you're not a good Muslim or if you're not a Muslim, him, your life doesn't matter because you're an infidel. That changes the calculus and the game theory of everything immediately. And that's a valuable perspective, whether it's, you know, whether you personally think it's correct or not. I think it's a valuable dimension to this conversation that has to be taken into account. And Sam is somebody who provides an immense level of clarity and has done from an early point in this conversation about that issue issue, which is super important.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I think there's still so much more to cover, including some compelling insights into resilience, free speech, and the complexities of human relationships. So stay tuned for part two of this fascinating discussion with Konstantin Kissen. Until then, be legendary.

[Grainger Advertiser]

When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery, so you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.