Objectively Speaking with Konstantin Kisin Transcript

What does it mean to truly appreciate the values of the West, and what happens when a culture begins to lose confidence in them? That’s what Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman sat down to discuss with Triggernometry co-host Konstantin Kisin back in November 2022, covering his book An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West. A Russian-British comedian and political commentator, Kisin also offers a unique perspective on censorship, gratitude, and cultural issues in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Watch the interview HERE or read the transcript below. 

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JAG: Jennifer Anju Grossman

KK: Konstantin Kisin

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JAG: Hello everyone, and welcome to the 128th episode of The Atlas Society Asks. My name is Jennifer Anju Grossman. You can call me JAG. I'm the CEO of The Atlas Society. We are the leading nonprofit organization introducing young people to the ideas of Ayn Rand in fun, creative ways, like our graphic novels and animated videos. Today we are joined by Konstantin Kisin. Before I even begin to introduce our guest, I want to remind those who are joining us, whether on Zoom, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube. You can use the comment section to type in your questions. Go ahead and get started. We'll get to as many of them as we can. 

Konstantin Kisinn is a Russian British comedian and political commentator who hosts Triggernometry, a YouTube channel and podcast devoted to free speech. He is the best selling author of An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West. He made international headlines for refusing to sign a behavioral agreement form banning certain kinds of jokes in order to speak on a university campus. We are delighted to have him join us today. Konstantin, welcome. 

KK: Thanks for having me, JAG. I appreciate it. 

JAG: We always like to start with a bit about our guests’ origin stories and yours, which you share in your book, was particularly fascinating. You were born in Soviet Russia, and as I understand members of your family tree were actually jailed as political dissidents. Tell us a bit about your family history and how your experience under communism may have shaped your political perspective today. 

KK: Well, the short story of it is, as you say, I was born in the early eighties in the Soviet Union, and yes, members of my family experienced various sorts of punishments ranging from being sent to the gulag to being fired from work, et cetera. Some of it was for political dissidents, people who had the wrong view, the wrong opinion, which is why free speech is so important to me. But a lot of it was just this radical reordering of society that you are interested in. 

Before we started, you asked me if I'd read Ayn Rand, and one of the things I found very interesting as I explored her work in my sort of late teenage years and early twenties, is her name obviously wasn't, it's a pseudonym, Ayn Rand. Her name was Alice Rosenbaum, and she escaped Russia because of the communists that were taking over. The very things that she was fleeing and her family were fleeing were the very things that my family experienced. So yes, I had all sorts of different experiences in my family and, of course people often say to me, Well, look, you were born in the eighties, what are you talking about? How could this affect you? Well, actually my grandfather, I talk about this in the book as you know, was fired from work. His wife was fired from work, and his children, my dad and my aunt were forced out of the university because he criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the mid-eighties. 

So this repressive machine was still around even when I was a little boy. But more importantly if you live in a family particularly a Russian one where we like to go over the dark and terrible things that have happened to us or that we've experienced over and over in great detail and you spend a lot of time living with grandparents as well in a way that most people in the West don't tend to do anymore, then you get it infused; your whole life is infused with all of these stories and they shape your experiences and how you see the world. There's all sorts of other things that we could talk about in terms of that, that I don't even talk about in the book. But for example, my grandmother who lives in Ukraine, lived in Soviet Ukraine all her life. She experienced not only the people coming and sending her family off to the gulag, confiscating her property, exiling them to the far east of Russia because they had a horse. That was their great crime. They were kulaks and wealthy, therefore. . . .

But also the fascinating thing to me is in many ways that was not even the worst thing that she went through because she then lived through the German occupation of Russia and Ukraine. Of course now, she's still alive, my grandmother, 94 years old, living through yet another occupation of Ukraine. It's a society that has seen a lot of turmoil, and I think it shapes a lot of the way that people think. I was born there, partly culturally from there, but also happened to come to the West when I was a teenager. I have a foot in both camps. I can see things in both ways. I often say that actually speaking a different language gives you a different personality. Like the person I am when I'm speaking Russian is probably quite different to the one I am speaking English. That sort of access allows me to perhaps see where, hopefully where the West is perhaps unaware of how things are everywhere else. I talk as you know about this quite a lot in the book. 

In the West, we've got this very self-focused view, and because we're fortunate to be wealthy and safe and stable, and whatever, we don't have to think about how people live elsewhere. We therefore don't compare ourselves, and therefore it's very tempting then to think, Oh, actually what we have isn't great, and all of that. On the other hand, I can also see into the Russian way of thinking and the Russian culture and how that impacts the way people in Russia think and some of the threats we in the West face as a result. Yes, that's my background. I was trying to make it short, but ended up being long as always. 

JAG: No, I thought it was really fascinating, not just your experience of being sent here for boarding school and not speaking the language. Then also there's the aspect where just as with the Holocaust or the cultural revolution in China and the resulting scar literature as they call it, these experiences do get passed down through the family and in a way because it not only changes those that have directly experienced it, but it also shapes what they pass on to the next generation. Speaking of passing on to the next generation, you were a teacher at some point in your career— 

KK: Was I?

JAG: I thought you taught in school or no, maybe was that—

KK: You're probably confusing me, but Francis. 

JAG: Okay. 

KK: Okay. I can't believe you've confused this, JAG, I'm not attacking you, it's just he brings it up every bloody episode. I would've thought you would've got that, but don't worry about it. No, I wasn't the teacher. I've run a few training courses, but I was never a teacher. 

JAG: Yes. So how did you get into standup comedy? 

KK: Well, it's a long and boring story, but I had a friend who was an agent for comedians, and he invited me to a comedy festival that he founded in a very small city in Ireland in Kilkenny called Cat Laughs. And I just looked at the people performing there. I'd run my own translation business for 10 years before that, so I was getting to the point where as you can see from the gaming chair behind me I used to enjoy computer games, and I think of life in that way. It's like I'd completed all the levels in my previous career, and I think I was ready to do something else. I saw all these guys, and it was mostly guys on stage, just talking and making people laugh. I, like a complete idiot, thought, Oh, that looks like fun. Why don't I do this? Not realizing that actually it sounds like they're just talking and being funny, but the ability to be that funny is the process of years and years and years of crafting what is material on stage. 

But I'm the sort of person that likes to challenge myself. I like to have a go at different things. And so I started and you start out doing the open mics and it's absolutely brutal. They’re the hardest gigs that you do. Eventually, I was fortunate that my career went very well. I made it into the different clubs. I wrote on TV. I opened for some of my heroes on tour. I did my own show in 2019 which was about that contract that you mentioned earlier; so I was able to weave together the many interests that I have. But I think standup was never quite the right thing for me because I was always much more interested in satire than standup. Standup is a different genre. A standup is much more simply about entertainment. I was much more, again my Russian influence coming into it because in the Soviet Union of course people just joke about day-to-day life—but humor was particularly powerful in terms of highlighting some of the things that were happening in society because they were almost the only way that you could be funny. 

Jokes were a way of exposing the hypocrisies and the flaws in the system that people were living in. Russia actually has, and the former Soviet countries have, a very rich culture of political satire as opposed to just humor for the sake of pure entertainment. I was much more interested in the satirical side of things, which is why I think over time I began to do Triggernometry and do other things because while I enjoyed standup, and Francis calls it the joke coke, when you're on stage, it's a very strong physical experience. I always enjoyed public speaking and standup and all of those things. They're fun. When the pandemic happened and I realized that I was spending half my day driving around to various obscure cities in the UK to do a 20 minute set in a comedy club, and my wife hasn't seen me for a couple of years, which is sort of how she was feeling, I decided to take a break and we'll see how long that break from standup lasts. 

JAG: Well, so you mentioned in the introduction this experience that you had when you garnered international attention for refusing to sign this university behavioral agreement form. So what was it and what was your thinking and what was the reaction? 

KK: I'll tell you the story very quickly because anyone who knows me has heard it a thousand times. But basically, I was asked to perform at a college hit in London, and they said they needed me to sign a behavioral agreement contract, which had a zero tolerance policy on—get this—racism, sexism, classism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-religion, anti-atheism. It also said that all jokes must be respectful and kind. I turned it down. I tweeted about it to what was like a thousand people at the time. I didn't have a particularly big following back then. We'd just started Triggernometry a few months before and it went super viral around the world. It was the second most read story on the BBC News website on the day that the then-Prime Minister was nearly removed from office by her own party. That's the equivalent of, I don’t know, right now Joe Biden gets nearly impeached by the Democrats and the biggest story on Fox News and CNN is a comedian no one's ever heard of turns down an unpaid charity gig from some college no one cares about. It was crazy. 

JAG: Why do you think it struck such a chord? 

KK: Well, this is what I realized in that moment: prior to that, I think I was tempted to think that the reason I care so much about people being free to make jokes and express themselves and say controversial things and even things that I strongly disagree with was because of my background and how I'm built and blah, blah, blah. But when I turned down that contract and it got that reaction, I realized that actually a lot of people in our society—and the statistics bear this out and I cite many of them in the book—even people who we think of as, let's say, the Left feel the Left has control over the media or more control over the media than the Right. Let's say this is a documentary some people would make. Even on the Left, people feel terrified of expressing themselves in public and on the Right and in the center it's even more pronounced. 

I think the reason that it had the resonance that it had is that ordinary people feel in their own lives on a day-to-day basis almost like there are situations in which they've signed that contract, they've signed a contract not to offend people, they've signed a contract which says that if you say the wrong thing or you don't quite use the 2022 word, you use the 2020 word and you didn't get the update notification about that word no longer being allowed, if you didn't do that, then you’re going to be in trouble and you risk losing friends or losing your job or being hampered in your career or being kicked out of college or school or whatever it might be. I think the reason it had the resonance that it had is that quite a lot of people don't like being told you can't say this, you can't do that. I think they're also tired of these endlessly creeping moral standards where a person who's been in a coma for like five years would wake up now and be a massive bigot automatically just because they hadn't been around for five years of new cultural norms. You know what I mean? I think that that's where a lot of the sentiment, not just in reaction to that contract, but more broadly in our society, a lot of it is coming from that place.

JAG: So, as I had mentioned, your book was really beautifully written and also beautifully narrated. Konstantin does the narration himself, which I know is actually not very easy.

KK: I lost my voice. I talk for a living <laugh>, so I was absolutely like you. I thought I was just going to walk in there. I did my audio book for two days and my throat was just gone. It's incredible. 

JAG: It's not easy, but I thought you did a great job. What was the inspiration? 

KK: I don't know if I had an inspiration, I'd had the motivation, which I think is a very different thing because and I reflect on it as somewhat ironic that I wrote a book called An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West, which is largely about where I think the West is going wrong. I'm not unaware of that sort of contradiction to some extent. I just think that we've got to a point in society where someone had to say the things that I'm saying in the book, and I didn't see anyone else saying them. I also thought that I perhaps would have, and you know, one of the reasons I may be able to say is the fact that I'm a first generation immigrant and whatever allows me to say things that maybe somebody born in the West and raised in the West not only wouldn't necessarily be able to say because they don't have the outsider perspective, but even if they have the perspective, they're just not going to be allowed to say it. 

Publishing my book was not easy, and I imagine that if my name was John Smith and I was white and born in the UK it would've been a lot harder. I think that's why I felt it wasn't so much inspiration. It was more, I felt a duty really to say something. This is perhaps where, again, coming back to a lot of my thinking and my approach to life, where it comes from is I come from a society where people spend most of their time not saying what they thought and pretending to be okay with things that they were not okay with. I'm not okay with some of the things that are happening in our society. I don't think they're the right thing that should be happening. I'm in a fortunate position to be able to say something publicly, and I just felt it was necessary to do that. 

JAG: All right. I have more questions about the book, but we have questions coming in from the audience, so I want to dip into those. Candace Morena on Facebook says she loves Triggernometry. She says, “You recently discussed your views on how to promote free speech and police hate speech. Could you go into that in more detail?|

KK: I'm trying to remember what Candace is referring to. I'm not sure. I know what she's referring to, but yes, maybe she'll come back. Maybe she'll come back because that's a bit of a vague one and I wouldn't want to respond to something.

JAG: Let's go to another Facebook question from Alex Kurch asking, “In America you hear about people leaving New York or California. Is there some parallel of people fleeing areas in the UK, people voting with their feet?” 

KK: Ah, that's an interesting thing. This is the big advantage of living in the United States. It's big, but also it’s the way that it's federalized; it means that states get to set their own rules, right? If a part of the United States wants to have certain rules when it comes to the usual hubbub, whatever issues you want to bring up—the approach to Covid or guns or other stuff—you get to choose. In the UK there is very little of that. Sure, you can move to Scotland. The weather's terrible. I lived in Scotland for many years. The Scottish people are nice, but the weather's terrible and their government is even worse than the one that we have and that's really about it. You don't have a lot of choice. There is not a huge amount of that going on beyond the usual of people moving out of cities into the more rural areas for all sorts of different reasons: crime, cost of housing, et cetera. 

JAG: Interesting. That would be, But—

KK: I'm very sorry, JAG, to interrupt you. I am very jealous of the United States. I know we were in Austin a few months ago doing the Joe Rogan show, and this is one of the things he was talking about, we were talking about: he moved from California to Austin and he's very happy at the stuff that he has and wasn't able to do in California. I'm very, very jealous. I'm such a big fan of America. People all over the world like to dump on America, and I think it's quite often jealousy because you guys do a lot of things very well. And this is definitely one of them. 

JAG: All right, another question from Facebook. “What is the best way to deal with bad-faith actors? Is it the way you and Francis respond to David Pakman?” I'm not sure who that is.

KK: So, David Pakman is a progressive commentator who we had on the show. And we were very happy to have him. We had a very good-faith conversation. At least we thought that, because afterwards what he did is he completely misrepresented what had happened on his own channel. It became very clear that he wasn't there to have a conversation. He was there to win. And so we just put out a quick video just explaining what had happened, what he did, and that because we believe in conversation, we're going to continue to act in good faith, even when people like him come on the show and act in bad faith. So, yes, I think that's it if you are in that sort of situation. But quite often you don't need to interact with people who are acting in bad faith. I increasingly find that on social media. I just go, Okay, this person isn't interested in having a conversation; let's not waste each other's time on it. 

JAG: In your book, you talk about how political correctness existed in the Soviet Union long before it existed here. I thought that was really interesting. 

KK: Well, it didn't just exist in the Soviet Union. It was created in the Soviet Union. This is my point, this is the point I was really keen to make in the book, is that political correctness never had anything to do with politeness or protecting people's feelings, or not offending vulnerable groups or whatever. We now believe it hasn’t anything to do with political correctness, it was a way of saying to you what you are saying may be factually true, but it is wrong for you to say it, is wrong because it does not match the position of the party. It is wrong because it does not match the political line you're supposed to take, even if it is factually true. That's the reason I bring it up in the book, JAG, because I think we can all recognize it to some extent, political correctness is used in that way in the West as well. Satirists like me mock this idea of hate facts. There are certain facts that are true that you're not allowed to express because they're hateful. Well, if they're true, I think we should be able to express them. That's why I think political correctness is important to highlight its origins because it tells you how it often gets used today in the West as well. 

JAG: All right. You said at some point that you almost wanted to call the book An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the Anglosphere. Is that correct? I think you talked about how the French had an obsession with reason and rationality versus the Anglosphere's sense of tradition as a source of knowledge. What do you see as the British and Scottish Enlightenment differing with the French Enlightenment? 

KK: Well, there was a huge difference. If you look at the outcomes of the two revolutions, for example, they are very different in that the foundation of the United States based on the ideas of the English and Scottish Enlightenment creates a very different type of society to the one that's created in the French Revolution which attempts to remake society from the ground up. It thinks that everything including human beings can be reimagined, that human beings can be remade in the model of pure rationality and reason; of course, the end result is blood, terror, murder, death. It's a fundamental difference between those two approaches to transformation of society and structuring society. But also, I think, it goes deeper than that. I'm a huge fan of Thomas Sowell's work, and this is one of the things he writes about in a couple of his books, A Conflict of Visions, and The Vision of the Anointed.

JAG: That’s a great book, especially that latter.

KK: Yes. Well, they're both wonderful. As you know, JAG, what he talks about is there are essentially two visions of humanity. To summarize it for our viewers and listeners, one vision is what he calls the tragic vision, which is the idea that human beings are flawed, they're imperfect, they're fallible and therefore, when we make society's rules, we have to make them taking into account that human beings are human beings, they're imperfect. The other approach is what he calls the unconstrained vision. It's not constrained by the tragic reality of life, and it believes that everything can be made from the beginning, human beings can be remade. This was the foundation to a large extent of the Bolshevik Revolution, which created the USSR, in which I was born. The idea was very much the same, communism is the idea that you can get people to abandon their natural attitudes and aspirations in favor of the greater good.

And maybe it'd be a good idea for ants or mole rats who biologically shared DNA, but for human beings who are intercompetitive and tribal in many ways, it just doesn't seem to be a good way of doing things. I might even agree with the sort of crazy progressives who think it would be better if human beings could be perfected and we could make a better society, and there would be no crime and no whatever, insert bad thing here, inequality. But it turns out human beings aren't like that and attempts to make them like that result in millions of people being forcefully killed or deported or forced to live a different life entirely that they're not happy with. Those regimes inevitably collapse. So, I think the reason I'm not so desperate to offend all my French and German and whatever other friends is just people often say, Well, you say the West, what is the West? I'm like, Well, this is the portion of the West that I quite like, and let's talk about that. 

JAG: All right. EmmaSura on Instagram is asking about the difference between allowing free speech and the choice to engage with people and their speech. Is it okay if there are people we don't want to talk to? 

KK: Of course. 

JAG: Sounds like you just said you're deciding no sanction of the victim on social media. If somebody is just there to harass you or if they're being irrational, you prioritize. 

KK: Right. This is one of the reasons I am excited about Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter in particular, because I think what he's talked about is like when you search for things on Google, no one goes to the third page of Google. That's because all the results on the first page of Google are great, right? If you had the social media experience where you, people can say what they want, but you just don't get around to looking at it. If it's not stuff that's constructive or helpful, if someone is calling you a dick or whatever, that to me is much better. I don't want people to be shut down. I don't want them not to have a Twitter account because I don't like them. I think that's a high standard for allowing someone to have a voice. I think people should have a voice, but also, yes of course, we don't have to listen to everything that somebody says. Any tool that allows us to allow people to speak, but also control what we choose to hear, I think that's great. I think that would take us forward. 

JAG: Yes, and I think to extend that even further, Ayn Rand talks about free speech not extending to forcing you to subsidize another's platform, right?   So that someone doesn't have the right to come in and shout obscenities on your lawn or in your driveway. I think that that is where we need to draw the line. Okay. This is a really interesting question on Facebook. James Covich asks, “Do you think there is a correlation between those who promote cancel culture and personality disorders?” 

KK: It's a complicated one because I'm not a psychiatrist, so I don't want to give you my unqualified medical opinion, but yes, <laugh> we've had a couple of people talk about how much of it is driven by narcissism. I think that's an inevitable part of it. I also think that cancel culture is representative of certain ways of doing things, which I wouldn't necessarily consider personality disorders, or whatever. But a lot of people have commented on it that it is—again please hear me correctly—a stereotypically more female or more feminine way of doing things. Men tend to fight directly. Men are more likely to challenge and to fight even directly, which obviously is bad in certain situations, whereas women will tend to destroy your reputation. They'll talk behind your back sometimes and whatever. I see it also partly as a changing of who has power in society in terms of the dynamic between the stereotypical two sexes. 

JAG: Ipswich 29 on Instagram is asking about differences between the culture wars in the US and UK, our big talking point here in the United States with regards to wokeness. You've had experiences in Britain, but you have gone back and forth. You have a lot of guests from the United States on your show. How is the situation worse or better in Great Britain? 

KK: I think that the situation in Britain is quite a bit better actually in many ways. There is much more pushback, I think, against some of the excesses of this way of doing things. So, for example, in both countries you have clinics which are performing gender-transition surgery on children, which to me is just an abomination. But in the UK the clinics that were doing that, several of them have been shut down by the government pending investigations about children being encouraged down that path when they shouldn't have been. It's terrible that it happened, but at least we're taking some action in terms of making sure that people are getting the help they need without dragging other people into that conversation who really don't belong there. I see that as one of the worst consequences of this culture, actually you know, pink-headed idiots on college campuses bother me less than children being encouraged to have permanently life-altering medical procedures. On that front, we're doing better. 

I think we are also less crazy in the way that we talk about these things. There's less hyperventilation because America is a very high energy culture. When you fight, you fight hard. When you do things, you do them full on. In the UK we don't take things quite as seriously, and that has many disadvantages. But one of them is that when we do have these polarized situations in both our societies, perhaps we don't quite do that side of it as harshly as you guys do in the US. Our media is probably less polarized as well. We still have a BBC; people argue over its impartiality, of course, but it is a somewhat independent source of media. Generally, I just think, and also most importantly in terms of this conversation, at least we don't have guns. Even if we do have a falling out, it's not going to be quite as bad. For those reasons, I'm quite optimistic actually, about the situation in the UK.

JAG: But I think I've seen reports of regular people who say something that is considered hate speech on social media and it gets sideways and they’re arrested by police.

KK: On that issue, I completely agree with you. This is a huge advantage of the American Constitution that makes America such an appealing place: you have enshrined the principle of free speech right in the heart. It's the First Amendment for a reason. It matters, really tremendously matters, to your society. On that issue, no question about it, you're absolutely right to pick me up on that, JAG. We are much worse off on that side of things. I hope we can win that battle because, as I say, the more ordinary people start to see this happening, the more pushback there is. But on that issue yet, you guys are doing much better. and I wish we had a First Amendment. 

JAG: All right. Well, it's something that we are, I am very grateful for. And you and your partner talk a lot about gratitude, and you mentioned that in your studio. I think that even though you're not religious, you say a secular grace when you're about to eat, even giving thanks for people who made your life difficult in the past. Of course, Objectivism is nonmystical and atheistic. I thought that was really intriguing, that you found a way to incorporate this as a ritual. But also in terms of your focus on gratitude more generally, which is a big theme of ours here at The Atlas Society. We talk about gratitude as an antidote to envy and resentment. 

How can we help to encourage people to see the personal and social benefits of gratitude? You are naturally positioned to do that because you have this experience of growing up in another country and having had relatives and members of your family that lived and suffered deeply under communism. That gives you, as you say, that second sight where you are. But just more general thoughts on gratitude and how we can encourage it. 

KK: Yes, I'm so glad you asked me that because I think it's such an important question. And this is actually one of those things that I don't think has anything to do with my background, because I wasn't actually always like this. I wasn't always grateful for the things that I had. I will confess as well, it's a lot easier to be grateful for what you have when your life is great. 

From that perspective, I think that's probably part of it. But for me right now, the idea of gratitude is I'm really blessed in terms of what's happening with my life. I have a job that I love that allows me to put a roof over my family's heads. I have a five-month-old, he's about to be a six-month-old baby boy. I have meaning, I have purpose. I have enough money to survive. What else could a man want? You know? From that perspective I just appreciate that so much. Also you know, we are building something very special with Triggernometry and the process is incredible. Connecting with hundreds of thousands of people around the world and going on shows like the Joe Rogan Experience and meeting people that I look up to and learning from them and being in conversations with all sorts of incredible people who are super smart and from whom I can learn so much. That was always a huge dream for me, being around people. 

Yes, I always like sharing my thoughts and I know that a lot of them respect my thoughts about certain things and my views of looking at things. A friend of mine was in town, Chris Williamson, from a YouTube channel, Modern Wisdom, and he was in town on his way to do something amazing in Africa. He had an 11 hour lay-by in London. I was like, Oh, hey, let me come down, grab you, we'll go to the gym. We'll sit in the sauna, and we'll have lunch afterwards. We spent six or seven hours together where both of us came away from that conversation massively inspired and enlightened and having learned things and shared things and given each other advice and support. That's amazing. I don't want to miss that. 

The reason that I spend so much time thinking about all these things that I'm grateful for and acknowledging them, is I want to be present and notice that they're happening in the moment and think, Oh, wow, this is incredible. Rather than being like the way I frankly used to be, where it was like, Oh, so what's the next thing? What am I doing next? What have I got tomorrow? I think being present naturally is helpful anyway even if life is difficult, but particularly when life is going well, it's important to be present. It's not something I picked up from going, Oh, let's compare myself to my grandparents in the gulag. I spend a lot of time doing all sorts of personal development because I've always been interested in squeezing the most out of the resources that I've been given. We all get dealt a certain set of cards. I always wanted to make sure that I was making the most of the cards that I was dealt. Gratitude is a part of every major religion. It's also a part of almost every personal development way of looking at things. If you want to make your life better, being grateful is going to make it better. 

Because one of the things people don't realize, and this is where the non-mysticism part of Objectivism, that I actually have issues with, or at least I disagree with, because I'm quite a mystical person in many ways, because I believe that there are very complicated connections that maybe you can explain logically, but we don't have the tools to do that level of analysis yet. They might as well be mystical in the sense of, if you are grateful for the things that you have in life, that means you come across differently to other people and that affects how they will treat you, whether they will help you, whether they will give you useful advice, whether they will lift you up or push you down. If you develop a disposition that makes it more likely that other people are attracted to you and want to work with you and want to help you, then more good things will happen in your life. Right? Even from that sort of mystical, you might call that a slightly mystical way of looking at things, it's just experientially true that being grateful is something that makes your life better and it makes it more enjoyable, makes you a more enjoyable person to be around for others. 

JAG: Exactly, yes. When I say mystical or supernatural, I am talking about something that doesn't exist in reality. What I think you're talking about is the possibility of connections or things that might be unified in ways that we don't have a way of understanding or measuring.

KK: The reason I say that, JAG, sorry to interrupt, is that I explained it in a lot of detail, whereas I think in any other normal conversation, if we hadn't brought up the mystical, nonmystical, I would've just said, Your energy's different, and other people respond to your energy now. Is your energy something that exists? I don't know. But I do think there is such a thing as how you are affects how other people are with you. I think we don't recognize that. 

JAG: Absolutely. Actually what you're talking about sounds a lot like the particular Objectivism that we promote at The Atlas Society, which is Open Objectivism. It is very much not just about, Hey, this is philosophy and we're going to impose it on you. But being open and entrepreneurial and interested and tolerant to the way that other people may see things or their points of view. Just being open, giving people the benefit of the doubt, believing that there is inherent value to other people. And if you're open, and if you are showing up as somebody who's benevolent and bringing something of value to the table, then you are, even in a self-interested way, probably going to be somebody who's going to make the connections that are going to be helpful for you along the way. 

KK: Well, those are awesome values. 

JAG: <laugh>. We like it. It works. All right. A couple of very interesting questions that dovetail a few that I had in the pantry. One of which is something I'm always interested in, we're getting it from Janus on Instagram. You mentioned lockdowns earlier. How was that for you? How did it change your outlook or mental positivity so you didn't have the opportunity to say, “Hey, we're going to go to Florida.”

KK: Well, initially the lockdown was incredibly good because as I say, I hadn't been spending nearly enough time with my wife and suddenly we had all this free time and we'd go for walks and spend time together and do stuff. It was incredible. The first lockdown was absolutely fantastic for me personally. 

JAG: But I also think, just to interrupt there, that given what we just talked about in terms of gratitude, that is really healthy. I don't want to whitewash or I'm not ready to move on. I'm not ready to call an amnesty.

KK: No, me either, but yes, I've got all things to say. 

JAG: I want to get to that, but your ability, even in a difficult time saying, Hey, this is good, and find positives and certainly spending time with—

KK: It was beyond good. It was absolutely necessary. So as someone who later developed a huge aversion to the subsequent lockdowns, there is a part of me that comedically thinks that a lockdown every 20 years probably would do a lot of people good, a couple of months where you're not allowed to go to work, you're not allowed to do everything the way you're used to, and you just are forced to reexamine your life for a couple of months, like once every 20 years. That actually might not be a bad thing, certainly, but you can do your own, I suppose. 

But beyond that, I thought once we got past the first lockdown, it was because at the beginning we didn't know what it was. Nobody knew how deadly or not deadly it was going to be. We didn't know how it spread exactly. Even if we say that that lockdown was a mistake, which I, at this point, would agree probably was a mistake, it was an understandable mistake in my opinion. But once you get past that and you know what this is, and you know how it works and you know how it transmits and you know that masks don't really work and you know, all this other stuff that we later learned, and when the vaccine comes out, there's a lot of other things that you're told to believe, which later turn out not to be true. People are forced to take it to protect other people. Even though the transmission, just the stopping transmission really wasn't strong enough to make that sort of claim at all. Right? I thought we went down a very, very dark path very quickly. 

Towards the end of it, I literally felt as someone who is grateful and as someone who had a great job throughout lockdown, once I stopped standup, Triggernometry happened to take off massively during that time, it became a full-time job for us. It was great. I was spending that time with my wife and my friends with whom I do Triggernometry. I had a good time. But by the end of it, I just thought that as a country or several countries, we were going down such a dark path when it comes to human freedom. The idea of liberty, the idea of bodily autonomy, which I think happens to be quite important and all of these other things that I actually thought we were in an emergency. I think it was only the development of the Alpha variant in the UK, which was much milder and the rising tensions to do with the restrictions, those two things combined allowed us to step back from the brink. I think that if Covid had continued to be as lethal as it had been prior to that, I suspect the government would've, certainly in our country, would've carried on attempting to continue to tighten the screws and reduce the amount of freedom of choice that you have and what you aren't allowed to do. 

Forcing you to have medical procedures. They were about to fire, I think, 70- or 80,000 nurses from the National Health Service who didn't want to take the Covid injection. This is at a time when the healthcare system is breaking apart because we don't have enough staff. They were prepared to fire tens of thousands of nurses, doctors, and they did fire social workers or caregivers in this country, again of whom there's a massive shortage, just to force everybody to take a vaccination that doesn't protect anyone except the person who's taking it to say nothing of the fact that there were, by this point, millions and millions and millions of people who had natural immunity who did not need to be vaccinated at all. So initially brilliant. Afterwards, I thought it's as close as we've come to a very, very dark place in our society in the time that I've been alive.

JAG: All right. Two questions on subjects I want to make sure that we get to. One is from MyModernGalt on Instagram, Thoughts on Brexit two years later?

KK: Well, it's six years since Brexit, isn't it? It happened in 2020 [the vote was in 2016]. I voted to stay in the EU and I was perfectly fine with that position. We don't know how that would've gone exactly. Might have been better, might have been worse. What I was horrified about is people who voted differently from me, who happened to be a small majority at the time, were immediately treated as if they were some sort of second-class citizens, because they happened to express a different opinion politically from mine. I always argued from the beginning that we had a vote and we have to accept the results of that vote and proceed accordingly. But it turned out that there were millions of people in this country who simply refused to lose. They had sour grapes and they wanted to continue to express their frustrations about losing in such a way that I thought was disgusting. I thought it was outrageous the way that they tried to attack people who simply had a different political view as being motivated by the most evil things in human society. It was just outrageous. But in terms of my own opinion, Brexit hasn't been a massive success. I also think it hasn't been a clean experiment because we've had the covered lockdowns, the war in Ukraine, and all of these other things that obviously have a massive impact on how things are going. So, I think it's very hard to judge. I think it was one of the Chinese leaders was once asked what was his view of the French Revolution? He said, it's too soon to tell. With Brexit, it's definitely too soon to tell. Yeah, I think it's very early days and how that issue is actually going to play out. 

JAG: Another basket of questions we're getting on Ukraine and Russia particularly. You have family in both. And I think you had said at one point that the purpose of what Russia was doing in Ukraine was to throw the West off its pedestal. Is that correct? And what did you mean by that? 

KK: Well, I did say that, but actually there is one other person who said it much better than me, and that's Vladimir Putin in almost every speech he's given since before the invasion and afterward. I've translated his last two speeches for my Substack. You can see from the horse's mouth in his last speech that he gave at the Valdai Discussion Club, which is essentially like Russia's Davos, it's the Russian Davos. They get delegates from all over the world. And he was pitching to them essentially a new world order which he calls a multipolar world in which the United States and its allies are not in the position that they're currently in. That lots of other countries now decide in what he called “democracy.” I'm using quotation marks for everybody listening. 

He was offering them a “democratic global order” as he put it. But yes. One of the things he said in that speech is that the UN Security Council needs to be changed to reflect the fact of this new arrangement, if you like. He's deliberately attempting to weaken the West. His entire approach to Ukraine, I detest. What he wants is for people to say, Well, Vladimir Putin is not a Communist. He's not trying to rebuild the USSR. I agree, he's not; he's actually trying to rebuild the Russian Empire. He's very critical of Vladimir Lenin, for example, and other revolutionaries who broke up the Russian Empire and created the USSR because a lot of land was lost in the collapse of the Russian Empire. He would like it to be taken back. This is why he's very critical of the Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev, because he transferred Ukraine, Crimea to the Ukrainian USSR, and that's basically his entire game. He wants to rebuild the Russian Empire. He wants a new world order in which America is no longer calling the shots. The amazing thing to me is people are always asking me this question, I'm not saying you did it in this way, but they're like, You're saying the super controversial thing. I'm like, No, guys, it's what Vladimir Putin's saying. Maybe we should listen to the guy that’s doing it. Is that controversial? Is that <laugh>, is that outrageous here? Am I being weird here that I'm saying maybe we should listen to the guy who's doing the invading to find out why he's invading?

JAG: We put that link in the comments sections of the platform, so people should go and check that out. Also, if you haven't already said—though it looks like unsurprisingly we have quite a few fans of Triggernometry already in the audience—but I'm curious, how did that podcast start for you? Have you and Francis been friends a long time and just decided to pull this together? Or what was the origin story of Triggernometry? 

KK: Well, we were two standups on the comedy circuit, and I became a regular performer at a comedy club that Francis used to help run. I was there a lot. We talked. I think it became very clear that we were both not on board with a lot of the things that were happening in our industry because some of the cultural changes you and I have talked about in the course of this conversation were happening in comedy earlier, faster, harder, at a more expanded rate in every way. It was becoming very apparent that the culture was going in this direction. It became quite clear that neither of us was particularly on board. I was looking around at the time, and you need to remember that starting a podcast in 2020, everyone's like, Oh, another podcast. But back then there were a lot fewer, particularly YouTube shows, and suddenly there weren't—basically none in the UK at that time. Now there's quite a few doing what we do. 

I'd been watching people like Joe Rogan. And Dave Rubin was having some interesting conversations at that time because he was in that “I'm a liberal and I don't really get what's going on.” He was in that place, which I found very interesting because I always find that much more interesting than people who have a very clear political grouping; I find that less appealing. But at that point, that's what he was doing, and I found that fascinating. Joe Rogan's always been having these conversations and there were a few other people doing it. And I really wanted to do it. That's what interested me. I thought that Francis would be a good pairing for me because I can sometimes disappear quite far into the overly intellectual side of things, and he's always going to be there to ask the question that actually most people want to hear the answer to, you know? There's a bit of intellectual stuff, and then there's the more grounded stuff and then layer a bit of comedy into it. Then I thought we could do something good. So, I suggested it, and I think my relationship with Francis is a rebound relationship, you might say, because he'd just been doing a podcast with somebody else. And he was very good. It was a pure comedy podcast, but it didn't work out between the two guys doing it. I came along and I was like, Hey, do you want to do this? I think he was keen to do something but he was also a bit raw from his previous experience, but eventually we found a way to make it work. And the rest is history. 

JAG: Well, I guess sometimes rebound relationships do work. <laugh>, 

KK: <laugh>, 

JAG: Well, we're coming up to the top of the hour. I want to put the cover of Konstantin's book up again. And again, I highly recommend the audible version, especially now that we understand the sacrifices that he went through to edit that for us. Any closing thoughts or new projects on the horizon for you? 

KK: Yes, well, there are always new projects. I'm someone who doesn't believe in saying things until I'm ready to sort of commit to them with my word. But there, I'm always working on new stuff and I've got some very cool, exciting things that I'll be doing over the next few years. Yes, there's plenty more to come. But in terms of closing thoughts, I just wanted to say how much I appreciate you having me on. It's been a real pleasure. I think you know, there is so much fighting and anger and destruction of each other's opinions happening on the internet. Like you and I have had this conversation. The truth is, I have absolutely no idea whether you've agreed with most of what I've said or not, and you, 

JAG: Most of it, I'd say, I'd say 85%, 

KK: But even if it was 10%, it doesn't really matter because we had a good conversation. What does it matter whether you and I agreed on everything? Of course 15% is a small amount to disagree with me on; five years from now, I'll probably disagree with 60% of what I've said today, but you know, I just think the space to have discussions without necessarily feeling like there has to be agreement or disagreement where we can just have a conversation, I think it's a wonderful and rare thing and I really appreciate you creating that space for us to talk today. 

JAG: It's good practice because Thanksgiving is coming up and I’m the only Republican in my family, so practicing a bit of openness. As our founder said, “If we are wrong, then we have something to learn; if we are right, then we have nothing to fear.” That's why it is good to be open to talking with people. It is not a sanction to just hear somebody else's point of view and in return have the opportunity to share yours. Konstantin, thank you very much for joining us. We really appreciate it, and thank you so much for the work that you do.

KK: Thank you, JAG, I appreciate it. Thank you.

JAG: Thanks to all of you who joined us. Thank you for the excellent questions that you submitted. You make my job easier. If you enjoy the work of The Atlas Society, again, we are a nonprofit, so please consider making a tax deductible donation@atlasociety.org. And join us next week. I'm going to be interviewing Grover Norquist. As you may recall, he was a guest in maybe the first week of these webinars that we started back during the lockdowns, dear friend of mine, founder of Americans for Tax Reform. We're going to be doing a reassessment review of the elections and looking at what comes next. Thanks everybody.