Join Rich in a thought-provoking discussions with Konstantin Kissen, a prominent comedian and YouTube sensation. They explore his journey from Moscow to England, the influence of censorship and cancel culture on comedy, and the limitations of the right versus left political paradigm. Delving into public perception versus media portrayal, they analyze hypocrisy among political leaders and the erosion of public trust. They discuss declining caliber among politicians fueled by social media and 24-hour news cycles. Konstantin's experiences in the Soviet Union highlight his passion for freedom of expression. We emphasize critical thinking, the power of ideas, and avoiding being a 'useful idiot'.
Engage the conversation on Substack at The Common Bridge!
Join Rich in a thought-provoking discussions with Konstantin Kissen, a prominent comedian and YouTube sensation. They explore his journey from Moscow to England, the influence of censorship and cancel culture on comedy, and the limitations of the right versus left political paradigm. Delving into public perception versus media portrayal, they analyze hypocrisy among political leaders and the erosion of public trust. They discuss declining caliber among politicians fueled by social media and 24-hour news cycles. Konstantin's experiences in the Soviet Union highlight his passion for freedom of expression. We emphasize critical thinking, the power of ideas, and avoiding being a 'useful idiot'.
Engage the conversation on Substack at The Common Bridge!
Welcome to this episode of season 4 of the Common Bridge, where policy and current events are discussed in a fiercely nonpartisan manner. The host, richard Helpe, is a philanthropist, entrepreneur and political analyst who has reached over three and a half million listeners, viewers and readers around the world. The Common Bridge is available on the Substack website and the Substack app. Just search for the Common Bridge. You can find the program on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. The Common Bridge draws guests and audiences from across the political spectrum and we invite you to become a free or paid subscriber on your favorite medium.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the Common Bridge. This week we bring you a special episode from our vault that now goes back over 200 episodes dating back to 2019. This is from August 2021, when we had bestselling author, comedian, satirist, social commentator you name it Konstantin Kissen on the show. This is just before Kissen hit the worldwide radar with his book An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West, and long before his Oxford Union debate on censorship and cancellation that generated over 100 million views worldwide. In this episode, rich and Konstantin talk about censorship and cancellation and we think it resonates now even more than it did when this first aired two years ago. So with that, we join Rich Helpy and Konstantin Kissen in conversation.
Speaker 3:So lots going on in the news today, and one of the things that we haven't talked about is comedy. How can that be? Well, that's always a commentary on our society and, of course, the Common Bridge is all about finding unity. We used to be able to laugh laugh at each other, laugh at ourselves and make fun of people that might have been on the other side, and we seem to have reached a point where we're just flat out not allowed to do that. But our guest today, konstantin Kissen, is going to talk about his work with that. Did I pronounce your name correctly?
Speaker 4:Konstantin, you did, you did. If you didn't, you'd be racist immediately.
Speaker 3:Very good, okay. So, konstantin, tell us a little bit about yourself. Our audience likes to know something about the background of our guest. How were your early days like? Where'd you grow up?
Speaker 4:So I was born in Moscow in what was then the Soviet Union in the early 80s. Both my parents were scientists. My father worked in a Soviet nuclear power plant and then also was responsible ironically given the moment we're in for making vaccines and working with viruses on the Soviet biological program. So I lived in Russia until about 1995, at which point my family became. It was a moment of time in the early 90s in Russia where there was a lot of opportunity to make a lot of money in a short period of time, and my father was one of the people who took advantage of it. And so for a very short period of time in my family's life we had some money and they used that to send me to a private school in England, and I've basically stuck around here since then. So I've been living in the UK now since 1995, 26 years.
Speaker 4:I had to drop out of university because my father got in trouble with the authorities in Russia. He had to flee under a false name and as a result of that I didn't have enough money to finish university. There was a point when I slept on the street for about three weeks and I had to just scrap and scrape and find something, so I started my own translation business. I did that for about 10 years and then I got bored and I decided you know what? I'll be a comedian.
Speaker 4:So in about 2014 now I embarked on that journey, and I did that for many years until the pandemic here, at which point live comedy virtually disappeared, and it so happened that during that time, the YouTube show that I started with a friend of mine had taken off to a point where it essentially became a full-time job, where this is what I do full-time now. So I'm not even doing much comedy nowadays, other than putting stuff out on social media, and sometimes we write some sketch-type comedy that we put out on our YouTube channel. But apart from that, interviews and conversations and also live shows that we do is the focus on my work at the moment.
Speaker 3:So I started the show saying that comedy was being crushed. So maybe two questions. First of all, am I right about that? Is comedy being crushed? And if it is, if it's not, I'd like to be corrected. And if it is, who's responsible for killing comedy?
Speaker 4:Well, I think it really really depends on who you are. If you are a Dave Chappelle or a Chris Rock or a Bill Burr or one of the established greats, then you are uncancelable and you can do the jokes that you want. You play to your own audience and largely this idea that you are being censored or you're forced to self-center is less true for people like that. The Ricky Gervaises of the world are not affected by people being overly sensitive. Ricky Gervaises himself often says there is no, I don't know how exactly he phrased it, but he basically says that you can do the jokes you want and then people will respond in the way that they want to respond. And that's it. And that is true for him and it's true for the big players.
Speaker 4:Where it's a lot less true is for a comedian who's a lot less experienced making their way up the comedy ladder. And what happens in that situation is you essentially travel from comedy club to comedy club in the hope that somebody will book you. You do five minutes and eventually you get 10 minutes and eventually you get 20 minutes and you work your way up the ladder. And in that world the restrictions around what you can and can't say are very strict indeed. The amount of group think that happens at that level is very restrictive and it forces out and it squeezes out people who think differently, which to me is a great irony, because I grew up and I'm sure you guys know these people, these names, the Bill Hickses, the George Carlins of the world these were my heroes.
Speaker 4:And when I looked at them I thought, well, I thought comedies for people like that, for people who don't want to fit in, who don't want to think whatever and everything, who want to challenge the narrative, who want to question the mainstream, who want to offer an alternative perspective and, most of all, who want to question the dogma that society is shoving down their throat. And I thought naively, when I got into comedy seven, eight years ago, that that is the place, that that's where you go to do that. And it turned out, as I very quickly discovered, that comedy isn't a place for that at all. But at least at that level of a comedy, it's the most conformist industry that I've ever encountered. Everybody's supposed to have the right opinion. You're supposed to be on the right side of history.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and it shouldn't be because I'm trying to imagine myself. I've never been in that role. I'm a rising comic and so you've got five minutes, I've got to get noticed, I've got to say something provocative and if I come out with the same joke or I can't touch a certain topic, I'm not going to distinguish myself. It's a really difficult place, I would think, for an aspiring comic.
Speaker 3:And, by the way, we've heard this from others on our show about news reporting. It said well, you're not really censored, but your editors are watching and you don't get good assignments if you don't say the appropriate things. We've heard it from researchers saying well, you're starting to draw the wrong conclusions, we're not going to let you go on to that next step. So it's fascinating, but I guess we should have seen that coming when we couldn't tell the difference between CNN and Saturday Night Live and we had people reporting on what Saturday Night Live said, which to me was the height of absurdity. So is this kind of central to the culture war where Side A wants to demonize and make Side B subhuman and vice versa? Is it part of the culture war? Who's winning the culture war.
Speaker 4:I think it is part of the culture war and the way I think about it. If you look at authoritarian societies throughout history, if you look at dictators, what is the first thing they shut down? In my country, vladimir Putin. The first thing he did was he shut down the equivalent of what in the UK was called spitting image, this puppet show about politics. It was very popular in 1990s. Russia was a massive liberal breakthrough. What happened in the 90s? Right, you've gone from this restrictive, totalitarian communist regime to essentially a free-for-all. You've got a free media, more or less, and suddenly people are poking fun and mocking politicians. That was unheard of in Soviet times and it was exciting. I remember as a kid I was probably 10 or 11, a whole family would sit down, we would watch it, we would discuss it. It was very exciting. The first thing Vladimir Putin did when he came to power is shut it down, and this is what happens every time, and the reason that dictators and totalitarians have to do this is it undermines their authority.
Speaker 4:But I also think what we're seeing now, given the number of false narratives that are being sold to you by the mainstream media, the politicians, etc. That you're forced to swallow. Comedy will always puncture that nonsense right, and so you have to try and restrict it if you want to continue to say things that aren't actually true, that don't resonate with people, because comedians will inevitably point out the lies and the hypocrisies for everyone to see. And how do you prevent that from happening? Well, you encourage people to self-censor. You say to them well, if you don't think there's a million genders, well it's probably because you're a bigger, it's because you hate trans people, it's because you're hateful. And there's been a lot of that happening in society now, where, essentially, you have to shut down a certain conversation because you know that if that conversation is being had, your lies will be exposed. And I think that is a big part of what's been happening.
Speaker 3:I agree with you, and we can't get learned voices above the din. By way of example, I was in a nanobiology lab in Massachusetts a few years ago and they were doing some fascinating research and they go oh yeah, we've got organisms here. One organism has nine genders. It's like, wow, okay. So then they explained it.
Speaker 3:I'm not articulate enough to explain that, but when I'm getting that kind of information from a scientist in the middle of research, I tend to believe it. It tends to open my mind when something kind of gets thrown out there, like in the middle let's fight about this. That, to me, is just it's more polarization and more division, and as I'm watching the right versus left and I abhor the red versus blue that we have in this country I just wonder if it's a fair fight. I mean the right wing discussion apps and the services, the Twitter, the Facebooks and the like. They seem to be about as effective as left wing talk radio was. Left wing tried to talk radio during the heyday of right wing talk radio and failed, and now it looks like the conservative or right wing is just getting shut down by censorship. And again, I know you're in London. Am I on track there or off base?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I don't really know what you're asking. To be honest, rich, I think it's. I don't feel like the right and I'm not someone who is right or left. I try and stay out of this stupidity and this stupid dichotomy. It just doesn't work for me. I've never been a I've always been a good team player. I've never been a tribal kind of person. I don't want to be part of anyone's tribe. It's not for me. But I do think that, given the people who run and control the social media, the big tech companies tend to lean left and not even left, but woke, really, I would say. Given that that is the tendency for their ideological views, then it seems like in recent times they've definitely had their hand on the tiller, if you like, and it's not an entirely fair fight. But I don't look at it through a party political lens.
Speaker 3:That was the question Is it a fair fight? And your point of view? As somebody that is not an either tribe I put myself in that category as well that it seems to be leaning more heavily from one side, and you know, pendulum always swings, so we should see what that next step is.
Speaker 4:I don't know that it's fair or not fair. My thing is it's a stupid fight. The right versus left is a pointless discussion. What I really think we ought to be focusing on is authoritarian people versus people who are pro-freedom. And that is a much more interesting conversation because, as we've seen, particularly with COVID, it turns out there are a lot of people on the left who are very authoritarian. We used to think that authoritarianism is primarily a right-wing sort of approach right, you know, and the historical examples obviously there we have seen more recently that it's. There are lots of people on the left, or the new left at least, who want to shut down your ability to say what you think. They want to tell you where you can and can't go, what you should and shouldn't think, et cetera. So right and left is, to me, a very poor map of the problem that we're having.
Speaker 3:First of all, I think that's a brilliant presentation of where we stand today, that it's a really helpful construct. We have covered a lot about the pandemic and the knowledge of the virus and medicines and vaccines and I'm trying to get to policy. That's what I look at and when I look at the you know political machinations and the personalities, I try to give myself a framework. So Donald Trump my framework for Trump was not qualified to be the president, not interested in learning to become the president, and massive personal problems and everything he did kind of reflected that. You know, it's all about ratings and all about him.
Speaker 3:And now I'm trying to see, you know, what's the way to look at the pandemic and I'm saying, all right, look, we have there's three, again three parts of the frame. It's reliable studies, okay, and they are out there and they like all scientific studies they are developing based on the data they can get today and the conclusions they can find based on the time element. The second element is do we have logical public health policies that reflect those reliable studies? And then, for compliance, do we have trusted communication? And my take on it at the moment is that reliable studies are getting buried in nonsensical public health policies and they're being communicated by people who have sacrificed their trust. And you wrote an epic and, frankly, very understandable piece that started with this imagine you're a normal person, and which I thought was a great lead in, so can you kind of just take us through that. I thought it was really a good piece. Why don't people trust those communicating to us today?
Speaker 4:Well, I started it in 2016 with Brexit and it's a kind of UK US centric focus that I've got in that piece. We could have gone back further. We could have gone back to the war in Iraq. If you remember that moment in the history of the Anglosphere, we were all told something that we obviously knew was not true. The idea that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was obviously untrue. We all knew it. The politicians knew that, we knew that they were lying and nonetheless they went ahead with it for reasons that we still, I don't think, really know to this day or you can have your own pet theories about it, but we still don't know why.
Speaker 3:You're saying that 11 Saudi Arabians who trade trained in Afghanistan wasn't justification for invading Iraq. Who would have thought?
Speaker 4:Exactly, but the justification we were given very explicitly in the UK because that level of bullshit wouldn't have flown in the UK. We needed something slightly beefier right, because we were not attacked, so we didn't feel like just retaliating against everybody everywhere around the world. We needed a good explanation, and what we were told was Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction which he can deploy within 45 minutes to attack Western countries. That was what we were told. Now, everyone knew that was bullshit, right, everyone knew it. And yet the politicians went in, ended up killing a million Iraqis, hundreds and hundreds of British and American soldiers, et cetera, et cetera. But look, forget that. That was a moment in which I think my generation I'm in my late 30s now that was when we lost faith a lot of us in the mainstream media and politicians, et cetera. But my thread and the article that you talked about exclusively the last five years, because I think the last five years have seen an acceleration, particularly with the existence of social media, of processes that have been going on for a lot longer. And the last five years, if you cast your mind back to 2016, let's say halfway through to 2016, the first thing that happened with Brexit, everyone told you, if you're a member of the public, that Brexit was never going to happen. That's what we were all told here in the UK, and we were told, by the way, that it's a movement by racist for racist, and that was something I believed. I voted to remain in the referendum. The only thing that I didn't really believe when it happened was, like I'm an immigrant with dark skin in this country. If you want to tell me that this country is at racist, I just know that's not true. You're not going to bullshit me about that, but I knew that. The media told me it was never going to happen. It's a fringe movement. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, bam. Brexit happens.
Speaker 4:The next thing, donald Trump. There were a number of publications that told you Hillary Clinton had a 99% chance of winning. Polls repeatedly showed that he had a very, very low chance of winning, and this was. It was perpetuated in the media and, by the way, this is an important point Polling isn't just telling you what the reality is. Polling influences voting behavior, and so if you keep putting out fake polls, you're actually interfering in the electoral process. Most people don't seem to understand, but this is very important. So you've got polls that don't tell you the truth. You've got the media that tells you something isn't true. And then, bam, donald Trump get elected.
Speaker 4:Okay, you say to yourself well, things happen, they got things a bit wrong, blah, blah, blah. What's next? Well, the next thing is they have to explain why they got it wrong. So what do they tell you? They tell you it was the Russians that did Donald Trump's election. It was the Russians that did Brexit. And, as a reasonable person who might be normal and listens to the media and whatever you go, okay, well, the Russians did it. Let's see the evidence. And you wait for three years, while the media constantly tell you about the dossiers, that Donald Trump got peered on by prostitutes, this that everyone's constantly outraged. And then the Mueller report comes out and it's a damp squib, there's nothing to it. Right, it's clearly. That isn't what happened.
Speaker 3:There are people today a lot of them, and people that should know better that not only believe that Trump colluded, they publish on it and they show up on American cable news as legal analysts. I mean, look, not that the bar to be a legal analyst on cable news is high, jeffrey Tubin right, but still people listen to it. And what you have to believe that Mueller, with this massive budget, really top notch attorneys, unparalleled access, including breach of client attorney privilege, the ability to put people in jail if they didn't cooperate he goes to 13 countries and he comes up with nothing. You have to believe that Trump somehow masterminded something with anybody. I don't think he's not that disciplined anyway, but to believe that that could happen, you have to believe Mueller missed all that. He said. He was that incompetent and I just can't get there and I was like, okay, if he did something, I want to know about it, trump, and if he didn't do something, tell me why you're in this, and I don't have a satisfactory answer for any of those.
Speaker 4:Well, to me, the explanation was obvious they didn't like Donald Trump. It seems to me they didn't like Donald Trump. There were many aspects of his behavior that I really didn't like, but what I was interested in Rich either way, was the truth. I wanted to know was his election the result of election interference or was it not? And I think what we found was that there is no strong evidence to suggest that I believe Russia would have tried to interfere, as many powerful countries always do try and interfere in electoral processes in other countries. But I don't think that was the deciding factor. I think the deciding factor was the increasing frustration of the American public with the status quo, but anyway. So you get to the point where you're told that it's Russian collusion, it's Russian interference. You find out that isn't true.
Speaker 4:So what does the media go to as the backup? They go to racism and they tell you that America, britain and all the other Western countries are structurally, institutionally racist, that racism has never been worse. And they give you examples. They give you just the smaller. They give you the Covington MAGA kids who are confronting this native American elder, and they run with these stories as if they're proven. I should have added Brett Kavanaugh as well. He's a gang rapist. They told you why? Not because it was the truth, not because they were interested in finding out the truth, but because it matched the narrative that they had.
Speaker 4:And so what the media is constantly telling you is we don't care about the truth, we care about our agenda. So you watch that, and that continues to happen over and over, on issue after issue, and you're seeing the media narrative crumble on issue after issue, and along at this point comes COVID. Right, your trust is already undermined in these institutions, and then you see that when it comes to COVID, as you say, the public health policies don't seem to correlate to what's actually happening. You keep being told one thing and then, three months later, the opposite. Marks are a very good example of this. Right, you don't need a mask, don't wear a mask, just wash your hands. This is what we were told here in Britain. Two months later, bam, a mask is necessary, and if you don't wear one, you're killing granny right.
Speaker 4:The number of people in hospital, the number of people who've died with COVID. All of these figures have been repeatedly discredited and published in the mainstream media as being adjusted Guess what in the initial few months of the pandemic are. In the UK, the British count for deaths from COVID included anyone who died after a positive test. That means that if you got COVID, or even had a positive test, which may even have been wrong you went outside, you got hit by a butt. You were a COVID death right Hospitalizations. 40% of the people who are in hospital in the UK with COVID are not people who came to hospital because of COVID. Most of them caught COVID in hospital and yet we talk about them in the media as if they are people who are in hospital because they caught COVID right. So you're constantly getting this message from the media and the politicians. That isn't accurate.
Speaker 3:I think you make a great point and because news is more nuanced, it's not binary, it's not team A versus team B, the cherry pick something and then extrapolate it. I witnessed this past week Florida's death count was doubled and one left-leaning person said oh, that proves that Governor Florida doesn't know what he's doing. Yet there's radio silence that a very clear executive order in New York by Governor Cuomo probably led to the death of 13,000 elderly people. And then he lied about the number. And then suddenly it's about well, he harassed 11 women and we have to get rid of the guy and not a peep about the really egregious thing that his policy that he got $5 million for a book advance to talk about killed 13,000 people.
Speaker 3:But in the middle of that you look at where's the voice and if you were in the United States you could see then President Donald Trump go to the microphone and make an absolute mess of every briefing. I mean, the guy literally thought the briefings were about him and he would get one little shred of data or information or theory or rumor or something just made up and he'd run out there and start talking about it. And so people are like well, I don't know who to believe Trump looks like he's crazy. Maybe we better listen to these other guys. And in the meantime we've had Martin Koldorf, who's a highly qualified professor of biostatistics, author of the Great Barrington Declaration great research. He gets shut down by Twitter and by Facebook and by other platforms, so it's not a surprise to me why people are really upset about pandemic information. But your article goes on beyond that too.
Speaker 4:Well, yeah, because there's another piece to this, which is it's very difficult to convince people that they should follow measures that you yourself don't follow, and it's very difficult to convince people that a disease is lethal if you behave as if it has no consequences for you.
Speaker 4:So if you keep telling people that they must stay indoors, wear masks, not go to restaurants, not go to nail salons, not go to birthday parties, etc. And if you ever go outside, you should wear a seven-mask, and then there is pictures of you, the governor, or you, the politician, not wearing a mask, having a birthday party, breaking all the social distancing rules. I mean, in the UK we had the incredible situation where an advisor to our prime minister broke the rules we had. It was covered like a terrorist attack by the media and several of the journalists who were involved in that press briefing were then caught attending a birthday party without taking any precautions, again in violation of the rules. So you've got layers of hypocrisy and if you are a member of the public, you're going. Well, these are the people who know about this disease, right? They speak to scientists, they speak to experts, they have meetings, committees. If they're not taking it seriously, why should I?
Speaker 3:We saw that in our state of Michigan, our governor violated the rules that she set down for 10 million people that live here in the state, literally from the beginning of the pandemic to the end, and there's still unanswered questions. We saw recently former president Obama when he would have had a great time to say look, this new wave is here and I'm going to defer my birthday party. Instead, it's a three-day maskless bash. And then, finally, the other thing that I'm hearing is that there are people coming over our southern border and we've always been an open, compassionate country and I'm not debating or trying to say that they shouldn't be here but it would seem to make sense that when you're coming in, you should be tested and vaccinated and given a mask. So people look at that and go well, wait a minute. Why that treatment? And why does my child have to go to school with their face covered and breathe into a mask all day? But leadership or vacuum of leadership and hypocrisy, I think, really is undermined the public trust.
Speaker 4:It has, and one of the things that we've charted quite a bit on trigonometry in previous years this is before the pandemic is one of the questions that I would always ask our guests who were involved in politics in one way is we used to have this phrase in the UK called the big beasts of politics. And these were people from both sides of the aisle who were widely respected and even if you disagreed with their policy prescriptions, you held these people as people to whom you would look up to. These were people who were senior statesmen. They would come from different backgrounds. Some of them were from mining communities they had been down the mines themselves and others were kind of conservative peers who'd been on the benches of the houses of parliament for three decades and had accumulated a respect, and they were people who would break with the party lines that were being set for them by their own leaders. They would say, well, yes, I am a conservative but I don't agree with this. Or yes, I am a member of the Labour Party, but actually I think on this issue I am going to stand on my principle.
Speaker 4:And what we have seen in recent decades, I think, is the decline of the average calibre of the politician. This has been with Advent, first of the 24-hour news cycle, and then with social media, and what you see now is not people who are willing to make a stand on principle. It's not people who went into politics for reasons of principle, because they wanted to serve the nation, but because they wanted attention, they wanted power, they wanted to have a large social media account, they wanted to be in the conversation. These aren't people that will stand for anything or on anything, and so that, I think, has been a big factor here, because there's no, I don't see many, many people standing up on a matter of principle. They are standing only for what is convenient, and if you do that, you will inevitably create hypocrisy, because the only way to avoid hypocrisy is to be consistent, and if all you do is respond to events as if they're independent of each other, you will never, ever be able to maintain a consistent fronting face for the public.
Speaker 3:I'm 100% on board with you. When the shoe's on the other foot, how are you going to react? I've found that people don't like that line of reasoning but, as we talked about the pandemic as well, because of the behavior of the leaders and people say well, you know what. What they're doing and what they're saying isn't consistent. I think that opens the door for some of this other craziness that we've seen, like vaccines have implanted you with a magnetic chip. I actually had a person very close to me say I have a vaccine, did you test it? Like I go, no, she goes. Well, don't you do your research? I go, yeah, but I'm not. That's insane. And Bill Gates put a microchip in us. It's like no, he didn't.
Speaker 3:But the hospitals were never busy. They were very, very busy. They were pushed to the brink. They were burning out their people. They didn't have all the right equipment.
Speaker 3:What the US healthcare industry did was nothing short of heroic and at the same time, that doesn't mean that there was good data about how many people were coming in because of COVID and we just went over that on a recent episode and there's still no data about that. And the PCR test we know measures live virus and dead virus and now we have a lot of people millions of people that have been vaccinated, so presumably full of dead virus if they've been exposed, and people that have had a natural immunity full of dead virus but they still keep coming up as cases and we just can't have that nuanced conversation to figure out what is the problem. For a guy that does comedy constantly, this is a very serious conversation that we're having Talk about your program and what you're doing and where people can find it and maybe a little bit what kind of feedback you're getting about your tweets and your writings and your appearances. It's got to be a very interesting time for you.
Speaker 4:It is. So my YouTube show is called Trigonometry. It's two comedians interviewing people. It's kind of a little bit like the UK version of Joe Rogan. It's not three hours, it's about one hour our interviews and it tends to be a little bit more focused and structured. Joe has a very laid back approach. He just talks to people about whatever interests him. We tend to go in with a specific agenda in mind of what we're trying to get from our guests, but they are sort of conversations that are quite serious in nature, like this one, with maybe a light hearted touch here and there. It's going very well. It's got over a quarter of a million subscribers on YouTube and probably another 50 to 100,000 on the podcast itself, and we talk about very much the things that we've been talking about.
Speaker 4:The reason that I feel comfortable expressing my opinions on this stuff is I've spent three and a half years talking to people who are very interesting, who have an interesting point of view on this stuff, who can talk about it based on research and data and facts, and that's where my knowledge comes from.
Speaker 4:So, really, trigonomchia was always a project to educate ourselves about what's going on in the world, and we invite people who are interested in doing that, to join along with us as we learn more about what's going on.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so I'm working on my first book at the moment, called An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West.
Speaker 4:I am looking forward to finishing that and I'll be out next year talking about what I think people in the West, particularly the younger generations, often miss, because there's an assumption that if you kind of take away all the basic founding principles of Western civilization that you don't like, everything else will remain the same. And of course, this is completely untrue. If you take away the founding basis of Western civilization, you will end up in a hellhole, and I'm just trying to point that out to people who maybe haven't had the benefit of a proper historical education, which it seems like no one has. So, talking about that sort of thing and, yeah, I'm enjoying contributing my two cents to these various conversations and frankly, as I think we talked about at the very beginning, in terms of the conformism of comedy, I feel a lot freer and a lot more liberated to do the things that I believe, now that I'm not really part of that world anymore and I'm enjoying it a lot more.
Speaker 3:I see what are some of your supporters and critics saying. What kind of feedback are you getting?
Speaker 4:Well, it's hard to know. I wouldn't say that we have many critics. There's always the usual crazies who scream about how anything that's not radical leftism is automatically the alt right and blah, blah, blah. I mean my show, trigonometry, is hosted by me, a Russian Jewish, first generation immigrant, and my co-host is half English, half Venezuelan. So if that's an alt-right program, I don't know Too obvious racist then. In other words, absolutely, absolutely Massive racists and white supremacists. Of course we hate the Jews, but so that's the kind of nonsensical, crazy side of it.
Speaker 4:Our supporters, I think, just really enjoy hearing unfiltered conversation, because it's becoming very rare now, and we just recorded an interview with a retired pediatrician who wrote a book about dying.
Speaker 4:Well, it's a book about death and how in the West we increasingly refuse to face the reality of death and the consequences of that.
Speaker 4:And actually we tried to have conversations with people on different sides of the political spectrum evolutionary psychologists We've had Jordan Peterson on the show a few times the Brett Weinstein and Heather Huyings, people like from what people call the intellectual dark web, which is now kind of fracturing and breaking apart. But we tried to talk to different people about different things and we found it really rewarding and I think our audience really enjoyed most of all that we try and make it simple. We tried to understand what's happening and really this is one of the things that I didn't really cover entirely in my article. That is the reason that we're here, but I think this is the biggest realization I've had about the nature of the mainstream media, which is that they've completely lost the ability to explain what's happening in society, and the only way to do that now is to listen and watch long form conversations in which people are actually trying to address these issues honestly.
Speaker 4:The media long since has stopped trying to do that, and I think that's one of the reasons that new media is making such a breakthrough at the moment.
Speaker 3:Yeah, look, I think that's a very powerful point in that, after the 2020 election, we had the incumbent president saying the election was stolen and that there was untoward behavior and such, and I'm waiting for the reasoned report to come out to say, well, wait a minute, here's the accusation, here's the facts behind it. Instead, what we heard well, here's the allegation that Trump is saying, but here's what somebody from the Democrats they're saying. You know, they basically personal attacks. So let me just give you an example. In my home state of Michigan in 2016, there were some 75,000 votes that left the vote for president blank and voted Democrat all down ticket, or voted Trump and then voted Democrat all down ticket. You know pretty clear that they did not want Hillary Clinton to be the president and Donald Trump won Michigan's electoral votes by 10,000 votes.
Speaker 3:In 2020, the reverse of that happened. There were votes with no one for president and Republican all down ballot, or Biden and Republican all down ballot. So I think the Democrats came home and Trump lost the state by 75,000 votes, which is a function of turnout, and that would have been so explainable. And then, when they talked about well, the vote counts in Wayne County, which is where our largest city, detroit, is all came in late. They always come in late. They collect from 463 precincts and they always come in late. You always have to watch that for a statewide. But Trump by that time had ignited this media fury and got people to start yelling about a stolen election, and then people couldn't turn on the news because it wasn't getting reported and then, if it was, they felt like they weren't being told the truth and that's to me that's very, very dangerous situation. It's not a question that just me pontificating.
Speaker 4:I agree with you that a democracy relies on losers consent. This is the first thing I said when Donald Trump started making these accusations. The problem is that I look, I'm utterly convinced that it was not a stolen election. Based on what I know about it, I never bought into that and never thought it was credible. The problem is, if you just spent four years shouting about Russian collusion, it becomes a lot more difficult to reject accusations that this election was stolen as well, because if you play tactically every four years when you lose is to go. Well, we lost, therefore the election was stolen. Well, don't be surprised when the other guy does it too. That's my only point I would make here.
Speaker 3:Hillary Clinton more than two years past the election on national television. Donald Trump's an illegitimate president. That happened. It makes her look as crazy as Trump and that's a high bar to get there. But she did say it.
Speaker 3:And so here we are to your earlier point about we don't have credible leaders and we don't have reliable reporting. So we need to do the kinds of programs that you're doing, hopefully a little bit the kind of program that I'm doing of you know, say we're going to talk policy, not politics, that there's a lot more that unites us than divides us. But one of the things you talked about I found interesting. I knew a few people that lived in Soviet Russia. Okay, from time to time I met them in my travels.
Speaker 3:I've been to Russia, but post the fall of the Berlin Wall and the post fall of the Soviet Union and the thing that let me see if I can put this in a question so private conversations that I have with friends, and friends from all description again, all socioeconomic strata, all racial descriptions and all every other kind of thing that we use to define people these days we can have really meaningful conversations and kind of get to the people at the top aren't doing that great, yet very few will allow that conversation to be in a place where it can be recorded. Like you know, social media they're very guarded outside of their own friendship circle, and you lived in Soviet Russia. Is there a parallel there, or are we into something different here?
Speaker 4:Well, the reason that a lot of people in from that background will be hesitant to talk publicly about their opinions is that it was always dangerous. You know, in America people often talk about the talk that African Americans, black Americans, have to have with their kids about how to behave when the police stop you. Well, in the Soviet Union our parents had to have the talk with us which was about what you can and can't say when you go to school, because the conversation you have around the dinner table, if that was to leak out even through you at school, you and your parents would be in trouble. So we're used to kind of having to have a private conversation and a public conversation. And that's one of the reasons I've been quite outspoken about the importance of freedom of expression in the West is that I know that that effect of shutting people up is corrosive and the fact that in recent times it seems like everyone is feeling like they have to do that, to me that's a big concern.
Speaker 3:I agree, and we have these wonderful communication tools today, the things that are allowing me in Michigan and you in London to be talking that your viewers, my viewers, your listeners, my listeners can see literally all over the world. We need to get more of this kind of content out there and we need to be respectful of people. But we also have to all develop a little thicker skin and not be so sensitive. And the notion that someone's going to dig in a comedians or an actor's background or a politician's background and a 15 years ago you said X. You know, going so far back is when someone was 15, what they wrote in a journal, that's insane. We have to get out and grow up a little bit. I think I agree with you on that. You're a great guest. You've won another follower to your show and hopefully the listeners and the viewers the Common Bridge will spend some time following you as well. What didn't we cover today that perhaps we should have covered?
Speaker 4:Well, we didn't cover a lot of things that we should have covered, because there's so many things going on simultaneously in the world. I think it's interesting you asked me that, because the last question we always ask on trigonometry is what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? So you've hit me with my own question there, and I always tend to have a different answer, which I think gives you a sense of how many different things are kind of important at the moment in the world. The thing that I'm thinking very heavily about now as I write my book is the importance of never being a useful idiot, and the reason I say this is my grandmother was born in a Soviet gulag. She was born in a concentration camp, and she was born in a concentration camp because both her parents were sent there for various political reasons.
Speaker 4:These were not people who were criminals. They were being repressed for their political views or their backgrounds or their nationality or whatever. This is what the gulag system was largely for, and when these people were released because most of these camps were in the far east of Russia or in the far north of Russia and Siberia they were not allowed to live anywhere within the big cities in Russia Moscow, leningrad, nassim Petersburg, all of these other places they were not allowed to go. Most of them ended up settling very near to where the camps had been, in small cities, and in those camps there were only three groups of people who lived there there were the local native populations, much like the Canadian Inuit, there were the former prisoners of these camps and there were the former guards, and all of these people lived together in one town. So in my grandmother's case, she remembers living in an apartment block and on her landing they had their apartment where they lived former prisoners, political prisoners and directly across from them were people who used to guard their camp, the guards, the people who used to keep them essentially locked up. So all of these people, they lived in one small town.
Speaker 4:And one of the things that my grandmother told me was when Joseph Stalin died in 1953, by 1954, his successor, nikita Khrushchev, essentially had to distance himself and the party from the crimes of the Stalin regime, and so they exposed him as a cult of personality, as a butcher, took down his statues, etc. And when this happened, my grandmother told me that many people in her town shot themselves, these former guards, many of them shot themselves because they did not know. They allowed themselves to believe that the people that they had dehumanized, the people that they would beat and rape and torture and murder in these camps. They allowed themselves to believe that they were justified in doing this, that the party told them that these were the wrong, bad people with the wrong opinions and wrong behavior, who were sabotaging the Soviet ideals, and they deserved to be treated this way, they deserved to be tortured and murdered, and so on.
Speaker 4:And so the thing that I'm thinking very carefully about now is the importance of not being that useful idiot who goes along with whatever the ideology tells them and encourages them to violate their own moral principles for the sake of some kind of idea of the greater good, someone who swallows untruths and goes along with things that they should never go along with because they'd rather be comfortable, they'd rather fit in, they'd rather not cause any trouble, they'd rather not lose their job, etc. And so that, to me, is the message that I'm really focusing on is don't be a useful idiot. Think for yourself, make up your own mind.
Speaker 3:And I think that's a great way to conclude this talk. That'd be a great title for your book the Importance of Not being a Useful Idiot and I think that is a powerful story and a powerful message. And you know, unfortunately in the United States today we have the beginnings of that, if not beyond the beginnings. I often ask people that are condoning behavior they're seeing buildings set on fire or people defecating in streets. I said, well, what if that was in front of your home? Would it be okay? And you can't get a straight answer the importance of not being a useful idiot. I think it's a good way to wrap up this session.
Speaker 3:Today on the Common Bridge, we're going to be posting more information about Konstantin Kissen and his broadcast on RichardHelbycom. There'll be more information about him. Konstantin, I am so grateful that you took some time to be with me today and I learned a lot, a very, very powerful message that you got, and I thank you for doing that. Thank you so much for having me. It's been my pleasure. This is Rich Helby signing off on the Common Bridge.
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