00:01:32.300So Konstantin kindly agreed to come on because I think we talked a while back about potentially having a discussion about areas that we might agree or disagree on.
00:01:46.480And then I listened to your recent appearance on Joe Rogan and some of the same issues that I thought would be useful to discuss came up and you kindly agreed to.
00:01:59.040And broadly speaking, I would say, I don't know how familiar you are with our podcast, but we tend to focus on online gurus or secular gurus.
00:02:12.980So this is people that fall into the Jordan Peterson, Nassim Taleb.
00:02:38.120Yeah, well, so just to highlight that we do try to range widely across the guru sphere as it exists.
00:02:48.040But we do have a tendency to focus on the kind of IDW heterodox sphere, in part because that's where a lot of the most dramatic and bombastic style gurus are, the Weinsteins, for example.
00:03:03.440But in any case, one of the things that we've come across quite often is that people within the heterodox sphere tend to see a much bigger concern emanating from the mainstream institutions and mainstream media sources.
00:03:20.940And to have less of a concern about the kind of alternative ecospheres and guru figures that we talk about.
00:03:30.700So I thought it might be good to talk about the relative problems in each of the spheres and where, you know, you might disagree with our emphasis and we might disagree with yours.
00:03:44.940And so maybe it would be useful just to start if you kind of outlined where you're coming from or where you see your position being, you know, in the online discourse or commentary space or whatever you want to call it.
00:04:03.260It's a very big and open question, I suppose.
00:04:06.380So the way I self-identify is a kind of enlightened centrist.
00:04:12.140I don't, I'm not interested in partisanship or party politics at all.
00:04:17.540In fact, I can't really understand people who are party political.
00:04:22.100It's like how you could wed yourself permanently to one side of the political spectrum in hugely varying circumstances.
00:04:30.400I find strange that people are willing to do that.
00:04:35.100I'm certainly a fierce critic of a lot of the mainstream institutions and the direction they've taken.
00:04:41.240I hope that that hasn't prevented me from being an equally fierce critic of where the old media is going wrong and the war in Ukraine and the way some of the supposedly heterodox people are covering that is something I've been calling out from the moment that it started.
00:04:57.060Because that is an issue I understand pretty well being half Russian, half Ukrainian, having grown up in both countries, et cetera.
00:05:05.400So when I see people going off the deep end on that issue, I haven't been shy about calling that out.
00:05:13.280But yes, that's, I guess that's my position.
00:05:16.500I see myself as being somewhere in the center, looking at both extremes and going, you're both crazy.
00:05:22.380In terms of the mainstream and the old media, I mentioned, you know, some of the areas where I think the old media can go wrong.
00:05:30.480I do think you have to be careful when you're comparing institutions or systems of communicating information.
00:05:37.120I'm going to sound very woke here, but it's kind of like stupidity plus power.
00:05:41.560Like if a guy on a YouTube channel with 30 followers is saying something really stupid, I'm less concerned about that than I am about a mainstream publication saying something equally stupid because the reach is bigger.
00:05:54.140And so I do think the mainstream media, which for the moment still has a much bigger reach and therefore more influence, should be subject to more scrutiny.
00:06:02.360But apart from that, I don't know if that gives you enough to start sticking pins in me.
00:06:07.640Yeah, so I know, for example, that you had run-ins with James Lindsay over Ukraine before his ignoble exit from Twitter discourse.
00:06:23.580And I think in general, you have been in the trenches over the Ukraine conflict.
00:06:29.880Even actually on the Rogan appearance, I noted that, you know, he was more skeptical about the validity of sending arms to support Ukraine or American involvement.
00:06:40.780And you push back, which I think is to your credit.
00:06:44.040But so I guess from what you said, the value of like being able to criticize people on both sides of the political spectrum and including people that might agree with you is something that you would seem to regard as like an important value, right?
00:07:03.580Well, Ukraine is just the latest example.
00:07:06.540So I've been very clear, for example, that even though because of some of the people that I've interviewed, there are a lot of people that think I'm massively on the Trump trend.
00:07:17.300And I have friends who are big Trump supporters.
00:07:19.720I'm good friends with someone who used to work for Donald Trump at a high level.
00:07:22.740But I'm very clear that what I was very clear on January the 7th, on the morning of January the 7th, when appearing on the Lotus Eaters podcast with Francis, that I thought what happened was a complete abomination and completely wrong to the, let's just say, dissatisfaction of many of the people in his audience.
00:07:43.380So I'm not really ever hesitant to criticize either side when they're doing something wrong.
00:07:50.080I just see that the threat from the, I don't like the word woke anymore because it was first it was co-opted and now it's been re-co-opted and I, you know, but the threat from the progressive left, particularly in the reaction it will trigger from the right, is to me a far bigger, far bigger concern than some of the other stuff.
00:08:11.800So that's why I've, I've been a vocal critic of that because I think it's, it's very, very dangerous.
00:08:16.720Yeah. So I, I guess one of the points that I would raise is that whenever I listen and we listen to a lot of content where people are being critical about the, you know, institutions or, or the, the kind of social justice left or progressive left or however you want to frame it.
00:08:38.700And one thing that often seems to go unmentioned in those conversations is first of all, that there is a very large receptive audience for critiques of those mainstream positions and of social progressivism on the right.
00:08:59.260And those tend to be not what you're talking about with like small YouTube channels, you have huge media entities, you have national newspapers and you have like channels dedicated to pumping out right wing takes.
00:09:13.440And I, I often see that if it is recognized, like just kind of gestured out that there is right wing media, but the right wing media is like a huge ecosystem.
00:09:25.820And in terms of disinformation or, you know, kind of pumping out partisan rhetoric, it seems equally, if not much more guilty than the left wing media ecosystems.
00:09:39.900You know, if you're looking at Breitbart or the Epoch Times or the Fox News, there's, there's definitely a very strong tolerance there for partisan positions.
00:09:52.320So I wonder in, in those terms, I rarely see that like on Joe Rogan, that's very rarely discussed, for example.
00:10:00.500And do you think that is a case of there being just more of a focus on, on the issues of the left or why, why does the right wing ecosystem tend to get a pass in heterodox spaces?
00:10:18.340I just think to liberal people like me and Joe, the idea that Fox News is full of bullshit and his right wing propaganda is taken as given.
00:10:26.760I don't, I've been on Fox News once, I think.
00:10:31.100I don't consider it to be an objective source of information, just like I don't consider CNN to be an objective source of information.
00:10:37.460However, when you talk about the ecosystems being equal, I wouldn't agree with that.
00:10:41.700I mean, look at, so I went on Twitter this morning and I saw a tweet from Joe Biden talking about how he was basically criticizing the right.
00:10:51.680But what he was saying is we have a situation where people either, if there's an election, either they win or they believe that the election was stolen.
00:11:02.240And this is treated as a perfectly reasonable thing for Joe Biden to say, even though it's very clear that the mainstream media spent four years after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, lying endlessly about his election, the reasons for his election, claiming it was Russia collusion, Russia interference, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, to the point where at the time, even I believed it.
00:11:26.980And one of my reasons for being so disenchanted with the mainstream is how much they've been lying to us.
00:11:32.460So, but nonetheless, Joe Biden can go out and say that, and no one is going to flag up his tweet for misinformation in the way that they would do with someone on the right if they tweeted something like this.
00:11:43.600So I think the idea that there's an equal and opposite echo chamber is untrue.
00:11:48.500I think the number of outlets and how seriously they're taken by the ordinary person is completely different.
00:11:53.960If I was to give a normie friend of mine, quote unquote, an article from Fox News, the way they would treat that would be very different to an article from The Guardian, even though in my experience, they're both equally frequently, equally as inaccurate as each other.
00:12:12.700And in some cases, The Guardian is more inaccurate and the bullshit that they're peddling is worse.
00:12:17.340And so I think that to present these as equally significant is inaccurate, in my opinion.
00:12:22.460So in that case, Constantine, like one thing I'd push back on, though, I listened to Rogan's podcast, and we've covered him in a couple of episodes.
00:12:34.720And it's not accurate to kind of present Joe as having just a complete wide variety of perspectives in terms of political takes.
00:12:45.460Generally speaking, generally speaking, he tends to be more in line in modern terms with the right wing positions, like the conservative right.
00:12:55.820I mean, the politicians that he is in favor of are like DeSantis and Bernie Sanders.
00:13:02.060But if Bernie Sanders, Joe said that he would possibly vote for him in the primary.
00:13:09.080And then when it was presented as an endorsement, he himself clarified he wasn't endorsing, just saying he liked Bernie.
00:13:16.500But he had Bernie Sanders on the show, and he had Cornel West on the show, who's a radical leftist professor.
00:13:23.060I'm not, by the way, I wouldn't claim that Joe's show is entirely politically balanced.
00:18:54.260And in the case of the pandemic, my big issue was we mustn't force people to take a vaccine.
00:18:59.840And we mustn't censor people who have even wacky, crazy ideas about COVID, the pandemic or whatever.
00:19:07.540Because at the end of the day, if we want to live in a reliable society, we've got to be able to have these conversations openly.
00:19:13.260And so I was simultaneously not happy that certain people were being promoted and also happy that they were not being censored.
00:19:22.160I know that's a complex position and it sounds quite difficult, but that's the way that I was coming at it from.
00:19:28.480So and I think that that will happen on a lot of issues.
00:19:32.200If you look at the people we had on trigonometry during the pandemic, I think we were a lot more sensible about it.
00:19:38.100We had one guy on who was Dr. Sucharif Bhakti, who I think people would consider very problematic.
00:19:45.880And really, it's not like we were endorsing his point of view.
00:19:52.020We just we wanted to hear what he had to say for himself.
00:19:55.220YouTube then banned that video and gave us a strike for that.
00:20:00.380Based on the rules, the way they updated them at the time, our interview did break the rules of YouTube.
00:20:06.300And we therefore didn't appeal it because we felt it was a fair thing for them to take down.
00:20:10.920And after that, you know, our own views on that issue evolved when we had covered, we put an episode out talking about how bad it was for both me and Francis discussing, you know, our updated views and all of this stuff.
00:20:23.240So, you know, we tried to I certainly always tried to approach it from a position of honest inquiry.
00:20:29.000And my concern with all of this stuff is the mainstream media were not doing honest inquiry.
00:20:33.700They were they became a propaganda wing of the governments, governments, which, as we now know,
00:20:39.640were were prioritizing public health over truth.
00:20:43.220And I don't believe that a government should ever do that.
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00:21:16.540So there's a there's a bunch of points that you made there, Constantine.
00:21:20.440I know I will say that I saw your episode where you discussed with David Fuller, you know, and he was critical about some of the ways that you covered COVID.
00:21:28.480And it was to your credit that you had that discussion with him and he pushed back quite forcefully, I think.
00:21:35.820And also the subsequent discussion that you had with Brett Weinstein on his podcast.
00:21:41.660That just personally speaking, it was very nice to hear someone saying that I don't have the expertise.
00:21:47.000I don't think I should be commenting on this.
00:21:50.860And, you know, not everybody needs to issue their takes on everything.
00:21:55.600People are not experts on every topic.
00:21:57.560So I acknowledge that, you know, you have had I'm not saying that your position on this has been entirely, you know, like just endorsing right wing partisanship or that kind of thing.
00:22:08.020But some of the bits I'd push back on are when it comes to figures like Malone and McCulloch and the the kind of anti-vaccine movement, although traditionally there's been opposition on the left and right, particularly the kind of health and wellness left side of things.
00:22:25.480And the anti-vaccine movement has traditionally had a lot of support from kind of mothers who link it to autism because of Andrew Wakefield and that kind of thing.
00:22:36.880Right. So but but I would definitely say in COVID era, there is a strong right skew to anti-vaccine sentiment and that you can see this by the fact that most of the figures who you're talking about not getting a hearing in mainstream media are regular contributors now to right wing media.
00:22:58.300Fox News are in most cases of the people that appear in Joe Rogan show InfoWars as well, which is like.
00:23:05.820May I may I pause you just for one second? I don't mean to derail you at all.
00:23:09.820I would agree with you in terms of the media that have these discussions, but that's not who's in my experience who's watching that.
00:23:18.500I know loads of people in my life who who would come up to me and go, thank you so much for talking about, you know, the vaccine mandates and all of this.
00:23:28.120And when I speak to them, my sense is they're not political at all and they're certainly not right or left wing.
00:23:33.880So I agree with you that the right wing media grabbed that as an issue and promoted it because it aligns with some of their beliefs.
00:23:42.860I don't think that's who the audience are.
00:23:45.580Obviously, I don't have the empirical data to be able to prove this to you, but I'm just going based on my own experience.
00:23:52.340And I would take the point that there are plenty of people who think there are valid debates to be had about school openings or the length of lockdowns and so on.
00:24:02.100But I tend to think that, you know, I'm not saying there are no missteps or that there aren't cases where there's a skew towards the government's position on like mainstream media or that kind of thing.
00:24:17.080But I do think there was a lot of debate about those topics in the media and like that the media is now such a fractured ecosystem that it was not difficult at all to hear.
00:24:30.140In fact, if anything, it's more like it was very easy to hear the contrarian takes on things and that when it comes to like stuff like vaccines, you know, there always has been a vocal minority anti-vaccine movement with Andrew Wakefield, RFK Jr., these figures, right?
00:24:53.460And typically, they're not given mainstream media coverage because their position is not equally well supported.
00:25:01.060And those figures are now like, for example, Brett Weinstein headlined an event with RFK Jr.
00:25:10.080and Dale Bigtree and a whole cadre of anti-vaccine figures in the UK.
00:25:15.740So the linkages between the like modern kind of critical of COVID vaccines is very tied into the anti-vaccine movement.
00:25:26.540And, you know, in the same way that we don't say we need to give equal hearing to the climate skeptics as the climate scientists,
00:25:35.740it does feel that you can create a false equivalence by seeking out, you know, the kind of meme is in Joe Rogan's forum, for example, that nine out of 10 dentists recommend this.
00:25:46.160Let's get that one dentist and see what he says, right?
00:25:53.140So first of all, I don't think the equivalency you're making between vaccines that have been tried and tested for 30 years and the current conversation about COVID,
00:26:04.380well, not the current conversation, the conversation from around a year ago, are in any way comparable.
00:26:10.320I don't think they're the same issue at all.
00:26:12.200There's a big difference between a set of vaccines that's been around for decades and a new vaccine whose long-term consequences we do not by definition know.
00:26:24.900The second point is I don't think it's true that the contrarian view was represented in the mainstream media at all for the first year or so of the pandemic.
00:26:33.580I mean, I remember the press conferences Boris Johnson was having where never a single journalist ever questioned him about,
00:26:43.600have you done some analysis on how many people lockdowns will kill, right?
00:26:48.400And that is a fundamental input data set that is necessary to make a decision.
00:26:53.920If you're making a decision between two choices, to go left or to go right, you need to know what are going to be the outcomes of the left one
00:27:00.720and what are going to be the outcomes of the right one, estimates at least.
00:27:04.000Otherwise, you cannot make that decision being fully informed.
00:27:07.480So I don't agree with you that it was well represented in the mainstream media.
00:27:11.960In terms of Brett and all of this stuff, the only issue I have with the way we're having this conversation,
00:27:18.720and I'm really enjoying it, is you're kind of getting me to defend other people a lot,
00:27:23.780whereas I prefer that you just attack me and I can speak for myself.
00:27:27.360Because Brett, I can tell you what I think about Brett.
00:27:32.700I disagree with Brett's approach to COVID.
00:27:36.560I also am not qualified to agree or disagree with Brett's approach to COVID,
00:27:40.400but I instinctively do not agree with the way that he's approached it.
00:27:44.140At the same time, Brett is a very good friend of mine.