The Great British Delusion - Konstantin Kisin

0:00Konstantin Kisin:I've bought two mattresses in my entire life. Both times I walked into a shop, lay on it for about four seconds and thought, yeah, that'll do. Genuinely world-class decision-making, which is crazy because you spend a third of your life on the thing and most of us buy one the way you'd buy a toaster. Today's sponsor is Avocado Green Mattress. Certified organic mattresses. No polyurethane foam anywhere near them, just natural materials and they're handmade. The bit that actually got me is you don't have to buy it blind. Avocado has real showrooms plus retail partners across the US. So you can go in, lie down properly, not for four seconds, and work out if it actually suits you before you pay for it.

0:39Konstantin Kisin:They're not everywhere yet, so check the store locator for what's actually near you. Avocado products are made, not manufactured, and thoughtfully crafted with real materials to deliver lasting comfort and support. You can experience them in person at an avocado showroom or a premier retailer near you. Or shop online at avocadogreenmattress.com slash trigger to check out their mattresses and furniture sale. That's avocadogreenmattress.com slash trigger. avocadogreenmattress.com slash trigger. Right, I'm going to level with you. I'm not a gamer, even though I look like one. I'm not going to pretend I've been grinding through RPGs between recordings, or that I have strong opinions about which Final Fantasy was the best one.

1:22Konstantin Kisin:I think it's Japanese and I think there's a sword. That's genuinely everything I know. But our social media guys showed me this app and I genuinely thought, that's quite clever. It's called Snacksy. Basically, game publishers need new players and they're willing to pay to get them. Snacksy just passes that money onto you. You play games you were probably going to play anyway. You own coins and you cash them out for real rewards. PayPal, Amazon, Netflix, gift cards. If you prefer gaming credit, you can redeem for PlayStation, Xbox, Steam and Nintendo or cash out your Ineba wallet. I've got no idea what that means.

1:56Konstantin Kisin:Actual money, not just points that expire. It takes a few minutes to set up. You open the app, swipe through the game offers, pick something that looks decent, play it, earn, redeem. That's the whole thing. There's a sign-up bonus worth up to$10 if you use our link, which is in the description of this episode. That's S-N-A-K-Z-Y, SnackSync. Click the link in the description to get started. And when you sign up, use the code TRIGGERPOD. That's T-R-I-G-G-E-R-P-O-D to claim your$10 bonus. And the app is mobile only, so click the link from your phone, not your laptop. The Great British Delusion.

2:43As regular viewers will know, for several years now, I've been trying to persuade anyone who will listen that if you want to address the widely shared concern about the pace and scale of mass immigration, Britain's most salient political issue, it might be helpful to understand what's actually causing the problem in the first place. The conventional explanation of mass immigration among critical commentators is that woke ideologues in the civil service and the political halls of power, believe that bringing more people into Britain is an unquestionable moral good. On the fringes of the right, some even murmur of the various theories of the so-called great replacement, which range in emphasis from elites bringing in compliant and desperate foreign workers to avoid providing good working conditions and fair wages to native workers, all the way through to Jews conspiring to replace white people with third world immigration.

3:33Whatever the exact flavor this perspective comes in, the idea is that mass immigration is happening for primarily ideological reasons. Likewise, advocates of mass immigration believe that anti-immigration sentiment is also motivated by ideology, hating immigrants or being racist, et cetera, rather than reality. What has been clear to me for some time, however, is that both of these claims are only partially true. Yes, some, as New Labour advisor Andrew Nether explained, wanted to, quote, rub the right's nose in diversity. Yes, many in Britain as a whole and in Westminster in particular think that immigration is an axiomatic moral good.

4:10The problem is, however, that this does not explain why a series of conservative governments elected on increasingly vociferous promises to bring immigration down to the tens of thousands continued to ramp it up. Facing the threat of Farage, who tore chunks out of the Tory vote year after year, they instead proceeded to set new immigration records culminating in 2023 when net annual immigration exceeded 900 ,000. It's also true that some people don't like immigrants, but the idea that this motivates a significant portion of the opposition to mass immigration in a country like Britain is absurd.

4:43According to that infamous far-right anti-immigrant rag, The Guardian, British people are statistically some of the most welcoming towards immigrants in the world. Put simply, both sides are misunderstanding what's happening, often on purpose. My view is that much of the concern about immigration comes from two practical realities. First, mass immigration on this scale is necessarily displacing. I've only lived in Britain for 30 years, and no one can tell me that the country and especially its major cities have not been completely transformed in that time. Many of the people who live in London today are either unconcerned by or actively in favor of these changes.

5:19But that's partly because most of the people who were concerned have left these cities. Now multiply across every city in the country and many of their suburbs. You don't have to dislike people to not want the area where generations of your family were born, lived and died to become alien to you within the space of two decades. In that same time span, the British people have been getting poorer. As I keep saying over and over, Britain's GDP per capita is lower today than it was in 2007 before the great financial crisis. Ironically, this is also why parties of every stripe have brought in millions of people into the country.

5:52We don't evaluate economic performance on GDP per capita. Instead, we measure GDP itself and itself alone. That is the equivalent of measuring how prosperous your household is without accounting for the number of people living in it. A household income of£100 ,000 per year is high by British standards at least, but what matters a lot more than that is how many people are in your household. A single person living on£100 ,000 is in a very different position to a family of five who are effectively getting£20 ,000 each. The explanation for why Labour and the Tories let immigration run rampant was best summed up by legendary investor Charlie Munger when he said, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.

6:32If all you care about is the headline figure, why not hand a bedroom to your in-laws to top up your prosperity with their pension? When described like this, it sounds frankly insane. Yet that is precisely what our politicians are incentivized to do. They are judged on the country's total GDP. The easiest way to increase it when you're busy strangling your economy with net zero, high taxes and endless regulation Bring in more bodies. This really isn't complicated to understand. So why do so many people in Britain who clearly feel the economic pain nonetheless refuse to see it? To see that mass immigration is an attempt by badly incentivized politicians to deceive them about what's actually happening.

7:12Instead, they cling to their support for mass immigration and the seductive but false idea that they are struggling because the rich aren't paying their fair share. A report last month, however, has opened my eyes to another reason. one I had never considered. It turns out many British people think that the decline in their living standards is personal to them, while the rest of Britain is somehow thriving. A big new poll and focus group studies conducted by Freshwater Strategy, with the support of the John Templeton Foundation, asked participants where they thought Britain stood economically compared to our main competitors.

7:45As David Frost put it in his excellent article, voters are living in a dream world. Specifically, nearly half of British voters think that we are as rich or richer than Switzerland. Over half think we're as rich or richer than Australia, Singapore, or Germany. And incredibly, over half of Brits think that our country is as rich as or richer than the United States. Imagine their shock when they were told the truth. We're 10 % poorer than Germany, 20 % poorer than Australia, 40 % poorer than America and Singapore, and only half as rich as the Swiss. Not only are the voters unaware that mass immigration is a deceptive tool deployed by politicians to disguise our poverty, they don't even know we're poor in the first place.

8:29If you thought that Britain was a rich country instead of one that will soon be overtaken by Poland, but also experienced a continual fall in your living standards, would it not be logical to think that you're deliberately being screwed by the people who are thriving? The British economy is not stagnant because we've produced too much of our own oil and gas. It's not struggling because taxes are too low. Our economic woes are not the product of insufficient regulation. But until the public makes the connection, the rapid rise of Zach Polanski and other redistribution enthusiasts is inevitable, even if it means more of the policies that made us poor in the first place.

9:05Our poverty is the direct result of net zero lunacy, welfarism and chasing out anyone who wants to start a business and make it successful. But it turns out many people don't realize that it's not them that's poor, it's the entire country. And if we don't persuade them otherwise, they'll vote for people who'll make things worse again and again. If you enjoy these monologues, remember that they're available as articles on my sub stack at constantinkission.com weeks and sometimes months ahead of time. So head on over there now and subscribe. As you know, I've been concerned about both the economic and political direction of travel of Western countries in recent years.

9:42That being the case, I'm keen to protect my family in case things continue to get worse. That's why I'm making sure to keep a portion of my savings in gold. The reason the price of everything continues to go up is that governments keep printing money. When they do, inflation is inevitable. What does inflation mean? It's just a fancy word for the value of your money being diluted over time. This is what's happened to the value of the dollar in our lifetimes. Gold is a great way to preserve the fruits of your hard work, while the value of your dollars, pounds, and euros is continually being eroded.

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