One American - Chase Geiser - Unpacking the Minds: Dave Rubin and Chase Geiser Analyze the Psychology of the Left

All Episodes

Previous Next

Jan. 19, 2023 - One American - Chase Geiser

25:55

Unpacking the Minds: Dave Rubin and Chase Geiser Analyze the Psychology of the Left

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Welcome to One American Podcast with Dave Rubin today.
	It's an honor and pleasure to have you.
	How are you, sir?
	I'm doing well, Chase.
	As I warned you right before we start, I've got a little construction going on in my house, and I cannot stop them right now.
	They've got like a conduit with the thing, and there's another guy holding something and a vacuum.
	So there might be a little banging in the background.
	Fear not.
	I think we'll get through the show.
	Now, are you in are you in Florida now?
	Are you still in Cali?
	No, no, no, no, no.
	I am I am long gone from Cali.
	Yes, I am a Floridian.
	I live in the free state of Florida.
	I've been here for about a year and a month, but who's counting?
	I love it here.
	They will bury me in the Everglades.
	They can feed me to the gators.
	I love freedom.
	I love sunshine.
	I love the sense of adventure that's here.
	I love the flourishing economy.
	I love the people, everything about Florida from top to bottom.
	I have literally no complaints.
	This is what America is supposed to be.
	And I fled a place that was a communist nightmare, basically.
	Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
	You know, it's funny because I live in Texas and people accuse uh Greg Abbott of copying off of DeSantis all the time.
	And I was like, listen, I've lived in Texas and California.
	I'd rather have a governor who copied off of DeSantis than one who copied off of Castro.
	Right.
	Well, and also it's like, you know what?
	If Abbott does copy off DeSantis, that's pretty good because DeSantis basically has made no missteps.
	He has picked the right fights.
	He's done them effectively.
	You know, obviously the proof is in the pudding in terms of the results of the election.
	The guy won by a ridiculous landslide, 20 points, which is nuts.
	I mean, even Miami Dade County, uh, which is a blue stronghold flipped red.
	There's basically no blue, this one little tiny blue thing, sort of in the Fort Lauderdale area, but that's it.
	Uh he has super majorities on both sides.
	But putting aside politics, he's defending people's right to live as they see fit.
	So if Abbott starts bringing a little bit more of that to Texas, which it's kind of funny that Florida would be leading Texas on the freedom front.
	You always, you know, everyone thought the Alamo, it's far, it's it's Texas on that side of things.
	Uh, but go for it, Abbott.
	Keep copying, man.
	That's what I talk about on the show all the time.
	This is the blueprint of freedom.
	So if we can strengthen that in Texas and in Tennessee and in South Dakota and some of the other red states, great.
	I don't think the blue states are coming along for the ride, but so be it.
	I think it's a time zone thing, you know, with you being Eastern time and here in Texas, we're in central time.
	I think that Adam wakes up and he's like, oh shit, the Santa's been working an hour.
	That's funny.
	He's always an hour behind.
	Right.
	He's always an hour behind.
	That's not too bad.
	Not too bad.
	So I have like a miscellaneous thing that I want to talk to you about, something that I would I was thinking about yesterday.
	So I'm a big, big fan of Elon Musk.
	And um, obviously what he's doing with Twitter, and I'm a fan of blockchain technology.
	It's I don't really invest in crypto because it's too risky for me, but I'm still very fascinated and interested in the technology.
	And I'm also actually a big fan of Grimes, his uh, you know, former partner, right?
	Yeah.
	Or partner, former, who knows if it's former not, whatever, it's partner.
	And so yesterday I had somebody on it on a different podcast that I host for Entrepreneur Magazine, um, who is an avid cryptocurrency investor.
	And I asked him, I was like, do you think that Elon Musk is Satoshi Nakamoto?
	And he's like, I'm not gonna speculate.
	I'm not gonna speculate.
	Yeah.
	So get this, man.
	So I'm listening to Grimes' single from this year.
	It's called Shinigami Eyes, right?
	And if you read the lyrics, it seems like it's basically kind of like a breakup song, but not really.
	And it came out sort of around some of the time of the tumultuousness, um, about you know, almost a year ago now.
	And I looked up Shinigami Eyes, and it's from an anime series in 2006-2007 called Death Note.
	And Shinigami Eyes were these like magical eyes that a person has where when they look at you, they can see your real name above your head, and you have to know someone's real name in order to be able to cast a spell on them in this anime show, right?
	And I'm like, oh my God, she's singing Shinigami Eyes about Elon Musk.
	Does that mean when she looks at him, she knows his real name?
	Like Satoshi Nakamoto, right?
	It's like, I know all your secrets, you know?
	And I'm like, I that she's like throwing like a hey babe at him in this song.
	I mean, you're going deep here, man.
	You know, look, I've heard all sorts of things.
	You know, people have said that Elon Musk might be Satoshi.
	I've heard the teal might be Satoshi.
	There's, you know, there's all sorts of theories on this thing.
	I don't know enough about Grimes per se to confirm Nor deny your accusation or your crazy conspiracy theory.
	My crazy conspiracy, yeah.
	Absolutely.
	So one of the things I wanted to talk to you about on this show is um specifically building a conservative voice online in this sort of age.
	So I started this podcast um just a handful of weeks after the whole January 6th fiasco.
	And it wasn't because I was pro-January 6th by any means, but I was very, very off-put by the mischaracterization of it as like this massive insurrection to me, it was a protest that got rowdy.
	That's sort of how I refer to it for as perhaps a less uh a less sensitive than should be characterization.
	But to me, it was just a protest that got out of hand.
	And obviously it was unfortunate that people died.
	But uh this this characterization of it is an insurrection and just this this misbranding of the Trump presidency and and and the legacy really just I was like, Oh, I know how to do a start of podcast because I'm I have a background in digital marketing.
	And so for the last year and a half, I've been building my my my following on Twitter.
	Um I've only got 140,000 followers, but I just started about a year and a half ago.
	And um my question for you is how did you build the following that you built?
	And if you had to start from zero today, how would you do it in this landscape?
	Yeah, well, I'll answer the the second part first, which is that if I was doing it today, you know, the landscape has changed significantly.
	So, you know, over the let's say the last 10 years of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, things that have come and gone, like Vine, Instagram, you know, all of these things.
	10 years ago, they all looked very different.
	And our behavior related to our phones was very different.
	You know, 10 years ago, this thing was freaking exciting.
	Like, remember there was that that couple year span where every day there was a new app that you wanted to download, a new cool thing happening, Uber appears out of nowhere, Google Maps, you can get to different places.
	Uh, you can hook up, you can whatever it might be.
	You can get food delivered to your house.
	Angry birds really what's that?
	Angry Birds.
	Remember that?
	Angry Birds.
	Yeah, it's all there, right?
	But now it's like, I mean, really think about it.
	When's the last time you downloaded an app that you were excited about?
	Like you might find something every now and again, but you know, it's few and far between now.
	We feel like we've kind of gotten to the other side of everything, or you put something like TikTok on your phone, which I do not have, by the way, and it becomes Chinese spy where you know you're you're basically your whole digital life.
	So if I was doing it now, um, I'd have to look completely differently at all of it because when I was doing it in the first place, I just started putting stuff up.
	You know, it was like, I'm gonna get on YouTube and put some stuff up.
	Let's see what happens.
	Like it wasn't really that you could fully make a career out of being on YouTube.
	And then I really used the other things.
	So Facebook and Instagram, and particularly Twitter, which is where I spend most of my digital life for better or worse.
	They were all to leverage, hey, I'm building something that I think is good on YouTube, which of course was the Rubin report.
	Now we're we're doing it with Rumble and have a whole bunch of other things going on.
	And I also started my own tech company in the middle of it, locals, which then merged with Rumble and all that.
	So if I was doing it now, I think the main thing that I would fear is that there's just a massive oversaturation of the market.
	It's like there everybody in their brother has a podcast.
	You know, when I was starting, I was one of the first people to do long form interviews again.
	Obviously, I didn't invent the long form interview.
	I grew up watching Larry King, humans have been talking one-on-one forever.
	Uh, but my feeling was, you know, everything was getting shorter, Instagram and Snapchat and Vine, things were getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
	I thought this is not good for society.
	We need to be able to have, you know, kind of long conversations about things, really hopefully sit with down with some people we disagree with or maybe see things a little bit differently.
	And you can't really do that in six-second videos.
	So let me do an hour-long interview, really without an agenda and see what happens.
	So that that is I would be a little leery now of doing all that because now it feels like if the system allows you in, you're in.
	And if the system doesn't allow you in, you're not in.
	You know, if you're talking about something dangerous now, you don't know what that algorithm's doing to you.
	I don't think the algorithms, and and maybe this is naivete, but I don't think the algorithms were so stacked against all of us, uh, say 10 years ago, the way they are now.
	So that's tough.
	But in terms of the first part of your question, just sort of generally how I did it.
	I mean, I really just think I started saying what I believed.
	It really was that simple.
	I I think 50 years from now, you know, when I'm 90 something, If they, if anyone cares to look back on my career, I think one thing that will really stand well for the test of time is that I was very honest about my political evolution as it was happening.
	You can really see it happening in real time.
	You can see me trying to work through the issues in real time.
	And I would say uh honestly getting to the other side of it.
	A lot of people, they start moving away from sort of the leftist group thing thing, and then they get to this spot that they get stuck at.
	I would put, say, like a Sam Harris or a Barry Weiss or a Bill Maher in this thing where they get all of the stuff right, but the final step of, well, you can't be a Democrat anymore.
	Really have to understand what centralized power is.
	You're gonna have to step away from some of the things that you really held dear.
	They kind of get stuck there.
	I think I think what has worked for me, and it was really just because it was what I thought was was right and true, was once I had evidence of stuff and really started talking to people on their side, I just kept going.
	I kept going.
	And it doesn't mean I'm right about everything.
	It doesn't mean I have every answer about everything.
	But I think people have appreciated seeing that happen in real time.
	And then through that, I was able to refine my ideas.
	I think I became a better communicator when I do these kind of things and a better interviewer.
	And now I do my daily show where it's really just my thoughts, which is very different than when I was on the other side of the interview.
	So uh I just think being real is the key.
	You you don't have to agree with me, you don't you don't have to like me.
	Uh, but if you're if you're real about what you're doing, I'll I'll respect you for it, truly.
	And I think other people will too.
	Well, and obviously, you know how hostile the online environment can be from both the right and the left.
	I've seen it on my own Twitter, for example, too.
	And if you if you change positions on anything, especially if it's perceived as abrupt, there's accusations of accusations of grifting and things of that nature.
	And you know, when I think about this in the context of what's happened historically in terms of demographic political affiliations and thinking in our country, look at the hippie generation.
	A lot of the a lot of the 19 sort of 69 and 1980 crowd, they switched teams.
	They were like hippie burning the draft card, left wingers.
	And then they that it's like what makes up the baby boom sort of conservative population today.
	And so, really what we have now is a situation in which the social media has existed for long enough that for the first time we've actually seen a generation of people go through that stage of their life when they're sort of like a young idealist to like a more conservative.
	I I think everybody's an idealist, but you know, they they switch from left more left-leaning to right-leaning, right?
	It's like the the famous expression that if you're if you're young and you're not a Democrat, you don't have a heart.
	And if you're old and you're not a conservative, you don't have a brain, right?
	Right.
	But I I think that, you know, maybe that's what we saw with you over the years is you just kind of grew in your political beliefs, and it was one of the first instances of a person of note being documented doing so.
	Yeah, I I actually think that's a pretty good assessment of what happened.
	It happened publicly.
	I, you know, I was on the Young Turks, which was a far left progressive network, and people saw some of my distancing with them.
	And then it obviously exacerbated and and everything else.
	And then when I left, um, you know, I was somewhat critical of them, but it really was about the ideas.
	Like you can't find a million videos of me going after them personally.
	They're always, even now, seven years later or whatever it is, they're always going after me.
	I just completely ignore it.
	You still get a Christmas card.
	There are no Christmas cards.
	These are people that some of them were invited to my wedding years after I left the young Turks that now say just the most disgusting things about me.
	And I don't address any of them.
	I I don't care if I don't care to fight with individual people.
	You know, on my show, the way I do the show, yeah, I'll, you know, if we show a clip of the view, I make fun of them, obviously.
	But there is this weird thing online where the lefties online seem to devote all day long to going after the righties online.
	And the righties don't really do it the other way.
	Like I, if you were to look at, say, me and Shapiro and Crowder and Glenn Beck or whoever you want to add to that mix, how many videos do we all do about our detractors?
	Pretty much none.
	They're all day long doing videos about Ben Shapiro's evil and Ruben's a grifter and Crowder's a racist and all this stuff.
	It's like, it's so boring, man.
	I'm not interested in that.
	I'm I'm hopefully trying to get people to understand a little bit more about individual liberty, living your life as you see fit, hopefully building a decent family and community and and defending the things that people who were much braver than us had to defend before us.
	That that's what I'm interested in.
	But yeah, I think it all kind of happened honestly and in front of the camera.
	And I guess I was one of the first people that that was happening for uh because of YouTube and everything else.
	And that just caught on.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Well, and one of the things that I've noticed too is that a lot of the sort of right wing content that I follow and create 99% of it is antagonistic toward actual left-wing figures, the politicians themselves.
	Yeah.
	But when you when you follow the sort of the left-wing content, most of the antagonism is towards the Trump supporters.
	So they've almost moved on from like bashing Trump to just like if you if you support them, you're evil, right?
	And it's it's so weird because like from the right, you don't really see a lot of hate for any American people, even if they're left wing.
	The hate is for like the political class or the left-wing political class, even the Republican political class, like the actual establishment, you know, party.
	But but from the left, you actually see hatred of half of America, man.
	Well, well, that shouldn't surprise you in a way.
	You know, I always talk about the thin veneer of tolerance and diversity that the lefties have because they're always preaching tolerance and diversity and rainbows and all of this stuff.
	But really, I mean, you know, you scratch a progressive and you usually find a pretty nasty authoritarian.
	You can get these people to turn and say the most vile things almost with no effort.
	I mean, just look at two plus years of COVID and the things that they were saying about people who did not want to get vaxxed or did not believe in mandates.
	They were killers.
	Grandma killer, I mean, the most vile things you can imagine, they were also for getting these people fired from their jobs.
	We're talking about doctors and nurses who I thought, you know, these were the indispensable people, but then they wanted to get rid of them.
	And you know, it's like, well, wait a minute, why is that?
	And the reason that that is, I think is actually fairly simple.
	They love power.
	The the progressive or lefty, whatever you want to call them, they want the world to bend to them.
	I'm actually not that interested in that.
	I'm interested in understanding the world, and then hopefully on the margins, maybe I can shift it a little bit.
	Maybe, maybe, maybe not.
	Maybe none of us can really shift the machine in a real way.
	But but I'm not demanding that the world bow to me.
	They seem to want the world to bow to them.
	If they only had enough power, if their political people were only in charge, if they only had more tax money from this person or that person, then they could correct everything.
	That just seems to me to be uh naive.
	It's sort of what you described before of the hippies.
	It's like it's like a youthful naivete.
	It's it's a simplistic view of the world.
	It's actually, I would say, a complete misunderstanding of how humans operate.
	I think the best you can do is live right for yourself and hopefully your family and your local community.
	And maybe you can make things a little bit better on the margins that way.
	But they view the world in a top-down way.
	And I think those of us who care about liberty view it as a bottom up.
	And that that is the that is the constant thing that's at loggerheads.
	I don't disagree with that analysis at all, but I do have another insight that I'd be interested in hearing your feedback on.
	Sure.
	So I'm I'm a big fan of Ayn Rand.
	I don't believe everything that she ever said or wrote, but The Fountainhead was a was a major influence on my my coming of age story of 17 when I read the book.
	I finished it on the bus on the way back from a field trip to a Frank Lloyd Wright house of all places.
	Of course, the book's famous for being about an architect.
	So it was like this magical moment of my life, right?
	And it's like click for me because I grew up as a fairly sensitive sort of artistic kid.
	I was very into music and I had like a breakup in high school that was devastating to like my whole being.
	And I read this book and I had like this switch where I realized that if you source self-esteem externally, you're always going to be miserable because you can't control the environment.
	But if you source your self-esteem internally, then you can really withstand anything, right?
	It's like Victor Frankel famously wrote in I believe Man's Search for Meaning is the name of the book, I believe.
	Um you can't change your environment, but you can change how you respond to it.
	That's what you can control.
	And um the reason I mentioned that is because I don't necessarily believe that leftists desire power as a primary.
	I think they desire power as a reaction to their psychology, which is their entire self-esteem and self-worth being Dependent on external validation and external sources with sort of like this void internally means that you have to do things like virtue signal.
	And the more people who disagree with you, the more miserable you feel about yourself.
	And that's where the, in my opinion, where the up against the wall mentality comes, it's like if this person's alive, then I can never be perfect because I'll always know that there's someone out there who disagrees with me.
	You see it from tyrants, right?
	Like from Mao to Hitler or Stalin, whatever.
	And we see it from the political left is like the lower someone's self-esteem is, the more they want anyone who disagrees with them to just be locked up.
	Yeah, I actually I actually think that's pretty spot on.
	And I think that's consistent with then why they want power, why they then want the world to bow to them.
	Once you decide, once you decide that victimhood is virtue, man, that will make you do all sorts of evil things.
	I mean, if you really think about it this way, Hitler felt that he and then by extension, the German people were victims.
	They were victims of this globalist plot, and they were victims of the Jews, and they were victims of these non-Germans and not Aryans.
	And then it got a whole bunch of people riled up to do uh like unimaginably horrific things.
	That psychologically is not that different than what you're describing with with all of these people now.
	They instead, what would any of us want to do?
	Think of any movie, any movie that anyone watching this loves, whatever your favorite movie is.
	Saving Private Ryan, what is it?
	Saving Private Ryan.
	Okay, saving Private Ryan.
	I actually only saw it once, but you know, I know he goes in, he's gotta save the three brothers.
	Okay, who is the main is it's Clooney that's going in to save the brothers, right?
	Okay, yep.
	So it's Tom Hanks.
	Tom Hanks goes in and saves the brothers, right?
	And then I think one of them's Matt Damon.
	I did see it.
	Something, something.
	All the brothers were dead except Matt, and that's why they had to say Matt.
	Right.
	That's why they had to go get Matt.
	Okay, because they didn't want the mom to have all her dead kids.
	Okay, got it.
	Right.
	The point is Tom Hanks went in and they go in.
	Now I remember there's that incredible fight scene.
	Yeah.
	The point is you take to you take saving Private Ryan, you take freaking Avatar Star Wars, take them, take any romantic comedy, wedding crashers.
	It doesn't matter.
	Every single story that we are told is about someone doing something for themselves to get what they want, whether that is love or a victory on the battlefield, or to save their dog, or sit stop the the Death Star from blowing up, you know, Naboo, whatever it might be.
	That was a terrible Star Wars reference, by the way.
	That made no sense.
	The Death Star never tried to blow up Naboo.
	That's okay.
	But but you get it.
	The point is the only part that'll go viral, the whole chat.
	Victim, yeah, exactly.
	Ruben doesn't know anything about the prequels.
	They never tried to blow up that boo.
	Um the point is that victimhood is not virtue.
	Victimhood is the victimhood is the first thing that sucks.
	We're all victims in a way.
	Something bad happened to all of us.
	We didn't have the parents we want, we didn't grow up with all the money we wanted, we didn't get the toy we wanted.
	Our teachers were mean to us, our we were bullied.
	Okay, fine.
	The the story of being a human is figuring out what your hero's adventure is, and then going and getting it.
	These people have decided a much easier route, which is my victimhood will be the fuel for my existence.
	And I will guilt everyone else into operating in such a way that I will somehow be better than them because I am the most uh the the my victimhood is at the pinnacle of this ridiculously uh constructed hierarchy.
	Uh, it doesn't work.
	I agree, it's a it's a psychological flaw.
	And by the way, it's also connected to why if you were to go to any school, any go to any college in America today, the kids who are the biggest social justice warriors, guess what?
	They also literally look the worst.
	And I mean that in terms of they are overweight, they look like they don't shower, they have purple hair, they don't look like they brush their teeth, and then go and find go to your young, go to your turning point uh group at that school, go to the young Americans for liberty or or literally any other group, and these kids look pretty good.
	I'm not making this all about looks specifically, but the point is, these kids have chosen to say, you know what?
	I'm gonna hit the gym every now and again.
	I'm not gonna have donuts for breakfast.
	And that's all connected to what then becomes the political ideology that we're talking about.
	So I've been excitedly reading the reports of the uh the Daily Wire purchasing the rights to do a series on Atlas Shrugged.
	Did you did you see that news?
	I I did see that news, and I think it's absolutely fantastic.
	And I I'll just tell you real quick.
	I think what their challenge really is going to be, because you know, this has been tried many times over the years.
	Yeah.
	And the Atlas Shrugged movies that I'm sure you saw from what 15 years ago or so.
	I actually thought the first one was pretty decent.
	And then the second one, they were, they were in a little too deep, and you know, they had budget constraints and everything else.
	But I thought the first one was actually kind of okay.
	Um, the challenge for them will be that you really got to put the right amount of money into this to make this thing blow up.
	And and hopefully it does because it is, of course, Atlas Shrugged is a story that it's so crazy that it has not been done justice on the screen.
	And it will be wonderful if they can really pull it off appropriately.
	Yeah, I think that I think they will, just because their other content I've really been fond of the movies that they've come out with.
	Yeah.
	Um, I think there's maybe four now, maybe more than that, even.
	But my the reason I bring it up is I wanted to ask you before we get off the this call is um did you audition to be John Galt?
	I didn't audition to be John Galt, but I may just pull a John Galt one of these days.
	That might be how this whole thing ends.
	Do you think they have the money for it?
	Like, all right, we're gonna have Dave Ruben as John Galt.
	I mean, that should be the whole marketing campaign, right?
	Who is John Galt?
	Could be anything from that EW, right?
	It could be any of us.
	Well, look, Sam Harris uh deleted his Twitter.
	He's and he seems to be trying to implode his entire career.
	So maybe that's his way of John Galting.
	Man, I don't know whether to be be angry with him or or or feel bad for him.
	I I'm disappointed, honestly.
	That's the truth.
	Sam and I also were friends.
	I mean, had sure, you know, have had had him and his wife over for dinner at my house many times.
	Um, and to watch him not only go, I would say go off the deep end, I mean, it just keeps getting worse, almost as if he's intentionally doing it, but also that he's kind of turned on all his old friends.
	He doesn't associate with any of us anymore.
	And I think it's because he honestly thinks we're all crazy.
	And it's like, well, Sam, I wasn't wrong about all the vaccine stuff.
	I I don't think I was wrong about what was going on with big tech.
	I don't think I was wrong about what was going on with Trump and all that.
	And and as I said to him privately, uh it just doesn't matter.
	It just doesn't matter if we have political differences.
	There, there's a friendship outside of that.
	So watching this happen with him, I I've tried to be very careful when I've talked about him because it's like we're we're not talking right now, I guess, as friends, but I'm not I'm not trying to destroy the guy, but he's he's just making a lot of like just self-imposed wounds right now.
	So to end the show, where can people find you?
	What are you working on?
	Where can they follow you?
	All that stuff.
	I mean, my main thing right now, beyond obviously doing the Rubin Report is I I started locals a couple years ago, which was a uh it was my foray into building a tech company to fight Patreon because Patreon was censoring a lot of people.
	Patreon's obviously the crowdfunding platform.
	Uh, we eventually we we did it as a startup, we raised funds, we built a great product.
	Uh, we eventually merged with Rumble, and Rumble really is not only the only real YouTube competitor, but also an Amazon AWS competitor.
	That's you know, the the underbelly of the internet, right?
	The infrastructure of the internet.
	And we've got something really great going.
	So I would tell people to check out Ruben Report.locals.com and it's social media that will not make you angry.
	We will hopefully bring a smile to your face.
	Okay.
	It's been it's been an honor and a pleasure to have you, Dave, on on uh One American Podcast.
	And I hope you stay in touch and you'll come back and join us again sometime.
	Chase, I enjoyed talking to you anytime.
	Absolutely.
	Take care, man.
	Good luck with those contractors.

▲