Dave Rubin has always sought out a career in the spotlight, beginning with stand-up comedy and then becoming a pundit (of sorts) on shows like the Young Turks. From there he (in)famously came to present himself as one of those classical liberals forced to 'leave the left'. He was also one of the honorary members of the Intellectual Dark Web although it is fair to say he primarily served as a conduit rather than a primary contributor. So, where does he stand now? Is he the heterodox classical liberal and centrist he once claimed? Or is he a reactionary and conspiratorial hyper-partisan right-wing pundit? It's the second thing. It's obviously the second thing. Everyone knows.But could he be anything more than that? Does he fit the secular guru template beguiling us with pseudo-intellectual, polymathic and galaxy-brained takes? Or just a slightly more acceptable version of Alex Jones without the drinking problem?Well, in this episode we'll figure it out. To be honest, it's not very complicated. The riddle of Dave Rubin is not so much a deep rabbit hole as a minor depression in the ground. So... Enjoy?P.S. We also talk (probably for too long) about "discourse surfing" in relation to topics like the lab leak and why you shouldn't do it. Don't worry. There are bookmarks, so you can skip it if you want (though you shouldn't really, it's good).LinksCritical Profile of Dave Rubin by Ross Anderson at QuilletteGreta Thunberg Gets Caught by Rebel News & Her Response Is Bizarre | Direct Message | Rubin ReportDave Rubin | Club Random with Bill MaherFor 'Discourse Surfing' see Stuart Ritchie's article at inews. Stop blindly believing or dismissing the Covid lab-leak theory – focus on the evidenceThe Wall Street Journal article that reignited the Lab Leak conversationOur previous episode 'Calibrating the Gurometer'
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, a podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Professor Matthew Brown.
With me is my trusty junior co-host, Associate Professor Chris Kavanagh, the Man Friday to my Robinson Crusoe, but nevertheless an indispensable part of the podcast.
Thanks for joining us, Chris.
Roger, Roger.
You're looking well today.
Looking youthful, full of vim and vigor.
Not the kind of guy that would be having a nap at midday or too worn out the podcast.
That's what I like to see.
That's what I like to see.
It's true.
It's true.
We were meant to be recording this yesterday.
I felt too weary.
So weary.
Just got a message saying, my old bones, they're acting up.
Yeah, it's true.
It takes a certain level of inner gumption to be able to tackle Dave Rubin and you, Chris.
But I think I'm up to speed.
I'm grinding the old bones.
I just want to remind everyone that the reason we're doing Dave Rubin today is that we were intending to do Dave Rubin and Bill Maher together to get them both out of the way.
We don't want to do.
Dave Rubin.
Nobody wants to talk about Dave Rubin.
But we went to the baller of listening to him and clipping him.
So we're not having done that for nothing.
We have to make the episode.
But we do realize that Bill Maher and Dave Rubin are not fantastic fits for the Guru template.
No.
It's kind of an open and shut.
Like, if this was like a Sherlock Holmes novella, it would be like three pages.
Oh, it was the guy with the knife.
If it was a house episode, it'd be like, oh, you've got the common cold.
It's always Lupus.
Yeah, so, you know, look, Bill Maher is going to show up again, but now you have the ground prepped for him from our previous episode.
And the people who...
Complained, the small number of people who complained, which is all right.
We're open to feedback that Bill Maher doesn't fit the template.
I just want to explain to them one thing, which is this show, we have a garometer thing, which we sometimes reference, which is because we were covering people who were a little bit different and varied on different axes that we decided to try and quantify.
In a way, the differences between them.
And so we came up with these 10 factors that we commonly see.
And for each person that we cover, we rate them on those factors.
And people score differently.
Some of the people we score, score very high on the Secular Guru template.
Some of the people don't score highly.
This is actually good.
Having some people that are in the middle or score lowly.
One, it's just useful to have a distribution, a variation.
Of the people so that you can see the difference between the people that completely fit the template.
But two, it helps people realize that it does not mean that somebody not fitting the secular guru template is someone that we like.
I don't like Bill Maher very much, and he didn't score highly on the Grometer.
That doesn't mean, oh, I really love Bill Maher, and that's why I, you know, scored him relatively low overall.
It's just that he doesn't fit that template.
So this is a good thing to emphasize that I suspect, I don't know yet, that Dave Rubin will score middling because he might want to be a guru, but he's a bit of an idiot.
So, yeah.
But he's just, you know, a partisan pundit.
And partisan pundit is not what secular...
Guru means.
They often are partisan pundits as well.
It's not the core of the definition category.
Okay.
So what you're saying is that this guru pejorative isn't just a way for us to stick it to characters that we don't like or are ideologically opposed to.
It's actually science.
That's what you're saying.
It's proof, Matt.
It just depends on what day of the week or what mood you catch us in as to how we're using it.
But yes, typically speaking, we are...
Striving to use it in a less pejorative sense, or at least allow that there could be bad non-gurus and good gurus.
Although, to be honest, if you score highly, this is the part that's a little bit confusing because a lot of the...
Factors are negatively villains, like conspiracy mongering, grievance mongering, and so on.
So if you're doing those, the chances that you're a good secular guru is probably quite low.
But there may be good secular gurus out there.
We're on the search.
We're on the search.
It's very complicated.
See, even you're getting confused.
For anyone who's struggling to follow along, there's at least three different ways in which you can define a group.
Firstly, it could be someone we cover.
Someone who meets the bar to actually be covered on our show.
They're on the show called Decoding the Gurus.
Ergo, we must think they're gurus to decode.
That's one way.
Then there's the, you know, they actually are kind of a secular guru.
Like Carl Sagan, he's kind of like a guru character, but he doesn't show many of those toxic traits.
And then the scoring high on our gurometer, which is the more...
He's like a toxic secular guru skill.
Really.
I can't understand why people keep getting confused by this.
It's very straightforward.
It's so straightforward.
Very straightforward.
We've explained this many times.
Yeah, so just, you know, if you want to understand, what you need to do is join the Patreon and listen to the Negrometer episodes.
I believe there's an episode in the back catalogue somewhere called Calibrating Negrometer.
Go hunt that out.
You'll get the concept.
It's all clearly explained.
And I never disagree on what the definitions of individual factors or what you should use to determine your score.
So, yeah, that's it.
It's all clear now.
Yeah, that's good advice.
Good advice.
Yeah.
If you don't want to get sort of verbally subtweeted on this show, called out for not understanding, pay us money.
You've got to listen to extra content and things will be clearer.
Listen to us model the definition even more in more depth.
Yeah, so another thing that has happened recently, you may have noticed, was in the discourse.
There was a change of a conclusion in a report concerning the likelihood of one lab leak origin for the novel coronavirus that we've all been enjoying these past few years.
And the discourse online has been very measured.
People, you know, are just taking it as a piece of new information, putting it in and kind of adjusting their probabilities in a reasonable manner.
And they're not stooping into partisan blowhardery.
It's been just fantastic to see that people have been so reasonable and restrained.
Oh yeah, yes.
Yeah, definitely.
Like, Brett Weinstein definitely wasn't poised.
Like somebody about to sprint 100 meters and then has been frantically running victory laps until he's been getting dizzy.
That's the kind of thing that hasn't happened.
That's what you're saying.
No.
This is sarcasm.
This is sarcasm.
We need to flag this up on occasion.
That has happened.
Everybody lost their shit.
Cats and dogs living together.
The sky was falling.
A report from the Department of Energy in America.
An organization in which, it's true, everyone was waiting.
Everybody was on pentahooks to see, are they going to revise their conclusion or not?
Because that's the domino where everything falls.
And so in any case, they revised their conclusion and they ascribed that for...
They haven't actually spelled out the reasons, but it seems to be from their assessment of some intelligence sources or whatnot that they think it's more likely, right?
But they put the confidence as low.
So they have a low confidence conclusion that their probability is higher for the lab leak.
And this has led to everyone and their muller on the internet who has been promoting the lab leak essentially declaring it Fiat accompli.
That's it.
That's it.
You know, look, you all lied.
You all said it wasn't possible.
Now who's laughing?
The Department of Energy has made its conclusion.
It's low confidence conclusion.
So what are you going to say?
And anytime this happens, and this does happen, Matt, this endlessly happens.
It's happened months ago whenever there was a ProPublica Vanity Fair pieces.
It happened.
A year before that, whenever there was some intelligence head that made a statement, when the head of the WHO makes a statement, periodically this happens.
There is an article that comes out where somebody or some organization expresses that the lab leak is a possible origin or is a likely origin.
And then lab leak, Twitter...
Heterodox Twitter lose their mind and just run all over the place screaming that this is it.
So what do you think of me now?
Look at me now.
Look, look, they admit it.
They admit it.
They finally admit it.
Yeah, we broke through the mainstream barrier.
Now we're taking over.
So this is related to this thing that's very frustrating, which you've called discourse surfing, which I really quite...
Like, as a concept.
And it obviously applies not just to lab leak, but to so many different things where instead of people paying attention to the aggregate body of evidence and expert opinion, whatever, that exists out there, which does change over time, generally in an incremental,
slow kind of way that generally isn't kind of these new revelations causing all the scientists to sort of go, oh my god, I've completely changed my mind now.
At the same time, there's the discourse layer on top of that, and it could be some Vox article, it could be a New York Times article, it could be a statement from some politician or some government department, whatever.
It's all the discourse, and people are seemingly extremely reactive to this discourse in both directions.
So, they could be reacting against some article or opinion where they might have been a bit bullish on something like masks or lab leak or something like that.
And then they go, now they said this and now they said this.
It's all discourse.
This is all some combination of journalists and pundits and various public figures making some public statement.
It isn't the underlying body of evidence or body of credible expert.
Yeah, so you could read it as the Department of Energy has relevant experts, they've got new information that has caused them to revise their assessment, and this adjusts your assessment of the likelihood.
But if it's hugely swinging it, like...
That's strange because there's been other intelligence agencies and other institutional bodies which have reached alternative conclusions, right?
Which either say there's not enough evidence or judge it not likely and there's ones that judge it likely, right?
So why this particular piece of information or why it is every month or two months when there's an article that comes out and quotes someone?
That you're so dramatically shifted is the thing which surprises me.
Because if you're really invested in this, I feel like you should be paying attention to the research literature.
And you might reach different conclusions from the research literature, but there's nothing really new that came out.
And most of the scientists involved have responded to this to point that out, that there's just a...
Low confidence conclusion shift in one American agency, but also to state quite clearly, almost all of them, if there is some smoking gun new evidence that emerges, that shifts the probabilities, that they will acknowledge that and shift their conclusions,
but they haven't seen it yet.
And every past occasion that this occurs, it's turned out to be much less impressive.
And there is this weird standard whereby the very people who constantly bemoan that mainstream media narratives are these are the things which are problematic and you can't trust government organizations and it's all like all of those narratives they just completely dissolve anytime an article appears that supports A heterodox alternative position.
It's like none of those critiques apply, except for the most conspiratorially minded who, like Brett Weinstein, for example, noted that Sam Harris released this episode recently on the lab lick with Lena Chan and Matt Ridley.
And then he noted that the Wall Street Journal article came out recently.
And then he just pondered, is there some connection?
Like, you know, is Sam, was Sam aware of this article or was there behind the scenes collusion between some shadowy elite of, you know, opinion makers who now have decided for some reason that Lively can be given more credibility?
And no, there isn't.
And actually, although there has been at times heavy-handed moderation, like Facebook, for example, had some thing which said, like, if you promote...
The lab leak has been an artificial thing that this wasn't permitted.
But as far as I can tell, pretty much all of the lab leak advocates were not kicked off Facebook.
I think the main thing that Facebook suppressed was presenting it as a bioweapon or that kind of thing, right?
Like leaning into that.
But then they changed that policy over a year ago in 2021 in response to some articles.
Coming out, right?
So, the notion that this topic has been taboo, I wish that were the case, because if it were, I wouldn't have had to hear about it every freaking month for years now.
So, like, to me, it's not covered constantly in the mainstream, but there's been a steady drip of discussion on it.
And usually in the articles...
That discuss the possibility.
The experts have these quotes where they say things like, we cannot rule out the possibility of a lab leak entirely.
The journal articles all make these points when you read it.
They say the evidence, scientific evidence for these reasons leads us to conclude that a natural origin is much more likely.
However, we cannot rule out entirely the possibility of a lab leak.
So it hasn't been taken off the table.
It's just that the scientists, for various reasons, Believe that it's unlikely.
The majority of scientific evidence, the weight of evidence, leans towards it not being a lab leak.
And that's where they draw their assessment from.
So it's just, it's difficult to handle the discourse because there's so many people who just want you to react to an article headline.
And this is a journalist who previously made a big thing about reports about people being sick.
I think we're good to go.
sick in the given time frame.
But in any organization, people get sick in the winter.
You know, you'd need to have evidence that they were sick with COVID or COVID-like symptoms for it to be a big story.
But the journalist presented it like that.
So you already knew where his sympathies were.
So, him publishing an article which does report things relatively accurately, but which is kind of framed as this is a big deal, it's not surprising.
It's just normal.
Like, some journalists are quite strongly in favor of the lab being the most likely possibility.
Well, and in general, journalists are in favor of a good story.
It's their job.
I mean, people should be used to this by now.
You remember when dark chocolate would cure cancer and, oh no, now...
Now dark chocolate will kill you.
Maybe she'll drink one glass of red wine a day.
I mean, journalists just have that tendency because it's very hard to write a story, an article, without making it out to be, you know, a bit of a big deal.
It's an unfortunate thing, but that's just how it is.
I mean, one of the things we see with the lab leak is a very common complaint that they're being ostracized, that they're being, you know, labeled conspiracists.
For merely wanting to discuss the possibility that such a thing might be the case, where, as you said, this is simply not true.
It's discussed and has been discussed extremely seriously in the scientific literature.
So two things can be true, right?
On one hand, it can be less likely on the basis of evidence that lab leak occurred.
It can be reasonable to still put forward, you know, to marshal the evidence for that position and explain the reasons why.
You're doing it.
At the same time, there can be and were very lurid conspiracy theories circulating around bioweapons and sort of crazy stuff, or even stuff which may not be crazy, but it is a conspiracy theory.
Just recently, we've heard Alina Channon.
Matt Ridley, talk about this conspiracy of silence around researchers, not just the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but international virologists everywhere.
We're going to talk about the origins of COVID, but in the background and perhaps explicitly, we're also talking about the political corruption of science and a fundamental lack of transparency on the part of public health officials and attendant failures of cooperation.
I first started wondering about where this pandemic had come from.
I had no idea about this whole history of collaboration between not just the US, but many other countries across Asia and Europe with labs in China to do quite risky virus work that might have led to this pandemic.
So here, it's not just whether Western scientists are afraid of provoking China.
It's really a question of, are they also complicit?
And in the origin of COVID-19.
And over the last few years, we've seen again and again a lot of support within the US for exactly that type of dangerous virus research that's commonly known now as gain-of-function research.
So if the pandemic did start from a lab in Wuhan, it is not just a Chinese government issue.
It is actually an issue that affects multiple countries, many countries who have all supported and endorsed and engaged in this work.
And the US is a big funder of it.
So they would have almost equal responsibility, I think, in my eyes.
It is a case that Western virology feels worried that its entire research program, indeed the whole of biotechnology, might lose its funding, might lose its social license if a major accident is revealed to have happened as a result of work in I mean,
whether or not you agree with them, they are alleging a conspiracy and they are basically pointing at that conspiracy for why there is a lack of evidence for their position.
So it seems a bit difficult for people to imagine.
Yep, you have people like Brett Weinstein getting on his high horse and demanding an apology for being called a conspiracy theorist because now this government organization has changed their assessment to being Having a low level of certainty that they think it's more likely that it was a lab leak,
even though there are, like, four other U.S. government organizations which have the opposite point of view still.
Yeah.
So, like, a point that's possibly worth emphasizing is that it is possible for people to draw different conclusions about the relative likelihoods, right?
There will always be a distribution of opinions.
On any given topic within a field.
And you will have some people that have outlier views and may hold them for good reasons or bad reasons or consensus positions can be wrong.
They have been in the past.
All of this is true.
But it is also true that there is a conspiracy ecosystem which exists online and which grows up around topics like these.
And the lab leak is no exception.
There are people In that community that behave exactly like 9 /11 truthers, exactly like climate skeptics.
There are genuine parallels with the lab leak online community.
You can see it in the tactics that they use, which are things like anomaly hunting, like focusing on out of context snippets of emails and presenting the scientists involved as Nefarious,
arrogant elitists who are trying to manipulate the public and they're just interested in securing research grants and they've been arrogantly playing God and now they're being captured.
Like the kind of very stereotypical conspiracy image.
And you also do see this thing about researchers being smeared, having their home addresses and whatnot being doxxed, family members targeted.
And they're becoming partisan targets.
Now, if you think that they are doing all of these things that are alleged, they're covering up the origins of the virus and they are colluding with the Chinese state to suppress important information,
then they are seen as fair game, right?
Because they're morally corrupt and bringing these...
Villains to light is justified, right?
But it should be clear that that is the image that has constantly been presented about climate researchers, about 9-11 investigations, the engineers, right?
That's the way that they're presented.
Yeah, about the people creating the vaccines as well.
Yeah, yeah.
And so that does not mean that any discussion, of the lab leak falls into the category of lurid conspiracism but that is a component of that whole ecosystem and it is very often the case that you see people not distinguish between the two and repeating the rhetoric of the more hardcore conspiratorial members of the lab leak community and
I understand it's like it is a tricky But what would be useful if you had an interest in the topic is to, yes, no problem, to listen to the people advance the reasons that they believe there's a conspiracy of silence or that they believe that a lab leak origin is more likely.
But also, go and listen to the experts respond to that.
Go and listen to them in long-form content.
Outline why they hold the views that they do.
Or, if you're capable of it, read the summary papers that are published attempting to summarize the evidence.
Because that gives you the counter opinion.
And that is why there is, I think, such a large delta between public perception and the general expert opinion.
Because the experts are basing their position largely on the scientific evidence.
And the public is not.
It's all this discourse.
It's this maelstrom.
And if it turns out that there has been this cover-up and the Chinese government engaged in all these nefarious actions, I guarantee that the people that uncover it will be people doing careful investigatory reporting.
It will not be the discourse-surfing conspiracy-prone people.
No, it won't be pundits taking hot shots on social media.
So look, it absolutely is challenging.
It's just human nature, I think, to focus your attention on whatever the newest...
I think we're both sympathetic because it is very hard to avoid because we're not experts in these things.
We rely...
Sensibly on somebody else to synthesize that evidence for us.
That's the right thing to do.
But that makes us quite...
Vulnerable to being influenced by whatever the latest thing is that's coming along and be more influenced by people who are, for instance, a science journalist writing a popular book rather than the more boring, less accessible opinions that are often buried in research labs or whatever.
So, the final thing that makes it hard for us all is we've got this confirmation bias.
The very same people who would totally dismiss some They would totally dismiss that if that organisation was saying something like,
I don't know, masks are really important, you have to wear them, right?
As untrustworthy, because it's the government and because they haven't shown the evidence or whatever.
So there's that very selective scepticism that comes into play.
Me and Chris, you can tell from listening to us that we're dummies as well with these things, but it's just good to ask yourself questions when these things come along, like how much has the evidence base or consensus expert opinion changed as a result of this new thing that's come along?
Is it really a smoking gun or is it just another little thing to add on the pile of existing evidence?
Where do my own kind of sympathies lie?
Am I more likely to believe statements that go in one direction rather than the other?
So, yeah, it's kind of like folk epistemology, right?
It's just people trying to have good opinions or have accurate opinions about how the world works.
And it's not particularly easy, but that's what we've got to do.
Yeah, like the one point that I will finish on, Matt, that I think is true is that I do think at times researchers, Do not do themselves favours by being more transparent about things,
how they reach decision or whatever.
And I think the public health authorities did the same thing.
I understand the reasoning why they made the decisions that they did, but I think they backfire because they don't explain.
So like in some cases of researchers that said, look, I thought initially that the virus was lab made.
Because it has these features.
But I changed my opinion because of X, Y, and Z, right?
Then I think that would be more well-received than people more sticking to the final conclusion and not trying to introduce doubt.
But I understand why they don't do that.
But I think that would have helped.
Yeah, look, on a very similar note, I think in hindsight, some people have suggested that it would have been better for public health authorities when they're giving public health advisories in relation to something like COVID to always have that
disclaimer, which is that this is our best guess based on
I appreciate, on one hand, the perceived imperative to keep public health messaging simple and direct and not introducing uncertainty.
That's just what you need to do when you are giving public advice.
When you're not sure, when the evidence is unclear, we're seeing how it can contribute to increased public distrust of science and public health authorities because it's perceived as lying, as flip-flopping, etc.
So yeah, I agree with you.
Yeah, so the topic will come up again endlessly, I anticipate.
But just to say there is an option where Whatever conclusion that you reach on the various likelihood, and I genuinely mean it when I say that I think for the vast majority of us, whatever assessment is, is completely irrelevant because we lack the expertise to properly assess things,
right?
So like what most people on Twitter think is the most likely, it doesn't matter.
Like what I think, it doesn't matter, right?
What matters is...
People who understand the evidence and where they draw the probabilities and the general way of evidence.
But also with that, if you want to be very invested in this and you think it's important for whatever reasons, just try not to be reactive to every new headline that comes out.
Whether it supports...
Your position or whether it contradicts it.
Take the cumulative perspective.
Overall, how much evidence is there?
What does this new piece of evidence adjust or not adjust?
And that's the thing which so few people seem to be doing.
They're just like ping-ponging between headlines.
And currently, there's a bunch of headlines saying lab leak is likely.
And so there's a big thing about it.
Well, now they're admitting the lab leak is likely.
There will likely be a bunch of other headlines in a second wave in a while which says, actually, this was oversold and the thing remains unlikely.
These things come in waves and it'll be a reaction to those headlines and so on.
And that's what I'm talking about, discourse surfing.
Underlying that, all that's happened is a organization changed a low-confidence conclusion in a report.
And you'd be better waiting on just more papers.
Coming out, more investigations, like proper investigations, not partisan political ones.
And yeah, that's it.
We've said a lot about it, but it comes up so frequently and it's going to continue coming up.
There will be another article and headlines in another six months' time and the same thing will happen again.
Yeah.
No, no, I think it's a good thing.
Anything that's helpful for making us a little bit less vulnerable to Punditry.
It's a good thing.
And on brand for Decoding the Gurus.
And you know what is also on brand for Decoding the Gurus, Chris?
Decoding.
Oh, yeah.
Decoding.
Dave Rubin.
Dave Rubin, is it?
Well, yeah.
It is true.
We often deal with annoying people.
So in that regard, he's on brand.
So Dave Rubin is a kind of talk show host for an online podcast.
It's a very detailed breakdown of his career and the trajectory,
right?
So if you want the background knowledge, I would suggest reading that.
But the very condensed version is he was a comic of sorts.
A wannabe comic.
Got some positions hosting media shows and alternative media talk shows.
He was with the Young Turks at some point, a fairly left-wing outlet.
And then he left that, created his own Rubin Report channel, which set itself out, branded itself as neither right nor left, just...
Looking at issues with nuance and not polemical, you know, giving people proper breakdowns.
And that pretense lasted for a little while, but very quickly became clear that Dave Rubin is a right-wing partisan and not really capable of offering pushback to any of the people that he interviews.
So he's now full-on, as you'll see.
A kind of right-wing, MAGA, conspiracist type.
And feuding with various people that used to champion, notably Sam Harris or that kind of person.
Yeah, these people are interesting.
He, like many, started off as a comedian, stand-up comedy, that kind of thing.
And he has gotten more partisan, right?
so early on he hosted LGBT themed shows I see yeah as you said was on the Young Turks probably at that point in his career
Yeah, so probably the easiest thing to do is just to demonstrate.
By playing clips where Dave Rubin currently is.
And there's two pieces of content that we looked at for this episode.
One is his interview with Bill Maher on Club Random, which we'll get to in the tail end of the decoding segment.
But the first is just a randomly selected Rubin Report episode.
This one is from...
When is it from?
Well, it doesn't matter, really, because they're all essentially the same.
But I think this is from a month or two months ago.
And it was focused on Greta Thunberg, her appearance at a conference or this kind of thing.
And you'll get to hear what...
Today's show, as we begin the week, is going to be an extension of sort of what we were doing last week, which is a lot of stuff about the World Economic Forum and how its tentacles have basically reached into every Western democracy and have us all doing a whole bunch of stuff that's probably against our national interest.
But for some reason, we feel the need...
Well, not you, not me, but the collective we, to listen to these lunatics like Screaming Al Gore and absolutely awful John Kerry or very bizarre angry little girl Greta Thunberg,
etc., etc.
The cast of characters does not end.
But we're going to go into a bit more about what's going on over at the WEF, which we think it just wrapped up.
It just wrapped up.
They're probably still sucking the natural resources out of the area and worshiping children or whatever they do.
But, yeah, the thing itself wrapped up.
So we're going to cover a little bit of the end of it, some of the media reaction to it, and then how that's sort of reflective of everything going on in our country.
Yep, he's spelling out the kind of stuff he's concerned about with the World Economic Forum.
Yeah, so it was Greta Thunberg's attendance at the World Economic Forum, right?
And you can hear from that clip...
His delivery is like a kind of classical talk show host, right?
His elocution is quite good, but he's delivering just hardcore, almost talk radio era conspiracism, right?
It's that flavor of conspiracism, but with the modern anti-wo talking point, like the modern right enemy is the World Economic Forum.
They're trying to...
Enslave us and take away national sovereignty.
But it's all very familiar themes, right?
It's like the globalists taking over and liberals being their kind of sock puppets in order to restrict national sovereignty and take away what's true and good about the American spirit.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's basically the same themes that someone like Alex Jones would be dealing with, but definitely, as you say, delivered in a different tone.
And yeah, you could substitute some of those topics, like you could talk about Satan and feminism and communism, and you could make it like radio talk show from the Midwest in the 1980s.
And Greta Thunberg is a figure who draws a lot of attention from the right-wing media system, both alternative and mainstream.
You might even say that there's something of a Thunberg delusion.
In effect, in the way that they cover her with so much attention.
But yeah, here's Dave Rubin talking about her.
So first, let's start with Greta Thunberg.
And you know Greta Thunberg.
How dare you?
This little girl who screams about climate change and who's aging horribly because her whole life is based on nonsense.
Anyway, we played last week her being arrested in Germany.
And there was a clip that went viral around the world, was seen millions and millions of times of her being arrested, protesting something in Germany, mean German police officers carrying her away.
It was very scary.
Of course, then we found the other video, and the other video shows that the entire thing was staged.
Completely staged.
Her smiling with the police officers beforehand.
Literally them, like, softly holding her on the wrist.
Just completely ridiculous.
That's a very clear parallel with, like, the Alex Jones kind of coverage, right?
That it's all a fake flag.
She wasn't arrested.
It was staged.
And, you know, and just the random shots about, like...
She's eating horribly.
Yeah.
Yeah, that seemed...
Yeah.
I was a bit surprised to hear that one, but...
Yeah.
Yeah, so, you know, it just...
It is that kind of narrative, and there's, like, a visceral hatred, but it's really...
She's just an avatar for, like, opposition towards climate change medication, right?
Yeah, it's interesting how right-wing pundits often do this.
Like, the...
Like, characters like...
I mean, maybe the left does it too, but I'm thinking like characters like Fauci or Greta Thunberg, they become, like you say, avatars of love everything that they hate.
Like the attention really does focus on individual people.
I mean, I don't know.
I really do hate Rupert Murdoch, so maybe it's true of everyone.
I don't know.
Yeah, but I think it does happen on both sides of the aisle.
You know, maybe just tendency of people to personify.
Things like that, systems or approaches.
But there is this, like, you know, if you're talking about the level of attention that, like, say, a Trump or Marjorie Taylor Greene gets, right?
Like, Greta Thunberg is up there in the pantheon of liberal hate figures.
But it's, yeah, on the one hand, it's somewhat surprising because the left also, I think, deserve some.
Of the responsibility for this because they did give a large spotlight to her when she emerged.
So in some way, that drew the ire.
But again, she was like a young kid speaking forcefully about climate change.
So there was a novelty aspect to it and the aspect that she was quite morally outraged that her generation is the one that will bear.
The brunt of the cause.
And she's been very effective as a campaigner in terms of getting attention onto the issue and having significant profile.
It's interesting how that climate change debate evolved.
I remember when the debate was very much quite dry on the pro-climate action side.
Like, it was very dry.
It was very scientific.
It was very logical.
You know, here's all the evidence, you know, statistics and graphs and that kind of thing.
And the response to it was very emotional.
Like, you had the talkback radio people and it was very hyperbolic, very over the top.
They're all lying to us.
It's this terrible left-wing plot and they're going to destroy the economy, all those things.
So probably Greta Thunberg marks a kind of a transition point where the advocates for climate action, I think probably just out of frustration at not really getting anywhere with the dry, rational approach, started taking a more passionate,
emotional approach as well.
Yeah, I mean, I think that has always existed to some extent, right?
I think things like Extinction Rebellion and the profile.
Of the more hardcore activist side against climate change.
But I mean, I remember there were still climate protesters and environmentalist protesters.
That's always been an element.
Like, you know, PETA and stuff like that have various campaigns which cause people to say that it's counterproductive or that kind of thing.
Yeah, but in terms of the stuff that took center stage, they always existed, certainly.
Yeah, but maybe it's a contrast between Al Gore and Greta Thunberg, their presentation, because Al Gore was more the TED Talk style, here's the graphs and that kind of thing, but I think, I don't know,
I haven't consumed Greta's content, so I don't know if she does that.
I've never, yeah, the only time I ever hear about Greta Thunberg is when the Wright are vilifying her.
Yeah, so I've only seen the clips I suspect everyone has seen of her, like, you know, giving a speech at the UN or whatever, wherever it was.
And it's amazing.
In any case, this is an aspect of, you know, the modern media that the figures which are reviled get a lot of coverage, be it on the right and the left.
And there it is.
But Greta Thunberg was, as you would imagine would be the case.
Was confronted by various right-wing media outlets when she was over at the WEF.
And in particular, one far-right outlet from Canada, Rebel Media, managed to bump up to her in the street.
And Dave Rubin, Alex Jones, all of the right-wing pundits here were quite excited at this prospect about confronting her and seeing how she responds.
Let's just listen a little bit to the way this is framed.
Greta ends up at the World Economic Forum, and she got questioned by some real journalists.
And I have to say, when I can say the word journalist or journalist without air quotes, it's an absolute pleasure, and I've given them a lot of credit, but I want to continue.
The guys over at Rebel Media up in Canada, it is an independent outlet, I believe started by Ezra Levant, who's a buddy of mine who's been on the show many times.
They've got Avi Yemeni and a whole bunch of other people who are out there doing it.
They are running down the street, getting microphones in these people's faces, asking them real questions.
Anyway, Ezra got in the face of how dare you Greta Thunberg and asked her about her staged arrest.
Okay, so like the delivery, Matt, it's so freaking...
I hate this style of delivery, like that kind of...
You know, dramatic, polemical, it's not even satirical.
I refuse to, like, honor it with that.
It's just this overly dramatic, hand-rigging partisanship.
Tucker Carlson does it too, emphatically emphasizing specific words and speaking with such disdain about the grit.
Like, it's cartoonish.
Yeah, yeah, a lot of venom infused into pretty much every word.
He says during this episode.
Yeah.
And so you heard him talk about how they are real journalists.
You know, he doesn't even like to talk about journalists anymore, but at least this group are real journalists.
So let's hear what the real journalism sounds like.
You're arrested the German coal mine.
How many times did you rehearse it?
Because it looks staged.
Is it true?
How many times did you rehearse your arrest?
Greta.
How many times did you film your arrest, and why was it staged that way?
Greta, considering you've not spent much time in school, how do you know so much about climate change?
Do you think at least the fact these delegates take private jets is a bad thing against, you know, what you believe in?
All of this could be done via Zoom, so surely, surely you should be encouraging all the delegates here, especially the likes of US Special Envoy John Kerry for Climate Change.
Surely you should be saying to these people, you should be doing this via Zoom with a much smaller carbon footprint, surely?
Greta, would you say you're a child actor?
Are you a child actor or an expert?
How would you describe yourself?
It's just great stuff from Rebel, and I know it's like jarring when you see a journalist.
Going after the people who they should go after and asking the right questions, you almost don't know what to do with it.
Because, of course, that's not going to come from anyone at the New York Times or CNN or anything else.
Yeah.
That's just like Ruben's little, you know, framing of it as great.
That was excellent.
Those absolutely loaded, stupid, gotcha, polemical, gotcha-style questions, which she...
Quite rightly, just ignores and walks on and Ruben's like, that's fantastic, isn't it?
Yeah, it just illustrates he's such a rampant partisan.
He blows the lid off that scale.
Yeah, anything which is sticking it to the left is fantastic by definition.
Yeah, and it's just such...
Such a little slimy sycophant as well in the way that, you know, he talks about any of the people that he admires versus the terrible people on the other side who are just soulless people they are.
Yeah, and the specific criticisms they're leveling at Greta, I believe she's rather infamous for trying to avoid.
Flying on planes and that kind of stuff.
So that line of attack is just stupid, right?
Obviously, she can't control how people arrive at a conference and all that kind of thing.
So in any case, we get to hear after that, Dave Rubin kind of talk a little bit more about the climate change issue.
So why couldn't she just say, actually, you know what, I will answer that one question.
That's actually a decent point, and perhaps next year we'll do it by Zoom, or perhaps next year we'll figure out some other way to have a series of flights instead of everyone flying in privately.
But it's all part of the grift.
So let's continue with the grift, because it's the greatest grift of all time that they are trying to pull off.
These are people who have...
Who enjoy all of the luxuries of living in Western society, right?
They have free speech.
They have freedom of association.
They have all made, most of the people there, millions and millions, or in Al Gore's case, hundreds of millions.
John Kerry's case, hundreds of millions of dollars through capitalism, through all of the things that they've done in these free societies.
Yet they have this meeting annually in Davos to discuss how they can destroy capitalism, how they can destroy free speech, Western societies, free thought, all of that stuff.
Just destroy capitalism, destroy Western societies, and destroy free thought.
I mean, not many people like the Davos Conference, right?
Across the political spectrum, or the ultra-rich.
No.
Influences important people that attend.
So it's understandable that the right generally, and Dave Rubin in particular, would be fixated on that because it is a good point.
The technocrats and the global politicians.
It's replete with gotchas.
But the sort of layering to it, that they're out to destroy the West and everything we hold dear, I mean, is just silly.
I mean, it does show that...
Yeah, as you say, he's willing to go pretty deep into conspiracism to further his partisanship.
Yeah, and that dichotomy between environmentalism being just parasitic on capitalism and the societies.
For me, it had echoes of Constantine Kissin's speech, that if you live in a modern society and you enjoy...
Plumbing and those kind of things.
You want to prevent other societies from developing because climate or environmental protection, it has to be prioritized.
But it's creating that dichotomy that the people at Davos in general, the notion that they would want to destroy capitalism and Western democracies when they themselves are many of the beneficiaries of those exact systems.
Yeah, it's just...
Yeah, I know.
It's silly.
It doesn't even make sense, does it?
I mean...
Well, you know, we talked about the parallels with Alex Jones and the kind of populist, right, isolationist kind of perspective and the kind of sentiment that you find on talk radio amongst militias in the past.
You can hear it in a lot of Dave Rubin's...
And this is him, for example, commenting on some remarks by a Slovenian foreign minister who's talking about the war in Ukraine.
But listen to what they say, what Riles gave the wrong way.
Here is Slovenian foreign minister Tanja Fijon, I think I got that one right, calling for countries to really stop caring about themselves and bow to the new world order.
We have to take care of the rules of the international law and really respect that and not change it in a time when there are countries that choose the way not to respect them.
And Russia choose that way.
So we have countries that are respecting the rules and we have countries that are respecting their national interests going beyond the rules.
And that is what is happening and we have to take into consideration the world order.
That's a really extraordinary statement for a foreign minister of any country to be saying.
You're respecting the rules if you're respecting the World Economic Forum's rules.
They are not some sort of binding organization.
Completely not.
They're a group of rich elites who...
Send out their minions to all of our countries to try to change our policies, but they don't set rules.
They'd like to set rules.
They'd like to set far more than rules, and they'd like to take a whole bunch of us out while they do it.
But she seems to think that their rules are more important than the country's own national interest.
Well, frankly, Slovenia lady, I think that Slovenians should be in charge of what happens in Slovenia.
Okay?
I think that's a pretty Slovenian idea.
And I think Americans should be more in charge of what's going on with Americans than a Slovenian foreign minister and her sold-out cadre of lizard people.
Okay?
That's where I sit on this thing.
Shocking.
Shocking.
That's a real turn-up for the books.
Dave Rubin is against global initiatives, multilateral agreements.
He's for nationalism, basically individual national countries.
Looking after their own stuff in isolation.
Yeah.
I know.
I know.
But it's such bad fear-framing as well because she didn't mention anything about the WEF's rules.
She talked about the international rules of law.
That's the international order that kind of you're not allowed to invade another country.
She explicitly mentioned Russia pursuing its own national interests at the expense of other countries.
And Dave Rubin and his cadre, like their know-nothing approach.
Your national interests become an international issue when another country invades you, right?
And that's what she was talking about, like upholding the world order, which the US is a...
Proponent of, right?
Like a key advocate for that.
And they themselves have also, don't get me wrong, like historically, they have not heeded the rules of international.
But that's all that's being said.
And he treats it as the lizard people are trying to take over America and Slovenia and say you can't have national interests.
No, like your national interests include joining alliances so that you are Yeah, and your national interests include not having your low-lying areas being submerged as a result of pollution that was put out by other countries,
right?
Yeah.
It's an interconnected world.
Yeah, look, this is all obvious.
We don't need to spell this out to people.
Everyone knows this.
But as you said, it's that know-nothing isolationism that's been a thread, especially in U.S. political discourse since at least the 19th century.
I mean, the thing that surprised me about listening to Dave Rubin, Chris, because I didn't listen to hardly anything of his before, is that I knew he was a partisan pundit, but I didn't realize how stupid or at what a low primitive kind of level his punditry was operating at.
Yeah, I mean, it really is creeping the barrel.
And Matt, you heard him mention lizard people offhandedly at the end, kind of jokingly, but like, listen to this clip.
But they continued because not only are they trying...
To confuse you about climate change, and they want to make sure you follow their rules.
Well, they've also got to make everything gay, okay?
They have to gay up the whole thing.
Hold on, let me loosen my wrist a little.
They have to make this whole thing gay, okay?
You have to be gay, and if you're not gay, they'll gay you up.
They'll put it in the water, whatever they have to do.
They're going to gay it up.
We have to get this gay stuff out there.
Video!
It's about making sure that people are seen in the mainstream media, in day-to-day life.
And I think that's another opportunity where we have the corporate world to play a really important role.
It's in the, as one of our colleagues said in another forum that we were in the other day, the hearts and minds part of this.
And that is to make LGBT people, the community visible when you are talking about your product.
You know, visible in your imagery.
You know, we can make sure that your products are centered towards it.
Does anyone think we need more of this?
Are you guys not getting enough gay imagery throughout the day?
Look, I think many people might reasonably roll their eyes a little bit at the sort of corporate corporations, you know, representation and etc.
Like, you know, it's fine.
They're obviously not trying to turn the frogs gay.
Put things in the water to turn people gay.
But I think the only interesting thing about Dave Rubin that I really spotted was that is the fact that he is gay himself.
I think he and his partner may have a child.
Yeah, they had surrogates.
So I think they had two kids.
And one thing, as we'll hear, I'm a bit sympathetic to him too.
I really shouldn't be because he puts himself in these positions, which is the kind of strange obsession that many fellow right-wing or heterodox people have with his sexuality.
But he occupies an odd role, doesn't he?
Because he definitely, I don't know, his homosexuality doesn't fit particularly well with him being a rabid right-wing.
Conspiratorial partisan.
And yet it somehow plays a role in his discourse, right?
Yeah, there's a little bit where it's almost like he has to be, you know, performatively critical of that whole space.
And in a way that avoids the potential, I think, for people to make that a point of criticism.
Like there was a roller famous clip where one of the people that he had on this show...
Afterwards discovered that he was gay, like a hard right commentator, who then, you know, fiended, mocked, outraged, and said, "Oh my god, he touched my hand!"
Steven said, "They hate Dave Rubin because he's a gay man with the wrong appeal."
Dave Rubin is gay?!
No!
He got a husband?!
I did not know!
I was in his presence!
I didn't know!
I shook his hand.
I sat down with him.
Why would y'all tell me before I went on this show?
Steven, why would you send me this?
Oh my God, Steven, you ruined my day.
And there's an element of that which is genuinely just depressingly lacking in self-respect.
You know, Dave Rubin talked to someone who was discussing The surrogacy, like when he announced his plans to have children via surrogacy, it was not greeted warmly on the right side of the aisle.
Yeah, I saw that a few times.
But the other thing is, like the reference to the turning the frogs game, putting stuff in the water, the lizard people, it's all done in a jokey tone, right?
It's not done with the same seriousness that you would find.
Alex Jones.
Well, Alex Jones also deploys a jokey tone at times when he needs to.
It just depends on the audience as to how he refers those things.
But I feel like Dave Rubin is getting away with essentially calling people lizard people and saying they're putting things in the water.
But because he does it in a jokey tone, he can make use of all of those tropes.
He can half-heartedly endorse them all.
But he always has this layer of deniability where he can say, well, no, I wasn't, you know, I didn't mean they're actually lizard people or that kind of thing.
Yeah, look, absolutely.
And there's this rich history of that kind of thing with, you know, 4chan-ish ironic stance where they're always joking, just trying to trigger liberals by saying outrageous things, just joking, not really, haha, aren't you confused now?
Now, you know, I guess...
We've got to mention, though, that that's extraordinarily common, though.
That ironic stance is something that even the best of us, Chris, might use on Twitter from time to time because it is rhetorically convenient.
So it's just worth noticing.
Well, yeah, it is.
But I think there's a difference between adopting irony to soften a particular perspective that you want to promote and kicking the most hardcore conspiratorial tropes.
Dropping them into your content when you have an audience which is conspiratorially leaning.
And especially when in the next breath or a previous breath, he's saying the WF is sending its tentacles out and its minions to take us all out and so on.
Like, he's not joking there.
So when you're mixing up jokes and scare quotes about gay frogs and lizard people, in that context, yeah, it's very different.
So it will not surprise you.
To hear, I think, that Ruben, alongside all of the standard punditry and whatnot, he also will frequently reference other right-wing figures.
We already heard him endorse the rebel media, Ezra Levant.
And here's him talking a little bit about Tucker.
And also...
Vaccines coming here.
Vaccines and globalists, Matt.
So, lots to enjoy.
Just stay out of our lives.
That is it, crazy hat lady.
Tucker had a nice little take on the ending of the World Economic Forum.
They brought in some entertainers at the end, and there was this incredible floutist.
She was a floutist without a flout.
Take a look.
Time to check in with our lizard overlords in Davos, Switzerland.
What are they up to?
Those people who run the world, question mark, I think, look, It all seems scary.
And they are plotting against us.
I mean, they really are.
And they do send these stooges like Justin Trudeau and Gavin Newsom.
They send these people into Western democracies.
But I'm telling you guys, I really, really believe this.
This is not the best of the best that we're up against.
These are incompetent buffoons whose ideas are so anti-human that they cannot win.
We just need to be a little bit braver pushing back on them.
We just need to expose them more.
And that's why they want censorship, of course.
Of course.
But a lot of the stuff that they have pushed over the last couple years is being exposed in real time.
And good people, not...
Crazy right-wing maniacs.
Good, decent people who are apolitical, who just want to go about living their lives.
They're figuring it out.
So this is really extraordinary.
You may remember a video that we played last week where Ezra Levant and Avi Yemeni, two of the Rebel News guys, where they got at Davos, they got in the face of Albert Borla, and he is the Pfizer CEO, and they asked him about the efficacy of vaccines and when did he know they didn't work and why are they continuing to push it,
etc., etc.
All these clips, I think, illustrate how far Dave Rubin goes.
I certainly wasn't aware that he was operating at this level of paranoid conspiracism.
Yeah.
Justin Trudeau and Gavin Newsom are the emissaries from the World Economic Forum who've been sent in.
They're just the puppets.
It's very much Alex Jones' presentation of how...
Politics function and that.
And also just that line about not crazy right-wing people, just decent apolitical people.
It was the apolitical bit that got me.
Yeah, they're so apolitical.
And that reference that comes at the end where he's talking about Ezra Levant and Rebel News cornering the CEO of Pfizer.
When did they find out the vaccines don't work?
And why are they continuing to promote it and stuff?
And it's just...
Yeah.
No, it's very...
It's bad.
It's very bad.
It's highlighting how deep the anti-vaccine stuff is on the right now.
And just to illustrate that more...
So what else is going on here?
Well, the other piece that comes with all of this is that we are learning every day.
More and more that the vaccines did not work, that they lied about the science, that they pushed things on people who did not need vaccines, whether they were healthy 25-year-old guys who otherwise were not going to get sick, maybe would get sick a little bit, but then move on like everything else in the world.
You get the flu, you move on, okay, life's fine.
But they wanted to vaccinate children, all of these things.
And now we're seeing all of this stuff about vaccine injuries and the heart attacks and people passing out and a whole bunch more.
And they can't...
Honestly answer those questions, right?
Because they'd all end up in jail, probably, if they honestly answered it.
So the grift, all of the people, all of the people, whether it's the people at Pfizer or the people at the government or people in the WEF or all the Hollywood actors, all of the people who pushed mandates, who pushed vaccines, they had no idea what they were talking about or they were doing it for genuinely nefarious reasons,
they all have to protect each other because if one guy admits it, then it's dominoes, right?
You're going to take out everybody.
One of the fascinating things about all of this is that, did you know, you probably did because you're a pretty bright person, that Pfizer wanted immunity from vaccine lawsuits and basically got granted it by our government.
Here's Tucker talking about that.
Yeah, I mean, I was talking to some normal person who was a bit confused that the anti-vax narrative stuff has really, if anything, stepped up.
In intensity, most recently, as opposed to whatever, a year or two ago.
And they said to me, like, why is that?
Because everyone who's going to be vaccinated has been vaccinated by now.
There aren't many intrusive public health measures going on.
It's kind of most people are basically moving on with their lives.
And it made me realize, and this clip illustrates it well, how...
It serves as a point of grievance.
It's now entering right-wing law as something to feel extremely aggrieved about, yet another thing that you were lied about, that you were tricked by whatever, the elites, the globalists trying to exert coercive control over you.
So it's interesting how it functions.
Yeah, and I actually think it ties into the discussion we had at the start about the lab leak in terms of you see it presented as They're all lying.
We found out none of it was true.
The media, the politicians, the celebrities, all of them were pushing this lie on us.
And now the dominoes are falling and we've been proven right.
And now you see that rhetoric.
It's the exact same around the lab leak, the reaction amongst the same people, Dave Rubin and co.
Right, this is where you can see the parallels in the rhetoric being used and why you should be suspicious about those kind of claims.
It is interesting because the facts do not support any of this.
The vaccines did work.
They've been extremely effective.
Most people have been vaccinated now.
Public health measures have been relaxed in almost all countries.
And this isn't what they said was going to happen.
They said it was going to be perpetual lockdowns.
This was just the beginning.
These were the authoritarian steps to get people in line before the takeover.
And yeah, it ties into the pre-existing rhetoric, the kind of globalists plan to take over really neatly.
It's just the newest flavor of that.
But actually, nothing has changed.
This is the same narrative that you would have seen in Infowars 20 years ago around vaccines.
And that's why when people are saying, Oh, you know, it's not about anti-vaccines.
It's about these vaccines and all that kind of thing.
No, it's not.
This is the same rhetoric.
It's just becoming more mainstream on the right.
Yeah, and it's not even specifically about vaccines, even in general.
Like, you could substitute, say, gun controls or something.
What books are in school libraries, whatever.
Every little issue can just be slotted.
Quite neatly into that broader worldview, which is, you know, we all know its features.
It's conspiratorial, it's anti-globalist, it's nationalist, it's anti-government, it's a whole bunch of things.
But yeah, you know, it's emotive and somewhat dangerous stuff.
And yeah, I just hadn't realized how far Dave Rubin had gone.
I mean, we're not really in this to be political commentators, but man, the hard right.
He's knocking farts, man.
Yeah, yeah.
Like Dave Rubin says he's a moderate or apolitical or whatever, but if you take his claim as true that he's like a liberal, centre-right, classical liberal person, like, man, that's insane.
The centre-right is fucking crazy.
Yeah.
And again, just sticking on the anti-vaccine point for a little bit longer, here's him discussing...
Vaccine advertisements and pharmaceutical industry, so on and so forth.
You take a pill, it's going to somehow fix that, but you're going to get hysterical diarrhea and thoughts of suicide and vomiting, and you're going to punch your grandmother, a whole bunch of wacky shit.
But for some reason with the Pfizer, I think, did I make up the punch your grandma thing?
All right, I might have made that one up.
But for some reason with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, they push these commercials everywhere and they never said anything about side effects.
How bizarre.
It is quite bizarre.
But it wasn't just, you can't blame just the drug companies for this.
You can't just blame Pfizer and Moderna because they need cohorts.
They need a partner to pull a scam like this on everybody.
We found this video.
What they need are government actors who will scare the hell out of people so that the government can make contracts with these big pharma companies and they can Pull the giant grift of all time right in front of our eyes.
Check this video out.
This is the Australian government.
This is not Pfizer.
I'm going to play a clip about trying to encourage people to get vaccinated.
But the Australian government, Matt, your repressive state is being called out there.
Yeah, evil regime that it is.
Yeah, he plays out a clip.
It's mainly a video clip.
There's no dialogue in it.
And I think it's probably showing someone in intensive care struggling to breathe because they've got the acute infection of COVID, right?
Yeah.
That's a safe assumption.
Yeah, it's just interesting the things that trigger them.
Like the Australian government, this is a bit of a tangent, but back in the day when AIDS was a big issue, there was like a public health campaign to get people to practice safe sex.
And it was a little bit controversial because they had, like, the Grim Reaper.
They had the Grim Reaper involved in it.
And it was a similar kind of thing, just showing people, yeah, you know, just using emotive visual techniques to raise awareness.
I'm okay with that.
They had a similar kind of campaign with, like, dangerous driving, drinking and driving, that kind of thing, showing the aftermath of an accident.
Yeah, I think that's all.
Yeah.
The amount of double standards which slam into you whenever you are dealing with partisan content is just...
You become desensitized to it because Ruben has been cheering on the most unhinged, polemical, gotcha journalism style and then a government video trying to use emotion to get people aware of risks.
That's beyond the PL.
But his lurid fantasies about the globalists sneaking into your bed at night to cut your throat, that's all fair game.
And it's just, you know, you become desensitized to it as you listen to more of it.
But it's just striking.
All of his claims are false, that the vaccines don't mention anything about side effects.
I don't know about you, Chris.
I had a pretty fair idea of the side effects that I would...
Even before I got the vaccine.
So it's lies.
It's just outright lies.
It's like, it works.
It works.
And that's just the thing that's amazing about it.
So, you know.
I think we live in an age of crowdsourced propaganda.
This is the world we live in now.
People like Dave Rubin are creating it.
You know, purely on their own initiative and on their own bat and presumably profiting, making a good living from doing it.
He's quite rich, I got the impression.
And so there's no sort of government apparatus, ministry of information that's generating the lies.
But yeah, in the modern era, we just seem like we've outsourced it, we've crowdsourced it.
It's now the domain of free enterprise.
People like Dave Rubin to just lie constantly.
Yeah, and if you want to hear an example of him lying, being a propagandist, being a partisan polemicist, and this is Dave Rubin at his best, like attempting to be a kind of right-wing rhetorician,
like a powerful orator, this is his best shot.
We're showing you all this because we're actually winning and they're losing.
And it's not just because some of them are resigning.
And it's not just because more and more people are waking up to the nonsense and people are realizing what outsourcing your individual choice does to society.
It's that people are...
Generally speaking, fighting the system in a new way.
They really, really are.
People are tuning out of mainstream media.
They're tuning into shows like this, and we can do it.
And then people get braver, right?
That's the thing that I'm always talking about, that bravery begets bravery.
So Ezra Levant, he's going out there, he's being brave.
Now that video has been seen 20 million times and he'll get braver.
And then you know what?
Some people will donate to Rebel and their operational.
Yeah, Matt,
the brief people tuning into this.
Gough.
And donating.
You know, the important thing.
It's like, it's always the fucking message with Alex Jones as well.
The fight is on.
We are fighting back.
We're the good people.
We're the real people.
Buy Bone Broth to support Infowars and I'll continue fighting.
Right?
Deep Rubin, Ezra Levant, they're all just siphons for credulous, partisan fools.
If you're supporting Deep Rubin, gone.
God damn it, man!
You didn't mention Donald Trump, whose flagrant grifting was just amazing, especially after he lost office.
Or every evangelist radio preacher in the United States, every sermon ends with that, donate to save your soul.
Yeah, it's pretty blatant, but it is, you know, you can see part of the emotional...
He's not even good at it, though, is he?
No, I mean, well, it's not working on me, but you have to try to put yourself in the position of his audience, I suppose.
But I'm thinking about it in terms of delivery.
Like, Jordan Peterson, whatever you think about him, he can give a passionate speech, right, where he's making it seem like...
Almost too passionate, Chris.
Yeah, he can.
But you know what I mean?
Yeah.
He's able to ramp up the audience's emotions.
Here, it feels like Ruben is just doing an impression of someone who he's seen do that.
He doesn't really have the capability.
I know this would work on the right audience to get the cheers that he wants and stuff, but he's not good at it, Matt.
No, I totally agree if I compare him doing it with Trump or with Jordan Peterson or pretty much any evangelical preacher.
Yeah, they've got the fire and the passion and can really sell it.
I mean, a lot of people call Ruben a grifter and I get why, because it's kind of more obvious in his case that this is like a job, you know?
I just get that, you know, you get that vibe from, we'll probably, I mean, it'll be interesting to compare.
The recording's here with when he's talking much more casually with Bill Maher.
But, like, he's playing a role right now and it's sort of obvious to you now, but it's even more obvious when you contrast it with him just relaxing.
We're going to get to that very shortly, God bless us.
But that notion, like, I think he's an ideologue as well.
I think Dave Rubin is just so...
So easily led that on the one hand, he is leaning into all the tropes.
He is just repeating whatever he knows the audience will hear.
But when you've heard him discuss things like on Joe Rogan's podcast or whatever in a less structured way, he's an idiot.
He just hears things and parrots them and he can't really respond to critical comments.
So I feel that he's both an ideologue and a grifter in the truest sense of the term.
It doesn't matter that he actually believes it, but he is so stupid that he does believe it.
Yeah, that's fair.
I'll concede that he's an ideologue, but only a very, very superficial ideologue.
Yeah, yeah.
Like, it does not run deep with him, as you say.
No.
So there's stuff like he's picked up the people that you should reference in the right wing that are seen as hero figures and stuff like that.
And I'll just play the very last clip from this content where he's giving the end of that speech that we just heard.
And you'll hear him reference a certain figure.
You know, this is the kind of thing that gets conservatives hard.
So now let's get to the good part of this.
The good part of this is that throughout history, guys, there have been bad ideas.
There have been fascists and communists and socialists and Nazis and a whole bunch of other bad people.
And then good people start saying things that are true.
You stop participating in the lie.
You stand up and you say, I am here, I have worth, and I am not going to pretend anymore that you are...
Good or valuable just because you guilt me into thinking something, okay?
You know who's a good person?
She was a great person.
I wish we still had her.
Can we maybe work on the cloning thing?
Let's talk to somebody in the UK about cloning her.
Here's Margaret Thatcher on responding to socialists, right?
Responding to these types of people who would otherwise give us endless chaos.
Oh, you're not going to play Margaret Thatcher?
I was looking forward to that.
No, I don't agree.
She's better at delivering speeches as well.
But like, my God, Matt, that was such a hard turn.
And you know who is a good person?
Let's play Margaret Thatcher talking about society.
And just with Ruben, you don't know sometimes whether it's a stupidity or it's intentional.
Because, for example, there.
He calls out extremists, right, and ideologues.
And then this next paragraph is about you are the good people.
Stop accepting the lie and stand up in your society.
Look for you can restore the real value.
That's the rhetoric of all those groups that you just said that you denounced, right?
So he's like...
Yeah, the thing that I find interesting, like, this is what you're talking to, which is the mismatch between the self-concept and the reality.
Like, clearly, people like Dave Rubin like to conceive of themselves as open-minded liberals, right?
The antithesis of socialism and fascism and communism and so on.
And it's so far away.
Like, you know, the apolitical centrist is the fond self-concept.
But, you know, from the clips that we've played, It's easy to see that he's part of the conspiratorial MAGA verging on QAnon right.
So there's a massive mismatch there, and he doesn't seem to be aware of it.
He's that superficial.
But the other thing that I'll say is that this calls back to the previous clip you played, which is that he doesn't deliver it very effectively, but you can see the intent there, which is that we are part of the true, the just.
The uprighteous people who care about truth and freedom.
All of the good things.
We're part of a club.
You can support the club by sending me money, sure.
But I guess that's part of the appeal, right?
That we are the good people.
And if we stick together and stay the path, then we can triumph over the forces of darkness.
So when it comes to doing the Garometer episode, we can...
Remember that, I think.
Yeah, so now we'll move to Bill Maher and Ruben chatting, which was our original intention to cover.
But just after hearing all of that garbage, Matt, I just want to play one clip from a bit into the conversation with Bill Maher.
So just listen to this.
Well, I think Jews probably should be conservatives most...
First off, I don't even consider myself a conservative.
The book that I'll give you at the end there, it's a defense of classical liberalism.
I think you'd read the book and you would go, you know, maybe a little bit, I'm more on the like, I don't really want any government programs anymore, so I definitely have more of that stuff now maybe than you do.
But I think you'd read that book and be like, yeah, we're 95% there politically.
Yeah.
I'm not a conservative.
Bill Myers agrees with that.
That sounds right.
Because Dave Rubin's a nice guy, right?
They're having a nice chat together.
They're having a drink and getting stoned together.
Well, he laughs at that initially, but...
You know, Bill Maher is very willing to say, you know, you and me, Dave, when we put aside the political stuff, you know, we're good people.
We both want the good things and stuff like this.
But you'll see in this conversation that the political is always just under the surface.
And there is a lot that Bill Maher gives a pass to.
But you just imagine, right?
All that shit that we've just heard, just from one episode of Ruben's show.
And he puts them out, you know, multiple times each week.
Bill Maher could go listen to a single episode of Rubin and he would presume that he would notice just how polemical and how extreme Dave Rubin is.
But I will bet you money he never listens to Rubin's show.
Yeah, not even a single episode.
Yeah.
It's almost certainly just incredibly lazy, isn't it?
So, I mean, let me ask you this, Chris.
Why does someone like Bill Ma have someone like Dave Rubin on his show?
Is it that he just happens to know him and likes him?
Or is it just cross-promotional?
He's famous, so he can be part of the lineup.
I think there's a couple of reasons.
One is for the kind of centrist cred of being able to speak to people from both sides of the spectrum and also that they previously were He bundled together in a heterodox sphere, right?
With Sam Harris.
Because Dave Rubin, for example, was part of the IDW.
He was part of the IDW, but he platformed Sam Harris after that kind of infamous run-in that he had with Ben Affleck on Bill Marshall, where Ben Affleck accused him of being bigoted against Muslims.
And Dave Rubin, likewise, at least in his story, He claims that he left the Young Turks in part because of their treatment about Sam Harris over accusations of anti-Muslim bigotry.
So I think there's a kind of, you know, like the general heterodox against the far-left misrepresentation of people like Sam Harris and that kind of thing.
I get it.
Yeah, there's a little bit of heterodox common ground there.
But I think more...
To contemporary era stuff is to do as well, Matt, potentially with COVID and, you know, as we heard in the last episode, Bill Maher's views about vaccination and lack of concern about COVID in the way that it's presented by the liberal left.
So listen to this.
Now you've hit on the one raw nerve with me on this issue.
That could make me go to Florida or anywhere else, and that's COVID.
And their overreaction, in my view, and their limited ability to understand that, please, look, I want to be a team player, but you can't get inside my body.
No.
And that has to be my decision.
Remember when they were for My Body, My Choice?
Wasn't that them?
Okay, that's an unfair analogy, because we're talking about...
A different life.
Yep.
Yep.
Well, look, they got some common ground here, right?
Government overreach.
I mean, this clip was, this was one of the original reasons that I thought covering them together would be good because there you can hear, you know, what we covered last week, which is Bill Maher's, my body, my sacred body.
Alongside Dave Rubin's right wing, the government doesn't have the right to tell you what to do.
Public health campaigns are just the first step on the road to authoritarianism.
And they can do that meme where they're reaching across the aisles and kind of clasping arms.
But when Rubin tries to tie it to a...
Right-wing talking point where he says, you know, yeah, and this is the part of my body, my choice.
You can see Maher's discomfort where he's like, well, no, let's stick on the COVID, not about abortion.
Yeah, yeah.
And there was another point of discomfort too, Chris.
I wonder if you have the clip there, which is when Bill Maher is doing that kind of, you know, thing where they go, oh, the world's gone so crazy now.
I remember when people were normal and everyone's so partisan and ideological.
And Bill Maas starts talking about, like, QAnon and MAGA people, right?
That's right.
Hey, that's the truth.
See, you are an old-school liberal.
Oh, I am.
You are an old-school liberal.
But it's getting lonely.
Don't you think it's getting lonely in a way?
Just watching so many of the people that you used to think were sane, or guys that you would bring on your show over the years that really were sane.
That goes both ways.
Yeah.
Because I certainly have seen a number of people become Trumpers and, like...
I don't want to reveal too much and have people know who I'm talking about, but some people who you would never think-- who are not like 60, 70 years old.
I'm talking about 40. And from places you would never think and now are full on-- QAnon, Democrats eat babies, and there's a pedophile.
I don't think they eat them.
They drink the blood.
It's not an eating situation.
They order them and then push them around the plate is really what they do.
It's that sushi spin thing.
But watching the lefties go nutty, because that's what people say about you now, that you stayed.
They kind of did go nuts.
I wish they didn't.
I wish they didn't.
Oh, me too.
Except that it's more material.
Yeah.
You know, it's like, I...
When did you see it?
I used to have...
What happened?
When did you see it first?
Like, when did you see the thing really changing?
And it was just funny to see how quickly Dave Rubin steers the conversation away from that towards lefties going crazy.
Yeah.
Well, I have one that I think spiritually makes the same point.
So this is when...
Dave Rubin is suggesting that Bill Maher is becoming red-pilled.
And maybe he'll get to the point to vote for the Republicans.
And here's his reaction.
It's the shirt.
How Republican you make the anal set.
I'll fully red-pill you.
That's what we call it.
When you're splayed out over the bed.
That's what we call it, Maher.
Is that it?
Yeah, yeah.
Because everyone's like, Bill Maher's almost there.
What does he need to finally get over the hump?
I know what it is, Bill.
Oh, I know what it is, too, and it's not that.
First of all, you've got to break up with your boyfriend, Donald Trump.
Okay, so forget Trump.
We don't even have to do politics if you don't want.
No, but I'm just saying, you brought it up.
Yeah.
You brought it up.
Fair enough.
You brought it up.
And I'm telling you.
All right, so let's, okay.
That's, I, red pill.
You know, you people make me laugh.
Okay, so.
As if you think that I would even entertain the idea.
Of joining up with a social club that made Donald Trump its president.
This fucking twice-divorced casino owner.
That's who you think?
Well, you would grant me that Bill Clinton's a rapist, right?
A rapist?
No, I would not.
Yeah, yeah.
So you can see them touching on that divide there as well.
And then just the notion that, you know, that Maher is close to getting red-pilled.
So Dave Rubin...
He references that, and he talks about it a couple of times in the conversation.
So there's a bit about it where...
So Bill Maher, for a big part of the conversation, focuses on gay sex.
He does.
The mechanics on it, the relative hygiene practices, why people are interested in it.
And this is kind of his thing.
He wants to make these conversations not about...
It's supposedly not about politics, just about, you know, hanging out and talking about nonsense.
But I've received general feedback that it's a bit like Rogan, where he says that, but every episode, COVID comes up or politics come up, right?
So it isn't exactly like that.
But, you know, when you were asking Matt about, like, why does he have him on?
It's clear that there's a little bit of discomfort around the potential for the subject to be focused on politics.
And so, listen to this.
And this is Club Random.
No, but we don't do that shit here.
We don't do that shit here?
No, we don't do, like, who are your committee heroes and, like, you know, what kind of elbow does your dog eat?
I mean, you know, that's too, like, a question you get in the press.
Here, we're here to talk about gay sex, Dave.
We're gay sex?
I want to know.
I do want to know one thing.
Now, Okay, so when did you...
When did you...
You started out liking girls or thinking, or you never did?
I never really thought about it that way, sort of, because...
Well, first off, people always say to me, you don't seem gay.
That's the thing that I get all the time.
You don't seem gay.
Yeah, Bill Maher has a real interest in this.
He keeps steering the conversation towards it.
Dead Ribbon isn't really comfortable talking about it, which I totally understand, actually, because...
Bill Maher's asking him stuff like, what specifically do you think about when you masturbate?
There's two or three questions.
What do you think about when you masturbate?
I'm talking about like they take sodium pentothal and they have to tell you the truth.
You only have a few minutes to get to know them.
How do you get your money?
Who are you fucking?
What do you think about when you masturbate?
Have you got those three answers on You know, I mean, sometimes it's not that scandalous.
Like, I don't know about you, Chris, but that's not a question I'm going to answer in public, right?
Yeah, so there is that.
And you can see that Ruben wants to present himself as, you know, I'm up for anything.
I'll talk about anything.
But he is not comfortable.
And just to give an example of how graphic the discussion goes, here's a...
Segment about anal sex chat.
You know, I do have gay sex.
That's something.
Good for you.
And I know people find that to be odd or it's a little out there for some people.
Well, it is odd.
I accept that it is odd, right?
Like, it's a little bizarre for people.
It's odd, but it's also normal because it's obviously...
A variation that nature intended.
I mean, it's not the majority, but it is consistent, and it's throughout history.
And for some reason, nature wanted this little sub-variant.
Where, um, you take it in the ass.
I don't get it because I hate shit.
So, like, the idea of fucking and shit is just so anathema to me, I can't even tell you.
Bill, do you realize my mother loves you, and she's gonna watch this?
But, I mean, it's where the...
She agrees with you more than she agrees with me.
And look, I love that you live your life as you love it, and I love that for everybody.
But we can't deny that's where this shit comes out.
It blows my mind because I don't like taking a shit.
Right.
So the idea that I would stick my dick in there is just weird.
And it goes on.
There's quite an elaborate discussion about this point.
It's probably the only thing that could make me feel sorry for Dave Rubin, just having to be talking to Bill Maher, continually steering the conversation towards the mechanics of his sex life.
Especially because, like, part of Ruben's whole thing is he's gay, right?
But he doesn't want to emphasize that point to his audience, except, like, he definitely doesn't want them talking about the relevant mechanics and his sex life.
Like, you can hear that he doesn't want to be on that topic at various points.
Look, obviously, for audience political reasons, it's not a good topic for him.
But also, any normal person, Chris?
Any normal person.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I know.
Yeah.
I know.
Like, that is true.
That is also the key.
But I think in Rubens, there's just a double bind.
Yeah.
Nobody...
Well, not nobody.
I'm sure there's lots of people that like to go into graphic detail about their sexual lives.
In fact, I do know that those people exist.
That's true.
But for the majority of people, it's probably not something that they want to discuss in public in great depth.
So I do have sympathy.
For Ruben on that point.
But yeah, and one point to note there, though, is you see that nature intended, like nature wanted this variation.
It speaks to his worldview, right?
That like, I know that he's trying to voice their view that he's okay with people being gay.
It's fine, right?
It's not unnatural, which is a good sentiment.
But it's still tender that notion he has about...
Mother Nature or Earth Force.
Nature determined that it wanted some people to have gay sex.
He's got a very personified view, a kind of wooish view about nature and biology and all that.
Yeah, it's a subtle influence there, but given all the other things we've heard him say, I think you're right about that.
Yeah, so sticking on the thing about what...
Bill wants to talk about and what Ruben alternatively might have wanted to talk about a bit more.
Here's a bit which comes up on several points.
We already heard one occasion where he's talking about maybe you'll vote for DeSantis.
And here again.
This comes up.
My entire crowd wants me to beat you over the head till you admit that you would vote for Ron DeSantis and you're asking me about anal sex.
I know, but it's my show, so shut the fuck up.
All right, all right, all right.
Keep going.
And it's not a political show.
I know, I know.
It's like, if we were actually just sitting around talking, would you, like, have that agenda?
If you had an agenda, I wouldn't invite you here.
Yeah, if Ruben had an agenda, he wouldn't have been invited.
I think Ruben has a slight...
You know, from all the stuff that we previously heard.
Although I think these kinds of things are just straight up cross-promotional to relatively famous people doing their thing.
I mean, one thing, Chris, though, is that, it has to be said, having listened to this entire rambling conversation, too much of which was devoted to the mechanics of anal sex, it was so tedious.
It was so scattergunned.
Ma definitely is a bit blitzed.
Ruben, not so much, but is a cretin.
So it was, my God, it's such tedious, tedious content.
I mean, it went nowhere.
I know it did.
But, like, I think that it is mostly a cross-promotional exercise.
But the fact that Ruben is talking about his audience wants to, you know, he's expected to red pill.
Bill Maher, or that's what they want out of it.
And Bill Maher wants to talk to him about anal sex, right?
Like, that's what Bill Maher wants out of it.
I don't know if that's what Bill Maher's audience wants to hear, but that's his goal.
But you can see Ruben at times, like, I mean, he's a really big DeSantis simp.
This is worth noting that, like, I listen to Ruben's content on occasion, mainly just because I've subscribed when we were previously covering something and it was relevant, but also...
Because he gives you an insight into what's going on in the right.
And he's very much switched from his Trump focus to DeSantis.
Although he still holds on the sycophantic prayers for Trump.
But it's clear if DeSantis gives him the option, he will completely switch to DeSantis at the drop of a hat.
And he already mostly has.
But so you do hear him bring this up again.
So we've already heard DeSantis twice.
And again...
Would you say that spit take was...
I thought you were going to go back to...
I thought you were going to go like, so did DeSantis prove to you?
You know what?
If California says, I have to take shots, and DeSantis says, I don't, hello, Florida.
That's what I'll say about DeSantis.
He's a good dude.
He's a good dude.
He really is.
And he doesn't care whether you smoke weed, and he doesn't care who you marry.
He doesn't.
But to sound like the voiceover at a movie that's coming out soon, shit just got real.
But like for me, personally, really, shit just got real with that.
Yeah.
And that's in my mind.
Dude, I left this place because of it.
And I don't want to leave this place.
It would be very hard.
That's interesting.
Some real talk there, right?
So, you can see there how a particular conspiratorial obsession like someone like Bill Maher has with vaccines and natural health can lead you, like it can't become the overriding issue.
Even though, you know, in broader ideological, political terms, he's like a terrible fit for DeSantis.
He, yeah, he will go there.
I think that happens to a lot of normal people, right?
Yeah.
And again, Matt, this is kind of dropping back to the Bill Maher world, but just listen to Maher discuss the issue about his bodily autonomy and how he regards it, how important it is.
That's different than, this is my body.
This is my body, my health.
And to pretend that you have enough information with all the things they've been wrong about.
I'm talking about COVID.
I'm talking about medicine in general.
All the things they've been wrong about, not mostly because they're corrupt, just because we don't know that much, and all the things they don't know and are still knowing, and every week there's some new story about something.
I always say somebody should write a book about medicine and call it Now You Tell Me.
Like they just found out that metabolism, which they always thought slowed down.
In age, actually doesn't.
Now you tell me.
You know, all the drugs they pulled off the market because they said they were safe and effective, but they weren't.
Now you tell me.
Eggs, you eat yolks, you don't eat yolks.
Yeah, right.
It's like you don't have a monopoly on what the truth is about medicine, and we're all individuals.
My profile is different than somebody else's profile.
So what might be right for them?
Would I recommend as many vaccines and boosters as they have for people who are 100 pounds overweight?
I would.
You probably need them.
I don't.
Or I don't think I don't.
And that should be my decision.
And even if it did affect you, which it doesn't, because we know that having the vaccine, you can still transfer it just as easy.
Or get it just as easy.
So that's a red herring argument to begin with.
It shouldn't involve that.
But even if it did.
It's still my body.
I want to be a team player, I want to help everybody, but you can't come inside my body.
It's not subtle, is it?
The fear about the bodily contamination from these potentially hazardous vaccines, that's really core to Bill Maher's whole thing.
It's not a superficial Just an aspect he has.
It's obviously very deep.
Yeah, and it's connected to his more general view because anti-vaxxers is quite a specific thing.
The skepticism of modern medicine and that preference for natural holistic things and bespoke, customized, tailored treatments and the skepticism about how much we don't know and how it's also complex.
It's a real mystery.
the importance of autonomy in figuring it out and making your own health decisions and you know better than than the authorities just like the
Yeah, there's nothing...
Original in anything Bill Maher thinks about vaccines.
This is all stuff, like, we could get a highlighter and pull out that table from one of those Ancater papers that you like, Chris, and we could highlight each of the tropes that he hits upon.
It's good because you actually see what his reading list is.
Like, you see the stuff that's infiltrated his brain from the internet or books or whatever.
So, you know, there were clips I was going to play, Matt, which was Dave Rubin trying to get spiritual and talk about the cosmic creator and stuff in the middle of this episode, but I...
Honestly, don't think it's worthwhile because there's nothing there.
Well, first off...
What does that mean, the universe?
I mean, it's just the vaguest sort of...
You must know that the universe really doesn't give a shit about you and is not sending you messages.
It's definitely...
No, I think you can find messages within the nonsense.
That doesn't mean that the universe handed them to you or even that there's a divine thing.
Doing it, but you can find moments that have meaning.
Like, I mean, really, think about it this way.
- From the universe.
- What?
Well, I don't know.
You can call it the universe or whatever.
There are, it's not all random.
Here we are in Club Random.
It's not all, it's not all completely random, right?
- It is, actually.
- You think it's all completely random.
You think it's all--- What are we saying all?
The fact that you're here and you showed up on time, that wasn't random.
We arranged it.
- That it's any order to any of this.
You think it's all just...
Well, first of all, we'll never know because we don't know.
We can basically...
Well, you're right.
We'll never know.
Look, you say it all the time on the show that it's okay to say you don't know.
Absolutely.
And you're totally right.
Of course you're right.
I'll tell you what it is.
He went for a walk on the anniversary of someone's death and then the clouds opened at some part when he was about to walk back and him and his sister took it as a sign.
And he thinks this, plus him talking to Bill Maher after wanting to be a success for so long, shows there's some cosmic power.
And Jordan Peterson has made him say that.
It's so stupid.
You know, lots of people have this kind of thing.
But with Dave Rubin, it's so vacuous and empty.
And he takes so long to tell this absolutely mundane point of view, which proves nothing.
It's just the sun.
Shines out of a cloud at a specific moment that he takes.
Yeah, his big point is that he's got a vibe that everything has a purpose, things are meant to happen, that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah, we can skip it.
There's nothing, there's absolutely nothing.
We listen to it so you don't have to.
Let's move on.
Yeah. So maybe the thing to round this terrible detour on is we, you know, try on a couple of occasions, but they end on a positive note.
So I have one clip of something that I kind of agree with Dave Rubin on.
But before that, let's just see if Rubin has accurately pegged his audience because he discusses his audience at one point.
So let's see how accurate he
So what can I glean from if I go on tour and my audience is mostly conservative and they're usually somewhat religious but I get a lot of your guys too.
I get a lot of the disaffected liberals or whatever you want to call that.
But they love me.
They love me and they think I'm honest, which I am, and I think that I'm decent, which I am.
And I'm a little different.
They're over the gay thing.
No, they're over it.
They absolutely are.
And that's why the woke are so dangerous.
Because the right, and here's where I would give Trump credit, maybe you wouldn't.
Trump was literally on stage with a fucking rainbow flag, which is, I hate the rainbow flag.
I have nothing to do with the LGBT community.
Yes, I have nothing to do with any of that.
Dear Rubin there is presenting himself as, you know, I'm a pretty moderate guy.
I get conservatives.
But, you know, there's liberals that come and people think I'm honest.
And, like, just again, Matt, in the context of where we just heard him outright polemical lies in the first segment of clips from his show.
And also, that notion that the right is now completely comfortable with homosexuality and stuff, it's not true, right?
Gay marriage, more acceptable on the right now.
Yes.
And Donald Trump can be on stage with a rainbow flag.
But you don't have to go very far to see evangelical reaction to anything about talking about gay lifestyles or same-sex parents or just go a little bit farther.
And you have Nick Fuentes and the...
People who present that as a perversion against Christ, against the traditional values of society and so on.
So it isn't that now the right-wing conservative movement is completely fine with gay people.
That's all in the past.
No.
Mainstream right-wing politicians might not campaign on that.
But there's a very thick, active strata.
On the right, which is not okay with gays.
And just look at Milo Yiannopoulos, right?
He was a gay provocateur.
And what's he turned out to be?
Now he's shilling religious icons and promoting gay conversion therapy on right-wing, far-right religious stuff.
So, yeah, just an example.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know, I know.
Someone who is, especially at the level of the conspiratorial QAnon stuff that Rubin deals with and promulgates.
I mean, I've seen so many versions of that, that any gay couple that, say, adopts children has got to be doing it for the purpose of child abuse or satanic rituals or something.
The level that he's working at is not moderate conservatism or classical liberalism.
The guy that was disgusted, he shook his hand with him.
Does that show that now I know the right ring?
Like Dave Rubin had that guy on his show and they're politically aligned.
And then on his home audience, he either feigns or genuinely expresses disgust at having shook hands with a gay person.
Yeah, I think if Dave Rubin has anything original to what he does, it's that he does kind of whitewash the extreme edge of...
QAnon MAGA politics, right?
The way he frames it is just, look, it's just normal, right-thinking, upstanding people who are open-minded and, you know, liberal in pretty much all respects, just wants, you know, dissentists is cool with smoking pot, you know.
Yeah, the way he puts it is that this is just, like, normal stuff that normal, healthy, right-thinking Americans would be into.
It's not crazy conspiratorial stuff.
Yeah, and he does have a clean-cut, wholesome image, right?
He looks good, he's healthy, he projects that kind of image, so he doesn't come across as, frankly, sick like someone like Alex Jones.
Yeah, and the other aspect of it is he does make those things more palatable, but he's also just lying in a way, Matt, because there's a famous clip of Ben Shapiro talking with Ruben.
And Ruben saying, you know, but you would come to my anniversary party, wouldn't you?
You know, because we're friends.
You might not approve of the marriage.
And Benjamin was like, no, you know, because it's against my religious values to celebrate your thing.
And so Ruben knows that that exists, that it isn't all sunshine and lollipops on the right.
Maybe there's more tolerance than before.
But it's not the case that nobody cares about it anymore.
So, yeah, he's just...
Anyway...
You seem surprised that he's lying about this particular thing.
It's not.
I'm not.
I guess it's just annoying that people can lie outright about this kind of thing.
And, you know, like in the environment that he's in with Bill Maher and stuff, there's going to be some pushback on some points, but like most of it will just slip past and they'll move on to talking about something else.
But it's why I'm a little bit wary about describing Ruben as just being about like cross promotion.
I think Bill Maher ending up voting Republican wouldn't be that surprising for the reasons he himself outlines.
Perceived that vaccination was going to...
And the thing is, the Republican Party is going to make anti-vaccination a core part of their message, it seems like.
You know, like you said, the kind of grievance politics.
So, yeah, maybe Rubin is right to view this as an exercise of political outreach.
Yeah, I guess so.
I mean, I guess I just assumed that he's...
Primarily like an entrepreneur.
He's looking to make money by being a political pundit.
I guess I see him as a pure grifter.
So I don't see him really caring that much as to the outcomes.
See, I think it doesn't contradict because if Rubin succeeded in being part of the catalyst for Maher coming out as red-pilled and endorsing DeSantis, that would completely play into his.
That would be a trophy for him, right?
So it can be both that he is just happy to be invited on a relatively famous person and is going to be quite sycophantic and at times diplomatic in what he says.
But also, if he can get Bill Maher to endorse more Republican talking points, that serves his purposes and he'll claim it as he was partly responsible for it if it happens.
Yeah.
It's just that I see these kinds of shows where, let's take Bill Maher's Club Random thing as an example, that he's had Sean Penn on, Andrew Sullivan, Woody Harrelson, like a whole bunch of names I don't know,
but I assume they're relatively famous, right?
And I almost think that they just get people on because they're relatively famous.
That's what they do.
And relatively famous people go on because Bill Maher himself is relatively famous.
It's just kind of what they do.
And then they kind of go, well, what the hell are we going to talk about?
So they meander about.
Yeah, but that's from Maher's side.
That's not Ruben's side.
Like, Ruben is happy to be there, but the guests that go there, they often do have their own agenda or thing that they want to talk about.
Like Woody Harrelson very recently was on SNL.
And gave a big monologue about anti-vaccine stuff.
And on his appearance with Bill Maher, he was talking about the same thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I mean, you know, he's so shallow.
Like, you heard what he talked about when he was talking about something that wasn't politics.
You know, how he thought he saw the sun come through the clouds and he thought everything had a purpose.
Like, it's just weak, right?
He doesn't have anything else going on in his head apart from political punditry.
So, like, of course he's going to talk.
So, I guess to me, that's the point is, like, I'm not saying he's the strategist.
Working behind the scenes.
I think he's just brain melted and he's not very intelligent.
So, you know, that is what he's going to talk about.
But he'll take opportunities where he can.
And like he is a polemicist now.
And I think my sticking point is just the version where Ruben is not really believing what he's saying.
I don't think it's the case because I think he's that stupid.
That he is a true believer.
At the same time as being absolutely a polemicist who will say whatever he needs to in the moment.
I can't remember if we've had this conversation online before or on the show before, but I've argued about people with this many times, which is that there's no contradiction here.
There's no contradiction.
People just believe.
Whatever it is that suits them.
And he's not very deep.
He's not going to put in the mental energy to be pretending to do his job and then to have his own sort of secret worldview that's separate from that.
No, no.
People just align their beliefs to what's convenient for them.
So I just never see a contradiction with...
You know, are they grifting and pretending, in scare quotes, or are they really ideologues?
Like, for me, it's just like, well, what's the thing that's motivating him?
And he's an entrepreneur.
He's a businessman.
Like, he started off in comedy, did a thing with the Young Turks.
Like, anything that will get clicks and get downloads and earn him money.
I mean, it's a job, like we see with so many people in the discourse.
Yeah.
We're different though, Chris.
We're different because it's a hobby for us.
That's very different.
Yeah, I'm sure that completely inoculates us.
But in any case, I've just had enough of thinking about Bill Maher, Jim Rubin, or anyone like them.
It would have been very hard to cover them both together.
So it was a good idea to separate them.
But my God, do I want to get back to people.
Who are a little bit more interesting in any way.
So Ruben, much like Bill Maher, is a polemical pundit and he's a not very intelligent one.
That's my take on him.
There's nothing really there except he's good at selling.
He's essentially a throwback in a way to the polished TV presenter.
He can do that.
But he's empty.
He's just this soulless husk of a human.
And he's been filled up by the absolute lowest-ranked right-wing partisanship.
And yeah, there's very little to analyze that isn't on the surface because he's all...
Surface.
That's all he is.
That's a good summary.
I co-sign every one of those statements, particularly the ones about him being superficial, all surfaces, and just not very interesting.
Recycled, conspiratorial talking points that sit somewhere in between Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, delivered in his own particular style.
Yeah, there's nothing there of interest to us.
I don't want to spoil the gurometer, but he'll probably dig a couple of things, but he's just not deep enough to be doing the guru-ish things.
It's just rank punditry.
You can see him aping the people that we've covered.
Like, he wants to be that kind of figure, in a way, to his audience, but he's just...
Crap!
So, like, the thing is, like, there are aspects of it where he's doing an imitation of Jordan Peterson or he's doing an imitation of Tucker Carlson or whatever, but it's...
Like, it's just appeal, imitation.
Yeah, like if you compare him to, say, someone like Douglas Murray, right?
Douglas Murray is similar in some respects, right?
That he's often talking to right-wing, anti-leftists, talking points, political punditry, monologuing, that kind of thing.
Polished speaker as well.
But Douglas Murray has some, for all his faults, some depth to it.
Like, he'll put together...
He'll put together things that are particularly Douglas Murray in arguments and frameworks and rhetoric.
Yeah, but the thing with Ruben is that it's like it's targeted at 10-year-olds.
Like, it's really simple stuff.
It's lowest common denominator stuff.
So, yeah.
Yeah, so we're sorry.
We're sorry for inflicting this upon the people.
But, you know, there he is.
He's off the...
Dock it.
We don't need to do Ruben again.
And I don't think he's going to score particularly high on the Garometer just because he's not good at things.
So this will be an illustration that it is not just people we dislike because I really dislike Ruben.
I politically dislike him as a person.
I dislike him.
And yeah, I don't think he's going to score that highly on the Garometer.
No, no.
Okay.
So he's not even going to do well at that, Matt.
He's failed at it as well.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm just looking here, though.
I don't want to spoil the surprise with the Garometer, but, you know, conspiracy mongering.
That's there.
Grievance mongering.
That's there.
Anti-establishment terrorism.
I know which one.
Yeah, I know where he's going to score high and where he's going to score low.
He'll hit about half of them.
He'll hit maybe just under half, but the other ones he'll score very low on.
Yeah, all the ones that require some sort of intellectual, even pseudo-intellectual effort, like Galaxy Brightness, he's going to fail at.
Yeah, I agree.
So in any case, off he goes.
Arrivederci.
Goodbye, David Rubin.
Back to your bunker.
And like I say, we'll try to get some more.
Substantial figures in the next one.
But, you know, for calibration purposes, it's useful on occasion.
And we do have to, this year, dip into the left-wing commentariat space, but we'll maybe try to lean more towards left-wing guru types.
So, yeah.
I'm wondering who Dave Rubin's left-wing...
Equivalent is answers on a postcard.
But I don't want to do them.
Whoever it is, we might end up doing them, but, you know, just, yeah.
Yeah, let's do someone who's going to score highly next time.
Make the Garuma go ding.
Yes, that's right.
Now, because, Matt, we stopped canvassing for reviews, we've got a dearth of new reviews.
So this is a problem for a review of review segment.
I did come across one negative one from this month.
So this one is pretty good.
It's titled, Grifters with Delusions of Grandeur.
So here's us, Matt, being grifters.
It's a short review.
It just says, unbearably smug, unlistenable.
That's from Eric Jones, 79. So, you know, Matt, maybe we're...
Are we the Dave Rubens for some people out there?
It seems so.
We're the...
Smug grifters.
Maybe we are the mirror image of Dave Rubin.
Could be.
And there's a positive review then to balance that with, which is by A Brain Galactic.
It's a little bit long, but I'll read a selection from it.
It says, Criticism hidden as witticism.
A low-quality endeavor.
Five stars.
I like that.
These two neoliberal shills.
Don't fool with their fake accents, lulling you into unconscious submission with their disk-approved neuro-linguistic programming, aimed at reducing your involuntary and tremendous personal convictions with doctored and unrelenting criticisms.
The CIA-approved tactic will helplessly mold your mind into the dull collectivist acquiescence of a babe in Bunting carried down the river to Babel's Tower.
For reprocessing as meat in the new world order.
That's a good exercise in creative writing.
That's good.
Well, we can always get ChatGPT to create reviews for us if we can't get enough of them.
But I just Googled it, Chris, and I see in various sites, I don't know if we've done these ones before, but there's lots of good reviews out there.
Of course, we have hundreds of reviews.
These are new ones, Matt.
I'm canvassing new ones.
Contemporary reviews.
I don't like to go into the past.
I only live in the present.
I'm a shark.
Yeah, so that's where we are.
So, you know, more reviews, please.
More reviews.
I can't look back at old reviews.
I only can see the future.
So supply us with reviews or it'll be back to the wisdom of Michaela.
It's up to you.
You don't want that, guys.
Trust me.
Yeah.
Now, patrons, Matt.
We need to shout them out.
I'm always wary about this segment because of the difficulty I have in tracking who's been shouted out.
But here we're going to go.
And I'm going to first shout out the conspiracy hypothesizers.
Simmons, Ken Harris, Daniel Farley, Mizzus Frist, Undead Legend, Louise, Jessica,
Greg Tuff, Sean Hacobian, and Patrick.
That is our Conspiracy Hypothesizers for this week.
Thank you, guys.
I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions, and they've all circulated this list of correct answers.
I wasn't at this conference.
This kind of shit makes me think, man.
It's almost like someone is being paid.
Like when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
I really like Joe Rogan's tone there.
It's like this sort of 60s kind of hippie thing.
This kind of shit, man.
Yeah, I know.
And these guys advancing, you know, plans.
It's like, it's you, Joe.
You're the one saying that.
You know, all these people saying, Soros, it's up to shit.
Like, you!
You're saying it right now.
But anyway, those were conspiracy hypothesizers.
Our revolutionary thinkers, Matt, they include Lachlan Gilchrist, Alex Weschler, David Love, Maureen, Matt, Not you.
A different man.
Max.
Liam Dobson.
Bill W2011.
Jonathan Kano.
I wonder, like, the Mortal Kombat character.
And Sean Carmody and Patrick Dunlop.
Those are revolutionary thinkers.
Thank you.
I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time.
And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.
I'm someone who's a true polymath.
I'm all over the place.
But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption.
Now, that's just a guess.
And it could easily be wrong.
But it also could not be wrong.
The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.
That one always catches me off guard.
Brett Weinstein's reaction to Jordan's comment.
Yeah.
You know, contrasting delivery, like you were saying about how Ruben is just so unconvincing.
He's like a pale imitation.
And, you know, Brett, he's got the delivery that, you know, that emotion is coming through.
Yeah.
So, last Matt.
The shining stars and the guru size, the galaxy brain gurus, who are welcome to talk to us once a month at long Ask Me Anything live streaming chat hangout events.
They are Sarah Eccle, Sean Chinnery, Rez, SM Jenkins, the Hey Elliot podcast.
Hey Elliot podcast.
Thomas T., 4RSEF, Tim Rossiter, Tom Allison, Tom V., Tom Yasko, and Trey DeVille.
Very good.
Well done, Chris.
Thank you, everyone.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank you all.
We tried to warn people.
Yeah.
Like, what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything.
Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense.
I have no tribe.
I'm in exile.
Think again, sunshine.
Yeah.
The thing that that last clip just made me think about, I actually missed Scott Adams.
This makes me pine for Scott Adams because, like, he's evil, but at least there's, you know, something entertaining to him.
Like, Reuben, oh, fuck me.
Sorry.
Yeah, no, I know.
Evil, but...
Complicated, in a way, you know?
Or, like, he's got...
There's stuff going on there that we could talk about.
But what can you say about Dave Rubin?
Nothing.
Nothing except what we did say, but...
Alright, so...
For two hours.
Yeah.
I know.
Anyway.
Yeah.
Sorry about this episode, everyone.
We had to get it done.
We listened to those episodes.
We had to put them out, but...
They can't all be bangers.
There's got to be some fillers, like side B stuff.
That's how it works.
That's right.
We'll be back on side A soon.
Don't worry.
This is just, yeah.
Well, anyway, thank you for listening.
Accord the disc.
Note the gin.
Be aware of what a Prat the Aruban is and go about your lives.
