May 20, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
03:09:38
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| All right, the big day is here. | ||
| We are finally doing the Rubin Report Fan Show. | ||
| In case you missed it, a couple weeks back, I had asked you guys to let me know why I should interview you, and I gotta tell you guys, you did not disappoint me. | ||
| We got almost 1,200 responses within a week and ended up selecting 20 of you instead of the original five that we had intended. | ||
| We're gonna release these over the course of a couple weeks, each video with a few eight to 10 minute interviews. | ||
| Many of you guys wrote incredible essays on what's going on in your life and in your corner of the world. | ||
| I promise you that we read every single entry. | ||
| It took us a long time, and it was incredibly difficult to make the decision of who to choose. | ||
| We did our best to pick an eclectic mix of people from all over the world. | ||
| On a personal note, I just want to say how truly, truly awed and humbled I am by your submissions. | ||
| The fact that you guys watch this show, share it with friends and family, and are engaging in the battle of ideas yourself really makes putting myself out there worthwhile. | ||
| I'm honored, really, to have such an incredible fan base that not only is connecting with me, but with each other as well. | ||
| Clearly, you guys all recognize that we're in this together, and that talking about the important issues honestly is the only way to move forward as part of the human race. | ||
| All right then, the first ever Rubin Report Fan Show is here! | ||
| Let's roll. | ||
| All right, I'm on with Sophie in London. | ||
| Sophie, how's it going? | ||
| I'm amazing. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me tonight, Dave. | ||
| Yeah, my pleasure. | ||
| All right, so I saw on Twitter you're very excited to talk to me. | ||
| I have a whole list of things that you had written in originally about, but I sense that more than anything else you want to talk about feminism. | ||
| Am I right? | ||
| Yeah, my favorite topic. | ||
| It's delicious. | ||
| Delicious. | ||
| All right, well, let's dive right in. | ||
| What are your feelings about feminism in 2016? | ||
| Well, Dave, the problem is feminism in 2016 isn't the feminism that once was. | ||
| I think we know from Milo Yiannopoulos and Christina Hoff Summers, who have promoted it amazingly well, this idea that modernist feminism has become akin to man-hating. | ||
| It has, it has. | ||
| And I myself, having been brought up in a family of mostly females with my dad, of course, bless his heart, I know the value of being a strong, independent woman, as cliche as it sounds. | ||
| And that doesn't involve safe spaces. | ||
| That doesn't involve shying away from debate. | ||
| You know what it involves? | ||
| It involves being equal to a man. | ||
| It involves working to be equal. | ||
| So, you know, everything about this whole safe space concept is extremely dangerous because these people, these people, these students, universities, like myself, they will be subject to modally cuddling, to being told they are victims all the time. | ||
| And I imagine you're being constantly told you're a victim. | ||
| What is that going to do to your mentality? | ||
| That's extremely damaging. | ||
| And that is what modernist feminism is doing to women all the time. | ||
| And it's depressing because We are meant to be for gender equality. | ||
| So why are we telling these women, why are we telling females everywhere that you can't do this? | ||
| That this mystical force, the patriarchy, is supposedly oppressing us. | ||
| And I say this obviously, patriarchy is a serious issue in countries such as the Middle East and India, for instance. | ||
| But in the West, you know, I can walk out of my house without a mail minder and it's fine. | ||
| You know, I don't have this oppression on me. | ||
| Yeah, so you're telling me you're safe when you walk out of your house in London, you can make it to the store without a man, and you can do that on your own? | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I mean, sometimes I do get a bit of a panic attack coming up, because I feel like sometimes the wolf whistles are going to come at me, and then I'm going to be triggered, and then it's just going to be horrific. | ||
| But, you know, I just manage it. | ||
| I just manage it, Dave. | ||
| And the sad thing is, is that this is extremely patronising to women. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| We have fought for equality. | ||
| Why are we shying away? | ||
| This takes three steps backwards. | ||
| This is ridiculous. | ||
| And the thing is, With modern day feminism, like I said, it doesn't support men's needs as well. | ||
| If we want gender rights, if we want gender equality, we have to consider things that they aren't addressing. | ||
| Now, from what I previously stated, the patriarchy. | ||
| Now, feminists like to consider it an oppressive force on females, and they like to paint it on Western females as well, not just those that are generally oppressed. | ||
| Now, I would say the patriarchy is doing a bloody bad job at Benefiting the oppressors. | ||
| If we look at the endemic of male suicides, for instance, if we look at the rates of male to female ratios of going into university, especially in the UK, it's atrocious. | ||
| And I can't help but feel that these modern day feminists are fighting battles that are already won in the West. | ||
| You know, a newspaper here in the UK, The Guardian, I'm sure you're a big fan of those lovely articles. | ||
| A little regressive for me, but every now and again, there's something OK. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| There's always a fairly good discussion on... It's like a diamond in the rough, but for the most part, it has become sort of clickbait. | ||
| Guess what we're going to appropriate today? | ||
| What's sexist today? | ||
| How can I be a victim today? | ||
| And it's so disempowering. | ||
| You know, I want to read articles about women making it in the world, which we do, which we do because we are equal to men and we should be so proud of it. | ||
| So why are we shying away from that? | ||
| Why are we teaching these students that, you know, men are horrible creatures, which is something I detest because we are equal. | ||
| And when I say equal, we are not the same because we are biologically different. | ||
| And again, we should be so proud of that. | ||
| We should be proud that we feel each other's differences. | ||
| We complement each other. | ||
| It's a wonderful thing. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so we gotta pause there, because you're giving me a lot. | ||
| I love it, and you know I'm on board with most of these ideas, and you know what, I promise you, I'm gonna send this to Christina directly, so she can listen to this. | ||
| Oh, that is so lovely, thank you. | ||
| So when you talk about these ideas, it's very obvious to me, you're not just telling me this, this is something you talk about in your life as well. | ||
| When you talk about this, either at university, or with your friends, are you shunned? | ||
| Have you been fighting with people? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| I've been told to check my privilege because apparently I'm not oppressed enough. | ||
| I'm not oppressed enough as a woman. | ||
| And apparently there are other women out there in the West that are suffering from the patriarchy that I am yet to be aware of. | ||
| I think they should also talk to the working class ex-coal miner in Yorkshire who is currently suffering and can barely afford his council flat tax, you know? | ||
| There's a slight discrepancy in their logic, and they don't see this. | ||
| And I can totally empathize with what they're trying to do. | ||
| They're trying to find some good. | ||
| They're trying to do something. | ||
| I can see the intentions, but good intentions don't always mean good results, you know? | ||
| Yeah, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. | ||
| Good intentions, exactly. | ||
| And like you say, I do get, when I say shunned, I don't want to be victimizing myself or, you know, I'm so triggered by talking about this. | ||
| That was a good move there. | ||
| You could have went that route, but you got out. | ||
| That was good. | ||
| But in a sense, there is a wall. | ||
| I'll give them videos and say Christina's talks or, you know, I'll link them. | ||
| I dare not link them to Milo yet. | ||
| I mean, I adore him, but I feel like they won't get him quite yet. | ||
| Baby steps, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| I'll link them, say, peer-reviewed studies suggesting, perhaps, that the pay-wage gap has nothing to do with a mystical patriarchy, but is merely to do with job preferences as one of the factors. | ||
| And they'll just dismiss it as saying, oh, it's just a one-off case. | ||
| But how many one-off cases can you use as an excuse for that? | ||
| It's strawmanning, to say the least. | ||
| And they're trying to fight a battle which has already been won, as Christina has already said many times. | ||
| Yeah, so do you think that goes to the, you know, the feelings over facts idea? | ||
| That seems to be what comes out of, unfortunately, a lot of the left these days. | ||
| It is sad. | ||
| And it's sad because as much as we use the regressive left meme trope, so to speak, and it's very true. | ||
| It's very true. | ||
| I try not to think that it's most of the left because, you know, I'm very much a liberal on ideas. | ||
| I believe in equality. | ||
| I believe in gay marriage. | ||
| I believe all of that. | ||
| And I believe in freedom of expression. | ||
| I believe in exchange of ideas. | ||
| And I truly believe with free exchange of ideas, you can empathize with people. | ||
| You can see why people think the way they think. | ||
| And there's less hatred, there's less tension, because you're able to understand one another, which is ultimately an amazing thing to do in such a globalized world. | ||
| And it's hard to do that when you just focus solely on emotion and not logic and rationality, because then you can misinterpret something, you can say it's racist, you can say it's bigoted, when it's perfectly an innocent statement. | ||
| It's probably a statistic that has suddenly magically turned out to be racist. | ||
| Man, you are preaching my logic or something. | ||
| I just mangled that one. | ||
| I think you could be my new co-host. | ||
| But wait, I want to shift to one more with you. | ||
| So you mentioned in your submission that there's a form of atheism also that you don't like. | ||
| And now I've had a lot of atheists on here. | ||
| Generally, I'm pro-atheist and I'm pro-logic and reason and all that stuff. | ||
| But you think that some of the movement, so to speak, has taken a turn that you don't like. | ||
| Can you tell me about that? | ||
| I'm sure, of course. | ||
| I'm an atheist myself, huge fan of the secular movement. | ||
| I think we are very, very fortunate to be living in mostly a secular world with exceptions, and I'm glad we are doing a lot of work towards fixing that. | ||
| However, I do think there is a sinister smugness in the atheist movement, and I do think it's connected to some of the far left, because it's very interesting how some of these people swap, say, a religion for their own ideology, a fervent ideology based on the patriarchy or based on imaginary things, and it's very religion-like. | ||
| So, in an essence, suddenly swapping religion, and I'm not anti-religion, I might be atheist, but I'm not anti-religion at all. | ||
| I think there's a lot to be said for some of the cultural things, like the Anglican Church for the United Kingdom has given us culture, it's given us art, it's given us an explosion of things we can't deny. | ||
| Total hero. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So, one must be careful when criticising belief, which is totally fine, and not the believer, and the benefits of what that belief has given us. | ||
| But I do also think that some of these people go a very Marxist route, so they do believe that religion is the opiate of the people, say, and they completely exchange logic and reason for their own ideology. | ||
| So it's not like an atheist has become an atheist because they've Discovered science, or they've, you know, read more of Dawkins, they've become an atheist, sort of as a result of the ideology through the cultural Marxism that is being perpetuated in a lot of the academia nowadays. | ||
| That's, that's how I'm, that's why I'm worried about that route. | ||
| But for the most part, you know, I'm, I'm perfectly, perfectly joyous at a secular movement. | ||
| So that's, that's fine with me. | ||
| Yeah, all right, well listen, this went by super fast, clearly. | ||
| I know. | ||
| We could have talked a lot more. | ||
| I'm curious, what do you want to do with your life? | ||
| Because obviously you have a lot to say, and you should get that voice out there. | ||
| I do have a lot to say. | ||
| That's very kind of you. | ||
| I have a lot of... I want to start my own business. | ||
| I'm quite ambitious, actually, and I'm just finishing up my final year of university, so I'll be free from the shackles soon enough. | ||
| But I'm going to have a think about what I'm going to do, actually. | ||
| I'm going to have a think, because this is actually, this has been a pleasure, actually. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me on the show. | ||
| All right, I'm on with John from Turkey. | ||
| Now, John, it's spelled C-A-N, but as I know that the C in Turkey is a J. Yeah. | ||
| Is that all I need to know about your alphabet? | ||
| There's a couple other things I should probably know, right? | ||
| Probably, but it's pretty much easy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's pretty easy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Well, we have a lot to talk about because we've talked a bit about Turkey on the show and you sent us a great email with explaining some of your frustrations with Turkey, some of the good things with Turkey. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| We're hearing a lot about Turkey in the news right now for a series of reasons. | ||
| So I'm going to start it there. | ||
| Give me just the general state of things in Turkey right now. | ||
| Well, the life in Turkey is tough, but I can say that it's relatively easy than living in any other predominantly Muslim country in the region. | ||
| but there are still tons of human rights violations, pressure on free press, pressure on free thinkers, | ||
| and we also have a massive refugee crisis, and this creates security problems, | ||
| economical and social problems. | ||
| And also, we have a really polarized country. | ||
| Like, there are many different social and cultural groups that have different lifestyles and values | ||
| and expectations from life, and finally we have, what can I say, | ||
| we have an internal conflict for more than 40 years between the Kurds and Turks, and it blows the line | ||
| between the Islamists and the secular. | ||
| Like, it even makes Islamists and some secular Turks stand together against the Kurds. | ||
| So I assume, are you totally secular? | ||
| Are you an atheist? | ||
| Are you religious? | ||
| Are you Muslim? | ||
| Some combination thereof? | ||
| No, I'm atheist and I'm totally secular. | ||
| I'm from secular and liberal valleys. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Can you be openly atheist, openly secular there? | ||
| Because it sounds like the Prime Minister has sort of been cracking down on, or he's making the country more Islamist in a sense. | ||
| Well, he tries his best and he has a great support. | ||
| I mean, he's been winning every single election that he was getting into. | ||
| He has been getting into for 14 years. | ||
|
unidentified
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He has half of the votes every time. | |
| And also we have another Islamist and nationalist party in the parliament. | ||
| But I can also say that we have roughly one-fourth of the population that is secular. | ||
| And for secular values, they have secular lifestyles. | ||
| There are many atheists. | ||
| It's always said that Turkey is 98% Muslim and that kind of stuff. | ||
| But I think it's less than this. | ||
| And it's Muslim community, atheist community is getting bigger and bigger every day. | ||
| And people are understanding that secular values are really important for us. | ||
| Yeah, so that's really interesting because, you know, we hear from people in the West all the time. | ||
| They always use Turkey as the example of sort of like, you know, a good Muslim country, you know, because you're OK. | ||
| You can do this. | ||
| You have no fear about being on this show, right? | ||
| You can do this and you're not. | ||
| I mean, I know that Erdogan is cracking down on the press, but do you? | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| I don't know if it's okay to say, but sometimes I feel like if I do some certain stuff, I can lose my job. | ||
| Some certain things can go badly and that kind of stuff. | ||
| But at the same time, I want to speak out. | ||
| I want to be open and I want to share my ideas and values and I want to stand for these values for my country and for the entire universe, especially. | ||
| Yeah, well, I love that. | ||
| That's exactly why I do the show. | ||
| So let's talk a little bit about the immigration situation because obviously you guys, you share a border with Syria. | ||
| It sounds like at some level, a lot of the European fighters for ISIS come through Turkey to get there. | ||
| Then you guys get the refugees. | ||
| Then, as you said, There's also this issue with the Kurds who are sort of | ||
| caught in the middle and being fought on by both ISIS and Turkey. | ||
| So what's the general situation as far as like integrating the immigrants? | ||
| Are they staying in Turkey? Are they just using Turkey to go to the rest of Europe? What's going on? | ||
| Well, there's literally no integration because I mean millions of people keep coming to Turkey | ||
| and you cannot shut down the border. | ||
| You cannot just say that we are not welcoming you. | ||
| So we have to accept them but they're coming By millions and like they're on the streets and there's a lot of social problems like a lot I see I started seeing in different cities in Anatolia like beggars on the streets like people living on the streets and refugee camps and that kind of stuff and also I want to say that like people say Turkey but Turkey is a really big country and | ||
| For example, the Syrian border is roughly a thousand kilometers away from me. | ||
| So I don't see that, I don't feel that effect of ISIS and that kind of, but cities on the border suffer the most. | ||
| Yeah, so you also wanted to talk about the regressive left, of course. | ||
| I'd say out of our 1,200 emails, I'd say about 1,000 of them did have the phrase regressive left. | ||
| So how has this regressive ideology affected your life in Turkey? | ||
| Well, whenever I hear an aggressor talking on any TV show or on YouTube, blood rushes into my head and my palms start sweating. | ||
| I keep getting angry and angry because they're telling lies. | ||
| They're telling stupid stories about Turkey and about Muslim countries. | ||
| For example, that harmony myth. | ||
| They say Turkey is the harmony between secularism and Islam. | ||
| It's a perfect country. | ||
| Whenever someone criticizes Islam, they say, it's the perfect example. | ||
| And you say, all Muslims, but here is Turkey. | ||
| It's our nature, our life. | ||
| So you're a bigot. | ||
| You're an Islamophobe. | ||
| But the realities are much different than that. | ||
| I mean, there is a struggle between the settlers and the Islamists. | ||
| And it's not just a... And whenever you see something about Erdogan on the media, it's presented like he's holding us as hostages. | ||
| Like there's a dictator and he's doing whatever he wants. | ||
|
unidentified
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No, he has a huge support. | |
| From society. | ||
| I mean, 50% of people support him, love him. | ||
| They just support and love him. | ||
| But at the same time, we have seculars. | ||
| So it's just a constant battle between us. | ||
| So it's not just a harmonious coexistence. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And regressors keep telling lies about it. | ||
| And, you know, I want to say something more. | ||
| For example, I always see some Muslim guys speaking with confidence about truth in Islam, like how wonderful it is and that kind of stuff. | ||
| But then I see people from the left in the Western countries who are cherishing the Western values the most. | ||
| And they start talking cowardly, being incapable of defending universal liberal values. | ||
| So I can't get it. | ||
| What's wrong with you? | ||
| I mean, what's wrong with these liberals in the West? | ||
| I wish I knew what was wrong with them because it would solve a lot of my personal problems. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So, but how big is that ideology there? | ||
| Like, so you have, you have the Islamists. | ||
| Now, okay, we get what they're about. | ||
| And then you have the secularists. | ||
| How big is that, that piece that is this sort of regressive thing? | ||
| Well, how big is the regressive part that's sort of trying to quiet the secularists? | ||
| Because we know that the Islamists are trying to quiet the secularists, right? | ||
| Right, you know what? | ||
| We don't have enough comfort to be regressive, right? | ||
| We don't have any regressives in our country. | ||
| But regressives keep helping the Islamists in the West, and they do not care about us. | ||
| Guys in Bangladesh, in Saudi Arabia, in many Middle Eastern countries, they are getting hacked to death by machetes. | ||
| And people keep talking about, I mean, wearing a burqa, is it a right? | ||
| Or what is that? | ||
| Or people keep talking about being a proud Muslim and that kind of stuff. | ||
| I mean, this really makes me angry because People are fighting for freedom here and people, like, they're losing their lives. | ||
| And then I see people living in comfort and calling people, even people like me, Islamophobes. | ||
| I've been called by Westerners, Islamophobes, for many times. | ||
| Even though I'm living in Turkey, I was born in Turkey. | ||
| Right, you're living in it, they're living in the comforts of the West and they're calling you an Islamophobe. | ||
| Listen man, we could go on forever. | ||
| We could go on forever here, but unfortunately we gotta keep rolling. | ||
| But it was really a pleasure talking to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, thank you for picking me out of 1,000 people. | |
| Thanks for submitting. | ||
| Alright, we'll talk again. | ||
| Alright, I'm on with Bashir in Jordan. | ||
| Bashir, how's it going? | ||
| Doing well, thank you. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How about yourself? | ||
| My pleasure, I'm doing great. | ||
| All right, so you're the third one up. | ||
| We're dancing across the globe here. | ||
| You know, Jordan, one of the things when I saw your email, you're actually the only person from Jordan that emailed. | ||
| And we never really hear anything about Jordan. | ||
| You hear about the Middle East constantly. | ||
| Every day in the news, something terrible's happening in the Middle East. | ||
| But Jordan, you don't hear much. | ||
| The king comes here and he has a nice suit and looks good and everything. | ||
| That's pretty much all you hear about Jordan. | ||
| So tell me a little bit, what's going on in Jordan? | ||
| Well yeah, I think Jordan's like the eye of the storm. | ||
| And when you have a storm, nobody speaks about the eye of the storm because it doesn't do anything. | ||
| So all the damage is happening all around us, but Jordan is pretty safe and nothing really happens. | ||
| Except we keep taking in refugees from all over. | ||
| The latest numbers I've looked at, almost a third of Jordan's population is actually refugees, including my family. | ||
| We came from Palestine after the first issues with Israel, after the Second World War. | ||
| So yeah, my family is included in that number. | ||
| Do you have full rights? | ||
| Do Palestinians in Jordan have full rights? | ||
| I thought they can't vote in certain things or have certain jobs or something. | ||
| Well, that's a tough one. | ||
| There's so many regulations. | ||
| My family has been here from the start. | ||
| I'm kind of okay, but Palestinians who've come later do have some issues, especially with, like you said, and the legal system, they're not fully protected, so to speak. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How do you feel in terms of, so you emailed me, you're doing this right now, like just in the general terms of being able to speak your mind and not worry about government coercion or anything like that, like do you feel pretty comfortable? | ||
| I think I do. | ||
| I stopped really bothering with it too much. | ||
| It was really difficult to start speaking out. | ||
| Eventually you find your own circles and at some point there's this tipping point where you just don't care anymore about the consequences. | ||
| You just fight for what you think is right and this is one of the reasons I love your show and I love you and I admire you for what you're doing. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| All right, so you gave me a bunch of great stuff to talk about here. | ||
| One of the things you wanted to focus on was the Western apologists for Islam. | ||
| Now obviously I have spent a lot of time talking about it, right, and I always try to separate You know, the Muslim people from the doctrine of Islam. | ||
| It's very hard to do, as we know. | ||
| But yeah, go ahead. | ||
| The Western apologists. | ||
| You're in a Muslim-majority country, having to live under certain laws dictated by Islam. | ||
| So what do you make of these people in the West that are apologizing for this? | ||
| Well, I'll just start out by saying, like, even your distinction is sometimes a bit blurry. | ||
| Even when you separate Muslim people to add the doctrine of Islam, I think there's still some muddy areas in between. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, sure, all of us want to be nice and peaceful, but at the same time, when you're in a conflict and you expect the other side to be as nice as you, that's, I think, a bit silly. | ||
| You don't walk up to a lion with a flower and expect it. | ||
| Yeah, you'll be friends forever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So, yeah, it doesn't work. | ||
| So, uh... the the western apologist is my problem with them is | ||
| by focusing on the business directs the problems of the issues | ||
| and as if it's like you know it's not as bad you know i'm sure | ||
| people like reza aslan and the young turks sorry for bringing that up | ||
| what they practically do is the the effects on the | ||
| the good people like yourself and the classical liberals or whoever is | ||
| genuinely caring about what's happening in the middle east and the muslim | ||
| majority countries they take the conversation away and it alleviates this uh... | ||
| sense of urgency They just kill it like if you wanted to help and then you hear someone who claims to be a scholar and like he knows everything on the inside and they tell you that no, it's all fine. | ||
| Then you just think, yeah, I don't feel the urge to help anymore. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And for us on the inside, we see this almost on a daily basis. | ||
| I mean, female genital mutilation, homophobia and all the terrible things people just genuinely dislike in the West. | ||
| These are real problems and we would appreciate the help from, you know, from everybody who can help. | ||
| Right, so in a way, so you're in like a particularly, I guess, tenuous situation because you're clearly, I assume you identify as a classical liberal or a liberal or some western-ish something. | ||
| You stand for basically western values, I sense, right? | ||
| And you sort of need the help of the outsiders to make change there because it would be very hard to do on your own, right? | ||
| Well, you know, of course the help would be much appreciated, but when there's... What's the opposite of helping? | ||
| They're just not helping at all, and they're actually making everyone else feel like there's no problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you think there's no problem, then, well, what are you gonna do? | ||
| The problem's gonna keep on escalating until it just blows up. | ||
| So I don't... it's a tough question, I think, because, I mean, sure, the help would be needed, but, you know, not ruining it for us would be also appreciated. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So on a day-to-day basis living in Jordan, like, how much is religion affecting... well, are you religious at all? | ||
| Do you have any religious... | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| So how much religiosity, religiosity? | ||
| What's the word there? | ||
| How much of that are you... Yeah, I think I got something close. | ||
| How much of that is affecting your day-to-day life? | ||
| Well, my day-to-day life isn't really a problem for me, but if you look at other segments of society, like women or homosexuals or, you know, any kind of Traditionally marginalized group, because Jordan's still a very patriarchal society, unlike what feminists in the US want to tell you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, being a woman, if you walk down the street, you're expected to be dressed appropriately, which is pretty much covered up. | ||
| And it's not really strict, like in Saudi Arabia, where you have to wear the veil. | ||
| It's not like that. | ||
| But like, don't show legs or, you know, So it's kind of moderate in that sense. | ||
| Religiosity is pretty much everywhere. | ||
| Like, you always see these verses from the Qur'an or somewhere in the streets. | ||
| You always hear the call to prayer five times a day. | ||
| So, and it's part of our language. | ||
| We always say like, you might have heard this phrase, Inshallah. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| So yeah, Allah, the Prophet always come into these traditional phrases. | ||
| We don't probably mean it to be religious, but it's just ingrained in us. | ||
| And yeah, it's just inescapable, really. | ||
| But I mean, it's not as bad as elsewhere. | ||
| So that's some hope for us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, this was quick. | ||
| Wait, we're basically wearing the same shirt, I just realized. | ||
| It's pretty close. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| So we're in good company. | ||
| Listen, I could go way longer with you, but we gotta go. | ||
| You're third out of 20. | ||
| But it was a pleasure talking to you, and let's stay in the loop, and I hope to get to Jordan one day. | ||
| Well, you're always welcome. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Don't tell us you're gay, though. | ||
| We'll keep it quiet. | ||
| We'll keep it quiet. | ||
| Don't worry. | ||
| Alright, I'm here with Felix in Germany. | ||
| Felix, you dressed for the occasion. | ||
| Finally, somebody that's looking sharp. | ||
| That's nice to see. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I mean, you're always dressed very well, so I thought I'd dress up for the occasion as well. | ||
| Very nice. | ||
| You one-upped me with the tie. | ||
| Next time maybe I'll see what I can do. | ||
| Alright, so we got a lot of responses from Germany. | ||
| I'd say after probably the United States, UK, maybe Canada and then India. | ||
| I think Germany was right there in the top five. | ||
| So you're the one that we selected from Germany. | ||
| So tell me, what's going on in Germany these days? | ||
| I mean, the biggest thing is obviously the refugee crisis and the whole political field that is surrounding that, so kind of our politics is in kind of trouble because we have people who don't agree with established politicians and established politicians fighting each other, so it's really interesting times. | ||
| Yeah, so we've talked about it a little bit. | ||
| Basically, you guys have let in about 1.3 million immigrants or migrants or refugees, | ||
| whatever you want to call them. | ||
| You guys give them some pretty great social services, right? | ||
| It seems like they get a lot. | ||
| So what is the problem? | ||
| Is there an integration problem? | ||
| Is it more from the German side? | ||
| Is it from their side? | ||
| Is it both? | ||
| Is it economics? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| See, Dave, I would say it's not a problem with either the German locals or the migrants | ||
| or refugees themselves. | ||
| It's a problem with systems. | ||
| The government let in all these immigrants who are not necessarily all refugees because there's really no proper control who gets in and who doesn't and they sort it out later in a process that takes months until the whole asylum application goes through. | ||
| And then we take in 1.3 million of them But there's no system to give them shelter effectively, to integrate them, to teach them about the German culture. | ||
| So what we get is a lot of people bunched up in a really small place who come from different cultures than our home culture and who then form their own little subcultures and don't integrate very well because they have nobody to really talk to except for their own people. | ||
| Yeah, so does Germany have sort of a special place in this because of the history with Germany and obviously xenophobia and World War II, and Germany has done a tremendous amount to repair that and the culture has completely changed, I think that's very obvious, but that there's a certain amount of guilt that, so you want to do the right thing and then they come here and then the systems, as you're saying, are just not in place, so it's like the idea doesn't quite match up with the reality of what's going on? | ||
| That's exactly what's happening. | ||
| I mean, in Germany we have a certain type of unique political correctness in that we really still have the shame or the guilt and want to redeem ourselves, basically, even though we are almost two generations removed from the events. | ||
| But most Germans still feel the need To be proper to other people and to help out others. | ||
| So there is this goodwill of helping these people and naturally people who come from civil war ridden areas there is a human feeling of you have to help them out. | ||
| But I think the way we are doing it now is really failing those people in need and is also failing the people locally in Germany. | ||
| Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about what happened on New Year's Day in Cologne. | ||
| Because I thought that was sort of a perfect example of why this whole debate is so crazy. | ||
| So there were these mass attacks that mostly, it sounds like they were mostly done by migrants, assaulting women, there were rapes and all this stuff. | ||
| And I saw the reaction of the left here immediately was saying, ah, this is Islamophobia and all of this stuff that we talk about endlessly. | ||
| And really, It didn't have anything to do with that. | ||
| If any group had attacked a whole bunch of women, I would have been against that group. | ||
| How was the reaction in Germany to that? | ||
| Because it sounded like it took a couple days for it actually to catch on, right? | ||
| And then people didn't really want to talk about it. | ||
| Well, it almost took a few weeks, because the fact that those groups who assaulted the women were mainly immigrants was hidden away from the public, essentially, by political officials and the police. | ||
| And the reaction was quite interesting, because people were really afraid and really angry about the situation. | ||
| And some on the left, they're the same as leftists in America and try to put it away from Islam as a religion or | ||
| culture. | ||
| And then on the right, a lot of people blame Islam or Muslims in general for that, which is obviously also way | ||
| too extreme. | ||
| But kind of the center is missing where we acknowledge the problem that there are cultural differences. | ||
| And if you put young males who come from this culture, who have been growing up in this culture, put them in a place | ||
| and just let them have their own communities without any integration, then these problems can occur and will occur. | ||
| That's why we have no solution for it, because we can't acknowledge the problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So with everything you've said so far, do you guys have a particular sort of fear of | ||
| the right wing parties growing because of the history of your country that you don't | ||
| want these, the xenophobic people to actually take power. | ||
| And then at the same time, as we talk about all the time, if the left doesn't deal with | ||
| these issues honestly, it almost seems like the average person, the person that's in the | ||
| middle that you're talking about, well, then they go to where the only answer is being | ||
| spoken of, even if it's not something they agree with. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| And that's what we've been seeing. | ||
| I mean, there's always a move from the established politicians to ban these few very right-wing parties that we still have in Germany, which are really extreme, at least some of them are. | ||
| And they always try to ban them via the legal system. | ||
| But now, with the alternative for Germany, the AfD in Germany, that's a new party that has sprung up. | ||
| And all this controversy. | ||
| And they've become very, very big. | ||
| And a lot of people jumped onto that opportunity. | ||
| But at the same time, a lot of right-wing extremists obviously jumped on that. | ||
| And the established politicians all try to paint this new party, which is more conservative, more right-wing, into the Nazi corner to isolate them. | ||
| But what then, of course, happens is that you get a lot of extremists to join that party, and you don't find the real discourse. | ||
| Yeah, so one of the things that you wrote that I thought was really, really great. | ||
| So first off, you're starting a podcast with a Hungarian friend. | ||
| Is he in Germany or is he in Hungary or somewhere else? | ||
| No, he's in Hungary. | ||
| In person, we've only met once when I visited him. | ||
| We connected through the internet just by chance. | ||
| I met him one day and we started talking and talking and talking. | ||
| And because we both felt the need to speak out about politics, about philosophy, about our societies, and to discuss how we can make them better, we started having night-long discussions, literally through the night until the sun came back up. | ||
| And at some point we, through shows like yours, where you really emphasize the need to make your voice heard, we decided we have to do something. | ||
| And we decided to basically start a podcast to get other people in to discuss stuff with us and to develop our opinions openly and to kind of make a difference. | ||
| Yeah, well, listen, I love that. | ||
| And if every single person that watched this show started their own show and I became completely irrelevant, but the ideas won, I would be I'll be happy to retire on a farm in Wyoming or something. | ||
| So one of the phrases that you used in your email to us was the difference between a global network and a local network. | ||
| And I thought this concept was really cool because it's very much what we're doing here. | ||
| And it's why I wanted to do this fan show. | ||
| and we have 20 people, I think, in 18 countries or so, or 15 countries. | ||
| So can you describe what you meant by that concept? | ||
| So a lot of our local networks, like universities, schools, but cities and even countries are very isolated. | ||
| We have a consensus usually in those networks. | ||
| Universities in America, for example, you have all the social justice warriors having a real consensus and a lot of power. | ||
| So I think as a modern human you can't rely on that to Get a full picture. | ||
| So these global networks that are enabled by the Internet are really where it's at, where you can get your ideas challenged, where you can get new ideas, where you can exchange ideas. | ||
| And that's where you develop the good stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I love that. | ||
| It's very much a concept that I believe in and that I'm trying to put into action. | ||
| And we got to go. | ||
| But definitely let me know when the podcast is up. | ||
| Just email us again. | ||
| I'll be happy to send people over there and I'll be a guest if you want. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Oh, that would be amazing. | ||
| It's actually up now. | ||
| We're at episode four now. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| And you can find that on NeedlesslyComplicated.com, on iTunes and everything else. | ||
| And if you want to be a guest, I am happy to send you an email. | ||
| You be the host and I'll be the guest. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| All right, so I am with Monica in Paris, France. | ||
| And Monica, you know, I got a zillion people that emailed from Paris, but your bio, your bio, just where you've bounced around from, a little bit of your family's history, there was so much there that you were the winner from Paris. | ||
| Oh, cool. | ||
| It's an honor. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| So first off, just tell me, so you told me that you grew up with two atheist parents, but that that was also colored with a Mexican tradition and a Jewish tradition. | ||
| Can you just explain some of that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So my mom is from Mexico. | ||
| She's from a city to the north of Mexico City, and she immigrated to the United States as a baby. | ||
| And my dad is of Russian Ashkenazi descent. | ||
| And they both met in university. | ||
| They've always been atheists, both of them. | ||
| And they raised me and my sister, not to be atheists, but religion just never played a part of our lives. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And yeah, we were raised between the two cultures, which was quite difficult growing up in Arizona and California. | ||
| We were never Mexican enough to be Mexican, never like white enough to be white. | ||
| So it was an interesting experience. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I'm very grateful for it. | ||
| Yeah, that's really cool. | ||
| So then you bounced around pretty much all over the world. | ||
| So can you give me like a one minute synopsis of just where you've bounced around and then we'll dig into some of the things that you want to talk about? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| So I lived in Argentina for about a year in 2012. | ||
| After that, I lived in Israel for a while and now I live in France. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I've lived in a few different countries. | ||
| Okay, so let's go to some of the reasons that you've bounced around. | ||
| So you met an Israeli and you moved to Israel, and then you were there during the Gaza War of 2014, I think. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I was there during Protective Edge. | ||
| Protective Edge. | ||
| So tell me a little bit about what it's like to be in a country that is at war. | ||
| It was really scary, so I still remember the very first time I heard a missile. | ||
| I was watching a show on my laptop, and I heard an explosion, and I didn't really think anything of it, and then I heard more explosions, and then there were sirens, and I had no idea what to do. | ||
| I was living in a small house that didn't have a bomb shelter, so I ran outside. | ||
| My neighbors told me to run into the bomb shelter next door, and I couldn't have known, but then after that, for the following months, it just became the norm. | ||
| Like, at least, minimum, seven times a day I would find myself in a bomb shelter, and I was an English teacher at the time, and a lot of our class time was spent learning in bomb shelters. | ||
| Yeah, so what's that like being around kids when this is happening? | ||
| I mean, you're literally, I assume every school there probably has a bomb shelter, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So the middle of the day you're teaching and then suddenly we all have to run downstairs. | ||
| Yeah, so the kids know the drill. | ||
| The kids are eerily desensitized to it. | ||
| It's just the norm for them. | ||
| You know, inside the bomb shelters we have teaching materials and it was like everything just kind of kept going like normal for them. | ||
| Just part of their everyday. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So then, okay, so you were there for that and then you moved to Paris and you were in Paris during the Paris attacks, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Charlie Hebdo happened just months after me arriving. | ||
| Um, and my initial reaction was disappointment. | ||
| Um, because I left Israel to kind of get away from all that, uh, danger. | ||
| And then I found myself in the middle of it again. | ||
| Um, I was shocked. | ||
| I was really, I felt really angry. | ||
| And then the way people reacted to an attack like that in Paris was so different than the way Israelis would have reacted. | ||
| So that's one of the things that I thought was really interesting. | ||
| So you mentioned that basically a lot of people said, oh, we're defending Charlie Hebdo, but that really privately, that's not really what they were doing, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So there was like a protest where people went out in the street and they were like holding up pencils. | ||
| I didn't want to participate in anything like that because I'm just thinking like the people who shot these cartoonists and shot these artists were not trying to take away their pencils, like they were trying to kill them. | ||
| It has nothing to do with your ability to write or draw a cartoon, like they want to murder people. | ||
| So I just felt like the reaction was very soft and just very different than the Israeli reaction would have been. | ||
| So what would the Israeli reaction be? | ||
| I mean, they're dealing with this pretty much every day. | ||
| I think we all know what the Israeli reaction would have been. | ||
| It would have been something that probably most of the world wouldn't have been very happy with. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That most of the world would protest against. | ||
| And something that I would have protested against before I lived in Israel. | ||
| When I went to Israel, I was, I wouldn't have described myself as pro-Israel, but now I would. | ||
| Because it's just very different when you have missiles flying over your head. | ||
| And if it wasn't for that Iron Dome interception system, you know, they could just fall on your head and kill you and all your friends and family. | ||
| So it changed my perspective completely. | ||
| Yeah, interesting. | ||
| So, OK, so then you were there for Charlie Hebdo, then then the more recent attacks at the theater. | ||
| How has that changed society? | ||
| Because it does seem like that attack and then Brussels and then we had the thing here in San Bernardino. | ||
| That now there is some piecing of this all together across the globe, and I think it really felt like it started with that one. | ||
| I'm from San Bernardino, by the way. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, this is all getting very close to home for me. | ||
| Man, you really are something. | ||
| Yeah, it's nuts. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, the most recent attack was very unsettling. | ||
| I had the same feeling towards the French reaction that I did for Charlie Hebdo, kind of just disappointment in the lack of, I don't know, like a strong reaction. | ||
| It was more just like a soft reaction that we have to protect people who haven't even been insulted yet. | ||
| Everybody was just worrying about hurting a certain group of people's feelings instead of actually trying to get to the root of the problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How deep is that? | ||
| How deep is that feeling in France? | ||
| I mean, that's what we talk about when we talk about this regressive ideology, that we care more about feelings over facts. | ||
| How much has that sort of seeped into society over there? | ||
| I would say probably even more so than in America. | ||
| People here are very concerned about being politically correct in a country that has a very high percentage of North Africans and Muslims. | ||
| People are very careful to choose their words. | ||
| The media is very careful about what they say and how they say it, which is a good thing and a bad thing. | ||
| But I would say that now things have kind of died down. | ||
| Honestly, people have kind of forgotten about it. | ||
| Security is very lax everywhere. | ||
| They still have some emergency procedures in place ever since Charlie Hebdo, so it's been almost two years that we've had these emergency procedures They're supposed to be in place, but like private and public security in France is just not where it should be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the other thing that I wanted to talk to you about or that you mentioned is that there's, there's two things happening in France right now. | ||
| So one is, is the immigration situation. | ||
| Uh, so you have all these migrants coming in and then at the same time, uh, basically Jewish emigration from France. | ||
| So Jews leaving France is at an all time high. | ||
| I was actually in Israel in November and I heard a Tremendous amount of French being spoken there. | ||
| I couldn't believe it. | ||
| I mean, there were signs in French, all the places that were selling houses were written in Hebrew and in French. | ||
| So what's going on there? | ||
| So I can't speak too much about the immigration of refugees to France, because honestly, we hear about it on the news, but it doesn't affect me at all. | ||
| I don't see them. | ||
| It just doesn't play a role in my life. | ||
| So I can't really speak on that. | ||
| But I have been very involved in the French Jewish community so I know how they feel about The situation in France and in Israel. | ||
| So there's kind of this feeling in the French Jewish community. | ||
| I don't want to say I'm Not a victim hood, but they're very closed network of people like in the Paris area and They always feel targeted and they feel like Israel is kind of like this El Dorado it's like this thing that they idolize and it's like this ideal utopia that they all want to Yeah. | ||
| strive to be a part of. | ||
| So every time there's an attack, it's like the percentage of French Jews | ||
| that leave France just skyrockets. | ||
| But then another interesting phenomenon is that when I was in Israel, | ||
| I met so many people who leave Israel after intending to settle there, just like I did. | ||
| There's actually a word in Hebrew for that, it's called yaredah. | ||
| So aliyah is when you immigrate to Israel to go live there, supposedly forever. | ||
| And there's even a word to describe leaving there forever because you just can't handle the quality of life. | ||
| So French people encounter that. | ||
| They leave hoping to find this network of acceptance and like living amongst Jews just gonna be amazing. | ||
| And then they get there and realize that they were kind of sold a dream and a lot come back. | ||
| Yeah, so it's sort of like the grass is always greener. | ||
| You have it one way and you think, okay, it's going to be better over there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, well, you've given me a lot and we're plowing through all these interviews, but it was a pleasure talking to you and good luck with the rest of your adventures. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| All right, I'm on with Theron in Canada. | ||
| Theron, how are you? | ||
| I'm good, thanks. | ||
| How are you doing, Dave? | ||
| I'm doing well. | ||
| I've been enjoying talking to all these great people. | ||
| So what's going on up in Canada these days? | ||
| How's Canada? | ||
| Canada's fine. | ||
| Not as libertarian-leaning as I'd like, as a libertarian myself, but I'm working on it. | ||
| I work with an organization called Students for Liberty, and I'm currently going through training to be in charge of the Canada Yeah, well, as you know, I've kind of been into libertarianism lately. | ||
| I think it's very close to classic liberalism, which is really where I consider myself. | ||
| But speaking of your political leanings, my producer told me just a minute before we connected that apparently you're in Breitbart related to something about Milo. | ||
| Yes, I just read the article this morning. | ||
| So can you tell me what it is? | ||
| He literally just screamed something in my ear and then ran off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Well, the name of the article is like, it's called Trannies for Trump. | ||
| And it's basically talking about trans women who either like Donald Trump or support him fully. | ||
| I don't fully support him, but I like him in many ways. | ||
| And I think his presidency could in some ways actually Yeah, but that's a strange place to be for a libertarian, right? | ||
| Because he seems to be a big government, more of a liberal guy, but I think you like the sort of trolling, unpolitical, correct idea, right? | ||
| I don't agree with his trade policies. | ||
| I think that they're economically illiterate. | ||
| I don't have a particularly strong stance on his immigration policies. | ||
| Yeah, so no, I don't really like that. | ||
| And I read an article Just the other day that if he becomes president, that things like taxes would be risen and minimum wage would, so not that much. | ||
| Right, so it's a strange place for a libertarian to be. | ||
| As I said, I don't support him, but there are certain parts of him that I like. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, so you gave me a lot on your email entry, so let's dive right into it. | ||
| So first off, you're a men's rights activist, correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So, can you explain what that means? | ||
| Because I think a certain set of people get that, and then another set think that's something crazy, but I think the bulk of people just don't even understand what that means. | ||
| So, a lot of people don't necessarily realize or they're not informed about the fact that men are falling behind or are discriminated against in many ways in today's society, in Canada, in America. | ||
| Whether it's the high suicide rates, whether it's the high rates of homelessness, whether it's men kind of getting the short end of the stick legally nowadays with all these rape cases. | ||
| And then there's domestic violence, which is also a huge problem, and men really don't | ||
| get seen. | ||
| And the statistics and the knowledge on the reality of domestic violence isn't really | ||
| known to most people. | ||
| So I'm more than just an advocate. | ||
| I'm an activist. | ||
| I lead a men's rights group on my campus at Simon Fraser University, and we host monthly | ||
| events inviting different people with different perspectives on men's issues. | ||
| We had Karen Strawn and Alison Tiemann last month, and then this coming up month, | ||
| we're having a panel discussion event on different perspectives of masculinity | ||
| from men going their own way to mythopoetic, which you probably don't know | ||
| if you're not into the men's movement. | ||
| And then there's the feminist perspective. | ||
| So we're gonna have a whole panel discussion. | ||
| So it's really about boots on the ground activism and really engaging with people. | ||
| So I'm kind of taking the online, I'm one of the people taking the online sphere offline | ||
| and trying to raise awareness one-on-one. | ||
| Yeah, so I think for the average person watching this that doesn't know much about these issues, | ||
| they're probably looking at you and saying, wait a minute, here's a trans woman | ||
| into men's rights issues. | ||
| That kind of flips everything on its head. | ||
| Does that give you a certain cachet within the community? | ||
| I think that it gives me a lot of freedom to say what is true without being labelled a misogynist or a sexist or this or that. | ||
| I say a lot of things that if some average white guy said it, he would be maligned. | ||
| I think my being trans Has helped a lot for our club in the sense that we haven't been protested much, well we haven't protested at all, we haven't got too much backlash and I think it's because in the kind of | ||
| Progressive mindset attacking a group that's led by what is in their minds an oppressed minority would be oppressing a minority even further. | ||
| So you're sort of like kryptonite in a way to them because they judge you not by your individual ideas, right? | ||
| But they're judging you as Solely a trans person, they know the trans person is high on the oppression olympic chart, so then they can't really figure out how to attack you, thus you're able to protect your own ideas. | ||
| I mean, it's actually kind of genius and also bonkers. | ||
| Well, it's genius and yes, bonkers. | ||
| I kind of realized that very early on. | ||
| I realized, when I realized the reality of men's issues and how There isn't much, a lot of spokespeople for men and men who suffer. | ||
| I realized that if not me, who, you know? | ||
| And who better than a trans woman? | ||
| I realized right away the position I'm in and how I would be squandering a really great opportunity. | ||
| So I totally I totally use my identity as a trans woman to further men's rights and I'm not really ashamed of it because I want to help men and I want to further the discussion. | ||
| Yeah, so obviously I get the part that you've sort of insulated yourself from some of the criticism, but when you do get the criticism, does it feel particularly personal to you because you're trans and that, I talked to another trans person, that's sort of like the thing of the moment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Um, no, I don't know. | |
| Criticism I get from kind of the regressive side. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They generally try to really steer away from the fact that I'm trans. | ||
| A lot of them, the criticism that has been lodged at our club haven't even recognized me as the president. | ||
| They kind of try, they wouldn't touch you with a ten-foot pole. | ||
| I mean, I get criticism for being a female men's rights activist in general. | ||
| I mean, there are a lot of people who take issue with that because it's just kind of perpetuating, you know, everyone focusing on women, you know. | ||
| Are there other women in the group? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's actually our executive team is three women and one guy. | ||
| I mean, that's really fascinating. | ||
| Yeah, I find women are a lot, it's a lot easier for them to approach, | ||
| let's say we're tabling at club days, it's so much easier for them to approach our table | ||
| and start discussing and they don't fear. | ||
| I find a lot of men are kind of weary. | ||
| They're very afraid that they're gonna be judged as a certain, you know, they're gonna be judged | ||
| as misogynistic or sexist or why are you associating with those people? | ||
| Yeah, it's actually quite a bit easier to attract women. | ||
| But then when I hear about the men who do come talk to us, the men who kind of master up the bribery, | ||
| I, I hear quite horrible stories, uh, you know, from being, you know, horribly abused by their girlfriends or having narcissistic mothers, uh, and, uh, abuse of fathers. | ||
| And I'm just, I hear, I hear really the truth of what's going on. | ||
| Uh, and yeah, I would encourage men to, um, Uh oh. | ||
| to approach us more, because we are in that sense kind of a safe space, if you will. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| But you don't like safe spaces, right? | ||
| I like, I don't like safe spaces if that means that you can't talk about certain things. | ||
| But that's not really what it means in our context. | ||
| It more means that we won't malign you if you feel certain ways. | ||
| If you feel angry, because a lot of men are angry and I understand that anger. | ||
| I'm not going to tell them that they're just misogynists and sexists. | ||
| They're not going to get judged. | ||
| They're going to have at least an understanding. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's not a safe space of ideas. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's just a safe space of judgment, which are two different things. | ||
| It's an understanding, compassionate space. | ||
| How about that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So what's next after this? | ||
| So, you know, when you get out of school, is this something that you want to pursue at a career level, or are you interested in other things altogether? | ||
| Well, I'm currently finishing up my music composition degree, which is completely kind of separate from what I'm doing here. | ||
| But I actually want to go into law and probably constitutional law. | ||
| But I think in my path in law, I can definitely influence some real, at least legal change where it helps men. | ||
| But also just defending constitutional rights and human rights on a very basic level. | ||
| Kind of putting my effort into keeping the state small. | ||
| Yeah, that's the libertarian part. | ||
| There you go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| All right, well listen, we could obviously do a lot more, but unfortunately we gotta cut it short, so I really enjoyed talking to you, and good luck with everything. | ||
| I enjoyed talking to you as well, and thank you so much for the opportunity, Dave. | ||
| All right, I'm on with Tomi from the UK. | ||
| Tomi, how's it going? | ||
| Very good. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you? | |
| I'm doing well. | ||
| So your story, you know, everyone's sending me these great sort of life stories and what they want to talk about. | ||
| There was something particularly interesting right at the beginning of yours. | ||
| You're originally from Nigeria and you moved to the UK the day before 9-11. | ||
| So you moved on September 10th, 2001. | ||
| Can you describe a little bit of that? | ||
| Yeah, when I first got the news about that, I was on top of a double-decker, you know, the sort of British buses? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| The two-stage, the two-level buses, I was on top of that. | ||
| And that's when we heard the news about something that's happened in New York, you know, some explosion or something about buildings. | ||
| And then we got home and then I sort of saw the pictures of what happened. | ||
| And, you know, I didn't really understand the gravity of what had happened. | ||
| I mean, I understood it was a horrible thing, and that many people died. | ||
| But it wasn't years till years later that I sort of really understood, like, you know, the world has changed in a radical way. | ||
| So that was sort of my earliest memory coming into the UK. | ||
| So In a sense, it's sort of a baptism of, you know, fire of sorts, yeah. | ||
| Talk about a crazy time to move to the West. | ||
| So let's back up a little bit. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about growing up in Nigeria, what kind of family you came from, and what made you guys move to the UK? | ||
| Or did you move by yourself? | ||
| I'm actually not sure. | ||
| No, I moved with my father. | ||
| My mother is a nurse. | ||
| She was a nurse for many years in Nigeria. | ||
| Because you do know we have an NHS here and there's a high demand for nurses in the UK. | ||
| And so she moved over to the UK about two years before we moved to join her. | ||
| My father was a journalist and used to be an editor in Oil & Gas magazine in Nigeria. | ||
| So we moved together, myself and my younger brother, we moved together with him. | ||
| And we moved basically essentially to have a better education in the UK and to be with our mother. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so that was, you know, a little bit Yeah, what was life like in Nigeria? | |
| People, you know, you hear about Nigeria, but we don't know really, at least here in the West or in the US, we don't talk about Nigeria that much. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about what it was like. | ||
| Growing up in Nigeria, life was fun. | ||
| You're out there with your friends playing. | ||
| Childhood was the best time. | ||
| There was just no care in the world. | ||
| During the time when I was growing up in Nigeria, we had a dictator, General Sonny Abacha, and he was a very ruthless guy. | ||
| destroyed the country in a lot of ways, economically, and bezel a lot of money. | ||
| But Nigerians are very resilient. | ||
| They are probably the most resilient people in the world. | ||
| You put them in the middle of a Sahara desert, they start sending you sand. | ||
| (laughing) | ||
| So Nigerians are very resilient. | ||
| So, we got through, we survived, we did well, you know, went to school and things like that. | ||
| But towards the time I was coming to the UK, he passed away and there was massive parties in the streets and everything like that. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, so that's how much hated he was. | ||
| And then did another dictator come in right after him? | ||
| I don't even know the history. | ||
| After that, we had our first democracy after many years of going through generals and dictators, basically. | ||
| And so we had Obasanjo, who became president. | ||
| And he ruled, but he was also corrupt in many ways. | ||
| And he's also from the same tribe that I am in Nigeria. | ||
| But many from my part of Nigeria, especially my dad, did not like him because he was not a fair man. | ||
| We had that, but now we're a country that's struggling a lot. | ||
| We just had our president go to the UK for some anti-corruption talks, and he's trying to get back some money because the country's been really hammered by previous regimes, basically. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so let's flash forward to today. | ||
| One of the things that you wanted to talk to me about is something that we've touched on the show on just a tiny bit, but Brexit. | ||
| It's obviously huge for you guys over there. | ||
| Now, you support Brexit, right? | ||
| Yes, I am a big supporter of Brexit. | ||
| I'm a big supporter of Brexit as a Nigerian, I'm a big supporter of Brexit as a first generation immigrant, and I'm a big supporter of Brexit as a British citizen. | ||
| And it rests essentially on this principle. | ||
| I asked myself this question, if I was in Nigeria, and I found that the The Nigerian political system was controlled by another political system that was based in Cairo, that's in Egypt, and they passed our laws, they told us what to do with our fishes and in our waters and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| I'd be upset about that. | ||
| I'd say that's not fair. | ||
| We can't. | ||
| Nigerians should have control over their own laws and over their own Borders and everything. | ||
| So I look at it from a point of view, if I was a Nigerian, living in Nigeria, and this was happening to Nigeria, how would I feel? | ||
| And take it to the UK now, that is exactly what is happening to the UK. | ||
| We have a situation whereby we have a European Commission that is not elected, but passes a law that we have to abide to, and we cannot vote them out of office. | ||
| So it's essentially a sort of a dictatorial system of sorts. | ||
| Yeah, so how much of your feelings about that is fueled by just the border situation? | ||
| Because one of the things, I think we've done about 12 interviews now, and one of the things that almost everyone has wanted to talk to me about in Europe is the immigration stuff and the border stuff and the migrant stuff and all that. | ||
| So how much of your feeling is just wrapped up just in that you want the UK to be able to control its own borders? | ||
| I think that's a very essential part of the Brexit argument. | ||
| The border situation is tangential to the real issue. | ||
| And I guess since I'm not an indigenous British, the way I feel about immigration might be slightly different. | ||
| But I have a lot of sympathy to the indigenous who are saying that they feel the sense that the country has been overwhelmed and they have no control over it. | ||
| So I have an appreciation and I sympathize with that. | ||
| My biggest problem is that if we do not give nations control over their borders, it will | ||
| lead to a situation of social tensions. | ||
| And as someone who is an immigrant, and I'm black, in case you don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I had no idea. | |
| So as someone who is an immigrant, I feel like if you create so much social tension | ||
| within the system, there will be a backlash. | ||
| And so my biggest worry about this whole EU control and the control the EU puts on different nations is that it doesn't allow nations to act autonomously. | ||
| So it doesn't give them that sort of self-will to do things. | ||
| And that leads to frustration. | ||
| And that's why we see the rise of the far right and the far left in Europe now. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm curious. | ||
| So as a first-generation immigrant, it's really interesting. | ||
| You're framing this not only from your perspective, but you are looking at the people that live there before you and saying that they have some legitimate fears, or maybe some of it's not fully legitimate, but you're acknowledging it. | ||
| I'm curious, has some of the sort of regressive ideology I like to say this. | ||
| that affected you in that I think most people would probably look at you and say that you're black | ||
| and that you're an immigrant and that you should be for fully open borders or something along those lines. | ||
| I like to say this, I'm a fair-minded person and I also like to deal with the realities of life. | ||
| So, back in Nigeria, where I'm from, in the late 80s, we had a massive influx of immigration from Ghana, which is another West African nation, into Nigeria, because they had an economic downturn. | ||
| But that put a lot of pressure on jobs and services in Nigeria, and there became this chant, you know, this movement called Ghana Must Go. | ||
| Now, that wasn't a sort of a racist movement, but In that, I could see and appreciate that whenever you have a massive influx of immigration, uncontrolled immigration, it's another place, it leads to social tensions. | ||
| And you can look at it throughout history and throughout everywhere in the world. | ||
| And so we have to deal with this fairly. | ||
| I'm pro-immigration. | ||
| Immigration is good. | ||
| But it has to be controlled. | ||
| It has to be sensible. | ||
| And it has to be at the behest and at the will of the people. | ||
| If not, it's going to lead to trouble. | ||
| And that's where I think this discussion needs to be had. | ||
| Man, you're talking a lot of sense. | ||
| Why aren't you on TV over there? | ||
| I don't speak a lot of PC stuff, so I'm not PC. | ||
| On that note, I'm going to let you go without saying anything too crazy. | ||
| It was really a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| Alright, I am on with Marcelo, who is in Maine in the United States, via Brazil, am I correct? | ||
| Yes, you're right. | ||
| I'm from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. | ||
| That is quite a move to go from Brazil. | ||
| It's hot and now cold. | ||
| People are supposed to go the other way. | ||
| What are you thinking? | ||
| Yeah, I actually lived before in Connecticut initially when I moved to the U.S. | ||
| Then I lived a little one year in Miami. | ||
| So I kind of experienced the warm back and now I'm back in Maine. | ||
| It was just mostly for my work. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What kind of work do you do? | ||
| I'm a physician. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Okay, we're going to get into a little bit of that. | ||
| I knew that actually. | ||
| But so one of the things that you wanted to discuss with me was how regressive attitudes and this ideology had really infected Brazil and how you saw it change attitudes in Brazil. | ||
| So can you tell me a little bit about that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Brazil overall is a pretty hardcore leftist country. | ||
| The culture in Brazil was taken over by hardcore socialists in the last about 30 years. | ||
| They took over the churches, the press, the universities, and they have this mindset of not wanting to debate ideas. | ||
| So the way that they see things is that if you're not, if you do not agree with them, then you should shut up. | ||
| You should basically get out of the way. | ||
| And this is quite concerning because you see people who have this will to learn and to get into debate. | ||
| And I think that's how countries progress. | ||
| That's how ideas, debating ideas, that's how you get to a common sense, to a place for everyone. | ||
| You speak in my language, brother. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| And that's actually what caught me to your show initially. | ||
| The idea of fighting for free speech. | ||
| And in Brazil, basically, they were skilled. | ||
| And now, in the last 10 years, I would say there is a conservative movement surging. | ||
| Still small, still not in power, but at least there is another way of thinking kind of surging. | ||
| And people are interested. | ||
| People are actually looking to it and amazed. | ||
| Whoa, this exists? | ||
| You know, like, oh, that makes sense. | ||
| And that's very interesting. | ||
| And it's very unfortunate that Brazil went in that direction. | ||
| So that's really fascinating. | ||
| So you're saying basically in the last 10 years, as a result of this regressive ideology taking root, that now conservatism is bubbling up and that is what is defending free speech. | ||
| It sounds a little backwards for the way America is, although right now I see that happening here, because strangely it's conservatives that are defending free speech and the left that's trying to stifle it. | ||
| So it's really, everything's kind of upside down. | ||
| Yeah I totally agree with you and I'm not sure if there's a direct effect of that or if it's just people really When they read about new ideas, they get interested, even if they don't agree initially, when they have the freedom to do it. | ||
| So there are some thinkers, some writers in Brazil that 10 years ago started writing some stuff, and that's when actually I started reading more about conservatism, more about America, the free speech ideas, the individual rights, and the idea of you're able to say whatever you want, and you're fine. | ||
| If you don't like it, that's fine. | ||
| That's fine to not like it. | ||
| And that's not the way in Brazil before. | ||
| And I saw, for example, journalists actually having to move away from Brazil in order to be able to speak. | ||
| And that, for me, is something unacceptable. | ||
| It shouldn't happen. | ||
| Yeah, I have to say that until I read your email, I really didn't realize how bad things had been in Brazil. | ||
| So one of the things that you wrote that was interesting is that you started getting interested in conservative writers. | ||
| And that sort of helped your awakening, and now you're saying many years later these conservative ideas are becoming cool again down there. | ||
| Who were some of the writers that you were interested in? | ||
| Well, initially I started reading Brazilian writers, and one of them was a philosopher | ||
| called Bolavo de Carvalho. | ||
| He currently lives in Virginia. | ||
| He's a well-known philosopher, well-known writer in Brazil, who actually had to move | ||
| away. | ||
| He's one of them, and he lives in Virginia, US. | ||
| He's a big fighter against communism, against socialism in Brazil, a for free speech guy. | ||
| After starting reading his stuff, I then started reading American writers like Thomas Sowell, | ||
| Henry Hazlitt, and Von Mises, other guys from other countries as well. | ||
| Von Mises from the Chicago school, Milton Friedman. | ||
| More recently, I've been reading a lot of things that Dinesh D'Souza writes. | ||
| So, there are a few conservatives, and they, usually these guys, they defend free speech, they defend free exchange of ideas, and some of them were actually leftists before, like David Horowitz was a hardcore leftist, Thomas Sowell was a leftist, and they, when they got in contact with the ideas of conservatives, they kind of leaned the other direction. | ||
| Yeah, I've really been doing my best to get Thomas Sowell on the show. | ||
| I don't know how much public stuff he does anymore, but I'm working on it, so stay tuned on that one. | ||
| Okay, so you move up here, and you've already seen the damage that these ideologies have done in your home country, so what do you make of what they're doing to America right now? | ||
| It's like seeing a movie again. | ||
| And it actually changed a lot. | ||
| I feel like it changed a lot in the last, let's say, eight years, seven years since I moved. | ||
| Not sure why, but I see happening things that I never thought it would be possible here. | ||
| When I moved to America, I thought, you know, the universities here are the best universities in the world. | ||
| They probably have very free environment for new ideas, for speech, for debate. | ||
| And then when we see cases like Mizzou, where the professor was saying, | ||
| "Get some muscle here to shut off a journalist student." | ||
| And then you see guys that, just to stay with guys that are interviewed there, Shapiro, Milo, | ||
| being, there was violence against them and they cannot even speak anymore in campuses. | ||
| And you see leftists, even leftist powers. | ||
| One of the journalists wrote a book about the left shutting up. | ||
| Oh, Christina Powers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Christina Powers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So even these guys, people are, wait, this is not cool. | ||
| This is not good for anybody. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what do you do in your own personal life to combat this stuff? | ||
| I guess this is the example of it right here. | ||
| You're talking to me, so that's pretty good. | ||
| But really, as someone that has seen the damage of this, and you see this happening now, do you post stuff on Facebook? | ||
| Do you try to get stuff out there to combat some of this? | ||
| Yeah, I use my Facebook a lot. | ||
| I have a lot of American friends. | ||
| I have Brazilian friends. | ||
| I'm very political on Facebook. | ||
| I'm glad that I still live in a country that is very free, that I'm not afraid like I was in Brazil. | ||
| People in Brazil are afraid of speaking out things against the government, for example. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Here, no. | ||
| I feel comfortable. | ||
| I'm very active on Facebook and I usually try to use the experience that I have in Brazil and post to my American friends so they can see the parallel. | ||
| To try to avoid it, it would be horrible to see an American go in that direction. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's very bad. | |
| Do you have American friends that are defriending you yet and blocking you and all that stuff? | ||
| Yeah, I guess in some cases you wouldn't know, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay, so the other thing, let's move away from politics a little bit, although everything is political. | ||
| So you mentioned that you're a physician, and one of the things that you wanted to talk about was the free market and healthcare. | ||
| We don't have a ton of time left, but can you just go with that? | ||
| Tell me what you were thinking. | ||
| Basically, just a short thing. | ||
| In Brazil, we have free healthcare, meaning the government takes over everything. | ||
| And that's exactly where I see people dying for lack of basic care. | ||
| People waiting in lines for six months to get an MRI when they have cancer. | ||
| They die in line. | ||
| That's very common. | ||
| And I believe that, as anything else in life, when the free market is able to work, it works better than the government. | ||
| So, I think in that sense we're going in the wrong direction. | ||
| America has a very good healthcare. | ||
| We have problems that can be solved. | ||
| We have to sit down and see what the best policy is to get. | ||
| But I think the fundamental idea is that we should go towards more free market because competition makes prices go down, makes things more available, services more available. | ||
| I want a system that gives us iPhone, new TVs, new cars for cheap. | ||
| I don't want a system where to give my healthcare to bureaucrats who spend $1 billion to make a website that doesn't work. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, for you in the personal sense, as a physician, how have you seen the healthcare economy change? | ||
| I mean, it's obviously changed hugely in the last three years alone. | ||
| What have you seen firsthand? | ||
| I think the hospital, we haven't had the hit from Obamacare yet, but I see a lot of people who work as an office outside with patient schedule, outpatient, retiring because they just can't handle it anymore. | ||
| I see a lot of regulations coming in, increasing the prices, because every single regulation, every single pile of new rules, costs. | ||
| So, when you get more government in between patients and physicians, you have bureaucracy, you have more costs, so prices go up. | ||
| And I've been seeing this, and we don't have the Obamacare fully implemented yet. | ||
| I think there are a lot more things to come, and that may make things even worse. | ||
| Listen, if I ever need a full frontal lobotomy because of the regressives, is that something you can do? | ||
| I'm not a neurosurgeon, but I don't want you to have a lobotomy. | ||
| I think you're a very good fighter for freedom. | ||
| We need you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Well, listen, it was a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| I wish we had more time, but we got to keep going. | ||
| It was my pleasure. | ||
| Thank you so much for letting me participate in your show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| I'm talking with you from Switzerland. | ||
| How's it going? | ||
| I'm pretty fine. | ||
| I'm fantastic, actually. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Good. | ||
| That seems like the answer that someone from Switzerland would give. | ||
| I'm pretty fantastic. | ||
| People think everything's great over there, huh? | ||
| Well, life here is actually pretty great. | ||
| So yeah, everybody's happy around here and we need to show that. | ||
| I like hearing that because, you know, we talk about a lot of heavy stuff on the show, but it's nice to know that things are working. | ||
| But one of the things that you mentioned you wanted to talk about is the dreaded regressive left and how their ideology is changing society in Switzerland. | ||
| So go ahead. | ||
| Well, the regressive left in Switzerland, or the equivalent of them here, they're not really out there in your face like in other countries, but they actually speak volumes, of course, you know. | ||
| I mean, they've always been there, but yeah, they keep on stirring the pot, you know. | ||
| I mean, we recently had a case, like in Tel Aviv, that's just around the corner from where I live, in which You know, two boys from a school from Syria with a very strong religious background refused to shake hands with a female teacher. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You heard about that? | ||
| Yeah, that made news here. | ||
| Yeah, and you know, the reason behind that was because they didn't want to study her dignities by touching her, right? | ||
| And this, of course, all stemmed from the father who is preaching at the local mosque. | ||
| And yeah, there stood quite controversy here. | ||
| And of course, the reactions were huge. | ||
| We had the right shouting all the way down there, it's not acceptable, and yadda yadda yadda. | ||
| And you had the left playing everything down, saying it's just a handshake. | ||
| If you want to go do some handshakes, you can go to the streets and do that. | ||
| It's not big of deal at all. | ||
| And most of all, they all kept on saying it's not against the law. | ||
| It's fine, right? | ||
| But I think what annoyed people more and the reason why they were so passionate about the whole ordeal was because the decision of the school by just tolerating that without actually any afterthought, you know, which is quite a regressive thing to do, you know. | ||
| And, you know, of course concerns were made, you know, by the people by saying, like, they wanted to start this discussion, you know. | ||
| It's not particularly about the handshake itself, which also refused the moderates in our country. | ||
| And they just asked themselves, they wanted to start the question, you know, like, what is acceptable in terms of integration? | ||
| What is acceptable in terms of religious freedom, you know? | ||
| and this basically has been washed out by just saying like, the left saying like, you know, it's not a big deal, | ||
| you know, it's just, I mean, and they also interviewed the head teacher from the school | ||
| and he also kept on saying it's not against the rules and that's about it, you know, | ||
| we just don't wanna put ourselves out there too much, you know, and this annoyed quite a lot of people | ||
| because, you know, the reason why they feel passionate about this whole ordeal was not because, you know, | ||
| the handshake itself, it's because the discussion which has never been actually made, you know, | ||
| this was kind of, you know, a big deal here around. | ||
| Yeah, so it's not about the actual handshake. | ||
| Nobody really cares about that. | ||
| But it's just about the creeping idea behind it, which is that these boys will grow up and not necessarily respect women or treat women as equals. | ||
| And then that becomes an actual societal problem. | ||
| So it's not about a bunch of young boys, whether they shake this one person's hand or not. | ||
| Well, I think it was more about like, you know, what are the ground rules of integration here? | ||
| We just want to talk about that. | ||
| And we don't actually want to talk too much into the future because we don't know what actually would happen. | ||
| You know, it was just like, let's just talk about it. | ||
| And at some point it was just not possible anymore. | ||
| And it didn't end at that point, actually. | ||
| I mean, the pot kept on stirring and stirring, you know, and there was another recent case in another city in Lucerne. | ||
| Which is quite a famous destination here in Switzerland. | ||
| But there was actually a dentist, a Swiss dentist, who refused to operate on a patient. | ||
| The patient happens to be a Muslim woman, and she refused to give him a handshake because, you know, it's just a thing she doesn't do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He refused to operate on her because his argument was, you know, a patient A doctor relationship is based on trust. | ||
| If the trust is not there, I cannot, by the best will and by the best capabilities of my conscience, I cannot operate on her, you know. | ||
| And of course, this has, you know, blown up again, you know, like people asking, like, haven't you made something like a hypocritical oath or something, you know? | ||
| He said, "Yes, I did, but it only counts with emergencies." | ||
| And she can choose whoever doctor she actually wants. | ||
| The same thing just in opposite positions. | ||
| It has no end here. | ||
| So this is like with us, you know, it's like these bakers that don't want to bake a cake for a gay wedding. | ||
| And it's like, what should the role of the government be? | ||
| And should we force people to do all this stuff? | ||
| So one of the other things that you wanted to talk about was the amount of Americans that are moving to Switzerland. | ||
| So that's a different type of immigration that you have going on there. | ||
| Tell me about that. | ||
| Yeah, you can see the other side of the story too, yeah. | ||
| I mean, of course, the amount of Americans still pales in comparison to the EU, which the most people, immigrants and so on, come from. | ||
| But there are quite a lot of Americans coming here, because Switzerland is a place that is home to many major global companies. | ||
| And, of course, eventually they get a chance to come here and lend themselves an expected program. | ||
| And after some while they can go back. | ||
| And most of my co-workers actually decided to stick around a little bit longer because they learned to appreciate the high wages and the security and the nice infrastructure. | ||
| And before I sound too optimistic, too positive about Switzerland, of course there are some bad things here as well, you know, like the depressive Sundays here where everything is closed. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I have to tell you a little story. | ||
| Sorry about that. | ||
| We are also a household now. | ||
| We speak a couple of languages, right? | ||
| network here around and like to stick around here. | ||
| And the thing is, I have to tell you a little story, sorry about that. | ||
| We are also a household now. | ||
| We speak a couple of languages, right? | ||
| And we speak also English. | ||
| Before my daughter entered the kindergarten, we had to fill out a form explaining how good | ||
| her German was, actually, so she can keep up in the school, you know. | ||
| I was just actually, yeah. | ||
| It's a sensible thing to do. | ||
| And after sending the letter I received from the Department of Education, I received a letter, an annual letter, actually, demanding for me to organize German classes. | ||
| Of course, I was actually surprised. | ||
| I was calling up and asking what's the reasoning behind this because I do speak Swiss German pretty well, actually, being a citizen and so on. | ||
| And she actually was very surprised. | ||
| She thought, like, oh, yeah, you know, I'm sorry about that. | ||
| I mistook you for someone else because, you know, there are some people who have more issues. | ||
| And I thought about that. | ||
| Yeah, I my name, Asian, or maybe she thought about Asian people who | ||
| do actually have some difficulties learning Swiss German because it's pretty bad. And she told | ||
| me actually, "Noah, I thought you're American." Because the American, she told me in private, of | ||
| course, the American are, among those people, have most difficulties willing, | ||
| they have most difficulties to want to learn Swiss German, actually. | ||
| Because one of the reasons is because they just spent, they're just going to be here for five years. | ||
| And the other is just that they refuse because, and that's what she said, you know, it's like, yeah, there's actually no need for us to learn, you know, because you can also all speak English, which is actually true. | ||
| Most people actually in the area I live do speak English. | ||
| It's actually, you know, the reverse thing of the whole thing, you know, I mean, it's like, of course, not all the Americans, I mean, I have many friends here who are Americans, they're not like this, but as I found out, my surroundings is not quite representative, because after, you know, I mean, this whole thing interests me, you know, and after learning more about this, I really found out that there's really something with some Americans here, a not willingness to let themselves assimilate, you know, After calling up my ex-employee who happens to work with the Office of Statistics, he said, like, that's because, you know, they have something like, not all of them, of course, but some of them have something like Special Snowflake Syndrome, you know, like something like that. | ||
| Yeah, we do it all well anyway. | ||
| You can speak English, so why should I, you know? | ||
| Right, and that's really fascinating because it also shows that all this integration stuff and immigration stuff and migrant stuff, it's not just about religion, it's culture, because now you're telling me that Americans are coming there, it's not because of religion that they're not integrating, but it's partly language, only gonna be there for five years, they're used to always speaking English. | ||
| Listen, we could go on way longer, and I didn't get to half the stuff I wanted to talk to you about, but we gotta go, so I thank you very much. | ||
| All right, I'm on with Stephanos from Greece. | ||
| Stephanos, how's it going? | ||
| Everything is alright here and as long, like I said previously, as long as I have still money in the bank, despite the capital controls being implemented, I can still live. | ||
| All right, so that seems like a sort of depressing but good place to start. | ||
| So we don't hear much about Greece in the American media, but you guys are going through a massive financial crisis right now. | ||
| So I know you're not an expert in economics, but can you sort of lay it out, just what the average person in Greece is going through right now? | ||
| So let's just say that the minimum wage here is 500 euros. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And show me one household that can live like that. | ||
| Just show it to me. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| You can't do that. | ||
| And I can say, fine, it's 500 euros, but can you at least tax me slightly less? | ||
| But no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks to the memorandums that are being imposed by Merkel, Right, so basically you guys, because of the conditions that the EU helped Greece out with, your taxes are very high, and you have a lot of people that are getting a lot from the government, so there's not a lot to go around. | |
| Is that pretty much fair to say? | ||
| Yeah, and it's not only the EU's fault. | ||
| The number one... The ones responsible for this, in my opinion, is my government. | ||
| The Syriza and ANEL government that we have right now, and the ones before them. | ||
| New Democracy, for example, PASOK, etc. | ||
| They're responsible for this. | ||
| Yeah, so how do you feel? | ||
| I mean, in general, look, democracy came from Greece. | ||
| Modern philosophy came from Greece. | ||
| Greece has given so much in terms of freedom and free thought to the world. | ||
| How do you feel about what's happening in Greece at the moment? | ||
| Yeah, if only that existed here, because it's a pretty much extinct species by now here. | ||
| And the problem here is that Let's just see the elections. | ||
| The elections here are being held by a company called Singular Logic that works with the government to count all the votes, etc. | ||
| So, at the surface it's all fine and dandy until you get to realize that this company belongs to the Rothschilds. | ||
| No, the ones, the big bad bankers, which, to be honest, they kinda aren't. | ||
| They're, I think, behind the scenes of all this nonsense. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you guys are sort of caught between the European Union and the bankers that are kind of funding the elections, sort of. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're the ones benefiting from this crisis. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's get away from politics for a minute because it obviously can be pretty sobering. | ||
| One of the things you wanted to talk to me about was Gamergate, which a lot of people jumped on the Gamergate idea. | ||
| Anything specific on Gamergate or how did you get involved in it? | ||
| Were you in it from the beginning? | ||
| I was involved in it the moment I heard about the story of Zoe Quinn having sex with one of the journalists in Kotaku when he posted a review of, what was it, Depression Quest? | ||
| If I'm right, yeah. | ||
| That game. | ||
| So, it is quite obvious that all these Gaming journalism websites are corrupt. | ||
| And all these feminists, the SJWs, and all these people defend this. | ||
| Like, why would you defend this? | ||
| They don't care about gamers. | ||
| They don't care about us. | ||
| So that's why I was so interested in GamerGate even before... You know, I used to be a gamer, like, in the, like, 80s and 90s, and now, like, I love the culture around video games, but I don't play that much, but I thought... | ||
| The whole thing was fascinating because you guys were dealing with so much of the stuff that we talk about now. | ||
| The gamers were dealing with all the social justice warrior stuff. | ||
| All the collusion between, you know, creators and the publishers and all of that and feminism and all of this stuff. | ||
| And that sort of seeped up into society, which is a good thing. | ||
| Transition for you also want to talk about cultural Marxism, and I think that's very much related So how is cultural Marxism the ideas of it taking root in Greece right now? | ||
| I could say that Greece pretty much invented cultural Marxism. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Due to the fact that we have parties like Syriza and to an extent other parties like And Arsia, which is not in the parliament right now, they get like 1% of the vote or something. | ||
| And they are radicals. | ||
| And there was also PASOK, also known as the Socialists, which was responsible for the crisis that we live in right now. | ||
| They were promising to the people things that on the surface are needed, like high wages, high pensions, benefits and all that good stuff. | ||
| But what they do, what they did, let's say during the 80s, they tripled the wages. | ||
| So that's fine, but they did it while not acknowledging that in order to do that, you have to take some countermeasures. | ||
| As well, like you have to decrease taxation for the company so that they can pay their employees. | ||
| They didn't do that. | ||
| And as a result, a lot of industries that we had back then, like we used to create buses, for example, we had a car industry, small but still relevant at the time. | ||
| And as a result, they all closed down. | ||
| And the situation was getting worse and worse until now that we happened to be in the EU. | ||
| And despite the things that were being told by the media that, oh my God, the EU is our home and if we leave, we'll turn into North Korea. | ||
| It's fucking laughable. | ||
| How am I supposed to take you seriously after saying this? | ||
| So basically... All the problems that we have have pretty much We have gone plus ten, right? | ||
| At the moment we joined the EU and the Eurozone in 2001, I think. | ||
| So I guess it was about a year ago when the financial crisis seemed to be at its worst, right before the EU came in and bailed out. | ||
| Again, what you're saying is a pretty crappy situation. | ||
| But what was it like when you couldn't go to the ATM and get money out? | ||
| Didn't they stop money coming out? | ||
| What did that feel like for you and for your family when it feels like the system is collapsing? | ||
| It's pretty difficult. | ||
| The fact that you have to take only 60 euros per day. | ||
| From the ATM, and yeah, we had to adjust to that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alright, listen, we could talk about so much. | ||
| We went pretty heavy here. | ||
| Listen, where's the best place for souvlaki in Athens? | ||
| There are several restaurants where you can buy gyros and all that, but I can't really tell. | ||
| It's entirely up to you. | ||
| One warning. | ||
| If you see gyros that have a lot of olive oil, avoid it. | ||
| Stay away from the gyros with a lot of olive oil. | ||
| All right, well done. | ||
| They're not really that tasty, at least to me. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| All right, Stavatos, it was a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| All right, I am on with Joe from Egypt. | ||
| Can I call you Joe, or should I call you the Last Pharaoh? | ||
| Yeah, Joe's fine. | ||
| Joe's fine. | ||
| Joe is fine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Last Pharaoh would be a bit awkward, so yeah. | |
| All right, so for people that don't know you, you're the only person we selected out of the 20 people that I actually do know of, because I follow you on Twitter, and you are a YouTuber by the name of The Last Pharaoh, and you do really some great videos talking about atheism and secularism and being an ex-Muslim and the regressive left, all of this stuff. | ||
| But before we get into that, tell me, you're 31 in Egypt, how is life in Egypt these days? | ||
| Well, it's kind of okay, I mean, by... Look, when people ask me that question, I always like to think, like, to give myself some hope, to say at least I'm not living in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia or something. | ||
| So you're an optimist? | ||
| Yeah, just to be able to, you know, to function. | ||
| And actually, like, On a day to day basis, I really don't feel like that much of, you know, it's just like for other people, other people are getting it like bad. | ||
| But for me, maybe because I just have like thick skin or something. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm not really feeling that affected. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| So, we don't have to go too much into the politics, because I want to really focus on what you're doing. | ||
| But, you know, it was only, what, three, four years ago that the Arab Spring happened, and you guys lived under Mubarak, who was basically a military dictator for 30-something years. | ||
| Then you had the Muslim Brotherhood, by democratic elections for a year. | ||
| Then they get overthrown by the military again, and that's where you're at now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So to people there, how do they feel just about the whole system? | ||
| Is there a feeling that democracy is ever going to come back? | ||
| Do they want democracy to come back because it didn't really work for that year? | ||
| Like, what's the feeling there? | ||
| Well, you have to, like, differentiate between, like, two, like, classes of people, so you have, like, the majority of Egyptians, like, the normal, everyday, like, kind of people. | ||
| I would say they're, like, I don't know, they're not happy right now, as they should, but they're, like, kind of okay with it, like, with the current, like, government. | ||
| They were not happy during the Muslim Brotherhood, even less happy than they were under Mubarak, so that was, like, that was not gonna work at all, the whole thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, but the political class in Egypt, which I happen to think that like 90% of them are idiots, but yeah, they're not happy with anything. | ||
| Which I think is like, they have like this like kind of like regressive SJW kind of a thing happening like all the time and they're not focusing on what's important. | ||
| So they just make big deals about nothing while not talking about really people going to jail for just saying Like normal, like just stupid shit. | ||
| People say, people are going to jail for making jokes about filling like balloon condoms with air and handing them out so they just send them to prison. | ||
| Some people just went to prison because they do like sketch comedy on YouTube or something, they sent them to prison. | ||
| So I think the most important thing that needs to change in Egypt, not the regime, not the economy, Economy and everything, they're just doing what they can. | ||
| I mean the government. | ||
| They have an interest to just do as best as they can. | ||
| What I really think is important is the whole free speech and the blasphemy law, the modesty laws. | ||
| These kind of laws need to go because the Constitution actually doesn't allow it. | ||
| People should just focus on that. | ||
| Raising the money, getting those laws in front of the Parliament or in front of even the Constitutional Court. | ||
| Because the Egyptian Constitution, if you read it and forget it's from Egypt, you really wouldn't know that it's from Egypt. | ||
| Because it's like 99.9% secular. | ||
| Like really, freedom of speech has its own article that's totally guaranteed, no restrictions, no limitations under any circumstances. | ||
| So the fact that we have laws Punishing people because they insulted this guy or the president or like some... I don't know, anyone. | ||
| It's unconstitutional. | ||
| It's like 100% unconstitutional. | ||
| Yeah, so with all that in mind, I mean, where do you get the balls to do what you do? | ||
| You're showing me your face right now. | ||
| I asked you before we started recording if it was okay if we wanted to do something different or whatever. | ||
| Wear a mask or whatever. | ||
| But I mean, you put your videos out there with your voice. | ||
| You're incredibly brave and clear and honest. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I don't see it that way, actually. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, I don't see it like that. | ||
| I just see it like... I said that before to a lot of people. | ||
| I'm not doing the videos anonymously to hide. | ||
| I just like my, you know, my privacy. | ||
| I don't like putting my face on camera all the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But even if I was living in America or something, I would still do the videos anonymously. | ||
| People seem to miss that point. | ||
| I said that all the time. | ||
| I'm not hiding. | ||
| I just don't like putting my face on camera. | ||
| I just don't like seeing myself on camera. | ||
| So that's it. | ||
| And to me, it's like, I don't know. | ||
| It's like I'm tired. | ||
| I'm like 31, but I feel like I'm 60. | ||
| I'm tired. | ||
| I'm not gonna hide. | ||
| I'm not gonna censor myself anymore. | ||
| People seem to forget that on a day-to-day basis, I have to pretend to be someone else to everyone around me. | ||
| Even when I'm getting a haircut, I have to agree with the guy who's cutting my hair that The weather, we have like a particularly hot summer these days, that the weather is like Allah's thing, and you know, we have to be thankful because some people got it worse. | ||
| So I have to agree with that, like every single minute of every single day. | ||
| So I'm not gonna censor myself online, that's like, not gonna happen. | ||
| So wait, you have to thank Allah that it's really hot, but not hotter than really hot. | ||
| Yeah, so basically the idea in every Muslim country is you have to be thankful because you're not like the worst thing on earth. | ||
| So as long as like there's one guy that's worse than you, you have to be thankful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So find that guy and that guy should like have a problem with God, seriously. | |
| It can always get worse, I get it. | ||
| All right, so wait, I want to talk a little bit about your personal stuff. | ||
| So you are an atheist and you consider yourself an ex-Muslim, correct? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you put these videos out there, and you have a real fan base. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| What about in your own personal life there? | ||
| Are you out to your friends and family? | ||
| How much can you talk about that stuff? | ||
| Well, look, my friends and family, they know I'm not religious. | ||
| That's what they know. | ||
| And they know that I'm kind of like you know, I just don't care about any of that stuff. They | ||
| know that. But they don't know that I'm like a hundred percent atheist. Actually, the idea wouldn't even | ||
| enter their minds. Even if I told them, they would be like, you know, they're not, their mind | ||
| wouldn't like, because the option is not on the table here in like Egypt or in the Muslim | ||
| countries. | ||
| It's not an option to be an atheist. | ||
| No one knew that. | ||
| No one told me that. | ||
| So if someone would have told me that when I was like six years old, because I always wasn't compliant with religion. | ||
| So if someone would have told me that when I was young, I might have made the switch a long time ago. | ||
| But the idea wasn't even there. | ||
| So when did you make that switch? | ||
| When did you wake up? | ||
| I think it was like about three years ago I had some like you know like I had like a major event happened in my life so I had to stop because I was just going and I wasn't like really paying attention but I never really was a Muslim if you really like Considering, like, how I was living, I never really was. | ||
| I just didn't even stop to think, you know what, maybe this is all bullshit. | ||
| I never stopped to say that to myself. | ||
| But when my life just stopped me, like forcefully stopped, I had some time to, like, reflect and think and just reach a conclusion that was just, like, right there, but I never really even considered it. | ||
| Yeah, and did you jump on YouTube right after that? | ||
| Because the stuff that you do there is really great and we'll put a link below so everyone can find you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is it so? | |
| Is it though? | ||
| Is it great? | ||
| I don't think... It is! | ||
| Yeah, but I think you're brave for having me actually. | ||
| I'm brave? | ||
| I think you have the backwards. | ||
| No, no, no, because like my videos are not really like advertiser friendly or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They don't really... I don't really follow like... Yeah. | |
| So, so yeah. | ||
| No, what actually made me jump on YouTube was, I know it's like a cliche at this point, | ||
| but actually it was the Sam Harris, Ben Affleck thing. | ||
| I mean, that was my awakening too, so we're across the world. | ||
| Yeah, it was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Someone needs to like, someone needs to have this guy's back | ||
| because he's like taking all the heat for saying something that's so obvious. | ||
| And it's like ridiculous what people, and actually not just the interview, | ||
| The next day, on CNN and all that, that was like a shit show. | ||
| That was like... Are people... Can I say that? | ||
| You can say it. | ||
| Go crazy. | ||
| You can say more than that. | ||
| So yeah, I had to like say something. | ||
| I actually uploaded two videos and deleted them. | ||
| Uh, but then I uploaded a third one because I wasn't really sure about the whole thing. | ||
| I, I, it was like, okay, if I get like a hundred views on that, okay, I'll do a second one. | ||
| And it just kept going from there. | ||
| Think how awesome that is, really. | ||
| I mean, we live something like, I don't know, 8,000 miles away from each other, | ||
| and that moment, that same night, I mean, that was my awakening. | ||
| I had had a little crack in my awakening before that, but we had that together. | ||
| That is so cool. | ||
| So I'm thrilled to be talking to you. | ||
| I'll go ahead. | ||
| No, you go ahead. | ||
| You're a good host, too. | ||
| All right, so we only have like another minute, but I'll do something else with you in the future, but just talk to me a little bit about the regressives, because you hate them as much as I do, this regressive ideology. | ||
| So how does it affect you as a free thinker and a secularist and an atheist in Egypt? | ||
| How does their ideology harm your ability to live the way you want? | ||
| Well, they're basically shutting down any conversation that could lead to anything. | ||
| Because when you're talking about like that, yeah, that there's no such thing that like that Islam is just like any other religion and like that, they're ignoring Like the majority of Muslims that live outside of the US, the United States or the UK or whatever, that really are living in horrible conditions. | ||
| Don't look at me, I'm living fantastically compared to other people, even in Egypt. | ||
| No one bothers me, I do whatever I want, but some people can't. | ||
| And when you start saying things like that's racist to just say that we should keep an eye on some issues that are very important and you should like... | ||
| You're liberal. | ||
| That's the problem, too. | ||
| You should, you know, you should actually leave everything and just focus on that there are people getting murdered for being gay or for saying the wrong thing or for listening to the wrong kind of music. | ||
| You should do that. | ||
| You should champion that cause, not just for people living outside the U.S., just live inside the U.S. | ||
| and don't want to travel because, you know, the Internet and all that. | ||
| And don't even get me started on this nonsense about feminism and Islam. | ||
| We need a whole other hour. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Here's what we're going to do. | ||
| For real. | ||
| I'm going to do an hour with you because this is just the beginning and I truly am a fan of yours. | ||
| So we're going to do a full hour together. | ||
| So I'm sorry we had to cut it short. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| I think I told you this, but I was in Egypt back in 1997. | ||
| It feels like a lifetime ago. | ||
| And I would love to go back at some point. | ||
| So maybe we can work that too. | ||
| Just call me up. | ||
| I'll be like your tour guide. | ||
| I'm gonna show you like the pyramids, all the cliches, and other stuff too. | ||
| All right, I am on with Kushal from India. | ||
| Kushal, you are number one. | ||
| You are first on the Big Rubin Report fan show. | ||
| How's it going in India today? | ||
| Namaste, Dave. | ||
| Namaste. | ||
| So I'm really happy that you have me over. | ||
| India's good. | ||
| It's really hot right now, actually. | ||
| Yeah, what's really hot for you guys? | ||
| Oh, I mean, we're dealing in Celsius, not Fahrenheit, so it's actually right now it's 35 degrees Celsius with the humidity of 77%. | ||
| That's pretty hot. | ||
| Oh man, are you in air conditioning right now or you just have a series of fans? | ||
| Air conditioning. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Very nice. | ||
| Alright, well, I'm super excited to talk to you. | ||
| Now, I don't know, we got a lot of responses. | ||
| I don't know that all 1.2 billion, with a B, people in India responded, but we did get a ton of responses from India, about a hundred people. | ||
| So you're the lucky one out of a hundred. | ||
| So there was a lot of things that you sent me that I thought were really, really interesting. | ||
| So first off, and a few people in India talked about this, you mentioned just the general state of freedom of expression in India right now. | ||
| So can you tell me a little bit about your concerns about the state of freedom of expression? | ||
| So here's the thing. | ||
| I don't want to paint a very, you know, dangerous scenario or something on that sort. | ||
| But, you know, as a skeptic, I'm a skeptic myself. | ||
| So, I mean, in India, we have some weird laws. | ||
| So I'll give you an example of a couple of situations. | ||
| So it all starts with a particular constitutional article called 295A. | ||
| So basically that article restricts any criticism of religion. | ||
| So I'm not going to give the whole text of the article to you because that would just take away a lot of time. | ||
| But the article says that you cannot hurt the sentiments of religious people. | ||
| And here's the funny part. | ||
| So it's basically a blasphemy law. | ||
| And India is a 80% Hindu country. | ||
| And Hinduism does not even have a concept of blasphemy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I mean, it's hilarious, actually. | ||
| But the history of the law is that in 1926, I think it was in 1926, we had this publisher who published a book called the Rangila Rasool. | ||
| So it's a word in Hindi. | ||
| So Rangila Rasool means Prophet Muhammad the Casanova or the playboy. | ||
| So it basically spoke about the marriages and the sex life of Prophet Muhammad. | ||
| Now, obviously, Muslims did not like it at that time. | ||
| And there was a lot of rioting. | ||
| This is in 1926. | ||
| So eventually the publisher was murdered. | ||
| And the Britishers, because they didn't want to deal with it, they just came up with this blasphemy law and we're just stuck with it now till 2016. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So wait, hold on. | ||
| So if Hinduism has no blasphemy, so it's really only being used one way. | ||
| It really sort of has nothing to do with Hinduism, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's not. | ||
| But the tragedy is that even Hindus have started using this law. | ||
| That's the tragedy. | ||
| See, I might be a skeptic, but I don't consider myself to be outside the Hindu pantheon. | ||
| Because, you know, we don't have that Abrahamic problem where, you know, atheists are considered outside the Abrahamic pantheon. | ||
| Hinduism had a very healthy tradition of atheism built in itself. | ||
| It hurts me even more because I consider myself to be a Hindu and we have this law and nobody talks about it. | ||
| I mean, there have been rationalists who had to leave India. | ||
| I'll give you an example. | ||
| There was a rationalist called Sanal. | ||
| I don't know his second name, but I know his name, Sanal. | ||
| So he basically went around in 2012 and he was talking about how certain miracles claimed by Christians were not real. | ||
| So they used this law and they went down on him. | ||
| And he had to leave India. | ||
| He stays in Finland now. | ||
| And that's really sad. | ||
| Recently there was a comedian, Kiku Sharda. | ||
| He made fun of a Sikh Guru. | ||
| So the followers of that Guru, they went after him. | ||
| Again, he had to apologize. | ||
| And I can give you examples of various religions. | ||
| Obviously, I mean, the highest amount of offense is caused by a particular religion, which nobody talks about. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I got I got a lot of emails about that. | ||
| I think everyone knows which one you're talking about. | ||
| So one of the things that you wrote that I thought was really interesting. | ||
| You said you wanted to make the distinction between tolerance and mutual respect. | ||
| And I really thought that was fascinating because here in America, at least, we talk about tolerance all the time. | ||
| We have to tolerate everybody. | ||
| But in a way, that's not a very lofty thing. | ||
| Mutual respect is. | ||
| So can you explain that? | ||
| So basically, it's not something that I've come up with. | ||
| It's a concept that was discussed and, you know, basically it's a concept introduced by an Indian-American author. | ||
| called Rajiv Malhotra. | ||
| He wrote a book called Being Different in 2011. | ||
| So, what he basically talks about is every time we have an interfaith dialogue, right? | ||
| So, you have these interfaith dialogues where everybody around the table says, oh, we tolerate all religions. | ||
| You know, Rajivji spoke about it in a very beautiful way. | ||
| So, you know, he went around asking people, so do you tolerate your spouse in your house? | ||
| Do you tolerate someone when you're having dinner with them? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, I have just basically taken this concept, being a skeptic, now I'm taking it to the next level and I'm saying, okay, here I am, I'm a skeptic, I may not agree with some views of Hinduism, I may not agree with a lot of views of Islam or Christianity, but where mutual respect comes in is, I don't need to tolerate you, I need to respect you and you need to give me that respect back in return. | ||
| That's when you have a dialogue. | ||
| Tolerance is, you're saying, you suck, but it's okay, I'll let you be. | ||
| Right, but I won't kill you, pretty much. | ||
| That's tolerant. | ||
| And this is, again, it stems from this exclusivist nature of Abrahamic religions. | ||
| See, Hindus don't have this problem. | ||
| And I'm being very honest here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I've never faced a Hindu saying, you know, I've never come across a Hindu who says, oh, I'll tolerate you. | ||
| You know, Hindus would be like, OK, you don't believe in God, you do your own thing. | ||
| I'll do my own thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But, you know, it's not like one God, one book, one religion. | ||
| It's not that. | ||
| So does that make the state of atheists in India much stronger, actually? | ||
| Because I did get a... I would say probably half of the people that emailed us from India said they were atheists, and didn't make it sound like they were hiding, per se. | ||
| Obviously, you're doing this right now. | ||
| So if Hinduism, which is 80% of the religion in India, is sort of tolerant of atheism, that's pretty fantastic, right? | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| See, I like to classify Indian Atheism in three parts. | ||
| So, there are the Hindu Atheists or the Hindu Dharmic Skeptics. | ||
| I call myself a Dharmic Skeptic. | ||
| So, we are not sure about some claims of Hinduism. | ||
| So, I would say I'm skeptical to reincarnation. | ||
| I'm skeptical to a few claims that the Gurus make. | ||
| But there are a lot of things in Hinduism that are Beautiful! | ||
| I mean, I personally like the theory of karma as an action and reaction. | ||
| I think karma could be taken as an action and reaction. | ||
| But then, there is this new atheism in India. | ||
| I call them the Marxist atheists. | ||
| So basically you have to understand, the political scenario in India and especially the media, you have the social sciences and the humanities departments, they keep churning out these Marxist atheists. | ||
| So when you got a lot of emails, I won't be surprised that you must have gotten a lot of emails of those Marxist atheists who will paint a very different picture about Hinduism to you. | ||
| And then I have the third category, which is the wannabe atheist. | ||
| So that person has not read anything. | ||
| So they just probably saw a video of Richard Dawkins on YouTube. | ||
| So they must have gone, okay, I like this. | ||
| It's like that. | ||
| So I have three categorizations of atheism in India. | ||
| I belong to the Dharmic skeptic. | ||
| Yeah, well listen, I feel like we just started and you're my first person out of 20, but our time is up already. | ||
| But I really, I appreciate your support. | ||
| I appreciate you coming on and sharing your thoughts and I have got to make it out to India. | ||
| So when I do, I'm gonna look you up. | ||
| Yeah, when you come to Mumbai, dinner's on me. | ||
| Done and done. | ||
| All right, I am here with Hannah in Texas in the good old U.S. | ||
| of A. Hannah, how are you? | ||
| I am amazing. | ||
| How are you? | ||
| I'm doing well. | ||
| Texas, it feels like Texas is like a whole other country in a way. | ||
| What's going on in Texas? | ||
| Well, honestly, I think that we are better than North Carolina right now. | ||
| That's pretty good. | ||
| That's pretty good. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, like, we get a lot of bad rap here, but at the same time, when you actually live here, it really depends on where you live. | ||
| Like, Texas is bigger than, like, France or something, right? | ||
| So, I live close to Dallas. | ||
| Not super close, but about an hour away from that. | ||
| And the closer you are to these major cities, the better it is. | ||
| But whenever you start getting out to the rural areas, it gets kind of... | ||
| They're a bit hickish, but they're good people. | ||
| It's always like well-intentioned, good old boys sort of thing going on. | ||
| All right, all right, I'll go with that. | ||
| Well, your submission was really great because you gave me a lot to work with here. | ||
| So first off, you are trans. | ||
| Big deal, but you are trans. | ||
| Yes, and I put a little asterisk on that. | ||
| I am somebody who's very anti-labels, and there's a reason for this. | ||
| I'm not, again, special snowflake stuff later, but I don't know what I'm agreeing to whenever I say, yes, I'm trans, right? | ||
| I mean, like, how far does that go? | ||
| That's always kind of the big question whenever you're saying, are you a trans man, trans woman, transsexual, transgender, cross- Where are the lines? | ||
| You know, what am I agreeing to if I say, yes, I am that? | ||
| But in a colloquial, general understanding, at the very basic level, yes. | ||
|
unidentified
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As long as all the bags are kind of kept off to the side. | |
| I think that's really interesting. | ||
| And it's actually kind of freeing because you, as the person that identifies however you want to identify, you're making the point of saying, well, sometimes these labels are a little confusing or don't quite get it right or all that. | ||
| And meanwhile, society is just obsessed with these labels, right? | ||
| Yeah, I have been doing this for close to nine years now. | ||
| The thing with the internet is that you don't really know who is typing what. | ||
| For the most part, a lot of the trans stuff that comes out and people doing that, it's probably people just trying on a persona or trying on an identity or something like that. | ||
| Usually teenagers. | ||
| And I think that we kind of take them a little bit more seriously than we should on a national hysteria-type level. | ||
| But I don't necessarily see that there's much wrong with it, but it just... | ||
| Let it be what it is, instead of making a big deal out of it if it's online. | ||
| In-person stuff, real tangible happenings, that gets a little bit more attention, or should. | ||
| But whenever it's people online typing or posting or whatever, it's like... | ||
| It could be anybody. | ||
| Are you telling me that Tumblr is not real life? | ||
| Is that what you're telling me? | ||
| I know it'll blow your mind. | ||
| I can't believe it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You know, you can be anything on the internet. | ||
| Like an attack helicopter. | ||
| That one's really popular. | ||
| Is that a big one right now? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Identifying as an attack helicopter is great. | ||
| Alright, so let's back up a little bit. | ||
| So for someone that's watching this right now, wherever they are in the world, that has never heard from a trans person or the only trans person that they know of is Caitlyn Jenner, can you just tell me a little bit about growing up, when did you realize you were trans, etc.? ? | ||
| Yeah, this is always very difficult because everybody's going to have like a similar overarching narrative, but it's going to have its different details. | ||
| I knew something was off as a child, which is one of those common narratives, but I grew up Southern Baptist and being raised that way is very kind of closed off. | ||
| Everybody that wasn't Southern Baptist was influenced by the devil. | ||
| But we moved around a lot and all that sort of thing. | ||
| And just, I don't know how to qualify myself. | ||
| We are kind of the only people it seems nowadays where you have to explain yourself, rationalize to me why I should accept that you are who you say you are. | ||
| Right, you guys are the ones of the moment, but you know what, that won't last forever for whatever that's worth. | ||
| So it's one of those deals where it's like, I wish I could give a definitive answer. | ||
| Like, this is exactly how I know. | ||
| I can point to these scientific studies. | ||
| This is exactly what happened. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| We don't, we're not there yet. | ||
| What I can point to is that trans people have existed throughout history in multiple cultures. | ||
| This is not a new thing. | ||
| It is only new to the American West. | ||
| And what I mean by that is the modern American West. | ||
| Native tribes had different allowances for different genders and gender roles. | ||
| So it's only new to, you know, the North American West. | ||
| And I think that kind of goes back to like Puritan European influence and whatnot kind of scrounging. | ||
| All deviancy away from the possibility of human experience. | ||
| And I'm sure that there were people back then, you know, white European colonials or whatever, that were also trans but could not say anything for risk of being hung or killed or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, so. | ||
| Yeah, I'm curious, how much of your sort of just mental energy and ability to be a functioning person is about just having to explain yourself? | ||
| Because that seems more exhausting in a way than dealing with something personal. | ||
| It is exhausting and it was exhausting. | ||
| I think a lot of trans people go through very similar phases in their transition. | ||
| When I first started, I was a helper. | ||
| I was going to be there for my trans sisters who were just starting also. | ||
| I spent a lot of nights sleepless trying to keep people from killing themselves. | ||
| But also trying to educate and explain and all this sort of thing. | ||
| And as time went on and I got more passing privilege, as we call it, I didn't have as many people stopping me and asking me. | ||
| And I kind of developed sort of a passive routine of like, this is how I'm just going to interact with people and just be super kind, super sweet and all that sort of thing. | ||
| And there's that pressure. | ||
| That you always have to be on your A-game as a trans woman around the normal people or whatever, right? | ||
| And there's two camps on this. | ||
| There's the radical queers who are like, we should not be trying to fit in. | ||
| We are unique in our own way and it's beautiful and all this sort of thing. | ||
| And then there's the people who are like, well, no, I kind of just want to fit in, you know? | ||
| It's difficult trying to navigate this because it's very politicized. | ||
| If you choose one side or the other, or you try to not pick a side, nobody's gonna like you and you end up in your room all alone all the time. | ||
| Well, is that one of the hardest things about sort of being, not only being a minority in this regard, but like, as I said, trans issues seem to be the minority of the moment, as you referenced before this issue with the bathrooms and North Carolina. | ||
| Everything trans is, you know, makes drudge and it makes all the news. | ||
| So do you feel that you're under a microscope, even in just your private life, with everything that you do? | ||
| Yes, and here's a thing. | ||
| I have been using the women's restroom for eight years without any issue. | ||
| Now I'm scared. | ||
| Because now people... I mean, that's interesting. | ||
| Now people are looking. | ||
| Now people are scrutinizing. | ||
| And whenever governors or mayors or whoever it was in North Carolina says women should spray people if they're scared in the bathroom. | ||
| And a year ago, a girl with a, I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, a genetic girl with a vagina Actually got pulled out of a restroom by men. | ||
| Wait, did you say a genetic role with a vagina? | ||
| So a female, a regular cisgendered female. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I hate cisgenders. | ||
| Oh, there's so many words. | ||
| She does not perform her femininity well enough. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that's a specific issue. | ||
| And it always makes me wonder whenever things like this happen, like, what else is going on? | ||
| Like, what are the real issues that are going on right now whenever they put this panic out here? | ||
| Like, we've been around all this time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But just for now, for some reason, right now, now we have to talk about this. | ||
| Like, now we need to have this national discussion. | ||
| What's the real issue? | ||
| Like, what's really happening? | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| The news cycle's pretty quick, so I think this one, hopefully, we're shifting out of this one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The process and everything, I'm just like, this is blowing my mind. | ||
| That's more of a specific issue. | ||
| The trans experience is hugely diverse, as diverse as the queer experience. | ||
| And again, who do you define as trans? | ||
| If you go with the Tumblr versions or whatnot, if you cross-dress on Halloween for a Rocky Horror Picture Show, you qualify as trans now. | ||
| Congratulations! | ||
| And you can't really say, well, no, you don't qualify if you're in that community because suddenly you're removing somebody's identity and you're going to get in trouble for that and all that sort of thing. | ||
| So I'm just kind of like, I need to accept the concept of qualia. | ||
| I don't know if you're familiar with that, but... No. | ||
| Yeah, qualia is a term, I'm kind of like, I think so much that I'm an armchair philosopher, but qualia was a word that was coined that was to describe the specific experience that we each have. | ||
| So whenever you look at like a blue wall, you will have a certain range of emotions and feelings and all that. | ||
| And I will have a supposedly different one. | ||
| And that is qualia. | ||
| So we can relate that we're looking at a blue wall, but Whatever's invoked inside of us is going to be different. | ||
| So that's kind of like the trans experience, and that's the best I can do when it comes to rationalizing. | ||
| You know, it's like, I just know what I feel, and I'm sorry that you can't relate. | ||
| And again, with the bathroom issue, oh my gosh. | ||
| Well, listen, I appreciate... Oh, go ahead. | ||
| Well, I mean, like, I appreciate people trying to relate to the trans issues, and like, and whenever they think of the bathroom thing, they're like, Why would I go to the bathroom? | ||
| Or why do I think people would go to the bathroom first thing that comes to mind? | ||
| Well, sexual assault or something, right? | ||
| And I'm like, well, you should not get in a dress and go into the bathroom then. | ||
| Like, you're messed up. | ||
| Actually there is one other thing that I wanted to talk about that you mentioned in your submission that I thought was really interesting. | ||
| You brought up a phrase that I hadn't heard before called constructed illusion and you related this to having a male and female voice and when you may use each one. | ||
| Can you tell me about that? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So this is what people call performing gender. | ||
| So I have developed this voice with years of training. | ||
| It's still my voice, it's just exercised, right? | ||
| My arms aren't exercised, but it makes sense. | ||
| So I have a wider range. | ||
| So with this voice, I get treated different whenever I interact with people because I'm not threatening with this voice. | ||
| But, if you're ready for this, if I drop my voice, I suddenly become a threat. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So I can switch between these two, but that was the voice that's affected by testosterone. | ||
| And anybody who heard that I am immediately a different person. | ||
| There's no going back, right? | ||
| The illusion is broken. | ||
| But how do they know that's just not another one of my developed voices? | ||
| And this is kind of why I call it constructed illusion, because it's related to magic tricks, performance magic. | ||
| You do misdirection, all that sort of thing. | ||
| And it is a performance, in a sense. | ||
| But in another sense, it is me. | ||
| It's really hard to really unpack that in a short amount of time. | ||
| But it's inner subjectivity. | ||
| With my voice, it was for me at first. | ||
| But eventually I kind of start feeling trapped by it, because even though I've exercised this voice, I'm still not capable of a full range of emotional expression using it, if that makes sense. | ||
| Right, but I assume that there's an evolution with that, right? | ||
| Like, you'll get there, so to speak. | ||
| Eventually. | ||
| But it takes a lot, a lot, a lot of practice. | ||
| So this goes back into like passing privilege and all that sort of thing, so... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| Well, it was really nice talking to you. | ||
| It was amazing talking to you. | ||
| I'm so ecstatic. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I'm on with Jason in Brussels. | ||
| Jason, how's it going? | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| Pleasure to be on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I'm excited to talk to you. | ||
| So you are in Brussels, but originally from Cyprus. | ||
| So we're going to get to Cyprus in a minute because nobody talks about Cyprus, but it's a really interesting, tiny little country that very few people know about. | ||
| But you're in Brussels. | ||
| Now, obviously, the last few months in Belgium, but especially in Brussels, have been very tough. | ||
| So can you just start with that? | ||
| Well, yeah, I have to say it hasn't affected people on a conscious level. | ||
| I mean, you see people going about their daily routine, but it's definitely had a very malicious sort of subconscious undertone, particularly since the Paris attacks. | ||
| We've had Martial law on and off. | ||
| And it's very concerning when you see four armed soldiers outside McDonald's and an armoured car outside your workplace. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, yeah, it's been very strange. | ||
| And the attacks actually happened at a metro station that I used quite frequently. | ||
| So when you see these changes, you see more soldiers out there, you see more security and all that kind of stuff, how does that just change your general psyche? | ||
| Like, that you're walking to work and you're seeing this stuff. | ||
| It changes just sort of the day-to-day, right? | ||
| Well, no, you become accustomed to it, actually. | ||
| But, I mean, it's very disturbing to see the military deployed in a Western capital. | ||
| I mean, it's like the problems truly have become global. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So there were a lot of reports after the attacks in Brussels that in parts of the community that one of the attackers was from, and I guess they found him a couple weeks later, that the community there was knowingly hiding him. | ||
| Were people talking about that in Belgium? | ||
| It sort of trickled its way into Western media, but not really, and then it was kind of hard to tell what was actually true. | ||
| Well I don't think this is just a problem that's isolated to Belgium. | ||
| I think in general we don't see members of the local community where many of these suspects are from turning them in or making a concerted enough effort with the authorities. | ||
| And it is something that we have to try and deal with through better integration policies. | ||
| Yeah, so how is the integration going? | ||
| I guess to that point it's probably not going that great. | ||
| No, no, no, it's terrible. | ||
| I mean, you have different communities that live parallel lives, which, I mean, they exist occasionally in the physical space, because, I mean, the physical space is overlapped slightly, but they just live in a different reality. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So how much of that, where do you place all the blame on that? | ||
| Because this is one of the things that a lot of people emailed us about was this idea, especially people in Europe were saying that a lot of the Muslim communities aren't integrating properly and some people were sort of blaming their own government, some people were blaming the Muslim communities. | ||
| My guess is that the truth is somewhere in between. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Well, I like to go from more abstractly and say that the problem has been that because of our social justice approach, or rather regressive approach, we've been giving rights to communities rather than to individuals. | ||
| And it's very arbitrary to define a community in a certain way. | ||
| And, you know, because the premise of our individualist kind of rule of law has been that rights should be given to individuals and not to You know, what social justice people, however social justice people decide to classify people as. | ||
| Yeah, so how much of those ideas, clearly you're speaking my language, it's about the individual not the group, let's get away from the suppression Olympics thing, all of that stuff which we've talked about so much here, how much of that ideology has taken hold in Belgium? | ||
| Well, I'm more qualified to talk specifically about how this is manifested in the UK, because I've been doing a study on that. | ||
| So you've been studying this in the UK about the school system, right? | ||
| The school system, yeah. | ||
| Because in the British school system, what you have is you have a third of schools which are regarded as, which are faith schools, they receive public money because they haven't designated a religious character. | ||
| and uh... what we see here is that uh... i'd i'd believe that the child's rights | ||
| uh... being infringed upon | ||
| because uh... basically because that the child is classified as as as | ||
| belonging to a particular community uh... they get labeled | ||
| uh... by very arbitrary criteria uh... and uh... | ||
| and attend uh... faithful | ||
| uh... | ||
| fulfill uh... the aims of social justice and i think that this is | ||
| uh... | ||
| this is a very large structural problem | ||
| it's it's a bizarrely backwards thing that we do in the west | ||
| I mean, we do this in America with several religions, where the government funds sort of faith-based schools, even though we're a totally secular society. | ||
| Well, yes, and, you know, shockingly in the UK, the faith schools have an exemption from even the Equality Act. | ||
| I mean, it's written in the law that they have an exemption from treating people equally in employment and admission. | ||
| The problem is, although the schools are obliged to teach the national curriculum, they teach it through a religious lens. | ||
| So you might learn about many secular subjects, but then, and about other religions and secularism and how to behave in a civic society, but if you also learn that the penalty for apostasy is death, and that the law of God in the Sharia is above Yeah, I mean, to me, that gets to the heart of the social justice stuff because it seeps into the education system, then you have a government that is subsidizing basically religious teaching. | ||
| Yeah, it's suicide. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| So let's move away from that for a little bit, because I do want to talk about Cyprus with you. | ||
| So nobody knows about Cyprus. | ||
| It is a tiny little island country. | ||
| You're from there. | ||
| Just tell me a little bit about your history. | ||
| You don't have to give me the whole history of Cyprus, but tell me a little bit. | ||
| I'll give you the recent history that's most significant now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, in 1974, the Turkish army occupied half of Cyprus. | ||
| And the island has been divided since then. | ||
| The Turkish state installed a kind of fake republic that's only recognized by Turkey and Pakistan. | ||
| And there have been ongoing attempts to resolve the situation over the decades. | ||
| I feel that I'm not very optimistic about the two sides coming to a settlement because of the physical power that Turkey is exerting. | ||
| I think whether Turkey withdraws or not is mainly a subject of the trajectory of Turkish foreign policy and whether it's in Turkey's interest to leave. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And my hope is that because Turkish foreign policy has become increasingly Islamified and that it's shifting away from the foreign policy of the West, There's a growing relationship between Cyprus and Israel, and my hope is that the West eventually aligns its foreign policy closer to secularist entities throughout the region, like the Kurds, for example, also. | ||
| And my hope is that that will lead to a better, will give Cyprus leverage in negotiations | ||
| because it will have the more backing from the West. | ||
| Yeah, well, I promise you that I will talk about it more because we've talked about the Kurds here, | ||
| but as you said, Cyprus is a sovereign nation, a United Nations member country, | ||
| and it's in full occupation since 1967. | ||
| So there's a lot, listen, there's a lot more that we could talk about. | ||
| Unfortunately, we got to move on. | ||
| I got a long day of interviews, but it's been a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| All right, I'm on with Jill up in Canada. | ||
| Jill, how are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm good, thanks. | |
| Well, it's good to have you here. | ||
| Now, first off, before we get into any of the issues you emailed me about, is it true that Canada is going to build a wall to keep Americans out regardless of who wins our presidential election? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've heard rumors, yes. | |
| Okay, rumors. | ||
| Alright, we're gonna get that on the internet. | ||
| Okay, so you sent me some really interesting stuff that sort of touched on some of the things that we talk about on the show, but then you really went in another direction with it, which is why I wanted to have you on. | ||
| So one of the things you mentioned is that sort of the mental health anti-stigma The campaigns that we see these days are actually part of the regressive left ideology. | ||
| Now, I gave a lot of buzzwords there, so can you unpack that for me a little bit? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think so. | |
| Not very many people agree with me on that. | ||
| Well, let's see. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it's the same sort of victim mentality. | |
| Except pretty much anyone can be a part of it. | ||
| It seems almost like a club to be mentally ill these days. | ||
| And a lot of times it ignores the real issues. | ||
| Like right now in Canada we have a huge crisis with First Nations communities. | ||
| Like lots of youth are committing suicide. | ||
| But of course, anti-stigma campaigns want to hijack this and make it about illness. | ||
| But if you actually talk to these youth, they say, well, we have no hope because there is no hope here. | ||
| We have no jobs. | ||
| We have no library, things like that. | ||
| So I think just the campaigns tend to really get away from the issues and tend to put people again in the victim role. | ||
| Yeah, so you're sort of talking about two things there. | ||
| So on one hand, there's the feeling if the economy is not good or their family life isn't good or whatever else it is, sort of a reality in their life versus these campaigns that in a weird way, because of this oppression Olympics that we've talked about, kind of make it cool to say, Well, this is wrong with me, or this is wrong with me, or I have this, or this, or that, correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, there seems to be a bit of a hierarchy, like, it's more cool to be, like, bipolar than to be depressed, and they seem to be saying, accept me because I'm not like you, whereas we all know, like, the way towards acceptance is to be, well, we're all human, we're all the same, but They're really going for, no, because I'm different and it's not my fault. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So sort of, for people who don't have an illness, what does that mean if they're struggling that they shouldn't be accepted? | ||
| Right, that's really kind of fascinating. | ||
| So someone who doesn't have any known condition, so to speak, in a weird way, then it feels worse for them because they're supposed to feel okay, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| And there's a lot of research showing that the more we sort of give people this information about these illnesses, the more we create them in people. | ||
| Because it's very much cultural, but they just have to get a brain scan and people pay attention because they think that's science. | ||
| Yeah, do you guys have all the crazy commercials that we have in the States? | ||
| You know, you turn on the TV, especially any of the cable news shows, and all the commercials are for one depression medicine or another, and you know, there's a cartoon cloud following somebody, and take this medication with this medication, and it makes everybody think that they're depressed or somehow defective. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I don't watch TV, but I'm sure we do have those. | |
| You're a wise woman. | ||
| So a lot of this though, from what you wrote to me, is very personal for you because you're a recovering addict yourself, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So can you tell me a little bit about that? | ||
| Either, you know, what you were doing, how you got out, et cetera. | ||
| You don't have to give me every bit of personal stuff, but. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I was a heroin, I guess I still am a heroin addict. | ||
| I don't know much to say about that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you're in full recovery? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I guess it's a lifelong struggle, I suppose, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, almost two years. | |
| Wow. | ||
| So, the other thing that you wanted to talk about, which of course is related to all this, is the war on drugs. | ||
| And, you know, this is something we talk about a lot in America. | ||
| I'm not that familiar with the drug situation in Canada in general. | ||
| Can you tell me a bit? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I probably don't follow politics as much as I should. | |
| I get too depressed. | ||
| But I have read a lot of Bruce Alexander's work. | ||
| And Vancouver, which is where I'm from originally, has the worst addiction problem in the world, pretty much. | ||
| So he talks a lot about how globalization has affected that. | ||
| And the war on drugs pretty much focuses on the drugs themselves as being evil. | ||
| And it's really not about the drugs. | ||
| Bruce Alexander's work in the 70s, he pretty much disproved all other notions of addiction, but people have still held on to it. | ||
| Basically, it was called Rat Park. | ||
| He gave some rats morphine water and of course they used it up, which is pretty much identical almost to heroin. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But then he put another group of rats in like a bigger container where they could socialize and they could play and they had lots of room and those rats wouldn't drink the morphine water. | |
| Even when they had already forced them into physical dependency. | ||
| So, that to me is evidence against this whole crazy notion that we should be fighting drugs. | ||
| Canada isn't probably in the same state as America, but we are certainly getting there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you guys do have some places, Vancouver for example, where at least marijuana is legal, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not legal, I don't think. | |
| We do have a safe injection site, but our conservative government, our previous conservative government, tried really hard to get rid of that. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Well, listen, it's fascinating to me because you took sort of a theme related to, you know, political correctness and this oppression stuff and all that, and applied it to something that we haven't talked about that much. | ||
| So I really appreciate your thoughts on it. | ||
| All right, I'm on with Gianmarco in Switzerland. | ||
| How's it going in Switzerland right now? | ||
| Hey, Dave. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| It's evening. | ||
| And yeah, just waiting for your call here. | ||
| Yeah, I got a guy with better hair than me. | ||
| This is very upsetting. | ||
| But we're gonna do it anyway. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| So one of the things you wanted to talk about was sort of coming out as an atheist, which I think is really interesting. | ||
| And it's one of the things we've talked about here, that people feel this need to make this proclamation. | ||
| So can you tell me a little bit about your journey? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| Well, I was born and raised in Switzerland, so it's not that religious country. | ||
| It's just like, yeah. | ||
| I had some religion classes in primary and stuff, but I was never really religious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Catholic? | ||
| Was it Catholic classes? | ||
| No, it was evangelical. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, then I went to Sydney for an exchange semester when I was like 18, 19. | ||
| And I stumbled upon this debate of Ken Ham against Bill Nye. | ||
| And I was like, To say the least, I thought it was ridiculous that some people would think that way, like Ken Hammond would. | ||
| So basically, for people that don't know, he's the guy that runs the Biblical Park somewhere in America, and he debated Bill Nye about evolution versus creation. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So I was a bit confused. | ||
| I told my brother and he was a little bit more into that. | ||
| He showed me Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. | ||
| I thought it would be a good English lesson to read those books like God is not Great. | ||
| I was talking to some people there because I had connections to Everywhere in the world, because I had some people from Chile there, from Switzerland, from Belgium, from everywhere. | ||
| So what astounded me the most was this guy from Switzerland, actually, who was like, well, I believe in creationism. | ||
| And it was a Swiss guy like me, who was thinking that Noah's Ark really happened. | ||
| It was just mind-blowing for me. | ||
| So I started to watch debates on YouTube and stuff. | ||
| And yeah, when I came home, I was like a full-blown atheist. | ||
| And it sounds to me that you deal with exactly what most atheists deal with, which is that it's not actually that big of a deal, but you feel like you have to sort of say it because otherwise the world just thinks you believe something that you don't. | ||
| Yeah, right, right. | ||
| It's like that. | ||
| And when I discovered all of this, I was a little bit more militant. | ||
| I don't know how to say it. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I thought people who believe this stuff would be stupid, or not really stupid, but ignorant and kind of weird. | ||
| So I got a little bit out of that. | ||
| I let them have their beliefs and whatever. | ||
| Yeah, but I feel the need to tell that I don't believe that. | ||
| Yeah well it's funny because I always say it's like to me I don't care what you believe as long as you're not trying to chop my head off for making me believe anything else then you go ahead and believe whatever you want you know. | ||
| Alright so one of the things that you wrote in that you want to talk about that I thought was really interesting was that you want to talk about the difference between the US Constitution and the Swiss Constitution and that basically you think that we're, don't worry about the hair, that we That we are sort of obsessed with never changing our constitution, but you guys actually change your constitution pretty frequently, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was like, I heard this whole debate about gun regulation and the Second Amendment of the United States, and I thought to myself, like, why wouldn't they allow to change that? | ||
| I live beside all this lobbying and stuff from the NRA. | ||
| But I have read a Gallup poll that like 55% of American people are for more strict gun regulation. | ||
| And I looked into it a little bit more and what I found was pretty astonishing to me. | ||
| I've always thought like The American Constitution is kind of static and just for 230 years it was almost the same. | ||
| And the Swiss Constitution, as you may know, we have referendums like four times a year where people just send in some ideas and we vote on it. | ||
| And this is like changing the constitution every time. | ||
| Wait, did you say you guys do that four times a year? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Man, that's a lot. | ||
| And people show up and vote four times a year and actually change the constitution that often? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, it is. | ||
| Like, well, we have, we have like, like 50, 55% of the people vote. | ||
| Um, the rest is just like, yeah, well do whatever you want. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And uh, yeah, but we, we vote like for, 12 to 15 different referendas each year. | ||
| In four steps. | ||
| Yeah, so alright, so have you seen any... give me like one good example of that, like something that you guys have changed for the better, and one time that maybe it didn't work, if you can think of something. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| We had 2010 I think, it was like the far-right party of Switzerland, the SVP, | ||
| proposed that we should ban minarets like the towers on the mosques. | ||
| So... | ||
| And it was accepted by the people. | ||
| So now we have in our constitution, it was article 72, that it's prohibited to build | ||
| minerals. | ||
| And we have like two buildings to this point in all of Switzerland, so it was like no issue | ||
| Right, so it wasn't really a problem, but the far right grabbed it, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it was just, like, xenophobia and, like, populistic and, yeah. | ||
| And a good thing we accepted? | ||
| I really need to think of that. | ||
| It's like, most things are good. | ||
| Not that they're not accepted. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All these proposals are either far right or far left. | |
| Like minimum wages. | ||
| I mean, that's kind of okay, but minimum wages were set to $22 per hour. | ||
| And that's just ridiculously high. | ||
| I mean, who would pay that? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So does that ultimately hurt the Swiss economy? | ||
| I mean, do businesses then leave Switzerland? | ||
| Because it sounds like Switzerland, we always think of it as, oh, they have so much money. | ||
| Everybody's so happy. | ||
| It's so great. | ||
| Yeah, no, I think so. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I'm not an economist or anything, but from what I've heard and what I've read, I think it would really hurt the country as a financial hotspot. | ||
| And then, yeah. | ||
| And also, yeah. | ||
| So the other thing that you wanted to talk about, which is one of the things that almost everyone in Europe especially has wanted to talk to me about, is the refugee situation and political correctness. | ||
| So I'll let you go from there. | ||
| Yeah, so, refugee crisis in Switzerland itself, I mean, I'm not that Don't worry, I'm not going to quiz you on everything. | ||
| like the whole European situation. | ||
| I know where borders are closed on the Balkan route and stuff. | ||
| Don't worry, I'm not gonna quiz you on everything. | ||
| We're just getting your opinion. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| So yeah, I'm basically for like letting refugees in. | ||
| I mean, we're all humans, we should get along with each other and help each other. | ||
| That's the humanitarian aspect of it. | ||
| But the left is pushing these ideas or these reasons to let them in. | ||
| For example, when someone says something a little bit I don't know, let's say controversial about refugees and what they're doing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's just like, shout it down. | |
| You cannot talk properly about what the issue is with the refugees that come in. | ||
| I mean, I'm all for letting them in, but we have to talk about the issues that are coming to us with this. | ||
| Yeah, they're just saying that no, there are no problems at all coming with this, or maybe a little bit financial, but nothing really cultural or religious. | ||
| Listen, that's exactly why I'm talking about it on the show, because we've got to have these conversations. | ||
| Listen, that was quick, but it was a pleasure talking to you, and thanks. | ||
| All right, I'm on with Adam in Sweden. | ||
| Adam, how's it going? | ||
| It's going just fine, actually. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Looking forward to this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| Well, me too. | ||
| So, you know, I've mentioned a lot about Sweden and just recently I had Tino Sanandaji on the show, who is an economist from Sweden and one of the few people that will talk about the political correct situation and sort of this regressive ideology that seems to have taken hold in Sweden. | ||
| And I got a lot of messages from Sweden talking about that. | ||
| And you were the one we went with. | ||
| So we expect you to represent your whole country. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Oh boy, I'm the most un-Swedish Swede you just could find, so I'm not really a good representation there. | ||
| Well, as you know, I believe that it's about the individual, not about the bigger group, so let's start with that. | ||
| So, one of the things you wanted to talk about was that, the political correct, this seeping ideology and what it's doing to society in Sweden. | ||
| So let's start with that. | ||
| Well, I've been doing a lot of thinking to explain this. | ||
| It's fairly hard, really, since you need so much context for it, and we have so little time for this. | ||
| Well, do the best you can. | ||
| Let's see how much thinking you've done. | ||
| I think I'll just say that it goes back at least a hundred years. | ||
| It started with socialism and everything like that in Sweden. | ||
| But in the modern era, at least since the 70s, Sweden was a hotbed for very radical leftism in the 70s. | ||
| We even had leftist terrorists and everything like that in Sweden that occupied the West German Embassy. | ||
| So it has a long tradition. | ||
| But the biggest things I actually want to explain with this that explains how Sweden works today is two terms. | ||
| And I think I've translated them reasonably. | ||
| One is called the opinion corridor. | ||
| I think that's kind of self-explanatory, but I'll give an explanation. | ||
| Yeah, please. | ||
| That is, in Sweden, there's a very narrow corridor of opinions you're allowed to have. | ||
| The rest, well, if you have any opinion outside of that, like me, you're a Nazi, you're a racist, you're a bigot, and, you know, you're all of that. | ||
| Now, just to be clear, you're not a Nazi or a racist or a bigot? | ||
| Let's just get that out there. | ||
| Yeah, I'm neither of those. | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| I may be very Aryan, but I'm not a Nazi. | ||
| And that opinion corridor for my entire lifetime has just been narrowing. | ||
| And I would definitely say that it narrowed its most when Obama became a president. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, I would say Sweden The last, I'd say, two decades, I guess, has tried to emulate America in all its worst parts. | ||
| so we always have this opinion corridor | ||
| but then we saw how you guys started going with the political correctness | ||
| part and then it just went worse | ||
| so yeah i think that explains | ||
| that part Then we also have another term that we didn't invent, but a Swedish political commentator in the seventies put to coin very well. | ||
| He's called Wilhelm Moberg. | ||
| And I would recommend reading up about him because he will give a lot of context to the bullshit that's going on today. | ||
| And I think I'll try to pronounce this right. | ||
| Democratership, he called it. | ||
| A combination of the word democracy and dictatorship. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And that works essentially in that we have a formal democracy, but on the behest of the cultural force that our government represents, we have an enforced dictatorship of a sort in the form of the cultural hegemon in Sweden that, you know, has its expression in the opinion corridor. | ||
| Right, so what you're talking about basically is, as we've used this phrase, the Oppression Olympics, you guys are really big on this, that depending on who you are and where you're from and your religion and your skin color, we really put you in this pecking order, right? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And you're basically, you were very much a homogenous society, and now that's really changing, so the pecking order starts getting even... Yeah, we were a very homogenous society up until at least the 90s. | ||
| That's when the Balkan Wars erupted and we had the genocide and everything like that, and we got a lot of refugees from that. | ||
| They've integrated mostly well. | ||
| We didn't really get the problems until we had the very large immigration from the Middle East. | ||
| It's easier to integrate a European culture than a completely foreign culture from an entire different part of the world with a different cultural context and all of that. | ||
| But even saying that would label you a racist, right? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I'm definitely a racist for saying that here in Sweden. | ||
| So the problem is, because that's outside the opinion corridor, we can't talk openly about it. | ||
| And that's caused a lot of issues. | ||
| Yeah, so that leads directly to the other thing that you wanted to talk about. | ||
| Especially. | ||
| Exactly, I mean. | ||
| It leads to the other thing you wanted to talk about, which is the rise of the right in Sweden, which is a new phenomenon. | ||
| So can you lay that out? | ||
| Yeah, it's a new phenomenon because in Sweden the left has essentially ruled since post-World War II. | ||
| For 60 years we had one party dominant in our, what's it called, Parliament. | ||
| For 60 years we had the Social Democrats completely dominant in the Parliament. | ||
| Only one interruption for four years. | ||
| And that's kind of, when I look back, I'm a student of history so I can see the negative side of it, it's absolutely insane to see it just have one party. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| They did achieve some pretty good things, the things we call Folkemet in Sweden, our welfare state, they did achieve that, but they also dismantled it. | ||
| But the right has risen because we can't speak about these things, and they are the only ones that have the balls to speak about it, because, well, the extreme part were already Nazis, The less extreme part didn't really care to be compared, that they were compared with the Nazis, so they just talked about it. | ||
| And now the only way to talk about this is to dedicate yourself to being on the far right, essentially. | ||
| Yeah, so we see this happening in America right now, and that's why I've been talking about it, because I see all of you guys, not just in Sweden, but all over Europe, I see this happening, and I'm trying to help that not happen here. | ||
| So what does that do for a person like you? | ||
| A person that is not a Nazi and is not a racist, and yet you see a problem with society and only one group talking about it. | ||
| Where does that leave you? | ||
| Completely alone, essentially. | ||
| Because the left, well, they think I'm the great Satan. | ||
| The right, well, I'm also the great Satan for them, because, well, you know, I kind of think that brown people are people too, and judge them like people, and that's not right, according to the far right. | ||
| I mean, I consider myself ideologically independent, because I consider ideologies to be secular religions. | ||
| So I shy away from those things. | ||
| So it's very hard being of my camp in Sweden, which is, you know, liberal, essentially. | ||
| Yeah, well, you know what? | ||
| That's the whole purpose of this show, and almost everyone that I'm talking with today all over the world, I mean, this is what it's all about. | ||
| So just to end this real quick, though, because we've got to go, you're starting your own YouTube channel, right, to get these ideas across? | ||
| So where can we send people? | ||
| The YouTube channel has been slow. | ||
| I'm in the uptake because I've been busy. | ||
| I'm a college student, so. | ||
| But look for the Thought Criminals channel in the near future. | ||
| All right, I'm on with Michael in Colorado. | ||
| Michael, how are you? | ||
| Hi Dave, I'm good. | ||
| Good to see you. | ||
| Yeah, good to see you. | ||
| So I have to tell you, we picked 20 people out of 1,200, and I hope you take this the right way. | ||
| You are the elder statesman of the group. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| Yeah, not to add any extra pressure. | ||
| Okay, well that'll give me a beer at the local bar, so that's good. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So, first off, you had a really interesting history. | ||
| That's one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you. | ||
| And you were in the Navy, so first off, tell me when you served and where you served. | ||
| I was in the Navy. | ||
| I joined when I was 18 out of high school. | ||
| Went in in 1961. | ||
| Put that in context. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| President Kennedy announced the Apollo program. | ||
| West Side Story came out. | ||
| And our president, Barack Obama, was born. | ||
| When he was in diapers, I was in boot camp. | ||
| And I served eight years, got out in 1969 to go to college. | ||
| San Diego, I was on a guided missile destroyer all over the Pacific for a while, came back, got involved in the Polaris submarine program. | ||
| And I was stationed in Spain for a couple of years and in Charleston for a couple of years working on some high tech, you know, secret stuff. | ||
| And said adios to that and went to school on the GI Bill. | ||
| Took a degree in anthropology and pretty much minored in history. | ||
| And, you know, then life went on. | ||
| Then life went on. | ||
| When you look back at that part of your life, the service part of your life, do you think of it fondly? | ||
| Do you miss it? | ||
| Anything like that? | ||
| I do think of it fondly. | ||
| You know, distance, you know, does make the mind grow a little bit more, you know, accommodating, I think. | ||
| But all in all, it was really good for me. | ||
| I had no idea what I wanted to do when I was 18 years old. | ||
| My friends, many of them were going off to college, but I knew I wasn't really ready for that somehow. | ||
| It was good for me in a lot of ways. | ||
| You know, it helped me to grow up. | ||
| It gave me some responsibility. | ||
| Let me know that I can handle that. | ||
| Gave me the equivalent of a master's degree in electrical engineering, which was a big help. | ||
| But when I got out, I abandoned engineering and went directly into anthropology | ||
| because eight years of engineering is pretty, is enough. | ||
| But I'm pretty sure, if my notes serve me correct, that in 1964, before you went to anthropology, | ||
| you built a computer? | ||
| Well, I built and more to the point, I programmed my first digital computer. | ||
| Because when I got in the Polaris program, all the systems on the boats, these are intercontinental ballistic missile systems, are run by computers. | ||
| In 1964, those computers were probably not quite as powerful as the iPhone that we have today. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I was very fascinated by computers. | ||
| Still am. | ||
| And as part of my training, we put together a little block system of computers, of a digital computer, and learned how to do the basic programming. | ||
| It was all what we call machine language. | ||
| It was all ones and zeros. | ||
| And then we went to the lab and we started programming and working on the big guys in 1964. | ||
| So that was my introduction to digital computers. | ||
| Yeah, so that's so cool. | ||
| So 1964, you're working on the very beginnings of digital computers, and you said all zeros and ones. | ||
| Did you ever, do you remember ever having the glimpse of what that could become? | ||
| Did you ever think you could be walking around with this thing in your pocket that would be exponentially more powerful than everything you were working on at the moment? | ||
| I don't think anybody did at the time, you know, because it was the beginning of solid state, the solid state years. | ||
| These things are really big. | ||
| They were in cabinets that doors opened, etc. | ||
| I remember when the personal computer, the Altair, those came out. | ||
| You know, it was pretty neat. | ||
| You could have one at home. | ||
| But hell, you know, digital, or LCD watches were the big thing back then, and Texas instrument calculators. | ||
| Nobody really thought that we'd be able to have an iPhone and communicate face-to-face, Dick Tracy-like things when I was growing up, the comics. | ||
| You know, we thought that would be pretty cool, but nah, who ever thought that the advances would be that fast? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I remember being at a friend's house, probably when I was six, on a Texas Instruments computer playing, they had their own version of Pac-Man. | ||
| It was like their ripped-off version of Pac-Man. | ||
| I thought it was the coolest thing ever. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, you know, there was a book called Future Shock, you're probably familiar with, years ago, in which Alvin Toffler predicted that progress would be so fast that by the time you began to get a little bit comfortable, the next thing would come along, and you'd be a little bit in shock, and you'd deal with that, the next thing would come, the next thing would come. | ||
| Well, I think that's pretty much where we're at right now. | ||
| It does seem like that, that the second we get okay with a little bit of the technology, or just another app comes out, the second you're okay with one and now this one does something else and you forget that, it's really, it's fascinating. | ||
| It is, and what I find kind of disheartening is a lot of people, one of the things I do here is I'm on the library board and I help some of the older retirees here try to deal with their iPads and their iPhones and God help them, their Windows computers, etc. | ||
| That must be a trial in patience. | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| Can I give my mom your number? | ||
| You can. | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| Not a problem. | ||
| I do that all the time. | ||
| But you know, I think a lot of the older people are now understanding that this is actually a device that can be used for things like we're doing here and for making contact with other people and spreading ideas and getting your ideas out. | ||
| So as they become easier to use, In a human sense, people are going to look past the technology now. | ||
| I have a neighbor who's, she's 20 years older than me, right, so she's 93 years old. | ||
| She has an iPad. | ||
| Love that. | ||
| She does her email and her little Google things and all that with her iPad and she's quite, quite Familiar with it. | ||
| It's sort of magic to her, but she knows how to use it, so it puts her in touch. | ||
| That's pretty cool. | ||
| All right, let's shift topics all together because you gave me a bunch in the submission. | ||
| You are an atheist. | ||
| Were you always an atheist? | ||
| When did you decide you were an atheist? | ||
| You were an atheist before it was cool. | ||
| Now it's cool. | ||
| Yeah, well there's a ton of places that are still not cruel. | ||
| I can point you to right down the street here. | ||
| We have five churches and four real estate offices in a town of 800, so think about that. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So you're a real minority. | ||
| You're a minority in a minority right there. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I am, especially here. | ||
| I remember, I was thinking about that, and I remember when I was probably five or six, we were living with my grandmother, going to church, Sunday mornings, Sunday night, Wednesday night, Methodist Church, a little North Texas town, sitting at Sunday school, looking out the window at the tree and the swing, and so I'm thinking, God, I'd rather be any place but here. | ||
| I think probably realistically about the time I figured out Santa wasn't real, I had the same kind of questions about the stories I'd been taught. | ||
| So, for about as long as I can remember, I guess. | ||
| Yeah, so one of the other things you mentioned is that you're sort of fascinated by how Christians and just religious people in general are often deceived by their sources. | ||
| So it's not even necessarily the source itself, right? | ||
| It's not necessarily the book itself, but it's sort of the messengers that are the deceivers. | ||
| Am I getting what you said sort of correctly? | ||
| I think it's both those things. | ||
| You know, if you look at Abrahamic religions today, they don't have what we consider to be basic hardcore evidence for their claims. | ||
| The only thing they have for a source are books that stem out of oral traditions, that stem out of ancient manuscripts that have been copied and recopied and copied and changed and different. | ||
| So I think there's a problem because the people who are their pastors and who are their priests and go to divinity school. | ||
| They understand the history of their religion. | ||
| They know the questions involved. | ||
| They know the contradictions. | ||
| They know that a lot of this is really false. | ||
| But they don't tell that to their congregations. | ||
| So the people who hear this really have no independent way of judging whether this is real or not. | ||
| So if I have a book, somebody's giving me a book and says, look, this is reality. | ||
| I have some questions. | ||
| Well, where did it come from? | ||
| What does it say? | ||
| How do we know what it says is true, etc.? | ||
| So digging back into those sources and being able to come up with what we think are historically realistic stories about all this helps people to be a little bit more critical and judge the things that they just take on faith. | ||
| Yeah, so one of the things when I've talked to other atheists and when I talk about atheism in general, one of the questions I get is people say, well how do you have a moral center then? | ||
| How are you able to have a code that you live by without religion? | ||
| I think your laugh already sort of gave away your answer, but tell me, what have you based your moral center on? | ||
| What do I base my moral center on? | ||
| Well, like I tell, you know, we have two adopted kids. | ||
| They're adults these days, and they're doing quite well. | ||
| And one of the reasons that they're doing well is because they know what's right and what's not right. | ||
| You have this, I think humans have this inherent ability to understand that the right way to act, for | ||
| example, is the way you act when nobody is watching you. | ||
| You come out of this feeling of compassion for other people. | ||
| You come out of this feeling of being able to help other people and to be basically a | ||
| good person. | ||
| I mean, sociopaths aside, if you're a normally constructed human being, you know, I feel | ||
| that you understand this. | ||
| I mean, the Greeks understood it, the Romans understood it, the Plains Indians understood it, right? | ||
| They were all allied to different religious systems. | ||
| So, it's not something out of a religious tradition or a book that says, follow these rules. | ||
| I mean, you know it's wrong if you kill somebody. | ||
| Murder, for example. | ||
| That's just human basic wrong. | ||
| And I don't think it takes an ancient book and dictates from the guy in the sky to say, no, do this and you're in trouble. | ||
| Yeah, and if it does, there's probably a bigger problem. | ||
| There's a bigger problem. | ||
| There's a bigger problem. | ||
| All right, so unfortunately we have to wrap it up, but let people know. | ||
| So you're working on a book, correct? | ||
| And you have a website. | ||
| So where can we send people? | ||
| You can send people, I have a book, it's already, I self-published it, it's out on Amazon, The Q Fragments, and it's about the, it's about basically what we've been talking about. | ||
| Great. | ||
| It's digging back into the sources and to finding out, in a secular situation, what happened. | ||
| It's a novel, characters and action. | ||
| You can go to theqfragments.com. | ||
| It's out there, links are out there. | ||
| I podcast it, every chapter is a podcast that I read. | ||
| So I just like people to read it. | ||
| Enjoy the tale, and think about the message that underlies this, right? | ||
| That all of these myths and everything may have come from some particular historical actors and people, but they're not necessarily what people are trying to get us to believe today. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I love that message, and I love chatting with you, so thank you so much. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Have a great night. | ||
| And thank you for your program. | ||
| All right, I'm on with Brendan in Ireland. | ||
| Brendan, how's it going? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How you doing, Dave? | |
| I'm doing well. | ||
| I feel like you could be my Irish cousin. | ||
| We are dressed exactly the same. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, all our cousins dress the same over here, apparently, yeah. | |
| Apparently. | ||
| Actually, my brother-in-law is half Irish and his name is Brendan, so there you go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, cool. | |
| Where in Ireland does he hail from? | ||
| Oh God, I probably should know that. | ||
| I'm going to have to get back to you on that one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sorry, it's small enough. | |
| You already got me in trouble. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think he's from near the local pub. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, the pub, the pub. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Everybody, yeah. | |
| Alright, so what's going on these days in Ireland? | ||
| We don't hear much about Ireland in the news. | ||
| How's it going over there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're pretty small so you won't hear much about us but at the moment we've just had a new government formed ten weeks after our election. | |
| Miraculously enough. | ||
| There's a lot of discussion. | ||
| Water charges were brought in and that's kind of been discussed a lot. | ||
| The far left, the socialist parties, they're not very happy with it. | ||
| Neither are any parties really, apart from the parties in government. | ||
| There's discussion over repealing our Eighth Amendment, which basically stipulates that abortion is illegal in Ireland. | ||
| Obviously on the good front, last year we legalised marriage for homosexuals, which is fantastic. | ||
| I wasn't in the country, I was actually abroad in China for the year, and you're not allowed to vote if you're Irish abroad. | ||
| I wasn't too happy that I couldn't vote, but I mean, that was brilliant. | ||
| Wait, let's pause there for a second. | ||
| So that's really interesting. | ||
| So you guys voted for legalizing gay marriage, which is obviously very great and a very liberal, progressive concept. | ||
| And then at the same time, you're telling me that they're voting on possibly repealing a law that allows abortion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, to repeal the law that disallows it. | |
| Oh, so abortion, is abortion completely illegal? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it's illegal in the Republic. | |
| Wow, so I assume people are having illegal abortions because people have them whether it's legal or not, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're generally heading over to England. | |
| Wow. | ||
| So do you think the law is going to pass? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would say so. | |
| So if you take last year, there was obviously fervent opposition from perhaps the churches and stuff against gay marriage. | ||
| But no one really cares that much about what the churches say anymore. | ||
| So are the churches, I mean, are they losing their power quickly? | ||
| How much power do they actually hold over politics these days? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very little. | |
| They're kind of Auxiliary, I guess. | ||
| I mean, like, you don't get too many people going to mass, and they don't take too much of it seriously, and most of Ireland is very, you know, with regards to, say, homosexuality or whatever, we're generally, as a country, we're generally quite alright with it. | ||
| We're quite a, we're a country basically, like, as long as you don't annoy me, I don't really care what you do. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That's my personal ideology, too. | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| Yeah, I need to go to Ireland, obviously. | ||
| So you're studying politics, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, I am. | |
| What got you interested in politics? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can't really remember. | |
| I think I just really wanted to... I don't know, maybe it was probably the advertising on television with, you know, just starving African children and stuff, and you wanted to be like, oh, I'd love to help someone like that, and it just kind of grew and grew. | ||
| I was very interested in wars and I did a module last semester which was Ethnic Conflict which was fantastic and I'd love to do a Masters in Ethnic Conflict, a Masters in Ethnic Conflict. | ||
| So I'd love to work in the United Nations, something like that and a conflict resolution. | ||
| My whole undergraduate actually just began, so I'll be done on Saturday. | ||
| Nice, nice. | ||
| Well, thanks for taking some time then. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no problem. | |
| So one of the things that you wanted to talk to me about is one of the things that pretty much everybody wanted to talk about, which is political correctness and how it's seeping into society. | ||
| So what's going on on that front in Ireland? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think a lot of the stuff you see in I think ideas of racism and stuff are important from America. | |
| We all think, oh we have problems with racism. | ||
| America is a very specific problem with racism. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And we think, oh my god, you're racist towards black people and that. | ||
| We never had that problem. | ||
| Because, you know, we've only been in our own country for 94 years or something like that. | ||
| 25 years, sorry. | ||
| Well, you'll get people, it's generally hard left people, people on the socialist spectrum. | ||
| I'm not saying, you don't have to be a socialist, obviously, to be, you know, ridiculously, you know, as Maajid Nawaz is saying, you know, regressive left and all. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You get that. | |
| We had, do you know the German group Pegida? | ||
| Of course. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pegida. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They had a protest here. | ||
| You know, it was like 100 people or 300 people or something like that. | ||
| So it's not really picking up steam there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, this particular incident, they were chased down the street by counter-protesters, to which we were like, I totally disagree with their beliefs. | |
| They're racist, they're fascist, whatever. | ||
| But I mean, let them say what they want to say and give them enough room to hang themselves. | ||
| But I think in Ireland, we're doing okay. | ||
| And when we see stuff that's happening in America, we're losing our fucking minds. | ||
| I can't vouch for everything that's going on here. | ||
| I'm wondering about some of it myself. | ||
| Don't worry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think we're okay. | |
| But I mean, when it comes to terrorist attacks and criticizing Islam, you do get some pretty, well, not Islam, sorry, the use of Islam in a violent way, use of anything in a violent way. | ||
| I mentioned that in a class and I got some pretty funny looks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's been one of the through lines here because we're just talking about ideas and you mention an idea and you get some funny looks in class. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, but no one is shouting me down claiming a safe space, which is progress, I think. | |
| So you guys don't have safe spaces there and trigger warnings? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, we're too small. | |
| Our universities are too small and I don't know, it hasn't caught on yet. | ||
| I think it's a combo maybe of small universities and a lot of beer, would that be fair to say? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I think it's not showing off the glass because of the beard I had before. | |
| There you go. | ||
| Well, listen, it was a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| And if you have any other fashion recommendations, let me know. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I am on with Brianna in Japan. | ||
| Brianna, how are you? | ||
| I'm doing good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you? | |
| I'm doing well. | ||
| So according to my notes here, you are in Japan via Tennessee. | ||
| How many people can say that? | ||
| Not very many. | ||
| So from personal experience. | ||
| They probably don't even know Tennessee is here 99% of the time, so. | ||
| Yeah, so tell me. | ||
| I cannot imagine. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about that. | ||
| So you grew up in Tennessee, and when did you move to Japan? | ||
| What are you doing there? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Yeah, so I grew up in Tennessee. | ||
| I was there for 18 years of my life until I moved to Philadelphia for college, and I've been in Japan for the past six months now for study abroad. | ||
| I'll be here a bit longer, and let's see. | ||
| In Japan, they know what the Tennessee Waltz is, and that's about it. | ||
| I don't even know what that song is. | ||
| I figured out about it when I was here. | ||
| Yeah, it's an oldie, I think. | ||
| It's the extent of their knowledge of the states. | ||
| Yeah, so what's that like? | ||
| So six months in Japan, have you been having major culture shock? | ||
| What do you like? | ||
| What don't you like? | ||
| How's it going? | ||
| It has been pretty good so far. | ||
| The culture shock isn't as bad as I thought it would be. | ||
| that's pretty globalized world at this point. So you know what Japan is like, just difference-wise. | ||
| So it's been pretty good so far. The biggest difference has been the academic system. | ||
| So it's pretty fundamentally different from American conceptions of education. | ||
| Yeah, and that's one of the things that you had written in that you wanted to talk about, a little bit about academia and the difference between America and Japan. | ||
| So let's do that. | ||
| All right, so it's just essentially been really refreshing being here, because a lot of the more annoying aspects of American academia are not present here. | ||
| At the moment, they might be. | ||
| Later on in the future. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So like what, for example? | ||
| So, like, the big issue with academia right now, as you can imagine, is the ideological, like, constraints placed on lots of students there. | ||
| But college in Japan is not a very ideological place. | ||
| Like, the classroom is a sacred environment. | ||
| You do not talk about ideological things there. | ||
| So it's pretty much not an issue, which has been really good for me because that's one of the reasons I wanted to come to Japan. | ||
| To avoid that, because my college is very stereotypical, very liberal, and very free speech censorship-y in lots of ways. | ||
| Sure, and a lot of the people that I've been talking to today are mentioning things like that, and we know about all this stuff. | ||
| So in Japan, is there a drawback to having sort of no ideology in the classroom? | ||
| Like, is there any kind of drawback to just sort of straight information? | ||
| There's a bit of a drawback. | ||
| Japan's academic structure has its own issues that I could complain about all day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We only have eight minutes! | |
| I know, but compared to the issues with America right now, I could deal with them way more because that's essentially just me saying, why do I have to respect the teacher all the time? | ||
| I'm American. | ||
| I don't respect people. | ||
| So that's really the main issue. | ||
| But like information being presented here just so straightforwardly really does seem to help like Nip the ideological issues in the bud there, because that's not something teachers are supposed to be doing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So how's it for you? | ||
| You said you've been there for six months. | ||
| Being an outsider in a pretty homogeneous society, have you had any challenges on that front? | ||
| I actually have not. | ||
| It's pretty interesting. | ||
| People stare at you, but people stare at anyone who isn't Japanese here. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 99.7% of the people here are Japanese. | ||
| And like the points, three people who are left are mostly Korean and Chinese. | ||
| But you're an oddity no matter what you look like, if you're from the West. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you speak Japanese? | ||
| I speak Japanese, air quote, air quote. | ||
| Don't worry, I'm not going to test you, don't worry. | ||
| I started studying in college, so I am in no way fluent. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I speak enough to surprise people greatly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So one of the things that you had written in that you wanted to talk about that I thought was really interesting was about content creators being unfairly criticized. | ||
| And I think what you were referring to is generally just sort of these YouTubers that put their thoughts out there that end up getting trolled endlessly. | ||
| That's the sense that I got. | ||
| Am I right on that? | ||
| And if not, please correct me. | ||
| Yeah, there's that. | ||
| And then there's the broader sense of content creation, where it's like, there are people who are writing books or making comics, or movies that are being endlessly criticized with a very ideological bent at this point, to the point where not meeting certain very leftist standards is considered a drawback and a fault, when it probably shouldn't inherently be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So give me an example of that. | |
| So it's like, It's not like I am mad when women show up in comic books, but I don't think it's all that fair when you get comic books pulled because they don't have women in them. | ||
| Like, that's not a drawback. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There was the controversy many years ago now, because I'm old, with the Joker comic book cover, where the Joker was abusing Batgirl because the Joker is the Joker. | ||
| But they had that comic book cover pulled and the artist essentially blacklisted because they said it encouraged violence against women. | ||
| And that should not have happened. | ||
| The Joker was a bad guy. | ||
| That's what bad guys do. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of people seem to really mix up what characters do versus what the author does. | ||
| So it's the George Lucas argument where it's just like, he put Leia in a skimpy outfit. | ||
| It's like Jabba the Hutt put Leia in a skimpy outfit. | ||
| Because Jabba the Hutt is a bad guy, and you're supposed to think he's creepy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, do you find that fascinating? | |
| Yeah, I mean, I find that totally fascinating that people seem incapable, a certain amount of people are incapable of separating the artist, the creator, George Lucas, who draws, you know, comes up with the idea of Jabba. | ||
| And then he had a slave and he put her in a sexy outfit. | ||
| And people think that's him imposing his view on what he thinks women should be. | ||
| It's kind of crazy. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous. | ||
| I don't want to defend George Lucas, but he's done very objectionable things on other things. | ||
| Jar Jar? | ||
| Is that a Jar Jar knock? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a knock against many, many aspects of the Star Wars universe. | |
| Wow. | ||
| But not the Slave Lair thing. | ||
| It is fine. | ||
| Yeah, you know that Star Wars is like everything to me. | ||
| I mean, I don't know what to say right now. |
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