Oct. 5, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
03:50
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| On the Rubin Report each week, we try not to get too caught up in the minutia | ||
| of what's going on each day in the news. | ||
| While paying attention to current events is obviously important, there's so much happening all of the time, and staying on top of every single news story can be overwhelming and exhausting. | ||
| The really important but less sexy issues, like infrastructure and education, often get overlooked or left behind. | ||
| Instead, I try to focus our conversations on the philosophical underpinnings that lead my guests to their conclusions rather than discussing every specific occurrence that happened that very day. | ||
| Real conversations and clear thinking are a long game, and it's often more important to understand why people think a certain way than how they think about a particular issue. | ||
| Unfortunately, this technique is totally lost on almost everyone these days, which is why instead we bounce from one daily outrage to the next. | ||
| In an election year, particularly this election year, this concept of bouncing from one outrage to the next has reached a whole new level of insanity. | ||
| Before you even have a minute to process what the candidates actually said, media on both sides is telling you how outraged you should be and which hashtag you should use to voice your outrage with. | ||
| Every quote, statement and comment is endlessly clipped and analyzed to the point that you can barely figure out what was originally said. | ||
| Candidates subtweet each other to see who can come up with the best insult and go on late night talk shows to see who can get the most fake laughs. | ||
| The side show has become the main show and we've all got a front row seat. | ||
| Recently I said I was going to support libertarian candidate Gary Johnson to see if we could help get him to 15% in the national polls, which would have qualified him for the presidential debates. | ||
| Although I explained that Gary isn't even a great candidate, nor a particularly good libertarian, at the very least we needed more voices to be heard on the debate stage than what the Democrats and Republicans have managed to throw at us. | ||
| My hope was that if we could just get someone else to join Trump and Hillary for even one | ||
| debate that we could spark some new ideas in people which might make our political discourse | ||
| a little saner. | ||
| Unfortunately Gary didn't make it into the debate and much of the blame is on Gary himself. | ||
| In addition to a generally uninspiring campaign in a year when a huge percentage of Americans | ||
| would have seriously given a third party a real look, Gary has had a series of gaffes | ||
| making me even question my initial support for him. | ||
| Just google Gary Johnson Aleppo or Gary Johnson Tongue or Gary Johnson Illegal Immigration. | ||
| While we failed to get another candidate into the debates this time around, it's my hope that no matter who wins this election, by 2020 we'll finally get ourselves out of this stifling two party gridlock. | ||
| It will be incredibly hard work to make this a reality, but it starts by starving both parties of what they crave most, which of course is money. | ||
| Until we get around to putting them on their cash diet, the least we can do is listen to new and interesting voices who are trying to cut through the political clutter. | ||
| My guest this week is futurist and journalist Zoltan Istvan, who is running for the president on the newly formed Transhumanist Party. | ||
| The goal of the party, which Zoltan himself created, is to put science, health, and technology at the forefront of American politics. | ||
| While I somehow doubt that 2016 is going to be Zoltan's year, I think the issues that he's talking about, like artificial intelligence, designer babies, and chip implants, are things that will be shaping the future of our society, regardless of who's in office. | ||
| Whether it's President Clinton or President Trump, technology is coming at us faster than ever, and we should be thinking about the moral and ethical consequences of a world changing at light speed. |
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