Dec. 21, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
06:27
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| With the Christmas season upon us, let's recap the year today, | ||
| both for the wider world as well as the great community that we've built here at the Rubin Report. | ||
| Note I did say Christmas season there, not holiday season or winter spectacular or whatever else the PC crowd wants us to say these days. | ||
| The fact is that the wide majority of people in the United States do celebrate Christmas, and whether you celebrate it or not, there is goodness to be had in the spirit of the season, like being kind to your fellow man. | ||
| When someone wishes you a Merry Christmas, that is not an affront to Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, or the cycle of the planets. | ||
| In many cases, probably most cases, wishing someone a Merry Christmas is more of just an acknowledgment of the holiday season rather than some sort of religious edict. | ||
| Of course, by the same token, if you're offended that someone wished you Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas, perhaps your offense meter is out of whack too. | ||
| The point is that it's the end of the year and 2016 has been particularly divisive, so let's try to find some joy in one another and wish good tidings even to people who weren't that good to us this past year. | ||
| On the world front, 2016 will go down as one of the craziest years ever. | ||
| Donald Trump becoming the next President of the United States was clearly the biggest story, but England choosing Brexit instead of staying in the European Union, as well as the continued humanitarian disaster in Syria, will all have major impacts as we move into 2017 and beyond. | ||
| More than anything else though, 2016 taught us that at least here in the West, the power is still with the people. | ||
| In both Trump's win and the Brexit vote, the vast majority of the media, the elites, the establishment and the money was on the other side. | ||
| Yet despite this, the people rose up and changed the course of the world with their votes. | ||
| You may not like the results of either of those two events, and you may not be happy with the electoral college or with the tactics of the Brexiteers, but you have to acknowledge that there is something amazing in the ability of people in a Western democracy to truly control their own destiny. | ||
| Most people on Earth would give anything to have this much control over the system that they live in. | ||
| In fact, the revolutions which swept throughout the Middle East over the past few years were done with the hopes that the people could one day have as much sway over their leaders as we have in the West right now. | ||
| While these revolutions haven't worked out as planned, the seeds of freedom have been planted, and even if Egypt, Libya, and obviously Syria aren't as free as we want them to be, the ideas of freedom have taken root. | ||
| Thanks to the internet, most of us now walk around with the world in our pocket. | ||
| We're connected in incredible ways, changing the world right in front of us. | ||
| No longer do we have to get our information from only a few sources. | ||
| Now any and all of us can be a source of information all over the globe. | ||
| Of course this low barrier to entry creates other problems, like who can we actually trust, but I would always veer on the side of having access to more information than less information. | ||
| Just look at how the mainstream media has reacted to the Trump win. | ||
| Did they offer us any real introspection and re-evaluate their tactics and methods? | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| Instead, they doubled down on identity politics and name calling. | ||
| And at the same time, the mainstream media told us that anything not sanctioned by them is fake news. | ||
| When the very people who invented fake news are warning you about fake news, well, you know the tide is beginning to turn. | ||
| The issues that I've tried to highlight over the past year, from the importance of free speech to having honest political discourse, really encompass everything which moved our world in 2016. | ||
| The stifling of free speech by using cries of racism and bigotry shut down honest conversation about relevant topics like Islamism and immigration. | ||
| There's a direct line from that stifling of hard but important conversations that led us to Brexit and Trump. | ||
| Couple the inability or unwillingness to have difficult conversations about important issues with the hyper-partisan fighting that we now have where people literally drop friends and family members over political disagreements and you have a toxic stew. | ||
| Having honest conversations without resorting to demagoguery will be Trump's biggest challenge and it's one that I hope he will succeed at. | ||
| We know that Trump is good at winning, but will he be gracious enough to understand that his win isn't just for himself and his supporters, but also for the people who voted against him, even if they're still shouting about it right this very second? | ||
| I really believe that if Trump focuses on the economy and infrastructure, if he doesn't get us involved in unnecessary military conflicts, and if he unleashes the tech sector, that we could have another American Renaissance. | ||
| These are huge ifs amongst many other ifs, but right now if you root for Trump to fail, then you root for our country to fail. | ||
| More important than anything else, if we had been able to have more honest and enlightened conversations in 2016, then perhaps the world would feel a little more sensible than it does right now. | ||
| You know, it's funny, we don't like when people discriminate on the basis of religion, which is simply a set of ideas, but we have no problem when people discriminate based on political affiliation, which also is just a set of ideas. | ||
| Tolerance of different opinions will be our biggest national challenge in 2017. | ||
| Accepting that not everyone agrees with us all the time, and not only is that okay, but it's actually preferable, will be something that we all have to put into action in this coming year. | ||
| We had our share of groupthink in 2016 because everyone seemed to go into their little bubbles. | ||
| Hopefully 2017 is where we burst them and see what happens. | ||
| Joining me this week is Tim Ferriss. | ||
| Tim is no stranger to talking to people from every walk of life and from every corner of the globe. | ||
| His podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, has over 100 million downloads and he's chatted with people from Sam Harris and Arnold Schwarzenegger. | ||
| To Tim Robbins and Kevin Costner. | ||
| He's been described as the Oprah of podcasting and his new book, Tools of Titans, is a compilation of some of the best habits he's learned from his various guests. | ||
| It seems fitting to veer into the end of 2016 as an interviewer interviewing an interviewer. |
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