Feb. 24, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| They say history repeats itself. | ||
| I'm a big believer in this theory, which is why I try to spend more time on this show talking about big ideas and political philosophies rather than day to day political rumblings. | ||
| Most of our political debates and media coverage has devolved into catchy soundbites and zingers, usually staged around some sort of publicity stunt instead of true substantive debate. | ||
| Even protesting these days seems to be more about screaming and hashtagging than making a coherent argument. | ||
| Just think back to the election itself. | ||
| Did the candidates and the media spend more time on the issues or more time on the circus? | ||
| I think the answer is pretty obvious. | ||
| Understanding political philosophies helps to guide us through the endless noise that comes out of our political machine. | ||
| This is why I've tried to talk about issues like gay marriage in a context which shows you can be liberal and for gay marriage because you want gay people to be treated equally under the law, or you can be libertarian and for gay marriage because you don't want the government involved in a contract between two consenting adults. | ||
| If you understand the philosophic underpinnings of liberalism and libertarianism in this case, It can bring you to the exact same conclusion. | ||
| Without understanding political philosophy, your thoughts on any day to day issue will be guided more by your feelings than by facts. | ||
| We see plenty of feelings over facts in our public discourse these days, and it's partly why we're so divided as a nation. | ||
| By the way, that isn't to say that feelings don't matter at all, because we are humans and of course they do, but the way we're governed has to be based on what is empirically true, not just what makes us feel good. | ||
| Beyond just knowing political philosophies, knowing history is an incredibly important part of having a well rounded understanding of how the world works. | ||
| Think of how many people you talk to who claim to know everything about what tax system is right or what foreign policy is best. | ||
| Next time ask them something like, so tell me the reasons that the flat tax is wrong, or remind me of the history of the Middle East during the Ottoman Empire. | ||
| Everyone on television seems to have the need to pretend they know everything about everything. | ||
| These are the very people you have to watch out for the most. | ||
| If history does repeat itself, I'm not exactly sure what it's repeating right now, and no, I don't think we're repeating Nazi Germany even though it's very trendy to say that these days. | ||
| We truly are at a unique crossroads in American politics, which is why I can't directly compare it to any other time. | ||
| It's not just that America has two diametrically opposed political parties that are caught between the left and the right. | ||
| Now with Donald Trump in the White House, we have a presidential wildcard who has turned political alignments on their head. | ||
| For example, Democrats are now suddenly arguing four states' rights because they don't like all the federal power Trump has with his series of executive orders. | ||
| This political chaos is also pushing massive amounts of people, sick of the extremes on both sides, into some sort of amorphous middle. | ||
| There doesn't seem to be a political leader for this new center, nor anyone in the mainstream talking about it yet, but mark my words, it's here. | ||
| The key to this new center's success will be who sees it first and who turns it into a political movement. | ||
| Whether that means a new party, or reforming one of the two existing major parties, or something else altogether, that remains to be seen. | ||
| On top of this new political alignment, we also have access to information like never before. | ||
| As I talk about all the time, we all walk around with the world in our pockets. | ||
| Right now you can connect with someone across the globe just as easily as with someone across the street. | ||
| The genius and power of the internet's ability to change our physical world can't be overstated. | ||
| This connectivity has started revolutions in the Middle East and shine light on the inner workings of our government via Wikileaks. | ||
| But at the same time, so much of the information is not just noise alone, but noise intended to deflect, confuse, and upset you, made by people who want to profit off you or outright control you. | ||
| Of course, if our mainstream media had done their job for the past 8 years, which is to be the guardian of truth in our society, then maybe the importance of the internet wouldn't be so vital to our functioning democracy in 2017. | ||
| Unfortunately, cable and network news dropped the ball at almost every corner and here we are. | ||
| They cozied to the power instead of keeping it in check, they colluded with the people they were supposed to keep watch over, and they partied with the very politicians they were supposed to be reporting on. | ||
| Now, suddenly the mainstream media is trying to get its mojo back by being hard on Trump, but I would argue that it's basically too late to do that. | ||
| Actually, it's kind of sad seeing them flail around knowing that less and less people are paying attention to them. | ||
| Even right now, there's talk that they are going to cancel the White House Correspondents Dinner because so many in the media dislike Trump. | ||
| Think how actually insane that is. | ||
| When they like the President, they can party with him and drink with him. | ||
| Now that they don't, Well, the jig is up. | ||
| Maybe we needed them to guard the guy they liked as much as the guy they don't like. | ||
| At the same time, we more and more cater the news to ourselves. | ||
| We don't listen to pundits we don't like, we impugn the motives of anyone we disagree with, and we block friends and family who dare have different opinions than us. | ||
| All of this is exactly why we need to know history and philosophy more now than ever. | ||
| We need to understand where we came from so we can know where we're going. | ||
| We need to know why the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution the way they did. | ||
| We need to understand why they yearned for freedom and liberty in a way that seems almost archaic to us now, but is possibly the most important lesson we could learn this year. | ||
| With all this in mind, I can't think of a better guest for this week as we continue our partnership with the fine folks over at Learn Liberty. | ||
| Dan Carlin is a radio and TV personality who hosts two incredibly successful podcasts, Common Sense and Hardcore History. | ||
| As a self-described political Martian, Dan uses thought experiments to try to make some sense of the modern world. | ||
| On his podcast Hardcore History he hosts long, well thought out presentations of historical events set to the backdrop of how we might view these events through a current day lens. | ||
| While he isn't technically a historian, he's proven himself to be incredibly adept at storytelling history in a way that offers some modern day answers to historical events. | ||
| If history repeats itself, then let's make the next repeat a little more enlightened | ||
| and perhaps a little less painful than the last time around. | ||
| We're continuing our partnership with Learn Liberty this week and joining me is a TV and | ||
| radio journalist, host of two hugely successful podcasts, Common Sense and Hardcore History, | ||
| and a self-described political Martian, Dan Carlin. | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you for having me on. | ||
| Political Martian. | ||
| I love this phrase. | ||
| I understand why you use this phrase. | ||
| But tell the people who don't know what a political Martian is. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| It came from not being able to have a good, easy description when people ask you your political views. | ||
| I'm really jealous of the people that can throw a word out there and everybody goes, okay, I get where you're from. | ||
| And I didn't have anything like that, and so I tried to figure out how you, in a very nice short way, describe that you're kind of off the map, and that was what I came up with, just this idea that, listen, I'm from Mars, as far as you're concerned, because no word. | ||
| I mean, I would have to sit there and go, well, I'm a little bit this, and then you start to give them sort of a political recipe, 30% this, 20%, and just political Martian ends up, people can nod their head and say, okay, I get it, you're off the grid somehow. | ||
| Yeah, and some of it is also that you're actively trying to figure out things, Still, right? | ||
| Like, we have this thing in America where everyone seems to believe or want everyone else to believe that they know everything. | ||
| You don't come from that position. | ||
| Well, it's a combination of that and believing that you have, and this is not, you know, I'm not insulting, I hope, people who have ideologies, but this idea that you could have a template that works all the time is something that just doesn't appeal to me because I think you have to be able to pivot based on circumstances, you have to be able to Yeah, what percentage of people do you think actually understand political ideologies in general? | ||
| That's what I was sort of talking about at the top of the show. | ||
| able to learn based on what you're actually seeing. | ||
| And I felt like there's not a whole lot of flexibility sometimes in these ideologies. | ||
| Yeah, what percentage of people do you think actually understand political ideologies in general? | ||
| That's what I was sort of talking about at the top of the show. | ||
| But it's like, I feel like people don't really understand what really | ||
| is the difference between a liberal and a pro. | ||
| and a progressive or a libertarian and a conservative or any of that stuff. | ||
| Like, do you think most people, even that talk about politics professionally, | ||
| actually understand sort of the philosophic underpinnings of this stuff? | ||
| Well, the easy answer to that is no. | ||
| But the second answer is partly because those words have all changed in terms of meaning. | ||
| I mean, take liberal as a perfect example. | ||
| I think I'm a liberal. | ||
| I think you're a liberal. | ||
| I think most people in this country who favor a democratic form of government based on freedom and rights and civic action and all that, we're all liberals in the grand scheme of things. | ||
| You have to kind of sit down with people and dive deeply into what they believe to try to figure out where they stand, but on the spectrum ...of governments all around the world throughout all time periods. | ||
| We're all liberals, right? | ||
| So we're just arguing over, you know, what percentage of this or that you want to put into the category. | ||
| But so by not knowing what the words really mean, or by conflating what they mean, or changing what they mean, I think the reason people use progressive is because liberal has been so changed in terms of its meaning. | ||
| I don't think any of these terms... What does conservative mean? | ||
| I mean, I'm fiscally conservative. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Right, it just doesn't mean anything anymore. | ||
| As I've done this show, at least in this incarnation for the last two years, I've realized I use these labels because sometimes you need them to frame conversations, and yet the more we use them, the more meaningless they become. | ||
| I guess I'm a political Martian. | ||
| Well, and the thing is that if you sit down and try to figure out when you're talking to people, where do you stand on this issue or where do you stand on that issue, I always feel like we're all a mix. | ||
| And that if you think you're really up and down the line, give me a little time and I'll figure out. | ||
| I always say we're all radical on something. | ||
| You know, I'll find some subject where, you know, if you said that you felt that way about it and gave no sort of clarifying remark, people would be like, whoa. | ||
| But I think that that describes all of us. | ||
| I think we feel like we have to, you know, I remember learning about totems in like Psychology 101, and I think that's what a lot of people do, where they sit there and say, part of my self-image is that I'm a conservative or that I'm a liberal. | ||
| And that locks you into things. | ||
| I mean, to be able to say that I base my opinion on my own views and that I don't have to fit into any particular box, I find that completely liberating. | ||
| I mean, people will say that you're inconsistent. | ||
| That's what they'll say. | ||
| Well, you're really not consistent. | ||
| You don't have a consistent philosophy. | ||
| I'm not sure why I have to have a consistent philosophy. | ||
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Right. | |
| Why should we treat a political philosophy like a religion? | ||
| That's actually the reverse of how we should treat it. | ||
| And yet they seem to want this purity test. | ||
| Yeah, what's that great line? | ||
| I mean, I love that line and I think it was, who was it who said it? | ||
| I think it may have been Kangs who said, you know, that somebody accused him of flip-flopping. | ||
| We would call it flip-flopping today. | ||
| And he said, when the facts change, I change my mind. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| And that's kind of how I feel. | ||
| I mean, I'm not going to get locked into... I know that I tend to be in my own life certain ways, but if I'm a fiscal conservative, for example, which I am, and you find out that for this particular cause you need to spend a lot of money, if I determine the cause is worth it, I'm going to spend a lot of money. | ||
| Does that mean I'm a flip-flopper? | ||
| So, I mean, in that sense, I guess I'm more of a pragmatist. | ||
| But even a pragmatist Can be utopian in ways. | ||
| You could say, OK, I want to base things on what's likely to work. | ||
| At the same time, I want to shoot for better than we have now. | ||
| Does that make you a pragmatic utopianist? | ||
| I mean, do those words... And once you start to mix those phrases, do they mean anything anymore? | ||
| I'm a liberal conservative. | ||
| I'm a conservative liberal. | ||
| I'm a pragmatic utopianist. | ||
| That's a lot of stuff. | ||
| I like premeditated spontaneity. | ||
| I mean, you know, at what point does it not make any sense anymore? | ||
| Yeah, how frustrating does some of that get for you as someone that tries to bring some of these ideas up, that you have to talk about things sort of in a way that sometimes can be a little confusing even for you? | ||
| It was frustrating in traditional media because they demanded that I do that, which is why I was always fighting with people. | ||
| In the world that we're in now, in new media, it's not frustrating at all. | ||
| I can be any way I want, which is why I'm a political Martian, and no one says anything. | ||
| They're fine with it, which is, to me, that's a sign of the changing, maybe, state of things, although it also might be a sign that I don't have a lot of liberal or conservative listeners. | ||
| It could be one or the other. | ||
| I have a lot of political Martians listening. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's probably a little bit of both, I suppose. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about your time in the more mainstream media. | ||
| And what led you to say, I'm gonna go off the range here and see if I can figure this out on my own, which you've obviously been very successful at. | ||
| I never wanted to do that. | ||
| I was working here in town at the ABC station, and I was working on the assignment desk, and I thought, you know, I was about 23, and I thought I had it made. | ||
| I thought this was really good. | ||
| And these reporters would come in, who were only a little bit older than I was, and said, what are you doing to get out of here? | ||
| And I said, nothing, I'm loving this, this is great. | ||
| They said, oh no, you'll die here. | ||
| You know, you'll be doing this forever. | ||
| And so to sort of assuage them, I sent out tapes to be a reporter, and no one was getting hired, so I didn't think there was any real danger, and then I got hired. | ||
| I became a television reporter, and then as life has it, you know, opportunities intervene, and then someone gave me a talk radio show job, and I was doing three hours a day, five days a week, And that's where I think things really started to grow and change because, you know, and I always feel bad for the people that are getting started today because I got to make all my egregious mistakes and have all that stuff go out into the ether and be gone. | ||
| If I started today, those would all be some YouTube video all put together and they'd see every gaffe and horrible thing I ever said or made. | ||
| Yeah, that shouldn't be understated, right? | ||
| What you're saying right there, because I think that's a huge thing. | ||
| And I mentioned that I had Dennis Prager on a few weeks ago and I said to him, You know, now that you're in the digital world, you come from traditional media and radio, but how conscious are you of being afraid of saying something that can just be selectively edited or clipped in a way that's going to make you seem like you said the reverse thing and then just be relentlessly attacked for that? | ||
| And the fact that you were able to have the breeding ground before it was fully on the, I guess, | ||
| the infinity grid of existing forever, it's pretty sweet. - I call it digital stone. | ||
| It's a digital stone. | ||
| As long as there is this thing, those things will be out there. | ||
| Now that I'm, now that I've got most, I hope, of the egregious mistakes out of the way, | ||
| I like that it's digital stone. | ||
| I mean, I like the idea that it's never going away. | ||
| But the kids coming up today who have to make all their mistakes and have it be forever available, I'm sympathetic. | ||
| I'm glad I didn't exist in that era. | ||
| I'm glad I was able to get all of my nonsense out of the way before it was forever. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, so in terms of my career, That's how you learn, and then also the political Martian thing works itself out that way too, because in talk radio when I was there, as I think it still is, it's really a conservative medium, and you know you would have a conservative guy, then you'd have me, and then you'd have another conservative guy, and I was the one who was continually, I mean I was at odds with the audience all the time. | ||
| And I was about 26, and the average age of talk radio was about 35 to 45. | ||
| And so, I mean, it was a baptism by fire that, looking back on it now, was really good for me. | ||
| At the time, it was really hard, but I mean, that's how life is for everybody. | ||
| I mean, you know, as you're working your career out, you have these ages where you're just pulling your hair out sometimes. | ||
| And now you look back on it and it's a wonderful learning experience. | ||
| At the time, not knowing the future, you know, especially for guys in your 20s, when you really are in a place where you want to, you know, your self-image is so wrapped up in how you, and gosh, it was such a hard time period. | ||
| And now I look back on it and think, though, if you don't go through that, you're not where you are now. | ||
| And so, you know, when you give your kids advice as a parent, there's going to be a lot of that I'm going to throw at them and hope it sticks. | ||
| Yeah, of course they're going to have that digital, what do you call it? | ||
| The digital stone? | ||
| The digital stone. | ||
| Their stuff's going to all be etched in digital stone. | ||
| Yeah, they also put their hand up and talk to the hand. | ||
| They don't want to hear anything Dad has to say anyway, so I'm not sure you can teach your kids a lot sometimes. | ||
| Yeah, I'm curious, so you were the sort of liberal or Martian around a lot of conservative radio. | ||
| What do you think it is about conservatives that it's only conservatives that listen to radio, basically? | ||
| I mean, we know that liberal channels, Air America and any of the progressive stuff, Yeah, I guess some of it exists here or there, but it pretty much always fails or nobody listens. | ||
| Is there something about conservatives and talk, do you think? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| And first of all, I always had a libertarian bent, which allowed me a place where there could be a meeting of the minds between the audience. | ||
| If you talk about freedom and liberty and the Constitution, which I do, There was a place where we could have some commonalities and then work around it. | ||
| In terms of liberal, it's because I believe in things like social programs and things like that. | ||
| So there were areas where we could have a little friendly competition, but there were meeting of the minds areas. | ||
| In terms of why? | ||
| You know, Rush Limbaugh, he always likes to say that there will be a wing of the talk radio history library, and he's right. | ||
| He will own that. | ||
| But by changing the landscape, you know, I can't speak for other mediums. | ||
| I can definitely talk about radio. | ||
| It's not extremely inventive. | ||
| They're not extremely chance takers. | ||
| And so when you see something works, and I think Limbaugh actually said this, he said, for years they told me to be like someone else and not to do this, and then the minute he makes it, Then they just want you to be like him. | ||
| I think that was partly my problem too. | ||
| When I would go in there and say, why do you want me to be like all these other people? | ||
| They would say, because that's what works. | ||
| Look at what's working everywhere. | ||
| So I think there's this attitude. | ||
| I guess what I'm saying is if a liberal talk show host made it big somewhere, Then you would see everybody saying, well, listen, this is working in Boston. | ||
| So I think there's a tendency to follow the leader in that business. | ||
| And I think he started off the trend. | ||
| After the Fairness Doctrine, if you go listen to talk radio before Limbaugh, it's a completely different animal. | ||
| I mean, I remember listening to it as a kid and it doesn't bear any resemblance to what we have today. | ||
| So once you see that working, that becomes the template. | ||
| And if you want to be big, you need to do it that way. | ||
| So that's why I had such a hard time for 12 years in the medium. | ||
| Because I wasn't like that. | ||
| Do you remember a guy by the name of Bob Grant? | ||
| Sure! | ||
| I remember being in the car with my mom when I was 12, 13, something like that. | ||
| My mom hated this guy, did not ever agree with him on anything. | ||
| His callers would call in, he would just scream at them, and then they'd hang up. | ||
| And it was just chaos. | ||
| And I remember thinking at the time, who could listen to this kind of chaos? | ||
| And yet he was one of the biggest guys around. | ||
| It goes back to a guy named Joe Pine, who was the original. | ||
| And there was a lot of imitators, but Joe Pine was, I wanna say, | ||
| you go back to like 1970, and Pine actually had a TV show too, | ||
| and it was the first one where you would just, 'cause before that it was like the Dick Cavett's | ||
| and everybody, you know, and the William F. Buckley's, and there were cigarettes and black and white | ||
| and high-minded, and Joe Pine would just say, you're a communist, and you yell at him. | ||
| And you know, what's funny is, is that when these are novelties, it's interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But when it becomes the norm, it... I mean, I was talking to somebody the other day, and we were talking about what I heard a right-wing talk show host say the other day, and I know he doesn't believe that, but he's got to differentiate himself from the competition. | ||
| So, for example, they were talking about a riot in Berkeley, and it was who could be the hardest on the rioters, and this guy said they ought to be taken out by the police, put in a back room, and euthanized like animals. | ||
| And you go, well, why would he say that? | ||
| Well, he says that because he's got to differentiate himself from the competition. | ||
| Who said the toughest thing? | ||
| I mean, this guy is going to go vacation at his house in the Hamptons after he said this. | ||
| Meanwhile, he's ginned up the anger level in the country so much more. | ||
| Now, there's not a lot of individual responsibility because no individual is responsible for all of that. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But collectively, It's creating a situation where there's no countervailing forces. | ||
| I mean, if you're ginning up the anger on this side, what's reducing the anger on that side? | ||
| What's helping us achieve some sort of stasis? | ||
| And the answer is nothing. | ||
| Yeah, well I think the answer might be, maybe if I could be so bold, it would be a little bit of people like us. | ||
| People that, like us, who are a little out of the system, right? | ||
| We're out of the mainstream system, but we're trying to find some answers. | ||
| So you get the flamethrowers saying crazy things like that. | ||
| I was, you know, talking about the protesters myself, but I'm certainly not for euthanizing them. | ||
| But that people like us who actually try to explore some of these ideas are maybe the counterbalance now. | ||
| So I guess some of that exists. | ||
| Do you think the same people are listening? | ||
| No, and that's an inherent problem, I guess. | ||
| But I think we're getting some of them, right? | ||
| We know this, because the cable news and mainstream news, their numbers keep going down, and digital stuff keeps rising. | ||
| So we must be shifting some of those people over, right? | ||
| I could suggest that maybe it's a genre playing itself out. | ||
| You know, that's the other problem. | ||
| So it's in the death throes. | ||
| Yeah, and I think what happens is naturally you take it more and more extreme, right? | ||
| Because when you're not, it's a little like a drug situation where you need more and more to get the same effect, but at a certain point you overdose and die. | ||
| Right? | ||
| No matter how strong you are. | ||
| And I think when you're talking about euthanizing protesters in the back room, there's not much further you can go. | ||
| And so maybe what happens at that point is the genre and the medium and the style plays out, and it's cyclical. | ||
| I mean, I think you could say that, again, like cutting off your heroin supply for a while and going back. | ||
| I mean, it may come back another round, but I'm not sure what these people can do | ||
| to continually gin up the level of anger so that those people are still getting something | ||
| out of the program. | ||
| I mean, I find this in my own political show where after a while you think, | ||
| at least I think, it's getting repetitive. | ||
| Now, what do you do? | ||
| I mean, if you've already said everything that you think, and I'm not willing to say stuff I don't believe, | ||
| I'm not willing to take it to the next level to keep the heroin hit affecting you the way you want it to, | ||
| at what point do you say, okay, I've said everything I can say. | ||
| You either take this or leave it, but I'm not gonna continue to hammer this point home. | ||
| I don't need to, I'll do something else. | ||
| I'm not sure everyone has that freedom, and I know that those people are being told by consultants | ||
| on these talk stations, more, heavier, heat, heat, heat. | ||
| So what do you do in those moments where you felt? | ||
| I've said this already, I've made this case, I've talked about this for a couple months, or maybe a couple years, and you want to shift. | ||
| How do you actually, do you tell your audience, alright guys, we're going? | ||
| I've always been very open with them about my struggles. | ||
| Partly is you try to find different ways to look at the point from different angles. | ||
| I mean, that's what I think, you know, media, with radio especially, they used to say that because people are getting in and out of their cars, for example, all the time, you can't go any deeper than 15 minutes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because otherwise, you know, you can't assume that people are following you through this whole broadcast. | ||
| I mean, they used to say, they have to know where you stand on every single issue within five minutes of turning on the radio. | ||
| That's a cartoon character. | ||
| So I said to them, that's not going to happen. | ||
| Now, on my program and on your program, you can show shades of gray and nuance, and especially because that's actually novel. | ||
| Now that might play out the same way that the right-wing stuff is playing out, but the novelty of being able to say everything is a little bit more complex than you make it out to be is great. | ||
| But I've done more than 300 Common Sense shows, and I start running. | ||
| I'm not creative enough to continually come out with new ways to do that, at least not to my satisfaction. | ||
| The audience says they still want to hear more of this stuff. | ||
| But I'm not sure I want to give it to them. | ||
| That to me seems too much like what I got away from. | ||
| So this is the true artist struggle. | ||
| I don't know if you think about it in those terms, but really this is the struggle of an artist to create something successful. | ||
| You're exactly right. | ||
| And then still feel enough inner power to continue and not pander and make something new and all that. | ||
| It shows you've really thought about it because it's exactly right and it's something that I didn't get initially. | ||
| I had to learn it by slowly but surely. | ||
| First of all, Getting used to the idea that anything you're doing is art is weird. | ||
| Because you can't call yourself an artist. | ||
| Artist is something that the other people have to say. | ||
| And first of all, I don't think that anything that we do politically is art. | ||
| And that's part of the problem because now the other podcast that I'm doing has evolved into something that is a little bit like art. | ||
| And it's so satisfying to be able to do something where you stand back and you look at it and you go, I'd like my grandchildren to hear that, because if I die before they meet me, they'll get a chance to know me through this. | ||
| Whereas, the more I listen to the political stuff, even my own stuff, I don't see any art in it. | ||
| And once you've done some painting, if you will, the idea of going and doing my pool cleaning job is just not as satisfying. | ||
| And at a certain point, I'm tired of it. | ||
| I think we live in a country that's a representative democracy, which requires us to be engaged. | ||
| But you, because of what you do, are hyper-engaged. | ||
| I'm hyper-engaged. | ||
| At a certain point, and this is why I didn't do 12 straight years of talk radio, because you burn out. | ||
| Especially in my case, and you and I talked about this earlier, I mean I'm a guy who feels like I rubbed the magic lamp and the genie came out and said you have a wish, what is it? | ||
| I said I want a political outsider because these politicians are killing us and he gave me Donald Trump and I thought... | ||
| Whoa, I really should have had a lawyer with me to decide exactly how I wanted to phrase that wish. | ||
| But what that does in my particular case is I'm not sure what to do anymore because I got what I asked for. | ||
| I've been doing this 24, 25 years if you have my radio thing. | ||
| I never thought I'd get a political outsider. | ||
| Now I have one and look what I got. | ||
| So what do I tell my audience now? | ||
| Where do I go from here? | ||
| For the few of us that publicly are in a similar space, I feel that very intimately, exactly what you're talking about. | ||
| I've spent a lot of time in the last year or two talking about what I think is wrong with the left because I'm a liberal and I want the left To be liberal again. | ||
| And now we have Trump, which brings this whole other set of problems. | ||
| And people say to me, well, you're not attacking him enough. | ||
| And it's like, well, we now have this X factor and everything is kind of upside down right now. | ||
| And I guess it's incumbent on people like us to pave the way for other people because they're waiting, right? | ||
| Well, I mean, let's get to Trump for a second. | ||
| Because to me, you had started out with talking about ideologies. | ||
| This is a different thing entirely. | ||
| First of all, I always say, if you could have had a crystal ball during the campaign, and you could have shown who the nominees for various official positions would have been, Trump doesn't get elected no matter who he runs against. | ||
| And I don't think he gets elected if he's running against even Joe Biden, who I consider to be, you know, kind of a zero. | ||
| I think Biden runs away with it. | ||
| I think he's a manifestation of our dissatisfaction with the political system, which we are, I mean, I don't know anybody who's satisfied. | ||
| And at the same time, it's not necessarily going to take us away from our problems, because our problems are too much power in the presidency. | ||
| Not enough attention paid to the Constitution, and the fact that we've gotten away from the various things that make America great, which is things like the separation of powers, checks and balances. | ||
| But the tendency of Americans is to blame things on, for example, the last administration or something. | ||
| This is 50 years of trends building on top of trends. | ||
| This is not a new thing. | ||
| And every president in my lifetime has taken us farther down the road to what presidential historian Schlesinger called the Imperial Presidency. | ||
| Well now it's the Hyper-Imperial Presidency. | ||
| We have a Congress that reminds you of the Roman Senate at the end where, you know, if you say what is the real skill level that you possess as a senator, it's fundraising. | ||
| Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard Law professor, had said that You know, he diagrammed how you work your way up through the political system now. | ||
| And the first thing they asked you when you want to be a small-town mayor somewhere, but have a little d or a little r by your name, is how good are you at fundraising? | ||
| So by the time you actually achieve a higher office, what was the number one qualification they were looking for the whole way? | ||
| That you were a good legislator? | ||
| None of those things. | ||
| I had a grandmother who was this amazing fundraiser. | ||
| She would raise funds for charity. | ||
| She would go to these events. | ||
| That's what these people are good at. | ||
| So it should surprise us very little when you say, OK, we need a check and balance here. | ||
| And they're not there. | ||
| They're only there. | ||
| Now, they'll be there if their contributors want them to be there or if they can make political hay. | ||
| But in terms, I mean, you watch the Republicans now in Congress. | ||
| If it wasn't so serious, it's fun to watch, because these people are some of the most astute hedgers you've ever seen in your life, but they don't know how to hedge now on this one. | ||
| They're sitting there at a fork in the road going, do I cast my lot with the Trump administration? | ||
| Is he going to be a big star and a hero in 10 years, in which case I turned the right turn at Albuquerque and it worked out, or is he going to be seen as a disaster and anyone who was aligned with him is, you know, a nightmare, so do I need to take... They don't know what And all they want to do is figure out the way where they're going to turn out the best so that I get reelected or whatever down the road. | ||
| I mean all of these people are so concerned about a job that they should only do temporarily anyway, that it's warped their entire ability to have anything connected to what we would call leadership today. | ||
| Yeah, you've hit on so many things that I talk about all the time on the show about separation of powers and an imperial presidency. | ||
| Because it's obvious, it should be obvious. | ||
| Right, and why we should be governed by the Constitution and not just by the whims of current events and things like that. | ||
| So the imperial presidency, I think, is a really interesting thing because I've been on the record for years that when George W. Bush was doing all the executive actions, I was against them. | ||
| When Obama was doing them, I was against them. | ||
| I'm against them now. | ||
| Now we have a guy who's obviously willing to govern fully by them. | ||
| Yeah, who's willing to govern by them, but it's like, it's not only his fault, it's not his fault for grabbing the power that has been ceded to him. | ||
| Somebody was going to. | ||
| Somebody was going to do it. | ||
| Somebody was going to. | ||
| So is that the best argument for limited government then? | ||
| That forget what your politics are on specific issues, that these people that want money and want re-elections and that are okay to be authoritarians, the only fight against them is to reign in the power they have over us. | ||
| Let's talk about that for a minute, because that's another one of those terms, just like we were talking about at the beginning, liberal and conservative, all these things that are hard to define a real meaning. | ||
| Who has a limited government in the world? | ||
| What country in the world has a limited government? | ||
| Who has that? | ||
| Because the truth is, we have a country here that has 300 million people, we have a budget that is enormous, we have needs that are incredible, How could you have a limited government? | ||
| Well, limited, I would argue limited meaning that it should just do less. | ||
| It should have a little less control over us, meaning that it should take less from us. | ||
| So lower taxes as a general thing. | ||
| We could probably scale back the military a little bit. | ||
| We could probably scale back some social services and they might be taken over a little more by private enterprise, that sort of thing. | ||
| I don't mean that we should dismantle the government and not, you know, have driver's licenses. | ||
| But the problem is that you end up, if you take away, if you go and you started to remove things, you would find out, I think, it's a belief, because we don't do this, so it's all theoretical, right? | ||
| But the belief is that if you took away this stuff, you would find out why it appeared in the first place. | ||
| Now, does that mean it's going to come back in a form that is bloated? | ||
| Because we all understand that the government has built-in budgetary increases every year, which is again, you would say, part of the problem. | ||
| This is where zero-balance budgeting and all that stuff comes into play. | ||
| The real wake-up call for Americans And it's funny because if I could do anything, if you wanted to say, I'm going to cut the defense budget by two-thirds and I'm going to give every American a travel budget where they can go around the world and begin to see how other countries work, because the biggest nightmare for Americans in terms of upsetting all your beliefs is to go to some of these other countries and be shocked that it works. | ||
| I mean, go to Scandinavia. | ||
| Now, Scandinavia would not work here, because the entire system is dependent upon you being Scandinavian. | ||
| Right, it's basically a homogeneous society. | ||
| Oh, well, and I had a Scandinavian girlfriend, and we were getting on the freeway here in Los Angeles, and as you know, getting on the freeway in Los Angeles is a struggle. | ||
| And she looked at me, and she said, this is what's wrong with America. | ||
| She goes, in Sweden, it would be, left hand would go, right hand would go, left hand would go, and I said, that's what's wrong with you people. | ||
| I said, that's why you can't compete like we can, because we fight for everything! | ||
| I mean, even getting on the freeway is a struggle. | ||
| But when you go there, what's shocking to an American is that they have a system that would not work here, but it works there. | ||
| And they don't tell you when you're growing up these things. | ||
| I mean, you have to actually see it. | ||
| Now, what that means is you come back here and you say, okay, government is not necessarily... we're kind of taught sometimes that government is necessarily inefficient and can't work. | ||
| And I always say that that's a defeatist attitude. | ||
| Back when the Clinton-Gore White House was brand new, they had a program that they called, had a great name, Great Markets, looked at reinventing government. | ||
| And the idea was that this is not necessarily the way government has to be, right? | ||
| Could we improve it? | ||
| Could we make it better? | ||
| What I'm always suggesting is we really haven't tried. | ||
| And remember, it's a big bureaucracy. | ||
| Even if you decide you want to go in and change it, it's hard to change. | ||
| I mean, I think what you're going to find out with Trump is he's going to find out pretty darn soon that the bureaucracy has a lot of ability to push back. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So when I talk limited government, for me it's about dismantling some of that bureaucracy so that potentially we could maybe get to some of that Clinton gore stuff. | ||
| For me, when I look at the system, The one thing that we could do that would affect the lives of average Americans the least in terms of cutting big government is change the foreign policy. | ||
| Because when you look at discretionary spending, and as we all know, many of the things like Medicare, that's not discretionary. | ||
| Social Security, that's not discretionary spending. | ||
| The military, though, is. | ||
| And remember that if you go actually look at a 1960 budget for the US military and a budget now, it's totally apples and oranges. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because of the way they deliberately hidden things. | ||
| So the 1960 budget, for example, the Veterans Affairs costs are all built into the defense budget. | ||
| Now it's a separate part of the budget. | ||
| So when you'll hear somebody say, well, we don't spend that much on defense now. | ||
| Well, deliberately apples and oranges, like so much of the budget. | ||
| Same thing with With unemployment numbers. | ||
| You can't compare the ones in the old days to now because we exclude people that haven't been looking for work. | ||
| So when you look at the amount of money we spend and you say, that's free money. | ||
| That's money you could allocate elsewhere. | ||
| So when you talk about cutting government, what would happen if you cut the defense budget in half? | ||
| I think we're still the largest military spending country in the world. | ||
| By the way, I should point out that we have a Department of Defense, and yet Americans have not fought on American soil. | ||
| My mother's 80 years old. | ||
| She was two the last time Americans fought on American soil. | ||
| What is that money buying us? | ||
| So when you talk about well-spent funds, Is there a lot of waste and fraud in Medicare? | ||
| Darn right there is. | ||
| But through the government pipeline, people are being helped on the other end. | ||
| Who's being helped by the defense budget? | ||
| When I bring this up, I'm called an isolationist, which is a term that goes back to the 1940s. | ||
| It has all sorts of baggage on purpose. | ||
| All I want is a government with a foreign policy like every other government in the world. | ||
| How can that, by definition, be isolationist? | ||
| How many bases outside of Russia does Russia have, which is probably the next most interventionist? | ||
| I think you can count them on one hand. | ||
| We have in excess of 125, maybe more. | ||
| It used to be 180. | ||
| And you pay for that as a taxpayer. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What do you get for that? | ||
| Right, well is this where Trump actually made headway with things? | ||
| Because he would say, well why do we have bases in Japan? | ||
| Shouldn't they be paying us? | ||
| Forgetting the moral center that we may not be sure about, but if you're just the average person, because he basically made the argument you're making, why isn't Japan paying us to protect them? | ||
| So he's making the sort of same argument that you're laying out there, right? | ||
| Maybe not as well thought out. | ||
| But it's a good point. | ||
| And the reason he made it, though, is the reason that every president you could think of makes the argument. | ||
| And that is that the United States public has been, and always is, except in the most extreme situations, of a mind that they don't want that. | ||
| And when you go look at how this started between 1945 and 1952 is when the country made a huge change in foreign policy and we've never looked back. | ||
| They knew, you could read the Truman administration and the things, they knew that the people didn't want this because it's natural. | ||
| They say, why am I spending money for this, that or the other thing? | ||
| That's why George W. Bush ran for a more humble foreign policy. | ||
| That's why President Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt both won elections before they took us into world wars on promises to keep you out of world wars. | ||
| There's no president that runs for the United States' top job and says, if you elect me, we're going to be in more foreign countries. | ||
| It doesn't happen because the electorate doesn't want that, and yet that's what we get. | ||
| So what does that say then? | ||
| Because if you think about it, when Obama ran the first time, one of the reasons he beat Hillary in the primary was because he was harder on getting out of Iraq immediately. | ||
| That was one of the reasons he was able to get through the primary to beat her. | ||
| Yet at the same time, I think he's the only president we've ever had that his entire eight years we were at war. | ||
| We've been in Afghanistan for this entire eight years. | ||
| We're still there. | ||
| We don't even know. | ||
| I mean, I don't think anyone has any clue why we're there anymore. | ||
| I think you need to define war because I was going to say I don't think we've not been at war. | ||
| Since 1947, probably. | ||
| Since the Truman Doctrine. | ||
| But it depends on what you mean. | ||
| I mean, is it war if you're funding war somewhere else? | ||
| Or is it only war if your people are actually fighting and dying? | ||
| Because we've been funding war. | ||
| And understand, there's a whole rationale. | ||
| It's called military Keynesianism. | ||
| And you can go back and read the documents at the time. | ||
| They're very open about it. | ||
| We had the Great Depression, and they tried all kinds of things to get us out of that. | ||
| We were still in it when the gin-up 1940 to the Second World War started. | ||
| And you go look at the production numbers and the economic numbers, and the graph is almost straight up, right? | ||
| So then in 1943, when it's clear that the war will be over in a couple of years, and it's like an arm-wrestling match and it's too far gone, they start thinking, okay, well what happens when we turn off the spigot? | ||
|
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Right? | |
| Because I had a great uncle who had a small little rubber plant in Orange County before the war. | ||
| When the war started, the government gave him a huge amount of money to buy up all the land. | ||
| You know, we need all of it, right? | ||
| And then after the war, they simply said, do whatever you want with it. | ||
| So he sold it and made a fortune just on selling the land. | ||
| That's the spigot, right? | ||
| That's the tech. | ||
| So there was this feeling that we could go right back to the Great Depression if you didn't keep the spigot on, right? | ||
| This unnatural amount of cash coming from taxpayers to military to build stuff that we might not even need, but it keeps jobs going. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| If I told you That we could get out of all these countries and the world would be fine. | ||
| You might say, that sounds great. | ||
| But if I said, yes, but we could also lose 250,000 jobs of people in the defense. | ||
| Then you have to say, right, is it? | ||
| But then one must ask, are these real jobs? | ||
| Or are these jobs where, you know, Dave Rubin's tax dollars is basically transferred to a guy who works in the defense? | ||
| I mean, right. | ||
| And is that really capitalism? | ||
| You know, we go after the socialist countries for being socialist. | ||
| How different is it? | ||
| Military Keynesianism is a kind of a socialism. | ||
| Right, we're just transferring it in a different way. | ||
| And then when we don't want the stuff, this is where you know it's a bit of a shell game. | ||
| Because if we were really concerned with defense, you would not give your best equipment to other people, right? | ||
| You would not say, this is our new M1 Abrams tank and we have it. | ||
| But then when you give it to other people, what does that mean? | ||
| That means they have the same stuff you do, which means you've got to go build better stuff. | ||
| So it becomes a make work program, if you will. | ||
| So how much of it is just that, that maybe this thing has grown so big, | ||
| talking about budgets and military and all that, that reigning it back in would almost be impossible. | ||
| Short of something completely radical, like I would probably be for, | ||
| I'd have to think it out a little bit further and sit down with some economists on it. | ||
| I would probably be for like a 20% cut across the entire board for the government just to just cut every department back 20% mostly because of the bloat and the bureaucracy because I think you could easily get 20% out of almost everything. | ||
| But do you think it's possible that we've maybe gotten too big that somehow turning it back could have repercussions that we can't even imagine? | ||
| Well first of all start with When you have a corrupt political system, take for example the question of tanks. | ||
| We just brought up tanks. | ||
| Well, there's a famous story that happened, I don't know, six months, a year ago, where it was a bit of a scandal because the government doesn't want any more tanks. | ||
| The military does not want any more tanks. | ||
| We have lots of them. | ||
| But they build tanks in important districts that have senators who then go and argue that, you know, you would decimate my local economy if we weren't building. | ||
| So they're building more tanks than the military says they want because we have to keep the work. | ||
| See, the military also smart. | ||
| They locate, and I love the U.S. | ||
| military, by the way. | ||
| I'm a military history guy. | ||
| But they locate the various important facilities in places where there are powerful politicians and what have you. | ||
| So you have a real reason. | ||
| I mean, if you talk about cutting defense, you're going to have, for example, congressmen Down in Southern California, who have marine bases that depend on that money, that feed families, that go into the local economies. | ||
| But again, do you have a defense department for that? | ||
| And if you got rid of that, does that mean you will suffer? | ||
| Or does that mean, you know, the true believers in capitalism would say, okay, then you will reallocate all that, right? | ||
| If you believe that, and you know, I'm more of a pragmatist, it's an ideology, but those funds will be relocated to more productive measures. | ||
| It'll be a form of creative destruction, if you will. | ||
| I think that's a more logical question. | ||
| If you talk about cutting the defense budget, for example, by 20%, the problem with that is you haven't cut the mission. | ||
| If your job is to be the global policeman of the world, we're not spending enough now. | ||
|
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So you have to match the funding... Well, I would argue that's a problem. | |
| Yes, you have to match the funding to the mission. | ||
| If our job is to defend the United States of America, we are wildly spending too much money. | ||
| So here's the thing that never gets debated. | ||
| It's like the dog that didn't bark in Sherlock Holmes. | ||
| The subject we never debate is allowing the American people a voice in the foreign policy. | ||
| Because if the American people are allowed to decide the foreign policy, we don't have this foreign policy. | ||
| And everybody knows it. | ||
| That's why we don't have a voice in that. | ||
| You want to say one thing about President Trump? | ||
| He's probably kept more campaign promises than any president I can think of, whether you want those promises or not. | ||
| But the one he's pivoting on is the foreign policy promise. | ||
| So the foreign policy promise, basically people thought he was going to be more of an isolationist, and now... Don't use that term. | ||
| That's a slur. | ||
| You're playing right into it. | ||
| Well, he didn't run on war, let's put it that way. | ||
| He said we're wasting a lot of money. | ||
| Foreign policy is more like other countries' foreign policy. | ||
| Right, which I guess in the American... We are hyper-interventionists. | ||
| Right, so in the American lens it comes out as if you're an isolationist, but just... | ||
| He didn't want to be the hyper-interventionist country anymore. | ||
| Yeah, but you suspect that he's actually shifting on that. | ||
| The powers... and I don't think he's doing it because he lied. | ||
| I think you get in there and you don't... the inertia that gets on you. | ||
| I mean, for example, the Russian thing is fun to watch. | ||
| I mean, because there's no reason for us to be at odds with Russia. | ||
|
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And they'll say, you know, Putin's this, Putin's that. | |
| Okay, what we're going to depend, these leaders now have to be, he's a bad guy. | ||
| I don't think he's a good guy. | ||
| But that doesn't mean you get into a nuclear war over some miscalculation. | ||
| I mean, listen, you have international competitors. | ||
| But that's life, and if your job is, as our military, we have a policy, and they update it all the time, a giant global policy on our plans for the next 10 years, 20 years, and our main goal, these policies say, is to have no international military competitors. | ||
| None. | ||
| If that's your foreign policy goals, you're leading to confrontation. | ||
| That ends in confrontation and it requires an enormous amount of spending because our old goal used to be to be able to fight two wars on opposite sides of the planet at the same time. | ||
| Who else has a policy like that? | ||
| I read Charles Krauthammer, who I dislike intensely, the other day and he said what makes America great is global leadership. | ||
| In other words, I guess we weren't great before 1945. | ||
| But when you think like that, it's not freedom, it's not liberty, it's not the Constitution, it's that we are the policemen of the world and we're the big dog and once we lose that we're no longer great? | ||
|
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How the heck did we ever survive up until the Second World War? | |
| All right, so this strikes me as a good segue to history. | ||
| Can you talk about history, Carlin? | ||
| Not with qualifications, but just as a fan. | ||
| So you're technically, you're not a historian. | ||
| I know you're upfront about that, but your hardcore history, you do an incredible job of basically storytelling history with a little present day context. | ||
| Do you see that as sort of the best way to get people to understand history? | ||
| It started off as a show for fans, which is what I am. | ||
| I have a history degree, but it's a simple BA, and we used to do these shows where I would just, I assumed that the audience understood the story, and so we would just talk about the weird things in the story. | ||
| I mean, I think the first show we ever did was 15 or 20 minutes, and of course the last one I just did was six hours. | ||
| And so you can see, I never would have done it if I'd known it was going to be six hours long or multi-part episodes. | ||
| But then people would write us, and it wasn't the audience I thought was going to pay attention. | ||
| They would say, I like those twists, or what we call them, the twilight zone musings. | ||
| And they said, I like those, but I don't know the background. | ||
| Can you give me more background? | ||
| And as you well know, I always say Seinfeld wasn't Seinfeld for the first 10 episodes. | ||
| Every show has to sort of evolve into what it's going to be. | ||
| And we started evolving towards giving a little bit more information, then a little bit more information. | ||
| Then we had to find out how a non-academically qualified person can transmit this story in a way where you could reasonably think you could trust it. | ||
| And I came up with something we call, in shop anyway, audio footnotes. | ||
| Which is, okay, Carlin says something, then I back it up with something that a historian says, and then we point out, which has turned out to be one of the most fun things of the program for listeners, that historians don't agree. | ||
| Because listeners always assumed, some of them anyway, That there was a history and that that's how it was. | ||
| To find out that history is a little bit more like, from 500 years from now, somebody having an MSNBC or a Fox News version of it, that turned on a lot of them. | ||
| And so the show evolved into what it is now, which part of what it does is show you how, we call it historiography in the history, but how history is put together and how it can change over time. | ||
| And so, what was the original question, Dan? | ||
| Well, I'll shift. | ||
| I think you basically got it there. | ||
| But I'll shift to this, which is how I started the top of the show, that I'm a firm believer that history repeats itself, which is why what I think you're doing is so relevant. | ||
| Is there something historical that we can look to for our politics right now and go, yeah, it was kind of like that? | ||
| Or is Trump really thrown in such a wild card here that there's nothing we can look and go, it's kind of close to that? | ||
| I think it was Mark Twain who said, history doesn't repeat itself but it sometimes rhymes. | ||
| It's not that history is so cyclical, it's that there's a constant element in it and it's us. | ||
| It's human beings. | ||
| What did Shakespeare say? | ||
| All the world's a stage and all the All the people merely players. | ||
| The tapestries change. | ||
| But if you could pull people out of the past, other than the fact that they're going to seem like different cultures because they were raised in completely different environments, they're still people, right? | ||
| If you measured them with sensory equipment, they're going to score the same. | ||
| And so that's why it seems similar. | ||
| So when you look back, for example, at the fall of the Roman Republic, you have two things that are similar. | ||
| One, human beings. | ||
| So with the same passions and desires and foibles and all that. | ||
| And then you have systems. | ||
| So the reason people always look at Rome, the Republican, everybody thinks Empire, but it's the Republic that's similar, is because when you have a government that is formed, because ours was deliberately modeled on some of those, so you have a similar system, and then you throw human beings into it, you're going to see things that are similar, because there are patterns that are going to reemerge. | ||
| Does that give you any predictive value? | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| History doesn't teach you how, for example, I love the right wing always tells you that | ||
| Hitler and Munich and appeasement taught you, you can't do that. | ||
| No, it doesn't. | ||
| It taught you what you can do with Hitler in that situation, at that time. | ||
| The variables mess that up. | ||
| So history doesn't teach you how to act, but it can tell you a lot about who we are. | ||
| So it's basically, it's just humans, really. | ||
| It's just humans within the time frame that they happen to live. | ||
| Humans and systems, right? | ||
| Human systems and culture. | ||
| Because you can take people, even now, from different cultures. | ||
| I mean, if you took people from a completely different culture, right here, go to Central Africa, and replace all the Americans tomorrow, and take them and put them in Central Africa, take all the Central Africans, put them in the United States, and say, here's your system, Donald Trump's your president, and you have a midterm election in two years. | ||
| They're gone. | ||
| Do you think there's going to be a few differences in the voting patterns? | ||
| So you have to factor culture systems and us into the equation. | ||
| But that's why history is important, because it really teaches you about us as a species. | ||
| Through cultures and through time. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's a beautiful way to phrase it. | ||
| That there are historical events you have to know about, but really what you're learning about is just sort of the nature of being human. | ||
| And that's argued about. | ||
| Is there a human nature? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But certainly, I mean, we have parameters within which most of us operate, and whether the culture expands those parameters over time, there's still, I mean, love is love, hate is hate, sex is sex. | ||
| I mean, there's certain things We see the similarities in primates when you look at them now. | ||
| So that's what connects you to an ancient Egyptian where almost nothing else would. | ||
| They're still people. | ||
| And when you read, for example, the epitaphs that the ancient Romans wrote on the equivalent of tombstones of their children who died, it touches your heart today the way you can relate. | ||
| The only reason you can relate is because if you took a Roman baby I'm pretty sure we're going to get back to that. | ||
| brought him now and raised him as one of us, he would be indistinguishable and vice versa. | ||
| You would like watching public executions for entertainment if I took you as a child | ||
| and raised you back in the middle ages. | ||
| Yeah, I'm pretty sure we're gonna get back to that. | ||
| You can say there's a version of it we do now. | ||
| (laughing) | ||
| We're not that far from it, you know, we really aren't. | ||
| And by the way, there are parts of the world, Saudi Arabia, they're beheading people on the streets and plenty of people watch and cheer and all that. | ||
| Are they that much different than us or is their system, and I guess that's what you would argue, the system around them, has just led them. | ||
|
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Culture. | |
| Systems lock you in, like a republic locks you into certain things. | ||
| For example, in Rome, the part that you look at and you just go, gosh, it looks so similar, is campaign contributions, and money, and favors with powerful people, and the ability of the powerful to influence. | ||
| The wonderful part of Roman Republic history for me is when you read about the attempts For example, the people who were known as the Gracchii, the Gracchi brothers are famous as the, you would call them the champions of the poor today, maybe like you would say the Bernie Sanders types or whatever. | ||
| But what I love about reading the Roman history, and Rome is great because you have so much history that you can actually look at and study, is that the people at the time Would say, that's not what they really believe. | ||
| They're just trying to pander. | ||
| It sounds so much like... They were being paid off by the Koch brothers. | ||
|
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That's right. | |
| And so when you read it, you just go, that's a systems thing, right? | ||
| Their system looks like our system. | ||
| And because of that, you throw human beings as they always are into that system. | ||
| The culture part is what makes it very different. | ||
| But I mean, you can see echoes of who we still are today. | ||
| Is it a predictive tool? | ||
| Not at all. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| But you do look at it and you go, gosh, we are interesting animals, and I see it over thousands of years of difference. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| I feel this question may come off a little too easy or a little too cliché, but are there a couple leaders throughout time that you look at as truly special in their time? | ||
| Everything that you've said making sense, like accepting that a lot of it's human nature and the time they live in and the system they live in and all that, but were there a couple that somehow, or even one, that just somehow within that moment did something truly special? | ||
| It's the age-old question, right? | ||
| How much do the leaders push things versus how much do the trends and forces of the time period create an opening that someone fills? | ||
| I mean, Trump is the perfect example of a trends and forces guy. | ||
| I mean, we have a situation here where a vacuum was created that someone was going to step into, and he walked into it. | ||
| He didn't push this, he didn't make this, he benefited from it, and he took advantage of it. | ||
| He's the beneficiary of the trends and forces that, as we said earlier, have been 40 or 50 years at least in the making. | ||
| Do you think he didn't push it at all? | ||
| I mean, some of the tactics that he used? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that's why he has to have the advisors he does to try to keep him in touch with the current trends as they are. | ||
| And not just the current trend society, but the current trends amongst the people who are his supporters, right? | ||
| He has to ask, you know, Bannon, how will this play amongst the people? | ||
| Because he doesn't know. | ||
| I truly believe if you look at Trump, we always thought Trump was either a centrist Democrat or a centrist Republican. | ||
| For him to have the most right-wing administration in anyone's memory is a bit of a shock. | ||
| But he was able to read the lay of the land and know that there was this crowd that had been created by the dynamics of the last 40 years and the anger over the situation that he could play to that. | ||
| Now he doesn't know intrinsically how to play to that because that's not him. | ||
| He has to ask. | ||
| How will this move react? So he's a trends and forces guy. | ||
| When you look at people that push the envelope, you look for people who are | ||
| wildly different. And that doesn't mean good necessarily. I mean I'm always | ||
| impressed with the geniuses. That doesn't mean that a guy like Julius Caesar | ||
| did not benefit from the trends and forces of his time, because he did. But | ||
| when you read about a guy like Caesar and you find out that he was able | ||
| to sit there in his litter going from place to place dictating three letters at | ||
| the same time... | ||
| I mean and you sit there and go well That's a really unusual human being so you put those human beings in certain situations And you say okay that situation turned out in a way that it never would have turned out had it not been for that person yeah Yeah. | ||
| So there's always an interplay between the trends and forces and the individuals who are exploiting them. | ||
| It's hard always to separate the line and say, okay, that happened because of that guy or that woman. | ||
| So when you say historical figures that I... | ||
| I gravitate toward the horrible people, and I don't know why. | ||
| Alexander the Great is the one I always look at, because to me, even with all the hyperbole, and there's a ton, he fascinates me. | ||
| He fascinates me because of even the different views that historians have over him. | ||
| Either he was the enlightened example of a philosopher king, or he was a total butcher who's been totally mythologized | ||
| later on. | ||
| And to be able to examine the many facets, I mean, imagine yourself in a situation where | ||
| 500 or 1,000 years from now, somebody on one hand is trying to explain you and they're | ||
| taking all of your qualities that are the best of you and portraying Dave Rubin as that | ||
| person. | ||
| I'm okay with that one. | ||
| Okay, but then the other person takes all of the qualities that are the worst of you | ||
| and creates a figure or a version of you and then multi-versions in between. | ||
| That's why I can't. | ||
| So when you say the most fascinating people, sometimes it's not what they did, but it's the many versions of them that you see, right? | ||
| The many holograms of Alexander the Great, and dressed up in all the different forms. | ||
| Evil, terrible guy. | ||
| So I'm moved by the figures that are larger than life. | ||
| And I enjoy watching how they've been mythologized, too, because I think we do that today. | ||
| I think liberals, for example, have mythologized Kennedy. | ||
| Conservatives have mythologized Reagan. | ||
| I've seen the Reagan thing in my lifetime, which I consider to be a wonderful teaching tool for me to then look and say, OK, I've watched how that happens. | ||
| So now you can see, OK, it's obviously happened with all these other people in history, too. | ||
| You think it's funny that with the Reagan thing it's like he was obviously the hero of the Republicans for the last, you know, 30 years and the standard bearer of what a Republican- And deliberately made into that. | ||
| And a conservative. | ||
| But then there was this thing in the last year where Democrats were saying a lot of nice things about him because they wanted to prove that Trump was not him. | ||
| So it was like they took the guy that they hated the most to try to trick, I guess, Republican base. | ||
| It's a perfect example of why it was done, right? | ||
| In other words, we create a metaphor, right? | ||
| We create an image, and listen, we're singling out Reagan, but this is why I like it. | ||
| It's the human thing to do. | ||
| We did it with Alexander too. | ||
| You take a person, and as soon as they're gone, you can easily compress them into a two-dimensional version of themselves. | ||
| And then you can use them as a symbol for what you want them to represent. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And if you could bring these people back now and show them in the 360 degrees of the human that they really are, it'd be amazing to compare them to the mythology that's been created about them. | ||
| And when you see it done to one person, it allows you then in your mind's eye to understand how the process works all throughout history, and not just with good people, but sometimes with evil people too. | ||
| I mean, if you go read Mein Kampf, The very first history show we did was asking whether or not Alexander the Great was a better or worse person than Hitler. | ||
| And the attitude in it was that if the stories are true, maybe Alexander the Great was killing all the people he killed because it made Alexander the Great a bigger historical figure. | ||
| Whereas when you read Mein Kampf, Hitler's a twisted human being, a product of his time, but he thinks he's doing something good. | ||
| If you think you're doing something good, does that make you a somewhat less evil, that's a good way to put it, than the guy who killed all these people because it made him a bigger figure? | ||
| That's a heretical thing to say, and a blasphemous thing to say, but the point is that do human beings literally go out to commit evil, or sometimes do they go out to commit good, or are these just byproducts, or mistakes, or accidents of history? | ||
| Right, and to be clear, you're not saying Hitler was good, you're saying- Never said Hitler was good! | ||
| I'm just going to clean that up for you. | ||
| You're saying that this twisted thing, that he himself believed it was good. | ||
| Here's what we need to do. | ||
| We need to get rid of all the Jews because it's going to make things better for everybody. | ||
| Does that make him better than the guy that gets rid of all the Jews because the more Jews I kill, the bigger a figure I am? | ||
| The whole question is weird. | ||
| But that's what history allows us to play with and ask ourselves, as we mythologize change and as many decades pass and we forget either the good points or the bad points of these figures, how do we create a figure that, if we could go back in time and see them as they really were, we wouldn't recognize the real figure anymore. | ||
| Kennedy's been mythologized. | ||
| I mean, this is a guy who served three years on office. | ||
| I mean, other than the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was crazy how good he performed in that. | ||
| If you went back and really elected the guy today, how many liberals would be happy with him? | ||
| Just like if you really brought Reagan back today and put him in front of conservatives, he might look like a guy that you wouldn't vote for because he wasn't conservative enough. | ||
| Right, that's the funny thing. | ||
| I think for Kennedy it would be, you'd get some classical liberals and conservatives voting for him, but the left would not be thrilled with JFK. | ||
| That's right, but the myth is different. | ||
| And the myth serves purposes. | ||
| You're able to put a wonderful bust, or you could put a picture of them at your convention as, look at the wonderful heroes the Democratic Party's had. | ||
| We've had Wilson, we've had Roosevelt, but would you want any of them today? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Maybe not. | ||
| So it's almost like we need Greek mythology in our system. | ||
| Or we need Marvel superheroes or something that represent these things because the people behind them are all flawed and screwed up as the rest of us. | ||
| Look at Martin Luther King! | ||
| I mean, this is the thing about Martin Luther King I always try to explain to people is that here you've created somebody that we can have a Martin Luther King Day, which is like the George Washington chopping the cherry tree down day, right? | ||
| People forget Martin Luther King. | ||
| You go look at the speeches that he was giving. | ||
| He was harsh on the American system. | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| Something like the focus evil of the modern world. | ||
| I forget the exact quote, but it's one of those things that gets really downplayed when we talk about the mythology. | ||
| They play up the sides that serve the purposes of us now, and play down the parts where the man was really revolutionary. | ||
| In fact, my favorite Martin Luther King speeches are the stuff we never talk about anymore, because they're really edgy. | ||
| But edgy doesn't serve the purpose of hero worship, and that's how we always are. | ||
| Yeah, do you think he evolved out of that stuff, or you saw it also as just a way to go mainstream, too? | ||
| No, because here's the thing. | ||
| We forget now. | ||
| Mainstream is what, when King is marching, for example, we forget that civil rights was not something that everybody was going, yes, we should have civil rights. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It wasn't that way. To simply be asking to get rid of separate but equal in the South is radical. | ||
| And they're turning fire hoses on you and setting dogs on you. | ||
| And a good 40 to 60 percent of the country is thinking those are bad people. | ||
| Today, if you showed the same thing today, the number of people that would say, | ||
| "Oh my God, that's horrible," would be in the 90 percentile. | ||
| But that's because we've moved on, and in part because of what those people went through. | ||
| In other words, Martin Luther King is more of a hero now because the times have changed, in part because of Martin Luther King, so that he's not seen as the radical he was. | ||
| Go read the things the FBI said about him. | ||
| In their minds, he's a communist. | ||
| I mean, go kill yourself, was what the FBI letters said to him. | ||
| Go kill yourself. | ||
| Can you even imagine today? | ||
| So what happens is when we have these figures that are radical and controversial at the time, if they were ahead of their times, then they end up looking like much more banal figures than they really were. | ||
| Martin Luther King was... Revolutionary is too strong, but edgy. | ||
| and in a good way, in my opinion, but now, of course, he looks edgy in a way | ||
| where we've all gone that route, right? | ||
| At the time, there were a lot of people that didn't like his stance, | ||
| and if you think King's edgy, look at Malcolm X. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| By any means necessary. | ||
| So as someone that talks about the Constitution and the separation of powers and all that stuff, | ||
| And you just mentioned separate but equal. | ||
| It's incredible to me, you know, in our Constitution where it says all men are created equal and yet these same people had slaves. | ||
| Eventually we freed the slaves and then we got to a place where we were allowed to have separate schools. | ||
| But if they were equal but separate, then that was okay. | ||
| But is that arc always bending towards justice? | ||
| Because I know it seems like right now everyone is more at each other's throats than ever before and angrier and more divided and all that stuff. | ||
| But I would argue, and I've had a lot of guests come on and argue this, that basically things have gotten a lot better, and we're always gonna have problems, for sure, and that doesn't mean we can always be better, but that really things have gotten a tremendous amount better, in large part because, if we were just governed by the Constitution, it's a pretty great thing. | ||
| I require clarification on the word better. | ||
| Better in that we are a more just society. | ||
| The United States specifically? | ||
| The United States specifically has consistently become a more just society every decade that has gone by, basically. | ||
| I'm sure we could probably find some setbacks. | ||
| Maybe you could think of a good one. | ||
| This is gonna be a person-to-person question. | ||
| The Dan Carlin answer, because mine's gonna be different than anybody else's maybe, is that... I want you to speak for everybody. | ||
| Now? | ||
| I thought the first 50 minutes you were talking for everybody. | ||
| Now you can just speak for Dan Carlin. | ||
| Here's the way I look at it. | ||
| I think our expectation levels are set at an early age. | ||
| And so the era I grew up in, the 1970s, I consider to be the high watermark For example, things like journalism. | ||
| And as a person who feels and came up in the journalistic profession, that's my background, I have a high-minded, idealistic and maybe even inaccurate historical view of how I see journalism. | ||
| Because if you look at journalism throughout most of the country's history, it starts off in revolutionary times as absolutely, you know, I mean, they're just yelling awful things to each other in different papers and they, you know, personal attacks and that's why you have libel and slander laws. | ||
| People don't realize that, by the way, that it used to be a lot of that. | ||
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It was terrible. | |
| People, they speak to each other so horribly now. | ||
| It was awful. | ||
| And then you go to the periods, you look at the 1930s and 40s, and it's all corporate stuff, right? | ||
| A lot of the stuff is just fed to you. | ||
| And then you get to the 1960s, and even then, it's still what we would call today almost propaganda. | ||
| Then you get to the 1970s. | ||
| The post-Watergate period is this little, teeny era Where it was the way I think it should always be. | ||
| And if I'm speaking for everybody, it's the way it should always be. | ||
| Where it was rough. | ||
| As a matter of fact, a listener once told me, and he sent me the speech, Catherine Graham, who was the editor of the Washington Post, had had to give a big speech after Watergate to all the bigwig people and say, don't worry, this isn't going to be a trend, we're not going to be this, you know, expose everybody all the time, because it was so unusual. | ||
| But I mean, if you go look at 60 Minutes, the way 60 Minutes used to be, they used to say the worst thing that could happen to you was to see Mike Wallace in 60 Minutes walking up your driveway, right? | ||
| Run! | ||
| We don't do that anymore. | ||
| And so for me, if we had the kind of media that we had in the 1970s, so much of what I disagree with today could not stand. | ||
| It's like the idea of sunlight being the antiseptic. | ||
| If we talked about it, and if we had the problem with media fragmentation, is that we're not all seeing the same things. | ||
| Now, is that good or bad? | ||
| It's something you weigh. | ||
| But in the water cooler discussions in the 1970s, we were at least all talking about the same things. | ||
| You might say the Washington Post lies like a dog, but we're still talking about the story that they wrote and debating it. | ||
| So when you say things are getting better, it depends on how you define it. | ||
| The iPhones are certainly better than they were in the 70s. | ||
| The 1970s. | ||
| But I guess we're talking about two different things. | ||
| I was purely talking about just the rights of the human beings, of the citizens of the United States. | ||
|
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Worse. | |
| And it depends on, if you ask folk from cultural minorities in this country, I think it's better. | ||
| Because they've been progressing at a different pace. | ||
| But if you say the rights of Americans in terms of, you know, the word liberty is a funny word. | ||
| Charles Austin Beard said decades ago that all you need to do to get I would say that the same thing would get you on a domestic terrorism list these days, and yet words like liberty used to be used in a real sense. | ||
| Now what does liberty mean? | ||
| Well, you could talk to 20 different people and get 20 different definitions. | ||
| But it doesn't mean what it used to be. | ||
| In the 70s we had this concept, and it might not jibe with the reality of the 1970s, but the attitude then was that they're always going to get better, right? | ||
| Your rights are going to get better. | ||
| You're going to have more rights. | ||
| All these things, and they're not. | ||
| The 1970s in terms of personal freedom and all these things, not only was it better, but the concept in the culture was different. | ||
| I would argue that if you grab a 20-year-old today And then talk about some of the things we used to think when I was growing up should be part of your rights and said, would you like to live in a country like that? | ||
| A decent number of them are gonna go, no! | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So I would even say that the concept of the kinds of country I would like to see might have been bred out of my my countrymen because of the changes in the culture. | ||
| Government is much more powerful, insular, secretive. | ||
| The secrecy in government is a disaster. | ||
| How do we go for that? | ||
| We go for it because, one, we don't have a press exposing it and talking about how outrageous | ||
| it is, but two, because the cultural norms put up with it. | ||
| We are much more scared than we were in the '70s, which is part of what ... That's another | ||
| reason the '70s were so great, because we had just exited an era where people were as | ||
| afraid of communism then as we are of terrorism today. | ||
| And in the 70s, we stopped being so... It was the beginning of the period where all of a sudden people would say, oh my god, you know, the commies are gonna come! | ||
| And you'd say, no they're not! | ||
| And yet this, the taking away of the fear was like dispelling something. | ||
| And after September 11th, and remember it started, we had World Trade Center bombings in 95, we had the Omnibus Antiterrorism Act in 96, I mean this has been a long, people forget those things, but 9-11 was a capsized point. | ||
| We are too afraid to have the kind of freedom and liberty that I grew up expecting, not only that we were going to have, but that every decade it would get better. | ||
| When you say getting better, that's how we felt in the 70s, and yet I would say to you, press freedom is worse, personal freedom is worse, our conception of what the government should do is worse, the secrecy is worse. | ||
| So, I mean, it depends on how you define it, obviously. | ||
| If you are an African American in this country, I think things are better today than they were in the 1970s. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's interesting. | ||
| depending on where you're looking and what your viewpoint is. | ||
| But my argument is, from the standards of the Constitution and all that, | ||
| the 1970s may have been the high watermark of American self-image of what these things should be. | ||
| So that's interesting. | ||
| So that it went from sort of real personal liberty, which we've come a long way. | ||
| The right to behave the way you want to, as long as you weren't hurting someone else. | ||
| Right, so that we've come a nice way. | ||
| What we've lost in the course of that is that we've allowed government to get bigger and spy on us, and at the same time watch the press kind of crumble around us. | ||
| But it's our doing! | ||
| I blame, I blame, and here's... Yeah, you gotta look in the mirror. | ||
| I used to call something the Pinocchio Effect. | ||
| Remember that Oliver Wendell Holmes had defined the limits of liberty on the court. | ||
| He said, the right to swing your fist ends where the other man's nose begins. | ||
| And I had asked the question, what if the other man's nose is continually growing? | ||
| Right? | ||
| In other words, if you say you can live the way you want until you harm somebody else, what if you decide things harm you now that didn't harm you before? | ||
| For example, If you play your music too loud, and I live next door to you and I can't sleep, you're directly impacting me. | ||
| That's a direct imposition on my freedom. | ||
| So you shouldn't be able to play your music that loud. | ||
| If, on the other hand, I smoke cigarettes, and my insurance company is going to have to pay for me if I get sick, which is going to raise your rates. | ||
| Did I really impact your rights? | ||
| Well, people will say, I can impact your rights because you're costing me money. | ||
| Okay, well that's the equivalent of the nose growing longer. | ||
| I call that wallet rights because it's different than a direct inhibition on your rights. | ||
| It's an indirect one. | ||
| Now, the problem with that is, if you're clever, you can connect point A to point B Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Once you say if it costs you money and the society is interconnected as ours, | ||
| then Oliver Wendell Holmes' whole proposition goes out the window because then everybody's actions | ||
| cost you something. | ||
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So you can't swing your fist at all. | |
| Right, you'd be out there That's right. | ||
| And so that's become the problem. | ||
| Once we decided that instead of a direct challenge to your right to live the way, an indirect challenge is an imposition and becomes cause for limiting you, then we've destroyed the entire idea that you have any personal liberty that you can call your own. | ||
| Because everything you do impacts at least my wallet somehow. | ||
| So that's interesting. | ||
| So let's just quickly, before we wrap up, go back to the example of the music. | ||
| Because I think it's a perfect example of where we can talk about government intrusion and personal rights and all that stuff. | ||
| So if my next door neighbor was banging on the piano all day long, even if they were playing great classical music, but it was bothering me, I would eventually go next door and say, you know, if you wouldn't mind... | ||
| Right, I'm saying this is my right in my own home to live here peaceably and not be... And the golden rule, you wouldn't like it if I did it to you. | ||
| Right, and I would use something like that but it would be me expressing my... | ||
| Thoughts, and then hopefully them hearing that. | ||
| Now, what a lot of people would say is, no, no, no, they would say, maybe you would try that, but if they don't, well, then what's the next step? | ||
| Do you go to your local congressman or councilman and say, we need some sort of noise law passed, and then all you're doing really is just expanding the government to then control what should be done as an interpersonal thing. | ||
| But sometimes you can't win all of those, what if the guy just says, well, go fuck yourself. | ||
| Sorry, buddy. | ||
| Then how do you balance liberty and not an intrusive government? | ||
| This gets back to my views on not educating the American populace on what their freedoms are and what they mean. | ||
| We don't do enough. | ||
| I mean, liberty is a bad word now. | ||
| And yet, look at your founding documents. | ||
| I like the word liberty. | ||
| But nobody even knows what it means anymore. | ||
| So for example, I always connected it to the Golden Rule. | ||
| The amount of freedom you're willing to give your fellow human being in this country is directly proportional to what you get. | ||
| So you're saying, God, that music really disturbs me, but you know what? | ||
| The guy enjoys it. | ||
| I'm going to cut him some slack until 8 p.m., and then I'm going to go to him and say, hey buddy, you know what? | ||
| After 8 p.m., can we cut it off? | ||
| And that's a fantasy way to live, because human beings aren't that way. | ||
| At the same time, there is a golden rule aspect to liberty, and if you get too restrictive of your fellow man, you're in effect restricting yourself. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Now, people don't understand this because we don't, you know, if you go look at the founding documents, there are eras, right? | ||
| And eras, certain things become big. | ||
| In this era, we talk about terrorism a lot, and we get granular with it, and we examine it. | ||
| In that era, liberty was big, and all these great writers, the John Lockes, and all these people we celebrate today, the Thomas Paines, they were examining that question from, and their version, by the way, what they meant when they said liberty is different than what even you and I are talking about today. | ||
| They had an 18th century political concept of what it meant. | ||
| But in the 70s, to get back to what I like to call the high-water mark of our concept of these things, this idea of your right to live your life the way you see fit was pretty darn strong. | ||
| And that became restricted due to this idea that people were going too far. | ||
| And in my view, I have a hard time with going too far in your rights to live your life, especially if you're not directly and directly, not wallet rights, not directly impinging on my freedom. | ||
| For example, We are less tolerant as a species. | ||
| I mean, look at how angry people get at smokers, for example. | ||
| I understand, especially if it impacts your health. | ||
| At the same time, there's no sense amongst—and I don't mean to single out anybody, because we all do this in our own ways—but to not understand that that impacts you. | ||
| They'll say, well, I don't smoke, so I don't care what I do to those people. | ||
| Yes, but it impacts the general idea about what you're allowed to do. | ||
| Yeah, they are doing something legal. | ||
| You may not like it. | ||
| We all do something that someone doesn't like, and the way we've become these ways is very selfish about our rights. | ||
| If I do it, it's important. | ||
| If I don't do it, and it costs me money, to hell with that. | ||
| There's a general concept, though, that we should teach in schools about how liberty is a give-and-take thing. | ||
| So then what do you do when they keep taking? | ||
| So going back to this guy. | ||
| So now it's eight o'clock. | ||
| I've expressed it kindly and nicely to him. | ||
| Eight o'clock rolls by, he's still slamming on the piano. | ||
| I do think that's the swing my nose fit. | ||
| That's when maybe you do have a noise ordinance. | ||
| And that's why I'm not one of those libertarians who would say you don't need government. | ||
| All these things can be handled between individuals. | ||
| No, you can't, because some people are jerks, among other things. | ||
| So that's what I was trying to get to. | ||
| The line between, I guess, in this case... Which is why I'm not a libertarian. | ||
| Libertarianism and classical liberalism. | ||
| And people can't take care of themselves. | ||
| I mean, when you get to libertarianism, that's my other problem, is that I don't have as much faith as they do that if you took away the supports, shall we say, that people necessarily can take care of themselves. | ||
| I can. | ||
| You can. | ||
| But not only cannot everyone take care of themselves, Great English. | ||
| But not only can not everyone take care of themselves, but there are people that do absolutely vital jobs in our society that are not profit-centered things. | ||
| And you look at the caretakers, and they make nothing. | ||
| And you look at them and you go, yeah, but what are you going to do when you need a caretaker? | ||
| Society doesn't allocate resources And never has, by the way. | ||
| This is, again, we're talking about fantasy here and theoreticals, but doesn't allocate resources that way. | ||
| So when I talk, I'm a libertarian when it comes to civil liberties. | ||
| When you talk about how you organize society, I always wonder about what I call the losers, and I don't mean that in a terrible way, but there are winners and there are losers. | ||
| And if you have too many losers in your society, they will destroy your society. | ||
| They will make you feel their pain. | ||
| I did a show once I called Well, I called one, What About the Losers? | ||
| I called the other one, The Revenge of the Gangrenous Finger. | ||
| And I said, listen, if our society is like a human body, and this finger gets diseased, you may say, to heck with this finger! | ||
| Who needs it? | ||
| It's a small finger! | ||
| Well, you can get away with that for a while, until it gets bad enough. | ||
| And then it will make you feel its pain. | ||
| There's a reason the French Revolution happened, right? | ||
| There's a balance and a stasis that every society needs, and there's a certain amount it can go before it gets out of balance. | ||
| If you say, I have an ideological template that says it's every man for himself, and enough people don't make it, they'll get rid of your ideology. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they'll destroy your society. | ||
| So would you basically say that classical liberalism is just sort of a more realistic version of libertarianism? | ||
| That's sort of where I've come around. | ||
| That I would consider myself a classical liberal, because I do, because I'm agreeing with you on this, that I see some use for the state. | ||
| There are some things that the state has to do. | ||
| And I want lower taxes, but I understand that you have to be taxed. | ||
| Everything is a balance. | ||
| And the problem is, is that because conditions change, you have to continually be rebalancing. | ||
| And the likelihood in a system like ours Where your views and my views are not what the politics... This is where the corruption comes in. | ||
| And I want to use the word corruption because when we talk about campaign finance reform or something like that, it sounds like an issue to be argued. | ||
| When you say corruption, there is no good argument for corruption. | ||
| And what I always say is every government is corrupt because you can't help it. | ||
| But if you go look at the U.S. | ||
| government actually puts out an index At the top countries are the least corrupt countries and at the bottom you get to these kleptocracies. | ||
| So everything's in between. | ||
| Even the most clean, well-run governments have some level of corruption. | ||
| And every government can function with a certain amount. | ||
| But there's a tipping point. | ||
| Somewhere on that scale you get to a number where it doesn't work anymore. | ||
| Where everyone has to be bribed. | ||
| The United States used to rank at a level much higher than we rank now. | ||
| At what point do you get to a place where it doesn't matter what Dave Rubin wants or Dan Carlin wants, you don't get what you want. | ||
| For example, all these politicians, you know where the real flaw in our system is, is a politician can promise anything they want. | ||
| There's nothing that holds them to it. | ||
| You have more protection in a handshake relationship with your gardener than you do with a person running for president because they get into office and change their minds. | ||
| The only reason you voted for them is what they told you they'd do. | ||
| What if they don't do it? | ||
| Well, you could say, well, I won't vote for them in four years. | ||
| And in four years, you'll get to a place where it's them against another idiot. | ||
| Some other nut. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And you hate them both. | ||
| But that's where the two parties kill us. | ||
| And this election is the best example you'll ever see. | ||
| How many people held their nose, regardless of who they voted for, and voted for someone they didn't want because they really couldn't stand the other guy even more, or the other gal even more? | ||
| Who said that they get to pick your choices? | ||
| And they say, well, you had a whole primary process, yes, but who got to be in the debates? | ||
| And who decided that? | ||
| A commission made up of half Democrats and half Republicans? | ||
| How is it that we let the Democrats and Republicans decide that the third party could only get in at 15% nationally? | ||
| We let the other two parties decide! | ||
| Okay, but once again, we get back down to the level. | ||
| We let them. | ||
| We let them. | ||
| And this is, you know, I said it, and people hate when I do this, about looking at the bright side of some of these things, but sometimes you don't get The right reforms in government until somebody crosses a line. | ||
| Was Watergate a good thing for the country or a bad thing? | ||
| Well, when President Gerald Ford forgave, pardoned Nixon, he said, our long national nightmare is over. | ||
| But we got reforms after that, that are the best reforms we've had in 40 years. | ||
| So was Watergate worth it? | ||
| So you say to yourself, okay, if you have to fall off the ledge for us to fix something in this system, should we fall off the ledge? | ||
| Okay, only if it gets fixed, right? | ||
| Not if there's a bottomless pit. | ||
| If you have a constitutional crisis, it's a great thing if afterwards you solve things. | ||
| It's a bad thing if you lose. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so that's that. | ||
| With Donald Trump, I can sit there and go, God, you know, when they talk about a constitutional crisis, just hearing the word constitution sounds like a reform, right? | ||
| We're talking about it. | ||
| But what if you lose? | ||
| So, in that sense, I'm torn between if you had elected Hillary Clinton, all those people that are upset with Donald Trump, you would have gotten more of the same, and I would suggest it's 50 to 60 years of slouching towards unconstitutionality. | ||
| I mean, to me, Donald Trump looks like chemotherapy. | ||
| He could kill us faster. | ||
| Or he could be something that prompts the equivalent of Democratic, and I don't mean Democratic Party, I mean Democratic antibodies. | ||
| He reminds us why authoritarianism is dangerous, and what could happen? | ||
| There's a lot of people who don't think about politics at all. | ||
| We have lives. | ||
| We have things in our own life that we have to focus on. | ||
| I mean, you want your country to run on autopilot, and you want it to run well on autopilot. | ||
| But in a system of representative democracy, if the people don't flex their muscles long enough, things get wiggy. | ||
| It's been 40 or 50 years since we've gone out there with our feet and told government, no, you can't do this. | ||
| And it takes, you know, they talk about a women's protest with millions of people, and that's great. | ||
| But that doesn't work. | ||
| It has to be protest. | ||
| Yeah, you have to maintain it. | ||
| And then they listen. | ||
| But you could lose. | ||
| And if we lose, then you have to have a plan B country. | ||
| Well, speaking of Plan B, I think we're gonna have to do this again to get to some of the Plan B stuff because I always say it's a good interview if I don't have to look down once. | ||
| Did I let you talk, Dave? | ||
| Did I give you any time at all? | ||
| Any space? | ||
| I cued you nicely and you took a bit. | ||
| This was really a pleasure. | ||
| I mean, this is what it's all about. | ||
| This is what I've tried to bring to my audience is let's really figure some of this stuff out. | ||
| Let's not pretend we know things that we don't know and let's figure out how we're supposed to be governed And how to look at the past so we can figure out the future. | ||
| So this is exactly what I like to do. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| I thank you for coming in. | ||
| You're gonna stick around and do a little rapid fire for our patron people. |
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