March 17, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:31:54
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unidentified
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... | |
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, people. | ||
| We're live on the YouTube and the Facebook. | ||
| We're doing something a little different today. | ||
| I'm not even wearing a jacket, because we're going casual Rubin Report today. | ||
| We've never done anything like this before. | ||
| This is gonna be our first ever live episode of the Rubin Report. | ||
| I've done live direct-to-camera stuff, played some video games, all that fun stuff. | ||
| This is our first ever live interview. | ||
| And for those of you who haven't been playing along at home, Colin Moriarty, who I had on, Last Monday, during YouTube Week, he was our first interview on YouTube Week. | ||
| We had a great chat. | ||
| I thought we were mostly going to talk about video games. | ||
| We ended up doing some serious political lifting. | ||
| And I said after, I tweeted it out, I think that same day, I thought, this guy is going to be a political star. | ||
| I really believe that. | ||
| And a couple days later, Well, he tweeted something. | ||
| And this is 2017. | ||
| I don't know if you guys know this, but when you tweet, you will automatically be destroyed. | ||
| That's pretty much how it works these days. | ||
| He tweeted a little something and all hell has broken loose. | ||
| So we're going to talk it all out, because a lot of strange things happened, and they're so related. | ||
| to the themes that I talk about here every week related to free speech, related to the chilling factor of using words like racist and bigot and all of this stuff and how it stifles conversation, related to how the media, mainstream and online media, is failing us miserably in so many ways. | ||
| So with all that said, Colin Moriarty, welcome back! | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| To the Rubin Report. | ||
| It's good to be here. | ||
| I feel like I'm turning into your Andy Richter or something like that. | ||
| Here I am again. | ||
| I might be your Andy Richter by the time we're done with this thing. | ||
| Oh, I doubt it. | ||
| I doubt that. | ||
| We have so much to talk about. | ||
| So first off, we're doing this live. | ||
| You came over for dinner last night. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Got here with Aaron, your girlfriend, about six o'clock. | ||
| We were up till literally till four a.m. | ||
| drinking whiskey and talking it out. | ||
| I got about four hours sleep next. | ||
| We're dragging a little bit today. | ||
| But I think we're going to be OK. | ||
| But I mention that because we talked literally all night. | ||
| There is so much going on here and everything that happened with you. | ||
| So first, why don't we show the tweet? | ||
| OK. | ||
| And then we'll go from there. | ||
| So let's throw the tweet up so that everybody can take a look at the tweet. | ||
| OK. | ||
| So that's what you did. | ||
| I'm gonna let you read it yourself. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let's do it in your own voice. | ||
| Well, I already know what it says. | ||
| It says, ah, peace and quiet, and then hashtag a day without a woman. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Now you tweeted this on International Women's Day. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Now, correct me if I'm wrong, that was a... | ||
| It was a joke that only would have worked that day, too, so everyone was like, well, how could you say this today? | ||
| I'm like, it doesn't make any sense otherwise. | ||
| Yeah, but I saw the hashtag trending and I thought it would be funny and I was laying in bed with my girlfriend and she brings it up because she's like, I had no idea when you showed me this tweet and we were laughing about it that it would blow up into this big thing because I remember just being like, don't you think this is funny? | ||
| Yeah, so you literally showed it to her. | ||
| She cleared the tweet with you before you sent it out. | ||
| And we were laying there, she was getting up, I think I had to go to work or something, and she was off, she works the night shift, and yeah, I was just like, isn't this a funny tweet? | ||
| And showed it to her, and she laughed, and I laughed, and I tweeted it out, and I didn't really even think twice about it. | ||
| I knew that it was gonna annoy some people, but my assumption was that, like with any other joke, and any other, you know, you think there's rational people out there, I thought wrong. | ||
| You just scroll through your feed, and you see that, and you're like, oh, or you're groan, or you laugh, and then you go about your day. | ||
| How quickly did you realize that this was gonna be It took a few hours actually. | ||
| I tweeted it out, I saw some reactions, people were kind of being more funny about it in the beginning, and then I went and took a shower and went to work. | ||
| And then it was around that time that I realized that it was becoming a bigger deal to people. | ||
| I told myself immediately that I'm not taking it down and I'm not apologizing for it and I'm not sorry. | ||
| If I apologize for it, then I'd just be lying to anyone anyway, so I'm not sorry. | ||
| And you still stand by that not sorry? | ||
| Nope, not even a little bit sorry about that tweet. | ||
| All right, so real quick, guys. | ||
| So right now, we've enabled Super Chat in the YouTube comments section. | ||
| So we really want to hear what you guys think. | ||
| So obviously, Colin's Twitter has been completely out of control, and message boards, and all that stuff. | ||
| And by my connection, mine has as well. | ||
| But you can comment in YouTube on Super Chat, and that'll bump it up for other people to see. | ||
| But for the last, we'll do about 45 minutes together, and then we'll do probably a half hour of just straight up Q&A from Super Chat, if you wanna get to us at the end, and I'll let you guys, that way you guys can share your thoughts and things like that. | ||
| Okay, so this happens now, people are talking shit. | ||
| They're going, oh, he hates women. | ||
| Yep, I hate him so much. | ||
| I hate women so much. | ||
| I have two sisters, and a mother, and a girlfriend, and nieces, and aunts, and female cousins. | ||
| Women are just terrible. | ||
| Well, you realize that's gonna be selectively edited now. | ||
| Yeah, of course, yeah. | ||
| Women are just terrible, and they'll put that on. | ||
| Dash Kalamoriarty. | ||
| Now, the funny thing to me, because there's a lot here, but when we did the interview, again, it was a week and a half ago or whatever, when we did the interview, You basically said, I think around halfway into the interview, one day you're going to tweet something and all hell's going to... because we were talking about the outrage machine. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you sort of saw this stupidity coming. | ||
| I'm omniscient, in a way. | ||
| Yeah, no, I did see it coming and... because we've seen it happen to other people. | ||
| We've seen other people destroyed over very menial things or really meaningless things because there's a lot of... | ||
| When things like this happen, there's a lot of mean-spiritedness and a lot of dogpiling. | ||
| And I have no problem if people are offended by the joke. | ||
| And by the way, I think the joke is so mild that I actually don't really believe anyone's offended by the joke. | ||
| Like legit offended? | ||
| Yeah, I literally do not believe that there's a single person that read that and was like, and aghast and lost sleep over it and cried in the shower and lost their minds. | ||
| They saw it and they saw an opportunity. | ||
| That's what they saw. | ||
| And they took it. | ||
| And that's kind of my stance and will always be my stance on it. | ||
| Okay, so let's talk about the part of this that is the part that I don't fully get. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Because I'm not in the video game world. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Despite my new PlayStation 4. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| You're very welcome. | ||
| So then the gaming community started writing about this thing. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I saw a site that I've never heard of before called Polygon, and they seem legit, they're verified on Twitter. | ||
| They wrote a piece saying that you had first been on doing right-wing shows, like the Rubin Report. | ||
| Yes, you're very right-wing. | ||
| Yeah, the guy also then claimed that you went on my show to discuss the tweet. | ||
| You were actually on my show before the tweet, so there were factually things wrong. | ||
| They changed the title several times, they changed the subtitle, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| But there was a bunch of this type of shit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, Colin Campbell, not exactly known for his great journalism, but yeah, there was a bunch of stuff like this. | ||
| And this was what I brought up with the opportunism. | ||
| And we talked about this a little bit when I was on the show last time about what I call, or I term like equivalent free speech. | ||
| The idea that like, we use Trump, I think, as an example. | ||
| Person X voted for Trump. | ||
| I voted for Trump. | ||
| Person Y doesn't like Trump. | ||
| Oh, I didn't vote for Trump. | ||
| I think that's a terrible thing, but that's not the case, right? | ||
| It escalates to this amazing level, this vitriolic level, very quickly, when people see someone wounded or that they can achieve an end or a goal that they've wanted to achieve for a long time. | ||
| Some people might shrug it off, but the fact of the matter is, as I was in mainstream games media, frankly dying games media, that I was the Only staunch conservative or libertarian voice there, and have long had people not like me, specifically because of specific views or certain views I've had. | ||
| And so if someone else tweeted this out, this would have been nothing. | ||
| It might have been, maybe some people would have, you know, scolded them a little bit in the corner, but it wouldn't have solicited this particular outrage. | ||
| I think that's as clear as day, and that's the most unfortunate part about it. | ||
| It is a total political retribution. | ||
| Yeah, so we were kind of discussing this privately, that what do you do in that case? | ||
| Because I've seen a lot of this, I see it now happening to me, and I've seen it happen with plenty of people like Sam Harris and many others, where you put yourself out there, then people change what your words are, accuse you of certain things, they do it in written form or in podcasts or whatever else, and then it suddenly is incumbent on you to defend yourself, and then all you end up doing is driving traffic to those things. | ||
| So that stupid polygon thing came out, again, a side I had never heard of before, Yeah. | ||
| some writer who has no traction that I can tell whatsoever and I don't even care about him. | ||
| But then there's a moment where I'm like, wait a minute, I have to correct this now. | ||
| And then you could spend all day doing that shit and then you're only strengthening them. | ||
| So there's a sort of personal morality of how do I want to go about living my life. | ||
| Yeah, it's unfortunate that that's the reality. | ||
| I mean, I looked at the comments in that story and I looked at the feedback that they were getting on Twitter and I saw that a lot of people were fighting that fight for me anyway because it was so obvious. | ||
| It was so transparent and it was such a bad story. | ||
| It was just ridiculous. | ||
| Thank you so much, by the way, for helping me in that fight because, you know, they obviously mischaracterize who you are as well because they don't care about facts. | ||
| And yeah, it is a Catch-22. | ||
| It is the ultimate Catch-22. | ||
| It is a quintessential Catch-22 because you can't just, at least maybe some people can, but I'm... | ||
| I have pride. | ||
| When I see things like this, this is hurtful when you see your character being mischaracterized and being dragged down into the muck for a very innocent joke from the cutting room floor of Married with Children or something you hear on CBS. | ||
| This is not an offensive joke. | ||
| You have got to try and just bend over backwards to be offended by something like this. | ||
| We had said on our shows one million more offensive things that were so far beyond the pale compared to this. | ||
| That was the biggest shock to me of all was I didn't expect that particular reaction to gain so much traction because I'm like certainly these people know that on our shows we are Super inappropriate. | ||
| That's part of who we are and our character. | ||
| So I assumed that people would know that about me. | ||
| And I understand that some context is lost on Twitter and this is going to reach people that it never would otherwise reach. | ||
| But that's not relevant to me because it's not like I was making this most heinous joke. | ||
| The joke is literally that women can be loud or shrill. | ||
| That's the joke. | ||
| It's a joke as old as time. | ||
| Every sitcom ever is about the overbearing woman and the idiot husband or boyfriend who just wants some peace and quiet. | ||
| Every sitcom for the last 40 years. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And the big mistake that people make, I think, out there, or this kind of perception about the joke is that, oh, you should be shaming people in a submission. | ||
| And as I said in the beginning, Dave, I'm not sorry. | ||
| I'm not apologetic. | ||
| You know who's stood behind me 100%? | ||
| My girlfriend, who I've known since we were 18 years old. | ||
| I'm 32. | ||
| My mother. | ||
| My sisters. | ||
| Both of them staunch, bleeding-heart liberals and feminists. | ||
| I mean, my sister Dana especially, like a staunch feminist. | ||
| My aunts. | ||
| Female cousins, female friends, people that actually know me, people that know my character. | ||
| If some person on Twitter is offended by that, but none of the people that actually matter to me and are relevant to me in my everyday life are, well, that's kind of the quandary that those people find themselves in, because they think that they can push people into a corner and bully them and punch them and knock them down and stab them in the back and do all these things as if I'm gonna apologize, and I'm not. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that's why this feels like something big to me, because It's happening not only to a new friend of mine, but all you're doing... | ||
| is sharing your thoughts. | ||
| And now your whole work situation has changed. | ||
| We'll get to that in just a second. | ||
| But when I talk about these words, bigot, racist, all of this stuff, and how dangerous they are, and how it can ruin somebody and all that stuff, well, here's some actual evidence of it. | ||
| Let's throw up the headline that the International Business Times, which is a legit organization, okay, this is a real place of journalism, or so I thought, look at the headline that they put up about your tweet. | ||
| Kind of funny Collins Moriarty resigns after targeting women in racist joke, insists it's his personal decision. | ||
| I think everyone can get what the key word there is, racist. | ||
| Now can we throw up the original tweet again? | ||
| Just to be absolutely crystal clear on what the tweet was and what happened on that. | ||
| Let's get that up for just a second. | ||
| Ah, peace and quiet. | ||
| You can see the racial overtones. | ||
| When you're so perpetually offended, you can't even keep your adjectives straight. | ||
| I mean, think about that. | ||
| So this is a legit organization. | ||
| Now they're labeling you as racist, and we know what this means now. | ||
| It gets caught in some Google algorithm, and people will Google you, and it's there. | ||
| It's just there. | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| The outrage that that particular thing generated from people who know me was over the top. | ||
| The legit outrage. | ||
| Like getting texts from people I've known forever. | ||
| This became a story in my circle from old high school friends and stuff, and I know that this is like the, oh, you have a black friend kind of thing, but I used to play basketball, and we used to cut class and play basketball and go out to eat and stuff with this black guy named Charles who I was really close with in high school. | ||
| And I saw his... I was just going through my messages that I was getting on Facebook, on the post that I posted, one of the posts. | ||
| There's like thousands of them. | ||
| But his caught my eye. | ||
| And we're friends on Facebook, so I think it just kind of brought it up to the top or whatever for me. | ||
| And he was outraged. | ||
| Like, he's like, I've known Colin since we were kids. | ||
| This isn't true. | ||
| And that was kind of the reaction I got from lots of different people as the character assassination began and the dogpiling began because people who actually know who I am Like, know the nature of my character, but it goes beyond that, Dave, because a joke like this shouldn't solicit me even having to say this, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And people just look for any reason to just kick you when you're down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so seeing something like that, that outraged me more than anything, because I was reading, you know, I went on Google, the news kind of feed, and was seeing who was writing about me, and it was a lot of small game outlets and stuff like that, and that's fine. | ||
| And then I got, I think, a respectable story from Kotaku. | ||
| Which is a big gaming website my actually my buddy Jason wrote it and I thought he was very respectful And it fair he didn't agree with the joke. | ||
| I talked to him both privately and publicly about that That's fine. | ||
| This has nothing to do with exactly at this point exactly no it doesn't and and So seeing like that you're right like I was outraged and I actually thanks to your help emailed their their executive editor and was the first time I ever really like The first time I actually was kidding around with your husband about it, when I emailed him about it later, where I was, I was like, it's the first time where I was like, I will get my lawyer involved in this. | ||
| This is so egregious what you guys are doing now, calling me a racist. | ||
| Now in LexisNexis forever, or in Google forever, no matter if you delete that, and they deleted it and did some half-assed apology after it was live for a day. | ||
| That's still going to exist forever. | ||
| Now Kyle Moriarty and racist are going to be associated, but what have I ever done? | ||
| That, that, that is such an egregious, that is the ultimate character assassination. | ||
| That is a word that you do not want to be associated with and I've never done anything to associate myself with that word. | ||
| And just to be crystal clear, again, your tweet had nothing to do with race. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So this isn't that you maybe said something racial that some outraged buffoon could be like, oh, this is racist. | ||
| Your tweet literally had nothing to do with race in any way whatsoever. | ||
| No, and that's what I was saying about keeping adjectives, you know, when you're so offended, when you're looking to just be offended, and that's what these group of people do, they just lurch from one thing to the next as this big zombie horde looking to destroy people over... | ||
| innocuous things and they try to tether people together. | ||
| And they try, you know, go to some of these message boards, you need some yarn and like a map on the bulletin board. | ||
| People have, you know, it's like Mel Gibson in conspiracy theory. | ||
| Some of these people are fucking crazy. | ||
| You know, and that's the one of the things I learned. | ||
| Like, and it just gets out of control. | ||
| This tweet turns into like all of these things, everything I've ever said, now they attack, | ||
| they'll attack anything, you know? | ||
| I have, it's so zany. | ||
| Like, Colin said, you know, I've often said I don't believe in diversity for diversity's sake. | ||
| What I always meant by that was that storytellers need to tell their story. | ||
| So there shouldn't be a quota in video games, for instance, on, although there's too many white men. | ||
| Are you uncharted, for instance? | ||
| Almost exclusively a white cast, not completely. | ||
| That was the story that they wanted to tell. | ||
| If they wanted to tell Uncharted with just Asian women, and that was what they felt served the story, then that's totally fine. | ||
| That's what I mean by that. | ||
| But, taken out of context, because they're looking for some way to nail me, they're like, come on, that means Colin's a racist. | ||
| Or Colin's a bigot or Colin's a sexist. | ||
| They ignore this entire body of work that I've put out over the years. | ||
| Videos on transgender rights. | ||
| My massive and popular rant on the Confederate flag. | ||
| My video on Ferguson and the rights of black people in the United States. | ||
| My very staunch defense of gay marriage. | ||
| My defense of pro-choice platforms. | ||
| And I'm more liberal than a lot of these people socially as well. | ||
| We were talking about it yesterday. | ||
| I'm for decriminalization of drugs. | ||
| I'm for the legalization of polygamy. | ||
| I'm for all these things. | ||
| I know I'm a far-right maniac, but you're more left than me on certain things. | ||
| I'm not even fully there on the full decriminalization. | ||
| That's the thing, and we can respectfully disagree. | ||
| You and I, as you said, I got here, you and your husband accommodated me so kindly, and my girlfriend, and we got here a little after six, after a little bit of an Uber odyssey, which was funny. | ||
| Like you said, we just talked nonstop. | ||
| about all these things, because there's so much to say about so little, based on the reaction that people had to something so minute, because it was an opportunity. | ||
| And there's so many reasons why that is. | ||
| Yeah, we didn't even get to play video games. | ||
| I know, it's such a shame. | ||
| But we did kill a bottle of Knott Creek, but we didn't get, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, we did well in the bourbon department, but I pointed at the system that you just got me, and I was like, we'll get to that later. | ||
| 10 hours later, we're still talking about the same thing because of the feed-in frenzy. | ||
| So, okay. | ||
| So I think people get that. | ||
| I think they get the idea of just they see a little blood in the water and just the way the gaming community turned on you. | ||
| But you did say something interesting to me was that a lot of people were privately backing you. | ||
| So publicly they wouldn't defend you. | ||
| Well, you know, well known people and journalists and all that. | ||
| They wouldn't touch it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| A couple of people did. | ||
| But that privately people have been defending you. | ||
| And this gets to the crux. | ||
| of what I think is wrong in society right now. | ||
| People are afraid to say what they think, because why put their, if you've now been labeled a racist for a joke about women, which wasn't even offensive. | ||
| It's straight out of Orwell. | ||
| Right, it really, it's right out of 1984, but then the risk for them is why bother putting my neck out, because they'll come for me next. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| And that's why you will have my absolute undying defense, because I see this happening with people, I've seen it starting to happen to me, and we need people to step up. | ||
| This cannot exist anymore. | ||
| Right, I've been using the word phalanx a lot, the idea that we can form a shield around, a meat shield even, around these ideas and die on these hills that are worth dying on. | ||
| The issue here with me is that these perpetually outraged, these professionally outraged oppression Olympics participants, will not get a fucking inch from me. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| They will not get an inch. | ||
| If you give them, they will not get a quark from me, an atom. | ||
| And because if you give them anything, they'll take it all. | ||
| And I'm not going to be the one responsible for it. | ||
| They can run roughshod over me and ruin me and do all those things, but I will not be | ||
| responsible for outrage culture gaining another mile in the fight. | ||
| I'd rather just sit here and ruin my career and die on this hill. | ||
| And at least people can look back on that and be like, well, he did the right thing for the freedom of expression and the freedom of speech and the freedom to say things without... and have commensurate reactions to that kind of thing. | ||
| You would think that I made... | ||
| You would think that I went to Auschwitz and stood there on a platform and screamed a Jewish joke or an SS joke or something like that. | ||
| That was the level of outrage that that tweet drew. | ||
| And they won't get a fucking iota of movement from me on that. | ||
| Not one iota. | ||
| And they can't handle it. | ||
| They're used to pushing people in a corner and making them submit. | ||
| I'm not saying I'm the first one that's ever done it. | ||
| We've heard this from Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock and all the guys that won't play colleges anymore because everyone's a baby. | ||
| In my own little way, in my own format, I'm going to fight that fight. | ||
| But the funny thing is that it didn't ruin my career. | ||
| It made me even bigger. | ||
| The people that are talking to me and the feedback that I'm getting has been positive and the opportunities and the doors that | ||
| are opening for me are incredible. | ||
| And I didn't do it to that end. I was just doing what I thought was the right thing. | ||
| But you said something to me, Dave, on the last show, which was so... | ||
| We were talking about the prescience of something I said. | ||
| Well, the prescience of something you said as well, which we were talking about... | ||
| I think that's where you were going. | ||
| Bring it home here. | ||
| I'm just trying to think of a thought now. | ||
| We were talking about. | ||
| I said something really genius. | ||
| I think that's where you were going. | ||
| Bring it home here. | ||
| Come on now. | ||
| Let me come back to that in a minute because I went too far on my own rant | ||
| to even remember what I was saying. | ||
| But yeah, these people will go out and try to ruin you and they want an inch | ||
| and we can't give it to them. | ||
| We have to defend those kinds of things and I was taking so much feedback | ||
| from people out there that were supporting me and the level, oh no, I remember what it is. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| We're doing this live, I guess. | ||
| We're doing this live. | ||
| You said that it was a special, your quote was it's a special level of cowardice | ||
| that people, well I was talking about conservatives in the gaming industry, libertarians in the gaming industry, | ||
| how they talk to me and they funnel things through me and I've been their proxy. | ||
| And you said that it took a special level of cowardice to do that. | ||
| And the special level of cowardice really came out to me, Dave, | ||
| with the. | ||
| The people that defended me, not at all publicly, but would come to me and be like, I'm so sorry this is happening to you. | ||
| Some of those people I appreciate, but a lot of those people I never want to hear from ever again. | ||
| I'm sick of being these people's proxy and their meat shield. | ||
| They just hang me out to dry. | ||
| And some of these people that assaulted me in public and went on and on in their little sub-tweets with each other, some of them are in this industry because I helped push for them to be in this industry. | ||
| One in particular literally got their job because of me. | ||
| These people would never say this to my face. | ||
| They would shake my hands and do all these kinds of things, but disparage me in their own little safe space and pile on in such a way that it is so mean-spirited and it is so transparent to so many people how mean-spirited it is that the reaction I got from that was so positive because I can identify that from a mile away. | ||
| Well, I do believe it's a special level of cowardice, but in a way, they don't even realize, and I think this is why it's important to talk about, how they're compounding the problem. | ||
| Because they're subtly saying, someone else can do this, but I can't do it. | ||
| And then they're saying something nice privately to you so that they can still feel good about themselves, but it has no value. | ||
| If anything, as you've just elicited, it makes you angrier, actually. | ||
| It shows their lack of strength. | ||
| We need people to be outspoken. | ||
| For very simple issues here. | ||
| We're not even talking about anything controversial. | ||
| That's the irony here. | ||
| Yeah, and that is the irony. | ||
| And the specific, again, mean-spiritedness of it, but also the vitriolic nature of it. | ||
| It's like, what does it serve? | ||
| What are you trying to do? | ||
| If I'm destroyed, for instance, did you win? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You just vanquished a dude for an innocuous joke. | ||
| Are you the winner now? | ||
| Is that the goal? | ||
| Now you won and you can move on to the next person that you wanna make into a corpse? | ||
| It is so outrageous the way these people think that they can treat others. | ||
| And some people will be out there and be like, it's so hypocritical that you think you can make a joke immune from feedback. | ||
| And I'm like, I didn't say that. | ||
| I want commensurate feedback to what happened. | ||
| If I went out and killed someone, then I expect that I'm gonna be arrested and lambasted in public and thrown in prison and they're gonna throw away the key and never see me again. | ||
| Does anyone out there, an intellectually honest person out there, think that what happened to me is equivalent to the joke? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| And by the way, I would go even a step further, that it doesn't have to be totally commensurate. | ||
| You could put the tweet out there, and then if you got an onslaught of hate, just people saying, I hate this tweet, or you're stupid, or you're a misogynist, or blah blah blah, That actually would be them just expressing their free speech, but it then becomes a feeding frenzy that makes it much more dangerous, thus related to your livelihood and your future. | ||
| So let's get to that part. | ||
| So, kind of funny, which you helped co-create. | ||
| Which you were, I guess I can say were now, a partner in an extremely successful business. | ||
| My audience knows that when we launched Patreon, when we decided to go fan funded, it was because we saw you guys and I thought, I looked at what you were doing and I was like, we could do this. | ||
| So some of my own success is directly related to seeing what you guys did. | ||
| You've created a hugely successful business. | ||
| You now, because of this tweet, are no longer even part of that. | ||
| So I know you don't want to throw anyone under the bus, and we don't have to get into obviously insider things that you can't really talk about, but I think for your audience they want to hear you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| I mean, at a base level, I felt like because of the feedback from some people in the industry and the way that the company felt like it needed to respond, which I respect because we're a voting company. | ||
| I mean, at a base level, I felt like because of the feedback from some people in the industry | ||
| and the way that the company felt like it needed to respond, which I respect because | ||
| we're a voting company. | ||
| I mean, there's, I'm not, I don't, you know, swing my dick around and think that that's | ||
| going to be like, that's going to be the way it is. | ||
| If other people disagree with me, I need to respect that. | ||
| And I wanted to respect that that was the community that they wanted to build, and I didn't want to become a distraction to the community and to my co-founders who I've known for years. | ||
| I want them to succeed and do whatever it is that they want to do. | ||
| And so I felt the best way to deal with it Since I wasn't going to apologize, and since we were on two different pages, clearly, was that I was like, let's just nip this in the bud now. | ||
| Because we're just going to come back to this again later, and then again later, and then again later, because our trajectories are different. | ||
| And I didn't want to punish them, and I didn't want to punish the audience. | ||
| I'm not going to get into the behind-the-scenes things about the way everything went down and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| I have too much respect for the situation and for them and for the audience again. | ||
| But I felt like by removing myself, the audience would be able to move on with the company it seemed like they wanted. | ||
| And I wish everyone all the best on that. | ||
| It was clear that we were going to come to this hill again and I was going to try to defend it and it was just not something I wanted to do. | ||
| So I made a decision very quickly and I have no real regret about it. | ||
| I wish them all the best. | ||
| And I even am working on selling my shares back to the company because I want them to | ||
| be able to move forward as a unit. | ||
| I don't want them to have to bounce things off of me anymore because they have a different | ||
| vision and I respect that. | ||
| I don't want to drag them in a different direction that they don't want to go in. | ||
| And so what kind of person would I be? | ||
| What kind of man would I be? | ||
| What kind of friend would I be? | ||
| And what kind of creator would I be if I made it all about me? | ||
| So that was my way to withdraw. | ||
| And I'm so sorry that some people seem upset about it, other people I'm sure are happy about it. | ||
| I'm sure it all evened out. | ||
| So that's kind of the story there. | ||
| I wanted to just go in a different direction. | ||
| I've often wanted to do something else anyway. | ||
| Video games have never been my biggest passion. | ||
| As we talked about on the episode that we did just last week, or that aired just last week, when I got my job offer, you know, I was a freelancer for IGN from age 18 to 22, and they offered me a job when I had graduated college. | ||
| I was about to start my master's in American history, so I was already on this different trajectory that was really more in line with the things I truly, truly love, which is history and politics and philosophy and all those kinds of things. | ||
| And that's what the future holds for me. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's incredibly obvious. | ||
| But just to be clear, you made a choice. | ||
| You didn't get fired. | ||
| No, I did not get fired. | ||
| You're clear about all that stuff. | ||
| You didn't get fired. | ||
| You made a choice. | ||
| They didn't even ask me to leave. | ||
| And you also, that's worth repeating, probably. | ||
| They didn't ask me to leave. | ||
| That was my idea. | ||
| I don't know where it would have gone if the conversation went on and on and on and in different directions, but it never got to that point. | ||
| I had left before. | ||
| I didn't want to nuke the fucking place, you know what I mean? | ||
| I understood what was going on, and I was like, let's just end it. | ||
| And I thought that that was the most respectful thing for all parties. | ||
| I was trying to do the right thing. | ||
| What's the piece of this that goes to just sort of moral clarity, having some moral clarity? | ||
| Because I think when we sat down the first time, that's one of the things that was most impressive to me about you. | ||
| It's very clear to me, That you have a code that you live by, it's very much who you are, and that's what it is. | ||
| And it's sort of take it or leave it, but this is the way I am. | ||
| And even the way you did this so quickly, I think most people, I think probably including myself, it would have probably been a little messier, it might have been a little more public, it might have taken more time, but I think you just kind of just laid it out. | ||
| Where does that come from within you, just sort of that clean? | ||
| Yeah, it's what I thought about. | ||
| I thought about the audience and I thought about the people that were there for me for years that enjoyed our content and made made us who we were and made me who I am. | ||
| And for me, I was like, can I sit here? | ||
| With moral clarity. | ||
| And disingenuously act like I'm happy. | ||
| And disingenuously act like I want to do this. | ||
| Because I don't. | ||
| And not after that. | ||
| I felt like I could never be myself again. | ||
| And that I would put them in a hard place and it would cause more fights than we already had behind the scenes. | ||
| And it would cause drama for the audience. | ||
| I made a lot of money. | ||
| It's not an inconsequential amount of money that I walked away from, but I felt like it was the right thing to do. | ||
| I can't live for the paycheck anymore. | ||
| I'm a big fan of the movie Boiler Room, which takes place on Long Island. | ||
| And Ben Affleck in it, I always used to love this quote, he's a big shot with all the guys sitting around the table, the guys that want to be brokers. | ||
| I actually kind of ancillarily know some of the people that it was based on. | ||
| Oh, that's a small world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jinx. | ||
| And he throws his keys on the table, his Porsche or whatever, his keys, and he says this one line that I always loved because as a capitalist and as like a Republican and all the, you know, free market kind of guy, free domestic market kind of guy, I was always like, I want money, I want money, I want money. | ||
| And he was like, the only people that will tell you the money is the root of all evil never had any. | ||
| And I always kept that in the back of my mind. | ||
| And I like the statement, and money isn't evil. | ||
| And having money and wanting money isn't evil. | ||
| But there is a vacancy to just doing it for the money. | ||
| And I made well over twice what I was making at IGN. | ||
| And I walked away from it. | ||
| Just completely walked away from it. | ||
| Because I can't live that way. | ||
| I don't want to look back and be like, well man, my bank account's swollen and I'm fucking miserable. | ||
| I'd rather make half as much money. | ||
| And do something that is fulfilling and feel like I can be myself and feel like I'm not also ruining the vision of other people that don't deserve to be brought down that road they don't want to be brought down and an audience that might have different expectations than the ones that we set down to begin with and so It was a decision made very rapidly out of respect for all parties, including myself. | ||
| And I felt like it was the right decision, and I felt by being like, oh, let's take two weeks, I'll give you my two weeks notice, and we can, I felt like that was just shitty, because then people will look at those two weeks of shows and be like, well, this is not Colin. | ||
| So they got, the last shows that we did were the real Colin. | ||
| And I think that everyone involved probably appreciates that, I hope. | ||
| Yeah, isn't the money thing is an interesting piece of this because, okay, so you walked away from it, but there's a beauty in terms of what we and many other people that are doing, content creators are doing, where we aren't beholden to anyone now but ourselves. | ||
| So I'll see sometimes in the YouTube comment section, people will be like, oh, Ruben's just talking about this or this or that for money. | ||
| And it's like, I was telling you last night, like, I've gotten two huge offers for this show that would make me way more money that I've said no to in the last 10 days. | ||
| Way more money than I'm making right now, because I can do what I think is right by doing it this way, and obviously my goal isn't just money. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So there's a beauty in that, that whatever you do going forward, which I know a gajillion people are asking, and I think you'll probably have some answers in the next couple days or so, that it's not about chasing the money. | ||
| You need some money to do it, but it genuinely isn't. | ||
| No, I like to live a comfortable life. | ||
| I don't need much. | ||
| I don't want to be like a multi-billionaire living a playboy lifestyle or anything like that. | ||
| I want to be comfortable, and I am comfortable, and I have plenty of money in the bank, and I'll be fine. | ||
| I'm being bought out. | ||
| It's like, I'll be fine on that front. | ||
| This gives me room to do what I'm passionate about and figure that path out. | ||
| Money's a necessary evil in the sense that, yeah, you need to pay rent, you need to eat, you need to do all these things. | ||
| And I don't begrudge anyone's pursuit of the dollar. | ||
| You are a capitalist! | ||
| I am I am I'm totally a capitalist and I think it's fantastic and I was an entrepreneur and I'm gonna continue | ||
| to be an Entrepreneur and I and and I believe them, you know every | ||
| possibility I'll make even more money in the future, but that's can't | ||
| be that can't be the end goal. I I Would have stayed just for that to be the end goal and I | ||
| respect if that's the end goal for a lot of people out there | ||
| but it I tried yeah, and I Put everything on a mental list and I'm like the money's | ||
| there somewhere on the list but my fucking sanity and my happiness and my authenticity | ||
| comes above that and And I think that that's gonna resonate with people, too | ||
| Again, I didn't want my co-founders, who I've known for a long time, These aren't just people that I found at some entrepreneur, you know, some rotary club, you know? | ||
| These are people I've known for a long time and they deserve a partner that is in. | ||
| And the audience deserved a partner that had an aligned vision with that. | ||
| And so to live for the almighty dollar only, I could have stayed and made more and more and more and more money. | ||
| But that, again, to what end? | ||
| My girlfriend always used the example, you can bring all that money with you, are you going to put it behind the hearse? | ||
| You can't bring her with you. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| At what point is it just like, just do what you need to do and be happy and be yourself? | ||
| And I need to be myself. | ||
| And I have no doubt that whatever you're gonna do next, and we talked that, talked it out a little bit last night. | ||
| We sure did. | ||
| over a lot of bourbon, it's like, ah, man, it gets you. | ||
| It gets you, you feeling a little sluggish? | ||
| 120 proof, yeah, knob cream. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so here's what we're gonna do. | ||
| So we're gonna, I have one more thing that I really want to address with Colin. | ||
| And then we're gonna, we've enabled Super Chat if you're in the YouTube comment section right now. | ||
| I know we're streaming on Facebook as well. | ||
| But if you jump into YouTube, we've enabled Super Chat. | ||
| So we will let you guys ask questions. | ||
| I usually think I'm pretty decent asking questions, but I know that there's a lot of you that want to directly ask Colin things, or maybe you want to ask me things, or both of us, our feelings on just the general themes that we're talking about and all that. | ||
| So if you jump in on Super Chat, Amir and David are gonna send them over to me, and I got my iPad right here, and we'll do that for, you know, 15-20 minutes, whatever it is. | ||
| But the last thing that I wanted to ask you specifically before we get to that, and I think people are gonna have a lot of interesting things to ask us, for someone that's watching this, that's feeling this, because there's so many people feeling this, this fear of saying something the wrong way, posting something on Facebook the wrong way, a stupid joke that goes awry, and they're not even public people. | ||
| It's one thing, you're a public person, so the feeding frenzy is doubled. | ||
| Yeah, it's magnified, yeah. | ||
| You know, many times over. | ||
| But for even private people that occasionally might say something controversial or just share some thought. | ||
| Sometimes I get people messaging me. | ||
| They go, Dave, I'm afraid to share your videos because I don't want to deal with the hate I'm gonna get. | ||
| Like, I'm giving you guys the most middle-of-the-road stuff. | ||
| Yeah, we're discussing. | ||
| It's very harrowing what you're doing. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of hate around here. | ||
| You know, it's endless. | ||
| It's a hate fest around here. | ||
| But for those people, that's what I think we have to figure out what's next for, is that all of these people that are watching this right now are going, I feel this. | ||
| What Colin's going through right now, I get it on my own micro level of being afraid to say it. | ||
| How do we destroy this monster? | ||
| I don't know that you're going to have an answer on that one. | ||
| I think you destroy the monster by bringing them into the light. | ||
| I say keep saying exactly what you want to say. | ||
| If you have something controversial to say or just something innocuous to say, because it doesn't matter to these people, it can be as innocuous as my joke and they're going to still come at you, expose them. | ||
| Then we know who they are. | ||
| Then we know not to take them seriously. | ||
| And we can continue to talk amongst ourselves. | ||
| You know, one of the things I noticed most is that, by and large, I had major support for the decision I made everywhere. | ||
| Except for places within the gaming industry. | ||
| That is very hyper-liberal, as an example. | ||
| And what you notice on these Twitter threads is they're just talking to each other. | ||
| Most of these people don't even have an audience. | ||
| Like, these people just talk to each other. | ||
| I'm not trying to be mean-spirited in any way, but it seems like a lot of this is the attempt, the old attempt to, what they say, punch up, right? | ||
| And to go at people themselves. | ||
| And there's certainly a level of envy from people that look at YouTube and look at this new space and know that they're not going to have an outlet to do their thing anymore in a few years unless they change and adapt, and they want to destroy that. | ||
| And that's why it's no coincidence to me that it was YouTubers and everyone that came and tried to protect Protect me, in a sense, because these other people are so mean-spirited and so in their echo chamber and so willing to just be as vitriolic and as angry as humanly possible over something so silly. | ||
| It shows a lot about who they are. | ||
| It shows a lot about what they're about. | ||
| And for me, you want to expose those people. | ||
| Those people should be out in the open, and so keep doing your thing. | ||
| Don't worry about that particular response. | ||
| We've also weaponized the incentive for them to do bad things, right? | ||
| Because, as we talked about before, by them writing some bullshit, even if no one, like the nonsensical article that this guy wrote on Polygon, which was garbage, again a guy who I've never heard of on a site that I personally had never been to, But I get it, it's a known sight in the game world. | ||
| But it only benefits him. | ||
| To jump on the feeding frenzy, he then drives clicks by you having to defend yourself, thus making him more money at the same time while fueling his fake sense of virtue signaling. | ||
| So he starts, ah, see, that guy's a racist, I'm a good guy. | ||
| I then looked at the guy's Twitter feed. | ||
| The tweets where I was defending you about it got probably into the thousands of favorites and retweets. | ||
| His tweet about me, you know, whatever it was, got literally one favorite. | ||
| So we've unfortunately, the system is now incentivizing these people who have no other traction to do bad work. | ||
| Like that, we gotta figure out how to manage that. | ||
| They're waning. | ||
| And that's just obvious to anyone that's paying attention. | ||
| I don't care what the micro-traffic looks like. | ||
| I don't care if you had a better week or month than last month. | ||
| Your sites are dying. | ||
| Period. | ||
| And we all know it. | ||
| Doing stuff like this and targeting specifically the people they target is a way for them to signal that sinking ship for all of us to see. | ||
| That's the other thing. | ||
| We talked about the things that we found agreement on, that I find agreement on with a lot of these people and their politics. | ||
| And you'd also find that I was not a very mean-spirited person, actually, at all. | ||
| I don't go after individuals. | ||
| I don't dogpile anyone. | ||
| You would never find an example of me doing this to someone. | ||
| Like, literally just going after a person to such a degree that they feel like they need to quit a job or do anything. | ||
| I don't think I ever once used the term social justice warrior, or snowflake, or cuck, or any of these things that go around. | ||
| Those aren't words that are even in my vocabulary. | ||
| I've used a couple of them. | ||
| I'm not saying you're wrong. | ||
| What I'm saying is that I've always been somewhat respectful in the sense that we can have a dialogue that is of a higher degree than that. | ||
| But, you know, things are changing for them. | ||
| And it's the same argument we had last time about media dying in politics. | ||
| Well, that media is dying too. | ||
| And these are the death throes of a dying medium that doesn't want to give any quarter to YouTube and to this new space that is going to absolutely kill it. | ||
| So, the same that all of these newspapers and magazines that write hit pieces and go after people and make it very personal are doing it, because they're too in their death throes. | ||
| And we have to elevate and raise the level of dialogue, which is what I'm going to try to do with what I do next. | ||
| And I hope that people understand that they don't have to feed into this anymore. | ||
| And that these people that wanted to come after me and be mean-spirited to me, it's not about your social cachet. | ||
| It's not about any of those kinds of things, because I think that in itself is mean-spirited. | ||
| It's simply about an anger and a fear, and I understand that. | ||
| And like I said on your last show, I'd be scared if what I was doing was waning too. | ||
| But it's not, and so that's a whole nother sublevel to what happened to me. | ||
| It's not only the politics, it's not only personal, it's not all those things. | ||
| There's a whole sublevel to it as well, and we all know that. | ||
| Yeah, and ironically, it will eat itself. | ||
| I mean, that's what I keep saying about this thing. | ||
| This snake will eat itself because all of these people who are either throwing you under the bus publicly or are only defending you privately, it will come for them too. | ||
| That's what I keep saying. | ||
| One day, mark my words, The left, this regressive left, I haven't said that phrase in quite some time, it will come for Bernie. | ||
| He is a rich white man with three houses. | ||
| They will have to, one day he will say something slightly off the range and they will have to come for him too. | ||
| And that's a direct parallel to this because all of these people that are trying to be holier than thou with you, one day they're going to say something too and they will be subjected to the same insanity. | ||
| Yeah, and don't look in my direction to protect you. | ||
| You know, like, I would have been more than happy to do that. | ||
| I will defend a person's right to expression and the right to say what they need to say. | ||
| As long as you're not hurting anyone. | ||
| I'm very libertarian in that sense. | ||
| If you're not hurting anyone, express yourself. | ||
| Explore difficult ideas. | ||
| Be wrong sometimes. | ||
| Don't be afraid of guilt by association. | ||
| Talk to people you disagree with. | ||
| Read challenging books. | ||
| Read a book at all. | ||
| I mean, all these people running around using the word fascist. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| It's getting old. | ||
| There's so many parallels between the United States and the Weimar Republic, don't you know, Dave? | ||
| And to me, it's just, this is a natural, the pendulum's swinging. | ||
| We're in an inflection point. | ||
| Things are changing. | ||
| The parties are changing. | ||
| As I tweeted out yesterday or two days ago, the regressive left is becoming the Christian right before your very eyes. | ||
| And I don't mean that in a disrespect to people of faith either. | ||
| What I mean is that the Christian right known for, you know, going after D&D and video games and violence on TV and they're very puritanical and if you don't agree with them you're bad and all that. | ||
| Well, what the fuck do you think the regressives sound like? | ||
| You know, it's time to look in the mirror and figure out the exact direction you're going in, and you're right. | ||
| Bernie Sanders is a champagne socialist with three houses and all these kinds of things, and they've ignored all that because he never even had a job until he was in his 40s. | ||
| They ignore all that because he has all these progressive messages, but they will turn on him, and they're going to turn on these other people, too, and they're going to understand what that might feel like and how they could have stemmed the tide for a person they might have even disagreed with. | ||
| And I think it's super scary, the direction we're going, and people like me and you need to stand up, and others out there, Stand up and make, and force some change, or at least fight. | ||
| And it doesn't have to be a fight of epic proportions or some sort of verbally violent fight. | ||
| It's just saying, no. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| No, that's it. | ||
| And before we get into the questions, I want to say one thing to you personally. | ||
| And I've said this to you privately, but I want everyone to know it. | ||
| When I was out there drowning, you were the first person that lent me your hand. | ||
| And you treated me, it's bringing tears to my eyes. | ||
| You and your husband, and you treated me like you're my newest friend, and you treated me like you were my oldest friend, when people out there that I've known forever just abandoned me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And thank you. | |
| Well, thank you for that. | ||
| All right, so let's do this. | ||
| We'll take a quick break. | ||
| We're doing this thing live. | ||
| We're gonna take just a quick break. | ||
| Have a little water. | ||
| It's the bourbon talking. | ||
| Yeah, we'll do a little quick break and then we'll jump into the super chat. | ||
| And we'll go for a while. | ||
| I mean, I wanna hear your thoughts. | ||
| I genuinely do. | ||
| I know Colin does. | ||
| And whatever you ask, look, this is not about throwing people under the bus. | ||
| This is not about attacking people and any of that nonsense. | ||
| But if you keep it respectful, that's exactly what you'll get from us. | ||
| And yeah, we'll take just like a two minute break. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay? | |
| I feel like Oprah. | ||
| We're doing a little Oprah situation. | ||
| We should be out in the forest. | ||
| You know, she's always out in the forest now. | ||
| You know these commercials? | ||
| She's in a forest at a fancy table, and they're eating bread, and it's very weird. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| And maybe she'll run for president one day. | ||
| I mean, it's all headed. | ||
| It's all heading in that direction. | ||
| All right, guys, so here's what we're gonna do. | ||
| So if you're playing along on YouTube, we're using the Super Chat. | ||
| That's a way that you guys are able to bump up your chat, because we know that the chat in YouTube is a little nutty. | ||
| but for a couple bucks or whatever it is, your chat gets a higher spacing and we can see it. | ||
| So we've gotten a ton of things and we're gonna do as many as we can. | ||
| We'll be here for a while. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| But people wanna know what's going on. | ||
| And as I said, if people treat it with respect, we'll answer as many as we can. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Okay, so first off, this isn't even a question, | ||
| but somebody wants you to go on the Joe Rogan podcast, We Got Your Back, man. | ||
| I think Joe's already been saying nice things about you. | ||
| Yeah, Joe actually reached out to me privately and yeah, we've been corresponding back and forth. | ||
| And yeah, he went, him and Jim Norton, it was a very surreal experience. | ||
| It's the same word I use with Glenn Beck when I open my interview, and he's like, why is it surreal? | ||
| And I had those things, well, Joe Rogan's a whole different level of surreal for me. | ||
| He's reached out, he told me a day or two ago that he's gonna pitch some dates at me, but obviously he's such a busy man, I'm ready to do it whenever he's ready. | ||
| And I wanna say for the record, I think I said this to you already, but Joe, so much of my success is directly related to him. | ||
| By going on his show the first time, and then I was on the day before the election, and he's generous with his audience, which is, to me, is like the greatest thing you can say about somebody in the public space, because a lot of people are just, want to protect their little audience. | ||
| They think if they show them something else, they might disappear, and it's completely not how he is, and I think it's a great way to operate, and he's a great guy. | ||
| Okay, Colin, does your future include making content regarding the gaming industry, or are you washing your hands of that altogether? | ||
| No, I think that you can expect, you know, it's something you and I talked about, and I'm going to go in a direction that is much more political and historical and philosophical. | ||
| I've been playing video games for almost 30 years, every day of my life, and they're an important part of who I am, and I'm happy, and I'm so excited to reclaim them as a hobby. | ||
| But there's going to be things I'm going to need to say about them still. | ||
| You're not going to find reviews or criticism of them from me. | ||
| But if a game is political or a game touches a theme, we're going to do that. | ||
| And I think that you can expect that there'll be gaming content that will be of relevance to you as well. | ||
| But don't think of it as when I was at IGN. | ||
| And by the way, when we were discussing, you know, sort of how we can work together in the future last night, it was funny because I was kind of like dragging, how do we figure out where we do something with games? | ||
| You were like, how do we figure out where we do something with politics? | ||
| I have a feeling we're going to meet in the middle and figure out some other ways to collaborate in the future. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely, I agree with you. | ||
| Alright, so here's something that's sort of video game related. | ||
| Colin, are we going to be able to read or hear your thoughts on future games? | ||
| For example, the last The Last of Us Part 2. | ||
| I mean, maybe on Twitter or something like that. | ||
| I think The Last of Us Part 2 is clearly going to have, you know, The Last of Us is a very interesting social and political game. | ||
| It's about, if you don't know, it's made by the guys who make Uncharted. | ||
| And The Last of Us is, in my mind, one of the great games of all time, and I think that's pretty common. | ||
| And it's about the end of the world and a father-daughter relationship. | ||
| That this man develops with a teenage girl that reminds him of the daughter he lost during the apocalypse, basically. | ||
| There's a lot of themes like later on it comes out that she's a lesbian and the game is incredibly diverse | ||
| and the game is incredibly progressive in that way. | ||
| And so I suspect, Neil Druckmann's a personal friend of mine | ||
| who was the creator of it and I just went out to dinner with him a couple weeks ago. | ||
| And my suspicion, we all know Neil out there, he will have a lot of themes that are gonna be worth | ||
| talking about that don't even really have to do with the game as a game. | ||
| Yeah, by the way, I'm just getting into this world now since you got me the PS4 and I'm fiddling around with it | ||
| and now in this a little bit and just from talking to you, I didn't realize, I knew this thing was big, | ||
| that video games are big obviously and all that, but just the breadth of actually dealing with real issues | ||
| and how I'm still amazed and I will probably be forever now about how the community is so broad | ||
| and it's everybody of every walk of life and all that. | ||
| Of course I knew that, but really now experiencing it and seeing the way people react to you now and this whole thing, it's incredible. | ||
| All right, keep up the good work, Colin. | ||
| Thank you, Ruben, for having him on. | ||
| As founding a new casual gaming review and podcast company with differing views, it's Casual Misfits Gaming, what advice do you have for us? | ||
| So for somebody that's maybe where you were five years ago. | ||
| Yeah, I think that it's the advice we're always given. | ||
| I know you know this. | ||
| Consistency is the most important. | ||
| You can't do a podcast and do it sporadically. | ||
| You can't have a video series and post it when you want. | ||
| There's room for that, I guess, but you will never become big if you do that. | ||
| Think about Phil DeFranco and how he does his videos every day. | ||
| Think about how when we used to do PS I Love You or do Podcasts Beyond back in the day, | ||
| we did them every week. | ||
| We were so absolutely fucking crazy about that, by the way, that even when we would take weeks off, | ||
| we took two or three weeks off at the end of the year, we would actually back Phil, | ||
| so there was always an episode on a Tuesday. | ||
| And you do that with your interviews as well. | ||
| If you want an audience, the audience needs to be able to rely on you for content. | ||
| Otherwise, there's way too much competition, especially in the gaming space. | ||
| They will forget about you. | ||
| So that's my biggest advice. | ||
| Colin, my brother Colton and I are huge fans of your work. | ||
| Are you going to stay with YouTube or move on to a new avenue? | ||
| Would love to see Colin was right live. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hashtag beyond. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| would love to see Colin was right live. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hashtag beyond. | ||
| Thank you, hashtag beyond. | ||
| Yeah, you're gonna find me on YouTube. | ||
| And doing videos and things of that nature, I think that's the space I'm in now. | ||
| And I think that's the most effective space for us to proliferate our message. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is there a way for people with different political views to find middle ground and discuss their ideas? | ||
| Seems like nowadays we're always at each other's throats. | ||
| I mean, this is what I've spent the last... | ||
| Two and a half years of my life trying to do. | ||
| I think we're making massive headway and that's why the people that don't want to build bridges are going so hysterical. | ||
| The people that were throwing you under the bus, that's all they have left. | ||
| When you have no ideas to stand on, All you can do is either punch, which that's why they wanna punch Nazis, or label everyone a racist. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt. | ||
| No, no, go ahead. | ||
| I was gonna say, I agree with you. | ||
| I think that you convinced me of something that I was wrong about when we interviewed the first time. | ||
| I made the claim. | ||
| That we were incredibly divided. | ||
| I used the 1850s as an example. | ||
| And for people that aren't historically familiar with that, the 1850s were a fucking mess in the United States. | ||
| You know, during the 10 years of Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan as the country was tearing itself apart. | ||
| James Buchanan famously walked out of the White House when the South Carolina seceded after Abraham Lincoln was elected and was basically like, there's nothing I can do. | ||
| Like, that was the attitude. | ||
| It was a fair attitude. | ||
| We don't know if you can constitutionally leave. | ||
| We don't know what the rules are about this. | ||
| We've never dealt with this before. | ||
| Obviously Abraham Lincoln vehemently disagreed with that. | ||
| The idea that the CSA could secede. | ||
| So these were very violent and polarized times. | ||
| And I see, even though I don't, as I said on the show, I don't think, there's no way we're gonna have a civil war in the United States again. | ||
| But I saw in that trends of this divisiveness, this like just two countries developing again. | ||
| But you convinced me and you were right, and I was wrong. | ||
| When I really pondered on it, that there are way more normal people and people exploring the gray area than you think. | ||
| If you get off of Twitter and stop dealing with hyper-liberal games journalists | ||
| and journalists from newspapers with axes to grind and all that kind of stuff, | ||
| and you just go to your local cafe or you go to a diner or something like that, | ||
| you're gonna find people, you might find a Trump supporter | ||
| and a Clinton supporter sitting next to each other that don't even know that they're, | ||
| and they strike up a conversation with each other because they, oh, guys talking about baseball, | ||
| oh, my son plays baseball and blah, blah, blah, and you don't get into the politics of it | ||
| because everyone kinda has the same goals, family, making it, whether it's pay to check the paycheck | ||
| or stuffing money away and trying to live a better life, all those kinds of things, | ||
| and when you really boil it down to that. | ||
| That's the basis by which we can have the constructive political conversations. | ||
| You have to find that common ground first. | ||
| Once that common ground is found, then you can build upon it. | ||
| And so I think that we want to, as I said before, we want to lop off, I think, the 5% on either side that are relevant to the conversation and are destructive to the conversation and truncate the middle. | ||
| And I really do believe, and this is just a tangent, that in the next 4, 8, 12 years we will have a third party president because of this. | ||
| Well, I mean, I just so firmly believe that. | ||
| I think the things that most of us want as people, you want some food, you want some sex, you wanna love somebody, you wanna be around family and friends, that's what all of us truly, if you can remove the nonsensical noise, that's what we all care about, that's what we all want. | ||
| You wanna feel validated in your work and be respected by people, all that stuff. | ||
| The problem is, you're right, it's the 5% on each side that's hysterically screaming, and then when you couple that with social media, where they're the angriest and the loudest, it makes it seem like we all hate each other, And I simply, I just simply don't subscribe to that. | ||
| Two questions for Colin. | ||
| Why only Adidas superstars? | ||
| And what do you think is the best place to get news? | ||
| Love ya dude! | ||
| I love you too, thank you. | ||
| Adidas have been my calling card. | ||
| My Sheltos have been my calling card. | ||
| These are probably my... | ||
| 30th pair of these. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's just like, everyone has their little thing. | ||
| It used to be like Tucker Carlson with his bow tie back in the day before Jon Stewart embarrassed him and I felt bad for him. | ||
| When I went on Crossfire that was one of the most cringeworthy things I'd ever seen in my life. | ||
| But everyone has their little trademark and that's just mine and I enjoy them. | ||
| I find them comfortable. | ||
| The construction of them leaves much to be desired. | ||
| They changed them a few years ago and they're not as good as they used to be but I keep wearing them. | ||
| So that's the reason. | ||
| And what was the second question? | ||
| The second part was, oh, what do you think is the best place to get news? | ||
| I get this question all the time. | ||
| Yeah, what is your answer? | ||
| Well, that you really, it is on you now, unfortunately. | ||
| That back in the day we had limited choices and there was a certain level of trust. | ||
| Now maybe that trust in mainstream was overblown and we shouldn't have had that much trust, but it was that you knew where to go to get news. | ||
| CNN used to be the most trusted name in news. | ||
| I would argue it's almost the least trusted name in news now. | ||
| The things that I see the New York Times doing, all of these things. | ||
| Now I think it's on you to follow a ton of different news sources and follow things that are left and right and read. | ||
| If they tell you something's happening because of Trumpcare or whatever they're calling it now, you gotta read a lot of articles about it. | ||
| It's exhausting and it's annoying. | ||
| It is, it is annoying that the onus is on us now that the days of Cronkite and all of this are dead. | ||
| My first thing is that mainstream media doesn't deserve your trust. | ||
| And they showed it as clear as the day was long in 2012, I think, and again in 2016. | ||
| And that obviously happened with Brexit, and that happened with all this stuff. | ||
| I was even reading about the Dutch election that happened yesterday, and some stuff that's going on over there. | ||
| Marine Le Pen, obviously, in France. | ||
| Did you see the interview she gave? | ||
| It was a 90-second interview, basically telling this journalist off, in a way, being like, we don't trust you, no one trusts you. | ||
| More people, by polling, way more people think Donald Trump tells the truth than the media, and Donald Trump doesn't tell the truth. | ||
| So that tells you everything you need to know about the way people feel about the media, and they have earned it. | ||
| So for me, I start with the wires. | ||
| I go with AP and Reuters, and then I branch out from there. | ||
| That's what's so funny when everyone's like, you're such a partisan. | ||
| I'm like, actually, MSNBC is the only cable news channel I watch because I don't need to know what I know. | ||
| I don't need myself reaffirmed. | ||
| I need to be challenged. | ||
| Rachel Maddow is one of my favorite people on cable television. | ||
| And I talked about Morning Joe, my admiration of kind of two people from different sides of the spectrum coming together. | ||
| But I love my Drudge Report, and I love my Politico, and I love The Hill. | ||
| You can go in a million different ways, but I don't think media bias is a problem. | ||
| I think media dishonesty is the problem. | ||
| You can paint a picture. | ||
| We were talking about the Civil War. | ||
| Think of Fort Sumter or something like that. | ||
| That would be painted as two different things. | ||
| The southerners might have looked at it as being like they're making a stand, right? | ||
| They're not necessarily wrong. | ||
| And the northerners might be like, that is a federal fort that they're occupying and we're going to take it. | ||
| And they're not wrong either. | ||
| There are biases there, but neither of them are lying. | ||
| So that's the difference. | ||
| There's a difference between bias and dishonesty. | ||
| And that's why the onus is then on you to go, all right, this is happening. | ||
| I gotta figure out that there are two sides to this and what truth can I get out of that? | ||
| Colin, can you speak to all your followers being painted as alt-right racists on forums slash Twitter, though some are trolls, much of us are level-headed. | ||
| I think you've sort of addressed this, but even, it's interesting, even the people that are coming to your defense are now getting this. | ||
| I see this happening to me. | ||
| Yeah, it's terrible, and this is the character assassination that will now go by proxy to the people that support me. | ||
| I am in no way, shape, or form alt-right. | ||
| I don't understand one specific thing that I've ever said or done or feel that would put me in the league with a Richard Spencer. | ||
| I mean, it is completely absurd. | ||
| And this is the new everyone's Hitler and everyone's a Nazi. | ||
| These people haven't read a fucking book about this. | ||
| They don't know what they're talking about. | ||
| Anyone who actually knows anything about Nazism or fascism is not gonna go around and call you a Nazi or a fascist. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And so to me, it's the same thing I always say, like people make fun of me sometimes | ||
| because I like Ayn Rand and I like Atlas Shrugged, it's a really important book to me. | ||
| They assume that I'm an objectivist, I'm not. | ||
| And they assume that I agree with everything she says, I don't. | ||
| And if you ever ask those people that make fun of her, hey, who are the protagonists? | ||
| They don't even know what the word protagonist means. | ||
| That's a whole other problem. | ||
| This is the thing that like and that's the thing I was saying with like when with these people calling out fascism | ||
| being like What does fascism mean like what does it mean? What is when | ||
| what when did the Nazis come to power? | ||
| I mean you you're such an expert on the on the transition from why my republic in the Nazi Germany wait here to die | ||
| Yeah, you know like since you're such a so these that you have to understand my friend out | ||
| You know that asked this question These people don't know what the fuck they're talking about, and they're just spraying a machine gun trying to hurt anyone with words the way they do by calling me a racist for a tweet that is sexist. | ||
| Look, if you can't beat somebody with facts, if you can't beat somebody with a breadth of knowledge, the best way to do it is to silence them, unfortunately. | ||
| Hey, Colin, I just want to say I appreciate how you've handled the situation and that you'll always have my support. | ||
| Excited for what's next. | ||
| Okay, not a question, but... Thank you. | ||
| I appreciate you. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| There's a couple other questions. | ||
| People are, again, asking if you're going to occasionally cover video games, so I think we've got that. | ||
| Thank you, Colin, for sticking up for what's right and fighting the good fight. | ||
| We need more people like you. | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
| You're welcome. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Dave, you've got to invite Daryl Davis. | ||
| And to Colin, I hope the best for you. | ||
| Keep up the great work, guys. | ||
| I'm not sure who Daryl Davis is, but I'll look into it. | ||
| Again, are you completely done covering video games? | ||
| Colin, long-time listener and PSN friend, are you going on Joe Rogan's podcast? | ||
| We got that one. | ||
| Can Colin's next show be called Who Took My Avocados with Colin Moriarty? | ||
| Yeah, we used to have a big avocado joke. | ||
| I blamed Greg for stealing my avocados. | ||
| He did one day, and I was going to use them and eat them, and then no one would let it go. | ||
| There seems to be a lot of overlap on these questions, which I appreciate. | ||
| All right, so this is interesting. | ||
| Dave, as the traditional religious right declines in America, it seems that a post-Christian alt-right is rising. | ||
| Will the left be able to deal with this evolution and have the intellectual cultural capital to deal with it? | ||
| You know, one of the things that I've been saying, and I think you sort of addressed this earlier, that The Christian right in America, which gets demonized constantly, and middle America that gets demonized constantly, and this white people being demonized constantly, and people with any sort of traditional values, and all of this stuff, they've changed a lot. | ||
| And if you don't acknowledge when somebody changes, then the onus is now on you. | ||
| You're now the bad guy. | ||
| So, for example, when it comes to gay marriage, there's almost no one fighting against it. | ||
| That doesn't mean that all the Christian conservatives and the evangelicals are thrilled with it. | ||
| But there really is no, the leader of the Republican Party is Donald Trump, who is not against gay marriage, who just kept all the LGBT workplace protections in, who's friends with Peter Thiel, et cetera, and a New Yorker who is obviously around plenty of gay people. | ||
| Right, a cosmopolitan man. | ||
| Yeah, so isn't it sort of incumbent on us to then acknowledge that and be like, you know what, these people who I may disagree with on a slew of things about faith and abortion and all that, but actually they've moderated themselves and now it seems like it's the other guys. | ||
| Yeah, they're fighting fights that don't exist. | ||
| I mean, this is always the thing that when people are like, you know, how can you support Romney, for instance, when he is against gay marriage? | ||
| And I'm like, because the fight's over, dude. | ||
| Like, no offense, but he's not gonna win that fight. | ||
| Like, just read the tea leaves. | ||
| Look around you. | ||
| It's the same people that are still fighting Roe vs. Wade. | ||
| I'm like, newsflash. | ||
| Never gonna happen. | ||
| You know, just never gonna happen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't care who's on the Supreme Court. | ||
| Like it's just, it happened 40 plus years ago, guys. | ||
| It's the fight, like if there are states rights issues there | ||
| or all those kinds of things that people wanna talk about, I think that's fine, but these people are like | ||
| wanting to fight fights that you already won. | ||
| Yeah, well also people don't understand that if Roe v Wade is flipped, | ||
| it doesn't make abortion illegal, it kicks it back to the state. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I think that potentially could happen. | ||
| If you had enough strict constitutionalists, I think that I wouldn't want that to happen, even though I'm a states rights guy. | ||
| Me neither. | ||
| But I think that potentially could happen. | ||
| But most of the people screaming about it think that it's about the legality of abortion, which it's not. | ||
| Because they don't pick up books. | ||
| But here's the thing about that, and I agree with you. | ||
| I want to clarify that I agree with you as well. | ||
| I hope it doesn't happen either. | ||
| It's the same reason why, even though I believe in a small federal government, when the federal government said gay marriage is legal, I'm like, well, that's inherently discriminatory. | ||
| It should come from the federal government. | ||
| It's the same argument that Goldwater had versus LBJ in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act. | ||
| Could this solve itself, or will we solve it for them? | ||
| And we solve it for them because there's no time to let it solve itself. | ||
| And by the way, doesn't that sort of show that we're all sort of inconsistent ideologically a little bit? | ||
| So I'm sure there would somebody here, you'd say that, and there's somebody out there that would be like, wait a minute, wait a minute, you're a small government guy. | ||
| You're a libertarian, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| It should have nothing to do with the government. | ||
| The government shouldn't even give these rights. | ||
| But you're saying there are cases where you're admitting that you don't have the answers to everything. | ||
| There are cases that may be a real world that can veer off the ideological path. | ||
| Yeah, if the ground is even, Then the government only needs to protect the evenness of the ground. | ||
| It doesn't need to protect your individual rights. | ||
| The individual rights are natural. | ||
| But if the ground is uneven for certain people, then it needs to be evened out. | ||
| That's just the way it is. | ||
| Otherwise, you can't have a libertarian society in which things are uneven. | ||
| So to me, it's totally compatible. | ||
| But I'm also not trying to fit a purity test either. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| This is a great question and I think about this a lot. | ||
| Colin and Dave, what are your thoughts on using civil suits to bring some accountability to these journalists? | ||
| So people know I'm a free speech absolutist. | ||
| Except for a direct call to violence you can say whatever the hell you want. | ||
| But what about this when it comes to libel? | ||
| I'm actually for libel laws, and when Peter Thiel took down Gawker after all of the god-awful, horrible stuff that they did, I had no problem with that. | ||
| What do you think about, as someone that just suffered from this, being called a racist in a mainstream... | ||
| Yeah, I think you have to have protections against slander and libel. | ||
| And libel, obviously, being the written word, what we're talking about. | ||
| I don't think it should be used as a bludgeon to say things if people have an opinion. | ||
| But when they're a character assassinating you or saying things that are untrue or false and defamatory, that's different. | ||
| You should be protected from those kinds of things. | ||
| And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. | ||
| I think some countries like England have way, way, way more strict libel laws that I think are kind of scary. | ||
| But you should be able to protect yourself. | ||
| A newspaper shouldn't be able to just write whatever they want. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so I think that that's a worthwhile protection to explore. | ||
| And Gawker was a fucking disaster, and they ruined people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This goes back to it, like, what did that guy from Conde Nast do to anyone? | ||
| For people that aren't familiar, this random writer just outs the CFO of Conde Nast, ruins his marriage, outs him as a gay man, which is a fucking personal thing, as you know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And destroyed him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What did he do? | ||
| That's not acceptable. | ||
| What if Hulk Hogan, because Hulk Hogan's a public figure, his sex tape should be leaked? | ||
| There has to be, there's no decency. | ||
| Why is it so personal? | ||
| Yeah, I think we're actually bringing decency back now. | ||
| I think people have had it. | ||
| People have had it. | ||
| Why did Gawker out Peter Thiel? | ||
| Yeah, because he's an enemy. | ||
| Because he's the enemy. | ||
| Because Peter Thiel's a conservative. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, but Peter Thiel has the last laugh, of course. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Colin, how do you think making a joke in the middle of the social media circles surrounding international women's day affected the backlash? | ||
| I'm not quite sure I understand. | ||
| I think what he's saying is that if the joke wasn't told that day, it would have been... My answer is that the joke would have been irrelevant if it wasn't told that day. | ||
| That was the entire idea. | ||
| You know, if you want to march in the street, that's totally fine. | ||
| I'm still of the mind that I can't think of a single right that a man has in the United States that a woman doesn't. | ||
| March away, if that's what makes you happy. | ||
| But the joke wouldn't have worked if not for that day. | ||
| If I just said that, everyone would be like, what the hell are you talking about? | ||
| Yeah, a couple people would have got on it, and that would have been that. | ||
| This is interesting. | ||
| Colin, does this experience change your view of Milo, Trump, Gamergate, et cetera, which you weren't big fans of? | ||
| Does it give you a better view of Trump in the media? | ||
| This general theme has pushed me in that way more, because now I see the corruption so obviously. | ||
| When I saw that International Business Times thing, it was like, holy shit, I knew 100% what the truth was, and it had nothing to do with that headline, and that is a theme with all of these things. | ||
| Yeah, and you and I discussed it a little bit privately too, in the sense that my stance is, Do I understand Trump more? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I also think that Trump brought it on himself in a way, so my sympathy for him is low. | ||
| But I understand the idea that, well, it's a boy who cried wolf in a reverse situation. | ||
| We talk about the boy who cried wolf, it's like fascism, fascism, fascism. | ||
| What if fascism really comes to America? | ||
| No one's going to listen. | ||
| It's the same Nazi, Nazi, Nazi, Romney's a Nazi, McCain's a Nazi, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| There's that. | ||
| But Trump lies over and over again and then expects to be taken seriously, and so it's a little bit of a different story. | ||
| But I sympathize with that because he has no effective way to tell his message, but he kind of brought that upon himself. | ||
| Milo, Milo Yiannopoulos, I don't know personally, but I've watched a lot of his things. | ||
| I agree with some of the things he says. | ||
| He's, you know, he's right about some of the things he says, but I don't... | ||
| I don't like mean-spiritedness. | ||
| That's just not who I am. | ||
| If that's your message and that's the way you want to do it, if you want to be what he would call himself as a provocateur, that's not who I am. | ||
| So the way the message is delivered matters to me. | ||
| I've always thought he had some interesting things to say. | ||
| I disagree vehemently with other things he says. | ||
| But I don't like the delivery in that sense. | ||
| Gamergate, I watched happen in my own industry as it was raging. | ||
| Again, it goes back to mean-spiritedness. | ||
| It goes back to character assassinations and making things very personal. | ||
| The message to me is lost. | ||
| Your message is lost when that's your tactic. | ||
| It just doesn't resonate with me. | ||
| So it doesn't matter what people feel like GamerGate was about. | ||
| And I've said it before on your show, both sides. | ||
| It's not one side or the other. | ||
| I hate both extremes. | ||
| In every situation, there's no need for that. | ||
| These people aren't revolutionaries. | ||
| We're talking about feminism, we're talking about video games. | ||
| The one thing that got me with GamerGate that I thought was annoying was this idea that there's collusion and it's not true. | ||
| I was the senior editor of the biggest video game website in the world. | ||
| If people were getting bought off for reviews and stuff like that, I'd know. | ||
| And I'm telling you right now, that doesn't happen. | ||
| The biggest thing that happened that I know of when I was in the industry was the thing with Jeff Gerstmann, who used to work at GameSpot, when he was fired for giving a bad review. | ||
| It wasn't even that someone asked him to give a review, the marketers or the salespeople there had a conflict of interest with all this kind of stuff and they fired him. | ||
| And that was terrible and that's wrong. | ||
| But, you know, in defense of the journalists out there and the people that are doing this work, I can't speak for everyone, but I can speak for the biggest gaming website in the world, it didn't happen. | ||
| I was in Nintendo Power Magazine in about 1989 or so, because I beat Adventure of Link, which we talked about a couple weeks ago, and I got the game very early somehow, it was like accidentally sold at a store near my grandma's, and I beat it before most people even had it. | ||
| My brother and I took a picture and we made it to Nintendo Power Magazine. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| You have it still? | ||
| It's in the other room. | ||
| That's awesome, I love that. | ||
| It's in the other room. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| All right, so here's what we're gonna do. | ||
| I know we could do this clearly all day. | ||
| We could literally sit here for 24 straight hours and people would keep doing this and keep asking us things, and even if they weren't, we could figure out things to talk about. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Let's say we'll do this for another 15 minutes. | ||
| Sure, whatever you want. | ||
| We'll go 15 minutes, so if you guys wanna jump in on the Super Chat for about 15 minutes more, then we'll wrap it up. | ||
| We got lives outside of this, too, right? | ||
| Yeah, I've occupied enough of your time, I apologize. | ||
| No, no, that's... | ||
| All right. | ||
| What motivates lynching? | ||
| What motivates public figure sacrifices? | ||
| What ideas do they want to crucify? | ||
| Why is this sacrificial behavior occurring in our modern society? | ||
| I mean, I think we've been sort of discussing this, that if you don't have ideas, if you don't have really good ideas, the best way to beat your intellectual enemies is to just destroy them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think that, you know, the evolution when, you know, we use the term witch hunt. | ||
| It's not really like the witch hunting that was going on in the 17th and 18th centuries in Salem, for instance, in the sense that that was all propagated by not understanding, by fear, by othering someone. | ||
| There's overlap there. | ||
| There probably are a couple people who want to put you on a stick and dip you in the water. | ||
| Oh yeah, for sure. | ||
| Oh yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Drown them. | ||
| Today, I feel like it's a scary mod mentality that is driven largely by anonymity, I can never say that word, largely driven by this need to be right, and driven by a level of mean-spiritedness. | ||
| To be able to do this to someone, to be able to go after someone to the level that people have gone after me, to be able to go after someone the way they go after others, you have to have a level of mean-spiritedness in you. | ||
| I don't know that I'd be able to do it, to be perfectly honest. | ||
| Unless someone was so beyond the pale, I don't know that I'd be able to dogpile to the extent where I would look at someone being fired, for instance, as a victory. | ||
| A good example, I can't remember the gentleman's name. | ||
| He was one of the founders of Firefox, Mozilla. | ||
| Oh, right, right, right. | ||
| And he had the audacity It's fucking audacity to donate money to a pro-traditional marriage cause. | ||
| Now, I don't believe in that cause. | ||
| Yeah, it wasn't a lot of money. | ||
| No, it wasn't. | ||
| It was like 250 bucks I think or something. | ||
| But the audaciousness of being able to do that, oh no. | ||
| But if you talk to people there, like he hired gay people, he had a very diverse staff, there's no case of him ever treating anyone with disrespect. | ||
| They fucking destroyed him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I look at that and I'm like, Jesus, God, why? | ||
| What did that man do? | ||
| I know people that are pro-traditional marriage. | ||
| They don't necessarily hate gay people because of that. | ||
| They might be religious, they might do all those kinds of things. | ||
| I look at that, when I see things like this, I'm like, how can you live in a world where you don't know anyone that voted for Trump? | ||
| How can you live in a world where you don't love someone that voted for Trump? | ||
| How can you live in a world where you don't know anybody That's against gay marriage. | ||
| That you don't know anyone that is pro-life. | ||
| That you don't know... It's like, get a goddamn grip, dude. | ||
| You know, like, these people... And these are the supposed tolerant people. | ||
| Yeah, these are the very tolerant people. | ||
| Meanwhile, this person over here is just like, I'm pro-life. | ||
| And that's my stance. | ||
| And I'm like, I respect that stance. | ||
| I've always called the pro-life argument a 60-40 thing. | ||
| I'm pro-choice, but it's a 60-40 argument. | ||
| I'm like, very tough. | ||
| Very tough. | ||
| But as I said, I was only pro-choice when I had conversations in college that changed my mind. | ||
| Which is why you need to explore this. | ||
| I was vehemently pro-life until I was not. | ||
| And I was reflected, and I'm like, I was wrong. | ||
| I see the other side. | ||
| And so this level of mean-spiritedness, this orthodoxy that people are obsessed with, that's what I was talking about at the top, Dave, where I was saying, we actually align 90% of the way. | ||
| Why do you hate me? | ||
| What did I do? | ||
| Because I believe in low taxes? | ||
| Or a small government? | ||
| Har! | ||
| What do you think about just the getting off on it? | ||
| That's what I think. | ||
| Even more than the ideological part of it. | ||
| Like people trying to beat you ideologically. | ||
| They can't beat you ideologically, so they just say these mean things. | ||
| But that there's some other piece of it. | ||
| That the people that are the true trolls, that the second you post a video, automatically comment something horrible and upvote all horrible things. | ||
| And fight with everybody and all that. | ||
| It has nothing to do with even the politics of it or the ideology. | ||
| It's just this personal sort of like, I'm getting off on just destroying shit. | ||
| Yeah, and it goes back to your point, too, about there has to be a level of cognitive dissonance there in the sense that you don't think that this cannon can be turned on you. | ||
| You better be very fucking careful. | ||
| That's why I don't participate in witch hunts, because I didn't want to become a victim of one, and it didn't matter anyway. | ||
| Let's see, Dave, first off, love the show, and your commentary is always insightful, thank you. | ||
| Both sides have truth in their arguments, and how possible is it to really reach that shared truth? | ||
| Why are moderates on both sides not working together? | ||
| Well, I mean, we've been talking about this the whole time, but I think moderates are, and I think we just have to consistently show that you can sit down with people that you disagree with. | ||
| I've had many people in that chair, in my own home, where this studio is, who are not for gay marriage. | ||
| When I had Bishop Barron on, who obviously from the Archdiocese of LA. | ||
| Come in here and he's not for gay marriage. | ||
| I didn't feel the need. | ||
| Did I really think I was gonna get by the end of it? | ||
| I could convince this bishop to announce on air and have a mea culpa. | ||
| You know what, I'm for gay marriage. | ||
| Of course not, but you have your beliefs. | ||
| I don't like them, but I let people hear what he had to say. | ||
| And isn't it interesting to, I thought that interview was fascinating. | ||
| I thought he was a really interesting man. | ||
| I actually read it and I was like, that was a very interesting conversation because isn't it interesting to see the principles of another person? | ||
| And understand how they might have approached that. | ||
| And I don't agree with his reasoning like you, but I thought it was interesting. | ||
| I never heard even some of the arguments he was saying. | ||
| I was like, well that's revelatory to me. | ||
| I had no idea. | ||
| So now when I go to the next conversation about it, I'm equipped with a different way of looking at things that might allow me to disassemble the idea a little bit further. | ||
| These people would never even expose themselves to that kind of idea. | ||
| And he didn't seem like a bad man either. | ||
| No, and that's the irony. | ||
| He actually got a lot of shit for coming on the show because at one point I got him to say something to the effect that his head and his heart aren't at quite the same place, which a lot of people, more conservative people than him, took as, oh, he might be for gay marriage, and then he was getting crucified, no pun intended. | ||
| That was terrible. | ||
| He was getting crucified in Christian blogs as saying that he was for gay marriage or something. | ||
| And then he had to issue a statement after that. | ||
| And then at the same time, I was getting attacked by people on the other side, the extremists on the other side, saying, how could you sit with him? | ||
| How come you didn't lambast him and blah, blah, blah? | ||
| And it's like, man, you guys, it's that horseshoe thing. | ||
| You guys are actually the same. | ||
| And think about it, just real quick, I'm sorry to interrupt, but think about it in this way, because the horseshoe, for people that don't know, the idea of you get so far to the extreme that you become what you hate. | ||
| Which is a political one-on-one idea that is indisputable. | ||
| But the, I really believe, and this is what I touched on before, I really believe that people are fucking over it. | ||
| That it's really, that we are at this massive inflection point. | ||
| We've had third party candidates in the past that have had varying success, right? | ||
| Teddy Roosevelt ran bull moose against Taft and Wilson in 1912 and ruined, and that's why we got Wilson, but he had a lot of vote. | ||
| You know, Perot, obviously all these people. | ||
| But we're going to get a middle-of-the-road candidate that is going to start peeling away votes from these parties to such a degree that it is going to become the new normal. | ||
| And that the far-regressive left, which I find a complete embarrassment, and this alt-right kind of movement, which is also an embarrassment in its own way, need to be cast aside so people, you know, normal conservatives Liberals. | ||
| Moderates. | ||
| Lots of common ground. | ||
| Lots and lots of it. | ||
| But we have to get rid of these elements that make it seem like it's not... It's the same way with the alt-right. | ||
| That the poor ball had, what, 200 people at it? | ||
| There are 4,000 people in the KKK? | ||
| But the media keeps making it sound like there's tons of them because they need this imaginary enemy. | ||
| So when Hillary did that thing talking about Breitbart and quoting Milo articles, titles of Milo things, and talking about deplorables, she strengthened them. | ||
| As opposed to just saying what you believe, you actually strengthen the very people that you're supposed to be against. | ||
| Yeah, it's strange and it's just so bizarre. | ||
| The system's already eating itself and I really do believe a Mark Cuban or a Mark Zuckerberg or someone... What about a Colin Moriarty? | ||
| I mean, what about a Ruben Moriarty or Moriarty-Rubin 2020? | ||
| I mean, it's a lot of work. | ||
| It's a lot of work. | ||
| I'm just getting into the video games again. | ||
| Yeah, the other thing is we don't bring regional balance, which is a huge problem on the ticket. | ||
| We're both from literally the same part of the same state. | ||
| We would kill it in Nassau and Suffolk, that's for sure. | ||
| Colin, your voice is invaluable. | ||
| I'm watching this instead of Colin and Greg live. | ||
| How public do you think you'll be moving forward, and how important do you feel it is to be public with your stances? | ||
| Yeah, I'll be very public, and you have not heard the last of me, and I hope that I can count on you guys to support me. | ||
| It is going to be very soon. | ||
| Colin, just curious, have you ever read any Austrian economists, Moses Hayek, Rothbard, etc.? | ||
| Yeah, not deeply. | ||
| I'm fascinated by economics and I have my own economic theories, but in terms of political theory, wonkishness as it were, or policy, I've never fallen super far down the economic pit. | ||
| It goes back to the idea that I have a lot to learn there. | ||
| And I think I take a lot from that school and others in the sense that, like, people are confused about, like, how can you call yourself a free marketeer but also a protectionist? | ||
| And I'm like, well, I believe in free domestic markets. | ||
| But I also think that if you're going to have an inflated currency and trade things and there's an imbalance, that that should be protected. | ||
| That protects our free market, you know? | ||
| Like, not the global free market. | ||
| I don't believe in this massive globalization. | ||
| So I also believe in the idea that no one really understands the economy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So there's been a couple themes here, and it's mostly related to, obviously, free speech and people figuring out the middle thing, and also, you know, what can they do? | ||
| They feel silenced, and how can they get, I guess, the balls to kind of do what you're doing in their own life. | ||
| But the other one that a lot of people ask about one way or another is just what is your relationship with the kind of funny guys right now? | ||
| And I think you kind of hinted at it, but if you just want to explain. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, you know, we'll always be friends. | ||
| I mean, we have significant disagreements, and I don't want to get into the behind-the-scenes things of what happened and all that. | ||
| I don't think that's my story to tell alone. | ||
| Maybe if they want to tell that story with me one day, we will. | ||
| I'd be happy to have everybody right here, and I'll even get out of the way if you just want to. | ||
| Well, you don't need my studio. | ||
| If they want to do it on, you know, neutral ground or whatever. | ||
| I'll say this. | ||
| I want them to succeed, and I don't want to be a distraction to them anymore. | ||
| I wish them the very best. | ||
| I'll keep the personal things between us. | ||
| And I've known them too long, specifically Nick and Greg, who I've known for ten years. | ||
| I mean, I've known these guys, those two guys, for a very, very long time. | ||
| I would never want them to fail. | ||
| And I would never want them to not find what they're looking for as well. | ||
| And that was part of the reason why I resigned. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| This is good because it gets to another Long Islander. | ||
| Colin, you've recently discussed watching and listening to Howard Stern. | ||
| Has Howard affected you the way you view free speech on the radio or otherwise? | ||
| Real quick, you know I was a former Sirius XM guy and I would see him occasionally and unfortunately we've never met and I would love to get on the show but I am such a huge admirer of his and he is Everything that's right about free speech and being able to say crazy shit. | ||
| And did you know that during the election that people were demanding that he release tapes of Trump? | ||
| And he said, I'm not going to do it because he came on my show within the scope of what the show is to have fun and say crazy things. | ||
| And all I would be doing, I'd be throwing myself under the bus. | ||
| And all future guests. | ||
| It's about giving an inch. | ||
| I respected that so much, Dave. | ||
| And they did fine some things, but I respected that so much because it's like, yeah, he can make a big deal about it. | ||
| And he didn't support their personal friends. | ||
| He was a huge Clinton supporter. | ||
| I'll answer this. | ||
| First of all, the pride of Roosevelt, Long Island, that's where he comes from. | ||
| Howard Stern is a Long Islander like us, and we love him for that, because we stick together, just like Jerry Seinfeld and all the others. | ||
| But he, I've always liked him. | ||
| My old roommate, Scott, was a huge Howard Stern fan. | ||
| I used to watch him on E! | ||
| sometimes when I was a kid, and I, you know, tangentially, you know, he's a funny guy, and Robin, and all, you know. | ||
| He had Howard TV in every day during dinner. | ||
| When we'd get home, we'd watch it together, and I was like, this guy's fucking awesome. | ||
| This is so funny. | ||
| It's so inappropriate. | ||
| It's so over the top. | ||
| You know? | ||
| He might have once said a thing about a woman and talking, and my God, how did they not kick him off? | ||
| I know, I mean, like the thing, and you know, my girlfriend and I, in the last couple of months, have fallen down the rabbit hole. | ||
| I mean, we watch hours, sometimes a day, of Howard Stern, just on YouTube, just anything we can find, because he's such a great inspiration. | ||
| He shows why you need people like him. | ||
| You need to have a guy that's willing to cross the line so significantly that you know where the line is. | ||
| And that also, he's not doing it with disrespect, I don't think, either. | ||
| I think he's doing it just to be funny, to just see what he can get away with. | ||
| He's such a fascinating man and such an important figure in that way. | ||
| And so, yes, he has inspired me and influenced me to a massive degree. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I suspect you'll be on, Howard Stern. | ||
| And I said to you last night, I have a feeling you're also going to get on real time. | ||
| with Bill Maher. | ||
| Before I do, and you're probably the only person that I would be okay if that happens | ||
| before I get on there. | ||
| Look, we could do this the rest of the day and people would keep asking questions and all that stuff. | ||
| But I think that we did something real here. | ||
| We're gonna figure out other ways to collaborate. | ||
| You're gonna have several announcements really soon that are gonna, I think, be huge. | ||
| And I'm glad we're in the loop. | ||
| Yeah, I owe you, you know. | ||
| You owe me nothing. | ||
| You owe me nothing. | ||
| I know you get so tired of it. | ||
| You brought two big bottles of bourbon. | ||
| I did, I brought some bourbon for you, and my girlfriend brought you a nice candle that the TSA had molested before they let it go through. | ||
| Apparently the candle you brought could have been construed as a bomb. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Turns out not a bomb. | ||
| I even lit it to check. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, and I warned you against lighting the bomb, but you did it anyway. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You, Mira, David. | ||
| You have been so good to me, and you have a lifelong ally. | ||
| I will always have your back, Dave Rubin. | ||
| So thank you so much for what you've done for me, and I will continue to support you in any way I can. | ||
| You tell me you need me down here, I'm here like that. | ||
| I have a little yard work. | ||
| Yeah, I'll weed-whack and do all that. | ||
| I was a landscaper in college. | ||
| Oh, there you go. | ||
| But you have earned in me the utmost loyalty and no one will ever besmirch you in front of me | ||
| and get away with it. | ||
| Well, I appreciate that. | ||
| I feel the same way. | ||
| You put your neck out there. | ||
| I need allies, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like this is also self-preservation. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You're doing something that you believe in, that you're passionate about, that is real. | ||
| And at the same time, it also serves what I think is the greater good, ironically, | ||
| By serving yourself, by being an individual, you're actually serving the greater good, which that's how it's supposed to be. | ||
| And this is just the beginning for us. | ||
| So anyway, Colin's gonna have all sorts of announcements. | ||
| I will promote the hell out of them. | ||
| I'll do a little video on them here, and we'll do stuff on Facebook and YouTube and all that good stuff, and we will continue. | ||
| Thank you guys for joining us for this. | ||
| You wanna say anything directly to the people, or did we? | ||
| Sure, I just wanna thank everybody Yeah. | ||
| Thank you so much for your kind words. | ||
| Thousands and thousands and thousands of you have reached out to me in support. | ||
| I hope I can count on you to support me on what's next. | ||
| And keep up the good fight. | ||
| Like you said, it's an army of individuals and we'll fight this collectivist, destructive, mean-spiritedness one person at a time. | ||
| And so I thank all of you out there. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| On that note, we did this without even having breakfast and it's past lunchtime, so let's get some food. | ||
| Absolutely. |
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