June 20, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:54:22
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unidentified
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All right, people, we're live on the YouTube. | |
| I am here with, now three times, returning champion to the Rubin Report, Tim Poole. | ||
| Tim, what's going on? | ||
| A lot, I guess. | ||
| A whole lot. | ||
| There is a lot going on. | ||
| You are a journalist. | ||
| A man in a beanie. | ||
| What else? | ||
| What else are you for the people who have no idea who you are? | ||
| Technologist. | ||
| I did some early pioneering work with drone technology and live news. | ||
| Me and my buddies did the first live broadcast of a news report via drone. | ||
| I helped set up some of the drone test locations. | ||
| So, hacker, journalist, traveler, weird, just jack of all trades, I guess. | ||
| Guy doing stuff, basically. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I think we sort of crossed paths about a year ago, was the first time I had you on, roughly a year ago. | ||
| You were in Milwaukee during the riots over there, and I had seen a video that you did where you said it was basically the most violent or sort of the scariest place that you had ever been doing live reporting from, and you've been around, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh yeah, yeah. | |
| Give me some of the places that you've been to. | ||
| Egypt, Ukraine, Venezuela. | ||
| I feel like those are the hotspots. | ||
| I've been to Ferguson, Baltimore, a lot of domestic stuff. | ||
| Thailand, Thailand was really scary. | ||
| The thing about Milwaukee was that, I don't know if scary is the right word, but disconcerting maybe. | ||
| You felt genuinely threatened, right? | ||
| I mean, you left because you felt that this thing was veering out of control. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I watched, I stood next to an 18-year-old white kid who got shot in the neck. | ||
| Because he wasn't even in the protest, he was walking by, and these people were screaming like, you know, F you white boy, and things like that. | ||
| And I'm like, I'm mixed race, I'm like Korean. | ||
| But it's just about perception. | ||
| Do you hold up a sign going, guy's not fully white? | ||
| Yeah, but it's weird because if I agree with the argument of the far left, they won't call me white. | ||
| They'll call me mixed. | ||
| And if I question their opinion, not even disagree, they'll say I'm just a white guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look, in Thailand, they're actually throwing grenades at people and shooting people. | ||
| And there's a kind of constant alertness that you have when you're like, at any moment, I gotta pay attention to someone chucking a grenade in our direction. | ||
| But that's random. | ||
| In Milwaukee, there's these videos where they're screaming, get the white people. | ||
| I hear a gunshot go off. | ||
| And then sure enough, there's this kid who's not even part of the protest. | ||
| He just was a few blocks away walking by and he's holding his neck. | ||
| And then I watch all these cops come in with their guns drawn and do some like SWAT team extraction where they had to pull him out, bring him to an armored vehicle. | ||
| And then I was like, this is getting crazy. | ||
| This is nuts. | ||
| So that's the thing. | ||
| It wasn't even the specifics of what was going on there that I thought was interesting, but when I saw, although obviously there was interesting things happening, it was that you did this video on why you left, and it seemed like that should have been a story, that reporters and journalists were under threat, were seen crazy, but nobody covered that. | ||
| Nobody covered that, and I was like, wait a minute, this guy actually is doing something different. | ||
| It was the conservatives who covered it. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| When I say nobody, I'm talking about mainstream stuff that really bubbles up. | ||
| It's the most frustrating thing. | ||
| When I went to Sweden just this past few months, initially the coverage was favorable to Sweden, that I wasn't seeing these crime-ridden neighborhoods. | ||
| And yeah, a bunch of outlets, left-leaning and sort of digital mainstream outlets, reported it, saying Tim Pool's trip has shown us X, Y, and Z. I had praise from a lot of progressives and left saying like, ha ha, Tim has proven the right wrong. | ||
| But then the inverse happened when I encountered some conflict in the Rinkabee neighborhood | ||
| and got escorted out. | ||
| Then the conservatives jumped out like, ah, it's happening. | ||
| And the liberals, not the liberals, but the progressive left just was totally silent. | ||
| So it's whatever fits the agenda, I suppose. | ||
| Yeah, so that I think probably encompasses most of what we're gonna talk about for the next hour | ||
| and then we're gonna do a Q&A after that. | ||
| It seems to me that everything is breaking down right now, in terms of how we get news, how we're treating each other. | ||
| It does seem worse, even in the last month, I think it's somehow gotten worse, and it's been the endless bickering, just picking the sides, the whole thing that everybody knows about. | ||
| And you're kinda right in the thick of it, because you consider yourself sort of center-left and... I took a test. | ||
| You took the test. | ||
| I took the compass test. | ||
| You took the political compass test. | ||
| Yeah, I'm center-left. | ||
| I'm center-left libertarian. | ||
| Yeah, but somehow you're also an alt-right white supremacist maniac, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| I've been called Nazi sympathizer, I've been called white supremacist, and I have a Korean mom. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So as a guy that was in mainstream, I know we've talked about some of this before, but as a guy that was in mainstream, you worked at Fusion, you worked at Vice. | ||
| I mean, can we consider that mainstream at this point? | ||
| Fusion, absolutely. | ||
| I had an ABC News ID card with a big Disney logo on it. | ||
| I actually did some reporting for ABC News. | ||
| I don't even know how it worked, but I was working with ABC out of the ABC building. | ||
| So you come from some level of traditional media. | ||
| You saw some pretty rotten stuff going on there in terms of ideology, right? | ||
| At Fusion? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's just review that real quick because I think it's important. | ||
| I mean, I think it all has to do with business, right? | ||
| So I did a video on Sargon of Akkad's channel, which, you know, he's going to be here later. | ||
| Sargon will be here later. | ||
| Where people always ask me about propaganda, manipulation, and I'm like, look, the reality is that a lot of these companies are trying to figure out how to survive and what are people interested in. | ||
| They're businesses that want to make a product. | ||
| And so at Fusion, when I was negotiating with them when I first started, they were telling me how they wanted to be like Vice. | ||
| Oh, we want to be like Vice. | ||
| We want to do this cool, edgy, new stuff, and that's why we need you. | ||
| And I'm like, you got it. | ||
| And then six, seven months later, they were like, you know what? | ||
| I think this is not going to work, and let's start doing social justice, you know, far-left progressive stuff. | ||
| And that's when it started to just go off the rails, you know, in my opinion. | ||
| Is there an actual sit-down where they're like, this is what we're doing now? | ||
| Is it that specific, or do you just kinda get hints that this is the stuff they're gonna want you to produce? | ||
| Well, they moved some people around. | ||
| Some people who, I don't wanna call anybody out, but they had Twitter banner photos saying things like, down with whiteness, and they gained positions of power, and then it culminated to where I actually had a meeting with the president, and he said, look, We're here to side with the audience, and the audience is progressive. | ||
| I had numerous meetings saying, look, yes, there are a large group of progressive young people, but you will literally cut your market in half if you just target one small group, and your company can't survive off of trying to cater, trying to pander to one political ideology. | ||
| And they were convinced. | ||
| The market research tells us that young people are progressive and that's what we're going to do so we can stay relevant. | ||
| And what happens? | ||
| They lay off everybody. | ||
| Yeah, I won't get into too much of what happened. | ||
| It's so interesting though because I had Jason Whitlock here a couple of weeks ago from Fox Sports 1 and we were talking about how ESPN is crumbling and he totally linked it to them Going down the SJW route of just talking about all of these things and dividing people amongst color and sexuality and all that stuff, instead of going to their core brand proposition, which I'm pretty sure is sports. | ||
| Or at least used to be sports. | ||
| The way I see it is the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and so you've got a lot of really loud activists on the left. | ||
| This is socially acceptable to be a far-left progressive. | ||
| You can literally write an article saying Trump should be executed. | ||
| And people are like, oh, okay, I'll read that. | ||
| And that's crazy fringe, you know, the whole punch a Nazi thing. | ||
| It's so anti-American. | ||
| I don't know, it's a weird thing for me to say, being like, I grew up as an anarchist punk rocker. | ||
| Now look what they're doing to you. | ||
| But free speech is so important to a free society. | ||
| And then you actually get the far, far left saying punch a Nazi. | ||
| There's propaganda banners made by the anti-fascists where it shows a Nazi and then on a smaller picture is the same photo but wearing a Trump hat with a knife to his throat. | ||
| These are the things that they're spreading around and that's socially acceptable. | ||
| There's pretty much nothing that's off limits right now, right? | ||
| You could do anything you want, really. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I think that because, you know, for whatever reason, when a conservative comes out and says, hey man, you can't put on a play where Trump is getting assassinated, then everyone goes, oh, come on, oh, you know. | ||
| When, for whatever reason, the media, I guess, because they are, they tend to be left, most of these companies are in big cities, tend to agree with the left, and then dismisses the conservative or even the alternative media viewpoint, it just encourages more and more of this behavior. | ||
| The more they do it, the more it happens. | ||
| Yeah, is the irony of all this that it pushes people to people like you, to people like me, to people that are in the loop with us. | ||
| Like, I would prefer to be living in a more stable society where the things that I care about are sort of in action more, and then if I was more irrelevant or had to find another gig, I would go do it gladly. | ||
| I really would. | ||
| I would rather be in that society. | ||
| But we're not in that society. | ||
| So then it pushes people to us. | ||
| So there is like an odd dichotomy there. | ||
| You know, after I left Fusion and I started talking to a bunch of companies and found that most of the digital media companies are pushing this social justice... I'll say this too, I'm not against social justice, right? | ||
| I did a documentary... What would you define social justice as? | ||
| There are legitimate issues in society that should be dealt with, I guess. | ||
| I think racism is a real problem. | ||
| I think sexism is a real problem. | ||
| I think homophobia, transphobia, these are all real things. | ||
| But then When you know me, who's like, I'm closer to the middle, I look at it like, yes, these problems exist, and let's take a reasonable approach to how we solve them and talk about them. | ||
| But to the far, far left, the intersectional feminists, I'm far right, I'm like a white supremacist. | ||
| So even though I acknowledge that these problems are real, maybe not to the severity that a lot of these people say, it's not good enough. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, that's the thing. | ||
| Of course I acknowledge that racism exists. | ||
| Some people don't like gay people. | ||
| Some people don't like trans people. | ||
| Some people don't like Muslims. | ||
| Some people don't like Jews. | ||
| Some people don't like half white, half Korean people. | ||
| I mean, of course, like just because of those words people don't like. | ||
| And so of course those things exist. | ||
| But what I'm finding particularly odd is, so in all your travels, have you found a place that is sort of better as a whole, that's more mixed and still better than what America is. | ||
| Like, that's what I think was happening here. | ||
| They're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. | ||
| Oh, I'm pretty sure everywhere I've been has been worse. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So is there anything even close, actually, when you really think of the richness of America and all the people coming here in the melting pot and the generations of people of every walk of life, literally from every country on Earth? | ||
| It's relativity. | ||
| You know, when you go, it's really funny, like Gavin McInnes was talking about, he did this video where he was arguing with this progressive woman, it was kind of like an ambush, where she talked about how the Scandinavian countries are doing so well, and Gavin goes, those countries are more white than America! | ||
| And so people often like to use the Scandinavian countries as good examples of, and I disagree, I'm like, the things I've heard from even white people in Sweden are that there's a cultural divide. | ||
| When they come to the U.S. | ||
| and you actually have loud progressive voices who can, I don't wanna name this guy, but he goes on Twitter, literally calls everyone a white supremacist. | ||
| I can think of several people. | ||
| Oh yeah, yeah. | ||
| This guy's well-known, and he calls black women, you know, wenches, and says they're like, you know, just these horrible racist things, and it's okay. | ||
| And I'm like, look, if you can get away with that stuff here, like, I definitely think we have problems with racism, especially within, like, the structure of real estate and the economy, for sure, but certainly we're, like, one of the most progressive places that I've ever been, if the most. | ||
| Right, that's the thing. | ||
| I mean, I think they believe we can have some sort of magical utopia that everyone will be exactly equal, which, of course, the real problem is that that creates any diversity of thought is going to have to be quashed, hence the people that don't like us. | ||
| Is it too late, do you think, for the mainstream media to make a comeback on this? | ||
| Because I'm 50-50 on this. | ||
| On one hand, I'm enjoying watching them crumble. | ||
| They've done such shit. | ||
| CNN has done such a shitty job on so many fronts, even the New York Times lately, with headlines that don't really match what's going on. | ||
| And then forget garbage sites like Mother Jones and the things that are on the right that are the equivalent. | ||
| Putting all of those things aside, I'm enjoying watching it crumble. | ||
| And then on the other hand, If we have nothing that we can all look to and basically be like, these are the basic facts, then we're gonna be in a worse situation we're in now. | ||
| Let me tell you a story. | ||
| Please do. | ||
| The Washington Post wrote an article alleging... I'm gonna guess a lot of anonymous sources here, huh? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| No anonymous sources in this one. | ||
| They allege that Kim.com may have been trying to fabricate an archive of emails to prove the Seth Rich conspiracy. | ||
| That's a bold claim. | ||
| Their evidence? | ||
| Seth Rich's email received a welcome notification from Mega.NZ. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And so I read this article, and I wouldn't say I'm an expert in cybersecurity, but a bunch of my friends are. | ||
| I come from the hacker community, so I'm pretty well-versed. | ||
| And I look at this article. | ||
| Nowhere do they have any evidence that a hacker from New Zealand may have been trying to access this. | ||
| No evidence. | ||
| That Kim.com was trying to do this? | ||
| No evidence. | ||
| Kim.com hasn't been involved in Mega for years. | ||
| And simply because their email account got an email from Mega that was evidence to suggest Kim was trying to fabricate emails to prove the Seth Rich conspiracy. | ||
| That is the craziest conspiracy theory I have ever heard published by the Washington Post. | ||
| I called the reporter on it. | ||
| I literally called him on the phone. | ||
| And I was like, how did this happen? | ||
| You just literally made this up. | ||
| And he removed a bunch of the stuff from the article saying, oh, I didn't know. | ||
| So isn't that? | ||
| So there's a ton of examples of that we could spend the next day sitting here and just talking about all the years that have Anonymous sources and allegedly this and you know, I love these people now that you know It's like the people are now policing it which I think is great so every time one of these bullshit articles comes out Washington Post does a lot of that anonymous sourcing and and people will start screen capturing it | ||
| and highlighting every word that allegedly source, friend, unnamed, all these things. | ||
| And then by the time you get to all of that, you're like, this is literally made up. | ||
| So that is the beauty of the internet, that now the people are police, | ||
| we've given up on them policing themselves, right? | ||
| Well, it's pros and cons. | ||
| We have to. | ||
| We have to police. | ||
| We have to do this stuff. | ||
| The scariest thing to me is that when I've called out some of this journalism, I get responses from big-name journalists saying, Tim, this is journalism 101. | ||
| Like, again, I don't wanna call anybody up, but I have upstairs. | ||
| Meaning that those practices of the anonymous source and the this friend. | ||
| AOA. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so, what I've realized is there's a divide between what is acceptable to the internet community, right, pics or it didn't happen, versus the journalism community, where they say, just trust us. | ||
| Don't trust the fake news, but trust us. | ||
| Right, which I do not trust them. | ||
| I don't trust anybody. | ||
| Right, so they need us to buy into their sort of old school narrative, because Otherwise it crumbles pretty quickly. | ||
| So I guess that's why it's happening right now. | ||
| So what's getting scary to me is that I did a video about Brittany Pettybone, who is, you know, she's one of the Trump-supporting, you know, American nationalists, she calls herself. | ||
| Uh, someone notified me that on her Wikipedia page they were discussing me in the talk section, right? | ||
| So anybody can edit Wikipedia. | ||
| The talk section is where they decide how to make edits. | ||
| And in her article it claimed that she was a contributor to altright.com, which is Richard Spencer's website. | ||
| She told me in two interviews that she was not a contributor there and never was. | ||
| So in the talk section, someone's asking, hey, a video interview she did with Tim Poole says she claims she's never contributed there. | ||
| Should we use this as a reliable source? | ||
| And they said Tim Poole is not a reliable source. | ||
| His content is an opinion. | ||
| And I read this and I'm like, how is an interview that I did with someone telling me outright they've never been a contributor? | ||
| And then you can actually go to the website, altright.com, and see she's never been a contributor. | ||
| How is that not a reliable source? | ||
| When I worked for Vice and Fusion, the work I did was a reliable source. | ||
| And there's literally no difference in the work I'm doing now to the work I was doing then. | ||
| There's no editor who reads my content and then fact checks it. | ||
| Wasn't it? | ||
| Vice, you could kind of say that, I guess, because we had some producers who would go over the script and look at documentary stuff. | ||
| Fusion, I would just, you know, I'd produce, I ran my own team, and that's all acceptable. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because I have a big brand backing me. | ||
| And so I was talking to someone who was working with, who volunteered with Wikimedia, and I said, if I start a brand name and publish under that, you'll consider that a reliable source, but simply because I'm an independent journalist on YouTube, my content is no longer factual. | ||
| What ends up happening is these fake news articles become sources for Wikipedia articles. | ||
| And what ended up happening with Brittany Pettybone is they looked at the citation, claiming she was a contributor at this website. | ||
| Her name wasn't even in the article. | ||
| But that was good enough for Wikipedia, yet my interview was not good enough. | ||
| So what does that tell you about Wikipedia? | ||
| Look, I think a couple of years ago, Wikipedia was providing some sort of value, and I see it now as really it's turned, because of the exact reasons you're talking about. | ||
| There's so much fakeness out there. | ||
| You gave me a very hearty defense, which I thanked you for before, and I'll thank you for again yesterday, over this nonsense that happened with me and Mother Jones, claiming I was basically, in effect, an alt-right extremist. | ||
| But that shit could then get into Wikipedia, And then I have to try to get into my own Wikipedia to defend it or hope that somebody, like it's just all garbage. | ||
| This is exactly why I came to your defense. | ||
| I don't even want to say I came to your defense. | ||
| I came to my defense. | ||
| I believe in rational self-interest. | ||
| If it's all for you, then that's fine with me. | ||
| But, you know, the same thing happened to me just a week or so ago where Look, in 2011, I literally slept at Occupy Wall Street for months. | ||
| If I wasn't in the park, I was at one of the occupier's homes or apartments or a volunteer, and I was just there to experience and learn. | ||
| Like kind of center, center left. | ||
| And so I wasn't really strong on all the political stuff, but I wanted to see what was going on. | ||
| And they call that great journalism. | ||
| My God, Tim, immersion journalism. | ||
| He went on the ground and actually worked with these people. | ||
| And then I go to dinner with Trump supporters, and you've crossed the line. | ||
| That's unethical. | ||
| You're an alt-right shill. | ||
| So this outlet, and again, I don't want to drive any traffic to their site, called me an alt-right journalist, and they put journalist in quotes. | ||
| So I call them, and I get on the phone with one of their editors or something, and I said, I don't know why you put journalist in quotes, is that a dig at me or something? | ||
| And they're like, no, no, no, we assure you it's not. | ||
| I'm like, oh, come on. | ||
| So, okay, so that happens to you, this nonsense happens to me. | ||
| Even, I mentioned on my direct message this morning, last week Forbes called this a conservative talk show, which they actually immediately retracted, and I don't think conservative is a pejorative, but to say this is a conservative talk show, I'm just talking to people, so if they had I guess if they had said this is a classic talk show hosted by a classical liberal, that would be the true definition. | ||
| But just putting these words in to help everybody pre-think what the truth is, I think is dangerous. | ||
| They want to put you in a box so that people immediately make an assumption about what you are before they even watch what you do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what do we do to fight this monster? | ||
| So, you know, I went on the full-on attack. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I unleashed them. | ||
| I shit got tens of thousands of retweets. | ||
| I had all these people attacking. | ||
| And were sick of it. | ||
| I was like, I'm just not going to, this guy that wrote this piece, he was one of the 40 people that the Virginia baseball game shooter followed on Twitter. | ||
| Now we know this guy was a far lefty and clearly had been at least at some level radicalized by some of the things he was reading. | ||
| So when you call me an extremist to the further right of Breitbart, There's an actual implicit danger in there. | ||
| Forgetting that it's not true, putting that aside. | ||
| Did you hear that a Trump supporter was just stabbed nine times the other day here in L.A.? | ||
| I didn't hear that, actually. | ||
| This guy, Tony, who I've actually met and talked with, he's the bodyguard for Baked Alaska. | ||
| Baked Alaska has been controversial, because he's one of the alt-right guys, I suppose. | ||
| This guy, Tony, isn't a public figure or anything, but he was leaving a bar. | ||
| He was driving away and a car rear-ended him. | ||
| This is their story. | ||
| He said that a car rear-ended him, and when he got up to exchange information, they said, you're getting the shank, white boy. | ||
| Stabbed him nine times. | ||
|
unidentified
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Jesus. | |
| He got 12 hours of surgery. | ||
| He's still in UCLA. | ||
| awaiting another surgery, I believe. | ||
| So when an outlet, a news outlet says that I'm an alt-right journalist, | ||
| the alt-right, that's Richard Spencer. | ||
| Those are white nationalists. | ||
| That's dangerous. | ||
| When people are writing about stabbing and punching Nazis, and then you hear some guy, for his political beliefs, | ||
| got rear-ended and then stabbed. | ||
| multiple times, these journalists are creating an extreme danger, especially | ||
| for me, because I have to go on the ground to these places. | ||
| I was just in San Bernardino and one of the anti-Antifa guys, you know, he | ||
| took a swing at me. | ||
| He was trying to take my hat. I don't want to make it seem like he was | ||
| trying to punch me in the face. I have a lot of questions about your hat, by the way. A lot of | ||
| people wanted to know more about the hat. Well, it's like, it's an | ||
| escalation and people getting physical with me. | ||
| In Portland, one guy followed me around for hours, screaming my name and screaming, you know, F.U. | ||
| And then he would prod other people, like, hey, that's Tim Pool, while I'm walking around just trying to film things. | ||
| And he was following my livestream to see where I was at. | ||
| The police wouldn't do anything about it. | ||
| And then later on, I had another guy doing this. | ||
| If you're gonna write an article falsely accusing me of being alt-right, | ||
| and then I have to go to this, they're gonna make it so that I can't do my job anymore. | ||
| I can't report. | ||
| But even beyond that, they're gonna make it so that you can't live anymore. | ||
| I don't mean that someone's gonna come kill you, but I mean, I was even thinking on Friday | ||
| after this thing went down, so a certain amount of people suddenly saw this article | ||
| and now will think Dave Rubin's extremist to the right of right. | ||
| I took a couple flights over the last few days and I was even thinking when I was at the airport, I was like, anybody could have just read this thing, now see me. | ||
| And when they're telling you you're an extremist to the right of right, what they're saying is that, they're saying I'm somehow some evil racist, which is the furthest thing from the truth. | ||
| So they are putting a target on your head for just somebody to come up to me at an airport and just fucking smash a wine glass over my head or whatever it is. | ||
| For associating, for interviewing people. | ||
| By the way, in the article, I mean, I know you know this, but he came up with three interviews of mine he didn't like. | ||
| So it was Cernovich, Milo, and I think Lauren Southern. | ||
| Forgetting all the progressives I've interviewed that most of my interviews have been with people that I think are really liberal to Libertarian, but all that it just doesn't matter because he knows he's all he has public shame now because I destroyed this guy But he knows he's not losing his job because the editor who we included on a zillion of these tweets She's not gonna say anything But here's the thing, you know, to the people who know you, to the people who are friends of the people who know you, you may have, you know, caused some damage for this guy, but the far-left progressives are cheering him on. | ||
| Right, they're cheering. | ||
| They're like, good job, you know, you show Dave. | ||
| So what's your, okay, so you, when these things happen to you, you've tried, you call people, you email people. | ||
| Well, here's a funny thing. | ||
| When this news outlet did this, they apologized to me. | ||
| They said, that wasn't supposed to be in there. | ||
| I'm so sorry. | ||
| We'll remove that. | ||
| We're going to change it to News Producer. | ||
| And I was like, OK. | ||
| And they're like, our editor is adamant about not calling you a journalist. | ||
| Something along those lines. | ||
| You should have been, I'm adamant about your editor not calling himself an editor. | ||
| Yeah, but you know what? | ||
| Honestly, we know what I was thinking. | ||
| I was like, they want to call me a news producer? | ||
| I'm like, I don't have any citations that claim that I'm a producer as well. | ||
| So I'll take it. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I've got an award in journalism. | ||
| I've got accolades from some foundations for my work in journalism. | ||
| But as a media producer and a news producer, yeah, I could use a citation that says that. | ||
| What do you think about the Streisand effect with all this, that by you fighting back, you then amplify them? | ||
| Because I did have, before I went on the assault, I had a one minute debate in my head. | ||
| It was going back and forth real quick, and the angry guy just took over, and I'm glad I did it that way. | ||
| But there's another piece that it's like, these things are always gonna come, and the more you fight them, as you're saying, it shows those people, ah, you see, you can get to them. | ||
| Let's just amplify, let's get more sock puppet accounts attacking. | ||
| This guy gained followers. | ||
| because he's got hate followers now and progressive followers who like him. | ||
| It's a challenge. | ||
| It's the Streisand effect. | ||
| I know feminists who always retweet trolls and I'm like, that's what they're trying to get you to do. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly what they're trying to get you to do. | ||
| But not every situation is the same. | ||
| I think in your case, the reason it was important for you to come out and challenge this article was so that in the future, if there's ever a question about whether or not you are far-right, you have a huge tirade saying, like, I do not stand for this. | ||
| If you let it slide to try and avoid the Streisand effect, they'd be like, well, the article came out, Dave didn't say anything. | ||
| Yeah, and by the way, just to show at every level what a fraud this guy is, he then did tweet at me, not publicly, I don't believe you're further to the right than Breitbart. | ||
| I think that was basically it. | ||
| But his pinned tweet, which is the article that I'm included in, is still talking about the extremists further to the right. | ||
| And at the same time, he's going after my Patreon money, because that's what they're, you know, he linked the whole thing to Patreon is tolerant of these evil people. | ||
| So it's like, you are not a journalist. | ||
| He is not, this is not a journalist. | ||
| This is an activist. | ||
| This is an activist. | ||
| This is what I tweeted while I said, I'm formally requesting that media organizations stop hiring activists and start hiring journalists. | ||
| And it got thousands of retweets. | ||
| No, because I work for these companies. | ||
| I know what they do. | ||
| It's like, I could name, if I were to name every journalist who was actually an activist, I couldn't count them on my hands and my toes. | ||
| There are people who appear on Fox News, who are on these shows, and they have journalists in their title, and you read their stuff, and it's like, either they're willfully ignorant, or they're malicious. | ||
| There's no way that somebody's gonna have 200,000 followers, be following this stuff wholeheartedly, and not know that what they're saying isn't true. | ||
| This guy, come on. | ||
| He knows who you are. | ||
| He put you in front of Cernovich and Baked Alaska and Kyle Chapman, in front of these names, in an article about extremists. | ||
| And I read that, I'm like, you know what really makes me angry about this? | ||
| Is that he can then dance around saying, oh, but I corrected it. | ||
| No, the article is about extremists, and you put Dave in that, and I think you're left of me. | ||
| But he can write in the article, so in the article about me, Oh sure, they were moved alt-right, but they still wrote an article about the far-right going to this restaurant and meeting together and wrote a piece about me trying to hide from the camera, which was not true at all. | ||
| And then put that I was sympathetic to Trump and his supporters and stuff like that. | ||
| I told the guy on the phone, you want to say I'm sympathetic to the Trump supporters at the rallies? | ||
| Just don't forget to mention that I've been sympathetic to Black Lives Matter and to refugees as well. | ||
| Go to my YouTube channel. | ||
| I like that you said before that you didn't do it to defend me. | ||
| It's to defend yourself and I love that because I really believe that's the truth. | ||
| I think we're gonna keep it. | ||
| I like that you said before that you didn't do it to defend me. | ||
| What did you say? | ||
| You didn't do it to defend me. | ||
| You did it to defend. | ||
| I was like, well, it's to defend me. | ||
| It's to defend yourself. | ||
| And I love that because I really believe that's the truth. | ||
| Anyone that defended me, if you're defending me, yeah, I appreciate your defense, | ||
| but I like that you were defending yourself because it's the same monster. | ||
| I've been saying this for years now, the same monster that originally went after Sam Harris | ||
| and said he was a Islamophobe that attacks, has the Southern Poverty Law Center | ||
| saying that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an anti-Muslim extremist. | ||
| The same insane monster is coming for everybody. | ||
| So you could have been like, you know what, fuck Dave Rubin, I don't care about him, but I'm gonna defend myself here. | ||
| Well, you know... It's kind of a beautiful thing, actually. | ||
| You know, the saying is, first they came for the communists. | ||
| I mean, look, this is the third time I've come on your show. | ||
| There's been this weird argument about whether or not left and right means policy anymore. | ||
| Does it mean social justice? | ||
| And now we're looking at simply... Let me stop there. | ||
| Let me say this. | ||
| Why do I interview Trump supporters? | ||
| Well, I want to better understand where their perspective comes from and help really... That's the point of journalism in my opinion. | ||
| So you're saying they're humans? | ||
| They're actually humans? | ||
| I found out that the Trump supporters, they're actually people. | ||
| Yeah, many people thought that they were some kind of demon or crazy monster. | ||
| Well, now I know what the promo is for this episode. | ||
| Yeah, but they're human beings who come from a place that gives them a certain perspective, and if I'm going to either convince them of what I think is right or just even help someone else better understand them, I'm going to go hang out and talk to them and have chicken wings and ask them questions and debate them, and that's too much. | ||
| That's, you know, you're officially one of the monsters now. | ||
| The point is, the only way to really mend the political divide, stop the violence, is to have honest conversations with everybody. | ||
| The media so often attacks people, like now it's attacking you. | ||
| In fact, I did a video with Chris Ragon. | ||
| I interviewed him about this. | ||
| He made a video called Punch a Nazi. | ||
| Yeah, I've seen it, it's great. | ||
| It's great. Yeah, and in it he talks about how if you like the one of the first lines is if you don't constantly | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| criticize The president you're a white supremacist and then sure | ||
| enough just if you know people start calling him a white supremacist | ||
| Yeah, I'm like, I asked him I think you made a video about this and then sure enough they start doing it to you | ||
| Yeah, it's it's like the irony is lost on these people. Do you think at any level they realize what they're actually | ||
| accomplishing? | ||
| So I get it. | ||
| They're getting a certain amount of clicks. | ||
| They're getting this virtue signaling feel. | ||
| They feel really good about what they're doing. | ||
| But do you think they realize the amount of people they're pushing away at the same time? | ||
| Because I see that number massive. | ||
| Look, I know the numbers of what we're doing here. | ||
| I know the amount of emails I get from literally all over the world. | ||
| So do you think they have any sense of what the counter movement that they've started, that I think people haven't quite picked up on yet, but I know it's here? | ||
| I mean, some of these people working there probably figured it out, but I think anybody who's at these big companies and has seen this has moved on already. | ||
| I mean, I worked at Fusion for two years. | ||
| Afterwards I had a bunch of meetings with these digital companies, and after these meetings I decided I can't work for them because I can see what's going to happen in the next several years. | ||
| Sure, there's a possibility that it goes crazy and this progressive stuff just really dominates forever. | ||
| But in my opinion, I think we're on the back end of the bell curve. | ||
| That things are starting to wind down. | ||
| We're starting to see less of this. | ||
| Fusion basically... So does that explain why there's more hysteria then? | ||
| Like the hysteria is getting louder. | ||
| But because we are actually on that other side, do you think that that's? | ||
| Yeah, it's like the volume is decreasing, so to make up for it, they're trying harder and harder. | ||
| And it's like we're kind of, this is my opinion, look, I've argued with people about this, but I think we're starting to become desensitized. | ||
| We're getting to the point where young people are just tired of being called white supremacist, racist, and they're just going, I don't even care anymore, just get away from me, I'm not talking to you. | ||
| So you gotta scream louder to get the same, it's like an addiction. | ||
| You need more heroin to get your high. | ||
| Doesn't that whole episode at Evergreen State, which you were gonna go to, but then you ended up not going to, right? | ||
| It was canceled for another few days, and so I was just like, eh. | ||
| I was in Portland, so. | ||
| Yeah, but doesn't that whole episode show you the true essence of the flaw here in this thinking, which is that this place is the most left, it might be literally the most left progressive campus in America, quite possibly. | ||
| And if they're dealing with all of this evil racism and evil homophobia, what does that say about what they've created there? | ||
| All of their values are there, amplified to the nth degree, and yet they're dealing with this stuff? | ||
| But the point is that they'll take a guy like Brett Weinstein, who they need to find racism, so you find a guy who's anti-racist, and you pin him as a racist. | ||
| It's cannibalism. | ||
| They've been, so many people on the left have been fighting themselves. | ||
| You know what I hear a lot of? | ||
| I tweeted about this. | ||
| A bunch of my lefty friends were like, come on, you can't say that. | ||
| But what I said was, it was during the anti-Sharia stuff that was happening across the country. | ||
| Seeing so many people on the left jump to the defense of a religion was interesting to me. | ||
| Yeah, and their immediate response is, it's about religious freedom. | ||
| And I'm like, just a couple years ago there was a religious freedom bill that you guys were saying was a trick to take away the rights of the LGBT community. | ||
| And I'm not saying it is or isn't, but I'm just looking for some consistency, I suppose. | ||
| I've talked to a lot of people who told me Feminism makes sense. | ||
| Historically, women have been held back. | ||
| Even in most countries today, women are in serious jeopardy. | ||
| There's a lot of countries that are horrifying. | ||
| But then when feminism starts encompassing other ideas, like defending Islam, in my opinion, do your religion, by all means. | ||
| But feminism is a femme, literally means Female, and it's about the rights of women specifically. | ||
| So I've had people tell me that they just sort of lost interest when it started fighting for the rights of religions and other communities that didn't fit with what the problems women are facing were. | ||
| So is that the silver lining here? | ||
| Is that intersectionality, it has to destroy itself. | ||
| I want more people to understand that, that we have to expose it, but it will destroy itself because these groups have competing interests. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Ultimately, like I said, you know, I'm not anti-social justice. | ||
| I'm not anti-feminist. | ||
| I agree with a lot of the things feminists say, with a lot of the stuff the anti-racists say. | ||
| My family's been victims of racism, of racist attacks and things like that. | ||
| But what ends up happening is, if you have a group of people that say, look, my core interest is fighting for the rights of women, then you come to them and say, but you have to fight for the rights of this other group too, they're going to say, I'm not interested in that. | ||
| So it's not about whether or not fighting for the rights of these groups are right or wrong, or what these groups do are right or wrong, simply that trying to create this global alliance of marginalized voices creates competing factions within that group, and then what ends up happening? | ||
| They fight each other, they leave. | ||
| There's a large amount of infighting that goes on amongst a lot of these progressives right now, especially if you look at Lacey Green, who simply came out and said, I want to have a conversation with the anti-feminists to better understand them. | ||
| And what happens? | ||
| Death threats, doxing, they're calling her a fascist. | ||
| You can't come out and even want to have a conversation. | ||
| Yeah, well I was happy to see that Lacey, who I don't even know, she's coming on the show next month, we've talked a little bit, but she came to my public defense and it's like, yeah, in a way it's her defending herself, which is kind of a beautiful thing. | ||
| I'm curious, this is a slight sidebar, but where do you think your commitment to honesty comes from. | ||
| Because people- It's to my own detriment. | ||
| No, I feel the same way. | ||
| Like, look, I tell people what I think. | ||
| I've never pretended to have all the answers. | ||
| I will screw up things. | ||
| There's been episodes where I've made mistakes that we don't edit it out because I want people, | ||
| like I've made some pretty stupid mistakes that we don't edit out because I want people to see | ||
| that I can make mistakes. | ||
| And I've said that the most teachable moment in the three years that we've been doing this is when I had Larry Elder on and I was going on about systemic racism and he challenged me, not denying that racism itself doesn't exist, but he kind of beat me over the head with numbers and facts and it changed how I thought of things. | ||
| We could have edited that out. | ||
| It didn't make me look good as I sat there kind of browbeaten, you know? | ||
| It does make you look good. | ||
| It shows that you're willing to learn and progress and make yourself better. | ||
| Yeah, but why is that so rare these days? | ||
| That's why you now are, I think, the second three-time guest on RubinPort, because I just found you and I was like, wait a minute, this guy seems to care about something true. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I didn't know exactly what, I still don't know fully what all your political, I don't know if you're pro-choice or pro-life or what your feelings are on taxes. | ||
| I'm just anti-authoritarian. | ||
| I grew up with a bunch of anarchists and you know if you have an authoritarian regime you can make a lot of things happen but man life would just sure suck. | ||
| So when it comes to a lot of policy stuff ultimately I'm like well can you force someone to do it? | ||
| Like I'm not cool with I don't subscribe to the belief that people are so stupid you have to tell them how to live their lives. | ||
| I think that the point of life and what works is competing ideas and the best ideas rise to the top. | ||
| So we don't need to say, I'm right, therefore I have the right to bash you over the head with a bike lock and make my ideas right. | ||
| You know, when I go to these rallies, the reason I'm willing to be completely honest and say, here's what happened with the Trump side, here's what happened with the left side, is because I don't care who's right. | ||
| I care what is right. | ||
| If we want to live in the best possible world, then we should find out what is correct and then use that data. | ||
| Honestly, I think it has to do with coming from the hacker community and being kind of a science-oriented person to where, the way I've described this in the past is, Other people call me a journalist. | ||
| I've sort of just used that because people understand it, but what I really try to do is collect as much accurate data as possible so that I can better understand why these things are occurring. | ||
| The best way to do that is to go on the ground, talk to people, collect research, and then come to a determination on how we move forward. | ||
| Unfortunately, a lot of journalists and a lot of other people are ideologically driven. | ||
| They say, I know the world should be this way. | ||
| I'm going to find evidence to back that up. | ||
| It's like these political factions are replacing religion almost. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's so interesting because I don't, people will tweet me and say, you know, Dave, you're one of the few journalists I trust. | ||
| I don't consider myself a journalist. | ||
| I sit in this room and talk to people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I hear what they say. | ||
| Sometimes they say things that I think are nuts, but I let them say it. | ||
| And sometimes they don't. | ||
| I think the best example I can give, I had the, you know, Bishop Barron here from the Archdiocese in LA. | ||
| This guy does not believe in gay marriage because that's what the church thinks. | ||
| And people were, I really challenged him a lot. | ||
| He got a lot of hate from Christian websites because I got him basically to say that his head and his heart don't quite match up. | ||
| I thought that was pretty impressive by letting him talk. | ||
| He eventually got to that place. | ||
| So they were giving him a lot of shit. | ||
| Things that were, you know, Christian conservative were saying, wait, did he just endorse gay marriage? | ||
| But I thought the people that were angry at me were like, well, you sat there with him and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And it's like, Do you think I was gonna get a bishop in here and then by the end of it, he was gonna be like, you know what, here's the frock and, you know, it's over. | ||
| Hold on, let me better, what you're saying is that you had a religious person sit in this chair who was opposed to gay marriage? | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| So you yourself are opposed to gay marriage, that means, right? | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| Yeah, the news articles are gonna start coming out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dave Rubin opposes gay marriage, that'll be in every, you know, Wikipedia. | ||
| Yeah, but this monster It's coming for everybody. | ||
| I mean, that's what my direct message was about this morning. | ||
| If you don't fight it, it will come. | ||
| Whatever you think, whatever you think that is not groupthink, they'll figure out a way to pin you on it. | ||
| I mean, we have more than enough movies about the post-apocalyptic future where ideas are restricted. | ||
| There's one of my favorite movies, Equilibrium. | ||
| Have you ever seen that? | ||
| No. | ||
| All forms of art and emotion have been suppressed. | ||
| And there's people who have paintings hidden underground and they're being killed. | ||
| I mean, Fahrenheit 451. | ||
| I've actually never read it, but there was a bunch of posts about it being about how our society gets so offended, we decide to start self-censoring | ||
| and destroying books because it would offend, oh this one will offend unions, | ||
| this one will offend cat lovers, we can't offend people so let's just destroy it all. That's | ||
| what scares me. | ||
| The homogenization of ideas leads to a very bad place. It's almost like when you look at evolution, | ||
| genetic diversity helps a species survive. | ||
| And if you homogenize all of that, and then, so I'll put it this way, let's say there's like ten political factions, and they're all competing with each other, and they all have an answer to a certain problem that we may or may not face. | ||
| If you get rid of all but one that can't answer the problems in the future, then we're doomed. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| So is the inherent problem that we have, if we take those 10 competing things, they all want to live in very different societies now, right? | ||
| So my belief is, because we live in a pluralistic society of 300 million people, it's like, well, we have a set of laws here. | ||
| We have a constitution. | ||
| We have to live by that. | ||
| We have to. | ||
| It's a pretty damn great document, I think. | ||
| We have to live by that. | ||
| But we have people that actually want to alter that or scrap that. | ||
| So our debate now is not how do we modify laws or how do we grow or shrink government? | ||
| It's like, are we gonna just rip up the whole damn thing? | ||
| Amend it to death, right? | ||
| I'm really impressed with the American system, because I've been around the world, and when I think back, this is my opinion, but I'm like, The founding fathers of the United States had a pretty good idea. | ||
| It's the three branches. | ||
| They're basically three different kinds of government. | ||
| Competing with each other, in a sense, checking each other out. | ||
| And you look at other governments, like just a king, just a despot, just a parliamentary system. | ||
| And we have different systems. | ||
| You know, we have Congress and the Representatives, Senate and Congress, who are like, you know, a council. | ||
| That's the democracy. | ||
| Then you have the President, who's the executive authority, and the Council of Elders, the judicial branch. | ||
| And they all make sure each other doesn't step out of line. | ||
| Then I look at how far we've come, even progressively, in the United States, and I'm like, yeah, this country's done a pretty good job. | ||
| It's got a lot of problems, for sure. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| We're such a young country, too, in the scheme of things, compared to most of our Western European allies. | ||
| We're so young, we've moved so far, and yet people want to just view all the terrible things. | ||
| I think perception is reality, is the saying. | ||
| And when I look at this progressive stuff, when I look at how people hate America, I guess I look at it like, if you were in the civil rights movement, you told your kids this stuff was terrible, and always remember, we need to fight for our civil rights. | ||
| These kids grow up in a world where there's significantly less racism and sexism still exists. | ||
| So they keep fighting it. | ||
| They tell their kids the same thing. | ||
| You need to fight sexism, racism, homophobia. | ||
| But now, the younger generation is growing up in a United States where, although these problems exist, it's significantly less. | ||
| But they're fighting this as hard as the past generations. | ||
| How do you fight a fight when you tell someone that their hairstyle is appropriating someone's culture and they should cut their hair? | ||
| Feminists arguing about video games and things like that instead of, you know, you look over to countries like Saudi Arabia, can't drive, other horrifying things. | ||
| Very equal with video game representation, wouldn't you say? | ||
| Yeah, and I know, like I've had this argument where people say, look, there are different problems to be fought and some people who live here are going to fight the problems here. | ||
| But it's not to say that they shouldn't fight, but it's simply like we've come to a point where what we have to argue about is like video games. | ||
| Pretty good. | ||
| That's pretty sweet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not bad. | ||
| Are there problems? | ||
| Oh, hell yeah. | ||
| That need to be fixed. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| But I kind of think we need to take a point of perspective, like get a better perspective, climb up on a mountain, look down over everything and say, wow, you know, we got problems, but damn, we've done a good job. | ||
| Yeah, so you've mentioned the hacker community a couple times. | ||
| So I'm actually not that familiar with the hacker community, and you've said it kind of framed a little bit of why you care about truth and all that. | ||
| Can you tell me a little bit about that community? | ||
| I mean, so in the hacker world there's three. | ||
| What is a hacker? | ||
| Let's just do like 101 just to say. | ||
| A hacker is someone who makes something do something it was not intended to do. | ||
| That simple. | ||
| So if you took that bottle of water and used it as a paperweight, You are hacking it. | ||
| It's a really crude way to describe it, but the word's sort of been changed by the mainstream, I suppose. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But you end up with a bunch of subsets of that. | ||
| So most people think hackers are computer hackers who are trying to steal your information. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| I think actually most hackers are people who build little robots who will take apart a doorknob and then make a piece of art with it. | ||
| They have hacker spaces all over the world where you pay a membership fee and you can go in and use a bunch of tools. | ||
| And what do you see? | ||
| It's a bunch of hippie dudes who make neon lights for Burning Man. | ||
| But then the computer hackers are in there too. | ||
| A computer hacker is someone who can make a computer do something it wasn't intended to do. | ||
| So within that, another subset is the infosec, information security. | ||
| So I used to program video games. | ||
| I used to do graphic design, websites. | ||
| I still do graphic design and website stuff. | ||
| And I grew up with these people. | ||
| One of the core tenets that is, it's not universal obviously, nothing's absolute, is the freedom of information. | ||
| During, you know, if you look like Kim Dotcom and Mega Upload, there's the Church of Copimism, which is piracy, like sharing digital files, that information should be free. | ||
| You see groups like Wikileaks. | ||
| Julian Assange was the hacker Mendax, who did a bunch, I think, I don't remember what he did, but he hacked NASA or something. | ||
| And now he's, you know, running WikiLeaks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You had Aaron Swartz. | ||
| These people all believe in the freedom of information, and that's something that I believed in, too, is that we want to collect as much information as possible and then share that so that we can all better understand the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I started doing what I do not because I wanted to be a journalist. | ||
| I didn't go to school for this, but because my hacker buddies in LA were doing work in the Arab Spring, and I was, you know, We were sitting down discussing ways we could help the activists get information out because the government's trying to silence them and things like that. | ||
| And we believe that everyone has a right to know what's happening. | ||
| So I said, I'm not going to program anything. | ||
| I'm not going to set up a satellite or anything. | ||
| I can just go on the ground and start taking pictures and sharing that. | ||
| And then I'll go back to the IRC, the hacker chat rooms, and work with my hacker buddies in that way. | ||
| And then the greater public took notice. | ||
| And then all of a sudden I'm a journalist. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So for me, it's not about journalistic ethics or anything like that. | ||
| It's literally about the freedom of information. | ||
| Obviously I'm not a freedom of information absolutist. | ||
| Yeah, well that was my next question. | ||
| Do you think governments have any right to have any secrets? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Not to a great degree, right? | ||
| Because I'm anti-authoritarian. | ||
| I'm very, very, like, if people aren't familiar, the compass, it's like authoritarian, libertarian, left and right. | ||
| And I'm pretty close to the bottom. | ||
| But I think it would be ignorant to be like, you know, there are some things that If your mom said, does this dress make me look gross, | ||
| and you're like, hey mom, you're disgusting. | ||
| So there are some instances where it's important. | ||
| So you're talking about like nuclear codes. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| And having some discretion over secret agents. | ||
| I think we're in a world with competing factions, with competing cultures, and some cultures, | ||
| most cultures don't like each other. | ||
| We're tolerant of each other, but there are some cultures on this planet that are really like, we will kill you. | ||
| And so if we just published all of our secrets, we'd probably die. | ||
| Very bad stuff would happen to us. | ||
| So when I see the argument from the government about, oh, leaking our secrets are bad and all that stuff. | ||
| It depends, really. | ||
| If you look at the instance of Reality Winner, this woman who leaked the Russian hacking, it was actually the suspicions of the NSA. | ||
| I don't think there's any proof, but the NSA is saying they believe this is what happened. | ||
| That's not whistleblowing. | ||
| That's just leaking information. | ||
| Whistleblowing, I'm for. | ||
| If the US government is, say, killing American citizens abroad, which they've done, and someone wants to blow the whistle on that, that's where we get good. | ||
| So what if there are just a cascade of unintended consequences? | ||
| I'm basically with you on whistleblowing. | ||
| I believe we have to know some of these things because the machine has gotten too big and I'm an anti-authoritarian as well. | ||
| But what about the unintended consequences of that, where you could leak something that then could put all sorts of humans at risk? | ||
| You think that's just sort of the complexity of it? | ||
| The main reason why I'm not an activist is that I just don't think I'm smart enough to actually address those problems. So I figured I'm not going to go | ||
| out in the street and wave a flag saying we should have freedom of information absolutism. | ||
| Everything should be 100% open and available to everybody. I'm like, there's probably so | ||
| much I don't know that I think what I'll do is I'll just personally work to do what I can to | ||
| have free information open where I see it. | ||
| And I can do that on the ground, covering big events around the world. | ||
| When it comes to what the governments are doing, I just don't know enough about what the consequences would be. | ||
| It's like imagining a scenario where someone feels, hey, if I shut down this dam, which is causing environmental destruction, I'll save the planet, and then they end up destroying a city or something. | ||
| It's like, I don't want to be the one that pulls that lever. | ||
| Do you think it's kind of odd that at some level you talk about politics a lot? | ||
| Because you don't strike me as particularly political, actually. | ||
| All of this leads to you having to talk about politics. | ||
| But it's not like, again, we can knock it all out if you want, but I really don't know most of your straight-up political beliefs. | ||
| This is what's funny is that... You are right, motherfucker. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| No, I don't tweet about social justice for or against it. | ||
| I just tweet about what's happening. | ||
| Most of the stuff where I'm opinionated is like criticisms of the media. | ||
| And that's basically it. | ||
| So it was crazy because when this news outlet said that I was alt-right, I got on my Twitter and literally my last tweet was like, what's your favorite song? | ||
| And then below that it was like, what's your favorite place to be? | ||
| And then below that was like criticisms of media. | ||
| And I'm like, I don't have, I never talk about Black Lives Matter. | ||
| I never talk about Islam directly. | ||
| I've done like one video recently. | ||
| It's like I'm being forced to address these things. | ||
| But I usually, my opinions on the matter are usually like, I guess I should say this. | ||
| When people ask me like, how do you feel about this issue or that issue? | ||
| How do you feel about Islam? | ||
| How do you feel? | ||
| I'm like, freedom of expression, anti-authority, and ultimately I just don't know. | ||
| So what can I do? | ||
| I can read the data and then show you the data that I found. | ||
| I can go on the ground and talk to people and tell you what they said. | ||
| Right, but through that often, through looking at data, through talking to people, you're often gonna come to the conclusions that are the unpopular ones. | ||
| At least at the moment right now. | ||
| With something like Islam, for example, if you were to look at the data and talk to a lot of the people and just look at pupils, it's gonna get you to come to some conclusions that a lot of people are not gonna be happy with. | ||
| Well, here's the interesting thing. | ||
| What did I learn about Sweden? | ||
| Well, it's not a crime-ridden refugee hellhole like the far right keeps saying, but it's also not a utopia like the left is saying. | ||
| Are refugees causing crime in Sweden? | ||
| Yes, a small minority of them, but the crimes are atrocious. | ||
| They're horrifying sex crimes. | ||
| Are they seeing crimes in certain neighborhoods they call no-go zones? | ||
| Yes, but those are the children of immigrants and that is likely due to failed immigration policies 20 years ago. | ||
| So, Everyone's wrong, everyone's a little right, everyone's a little wrong. | ||
| It's a nuance. | ||
| Sweden is such an interesting example, because I've had several people from Sweden on the show to talk about this, and they've all acknowledged that. | ||
| They were not Islamophobic bigots. | ||
| They were all acknowledging that the integration problems and some of the robust social services that they gave eventually caused these people to be stuck in enclaves. | ||
| So it's like, they weren't blaming this all on religion. | ||
| It doesn't mean there's no religious component, but even trying I can't explain that to people. | ||
| So here's the unpopular opinion. | ||
| Here's what happens. | ||
| When I talk to a conservative, I'll sit down for dinner with Trump supporters and we'll argue this and I'll tell them, look man, when you bring in a bunch of refugees and then you put them in an enclave where they have no access to the actual greater community, they can't speak the language, they can't find work, what are they going to do? | ||
| They're going to start building their own means and it's going to create a system within the system. | ||
| And then these young kids, what's happening in Sweden, these kids are growing up as Swedish citizens, but they're called immigrants by people in Sweden. | ||
| And then when they go back to their home country to see their grandparents, they're called Swedish. | ||
| They don't fit in with either culture. | ||
| So what do they do? | ||
| Well, they can't get jobs because they're not Swedish. | ||
| They're immigrants to the people there. | ||
| What can they do? | ||
| They join gangs, they steal, they just try and figure it out. | ||
| But it makes them resentful of the greater system, makes them disrespectful of it. | ||
| And so, what needs to be said is, are there neighborhoods, and it's not just Sweden, but the U.S. | ||
| has similar issues. | ||
| Are there issues of racism that hold back these communities? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's culturalism, it's racism. | ||
| And at the same time, are these communities committing crime in these areas? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The two things are happening. | ||
| So when you've had those conversations with Trump supporters at dinner, do you think they're a little more amenable to those ideas? | ||
| Because I do see a difference right now. | ||
| I just do, between trying to build the bridge and have sensible conversations with people that are this far left thing, where I think you can break through to some conservatives on that. | ||
| I know it because I've done it right here. | ||
| Here's where I think we sort of lose perspective. | ||
| You familiar with the Overton window? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Explain it for... Basically, the Overton window is like a scale of what's socially acceptable to what's not. | ||
| Right in the middle is what everyone talks about, and the further up or down you go, it gets less and less acceptable. | ||
| Take the political compass. | ||
| And put a two-dimensional Overton window right in the middle of what is socially acceptable. | ||
| And the fringe areas of the compass, they shouldn't be socially acceptable. | ||
| But the overtime window has moved so far to the left that the fringe left, as far as you can go left, is socially acceptable. | ||
| When we talk about Trump supporters being willing to have a conversation, we're talking about center-right to right-wing people who are not fringe extremists that I'm sitting down with. | ||
| I'm not talking about white, like I've talked to white nationalists. | ||
| They are not having conversations. | ||
| Right, but within the way the window has shifted, it makes it sound, when you say Trump supporter, people think that. | ||
| I need to correct that. | ||
| They're having conversations, but they're not moving. | ||
| So I actually spoke with guys, they call themselves race realists, and they flat out said, IQ, race, they're all intertwined, white people, Jewish people, they're so much smarter, Asian people, therefore race is yada yada. | ||
| And I said, I think you're overlooking culture, and they said, you're wrong. | ||
| You're wrong, you're a liberal, you're wrong. | ||
| But at least, you know, they're like, but we'll talk to you about it. | ||
| When you look at the left, I mean, you're left, I'm left, like I'm center left, Even Lacey Green is pretty far left, and she's willing to have conversations and check facts, and I think most people have realized that with the videos she's made recently. | ||
| But when you go to the fringe left, yeah, they're not going to listen. | ||
| They're going to say punch a Nazi. | ||
| So we start to say things like, Except that's not just fringe left, because when that thing happened to Richard Spencer, I saw all sorts of mainstream, verified people on Twitter, celebrities, movie stars, comedians, all saying it was the right thing to do. | ||
| So I think that's what you mean by the window shifting, right? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's becoming more and more socially acceptable to be further and further left. | ||
| People say things like, do you think Trump supporters are more willing to have conversations, stuff like that. | ||
| I say yes, but it's only because a lot of the Trump people aren't far-right extremists like the media says they are. | ||
| This is the craziest thing. | ||
| When they criticized you for saying that some of these people were centrist, I'm like... Cassandra Fairbanks, for example. | ||
| They've called her far right numerous times. | ||
| She took the political spectrum test and she's just center right. | ||
| I've exchanged stuff with her on Twitter. | ||
| I met her once. | ||
| First off, totally lovely girl. | ||
| We had a great night. | ||
| We got drunk in D.C. | ||
| It was totally fun. | ||
| She knows everybody. | ||
| We had a great time. | ||
| And she was going on and on about why she supported Bernie at first. | ||
| So it's like, but no, now she's racist too. | ||
| She's got a bunch of nationalistic views. | ||
| But she's far right in the actual sense of economy and authoritarianism. | ||
| She's relatively moderate, but on the right side. | ||
| These people in the media view her as far right as possible, and I'm like, you're ignoring the really crazy... | ||
| You know, the right-wing authoritarian and the right-wing libertarians are so dramatically further. | ||
| Who are the right-wing authoritarians right now? | ||
| Like Richard Spencer. | ||
| It's, yeah. | ||
| So that's, to me, it's like, those guys are complete, they're actually completely irrelevant. | ||
| They've been forced to be bubbled up into these conversations because people scream about them all the time. | ||
| But it's like, people say to me, why don't you focus on them? | ||
| Why don't you focus on these? | ||
| It's like, they have no institutional power. | ||
| Everyone knows it's right to ignore these terrible ideas. | ||
| I don't need to amplify these ideas. | ||
| I like the parts of the right that are more libertarian and more small government and anti-authoritarian. | ||
| But I see no influence with that group of people. | ||
| Yeah, and honestly, it's crazy to me how much... | ||
| When I talked about Brittany Pettibone and the Wikipedia thing, when I went to look at her Wikipedia page, it said she was a white supremacist, anti-Semite, neo-Nazi, and all these other really crazy things. | ||
| And I'm like, whoa, she sounds crazy. | ||
| But because they were challenging me, I started checking the sources on this page. | ||
| And sure enough, guess what? | ||
| They removed a bunch of those claims because they were unfounded. | ||
| There are people who are weaponizing information and character assassinating people. | ||
| Richard Spencer is a white nationalist who is, you know, I would put him in the top right, authoritarian, leaning towards authoritarian, leaning towards right-wing. | ||
| Meaning he really wants the government to come in and change immigration policies, potentially get people out of the country. | ||
| Yeah, I don't want to have this reflect on the things he's said publicly, but I've talked to him about it and I would definitely say based on my private conversations with him, like I interviewed him. | ||
| I never ended up using the interview just because it was during the inauguration and there was a bunch of breaking news that happened and it just kind of fell off. | ||
| But yeah, he's authoritarian right, but I wouldn't say he's the most extreme authoritarian right person I've ever met. | ||
| yet he has painted out to be that, I think that's actually dangerous. | ||
| When people say that Richard Spencer is the epitome of evil, I'm like, | ||
| there's more. It gets worse, you know? Like, yeah, I don't agree with his opinions. I think he's in a | ||
| spot that's like, it parallels mine. He's literally on the other side of what | ||
| I believe. | ||
| But it goes further than Richard Spencer. | ||
| And when you act like he is where it ends, you ignore that there are actual insane hardcore right-wing authoritarian who are buying guns, who are committing crimes. | ||
| So you're saying that labeling everyone a Nazi might be short-sighted? | ||
| Very dangerous. | ||
| When Richard Spencer is the guy who stands in a street corner and you punch him in the face you're acting like the worst there is is Richard Spencer when in reality they're like enclaves of sovereign citizens with guns who like refuse to get pulled over or pay taxes and you know It gets pretty fringe. | ||
| It gets pretty crazy. | ||
| But like you were saying, the Overton window has shifted to the point where we look at somebody who simply says, you know, Cassandra Fairbanks, who questions not even immigration, just terrorism and illegal immigration, and she's called far-right. | ||
| And I'm like, she's not No. | ||
| Which I always think is hilarious because there are plenty of videos of Obama before he became president talking about why we have to protect our borders and things with immigrants and all that stuff. | ||
| And there's videos of Bill Clinton saying almost the exact same things that Trump said with, you know, the language is a little different and Trump has a weird affect and all that, but almost the exact same things. | ||
| When you look at the, you can Google search the political compass and look at where people have placed American politicians and most of them fall somewhere in the authoritarian right. | ||
| It's not extreme authoritarian right, but it's in that spectrum. | ||
| I think Obama was just north of the barrier into authoritarian and just right of center. | ||
| So people look at Obama and say that he's like a liberal guy and it's like, Sure, but you know he is on the spectrum. | ||
| He is on the right side. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he's a little bit towards authoritarian. | ||
| Meaning he was more okay with state power. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I mean if you're president I think that's what's going to happen in the United States. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But you know America is all about the free market and we have limited regulations and taxes relative to a lot of countries. | ||
| When I was in Sweden they said the United States doesn't have a left. | ||
| They have a right and a further right. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And when you look at the political compass, where we place our politicians, like, yeah, that's, I would say that's relatively accurate. | ||
| Jill Stein, though, falls in the libertarian left. | ||
|
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All right. | |
| Well, I did the political compass about a year ago, and I'm not going to say the results right now, but I'm going to do it again, and then we'll do a video. | ||
| I'll just do a live video on it with no... | ||
| No editing or anything and just put that stuff out. | ||
| You're going to fall like far right at the beginning. | ||
| Oh man, he's going to be off the charts and they're going to have to come up with a new color quadrant or something for me. | ||
| It's so crazy because I just did a video with Lubert Kowski from We Are Change where I talked about this with him, and then he said, I want to do the test too, and he is center-right libertarian. | ||
| Our opinions are almost the same, just a little bit different. | ||
| I believe that there is a need for regulation in a lot of areas, but not crazy with it, so I'm only center-left. | ||
| And then Luke is kind of like, I don't know, regulation gets bad because the government gets too powerful, so I lean a little to the right. | ||
| Yeah, in that case, I'd probably lean a little closer to him. | ||
| But I've shifted a little bit on that kind of stuff. | ||
| But big damn look, that's the point. | ||
| Single-payer healthcare? | ||
| I'm for single-payer healthcare, which is a combination. | ||
| That'll push you really far left, it will. | ||
| Right, right, I know. | ||
| I was at a libertarian thing at Students for Liberty in Maryland. | ||
| I gave a speech and I was telling them about some of my positions. | ||
| And I said, it's great, because I know you guys are okay with agree to disagree. | ||
| And I said something about being for single-payer healthcare. | ||
| And they booed me, but then all started laughing at the same time. | ||
| Like it was like, yeah, all right. | ||
| And then people were kind of like jokingly heckling me, like, yeah, give it some time, Dave, | ||
| you'll come around on this. | ||
| And I was like, that's a beautiful thing. | ||
| I could have stood there and been like, oh, you booed me, like this show's over. | ||
| But it's like, we all got it. | ||
| We don't have to agree on all this stuff. | ||
| All right, so here's what we're gonna do. | ||
| We did about an hour. | ||
| We're gonna do a Super Chat Q&A. | ||
| I already know that most people wanna know about the beanie, which we've already talked about. | ||
| There's a lot about what's going on under the beanie. | ||
| Why are you wearing the beanie? | ||
| It's L.A., it's hot. | ||
| All right, guys, so that's what we're gonna do. | ||
| We're gonna take literally a one-minute break. | ||
| I'm gonna refill the water, and then we'll be back. | ||
| We'll do the Super Chat thing. | ||
| If you're on Patreon, you guys get bumped up the queue, and then we'll go from there. | ||
| there. All right, one minute. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| I believe I added a minute to the minute that I literally said I was going to take there. | ||
| Just bear with me. | ||
| OK, here we go, because there's already a zillion things here. | ||
| We'll start with Super Chat. | ||
| Happy to see you back here. | ||
| Tim, what do you think drives people to stop caring about what's true? | ||
| That's a great question, because I asked you why you care about what's true. | ||
| What about the other side of that? | ||
| No, I think everyone... I don't think people stop caring. | ||
| People who stop caring about what's true, stop caring about a lot of other things, too. | ||
| And I feel like when you read, day after day, bad news, when you start to wake up to the fact that it's not that journalists are evil, it's just that they're just people. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And so they're going to get things wrong. | ||
| There's a phenomenon where you read a news story, I think we talked about this last time, you read a news story and you think it's true, but when you read a news story in which you are an expert, you know it's not true. | ||
| So people start to say, you know what, if I can't trust any of this, I just don't care anymore. | ||
| And then, whatever. | ||
| And then they just fan. | ||
| I think we get to the point where people are so sick and tired of being told that they're evil, they're racist, that, you know, the Russia conspiracy stuff with Trump, and people are just finally like, oh God, I just don't care anymore. | ||
| Yeah, and in a weird way that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, too, because the apathy, then, the only way you break people out of apathy is with more hysteria. | ||
| You don't break people out of apathy with, I'm gonna calmly tell you about what's going on, you know? | ||
| That never happens. | ||
| Okay, on Patreon, I asked you this before, but maybe you can give me something that's close. | ||
| Tim, have you found anywhere in your travels that is as free and fair as America? | ||
| You know, free and fair, I guess, is a matter of perspective. | ||
| There's a lot of people who are, I'd say the people who are far, far left, would love Sweden. | ||
| Except for the fact that, you know, I'll say this, I actually found Sweden to be relatively racist. | ||
| I'm not even kidding. | ||
| It's about the fact that there's an overwhelmingly white majority that doesn't let minorities work at their companies while they all pat each other on the back claiming that they're not racist. | ||
| Yeah, they are. | ||
| I met white people. | ||
| I should say, it's not necessarily racist culture. | ||
| I met white people who spoke Swedish who said they weren't Swedish enough to get jobs after two years. | ||
| I don't need to rag on Sweden all day. | ||
| So you answered the reverse question. | ||
| Give me something that's close. | ||
| So I guess you're saying Sweden will vote despite its... No, I think it's like a matter of opinion, right? | ||
| Like a lot of people on the left, like the far left here, might be like, Sweden's great! | ||
| And they might go there and just sort of drink the Kool-Aid and dance around things and everything's fantastic. | ||
| You know, I've got so much to rag on Sweden about. | ||
| They export weapons. | ||
| That allows them to have more social programs. | ||
| Do you know the Swedish comedian Aaron Flam by any chance? | ||
| I've heard of... | ||
| Yeah, I had him on the show about a month ago, and he really gave a really damaging assessment of what has happened to Sweden, and it included the arms and all that. | ||
| All right, jump back to Super Chat for a second. | ||
| Tim, what do you think about countercultures being co-opted by far-left politics? | ||
| It seems like anything remotely artistic and fringe is overpopulated by far-left ideas. | ||
| Asking based on your past, so I don't know what that's referring to. | ||
| Uh, maybe like growing up with the anarchists, I suppose. | ||
| I feel like everything comes and goes in waves. | ||
| You know, there was a period where the country was significantly more conservative and patriotic, you know, nationalist. | ||
| And then the wave happens where then it switches to the left. | ||
| Then the beatnik, the rebels, the anarchists start becoming more and more palatable because they're challenging the authority. | ||
| I think it has to do with, you know, whenever there's a problem, it's the authority's fault. | ||
| So then people will start becoming very, very left. | ||
| And then problems with authority rise, and then people on the right are like, they're the problem, and then it just kind of teeters back and forth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's the funny thing. | ||
| It's like, yes, if the right started going completely bananas right now on free speech, which I care about more than anything else, I would be criticizing them, but at the moment, it just doesn't seem to be. | ||
| This is a good one from Patreon. | ||
| Did Snowden go too far or not far enough in his whistleblowing? | ||
| I don't have a for or against view of Snowden. | ||
| I think he published a lot of information that was really important. | ||
| We learned about a bunch of illegal programs. | ||
| However, by Snowden's own admission, he didn't read the documents that he took. | ||
| So, it's not whistleblowing. | ||
| It's just leaking. | ||
| In which case, there were several... I think it might have been John Oliver who did the interview with him, and this is surprising because I'm not a huge fan of John Oliver. | ||
| He said the New York Times made a mistake when they published one of the documents that they accidentally had unredacted information. | ||
| And Edward Snowden was like, yeah, that stuff happens. | ||
| But then Oliver said, do you bear responsibility? | ||
| Did you read the document before you leaked it? | ||
| And he goes, I didn't. | ||
| And he goes, then this is your fault, isn't it? | ||
| And Snowden said, I'm probably mixing up a little bit, but something where Snowden owned up to saying, yeah, you're right. | ||
| So I think the issue with Snowden is very complicated because To me, a whistleblower is someone who says, I've identified a program or programs that are illegal and this information needs to get out, versus just taking tens of thousands of documents and being like, here you go. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So potentially he did, I mean, we sort of hit this in the first hour, but potentially he did something more dangerous, because even though you're for the freedom of information, we don't know what all the repercussions of that are. | ||
| It's kind of like, I guess the issue there is it's always important to have a risk assessment. | ||
| We want to look to the past and the present to predict the future. | ||
| So when it comes to leaking information, it's important that you know what information you're leaking. | ||
| It's a challenge, right? | ||
| The more far-right libertarian people are very much like, all information should be available, borders are fake, things like that. | ||
| And I'm kind of just like, there's a lot to consider, and I'm not smart enough to figure it out. | ||
| So when I look at Snowden, I say, him leaking out a bunch of information that he didn't read? | ||
| presents a, it's Pandora's, it's a can of worms, right? | ||
| But at the same time, we learned about a bunch of illegal programs that we needed to know about. | ||
| So it's not good or bad, it's just another, you know. | ||
| It's such a great example of why being intellectually honest can create you problems on both sides. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Because a certain amount of people are gonna hear you say that, like, oh, you see, he's selling Snowden out, and a certain people are gonna be like, ah, he's completely backing him. | ||
| And this is a good one, because I think it sort of encompasses where we both are, sort of. | ||
| What do you think the difference between left libertarian and right libertarian is? | ||
| It's kind of weird because when I look at the compass, I actually feel like far-left libertarian and far-right authoritarian don't necessarily exist in a sense. | ||
| Far-left libertarian is... | ||
| Less about capitalism and more about a bunch of hippies sitting in a circle and talking about the best way to move forward and agreeing to do work in exchange. | ||
| Whereas far right is kind of like, let the system build itself, the free market will take care of it. | ||
| So it's kind of like, the further left you go, there's more of a centralization of decision making. | ||
| For me, left libertarianism is kind of like, We can't force anybody to do anything, but we all need to agree on what we should do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whereas the far right is kind of like, let us do our thing and the market will take care of it. | ||
| Just people's actions will... So basically you think that so far left, the only real difference then is just the degree of, as we talked about before, that you might be more okay with a little more government regulation on climate or something where Your friend you mentioned would be a little less a little yeah, and then like the far the far far left libertarian Is actually the bottom bottom left is anarchy yeah where you don't Anarchy means without authority and without our key authority, and that's basically where all decisions are made by committee Yeah, you know everyone comes together sits down and tries to come to a decision. | ||
| I that seems like it would work I That's why I'm not a... I grew up very much like with the anarchists. | ||
| I really believed that through conversation. | ||
| And that works in a small community. | ||
| But when you've got three hundred million people, it just absolutely does not work. | ||
| So the reason I'm sort of like center-left libertarian is that authoritarianism, violently forcing people to do things or coercing them through some kind of manipulation or emotional force of some sort, that's just pain and suffering I'm not cool with. | ||
| But then I'm closer to the middle because it's kind of like You know, we do need a market that can help us compete and evolve, but we need to make sure it doesn't go out of control. | ||
| You know, if you look at what Bayer has done, Monsanto, Dow Chemical, all these really horrifying things we've heard about in the past. | ||
| We need to make sure, look. | ||
| It's a great discussion that could be had there. | ||
| So you have the fear of those companies going on unregulated, where someone who would be more libertarian right or left libertarian would be saying, well, I'm afraid of the government doing that. | ||
| But that's a great space to have the exchange of ideas. | ||
| I had an argument with this really famous ANCAP guy, anarcho-capitalist, who told me that no matter what happens, he thinks the market will take care of it. | ||
| And I'm like, let me just start naming some things like Union Carbide, the Bhopal disaster, Deepwater Horizon. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| The market did not take care of this. | ||
| These companies continue to exist, doing these things. | ||
| Monsanto continues to exist, doing these things. | ||
| And, I don't know, I shrug, I guess. | ||
| But at least there's a conversation to be had. | ||
| You can understand the fear comes from a different, one's fearing government more and one's fearing business more. | ||
| I think it's a great place to... But the reason I'm in the middle, both are right. | ||
| The monopolization of power is the problem. | ||
| Well said, well said. | ||
| All right, back onto Patreon. | ||
| Do you struggle at times to report the truth when it means somebody you like, their beliefs will take a hit? | ||
| No. | ||
| I was, this is funny, because I did a video. | ||
| And the opening card says celebrating with the Proud Boys. | ||
| And that was not to mean that I was celebrating with them. | ||
| It was just meant to be like the people were celebrating. | ||
| But during this event, which I filmed their hazing and everything, one of the guys Some guy leaving a bar started yelling that you're all like fascists, white supremacists. | ||
| So then one of the dudes hanging out with the Proud Boys, I don't know if he was a Proud Boy, started yelling at him. | ||
| And these two guys chase after him, full speed. | ||
| So I ran after filming. | ||
| And then the guy who was starting the fight gets in his car and is driving away, flicking him off. | ||
| The Proud Boys are yelling at him. | ||
| And then one of them turns around and sees me filming and says, the hell are you doing? | ||
| Whose side are you on? | ||
| And I laughed, and I was like, not yours! | ||
| I was like, dude, I'm a journalist. | ||
| I'm here to film what happens. | ||
| And he was like, stop! | ||
| Turn that camera off! | ||
| And I'm like, dude, chill out. | ||
| Nothing happened. | ||
| A bunch of guys walked down the street yelling at each other. | ||
| It's not reportable. | ||
| But the fact remains. | ||
| I told the other guys, they asked me what happened. | ||
| And I was like, the fight was about to break out. | ||
| And they were like, oh, for real? | ||
| And I was like, yeah, he got mad I was filming. | ||
| But I'll tell you what, you guys, I'm not on your side. | ||
| I'm not on anyone's side. | ||
| If the fight breaks out, I'm going to film it. | ||
| And they were like, Yeah, all right. | ||
| I'm like, you know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's it. | |
| It's not about liking somebody or not. | ||
| It's like, you know, it's just about, look, if people say that these guys are, you know, doing bad things, I'm not going to lie for them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| It just, it is what it is. | ||
| It's what it is. | ||
| Oh, this is very important from Super Chat. | ||
| Thoughts on Pepe the Frog post-election? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's crazy to me how serious everyone has taken Pepe the Frog to the point where I don't want to say this is true, but I feel like most people who show the Pepe the Frog don't take it seriously. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. | ||
| I would say 90% of the people posting Pepe the Frog, even if you- | ||
| And the okay sign and milk and ice cream. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the people on the left are like pulling their hair out. | ||
| Yeah, that's the whole point of trolling. | ||
| The whole point. | ||
| I'm not saying I love it, but like I get it. | ||
| They're just trying to mess with people. | ||
| Here's what this article did. | ||
| Those are not the racists you need to worry about, let's put it that way. | ||
| This article that called me alt-right, one of the things they said was, in the photo you can see people making the OK hand sign, which is associated with Pepe the Frog, a symbol deemed a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League. | ||
| You see what they did there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The OK symbol is, yes, technically affiliated with Pepe the Frog, but this was the Trump hand sign, because he does it when he talks, and it became a meme. | ||
| And then they added this to Pepe, and then he claimed, because it was associated, he was able to word a sentence accusing this of being a white supremacist hand gesture. | ||
| Instead of saying the ADL said the OK sign is not a hate symbol, he said the OK symbol is associated with Pepe the Frog, which is a hate symbol. | ||
| These people, man. | ||
| Yeah, and it's like the ADL, it's like, man, after all the legitimate grievances that people have had to fight through of holocausts and pogroms and all of the true slaughters and murders, now we're going like this, which I know now people are gonna say. | ||
| Well, the ADL said that's, they debunked that. | ||
| This is not a hate symbol. | ||
| No, no, no, but they did say that Pepe was a hate symbol. | ||
| Exactly, I'm like, come on, guys, a cartoon frog used by a bunch of kids on the internet. | ||
| I'm pretty sure that the average person who was in Auschwitz If they would've eventually had to have been realizing that 60 years later after surviving, that a frog was gonna be their biggest problem, would probably be okay with that. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's just, it's so stupid. | ||
| Oh, this, I'm glad someone's asking this, because people have been asking me this. | ||
| Superchat, what are your thoughts on the Julius Caesar play interruption, disruption of free speech, or political stunt? | ||
| It was a political stunt. | ||
| I believe they were accused of buying the domain-free Laura a couple hours before doing the event, so I think they knew it was going to happen. | ||
| I read somewhere that this play, they just depict the president, and they've done Obama in the past. | ||
| I don't know if that's true, but... I don't know. | ||
| Look, disrupting the play, I neither agree with or disagree with. | ||
| What I will say is, to the people who are freaking out saying, like, how could you disrupt the play, I'm like, oh, that's peaceful protest. | ||
| Like, I'm pretty much okay with people peacefully protesting. | ||
| Like, you're getting loud, you're being noisy. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's so much better than throwing explosives and bashing people over the head. | ||
| Right. | ||
| At the same time, the play was free speech. | ||
| It's a conundrum. | ||
| I'm moderate, right? | ||
| What can I say? | ||
| It's like, I see both sides and ultimately I think the most important thing is that both events are peaceful protests. | ||
| And so I'm kind of just like, yeah, you guys say your peace. | ||
| Yeah, so I'll go a little further than you on that one. | ||
| So I have obviously no problem with the play in and of itself. | ||
| We do unfortunately live in a time where these things being put out there do seem to be affecting people's actions in a violent way, which is a problem, but it's free speech to put on the play, of course, if somebody wants to give you the theater to do it and sell tickets and all that. | ||
| The disruptors have their right to free speech so they can do it, but then you have consequences for free speech. | ||
| you either will be arrested or kicked out. | ||
| And absolutely that should happen. | ||
| I don't think the protesters should just be able to get on stage. | ||
| You know, the exchange we have of free speech is not that you can only use your speech | ||
| to silence someone else's speech. | ||
| You will suffer the consequences. | ||
| So I am 100% okay with these people. | ||
| Whatever the laws are related, you know, whatever the theaters policies are, | ||
| if you disrupt, you're gonna be kicked out. | ||
| Look, I've been in comedy clubs. | ||
| Well, I was always okay with heckling when I was doing stand-up, but I've been in many comedy clubs where they'd kick people out, and heckling is sort of understood to be part of comedy. | ||
| So it's up to the theater, and then if there are local laws, I'm completely fine with it. | ||
| Ultimately, I'm like, if the extent of your protest is running up on stage and yelling for 30 seconds, and then you get removed and arrested, and things move on, Yeah. | ||
| The inherent problem with that, though, of sort of okaying that, is that then it will just start happening everywhere. | ||
| Every Broadway show that you ever go to, someone's gonna be aggrieved about something. | ||
| They'll up the security. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| They'll up the security. | ||
| No, no, but it'll still happen if people just know that they're gonna, every show, you're gonna go to Beauty and the Beast, it's gonna upset a beast. | ||
| You know, some ugly guy. | ||
| Let me say this, because I was talking to some people about this, when the Hamilton cast You know, made a statement to Mike Pence. | ||
| A lot of people on the right freaked out, and I'm like, that's the kind of protest we want. | ||
| It took a couple minutes to say their bit. | ||
| Nonviolent, put them on the spot. | ||
| I think Pence could have owned up to that and just said, I will do my best, that's all I, you know. | ||
| Didn't he basically do that though? | ||
| It's something like, something along those lines, yeah. | ||
| Right, that's the thing, like that's what you want. | ||
| Like he went there to this place, hopefully to learn and to be around | ||
| some New York liberals and all that stuff. | ||
| So like, to me it was like, he tried to do something good. | ||
| They then, at the end, used their free speech to hopefully have a teachable moment. | ||
| But it was like, everybody was then immediately screaming at how racist Pence is | ||
| or whatever, or anti-gay. | ||
| And it's like, guys, that's not how you get people You can use this as a teachable moment. | ||
| Hopefully he saw some tolerance, heard what they said, but everybody... I actually, I was like, that's pretty cool. | ||
| Like, when I see Antifa bashing people over the heads, I'm like, that's a problem. | ||
| Throwing explosives, that's a problem. | ||
| When I see everyone's a Nazi, it's a problem. | ||
| When I see a bunch of people on a stage say, we just want you to do your best to represent all Americans, I'm like, I agree with that. | ||
| Yeah, that's pretty solid. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| The president should represent all Americans and do their best, and they're simply just talking. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Let me throw one in here just for a second, because we haven't really talked about Russia. | ||
| Trump, Russia, is he a Russian agent? | ||
| Yes or no? | ||
| I think we learned that the answer was no to that in the Comey testimony. | ||
| The whole issue with that, it seems like, was that... Trump, in my opinion, did not fire Comey over the Flynn stuff, because that conversation happened a long time ago. | ||
| He wasn't sitting on this, just waiting for his moment to do it. | ||
| Even Comey said this, that the reason Trump was probably angry was that Comey would not confirm Trump wasn't under investigation. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, as soon as that hearing ends, then they announce Trump's being investigated for obstruction, and it's just like... | ||
| Honestly, I'm just so tired of hearing this stuff. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm saying, it's just never gonna... I think people have to accept, so I'm fully with you on that, I think people have to accept this is not going to stop. | ||
| The plan is to impeach him, I really believe that. | ||
| The plan, you know, half media, half the Democrat plan is just we're going to try to impeach him, or we'll waste the entire four years of his administration with distractions to do it. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| One more on Super Chat, then we'll jump back into Patreon. | ||
| So we are answering questions. | ||
| Tim's answering questions, I should say, on Super Chat and Patreon. | ||
| Tim, what are your thoughts about influences of alternative media and public internet on... | ||
| Let's try that again. | ||
| What are your thoughts about the influences of alternative media and public internet forums such as 4chan in today's society? | ||
| 4chan is one of the most powerful and terrifying things I have ever witnessed in my life. | ||
| They found a cabin in the woods based on their direction of the sun. | ||
| They found a flag pointed up at the sky based on the star maps and the planes flying overhead. | ||
| That was the Shia LaBeouf thing, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow, that is scary. | ||
| It's not scary in the sense of they're coming to get you scary. | ||
| It's scary of that is an overwhelming... It's a supercomputer. | ||
| These people on 4chan have done such... I made a video about this. | ||
| They've convinced the media this is a hate symbol. | ||
| They just decide to do it. | ||
| And they know how to do it. | ||
| It's almost... I made a video called 4chan has become too powerful. | ||
| I've talked to a lot of these... I used to go on 4chan a long time ago. | ||
| I think a lot of the hacker community people did. | ||
| And I've talked to some of these kids who are on there. | ||
| and one of them told me never underestimate the power of millions of | ||
| lonely men and i was like | ||
| he you know he basically told me that he lost his job | ||
| and uh... he lives in a kind of like a semi-rural suburban area | ||
| and so he just goes on the computer and he found a community that likes to | ||
| make jokes and have fun and everything silly and they | ||
| when they find a project to take up they do it | ||
| and if that's locating a flag in the middle of the desert by the sound of frogs croaking or finding a cabin based on | ||
| the direction of the sun | ||
| when you get thousands of people all working towards it that is a | ||
| supercomputer it's crazy | ||
| it's a particularly dangerous supercomputer because it's got a lot of computing power and a lot of | ||
| human power that's like the ultimate but that's T2 | ||
| you know so i wonder 4chan was the birthplace of the anonymous, the hecticism | ||
| and they've done a lot of really historical powerful stuff It's not good or evil, it's just raw humanity functioning as a big machine. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Tim, have you ever filed a Freedom of Information Act request? | ||
| No, but I had this really cool idea where I would take a couple of my friends and we would FOIA our FBI files and then have a contest to see whose was bigger. | ||
| We never did it though. | ||
| But you never did it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Alright, another on Patreon. | ||
| Tim, have you researched media corruption and if so, ever found a more corrupt time period than right now in the USA or the world? | ||
| I haven't, but I mean, more corrupt? | ||
| I think it's relative. | ||
| And it's also your definition of corrupt. | ||
| Is it corrupt in the sense that they're evil people who are manipulating it, or is it corrupt in the sense that it's decayed to a point where it's just trash? | ||
| In my opinion? | ||
| We romanticize the past. | ||
| I keep hearing people say, like, oh, Woodward and Bernstein. | ||
| And I'm like, yeah, but they did the whole anonymous sourcing thing, too. | ||
| I think what we need to realize is that culture changes, and that the standards for what is true and acceptable on the internet is dramatically different from what was acceptable and true for newspapers and television in the past. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So corrupt? | |
| Different. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, Super Chat, you just answered this one, but Tim, do you agree that Trump colluded with Russia? | ||
| We got a no on that one. | ||
| Here's a good one, because I get this all the time. | ||
| Super Chat, advice for millennials that want to stand up for free speech and rational thought, but fear the backlash from peers. | ||
| How did you get to the point where you said, I'm going to do this shit? | ||
| I guess it's just a matter of conviction. | ||
| Just gotta go do it. | ||
| One of the big challenges with the free speech stuff is that these free speech rallies are all Trump supporters. | ||
| And I've talked to Trump supporters and I said, if you want to be taken seriously, get some liberal speakers. | ||
| In Berkeley, at one of their events, a woman came up and asked to speak on the megaphone. | ||
| And they were like, are you a Trump supporter? | ||
| And she said, no. | ||
| And a bunch of people were like, no, no. | ||
| But then all of a sudden, this big biker dude with a spiked helmet goes, no! | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is a free speech event! | |
| She can speak! | ||
| And then everyone started clapping and cheering. | ||
| And then she basically just said, think of the children, protect the children. | ||
| She's like, I know you're all here to do your thing, and just keep in mind there's a school next door. | ||
| And then everyone clapped. | ||
| And they let her do it! | ||
| They let her do it. | ||
| He's intolerant. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I think the main issue with free speech is, you know, I've talked to Trump supporters. | ||
| I said, you know what you need to do? | ||
| I was like, the left needs to do a free speech rally and the right needs to do an anti-racism rally. | ||
| Because in San Bernardino, just this anti-Sharia thing, I talked to the Trump supporters. | ||
| I said, are you guys opposed to fascism? | ||
| And they're all like, yes. | ||
| I said, so you're anti-fascist? | ||
| And they're like, Yeah, but not like those guys. | ||
| I'm like, I get it. | ||
| Then I go to the Antifa guys. | ||
| I'm like, do you guys oppose Sharia law? | ||
| And they're like, well, yeah. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, okay. | ||
| Just like, just like they do. | ||
| And they go, yeah, but they're bigots. | ||
| And I'm like, at the core, you guys agree with each other. | ||
| So I think, you know, if you got some people on the left to hold a free speech rally, then you got some people on the right to do like an opposition to racism rally. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Listen, I would love to headline a left I think there's a growing community of people who are left, kind of like us, that agree with free speech. | ||
| group on a campus that is a left-leaning one and speak. I only get invited to the | ||
| right one. So but I see your point. But I think there's a growing community of | ||
| people who are left, kind of like us, that agree with free speech. And where | ||
| we get along with the Trump supporters is on issues of free expression. And I | ||
| think that's why we get dubbed like alt-right, simply because we agree with | ||
| them on some things. | ||
| And then the far, far left people don't agree with free speech. | ||
| So I think there's a large group of people who are like center-left liberals who don't agree with Trump and his policies, but agree with free speech and would attend a rally and would put it on, but there needs to be leadership to make it happen. | ||
| Are you listening, people? | ||
| Make it happen. | ||
| Superchat, do you think there's a way of mainstream media regaining the public's trust, or are they too far gone? | ||
| That's a good one. | ||
| We kind of hit it before. | ||
| I don't think it's an issue of whether they're trustworthy or not. | ||
| I think it's an issue of who people choose to trust. | ||
| You know, more than half the people say they get their news from Facebook at this point. | ||
| So, am I going to trust Anderson Cooper, guy in a suit on TV who's a millionaire, or am I going to trust my good friend who says, trust me man, this is true? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| My friend, he's saved my butt a couple times. | ||
| He helped fix my car and bought me lunch. | ||
| Anderson Cooper, what has he done for me? | ||
| I'm going to trust my buddy. | ||
| Yeah, is that the other part that people know us in a different way? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, I had two little notecards here. | ||
| I didn't even look at them once. | ||
| We've just talked here. | ||
| You've revealed things about yourself. | ||
| I reveal things about myself that just by being human, just by being human, we've allowed people to Give us that trust, which maybe we'll fail them on one day, but we've allowed them to just get in on. | ||
| I mean, that's the thing. | ||
| You tweeted me. | ||
| I've had people with three followers start insulting me, and I just tweet right back at them. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's the power of Twitter that we talked about a long time ago, that celebrities were now more likely to interact with their fans. | ||
| But for me, I'm not like a celebrity. | ||
| I just have someone that people start, they keep following me on Twitter because I do this work, but I still use Twitter the same way I've always used it. | ||
| You tweet at me, I tweet back. | ||
| Obviously, sometimes I get too many notifications, but I've gone on huge tirades with just like, I don't know. | ||
| I don't feel like I'm above or below or anything. | ||
| I just feel like I'm on Twitter and you can tweet at me and I'll tweet back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| My ability to respond is getting... I just don't have time. | ||
| I just don't have time. | ||
| And especially if you're just an anonymous troll. | ||
| And again, I get trolling. | ||
| I like trolling. | ||
| But if you're just an anonymous person endlessly spewing hate at me, it's like, I am okay with the block button. | ||
| But I'm okay with it. | ||
| If I have the time, I give everyone the time of day. | ||
| Like, I don't discriminate. | ||
| You can call me names, insult me, and I'll still tweet at you. | ||
| Oh, good one. | ||
| Patreon, who's your mainstream media hero that seems to make the biggest strides towards telling the truth? | ||
| I suspect you don't have many heroes, specifically. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| But you got any? | ||
| I mean, give me somebody. | ||
| Is there anyone? | ||
| Because we both get asked this all the time. | ||
| Like, who do you trust? | ||
| I started mentioning you in that. | ||
| I'm like, you guys know this Tim Pool guy? | ||
| Check him out. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| In the mainstream media, who do I trust? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| You know, I know some journalists that... You know, the first thing that comes to mind is this guy from Occupy Wall Street, who now is a photographer up in Portland. | ||
| I just saw him for the first time in five years. | ||
| His name is Will Gagin, and he is a lefty, Occupy kind of guy, and he was at the Portland rally, and he flat out said, The only time I've ever seen violence was from the Antifa guys, the people in Black Block. | ||
| And I was like, oh, but you're like, you're a lefty Occupy dude. | ||
| And he goes, yeah. | ||
| I'm like, do you think the Trump people are racist? | ||
| And he's like, oh, I think there's a lot of hate speech over there for sure. | ||
| And I'm like, but you're saying Antifa's fine? | ||
| He goes, yeah. | ||
| And I'm like, I feel like I can trust you. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, you did it. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Superchat, such a good idea about the Yin Yang Rally. | ||
| I want credit for that name. | ||
| Oh, so I guess the idea of like, let's just come up with some like, We'll go, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
but i i i thought i thought a lot of i've talked on sports and want to get | |
| the anti-racism rally and their and they said they don't exclude people | ||
| and i'm like okay i i i i don't want to be an organizer in life | ||
| specially suggest they do it My question is, when they tell me they oppose... In Berkeley, Baked Alaska was trying to talk to people on the other side, the people chanting at them. | ||
| And one of them started chanting, no KKK, no Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA. | ||
| And then Baked actually said, yeah, no KKK. | ||
| And then I looked at him, and we're like, what? | ||
| And he's like, I'm with you. | ||
| And they were like, Oh, and then he fist bumped him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm like, well, why can't you have that rally? | ||
| You know, where you actually bring together the people who are like moderate, center-right, center-left, who are kind of like, okay, we agree that racism is bad. | ||
| We agree that free speech is good. | ||
| And it doesn't matter what your political faction is. | ||
| It's tough to gin up sane people. | ||
| You know, like, get the sane people really jammed up. | ||
| They have other things to do. | ||
| They like, you know, going out and playing sports and having sex and eating and working and whatever else it is. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| How do you feel on Facebook when someone posts something and the criticism is the poster allegedly stayed silent on a similar topic? | ||
| That's a good one. | ||
| Because I get that a lot, you know, like, oh, if there's one story, if I happen to not be, I'm trying to get off Twitter for the weekend, and something happens, people are like, ah, you see, Rubin, you didn't tweet about that. | ||
| Well, I was actually on a plane for six hours. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| The other day, someone tweeted, all of the conservative voices staying silent on the London attack, where the van hit the Muslims, are showing their hypocrisy or something. | ||
| And the interesting thing I noticed was, because I tweeted a couple things about it, because for me I'm like, my show is violence, right? | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| Stop being violent against people who are not being violent. | ||
| When the Manchester attack happens, when the London Westminster Bridge and all that stuff happens, my Twitter feed is nothing but talking about it. | ||
| When the van attack happened, no one was talking about it. | ||
| And even right now, the Trump supporter was stabbed nine times, no one is talking about it. | ||
| So there's an issue. | ||
| One, is it really that you won't talk about an issue if it's the other side, or is it that there's no conversation there, and so you're talking to a wall? | ||
| That's the challenge. | ||
| For me, I'm kind of like, I just tweeted, violence begets violence. | ||
| You know, we hear about these terror attacks from these crazy Islamists, and then what happens is some guy gets angry and drives a van into some Muslims coming out of a mosque. | ||
| Like, people just, it's a cycle of revenge, retribution, and it just makes people hate each other more. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's so interesting how the knee-jerk reaction to immediately something happens and we all have to share all our opinions on it. | ||
| And I'm even trying, even as someone that does what I do, I'm trying to scale back on that a little bit. | ||
| Because I just think it just starts feeding this monster. | ||
| And when this thing happened, when the truck got driven into the mosque, I happened to be traveling all day. | ||
| I was on a plane with no Wi-Fi. | ||
| I didn't buy Wi-Fi intentionally. | ||
| So I didn't know about it until I got off the plane. | ||
| I look at my Twitter, I saw something happen, and I was like, I need to be off on a Sunday. | ||
| I need to have some clarity. | ||
| I happened to get home. | ||
| My dog was sick. | ||
| I basically was at the animal hospital half the night. | ||
| And I ended up just retweeting someone that I do trust on this. | ||
| But I knew that there was going to be a certain amount of people like, ah, you see? | ||
| I was just like, I didn't want to get in the fray. | ||
| And it could have been any other specific incident. | ||
| Anyway, why do you choose the beanie and not another hat? | ||
| I've been very conservative here with the beanie thing. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You know, the funny thing is, people always ask me about it, and I've got... I was thinking about it. | ||
| I have photos from when I was 16. | ||
| I'm wearing the beanie. | ||
| Like, I've just... It's a skateboarder thing. | ||
| You go to a skate park, and 30-40% will be wearing beanies. | ||
| I saw a guy wearing a wool sweater and a beanie in the summer, and I laughed, because I'm like, people say the same thing about my beanie in the summer. | ||
| You wanna know... Okay, first, you wanna hear the gross truth? | ||
| I guess so. | ||
| It soaks up all my sweat. | ||
| And when I'm running around during conflicts and stuff, it's literally like a sweatband. | ||
| I can't wear a sweatband because they look silly. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I wear a beanie because it fits my skateboard kind of style. | ||
| But the big secret. | ||
| For one, I've always had some kind of hat. | ||
| I used to wear hippie beanie visor things. | ||
| I don't know what they're called. | ||
| But after Occupy Wall Street, I had the former marketing director for Puff Daddy tell me that the beanie was my character and not take it off. | ||
| That's really it. | ||
| He said that he was like, I was reading a magazine and I saw you and I'm like, this beanie guy. | ||
| The beanie guy. | ||
| And then he was like, if you ever do anything, make sure, like, you keep the beanie. | ||
| It's who you are. | ||
| It's like, it makes you identifiable. | ||
| And I was like, okay. | ||
| Honestly, I wasn't going to have you on the show if you had walked in here without the beanie. | ||
|
unidentified
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No, no, I was. | |
| You made it very clear. | ||
| Who's that guy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Beanie? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| We're not going to do this without a beanie. | ||
| But I'll say this, the fact that you ask about it, the fact that it's become a meme, proves that it's like, some kind of like, it's become, you know, like DeRay McKesson wears a vest and Chris Ragon wears a flannel, like, you know, you have something identifiable about you, I suppose. | ||
| I guess I wear a jacket, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Tim, what happens if Islamist extremists and left-wing extremists combine their efforts to silence the rest of us and then realize that they're truly ideological enemies? | ||
| Who wins at that point? | ||
| That's called anarchism. | ||
| I'm joking. | ||
| You know, I hear so many stupid terms all day long that I was like, oh man, here we go, another one. | ||
| Anarchism. | ||
| It's a great question, though, about intersectionality. | ||
| Actually, there's forums where I see anarchists. | ||
| I shouldn't say anarchists, because a true anarchist doesn't believe in using authority on somebody else. | ||
| But there are far-left communists who are talking about looking into Islamist doctrine for Advice. | ||
| And I'll just flat out say, this is on the Reddit community, the anarchism community, they were talking about researching Islam for their, you know, communist, communism and anarcho-syndicalist, like, factions and beliefs. | ||
| And that, to me, while, like, I bring it up because I'm sure a lot of people are going to go, oh my god, like, you know, these two factions are uniting, and I'm kind of like, true anarchists are totally chill and peaceful, and the overwhelming majority of Muslims are just, like, chill and minding their own business. | ||
| But then you get into the argument of, like, what percentage of these groups are violent, and that's something, like, I'm not smart enough to assert. | ||
| But if any violent faction joins forces with any other violent faction, yeah, that's something to worry about. | ||
| And I'll say this, the terror attacks that have been happening in Europe are Many of them have been from anarchists. | ||
| I don't know how many. | ||
| I was researching terrorism for a video I did just a few weeks ago, but there were like letter bombs sent to the IMF headquarters by Greek anarchists. | ||
| So in Africa, in the Middle East, there are anarchist attacks. | ||
| Do you think it's fair to say that if, let's say, this strange leftist Islamist alliance actually won the battle of ideas and started taking over, it would be far worse for the social justice people eventually than the Islamists, right? | ||
| Like the social justice people It would be almost impossible for them to turn against the Islamists at that point, but the Islamists then would have some plans in place to get rid of the other people. | ||
| Let me get a bit semantic, get into the semantics. | ||
| True anarchists who follow Islam would probably be super cool people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They would disagree with using force against other people, they would disagree with terror, and they would probably chill in the corner and say, let's have a conversation, because that's true anarchy. | ||
| And I think that sounds pretty great. | ||
| The joke is actually communism. | ||
| There's a video where someone's making fun of Glenn Beck, and then he's like, oh, and he writes it on a board. | ||
| And that's like, you know, communism is, while people say it's actually left libertarian, it's actually been implemented as an authoritarian left. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And when you combine that with extremism, regardless of whether it's Islamic or any other religion, yeah, then we got authoritarians who are following a fundamentalist doctrine. | ||
| That's terrifying. | ||
| Yeah, that's a bad combo. | ||
| All right, we got about 15 minutes left. | ||
| We're doing this on Super Chat and on Patreon Q&A with Tim Poole. | ||
| I've been in the mainstream media for a few years now. | ||
| Any tips on breaking free and going at it alone? | ||
| Save your money because you're going to be sleeping in a closet and you're going to be broke. | ||
| Here's the crazy thing. | ||
| I've had people say to me, Tim, how do I do what you do? | ||
| And I say, Just go do it. | ||
| But to be a bit more serious, someone said, like, but I can't afford to fly around the world and do these crazy things. | ||
| You know, some of the first stuff that I've ever covered was a $20 bus ticket. | ||
| I was in Virginia. | ||
| I was at my brother's place. | ||
| Occupy Wall Street happened. | ||
| I bought a $20 China bus ticket with just a cell phone and a backpack. | ||
| And I went up and just started tweeting. | ||
| Not because I expected to gain followers or to make a career out of it. | ||
| It was just something I wanted to do. | ||
| And I was willing to just drop everything and go do it. | ||
| But you know what I hear all the time? | ||
| Oh, but what about my apartment? | ||
| And then I'd have to remind people I didn't have one. | ||
| I was sleeping in the park. | ||
| And even when I started working for Vice, I was crashing on my buddy's sofa, saving all of my money, because I knew that at any moment this could all stop, and then I'd have to have my own resources to do my thing. | ||
| So the question becomes, what's more important to you? | ||
| Having an apartment and a nice job where you can go out on the weekends with your buddies or would you rather travel the world, fly to exotic locations and cover events that are changing the world if that means you're not going to have healthcare, you probably won't be eating very good food, you'll be eating rice and beans a lot and you're probably going to sleep on someone's floor most of the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, pick your, you know, which one do you want? | ||
| It's funny, when I think back of all the things that I was doing when I was a struggling comic, and in New York, and the odd jobs I had, and standing out on street corners in the freezing cold to hand out tickets so I could perform for free, and I ate literally almost nothing but tuna for a year because my friend worked at a distributor that had a lot of tuna, so I'm most likely gonna die of mercury poisoning. | ||
| I mean, when I think about that, it's like, I don't know how the hell I did it, but I always say the same thing to people. | ||
| It's like, if you like what I do, Do it yourself. | ||
| If you want to do it, then start a YouTube channel. | ||
| And if you hate me, that's the other thing. | ||
| If you hate me, if you think I'm a terrible interviewer, you don't like the questions I ask, start an interview show. | ||
| Do it better than me. | ||
| Go to town. | ||
| You've got some trolls who make videos about you. | ||
| It's like, there you go. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| Do it. | ||
| Doesn't mean I have to interact with you, but go. | ||
| Wonderful. | ||
| Free speech, man. | ||
| Tim speaks about a new network idea. | ||
| Is Dave going to get in on it? | ||
| Oh, so I started a website, my brother started a website, subverse.net, a while ago and I was, you know, this is after I left Fusion and I was thinking like maybe I should just, you know, work with my brother and try and start something. | ||
| It is the most difficult thing ever. | ||
| Trying to get people who want to write, having no money, and then what ends up happening is people slowly start losing interest because, you know, a lot of people just expect, you know, an instant return on whatever work they're doing. | ||
| So, what I will say now is, the idea with Subverse is to try and convince people to be their own journalists, to do their own YouTube, Twitter, whatever, and then we will aggregate as, like, having contributors, we'll post their stuff. | ||
| It's gonna take a while, but it is being worked on, so. | ||
| It takes, it's not, it takes money, it takes technology, it takes patience and perseverance. | ||
| Yeah, and I only have so many hours a day, you know. | ||
| I was gonna say, you seem like a busy guy, as is. | ||
| On Super Chat, ever thought of going to one of the many, quote, black graduations where people are willingly segregating themselves and asking if they are racist? | ||
| Uh, no. | ||
| I mean, yes, I've thought about going, but I wouldn't go. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| If a group of people say, like, we want to have a private event for our specific group, It's one thing if it's a public institution. | ||
| Like, the Harvard thing that people have been talking about that a lot of people don't understand is that it was a private event organized by a private group, not Harvard. | ||
| If there's public funding towards an event, like the Evergreen College thing, right? | ||
| That was a state college, I believe, right? | ||
| Yeah, it was a state college. | ||
| Yeah, if they say white people gotta go, I'm like, nah, that's illegal. | ||
| Like, I mean, you can ask them to do it, they don't have to do it, and then if you get fined because of it, like, you're crossing the line. | ||
| But if a bunch of people of any race are like, we're going to have a private meeting to talk about our issues, I'm like, that's America. | ||
| You know, you're allowed to have private events as long as it's not publicly funded. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Tim and Dave, do you think that people are now publicly reacting to each other based on what they're reading online all day? | ||
| In other words, the violent and mean rhetoric we used to think only happened on the internet is now manifesting itself physically. | ||
| I think the first video I did This year was that internet culture is now becoming mainstream culture, and I really do believe it. | ||
| I'm starting to see it. | ||
| The friendships that are breaking up, even family members that are being intolerant of each other, snipping, biting. | ||
| I have my facts, you have your facts, that this was on, it was really only online three years ago, and it really has bubbled up. | ||
| And it'll only be 10 times worse in 10 years, you know. | ||
| That's the big conundrum of the authoritarian versus libertarian argument for a lot of people is that when you have an authoritative broadcast system where rich people control it and dictate what the masses can see and hear, that it can control things. | ||
| And if they want to start or stop violence, they can do it. | ||
| And then the inverse of that is with a libertarian system of free information spread around, people just will start fighting each other and there's no one who can stop it. | ||
| I have friends who are actually authoritarian left. | ||
| I wouldn't put them in, like, the Stalin bracket, but they believe that, you know, there needs to be some control on what people think and hear, because certain ideas are dangerous. | ||
| Oh, if you let the anti-vaxxers start spreading misinformation, then people stop taking vaccinations, and then we all get sick and die. | ||
| Therefore, the government should make X happen, you know? | ||
| That's actually a pretty mainstream thought, though. | ||
| It's funny you say that. | ||
| There were plenty of celebs that were all hating on... Alex Jones. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Who was it? | |
| Was it Suzanne Somers? | ||
| Oh, I guess Alex Jones. | ||
| But to deviate from the anti-vax thing, to talk about Megyn Kelly, how dare she interview Alex Jones? | ||
| His ideas should not be shared. | ||
| The problem with that is, by coming out and saying, you can't do this, everyone hears it. | ||
| It's a Streisand effect. | ||
| That's why I subscribe to the libertarian belief of, like, let the bad ideas bounce around and eventually the stupid ideas disappear. | ||
| Whereas if you try and challenge it, you get a bunch of kids being like, well, maybe you don't want to get a vaccine then, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I'll show you, vaccine! | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Phil DeFranco's starting a news program looking for reporters. | ||
| What are your thoughts? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I know of him. | ||
| Everyone thinks we all know each other. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But you're going to go to VidCon in a couple days and see what's going on. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I guess, I don't know what it is, but coming from, I came from like the alternative, alternative world. | ||
| When I first started doing what I did, live streaming, live streaming was nothing. | ||
| Got a bunch of attention for doing it. | ||
| Live streams started to get big. | ||
| No one cared about news. | ||
| So I have never been, I have never had success at doing anything. | ||
| I'll put it this way. | ||
| Me going to VidCon has always felt like an uphill battle, where I'm not welcome there. | ||
| I am a moderate center-left news personality, and VidCon, the biggest YouTube convention, has personalities that talk real issues, but the guy who was one of the founding members of Vice News, who's traveled the world and actually covered this stuff in the alternative media space, Pioneering livestream is not someone we're interested in having. | ||
| And I've actually had an agent, a really reputable agent, say like, hey, are you guys going to have this guy here? | ||
| And they were like, we're not interested. | ||
| So why do I still go to VidCon? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Because people are there, but... | ||
| You know, I don't know. | ||
| It's their event. | ||
| I don't need to be involved. | ||
| I kind of feel the same way. | ||
| I mean, I know everybody's there. | ||
| You know, you're here today because of that. | ||
| I have Sargon coming on later because of that. | ||
| I know there's going to be some hangouts maybe with some people. | ||
| So I don't think I'm going to make it. | ||
| But if there's something like cool going down off-site, will you at least let me know about that? | ||
| I'm going to parties and networking. | ||
| What I really want to do is interview people. | ||
| So I was able to interview Chris Raygun, which was cool. | ||
| I did that yesterday. | ||
| And then maybe I'll get to... I did a video for Sargon's channel, and I got the Sargon bump, which bumped my channel up a bunch of subs. | ||
| I had an Uber driver be like, I saw you on On Sargon's channel, I was like, wow. | ||
| So I'm definitely grateful that he was willing to put out my video on his platform. | ||
| So maybe I'll get to interview or meet him. | ||
| That's better than the Uber driver who's like, ah, I know you. | ||
| You're an alt, right? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Well, I mean, being on Sargon's channel, it's like, yeah, you're an alt. | ||
| It's premises. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| All right, brother, well, it was a pleasure doing this. | ||
| I have a feeling we're gonna do many of these. | ||
| Yeah, I'm down. | ||
| I didn't realize that I was your second, third-time guest or whatever. | ||
| I didn't... My friend Faisal Syed Al Mutar, who is a freedom fighter for Western values, refugee from Iraq, is number one. | ||
| Gad Saad, a refugee from Lebanon who now fights for freedom in Canada. | ||
| I think he's also a three-timer. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I'm number three. | |
| Yeah, so you're number three. | ||
| Technically, one of the ones we did with Gad was a test show. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So we can consider you... I didn't realize that this was anything, you know... | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is pretty big. | |
| But I feel special. | ||
| We should have had some balloons falling or something. | ||
| All right, it was a pleasure. | ||
| Follow Tim on the Twitter, at Timcast. | ||
| What's your direct YouTube URL? | ||
| YouTube.com slash Timcast. | ||
| YouTube.com slash Timcast. | ||
| And we'll be doing this with Sargon at... What time, guys? | ||
| At 2pm Pacific, which is 5pm Eastern. |
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