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unidentified
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(dramatic music) | |
(dramatic music) | ||
If you caught my direct message last week, you heard me explain why we shouldn't let politics | ||
make us crazy, yet the crazy seems to be ramping up everywhere you look these days. | ||
This constant onslaught of political bickering has an incredibly polarizing effect on most people. | ||
The fighting either makes them obsessively tune into politics nonstop, or reflexively tune out of politics altogether. | ||
With so much news and commentary content out there, if you give me an hour or two of your week to hear about political science, philosophy, religion or anything else we're discussing here, I consider the time you spend with me to be a pretty high honor. | ||
Those of you who follow me on social media outside of YouTube probably saw that I spent last week on a farm with family and friends. | ||
Outside of Seattle. | ||
Though I spent most of the week hanging out with 20 chickens and one duck who thinks she's a chicken, I had a couple personal experiences with actual real life human beings which reminded me why these aren't just abstract ideas that we talk about here. | ||
One of the people on the farm with us was a trans woman in her 20s who happened to grow up on a pot farm. | ||
She was also an avid hunter and a guns rights enthusiast who was painting her gun locker bright blue and pink at the time of our visit. | ||
Yes, trans women are sometimes into guns, but if you judge people as a collective instead of as an individual, this is exactly the type of person who will always go ignored. | ||
I also spent some time with a farmer who lived almost 100% off his own land, but he was very concerned with treating other people fairly and making sure that others had the same opportunity to succeed which he had. | ||
While his day to day life had a very libertarian bent to it because he provided for himself and was living off the land, there was no doubt that he wanted there to be assistance for people so that they could one day share in the same opportunity and pride in work that he himself had attained. | ||
His live and let live attitude was blended with his desire to do good for others in his community. | ||
He was a far cry from what some would say about those selfish libertarians or what others might say about those authoritarian lefties. | ||
While I was away, I also had a truly awe-inspiring hike up Mount Rainier, which is part of the US National Park Service. | ||
This park is an incredible example of a natural wonder that we have right here in this country, which happens to be funded and protected by the federal government. | ||
You guys all know that I'm a small government guy and I'd always prefer local and state funding, but a place like Mount Rainier, which is so gorgeous and so powerful, I believe, should have some federal funding, and I'd say the same, by the way, for a place like Yellowstone National Park or Yosemite. | ||
The question here is how much funding, or the best way to pay for this funding. | ||
That's really what the debate is about. | ||
By the way, Mount Rainier is also funded by state and local organizations, and I met many great people along the trail who are volunteering their time and energy to a place they love so much. | ||
That right there is called putting your beliefs into action, not just demanding that the government pay for something with other people's money, which is often what we talk about. | ||
My point here is that people are complex, issues are complex, and finding answers which will satisfy everyone, almost always, is absolutely impossible. | ||
At the same time, not only do we all have our own strengths and passions, but we all also have our own inconsistencies and blind spots. | ||
Our goal shouldn't be about purity tests so that people fall in line or adhere to some false notion of perfection. | ||
Our goal should be the acknowledgement of differences so we stand up for the freedom and for the liberty | ||
that this country was founded upon. | ||
unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
Joining me today is an author, a commentator, a screenwriter, and a pilot, Bill Whittle. | ||
Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
Good to be here, Dave. | ||
Took long enough. | ||
It did take long enough. | ||
Considering the distance we had to travel to get here. | ||
I had no idea. | ||
I don't want to give anything away related to our location. | ||
We will not. | ||
We are in two undisclosed locations that are probably 400 yards apart from each other, something like that. | ||
Yeah, completely ridiculous. | ||
And there is a food place, which we're not going to describe, where later We could possibly break bread. | ||
Sweet. | ||
It wouldn't necessarily be bread we were breaking there, it would be... Careful. | ||
I don't want to say anything else. | ||
All right, I'm looking forward to talking to you. | ||
I was on your show a couple weeks ago. | ||
Yeah, it was wonderful. | ||
We had a great discussion about the things that I really care about, about freedom, about liberty, about how we should be governed, about ways that we shouldn't be governed, and all sorts of other stuff. | ||
And especially about the idea that people should not only should be allowed to, but the entire thesis of this country is disagreement, right? | ||
I mean, that's the entire reason we're here. | ||
We should be able to discuss things. | ||
I think I said on the show, and I certainly mean it, when somebody makes a case that's compelling enough for me, I'll change my mind and I feel a bigger person. | ||
You know, I feel like I come out of that larger. | ||
Yes. | ||
All right. | ||
So let's start right there. | ||
What happened? | ||
What went wrong seemingly in the last couple years where sitting down from someone that you disagree with and agreeing to disagree or just not agreeing to disagree but going, okay, I can still live in the country with that person. | ||
Where did that go? | ||
Where did that start crumbling? | ||
When did it start growing? | ||
Well, first of all, I think you could probably make the case that in terms of what the other side doesn't like, you kind of started this pendulum, and rather than the pendulum damping out, it's just gotten wider and wider and wider, right? | ||
So, you know, there's Reagan, and they didn't like Reagan, so Bill Clinton and conservatives didn't like Clinton, and then George Bush and liberals, and then Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump. | ||
The building's going to come apart. | ||
But I think the primary thing that's changed is that politics is in so much more of our life than it used to be. | ||
It seems to me that I didn't know if my dad was a Republican or a Democrat until I was probably 20. | ||
18, 19, 20. | ||
I just didn't care. | ||
And I didn't think about politics in any way, shape, or form until I was 43. | ||
So, all of the things that used to be political were not things that you'd get particularly ginned up about. | ||
You know, somebody's going to make a trade agreement with China, and if your neighbor thinks that you'd be 13% and you're one of the 24% people, you're not likely to lose Thanksgiving dinners over those things. | ||
Right. | ||
But as politics has pressed itself out into everything else in the entire culture, now everything is political. | ||
And you find yourself on these sides of issues And sometimes, occasionally, you find yourself arguing against things that you actually kind of support just because, you know, it's coming from the other team, and it's getting really out of hand. | ||
Yeah, so you weren't political until you were 43, which is really fascinating, and I want to get to that, but that you didn't know whether your father was a Democrat or Republican is kind of interesting. | ||
Tell me a little bit about growing up. | ||
Well, my dad was a hotel manager. | ||
I was born in Manhattan, and we lived just across the river in West New York, just a couple hundred yards from where Aaron Burr won that altercation. | ||
And just before my fourth birthday, we moved to Bermuda, so I grew up in Bermuda. | ||
And I actually kind of grew up in the best corner of Bermuda. | ||
My dad was pretty solidly middle class. | ||
I was quite shocked as an adult when I found out he never made more than $44,000 a year. | ||
It was really quite a shock for me. | ||
But there were a lot of great perks with it, and growing up on the pink beaches of Bermuda was pretty nice. | ||
But the main thing about that experience was the British schools, which were, anyway, exceptional, | ||
extraordinary. | ||
They were highly disciplined, very structured, but they were also very competitive, very | ||
competitive. | ||
And I just took to that. | ||
And it gave me a four or five year boost in terms of education, but socially it was probably | ||
It was an all-boys school. | ||
So suddenly you arrive in Miami and you're fearing for your life and you have this funny accent and you don't carry your book right. | ||
So it was a real transformative experience for me. | ||
And then what took you another 23-ish years to get into politics? | ||
I had seen the Thunderbirds. | ||
My dad was a very busy man because a hotel manager is a day job and a night job. | ||
He used to run the hotel during the day, came home, take an hour or two, nap, and then go down and entertain the guests. | ||
So he took me to see the Thunderbirds out at Kinley Air Force Base in 1965, I guess. | ||
Flying F-100s. | ||
And I just dropped my ice cream cone. | ||
I never really picked it up, you know. | ||
I mean, honestly. | ||
Between the ages of five and seventeen, I was just... | ||
I was just going to be an astronaut. | ||
I was serious about it. | ||
I got a job at the Miami Planetarium when I was thirteen, I think. | ||
I was running shows and teaching astronomy there from fourteen and everything's looking good and I went to take the vision test as part of the physical and sailed through everything else and I didn't even know I had a vision problem until I failed the vision test. | ||
And that was it? | ||
That was it and needless to say I spent that summer between junior and senior year in college I just wandered around like somebody had been clubbed on the head, you know. | ||
I didn't leave the house for a long time. | ||
Yeah, that must be. | ||
I mean, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. | ||
Sometimes still I don't know exactly what I want to do, but I can only imagine being, what, 17, is that what you said? | ||
That's right. | ||
And suddenly your dreams are crushed by something that you simply cannot control. | ||
Yeah, and I'd been after these for quite a long time. | ||
And by the way, that's a really interesting point because that aspect of my life is I've been a big influence on a lot of the political thinking I do. | ||
That idea that the world did not owe me the Air Force Academy, the world didn't owe me Mars mission, all the things I thought I was going to do, it didn't owe those things to me. | ||
I was heartbroken by it, but that's the way it goes. | ||
And parenthetically, just very quickly, what I did find out about life is that you can't always get what you want, but sometimes if you try real hard you can get what you need. | ||
I think there's a song about that, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
Somebody did that. | ||
No, I'm quite certain I came up with that one. | ||
But so, I wanted to fly F-16s, and I can't fly F-16s, and I never will, but I have a little experimental airplane with a propeller in the back so I don't have to see it, and I go through the air at 200 miles an hour, and I make my fighter pilot turns, and it's good enough. | ||
So that is the pilot that I mentioned earlier. | ||
Yeah, that's a big part of my personality. | ||
But it's a really interesting point for me because there's very few people in life who I think get exactly what they want. | ||
But if you are dealt cards that prevents that, you can still get pretty close. | ||
I mean, the number of people playing NBA basketball as a percentage of the population is... As you can see, where I would rather be than here. | ||
Exactly. | ||
Probably the only place that I'd rather be than here would be if I could be in the NBA. | ||
Okay, so you don't get a chance to play in the NBA, and that's the cards you're dealt with, and there's nothing you can do about that. | ||
Yeah, well that's what it's all about, right? | ||
And if you really, really like playing basketball, you could play league basketball | ||
with guys that are really, really good. | ||
And it's enough. | ||
It is for me anyway. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
Well, that's what it's all about, right? | ||
Sort of going as hard as you can, but then realizing where the limits might be | ||
and then figuring out how to max that out, Do you enjoy and skill or anything else? | ||
Yeah. | ||
I learned very late also, probably only three or four years ago, somebody told me that the ancient Greek definition of happiness was using all of your abilities to their fullest. | ||
And I thought, that's really true. | ||
You know when you're doing good work, and you know when you're doing bad work, | ||
but you know when you're doing good work. | ||
And when you do things that you put a lot of effort into, and especially when you work really hard for goals | ||
for a long period of time, there's no feeling like it. | ||
It's the reason, it's the reason it makes me feel human. | ||
That would be a good segue to where I want to go in a little bit about, you know, building your own thing and having your own platform and doing this on your own outside of mainstream. | ||
We're going to get there, but I want to hear about this 43-year-old episode. | ||
What happened? | ||
You're 43 years old. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You're doing your thing. | ||
Well, the Air Force thing happened between my junior and senior year in college and I had some friends basically took pity on me and they dragged me out into the Florida summer and we started making Super 8 movies and it gave me a chance to do a little clowning around and I guess it was just a natural ham and stuff, certainly looking at most of my videos I realize that's probably putting it mildly. | ||
It was actually fun, and we took it real seriously. | ||
We did a lot of stories and cuts, and, you know, we didn't just turn on the camera. | ||
We took it like real movies. | ||
And then I realized that when I went for my senior year in high school, that all the girls who had wanted nothing to do with Mr. Calculator on his belt, turtleneck in the Florida summer, you know, science dork, all of a sudden you're making movies, everybody wants to be in them, you know, and you get invited to parties, and people say, hey, you're actually kind of funny. | ||
unidentified
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somebody last year too. And so there was that reward. It was the turtleneck in Florida. | |
You have no idea. Don't even start me. It's all part of the outer shell of vanity that | ||
makes my life what it is. But truthfully, when I say it was a role, it was an identity. | ||
And it was very important to me. | ||
And then I became a theater major at the University of Florida. | ||
A friend of mine who's a year older, who was making the movies, just goofing around, went to the University of Florida, got a degree in theater. | ||
He said, you can come up, spend a weekend with him. | ||
I said, you can actually do this for, you can get a degree in this? | ||
Yeah, you get financial aid, too. | ||
Well, damn. | ||
You know, so I was a theater major. | ||
And I was very left-wing, I would say. | ||
Very left-wing. | ||
And over time, I just I just started reading all kinds of other different things and it never was really a moment. | ||
So I was considered a Republican by the people I was working with, but I didn't know much about anything. | ||
9-11 turned a lot of people, but it didn't turn me. | ||
What turned me was right after 9-11, about nine months later, my dad died and he was interned at Arlington, which is shocking because he was never a war hero. | ||
He was never shot at. | ||
He got to Germany in the last week of the war, I think. | ||
But I found myself out there on an October morning. | ||
I've never been that cold in my life. | ||
And you're walking the rows of Arlington, and all of the headstones are exactly the same. | ||
And here's a major general who's been in, you know, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War. | ||
Here's a guy who, just do the math, he's a sergeant, maybe less than a year, maybe. | ||
And this was in October of 2002, when a lot of the pushback was starting. | ||
Oh, we deserve 9-11. | ||
It was our fault, you know. | ||
And I just remember thinking that my dad, who'd been such an asset as a businessman, over time he just basically got fired on the phone. | ||
But 40 some years after, he signed on the dotted line along with everybody else. | ||
They turn out. | ||
Here's 20 guys in the army band. | ||
Here's another 20 guys in the army honor guard and the caisson and everything. | ||
It's freezing cold. | ||
These guys are in detention. | ||
They're the same age as he was when he signed on the dotted line. | ||
And I thought a country that keeps its promises like that, that keeps those fundamental promises It's worth defending. | ||
So I wrote just a very brief two-page thing to a guy whose blog I admired very much at the time, a guy named Stephen Dunn Best, and he said, do you mind if I print this? | ||
Okay, sure. | ||
And it got a lot of attention, and it did something else that got attention. | ||
Rachel Lucas set me up with a blog, and I started a blog called Eject, Eject, Eject, and I didn't write about politics at all. | ||
I wrote about philosophy and I wrote about morality. | ||
I wrote, it got to be an affectation I guess, but I wrote essays called Courage and Responsibility, Power, Honor, Freedom, History, those kind of things. | ||
Big, big issues. | ||
It's interesting to me, because when I was on your show just a couple weeks ago, we did a full hour, and we didn't prepare before, you didn't question me before, but I knew that, you know, we've met a couple times, and I knew that we were having a good conversation, but we barely talked politics in the traditional sense. | ||
We did a little more of this, where we're talking about the ideas around politics that sort of frame it. | ||
That's always what I'm interested in, and I sense that's what you're interested in. | ||
Why is that? | ||
Why isn't it about the minutia? | ||
There's so many people lost, I think, in the minutia of the day-to-day politics, screaming about this immediate decision, or Trump tweeted this today. | ||
Yeah, it's very reactive. | ||
Yeah, exactly, the reaction to this. | ||
I find the only way to make sense of it is to try to care about the stuff that really is the underpinning of it. | ||
Absolutely right. | ||
And one of the reasons I was looking forward to coming here and talking to you, | ||
and we did the election night thing as well, is because there's a great deal about civility gone. | ||
Now people can make a legitimate claim that I'm advancing the laws of civility | ||
because I do a fair number of videos where I point out things that I don't think, | ||
by the way, Thunderbird's just doing a quick flyover. | ||
You know, we've done a pretty good job of saying everything, but-- | ||
Quick flyover in my, no, no, no, no, they called it in. | ||
They knew I was gonna be on, heard the Thunderbird story, | ||
you guys are four and a half minutes late. | ||
But they, it's about the philosophy | ||
and it's about the ability to disagree about things. | ||
And to be honest with you, I'm ready to talk to anybody who's ready to make an argument, you know? | ||
And not just launch all the vitriol. | ||
But I try very, very, very hard to get things right. | ||
And before I ever go on camera or do anything, I really do kind of preflight these ideas. | ||
I kind of walk around and say, what if you're wrong? | ||
Are you right about this? | ||
You know, are you cherry-picking data? | ||
Are you aware that you might be cherry-picking data without even knowing it? | ||
And if I make a spelling mistake, it makes me sick. | ||
You know, it just makes me ill. | ||
Yeah, one of the things that we talked about a couple weeks ago is that I said to you that I have never blatantly lied on this show. | ||
That's right. | ||
I have made mistakes without question. | ||
We've had times where I've made a mistake and I've told my guys after, leave it in because I want, I'll comment then in the comment section and say, you know, I screwed this up. | ||
But I want people to see that I'm as human as anyone else and everything. | ||
But I would never intentionally mislead or intentionally lie. | ||
But even that, That seems like such a big thing these days, when it's actually such a small thing. | ||
Yeah, and that's probably the single most common word applied to people in terms of criticism of their politics on YouTube comments or whatever. | ||
You know, liar, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. | ||
I can honestly stand here and tell you, same as you, I have never told a lie on those shows. | ||
That doesn't mean I've never been wrong, but it means I have never gone out there knowing something was untrue and said it as if it was true. | ||
Yeah, that goes to so much of what's wrong with mainstream media right now, which I know you're, we're very much sympathical on that, on a lot of the mainstream media stuff. | ||
So the night that we first met was election night. | ||
We were over at the Daily Wire offices and they had some beers and Shapiro was there and Clayton and a couple other guys. | ||
Shapiro was sort of vacillating back and forth between, he was thrilled that Hillary wasn't gonna be president, but sort of horrified that Trump was gonna be president. | ||
I thought he was vacillating between being really upset that Trump won and being a little bit upset that Trump won, but yeah, he was out here vibrating. | ||
However you want to parse it, I had never seen him in that position before. | ||
Clavin, I think was a little, and I had him on a couple weeks ago, he was more okay with Trump, but you were elated that night. | ||
And you were the first person that I saw, and it was because it was happening that night and I happened to be in a room with you, you were the first person that I saw that was like, this is it, this is what I've wanted. | ||
And I had had Milo on and Cernovich and Scott Adams, other supporters, but I happened to be with you that night. | ||
Are you as elated eight months later? | ||
Well, I am, but probably, almost certainly for reasons that you don't suspect. | ||
I wasn't elated that Donald Trump was elected because I was a Donald Trump fan. | ||
I was never a Donald Trump fan. | ||
When people ask me for the first six months of this thing, what do you like about, say one thing you like about Donald Trump, I say I like his hat. | ||
You know, pretty much it. | ||
And all throughout the debates and so on, and so I was never like a Trump guy. | ||
I was a real solid You know, I was a Ted Cruz guy. | ||
But I wasn't elated about the night because Donald Trump won. | ||
I was elated about the night because there was still room for choice in the American political system. | ||
That this thing was not on a rail. | ||
That this media bias was not something that was insurmountable. | ||
There still was a chance to get off of the track of history that had been written out for pretty much the whole country. | ||
I didn't think he was going to win. | ||
I didn't think it was going to win at all. | ||
And the main reason I was as happy as I was, to be honest with you, is because my fiancé is from Russia, and when she came over... Oh, well... The fiancé is an open secret. | ||
When she came over here... Russia, you know... But when she came, this is before the Russia thing happened, because that all happened post-election. | ||
Two nights after the election, Hillary says, fake news, Russia connection, all the rest of it. | ||
But she came over from Russia, And we went to a debate, watching the first debate with a bunch of conservatives here in Los Angeles. | ||
There were three of us, I suspect. | ||
unidentified
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Maybe 20. | |
20, 25. | ||
Thin group. | ||
Maybe 20, 20, 25. Thin group. And in that first debate Trump was landing these, | ||
these, these, let's not say he was landing any blows, but he was | ||
counterattacking with enthusiasm. | ||
Let's at least put it that way. | ||
And people were cheering. | ||
And she looked at me and said, why is everybody so excited? | ||
I said, because, honey, these are important issues. | ||
This is really, really important. | ||
And it was impossible for her to really realize on the spot that we take it as That there is in fact a choice. | ||
There's no politics in Russia. | ||
The people don't have any. | ||
They don't talk politics in Russia because it doesn't make any difference what your politics are in Russia. | ||
Putin's going to do what he wants to do and that's the way it is. | ||
The idea that people would have an emotional vested interest in the outcome of this meant that the outcome was in doubt. | ||
And as the primary went on and as the rest of the election season went on and so on, It just began to look like that kind of headwind was just insurmountable. | ||
That the Clinton machine and the media coverage and everything was just not going to be possible. | ||
But no, he was never my candidate. | ||
He's not my candidate now. | ||
He is to me The only person that is capable of destroying the media information complex. | ||
And what comes with that, I'll take. | ||
And it's so interesting that so many people are putting such a high premium on that, including Andrew Klavan, who we were with that night. | ||
And one of the things that he said that evening that did help me frame this a little bit more was he said, what a beautiful country we live in that all the pundits could be wrong. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
All of the money and the power and the elite, they all said this is gonna happen. | ||
All the polls said this is gonna happen. | ||
And the reverse happened. | ||
That actually shows you the strength of our democracy and the beauty of the power to the people. | ||
Absolutely right. | ||
And this is my entire theory of what I try to defend. | ||
I had, when I was in my twenties and thirties, certainly right after I started making movies and stuff, in college, when I was in college, I was an exceedingly unpleasant person. | ||
I really was. | ||
I was so, I was so obsessed with intelligence, I was so obsessed with, you know, looking smart, being smart, and I was so sure of myself. | ||
And I had that beaten out of me over the course of, you know, 25, 30 years, 30 plus years of being a limo driver, a security guard, a waiter, you know, all these things. | ||
And I got to, I got to be in show business. | ||
I came out here as an editor and I'm hanging around very, you know, sophisticated people and very beautiful people and some celebrities and things like that. | ||
And I went on a speaking event early. | ||
in my career. And I'll just tell you the story straight up. | ||
I was at an event, afterwards, I make it a point to be the last person out of the room. | ||
You know, they're going to fly me out there and people are going to come and see me. I'm the last | ||
guy out. So I was talking to everybody, and a guy came up to me, and honest to God, he looked like | ||
Junior Samples from HeHoff, you know? | ||
He's a big guy. | ||
He was wearing the overalls, the coveralls. | ||
He looked like Junior Samples from Hee Haw. | ||
And I had this thought right then. | ||
I thought, you know, it'd be nice if I was a leftist and I could get all this kind of more glamorous people in the Hollywood crowd and just flow with the entire pop culture. | ||
Right on the heels of that, it wasn't late or anything, just like this lightning bolt, like I'd shocked myself, you know? | ||
I remember thinking, dude, this man knows a hundred things more than you do, better than you do, a hundred things he knows better than you do, and there's probably two or three things that this guy knows that make him pretty near an expert in the world. | ||
Now that may be just things like at what temperature milk begins to congeal or whatever, but don't, don't go there. | ||
This was an enormous breakthrough for me and and it's been something I've tried to keep myself honest with very very long time and very carefully. | ||
It's the idea that there is a reservoir of knowledge in the population of America and that it's not based entirely on education. | ||
In fact, it's not based mostly on education. | ||
It is a fundamental decency and a fundamental sense of what works and what doesn't. | ||
And I got tired of those people being demonized. | ||
I got tired of them being Being assaulted by people with very high rhetorical skill and very good looking on camera and very big loudspeakers. | ||
But I got tired of it. | ||
And it doesn't strike me as fair. | ||
And what I learned from this, Dave, is I learned that rhetorical ease and intelligence are not the same thing. | ||
They look like they're the same thing to some people, but they're not the same thing. | ||
They're different. | ||
Yeah, that's so interesting to me because we both were born in New York, we both now live in LA, and yet I feel what you're saying very intimately. | ||
That always became obvious to me when I started interviewing people and I'd start getting emails from people in the middle of the country and they'd say, Dave, it doesn't sound like you're judging us. | ||
Everyone else is judging us. | ||
I don't think I'm better than you. | ||
I'm somebody just doing the best I can, and that's it. | ||
I mean, that's it. | ||
I hope I'm bringing some goodness here and trying to do the best I can, but I don't feel that I have some magic wisdom that they don't have. | ||
I think, if anything, they might have some magic wisdom that I don't have. | ||
Precisely right, which is why my favorite part of the speaking events is the Q&A, because I agree. | ||
I love the keynotes. | ||
By far. | ||
First of all, if you can get a question you've never heard before and you can answer it on the fly, that means you understand your philosophy. | ||
Because many questions you've dealt with before, so you have kind of a canned answer. | ||
It's just the only way to think about it. | ||
You're a comedian. | ||
You write jokes. | ||
If you're a musician, you sing songs. | ||
If you're a pundit, you have answers to things that you get a lot. | ||
But when I get a question that literally stumps me, I realize, for me personally, I say, well, what's the freedom answer here? | ||
What is the freedom answer here? | ||
And that almost always takes me to the right place. | ||
And so I enjoy that aspect of it, but I learn so much from the people. | ||
And one of the things that I learn a lot from, I don't do many of them, just haven't, but when I go to very liberal schools, I have a very steep learning curve as a result of my interaction with the audience. | ||
Which is important and I suspect you probably enjoy. | ||
I do. | ||
I'm not wired for patience as a general rule. | ||
But I had an experience out in East Texas just last winter. | ||
And I got to this event, and I started speaking, and I think I might have mentioned, we did a whole segment on this, as a matter of fact, and there was a guy in the front row who had started a Facebook page to have me banned from speaking. | ||
And I said, you know, if you imagine if Trotsky had grown up in Malibu, that's what this guy looked like. | ||
So Malibu Trotsky is yelling over, I mean, he's yelling over everything I'm trying to say. | ||
And to my absolute astonishment, I just got serene. | ||
I mean, I went past calm into just kind of this zen tranquility, you know. | ||
And I just let him go, and let him go, and go, and go, and go, and go, and go. | ||
And people would ask me questions, a lot of antagonism about the questions, and I'd start asking people about trying to find what we have in common. | ||
They'd be agreeing, they'd be nodding. | ||
And I think Mel Butrowski looked around and said, well, he's actually having a conversation with these people that I brought down to boo him off the stage. | ||
And then he started criticizing me. | ||
You and your effing long answers, you know? | ||
What is it with all these long answers? | ||
You and your explanations! | ||
Yeah, you and your explanations for your behavior. | ||
It's... The big breakthrough for me, and from the time I've been doing progressive events, I don't do many of them. | ||
I've probably done six or seven colleges. | ||
Is that I thought I would go in there and I thought that my mission going in, I don't think I'd change anybody's mind, but I thought at the very least my mission is to go in there and explain these principles in such a way that people can understand them. | ||
Just give it to them the way it is, not the way people tell them. | ||
Tell them what I think, not let them hear what other people think that I think. | ||
But I found out very early in all of these cases that my primary result was that by the time it was over, | ||
people said, "Well, he strikes me as a human being anyway. | ||
"He strikes me as a human being. | ||
"He's a conservative, so obviously he wants to see "poor people just dying in the gutter. | ||
"But he strikes me as a person that doesn't wanna see "people dying in the gutter, and it turns out I don't." | ||
And so this moral preening that causes catastrophic events downstream is the one thing that I have genuine hatred for, | ||
is when people will puff themselves up about taking a position. | ||
That's one thing. | ||
But when you puff yourself up about all the good you're doing, when in point of fact the downstream effects of that are catastrophic, murderous, ruinous, dead people ruin lives, and you don't want to look at that, you want to instead just have the good feeling of feeling like you're doing the right thing, that's when I get... | ||
Yeah, what a perfect way to end that sentence, because it's an odd moral position that they've put themselves in. | ||
The same way, we've said this on the show a bunch lately, but this progressivism has become a secular religion in a lot of respects, and uncoupling that, or at least Dealing with those people can be tough, and I think, maybe, where you've probably made some headway, and I think where I've made a little bit of headway, is that if you keep pushing the ideas of, well, I'm for your liberty, I'm for your freedom, I'm for you to live your life the way you want, but then that comes with having other people live their lives the way they want, I think you can get a little headway there, but it is tough, it is tough for sure. | ||
Well fortunately we're recording this so you can take this out and post if you want to. | ||
We take nothing and post. | ||
I don't want to ouch you here but I mean I look over to the control room and there's an American flag in the back. | ||
We got a big American flag. | ||
Big American flag in the back. | ||
That's vintage for like, you know, something. | ||
Well it's beautiful. | ||
Thanks. | ||
But here's what that tells me. | ||
Seeing that flag in the background tells me that you love this country and that you care about this country and that you would like for the citizens of this country to have the most optimal outcomes they possibly can. | ||
Now how we get there is the subject of discussion. | ||
Therein lies the road. | ||
But your motivation, from my value set, your motivation is the same as my motivation. | ||
So I could talk to you all day about all kinds of things and not ever get heated about it because I could get excited about it but never angry about it because I perceive your motivations to be the same as mine and I try with all my might to make sure that my motivations are worthy, you know, that they're decent motivations, that they're not selfish or they're not exclusionary or they're not any of these things. | ||
There are things that you could answer for and not have to blush, you know? | ||
So you're telling me that as a Republican and someone on the right, you're not an evil, racist, bigot, homophobe, Islamophobe, gimme-a-couple-other-phobe, arachnophobe, etc.? | ||
I made the case before, and I'll just give it to you as an example here. | ||
I genuinely think, I was, one of the things that they yelled at me a lot about in that university was that I'd said that Black Lives Matter is not a serious movement and that I cared more about black people's lives than the Black Lives Matter people do. | ||
Now that's a provocative statement, I understand that. | ||
The data for 2014 shows the total number of black homicides in the country, of the total number of blacks killed in this country in 2014, 4% were by policemen under any circumstances. | ||
It's not 4% of the hands up, that's 4%. | ||
Shooting a police officer, death by police officers, 4%. | ||
And when you have a political movement that is determined to make It's not just making a molehill out of the 4%, because there is some signal in there. | ||
There are some bad cops. | ||
That's a legitimate point that needs to be raised. | ||
But when everything you do is about this 4% of your problem, and 96% of the problem you're not only ignoring, you're suppressing. | ||
When somebody points out to the fact, hey, you know, you're putting all this effort onto 4%, Most of which is not even up for discussion. | ||
You know, it's a gunfight or something. | ||
And you're leaving 96% out here. | ||
That tells me you're not a serious movement, and I want to know why. | ||
And then you look at things like Detroit's been governed by Democrats, uninterrupted mayors and city councils for 60 years, Atlanta's like 138 years, something like this. | ||
You, it takes courage, and I don't mean to blow myself up over this, but it takes courage to say that if somebody has to point this out, that somebody has to point out where the problem really is, and I know what's coming for me when I say that, you know, I know it, but it has to be said because people are getting killed and they're not getting killed where we live here in Santa Monica. | ||
Or Irvine. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Somewhere. | ||
This is not where the problem is. | ||
It's easy to talk about these things and it's easy to put a bumper sticker on your car and hold up a sign and protest all the rest of it. | ||
But meanwhile, every week in Chicago, five or six people are being killed. | ||
They're mostly black people. | ||
They're being killed because of these policies. | ||
They're being killed because of all of the economic decay, all of the graft, all the corruption, all of it. | ||
There are people dying, hundreds of them every year in every one of these major cities. | ||
And that's not an accident and it's not a coincidence. | ||
So, okay, so I get it. | ||
So you're putting your ass on the line. | ||
I mean, that's what any of us that are willing to take unpopular positions do. | ||
So you're putting your butt on the line to say something like that. | ||
When you've made headway with people, have you been able to get someone to go, wait a minute, if Atlanta has had Democratic mayors for X amount of years or Chicago or wherever, and this is where all this crime and murder is happening. | ||
This is where people are not moving upward and all that. | ||
How have you been able to reach people on that? | ||
Because it seems like it's almost like, it's almost the reverse of reason in a way. | ||
Because people are just, they just hold that belief. | ||
They just hold the belief that somehow it's the evil Republicans or something that are doing this. | ||
It's the racist Southern Republicans. | ||
Let me just go, just slightly off to the side of that, because I think the best way to answer that is like this. | ||
When I realized that people wanted to read what I was writing, it was just on a blog and stuff. | ||
And when I started to do actual political commentary, It became clear to me pretty early that I had thought my job was to change people's minds, was to convince them of things. | ||
But very quickly, after having gone to a bunch of speaking events, I think this is different for conservatives than it is for liberals. | ||
That a requirement that superseded changing people's minds was I had to pass ammunition to people and not just ammunition but comfort to people who've been under fire for a long time. | ||
That my primary job was to remind people that we call conservatives in the country today that they're not nuts, that they're not evil, that they're not all of these things and provide the evidence that that is the case. | ||
So I realized early that while it would have been nice to be a diplomat Mostly, my job was to go up and down the line and hand out ammunition cartridges, you know, and stop people from being so filled with despair because, I don't think it's accidental, but even if it is. | ||
One of the things that is applied against conservatives is this cultural idea that you're a dinosaur and you're all these horrible immoral things and that's the entire purpose because if we start arguing you know you're in trouble. | ||
So there are a lot of people out there and what the comments I was getting were not so much you changed my mind but Bill you finally put words into what I've been feeling my whole life and you finally allow me to talk to somebody at the you know the water cooler or whatever you've given me the arguments. | ||
I knew these things were true I just didn't know how to express them and that That became my primary motivation. | ||
Now, if that is your motivation, you're going to take a different rhetorical tack than you are if you're actually going to try and convert people. | ||
And I would like to be in converting people mode, but I felt that the left needed the same kind of ridicule That the right has been getting the whole time. | ||
And because I'm a former, I was never what you'd call a progressive by any means. | ||
I always loved the country, loved the military, business, all the rest of it. | ||
unidentified
|
But I voted for, my first vote was for Walter Mondale. | |
Wow. | ||
And it was because he said he was going to raise taxes. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So you've come a long way, so to speak. | ||
And this is not an effort to indicate that people who don't hold my positions are wrong, but I can tell you what interests me the most is I cannot believe looking back on things how passionately I believed in things that I knew nothing about. | ||
Nothing! | ||
Yeah, that's almost the key to being really passionate about things in a way. | ||
You don't know that much about them. | ||
I suspect that's not true. | ||
I suspect that as you've gotten more experience and more enlightened, me too, I find that the truth, that the pachinko balls of events tend to fall where you expect them to fall. | ||
And I personally, now this is more of a conservative statement, but I personally like the ability to say one thing and then do the same thing. | ||
I don't have to call for higher taxes and then tell my accountant to take every deduction that he possibly needs, you know? | ||
I don't have to do any of that. | ||
Right, which you're saying that's probably what most progressives are doing. | ||
It's certainly what most celebrities are doing, right? | ||
Yeah, of course. | ||
I mean, Matt Damon says, oh, we should raise taxes, and I'm rich, so I'll pay the highest percentage of taxes. | ||
Okay, Matt, but first of all, instead of going home with 13 million, you know, you go home with 10, but there are people who are struggling, and so on. | ||
And you're pretty much, we know you're going into your account and saying, of course. | ||
But Matt, I know, and you know, They don't know that Paramount doesn't write a check paid to the order of Matt Damon, $12 million. | ||
They write a check that says pay to MD Enterprises LLC, $12 million, and then the business pays for your house, your car, all your travel, everything. | ||
They give you enough money to go grocery shopping on and so on, and you pay tax on that. | ||
This is the essence of it. | ||
I suspect you don't have a problem with that, actually. | ||
I don't have a problem with that. | ||
You have a problem with the hypocrisy. | ||
Of course not. | ||
No, no, no, of course not. | ||
Of course not. | ||
I don't have a problem with that at all. | ||
They're taking about half of what I make, half, and here's the thing, and this is very enlightening, having somebody who lived very much from Russia, because Natasha would say to me, she'd watch me write these checks to the IRS, She's saying, what are you getting? | ||
So what do you mean? | ||
So in Russia, we have free health care, we have free college, we have free housing, basically all these things paid for by the state, and they take 25% of what we make. | ||
And I was a little embarrassed about that. | ||
But the kind of things that really affect me are, I try to put myself in other people's shoes, and I know a lot of people on the left think that people in business are very rapacious, and people in government are very kind. | ||
But I look around at the condition of the roads, for example, in Los Angeles. | ||
And I think about the amount of money that's being spent, and it seemed to me that if these were kind people, the roads would be in great shape, and the public sector retirement benefits would be quite small. | ||
Just to really personalize that, this tiny little road that separates our two studios is an absolute dump. | ||
It's third world. | ||
I mean, it's a dump. | ||
The exit that we're off of over here is literally a dump. | ||
I mean, there's garbage everywhere. | ||
And my fiance is shocked by it, because like everybody else in Russia, and everyone else around the world for that matter, You grew up with America. | ||
America's the land where the streets are paved with gold. | ||
She sees all this garbage on the streets in Los Angeles and she's quite struck by it. | ||
Yeah, it's so interesting what you said a moment ago about- You mind if I just knock this back? | ||
That's vodka, by the way. | ||
There's a real Russian theme here. | ||
Sweet. | ||
Is it really vodka? | ||
It's not really vodka. | ||
But the fact that you were pouring, either way, says a little something about your character. | ||
Thank you very much. | ||
There is a little MDMA in there, though. | ||
A little what? | ||
A little MDMA. | ||
That's the technical term for ecstasy. | ||
Is that right? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Sweet. | ||
Enjoy. | ||
I like what you said there, that you were sort of, even almost accidentally in a way at first, giving conservatives an ability to be okay because they have been under attack for so long, so that you gave them room to go, all right, I'm not so bad, or I'm struggling with this, or whatever it is. | ||
And I think in a weird way, I've sort of, Maybe accidentally, partly, and maybe not so accidentally, I've given liberals some cover that are going, wait a minute, something's wrong on the left, and I've just given them a little bit of room to go, it's okay to have some conversation. | ||
So I love that, that we kind of, from different political places, different political homes, the ideas of just talking about ideas was given some room. | ||
And as we said on my show, I'm 100% certain that you and I could sit down and, over some more ecstasy water, we could probably write a political platform that 85% of the country would get behind. | ||
I mean solidly get behind. | ||
85% of the people. | ||
So that's a good segue to Cruz, because you mentioned that you were a Cruz guy. | ||
I'm a constitutional guy. | ||
I want us to be governed the way that the Founding Fathers set up. | ||
I believe in the branches of government. | ||
I don't like all the executive actions. | ||
People know my thoughts on all of this stuff. | ||
My feeling with Cruz was there was something just slimy about him. | ||
And I couldn't get over it. | ||
In retrospect, maybe I was wrong. | ||
I don't know. | ||
But I couldn't get over that sort of used car salesman thing with him. | ||
Now, ironically, we have Trump now, so it is what it is, but in terms, was Cruz basically your guy? | ||
Like, that you thought, this is the guy that is defending all the principles that I believe in? | ||
Yeah, there's a lot. | ||
I'll run this very quickly. | ||
One of the reasons that I was a Ted Cruz fan was because I met Ted Cruz personally before I ever saw him on TV. | ||
And I remember very distinctly thinking, this guy, this would be early 2010, 11, something like this. | ||
I said, I don't know if this guy wants to be president, but he'll never do it because he's just too nice. | ||
He's just way too nice for this. | ||
I thought Trump said that everybody hated him, that the whole Senate hated him. | ||
Well, I have no doubt that they do, but he's also standing up for some principles, and that's not something the Senate's known for. | ||
I guess if the Senate hates you, you're probably in pretty good shape. | ||
Probably in pretty good shape. | ||
But I really liked him very much. | ||
And I had a couple of contacts from him about helping a little bit | ||
with the messaging on the campaign. | ||
And essentially I said, listen, can we be crystal clear on this? | ||
I don't want to be helping to show you how Ted Cruz should be acting on camera. | ||
I wanna be showing you how Ted Cruz should be not acting on camera. | ||
Please, please, can we not just go out there to his house and spend an hour with the cameras rolling | ||
and get all the official stuff out of the way and get down to the guy who's actually there. | ||
But I hear this from many, many, many people, and I could see it sometimes. | ||
I could see it. | ||
And my feeling was, well, you've got to run right at this. | ||
You don't run away from those weaknesses. | ||
You've got to run right towards it and get in front of it and explain it. | ||
But I liked a lot about what Ted was doing. | ||
I have to tell you, the fact that Ted was born in Canada bothered me enormously. | ||
I mean... | ||
But, and this may be justification, but I think it's actual realistic justification, not to get too far in the weeds with this, but the requirement for the president was a natural born citizen. | ||
And the definition originally was that you would be born in America, exceptions were made for people who were born before we became independent for the first 50, 60 years, but that you had to be born in the United States or United States territory of two American parents. | ||
And the reason was that They did not want an undue influence on you in regard to one of the countries. | ||
And now having spent so much time with somebody from Russia, I certainly see things about the Russia situation that I'd never seen before. | ||
I don't think it would influence me in my ability to make a decision, but it certainly opened up things there. | ||
Now what has absolutely influenced me, and prejudiced me I think is a fair way to say it, is that my mom is a British subject. | ||
And I have a very strong affinity to England. | ||
My grandfather was Order of the British Empire, and so that aspect of it does bias me. | ||
And I can see that that was a reasonable requirement. | ||
Now, Barack Obama was not... There's no discussion about... I'm not going to get into the whole legality thing, obviously, but he was not a natural-born citizen by the definition of that, because no one's disputing that his father was Kenyan. | ||
When they ruled that this was essentially okay, then I said, okay. | ||
Wait, wait, he was not a natural born citizen. | ||
By the strict definition of it, the original definition of it was two American parents. | ||
By the way, I did a quick little thing where I said, let's imagine a four-way race between Barack Obama, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Whittle, and Jesse Jackson. | ||
Which one of these is qualified to be president? | ||
It's Jesse Jackson. | ||
Barack Obama has a Kenyan father. | ||
I have a British mother. | ||
Schwarzenegger was born outside the country. | ||
According to the strict definition of it now, look, it is what it is, but when a standard falls, it's fallen. | ||
You can't unbreak it. | ||
It's down. | ||
And it's like the filibuster thing with the nuclear option. | ||
There was no Senate rules about it. | ||
It was comity. | ||
Which is nowadays mostly comedy. | ||
But it was comedy. | ||
It was manners. | ||
It was a gentleman's agreement. | ||
It was honor, basically, is what it was. | ||
We think it's important. | ||
So this is a tradition we've had for 150, 200 years, whatever. | ||
Harry Reid decides he needs a vote. | ||
So he uses the Harry Reid option. | ||
And it's gone. | ||
And I do have many supporters who say, well, we can't play that way. | ||
We've got to hold ourselves to a higher standard. | ||
My response to that is, no. | ||
No. | ||
You cannot do that. | ||
You have to fight the way you're being fought. | ||
And if that's the rules that they want, that's the rules that they got. | ||
And they're going to regret it. | ||
So there are videos, 100%, when I was on the Young Turks, a progressive network, at the time when they pulled the nuclear option. | ||
The read option. | ||
What's that? | ||
The read option. | ||
Yeah, okay, so when Harry Reid did this, and I was saying that I was not for it because you cannot change these rules and then expect that it won't bite you in the ass or something, and I don't think they expected it to bite them in the ass only, you know, four years later or whatever it is. | ||
But yes, you have to have principles. | ||
Yes. | ||
And it's hard to have principles. | ||
Yes. | ||
That's the point of having principles. | ||
That's exactly right. | ||
And when we were talking so much about the email situation and the insecure server and the unsecure server, It's a pretty nice machine, really. | ||
It wasn't as beat-up an old machine as they claim it was. | ||
But people would say to me, oh, so you're telling me that if Ted Cruz had done the same thing, you would have a problem? | ||
If Ted Cruz had done that, I'd want Ted Cruz in jail. | ||
I'd want him in jail more than I'd want her in jail. | ||
These are standards and these are principles and these don't change. | ||
Now, you may not agree with them, but they're consistent for me and they're important. | ||
And if it turns out that somebody who I've been supporting has been breaking the law, I want that person in jail. | ||
I want them in jail more than I want somebody on the other side in jail. | ||
So does this all feed to why you were so happy on election night because of that, as Andrew described it, the truck that ran through the media, or as I've described it, the chessboard that was thrown in the air, or whatever your metaphor is, because when the Democrats do some of this stuff, like crushing iPads with hammers and bleach-bidding computers, things that the Clinton campaign did, or colluding with Donna Brazile, which was so obvious that it was gonna happen. | ||
I had tweets about why is CNN hiring her from back in 2013, I'm not Kreskin over here. | ||
You know, it was pretty obvious that these things were gonna happen. | ||
So, does that explain why you were so happy that night? | ||
Because the double standard... Categorically, and that's the only reason I was happy. | ||
I think we shouldn't diminish that because it's so interesting. | ||
You weren't a Trump guy. | ||
I would suspect that if you're a real constitutionalist, as I expect you are, then you must have all sorts of fears about Trump, that he could take too much power and too many executive orders and all kinds of stuff. | ||
I'm not so much worried about that, to be honest with you. | ||
My primary problems with Donald Trump is I find him embarrassing. | ||
There are things he says and does that I find embarrassing, but that's the price that I willingly and knowingly went into and was prepared to pay. | ||
Now, for those people to think that, oh, everybody, all the conservatives are always complaining about the media bias, just as a quick point, In 2014, Evan Thomas, when he was a managing editor at Newsweek, said that he thought that press bias in 2004... I said 14. | ||
In 2004, he said he thought that press bias for John Kerry and John Edwards was worth 15 points at the poll. | ||
Now that's John Kerry, that's not Barack Obama, that's not Hillary Clinton. | ||
So, I took a look at the Electoral College maps of 2008, 2012, and 2016. | ||
I took 15 points away from the Democrat. | ||
And the entire country is red. | ||
Obama wins Delaware and D.C. | ||
or something. | ||
He wins Hawaii. | ||
Hillary wins Delaware. | ||
It's all red. | ||
All of it. | ||
And just as a rule of thumb, that's how the country would vote if the media was unbiased. | ||
Now, this needs to be said because I never bring up the subject without saying it. | ||
Many people think that I want a conservative media. | ||
I don't want a conservative media. | ||
I want a fair media. | ||
If we had a conservatively biased media, we would then fall into the exact same errors that the left falls into because we'd have the ring of invisibility, right? | ||
The ring. | ||
You're a Star Wars guy, I'm a Star Trek guy, but we probably both love Lord of the Rings, and Andrew Klavan pointed this out. | ||
What the press bias does is it gives democratic politicians the ring of invisibility. | ||
They know they're not going to get caught. | ||
And so when people have a sense of invisibility, they do things that they would never do otherwise. | ||
And this is why when sometimes in Mardi Gras or something like that, when people are wearing masks, they'll perform behaviors that would never, ever enter their minds because they don't feel directly responsible. | ||
And this is the great failure. | ||
Of the modern age is that I want a press that is looking 24 hours a day to find out whether there is impeachable information on Donald Trump. | ||
I want them looking all the time constantly to see if Donald Trump is colluding with the Russians to see if these impeachable offenses are there. | ||
But I would also like that done for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. | ||
And I don't want them to suppress a story, not just not cover it, just suppress it. | ||
Because then you've got an autoimmune disease, Dave. | ||
If it turns out that the press's job is to go through the political bloodstream and attack pathogens and destroy them, if it turns out that it's not doing that, but is in fact a way that ideology and pathogens are coming into the system, the country's got AIDS. | ||
It's got intellectual AIDS. | ||
The mechanism designed to defend us is now the mechanism that is in fact bringing in the contagion. | ||
Is it too late to fix that? | ||
Have we already crossed the threshold? | ||
I think you said, I think I've quoted you on this show, actually, you said that night, or maybe I said, now I've said it so many times, I'm not sure who said it, but I'm gonna credit you for it, that it got to parody that night, that the online media and the mainstream media got, I honestly can't remember which one of us said it. | ||
Was it you? | ||
You just assume it was me, I'll assume it was you. | ||
Somebody in this room said it. | ||
That seems reasonable. | ||
And if I have said that publicly, I'm pretty sure I have credit. | ||
Same for you. | ||
But I think it's probably just one of these convergent thoughts, you know, where you realize that something's happened. | ||
So is it too late to change it? | ||
There's good news and bad news. | ||
The bad news is, is it too late to change it? | ||
Yes. | ||
The good news is, is it going to change? | ||
Yes. | ||
And I know that sounds paradoxical. | ||
The mainstream media and the entire media complex in all of this is so heavily invested now, they're pot committed. | ||
They've got to play the hand to the end of the game. | ||
And it is so massive that you can't change it, but the good news is you don't have to, because For the first time, and it's not just our civilization's collapse, by the way, I started writing about the collapses of civilization. | ||
What kind of got me into it is my love for history. | ||
And I kept wondering, why do civilizations collapse? | ||
There's a struggle, struggle, struggle, and when they finally reach dominance, you know, when Rome finally defeats Carthage and there's nothing left, and it should be, phew, off they go, they just collapse. | ||
And I think they collapse because the elites get bored. | ||
But this is the first time in history when common people have had the means to actually influence other common people in large numbers and circumvent not just the priesthood of the churches or the media or the politicians, but just talk directly with each other. | ||
And that, I think, is our saving grace because now there's 160 million people walking around with high-definition television cameras in their pockets. | ||
and they've also got news vans in their pockets that send up the big mass and the big radio | ||
because I can Facebook live an event and now we're in the world of absolute truth, right? | ||
Once we get video, we're out of the world of what you think and what I think. | ||
There it is, you know? | ||
Pixar, it didn't happen, right? | ||
I mean, there it is. | ||
You can't argue with seeing it there. | ||
Is the inherent risk of that that the system will have to fight back even harder against us now? | ||
I wouldn't call that a risk. | ||
It's the inevitable consequence of it. | ||
Where do you see that going? | ||
Because I do worry about I do too. | ||
I find that I can get more honest conversation out of listening to you or listening to Joe Rogan or Phil DeFranco or Sam Harris. | ||
There's plenty of people that are online people. | ||
And I turn on CNN. | ||
I mean, I jokingly said to you in the green room, I put CNN on for you because I know you love that CNN there. | ||
But I watch it and it seems like pure dribble. | ||
18 heads all babbling on who got everything wrong before the election, now telling you everything that's gonna happen six months from now and all of this nonsense. | ||
And it just seems, it's archaic in its whole machinery. | ||
I mean, the amount of money that it costs probably to do one night of Anderson Cooper probably would foot the bill on literally a year's worth of my show. | ||
I don't think I'm being sarcastic when I say that. | ||
So do you fear that monster sort of hitting back in whatever that means to you? | ||
It's done the damage it's gonna do. | ||
It's done the maximum amount of damage it's gonna do. | ||
The world is changing, you can feel it in the air, you can taste it in the air or the water, whatever they say at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings. | ||
I got a chance to meet a guy I like very much, admire very much, named Mike Rowe. | ||
I'd love to get him on the show! | ||
He's a wonderful man, he really is. | ||
And he said, I said, I saw one of these things that you just did, the way I heard it, he just sets up a laptop in his kitchen, and he said, yeah, that thing got seven million views or something, When I was doing deadliest jobs at Discovery Channel, if I had 300,000 people watching the show, I'd get flowers from the network. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So here's why, you know, maybe you could just go back to what you started with. | ||
Why are things so acrimonious? | ||
I think they're so acrimonious now because what is not being seen underneath all the | ||
Trump, Obama, Trump, Obama, Hillary, blah, blah, blah, underneath all of this, way underneath | ||
it, is human beings are going through something that's only ever happened twice before in | ||
all of human history. | ||
We are straddling a worldwide fundamental change in how the world is built. | ||
You could make the case with so many wars and empires and governments and so on, kings | ||
and so on, battles, that the only things that have really happened in history is the invention | ||
of agriculture, the industrial revolution, and the information age. | ||
And when we talk about things like our cities being these murder pits, it's not an easy problem to solve. | ||
The reason the cities are murder pits is because the jobs are going. | ||
The reason the jobs are going is because America is now fully in the Information Age, and industrial-era jobs Have gone to where they're less expensive. | ||
This is a fundamental problem. | ||
This is the same problem that farmers had to face 400 years ago, where farmers were saying, well, we can't feed ourselves. | ||
Yeah, you got to go work in a factory in the city. | ||
And they didn't want to do that. | ||
And so it caused tremendous upheaval. | ||
But that's what we're seeing. | ||
It used to be that you could get off a boat, And walk through Ellis Island, come out on the other side, and get a job in a factory. | ||
I mean, no disrespect to factory workers whatsoever, but essentially an assembly line job meant that. | ||
Your job is to take this bolt and tighten this bolt in this location. | ||
And essentially anybody can do that. | ||
Anybody. | ||
So industrial era jobs, being relatively repetitive, gave people who are hard-working and oftentimes very smart, but people | ||
who were new here, people who needed a chance to get started, gave them a chance to do some work | ||
and get some decent jobs out of it. | ||
And Baltimore, for example, Baltimore, for a brief period there, the neighborhoods were, | ||
they were integrated. | ||
They were people who'd been there for quite a while. | ||
A lot of black workers coming up from the South after the war. | ||
But everybody was working at the factory. | ||
Everybody was working hard. | ||
Everybody had a vested interest in making their yard look nice. | ||
Everybody was going to more or less the same churches. | ||
They were hanging out together. | ||
It didn't last very long, but it was there. | ||
And it was there because the economic opportunities were there. | ||
And it's not like some company decided, hey, you know what, we make more money in China. | ||
That is, in fact, what happens. | ||
But it's a fundamental, enormous, enormous change. | ||
And you can't get people into the information economy as easily as you could get them into the industrial economy. | ||
It's interesting to me because we're obviously undergoing something absolutely massive right now. | ||
And stressful. | ||
It's stressful. | ||
Yeah, it's stressful. | ||
A lot of my direct messages lately have been about that stress. | ||
Just don't let politics make you crazy. | ||
Try to escape and breathe every now and again and do some stuff you enjoy, hopefully, and whatever else. | ||
But it also shows why easy answers are never the correct answer. | ||
Because I was in Seattle last week, and they pushed for the $15 minimum wage all this time, and I'm not an economist, but I understand that I don't see why you should be able to tell a private company how much they should be able to pay their employees, blah, blah, blah. | ||
I get off the plane in Seattle, and the McDonald's in the Seattle airport, you know what they have instead of workers? | ||
They have automatic kiosks. | ||
They have iPads. | ||
Pretty soon they'll have hamburger flipping machines. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And that's because I think this is the fundamental difference between the two camps that we call liberals and conservatives today. | ||
I'm sure people are going to find this a self-serving explanation, but nevertheless, here it is. | ||
I believe that liberals would rather feel good about things even if they do harm, and conservatives would rather do things that made sense even if it made them look bad. | ||
Your example of the minimum wage is a perfect example. | ||
Everybody would like people to make $15 an hour, and if healthcare were free, I'd be in favor of free health care. | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
What kind of an animal would I be? | ||
No health care for you. | ||
I don't like the way you look. | ||
Your skin's a little dark for me. | ||
No health care for you. | ||
Go off and die in a ditch. | ||
I would be the kind of person that people assume I am if it were free. | ||
But it's not free. | ||
So since it costs money, we have to figure out how to pay for it. | ||
We have to figure out how to pay for it. | ||
It means things like competition. | ||
All of a sudden you're a conservative again. | ||
So this is the point of it, right? | ||
You can feel good about things Because everybody else tells you, I'm in favor of, I support, I've got a bumper sticker on my Prius that says Free Tibet. | ||
See? | ||
See how? | ||
Because I care about Tibet and I'm deeply concerned about the people of Tibet. | ||
And I don't doubt that they are. | ||
But if you want to free Tibet, you need a bumper sticker that says United States Marine Corps, right? | ||
Or National Rifle Association, or something like that. | ||
Because that's what it would take to actually free Tibet. | ||
And that's not a pleasant thought, and nobody likes to admit it, and if you had somebody say that, you'd get a lot of grief for it. | ||
But it's the reality of the world, and so sugarcoating Sugarcoating the outcome in order to preserve this sense of this warm fuzzy feeling I have about myself to me is a form of vanity and hypocrisy that I can't afford for myself anymore. | ||
But we just as a society it seems to me we don't have time for it anymore because of the change that we're going under right now. | ||
There is no time to fiddle around with these feeling things when we're in such a massive time of upheaval. | ||
Right, and we're in this enormous upheaval. | ||
I think this is probably the best way to think about it. | ||
Why are people becoming so... Why are the sides diverging so much? | ||
Why is it that we're not even looking at the same news stories anymore? | ||
Why is it that half the country thinks that Donald Trump should be impeached immediately and the other half says that CNN's already admitted there's nothing to this story? | ||
Why? | ||
Why? | ||
Why can't the two sides hear each other? | ||
And, you know, the word meme before it meant a cat with, you know, impact font at the bottom of it. | ||
A meme was the idea that a thought could be transmitted the same way as a gene could. | ||
It could be passed on, essentially. | ||
So I think you can get a pretty good analogy out of genetics on this. | ||
If you have a population that lives here, and a significant number of people move over there, and now there's a mountain range between them, something happens. | ||
When everybody's living together, everybody intermarries and so they share the exact same gene pool. | ||
When people go over to a second location, now these people have the same gene pool as these people, but if they are no longer intermingling with each other, the normal evolution that this group has isn't affected by these guys. | ||
These guys have a whole other set of evolution, and what you find is, is you find this genetic diversion, and they'll continue to divert, and they'll divert until they become different species. | ||
Because the genes are not communicating. | ||
We're over here evolving, they're over here evolving, and this split is irrevocable unless you can remix the populations. | ||
I think it's the same thing with memes. | ||
We basically hear as conservatives, we hear news, we hear stories, we hear interpretations, all of it, that has become part of our Mimetic code. | ||
And liberals have a mimetic code, too. | ||
And we're getting very close to the point now where these two things can't interbreed anymore, you know? | ||
It comes a point when the species diverge enough so that—that's the definition of a species, is one that can no longer interbreed with the other. | ||
Right. | ||
And this is bad. | ||
This is bad, bad, bad. | ||
Because even though this divergence is happening so much, we're living next to each other. | ||
These are not continents that are going their separate ways. | ||
We're literally living next to each other. | ||
Sometimes I'm in the same room. | ||
And yet here we are, right? | ||
And yet here we are. | ||
The divergence is essentially nothing. | ||
It's essentially nothing. | ||
It's 10%, 15%. | ||
So that's the part that I wanna start focusing on and I think maybe for the next year of the show | ||
because I sense that things are gonna keep going like this. | ||
I'm gonna try, I think that's what I've been trying to do anyway, but maybe focus a little more | ||
on that 10 or 15% because most of us want the same simple things. | ||
You know, whether, I suppose you're pro-life, right? | ||
You know, it's funny, of all the things, I am. | ||
I was trying to pick an easy one. | ||
I am, but of all of the things in my toolbox, That is the one that's the most precarious. | ||
That's so interesting to me, because I'm pro-choice, and I would say it with the most begrudging, unpleasant, I just see no option in this case. | ||
And we can talk about how many months, or if you're gonna not let somebody have an abortion at some point, then does the state have to get involved and all that stuff. | ||
But even that, that proves the 10% right there, right? | ||
That you're saying, I begrudgingly come to this, or this is the one. | ||
I think the reason the abortion issue is such a hot issue and the reason that so many people do that split go all the way to one side or all the way to other because it does in fact, it leaves you without, there's no middle ground here. | ||
And so you have to pick one. | ||
And if both sides of the argument make sense to you, because they do, then you have to decide which one has the greater weight. | ||
Right? | ||
And I don't have the religious belief that some people do that drives them to be very, very passionate about this, and nor do I have the complete lack of religious belief that drives other people to be in the other position. | ||
This one is a tough one. | ||
The reason I come down on the pro-life side is essentially pretty simple. | ||
People say, this is my body, I should be able to control my own body, and I say, I 100% agree with that, but it's not your body. | ||
This is different, this is an entirely different chromosomal pattern. | ||
You could take a sample from the mother and a sample from the infant And you would get two completely different people. | ||
So, frankly, look, the abortion issue is very simple. | ||
It can be resolved in one sentence. | ||
It won't be resolved in one sentence, but it could be... If you put all the advertising terms away, pro-life, pro-choice, put all that stuff away, what it comes down to is, is it a person, yes or no? | ||
From conception to birth, is it a person? | ||
If it's not a person, then who the hell are you to tell me what to do with my bodily functions? | ||
If it is a person, then it has protections that supersede somebody else's opinion about it, and that's where the entire heart of the issue is. | ||
Is it a person or not? | ||
And the reason this thing is so bloody hard is because from conception to birth, there is no single day or event that happens. | ||
There's no switch, there's no mile marker that gets passed. | ||
It is a perfect spectrum of absolute uniformity between a cell that splits in half and a little baby that comes crying into the world, and this is why this issue's such a bear. | ||
Right, and that's why, so some people will argue, well, from conception it's life, and then some people argue, well, at eight months you should still be allowed to have an abortion. | ||
I would say both of those are not great, really tenable positions. | ||
But then, you know, you can whittle this, no pun intended, all the time, you must hear. | ||
I did it like 17 times last week. | ||
But I would say that maybe, all right, if we could, whatever science could get us to where we'd say, all right, for the first three months you can have an abortion. | ||
Again, not because you love abortion, not because you want to have an abortion, but we begrudgingly allow for this. | ||
And I know women, I know two women in the last year that have had abortions who did not do it lightly. | ||
what a terrible position to have to be put in, even if-- - Categorically. | ||
Yeah, but that's saying, okay, well, for the first three months, you can have an abortion, | ||
but then if the government then says, all right, but if the magic moment, | ||
whatever you wanna call it, is three months, well, now, and we're not gonna let you have an abortion, | ||
does the state now have a responsibility? | ||
Now, as a small government guy and more of a libertarian, you probably don't want the state to have responsibility, | ||
but at the same time, if the state is saying you gotta do it, then do we have a responsibility? | ||
I would probably argue yes, again, begrudgingly. | ||
But it's a rich place to have a conversation. | ||
Very rich conversation. | ||
Tragic conversation. | ||
There's nobody in this discussion who's happy about this. | ||
No one's going woohoo. | ||
I had an interesting thought about the abortion issue because it got to me the question of the whole person issue. | ||
And maybe this will help people who are on the pro-choice side understand the pro-life position. | ||
At least understand it, if not agree with it. | ||
Certainly not expect them to agree with it, but at least understand it. | ||
And my thought experiment was this. | ||
Whose side were you on in the Civil War? | ||
Well, most people would say the North. | ||
As was I. | ||
100%. | ||
Now, the South claims that the North launched this war of aggression because they wanted to secede and state rights and all that, but the reason the South left the Union was they wanted the state's rights and the state right was the state right to have slaves. | ||
So let's just call it what it is. | ||
They left before Lincoln was even inaugurated. | ||
If you're a Southerner, your position was, this is my property and they're going to launch a war and come all the way down to my house and take my property. | ||
Then, of course it's aggression. | ||
Of course I'm going to fight it. | ||
Right? | ||
The North's position is the same position, actually, as the pro-life crowd, which is, that is a living person there, and you do not own them, and you do not have a right to determine their destiny. | ||
Therefore, we have a right to go down and free the slaves. | ||
We have not only a right, we have an obligation. | ||
And so now what you find out is that the motivation of the Civil War comes down to a very simple issue. | ||
Are slaves people? | ||
Yes or no? | ||
Because if slaves are not people, if blacks from Africa are not people, if they're not humans, then they're property like horses and cattle and so on. | ||
The North is absolutely wrong. | ||
The war is completely unjust and so on. | ||
But if they are people, Then, the North has the moral right and the obligation to have the government step in on that person's individual choice and protect that individual. | ||
That's the fundamentals of the pro-life position. | ||
It has its own unique genetic code. | ||
It cannot defend itself. | ||
It is no longer subject to your choice. | ||
It's a person and we're going to protect it. | ||
Is it a person? | ||
Isn't it? | ||
How do I know? | ||
We know conception, we know birth, and that's all. | ||
And because the spectrum is uninterrupted, we find ourselves in this horrible conundrum which puts me against my desire to protect innocent lives that can't defend themselves against the disgusting, repulsive idea that any institution, including the government, gets to tell you what to do and when to do it. | ||
Yeah, and that's why it's such a rich one to talk about, where you can sit across from somebody and hopefully not impugn their every motive. | ||
Right, right. | ||
And this is where the problem is, right? | ||
Everybody automatically demonizes the other side, automatically assumes they're evil. | ||
I suppose I've been guilty of that to some degree. | ||
I try to focus that kind of vitriol on people who I am convinced are aware of what they're doing. | ||
You know, not just people, virtually all liberals, well I think many liberal policies I consider to be very poor, and some of them I consider to be downright evil, but I will certainly grant that the huge majority of people who support these policies do so for fundamentally good reasons. | ||
They think it's the best way to help people, they think it's the kind thing to do, they think it's the nice thing to do. | ||
I don't question their motives. | ||
But the people that are enforcing these policies know what the consequences are in the real world. | ||
And those people have a problem. | ||
Can I have some more ecstasy water? | ||
You absolutely can. | ||
I'm usually pretty good about pouring the water here. | ||
I'm like a camel. | ||
You know, it's interesting. | ||
I would be remiss if I didn't say in the course of all this, a few times you've said liberals and conservatives. | ||
I think you know, I consider myself a classical liberal. | ||
So just for the sake of argument, when you say liberal, really you're talking about sort of a leftist or a progressive. | ||
I hate to get lost in the words and the labels and all that, but I know people will be commenting going, Dave sat there and he was talking about liberals. | ||
No, no, critically important. | ||
I meant to say progressives, I usually do. | ||
Here's the irony of it. | ||
You call yourself a traditional liberal, and I call myself a conservative, and what I'm trying to conserve is liberal principles. | ||
I'm trying to conserve liberal principles. | ||
People think, what? | ||
When people were being held as slaves, I'm a liberal. | ||
When women are deprived from holding office or deprived from jobs, you know, in the same pay and everything, I'm a liberal. | ||
I'm liberal on all these things. | ||
But when I become a conservative is when this situation has gone too far. | ||
Well, what do you mean by too far? | ||
When equality of opportunity and equality under the law and when Martin Luther King says, I have a dream that my children will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, I'm a big old liberal when it comes to that. | ||
But when you get to a place where then you say things like that black people can't be racist or that we need set-asides or that we should hold people to a lower standard or whatever, you've gone too far. | ||
Now I want to conserve these principles. | ||
I want to conserve traditional liberalism. | ||
Classical liberalism is what many people on the far left would not agree with today. | ||
Don't I know it! | ||
And free speech is number one, right? | ||
Free speech, number one. | ||
The fundamental idea of classical liberalism is I should be able to say whatever I damn well want to, you should be able to say whatever you damn well want to, and you hurting my feelings is not the same as assaulting me physically. | ||
My feelings getting hurt by you is my problem, not your problem. | ||
And this is a traditional core value of liberalism, which conservatives are trying to conserve in the face of these progressives who want people to shut up, and if they don't agree with them, then they hit them on the head with a tire lock. | ||
Yeah, and that's why I've said defending my liberal positions is becoming a conservative principle. | ||
It's just how it is. | ||
There we go. | ||
So there it is. | ||
So most everything, most everything I think on the table politically could be resolved amicably with things like perhaps abortion being a real sticking point emotionally. | ||
But most things could be, I think, resolved pretty amicably. | ||
One little example, I was up in Idaho and I was talking to some people there. | ||
And it looks like they may be able to do things as a state that we can't do as a federal government. | ||
And I said, you know guys, if you could just explain the Laffer Curve, we'd get what we want and the progressives would get what they want too. | ||
If we could just show the math that shows that there comes a point as you lower the tax burden, the economy grows at such a rate that by lowering taxes you increase revenue. | ||
Who loses here? | ||
Businessmen and people like me and conservatives want lower taxes so we can do more, we can expand more, we can do all these other things. | ||
But if it turns out that lowering taxes increases revenues... | ||
and you're against that? That's where I go with these things. I try to go to the moral argument. | ||
Why do you hate poor people so much, Democrats? What do you mean? Well, your taxes are so high | ||
that you're not getting maximum revenues out of this economy. So if you actually genuinely believe | ||
you wanted to help poor people and disadvantaged people, you need money to do it, then you should | ||
be in favor of something that brings in more revenues. And if you're saying, no, I'd rather | ||
let those people undergo some hardships. | ||
So long as the rich get whacked, now you don't have the fig leaf anymore. | ||
Now you don't get to say, oh, I'm doing this for somebody else. | ||
You're doing it out of a sense of envy and other venal motivations. | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
I suspect usually, though, that their argument would be, well, we want to take from these people so that they can't get too much so that we can, you know, they have another justification for it. | ||
I don't agree with that justification. | ||
This is one of the instances, taxes, where I've definitely shifted a little in the last couple of years. | ||
But I see where your point is. | ||
Taxes, look, This is not an inflammatory statement. | ||
Taxes are money that are taken from individuals at a rate determined by somebody else and enforced by law. | ||
I think we can all agree on that. | ||
It's a relatively fair assessment of it. | ||
So if your position is that some people have too much and other people don't have enough, I understand that position. | ||
I understand it. | ||
I sympathize with the end results that you're looking for, but if it turns out that your personal animosity and your personal commitment... Here's the thing. | ||
If you really believe that, and it could be shown that lowering taxes increases state revenue, then anybody that's not in favor of that... | ||
is not talking about benefits for the poor. | ||
They're talking about their own envy. | ||
They're talking about their own inability to take your eyes off of what somebody else is making. | ||
Right. | ||
And there's no end point. | ||
I mean, there's no point where you can go, all right, we've taken enough. | ||
Now we can change the system and do it more equitably. | ||
Right. | ||
So, so, you know, we hear you could take a look. | ||
If you look at education scores versus money, what you find is the more money we've spent, the worse our scores have gotten. | ||
unidentified
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Right? | |
And the argument is always the same. | ||
We need more money for schools. | ||
Well, we pay three or four times per student more than the next closest developed country, and our grades are 27th, 28th, 29th. | ||
People like me would look at this and say, it's not a question of more money. | ||
The more money we put in, the lower our result gets. | ||
I would look at it and say the problem with education today is we're getting what we're paying for. | ||
and we're not paying for education. | ||
We're paying for graduation. | ||
And these are separate things. | ||
We have a factory where these boxes, we get paid by the box that comes out of the assembly line. | ||
And it doesn't matter if the product in the box is a terrific product or if it's broken | ||
or if there's nothing in the box. | ||
We get paid by the box. - We just gotta get it, yeah. | ||
Right, so that's what we're paying for and that's what we're gonna get. | ||
But if we decided we wanted to start paying for education instead of graduation, | ||
we'd see a whole different set of incentives and then people would do what I think they normally do, | ||
which is pursue their best self-interest with... | ||
in virtually everybody a sense of understanding that I'm not the only person in this entire country. | ||
I have obligations to other people for decency and so on. | ||
So you think people might be fundamentally decent? | ||
I know for an absolute certain fact that if you and I were to pick any | ||
ten people from your audience and ten people from my audience and put them in the same room, | ||
I would bet you it would take us less than three hours to get people to agree that all, let's say ten and ten? | ||
Yeah, all twenty. | ||
Twenty-three of us, twenty-two of us could write a plan for. | ||
That we would, if we could get past the animosity, we would find, in a nutshell, here's the way I think it works. | ||
Liberals have a desire to protect people who are underprivileged. | ||
Conservatives say yes, but the way to do that is through this mechanism, and this is where the head-butting goes. | ||
This is why I personally am so offended by the racist charge, and the misogynist charge, and the hateful charge, and the Nazi charge, because it's not about, I don't care about them, I just want as much as I can get for me. | ||
It turns out that the way the world is built, the way human nature is built, is that by me getting as much as I can for me, is in fact the best way for these people to be helped. | ||
This is the difference between feeling good and seeing what seems to be right. | ||
If handing poor people money Stop them from being poor. | ||
We wouldn't have poor people. | ||
We wouldn't have poverty in this country. | ||
We said trillions and trillions of dollars have been paid. | ||
And we're not getting anywhere. | ||
So it's not that. | ||
So if it's not that, then what is it? | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
All right. | ||
Well, we've done over an hour here. | ||
Now that I know our studios are so close, I suspect we will do this again. | ||
We'll set up a couple of hands with a string. | ||
We literally could do it. | ||
Yeah, better audio quality than I have at my studio. | ||
Yeah, it's that close. | ||
But I want to ask you one thing. | ||
If I didn't say the two words common sense before you walked out of here, I'd feel bad. | ||
Because your book was The Common Sense Resistance. | ||
It's the phrase that you tag on your website. | ||
And common sense. | ||
I think nothing that we've done here. | ||
I think that for the most part, what I've consistently tried to do every week is just bring a little common sense. | ||
Sometimes I talk with pretty bright people who are doing a really high level stuff that goes above that pay grade, but that the basics of what most people want right now are common sense. | ||
So to wrap this all in a nice little bow, what is the best way to just bring a little more common sense into the world right now? | ||
I think common sense is derided by people who have a vested interest in telling themselves how important they are. | ||
We don't edit for content. | ||
No. | ||
And the reason I know this is because I was one of those people myself. | ||
You know, if life was a role-playing game, I'd put all my points into intelligence. | ||
I just had to show everybody how smart I was. | ||
Intelligence was everything, everything, everything. | ||
I didn't care about anything else. | ||
But the problem with that is It makes you think that because you're smarter than people in some area, that you're smarter than people in all areas. | ||
And that's just not true. | ||
If you were to take... I would suspect that most progressives would think that the way to handle something like the economy would to take the 20 brightest Harvard and Yale economists, put them in a room, have them set policy, and then this policy would be determined across the country, legally enforced, and that this would be the smartest way to handle it because they're smarter than the guy that runs the gas station on the corner of the street. | ||
And there's no question that they're more intelligent. | ||
And the guy that runs the corner gas station. | ||
But what they don't know more about is how to run a corner gas station. | ||
That's what they don't know more about. | ||
And the idea that we are going to take away from the person who runs the gas station, the decisions on how to run a gas station, is where we get into trouble. | ||
Just because you're smarter than people in some areas doesn't mean you're smarter than people in all areas. | ||
And it kind of takes us back to that Junior Samples moment I had, where I thought, well, you know, what a cartoon of a, you know, of a Rube. | ||
And then for some grace, I was just lightning bolted. | ||
into a realization of how repugnant that is and how much more this man must know about many, many things than I do. | ||
Once you understand that, you realize that you can't take 10 or 20 processors, no matter how fast they are, and process information faster than you can with 320 million processors working in local information in parallel all the time. | ||
And so I think that the main thing to do would be to get away from this sense of Is to get away from the sense that this country consists of smart people and dumb people and that the dumb people vote for Donald Trump and that they don't see... The best thing I ever heard about Donald Trump that goes to this common sense thing is, I'm sure you've heard this before, is the difference between progressives and conservatives is that progressives take Trump literally but they don't take him seriously while conservatives take him seriously but they don't take him literally. | ||
And that's really it. | ||
We know, I know, and most of us know what he is. | ||
We tried a nice guy. | ||
We tried a couple of nice guys. | ||
Mitt Romney's probably the most decent man who ever walked this earth in politics. | ||
He's a racist, he's a murderer, he's giving people cancer, he's sucking the health care out of them. | ||
Okay. | ||
He had the binder full of women. | ||
You want a knife fighter? | ||
You're going to get a knife fighter. | ||
We can all walk it down. | ||
And the main reason I was so happy about coming to do this was I knew this is what this conversation was going to turn into. | ||
It was going to be an example that people who may have different labels in fact agree on virtually everything. | ||
And the things that they don't agree on are things that they can agree to disagree on. | ||
I'm going to go home and think about some of these things probably in a way I hadn't before. | ||
And at the very least if you can't come to agreement on this, Then you can at least understand that the person who you're disagreeing with is not some kind of monster. | ||
That's the essence of common sense to me. | ||
It's built into the society. | ||
It's baked in. | ||
It's a texture that's baked onto the wall. | ||
And we sneer at that at our peril. | ||
Well, let's keep this conversation going. | ||
I'd be delighted. | ||
We will meet privately at that restaurant I mentioned before. | ||
That sounds like a lot of fun. | ||
Not at the exit, that's a dump, that we both probably have to figure out. | ||
Okay, so now 4chan, 4chan now, 4chan now says, okay, we need a real dumpy ferry, and there's a good restaurant within a good, and 4chan, that's a whole other discussion, but yeah, they can stay. | ||
I didn't say it was a good restaurant, it's just a restaurant. | ||
It's not, it's... 4chan will have this address. | ||
Oh, 4chan's all over it. |